2028

by Ken Saunders

  ‘I appreciate your consideration,’ Fiona answered.

  His eyes narrowed. ‘This is a Dickens shop,’ he made clear. ‘I don’t want any of your John le Carré carrying on upstairs.’ He threw some oatmeal into the pot of gruel. ‘Your man is already there,’ he informed her.

  Fiona Brennan had arrived early because she wanted Wilson Huang to find her already in place, in control. The Compink Australia CEO had evidently wanted the same thing.

  She found Wilson watching a Dickens movie. ‘I always had a soft spot for Orlick,’ Wilson told her, indicating an actor skulking about on the screen. ‘A vicious man, yes, but he’s the only character in Great Expectations who seems intent on moving the plot anywhere.’

  ‘You like Dickens?’ Fiona asked.

  ‘Like Dickens?’ Wilson mused. ‘What an unusual question. Dickens is more like running a marathon. It has its highs and lows along the way but, in the end, you’re just glad it’s finally over.’

  Fiona laughed. ‘I’m here,’ she said more seriously, ‘to discuss the Renard–Amy situation.’

  ‘The Amy–Renard situation,’ Wilson corrected.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Amy Zhao is brilliant, my most accomplished employee. If Amy has chosen your Renard, then he’s a very fortunate man.’

  ‘Renard is very …’ Fiona had to admit she didn’t know Renard particularly well. ‘Very nice too,’ she said in his defence. She didn’t want Wilson thinking Compink Australia had got the short end of this love-between-the-agencies deal. ‘Amy is so accomplished, yet she’s only a data entry clerk?’ Fiona observed.

  ‘Amy Zhao is Compink Australia’s deputy CEO,’ Wilson informed her proudly, ‘and has been so for several years!’

  ‘I see,’ Fiona remarked. After a moment, she asked, ‘Did you mean to tell me that?’

  ‘Times are changing; I’m embracing a new openness,’ Wilson replied with a cavalier wave of his hand. ‘Fiona, Compink Australia is only following that time-honoured corporate tradition of trying to make as much money as possible. ASIO doesn’t need to bestow as much attention on us as you currently do. But back to the matter at hand: Amy Zhao’s happiness is important to me.’

  ‘Renard’s happiness is important to me,’ Fiona countered. She wasn’t going to let Wilson Huang beat her in a contest for Most Considerate Boss.

  ‘Fine. Then we agree to let them enjoy their happiness. A very good decision.’

  Fiona Brennan was getting a fair impression of why her agents had never got the upper hand on Wilson Huang. ‘If Amy Zhao is your deputy CEO …’

  ‘Yes, yes … I also gave one of your planted ASIO agents the title of “deputy CEO”. It made him think he was in the inner circle. Meanwhile, Amy could get on with doing the real work of deputy CEO. You should probably recall your man. Actually, recall all your spies from my organisation.’ Wilson hesitated, ‘Except, perhaps, Madeleine Fong. Her work is excellent. I’d like to keep her if I could.’

  ‘Wilson, I can’t leave an agent in place at the taxpayer’s expense because she does good work for you.’

  ‘She could spy on the Compink China agents infesting my workplace,’ Wilson suggested. ‘I’ll be leaving a few of them in place. Otherwise, they’ll just send more.’ He favoured Fiona with his most charming smile.

  ‘I’ll consider your request,’ Fiona replied. She was inclined to believe Wilson was being honest with her. Working with Compink Australia to find out about Compink China’s activities did appeal to her. ‘Perhaps we should meet here regularly,’ she proposed. ‘I hear the gruel here is very, well, gruel-like.’

  ...

  Just days to the election and it couldn’t be any worse. The 2RT station manager held his head with both hands, pulling on what little hair he had left.

  ‘Yes, caller,’ he heard Jim Jarvis say, ‘but we can’t just be against taxes. A solid, dependable tax base is the only way the government can fund the services people need.’ It was Virtual Jim Jarvis’s new voice of moderation. ‘I’m not alive anymore to pay taxes, but I’m sure Radio 2RT is making a lot of money off my show and my expectation would be that 2RT pay a fair rate of corporate tax.’

  The station manager slammed a fist onto the desk. ‘I’ll fucking kill him!’ he swore. ‘Don’t point out the irony in that statement,’ he snapped before the producer could speak.

  It was a nightmare. The nerd, when the station manager finally reached him, refused to come and fix Virtual Jim Jarvis. He’d also warned that if any other programmer attempted to tamper with the new Jim Jarvis’s personality, a sub-program beneath the current one would be activated and transform Jim Jarvis into a Muslim fundamentalist. The show plodded on all week with its new tepid host. Already old foes were cottoning on to the changed field of play. Now that Jim Jarvis wasn’t shouting people down, everybody wanted to be on the show, even the fucking Mayor of Sydney.

  ‘I’d rather have an ice pick jammed down my ear than listen to this stuff,’ the producer observed. ‘Even Radio National is more interesting.’

  ‘We’ve got to take Jarvis off the air,’ the station manager decided.

  The producer held up his hands impotently. ‘But what do we say? Why are we taking him off? We have a bloody shrine to the man in our foyer with his actual body in it. We can’t just give him the sack.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the station manager moaned. ‘Say he’s not well, needs to go on leave.’

  ‘Not well?’ the producer exclaimed. ‘He’s dead!’

