Phil had been silent for a little while, doing arithmetic in his head. “The difference between one-third and one-twenty-sixth is a number with a lot of zeroes,” Phil said.

“Yeah,” Sophia said. She was staring out the window. A smile came over her face. “And look. Here’s the thing. At Princeton we talk a lot about privilege, right? Well, the reality is that Richard was so wealthy, and the amount of money that mistakenly went into the trust was so huge, that even one-twenty-sixth of it—my share—is huge. I’ll never have to work. I am fantastically privileged because of him. Those zeroes that Phil mentioned are pretty much meaningless. But it’s still a huge number.”

“What about the foundation?” Phil asked.

“Completely separate from the trust,” Sophia said.

“Your mom runs it,” Julian reminded her.

“The saving grace of the will,” Sophia said, “was that it named John as the director of the foundation. If he was deceased, and if my mom was old enough, then she was to become the director. He was. So she did. She’s been running the Forthrast Family Foundation for the last fifteen years. She’s been drawing a salary. Nothing crazy. There are all kinds of rules around conflict of interest and so on.”

“How’s that going to affect your little plan?” Anne-Solenne asked.

“You mean, my little plan to spend my summer working for the Forthrast Family Foundation?”

“Yeah. Isn’t that a conflict of interest or something?”

“Not the way I’m doing it.”

Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Tom turned on his four-ways and let the Tactical (as they now referred to the pickup truck with the machine gun) coast to a stop on the shoulder of the road, just at the crest of a gentle rise in the land. Topography around here was subtle, but a long picket line of wind turbines, running approximately north-south, hinted at some kind of ridgeline. The maps in their glasses gave them a hint as to what was going on, and they confirmed it by climbing out of the Land Cruiser and walking up to the place where Tom and Kevin had parked. From there it was possible to look west across the valley of the Missouri River, separating this part of the state from Nebraska to the west.

The SUV had stopped behind them. Formerly gleaming and sleek in a chunky, huge SUV-ish way, it was now a cluttered beast of burden with two ladders strapped to its roof rack and a flatbed utility trailer, laden with tarp-wrapped consumer goods, trailing behind. Most of its occupants remained in their air-conditioned seats but Pete came out for a chat. He was strapped with a holster that was mostly inside of his khaki trousers but allowed the handle of a semiautomatic pistol to show above the waistline. He caught Sophia looking at it as he approached. “It’s like a cheese head,” he explained.

“Huh?”