Jude

by Jeff Nesbit

  “You don’t need me,” I told him once I’d made my decision.

  “True,” he said. “But I like having you around. You know my secrets.”

  “I do. But so do others now.”

  Which was true. There was Singen, of course, and the other regents—although they didn’t exactly count, because they were somewhat responsible for most of Jude’s darkest secrets.

  But Isis had become a near-constant companion to Jude since the state dinner at the White House. They were inseparable. Isis had become his closest advisor, closer even than Singen or any of the regents. And I assumed that she’d heard about, or knew, some of what I knew about Jude’s life and ways.

  I’d never asked Isis, of course. But I found it difficult to imagine that she could spend as much time as she did with Jude and not see how he conducted his affairs.

  As I got to know Isis, my fascination with her only grew. She was—as much as any human being could be—a flawless individual. She never raised her voice in anger in any situation. Waiters and limo drivers adored her. Heads of state fawned over her. She never misspoke, either in private or public. I never heard her speak ill of a soul.

  She was always dressed in the latest fashions, so much so that the paparazzi had begun to stake out her locations—as she shopped at stores on the Upper West Side or simply took in a new Broadway show—in order to send pictures to fashion magazines.

  She was also as quick a study as anyone I’d ever met. Within months of meeting Jude, she’d essentially become a combination chief of staff, campaign manager, and public-relations director to him. Even from afar, I could tell she was stage-managing and directing every facet of Jude’s professional and personal life.

  She seemed too good to be true.

  It was right about then that a slightly irrational and unlikely thought lodged itself within me—one that I simply could not remove, no matter how hard I tried.

  I didn’t dare confront Isis about it, but it became more apparent to me in every encounter and with every new interaction. In fact, over time, I’d come to the conclusion that there was no other explanation.

  I thought about raising the question with Jude, but swiftly realized how foolish that would sound. It would likely end badly for me. I also didn’t dare ask the question of Singen or any of the regents—not if they were in on the master plan. So I kept my mouth shut and merely watched their relationship evolve.

  While it was more difficult for me to do now that I’d actively removed myself from the daily affairs of Asher Enterprises, I nevertheless could tell precisely what Jude was attempting. It became apparent to others who paid attention to such things as well.

  Jude meant to become the richest man in the world.

  As he’d been his entire life, he was patient at first and systematic. He began by leveraging Asher Enterprises holdings to purchase key companies that exploited every known natural resource on the planet. He took some of them privately, while he took other holdings of public companies he had no hope of actually controlling.

  But in each case, the companies Jude selected quickly became industry leaders. The market responded. If Jude moved in on a company, it meant that it would soon establish itself as its industry’s leader and others piled into the action.

  Within a year or so after his resignation from the Fed, Jude either controlled or owned outright the leading oil, coal, and natural-gas companies. That industry, alone, moved him up to number eight on the Forbes list of the wealthiest billionaires in the world. But Jude wasn’t done.

  In short order, he consolidated three smaller companies to create the largest telecommunications company in the northern hemisphere. He then rolled up four computer companies to take over that dying industry and retooled the new company in order to directly challenge Apple’s dominance in tablets, mobile devices, and laptops.

  Those acquisitions moved him up to number four. But Jude still wasn’t done. He had a plan, and his sights were set on the prize at the top. So he acquired two dying Internet giants that had failed to match Google and Facebook’s pace of innovation, shook out all the cobwebs, and then turned them loose again on the darlings of Silicon Valley.

  This put him over the top. Three years after he’d resigned as chairman of the Federal Reserve, and before our fortieth birthdays, Jude rose to number one on the Forbes list. He had the most toys, and he wasn’t dead yet—not by any means.

  But Jude still had one more small surprise in store for me, one that I’d been dreading. It would prove to separate us for good.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “So what would you ask of Fortress, our modern-day Oracle of Delphi?” Kayla asked me playfully.

  Her husband and Dr. Simons were there in the parallel-processing room to gauge my reaction to the power of the system that the programming community had built.

  I couldn’t help it. I was nervous. “How about the meaning of life?”

  “Your life, or someone else’s life?” asked Dr. Simons.

  “I guess ours, in general,” I offered lamely.

  “Well, that’s just silly,” Kayla said bluntly, one hand on her hip. “And it’s also not relevant. But give it a shot. See what Fortress does with it.”

  After some back and forth, Fortress determined what I’d really meant to genuinely ask about—namely, the much more humanistic question about the meaning of my life.

  Fortress, at least, was able to determine that I didn’t seem to care all that much about the general meaning of life—what it all meant; whether there were many gods or just one God; whether perfect good and evil even existed; the nature of the mind; or whether we had souls. In fact, Fortress fairly swiftly determined, for me, that what I really wanted to know was my own reason for even existing.

  “Told you,” Kayla said, one finger wagging at me. “So try something else.”

