 Penguin Random House Audio presents A Hologram for the King by Dave Edgers Read for you by Dion Graham 1. Alan Clay woke up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia It was May 30th, 2010 He had spent two days on planes to get there In Nairobi, he had met a woman They sat next to each other while they waited for their flights She was tall, curvy, with tiny gold earrings She had a ruddy skin and a lilting voice Alan liked her more than many of the people in his life People he saw every day She said she lived in upstate New York Not that far from his home in suburban Boston If he had courage, he would have found a way to spend more time with her But instead, he got on his flight and he flew to Riyadh and then to Jeddah A man picked him up at the airport and drove him to the Hilton With a click, Alan entered his room at the Hilton at 1.12 a.m. He quickly prepared to go to bed He needed to sleep He had to travel an hour north at 7 for an 8 o'clock arrival at the King Abdullah Economic City There, he and his team would set up a holographic teleconference system And would wait to present it to King Abdullah himself If Abdullah was impressed, he would award the IT contract for the entire city to Reliant And Alan's commission in the mid-six figures would fix everything that ailed him So he needed to feel rested, to feel prepared But instead, he had spent four hours in bed, not sleeping He thought of his daughter, Kit, who was in college A very good and expensive college He did not have the money to pay her tuition for the fall He could not pay her tuition because he had made a series of foolish decisions in his life He had not planned well He had not had courage when he needed it His decisions had been short-sighted The decisions of his peers had been short-sighted These decisions had been foolish and expedient But he hadn't known at the time that his decisions were short-sighted, foolish or expedient He and his peers did not know they were making decisions that would leave them, leave Alan As he now was Virtually broke, nearly unemployed The proprietor of a one-man consulting firm run out of his home office He was divorced from Kit's mother, Ruby They had now been apart longer than they had been together Ruby was an unholy pain in the ass who now lived in California And contributed nothing financially to Kit's finances College is your thing, she told him Be a man about it, she said Now Kit would not Sample complete Ready to continue?