MACMILLAN’S VIDEO OF DECKER’S house collapse then glanced at the small newspaper photo on page twenty-two of the very dead Ratio-Man. He nodded and tossed the paper aside. Henry-Clay smiled. He knew that he was never special. He had no secret talent, he wasn’t blessed with particularly good looks or a powerful physique, he wasn’t even, if truth be known, all that bright—he just fucking worked harder than anyone else around him. He thought of films like Wall Street and Boiler Room as instructional videos. He hated comic book heroes. He thought it unfair that superheroes won because they had superpowers. The bad guys just used their brains and worked hard—like him. They, as far as he could see, were emblematic of the American work ethic. They were rightly American heroes making something from nothing using only their brains and willpower. The superheroes might have represented the values of Jupiter or Neptune or something but certainly not of this earthly plane. Henry-Clay had spent his undergraduate years at all-fun Tulane in pre-Katrina New Orleans, where he made the first of his great business decisions and quite a name for himself on campus—in his mind the daily double.