  “Yeah, that wasn’t very satisfactory,” Dr. Simons added. “Try something unexpected, something that only you would care about. That type of thing is what Fortress does best.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like something that is important to you—and to no one else.”

  In our childhood, Jude and I had once watched an old film together. It proved to be one of Jude’s favorites, perhaps of all time. It was a Hollywood epic with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor about the lives of Marc Antony and Cleopatra. The film had been loosely based on Shakespeare’s largely fictionalized account of Antony and Cleopatra.

  But I’d wondered since seeing that film why it had captured Jude’s heart. What was it about the film that struck such a deep chord within Jude? Was it the dangerous love affair between the queen of Egypt and a general vying to be an emperor god of the Roman Empire?

  He and I had ended up talking about the film deep into the night. Jude had clearly been taken by the concept of exotic queens like Cleopatra and the notion of emperors who ruled as gods. “Why had they vanished from the earth?” Jude had wondered. “The Roman Empire was the last empire to rule all of the known, civilized world. There would almost certainly never be another. But why?” Jude had asked repeatedly.

  In one fashion, we both concluded, it was actually the life of Jesus Christ—and the rise of Christianity to the point that it became the official religion of the Roman Empire—that had changed history and moved the civilized world in a vastly different direction. The life of one man had ended the world’s last great empire. Christianity and the notion of one God replaced the pantheon of emperor gods in the Roman Empire, a movement that Constantine eventually codified in the third century. A later successor to Constantine’s throne, Theodosius, was the last Roman emperor to rule all of known civilization.

  “What makes a god?” I asked Dr. Simons.

  “Do you mean a human being who is immortal?” he said. “Whose DNA code somehow lives forever?”

  “Yes, in a fashion,” I answered. �
�I know that you believe it will only be a matter of time before the human species is capable of cloning itself artificially. That I could, if I choose, become a creator of human life as I see fit. I could actually recreate myself—or anyone or anything else, for that matter. You, yourself, are probably capable of it today, right?”

  “Yes, I am fully capable of it today—if I should choose to do so,” Dr. Simons answered softly. “But I choose not to do so, though I daresay that there are others who will not make that same choice.”

  “So what is human life, then?” I asked. “And if we can create it so easily, in whatever fashion we choose and without any constraints, then have we become gods?”

  Dr. Simons smiled and gestured toward the parallel processors. “Ask Fortress. See what it has to say about it. That’s certainly a line of questioning I’ve never considered before, and I doubt anyone else has, either.”

  But I had a different, related question I wanted to ask—one I’d long suspected and which had separated me from Jude two years earlier.

  “Who is Isis Kent?” I asked Fortress.

  The answer, I learned, did not surprise me. It was the answer I’d guessed at two years earlier. It was the only thing that made any sense.

  According to my eventual answer from Fortress, Isis Kent had never existed on earth in the way we thought of human existence—not until she’d become Jude’s consort.

  Chapter Thirty

  “I want you to be the best man at my wedding,” Jude had said to me two years earlier, shortly after he’d achieved everything he’d set out to accomplish financially. “No one knows me like you. No one.”

  It had been less a request and more of a demand. But Jude had always been like that. He always got what he wanted. Nothing exceeded his grasp.

  I’d known it was happening. It made all the sense in the world. It was logical. It made for a perfect union. Isis was clearly his companion, in every sense of the word.

  Yet I wanted nothing to do with it. I couldn’t quite explain it, even to myself. I had, quite literally, reached the very end of my ability to either care or deal with the realities of what I faced. I wanted out—and didn’t know how.

  When I looked at Jude, I saw a perfect, physical reflection of myself. He was more confident than me and generally more in command of his environment. But we were still the same—physically.

  We were not, however, the same in the depth of our being. At least I’d hoped so, though I’d been unable to admit it until now. I’d largely been an observer, even of my own life, for a very long time. I’d been willing to stand by and watch Jude as he set out on first one path and then another—without any thought for what it might mean for me.

  I was done. It was long past time for me to get a life of my own. And I had to start right now, here, in the presence of both Jude and the thing that, I knew, would control my brother’s life for the remainder of his days.

  Jude and Isis had invited me to their summer estate south of the nation’s capital along the Potomac River to plan the wedding. The estate was near Mount Vernon, George Washington’s summer home that was managed by a private nonprofit. Most of Washington’s land had been preserved inside Mount Vernon, but not all. Jude and Isis had bought land nearby and had donated funds to restore parts of Washington’s historic estate. Jude thought it fitting and somewhat amusing that he’d bought estate property once owned by the father of our country. He’d planted two rows of cherry trees on either side of the long driveway that led to the stately white manor house he’d built on the property.

  When I’d arrived, a copy of Forbes magazine’s annual list of the world’s wealthiest people was tossed casually on the table in the entranceway. Jude’s smiling, beatific face graced the cover.

  “He made it,” Isis said as she greeted me, took my hand expertly, pulled me close, and gave me an affectionate kiss on the cheek. Even with no one around to witness her beauty, she was still breathtaking. “Now we can turn our attention to the Good Earth campaign.”

