Buyout A Novel

by IRVINE, ALEX

• ISBN13: 9780345494337
• ISBN10: 0345494334
• Edition: Original
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-03-31
• Publisher: Del Rey

Summary

From acclaimed author Alexander C. Irvine comes a gritty near-future thriller in the paranoid, prophetic vein of Philip K. Dick and Richard K. Morgan One hundred years from now, with Americans hooked into an Internet far more expansive and intrusive than today's, the world has become a seamless market-driven experience. In this culture of capitalism run amok, entrepreneurs and politicians faced with rampant overcrowding in the nation's penal system turn to a controversial new method of cutting costs: life-term buyouts. In theory, buyouts offer convicted murderers the chance to atone for their crimes by voluntarily allowing themselves to be put to death by the state in exchange for a one-time cash payment, shared among their heirs and victims, based on a percentage of what it would have cost taxpayers to house and feed them for the rest of their natural lives. It's a win-win situation. At least that's what Martin Kindred believes. And Martin is a man who desperately needs something to believe in, especially with his marriage coming apart and the murder of his brother, an L.A. cop brutally gunned down in the line of duty, unsolved. As the public face of the buyout program, Martin is a lightning rod for verbal and physical abusebut he embraces every challenge, knowing his motives are pure. But when evidence comes to light that a felon in line for a buyout may have been involved with his brother's death, Martin's professional detachment threatens to turn into a personal vendetta that will jeopardize everythingand everyonehe holds dear. Inspired by today's politics, Buyout is an unforgettable look at an all-too-believable future . . . and one man's struggle to do the right thing. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Excerpts

Chapter One


Rumors had been flying for days behind the energy-neutral windows of Antelope Valley Casualty. The company was being sold. A huge restructuring, with accompanying layoff massacre, was on the horizon. A big change in the regulations was about to be announced that would drive them out of business. Martin Kindred listened to them all on his way to the coffee machine, and listened to them all again on his way back. Then he kept working. Anything that happened up on the ninth floor might as well be the weather, was the way he looked at it. He had policies to revise and the first quarterly report of the year coming due

in a week. AVC had had a tough go of 2039, and he was feeling a little pressure—make that a lot—to make Q1 of 2040 cheerful. The fourth-floor financial daemon was gloomy, and Martin pushed figures around his desktop, experimenting with different configurations to see which would go over the best on the ninth floor.

He was pinged, at ten fifty-seven, by Santos Queiroz, an AVC lifer who, by quiet obsequiousness and careful displacement of his mistakes onto subordinates, had gradually moved up to the ninth floor. Martin answered the ping with some reluctance, since Santos was more nervous about the Q1 report than he was, but answer it he did, doing his best to look professionally optimistic as Santos’ face wiped out the unsatisfactory arrangement of figures on the desktop.

“Martin, hi, how are you,” Santos said. “Listen, can you come upstairs?” By which Martin assumed Santos meant Santos’ office, so he said, “Sure.” When he got up to the ninth floor, he found Santos’ office empty. Wandering in the direction of the conference room on that floor, he passed an open door and heard Santos call out to him. Backing up, Martin said, “I looked in your office.”

“Yeah, I know, sorry about that,” Santos said. There were four other people in the room with him. It was an unused office, with furniture left over from its previous occupant, whom Martin vaguely remembered as a manager of some kind who had left under a cloud having to do with reimbursement for adjuster’s expenses. He didn’t know any of the other four people, but Santos took care of that. “This is Kai Fonseca,” he said, indicating a seated Hispanic woman who radiated the intense confidence of a college basketball coach. “She’s a consultant working with us on liaising with Sacramento and Washington. Representing Washington is Victor Eads, who’s with Senator Ron Dempsey’s office.” Martin thought Eads looked like an uglier, older version of his boss, the state’s junior senator and self-proclaimed “law-and-order fundamentalist.” The senator himself affected cowboy gear and cowboy pronouncements that would have embarrassed John Wayne, to whom he bore a cultivated resemblance. Next to Eads, bookending a leather couch out of the 1990s, were a matched pair of Executiva californiensis: tall, athletic, tanned, and wearing several thousand dollars’ worth of tailored clothing. “And this is Scott and Jocelyn Krakauer,” Santos finished up. “They’re the ones who really wanted to talk to you.”

Martin shook hands all around, in the order of Santos’ introductions. Scott Krakauer gestured at an empty chair and started his pitch as if triggered by the contact of Martin’s buttocks with its seat. “Until recently, Jocelyn and I were consultants to the private corrections industry, primarily in Texas,” he began. “I don’t mind telling you that’s not a bad line of work to be in, but one of the things about Texas is that it gets you thinking big, right?” Eads chuckled, and belatedly Martin realized he should have, too, but by then the moment had passed. “We’ve been working on a proje

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Excerpted from Buyout by Alexander Irvine
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