  I had almost asked her—there in the hallway. But I didn’t have the courage. I looked at her, felt the pull from her dark, deep eyes that had mesmerized me from the first moment I’d ever met her, and then averted my gaze. It was hopeless really. What could I possibly ask that would elicit a truthful answer?

  Jude had already opened an expensive bottle of wine from the cellar to celebrate. He offered me a glass as I joined the two of them on the veranda.

  They were well into their wedding planning by the time I’d arrived. It would be a wedding like no other, they’d decided.

  “We’ve already heard from nearly one hundred world leaders,” Isis said proudly. “They’ve all said yes. They’ll all be there for the wedding.”

  “I don’t think we’ve had a single person decline, right?” Jude added.

  “Not yet,” Isis said. “I can’t imagine someone turning us down. We fully expect that most of the world’s leaders will show up for it.”

  They were planning to be married at the high altar in Westminster Abbey. I wondered how that might even be possible—given that they weren’t members of the Royal Family in the United Kingdom.

  “Oh, we’ve gotten special dispensation from the queen,” Isis said. “And I am, somewhat legitimately, part of the family. A distant part, but still. I was adopted into the House of Windsor. That should count for something.”

  “And if that doesn’t work, I’ll just join the Order of the Bath and become an honorary Knight of the Grand Cross. It isn’t like knighthoods are all that difficult to come by anymore, not if they gave one to President Bush once,” Jude said, laughing. “Of course, you do have to be pure in order to be bathed and enter in the knighthood. That could be a bit of a problem.”

  “Why there, at Westminster Abbey, of all places?” I asked them. “It seems a long way to go for a wedding.”

  “Well, it’s halfway between New Zealand and America,” Isis explained. “So why not? It will certainly be easier for the various world leaders traveling there from around the world.”

  “And everything is just a plane ride away, remember?” Jude had said to me with a wink. “Or have you forgotten?”

  No, I hadn’t forgotten. It was part of what was troubling me.

  When Jude finally did ask whether I’d be his best man at their wedding, we were still out on the veranda—sitting in refurbished chairs that had once been part of the original White House centuries ago.

  Lights from the nation’s capital were somewhere off in the distance. It was peaceful and quiet. It reminded me of my first memories as a child, before the world had gotten so complicated and obscure.

  “Do you remember that day, once, when we were kids on the farm in Waterford?” I asked him. “Do you remember that creature, the one that flew toward us and landed on the fence post near the house? I’d mentioned that it was such an ugly bird …”

  “But it wasn’t a bird,” Jude answered. “Yes, of course. I remember.”

  I kept my gaze steady on Jude. I was afraid that if I looked in her direction, I wouldn’t be able to go through with it. “Does she know about them?” I asked Jude. “Have you told her? Does she understand where your power and knowledge come from? Why you’ve been able to control the world as you have?”

  “Do you mean Isis?” he said, throwing a glance her way before looking back at me.

  “Yes. Does she know?”

  Jude looked at me for a very long time. None of us spoke. I wasn’t sure if it was because the question had surprised him or because he didn’t know how to answer it.

  “How could she not know, Thomas?” he finally said. “How is it possible that she could be my full and complete partner without that knowledge?”

  “Does that matter to you, Thomas?” Isis asked me. “That I know? Is that what you are truly asking? Or is it something else entirely that you are trying to ask him—and me?”
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  I finally looked at Isis then, and I knew. In my heart, I knew. I also believed that my brother knew as well—but may not have cared.

  “I can’t be your best man,” I told him. I stood. “I really and truly am sorry. I’ve been silent and complicit for far too long, and I can’t be any longer. This isn’t right, Jude. And I believe you’ve always known it.”

  I turned and left their home. I did not believe that I would ever return.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Jude won his Senate race by the single biggest margin in the history of federal elections in New York. He was about to become the most famous freshman senator in Washington—ever.

  I didn’t call Jude to congratulate him. There was no need.

  He wasn’t even in office yet and the political analysts were already looking forward in time, wondering when he would run for president and the White House.

  It was inevitable, they said. He had everything any national candidate could conceivably want—wealth, power, charisma, connections, a résumé without blemish, and a track record that appealed to every sector of the American electorate. He had a wife at his side whose star burned every bit as brightly.

  Jude Asher was almost the perfect candidate for national office in America right now, at a time when politics at the national level seemed utterly broken. Every single post-election poll said precisely the same thing about him. The people trusted him. They believed his words. They seemed to relate to what he stood for, his values.

  They expected Jude to save them financially. They expected him to lead them out of the wilderness of uncertainty, fear, and doubt. They expected him to rule with a strong and steady hand. And he would.

  Jude won a plurality in nearly every conceivable demographic. Even Republicans generally liked him—mostly, it seemed, because he was like them. And Democrats adored him as well, because he seemed to care about them.