  The station manager did not speak for almost a minute. ‘Let me run this by you,’ he said at last, his voice ominously controlled. ‘We hire some anarchist kid, some no-good with a chip on his shoulder, tell him he’s on work experience for the perpetually unemployed. Then we plant some rinky-dink bomb in our server and blow up Jim Jarvis!’

  There was a grin the producer had never seen before on his station manager’s face. ‘Jim Jarvis dies a second time!’ the station manager proposed, his enthusiasm growing. ‘A terrorist bomb going off at 2RT to kill Virtual Jim Jarvis! Anarchist suspect! It would be the biggest bloody story in the country!’

  The producer considered the idea. Several crimes were involved—including insurance fraud, if he knew his manager. Whether blowing up your own property could lead to terrorism charges was likely a murky legal area. Then there was the framing of some anarchist buffoon. Those things aside, the plan seemed reasonable enough.

  ‘And then we dismantle that fucking shrine in our foyer and stuff Jim Jarvis into the ground where he belongs,’ the station manager vowed.

  ...

  The Prime Minister sank contentedly into his chair. It was good to be back in his office if only for a few hours. Being the eve of the election, he’d have to head off soon enough to his home electorate of Dobell to cast his vote the following morning.

  The end of the race. During the whirlwind final week of the campaign—his last as prime minister in all likelihood—he’d visited the electorates of his twenty best backbenchers. He didn’t go to the Sydney fish markets or speak to the troops in Darwin. He shunned the easy photo ops and the hard-hat tours of factories. Instead, he went with his backbenchers to the coal face, where the swing voters were. He gave a speech in a hostile trade union hall. He met with the legions of unemployed in Centrelink offices. He talked with ex-GPs. He fought for votes in the likeliest and unlikeliest places. Most of all, he talked up the local MPs with feeling and commitment. It was the best effort he could have made to save the core of his backbench. And he did it all off script! That afternoon, Quentin and Leon had told him they were proud of him. He was surprised how much it moved him to hear his bodyguards say that.

  There was a soft rap on the door and he heard Olga’s voice on the other side speaking to Quentin. ‘Come in,’ he called.

  Olga O’Rourke entered the room almost sheepishly, a sheet of paper in her hand. Her normal straightforwardness seemed absent. On the eve of the election, Olga should be in South Australia banging voters’ he
ads together. ‘Is something wrong?’ Fitzwilliams asked.

  ‘A difficult matter, Prime Minister,’ she replied. ‘I’ve narrowed down the list of who could have been feeding information to the Luddites. There are only two possible suspects remaining.’

  ‘Does it even matter now?’ Fitzwilliams asked, finding himself oddly uninterested in the question. He still held out hope that the Liberal–National Coalition would be the largest party in the new parliament, though their ranks would be decimated. The Luddites had routed them in the election campaign. He’d seen the Luddite leader—Nemesis Ned, as he now called her—on TV just minutes ago addressing a throng of cyclists on the Yarra. Thousands of them. ‘We aren’t passing out how-to-vote cards,’ she had proclaimed. ‘You all know how to vote. Elect the best people you can to parliament!’ The Luddites were going without how-to-vote cards, without scrutineers, without even a party headquarters. Nothing by the book … and yet every absurd and unorthodox thing they did worked for them. Fitzwilliams was a seasoned campaigner and they had bested him. If he lived in Wills, he might even vote for Nemesis Ned. You had to respect that level of ability.

  He was both surprised and pleased to find that graciousness in defeat was coming so naturally to him. The Luddite mole was only one small facet in the likely rout his government was now facing. Did it really matter who it was?

  He could see that it did matter to Olga. He’d set her the task of unearthing the culprit, after all. ‘All right, come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s see who it was.’

  She handed him the sheet of paper. She had handwritten two names on it. His own was there. And the second name was possibly even more astounding to him. He lifted his eyes to meet Olga’s.

  ‘I’m sorry, Prime Minister,’ she murmured, giving what struck him as an almost apologetic smile. ‘I guess you may call me Ned.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘Olga …’ Fitzwilliams gazed at her in astonishment. ‘Why? If you wanted to be prime minister, you could have told me. We could have come to some arrangement.’

  ‘I did not want to become prime minister, Prime Minister,’ Olga replied. ‘I wanted to reform the political system.’

  ‘Reform the system?’ Fitzwilliams was incredulous. ‘With the Luddite Party? With celery sticks and logos on the moon and people marching in the nude?’

  By all rights, he should throw her out of the office. He could call Leon and Quentin and have them remove her from the premises. He could pick up the phone and contact his lawyers; God knew they had umpteen punishments on the books for leaking cabinet documents—unless they were documents the government wanted leaked, of course. It was utter treachery what she’d done—whatever it was she had done.

  But the rage he should be feeling wasn’t there. What he found in its place was … what?’ Respect for an opponent who’d got the better of him? Olga O’Rourke was one of the few truly first-class minds he’d met in politics. As he held that gaze of hers, what arose in him was not indignation but curiosity. He repeated his original question. ‘Why?’

  ‘I will give you a full explanation but I must ask you not to interrupt.’ Olga’s look remained focused, yet somewhat distant. ‘When I was growing up in the Soviet Union,’ she began, ‘my friends and I knew the Soviet system needed to be completely overhauled and we dreamed of bringing about such a change. But my parents emigrated to Australia in 1985, just as things started to happen in the Soviet Union. A few years later, that process reached crisis point.’ Her tone became bitter. ‘That drunkard Yeltsin scrambled onto a tank to proclaim a new era and everyone applauded as if a moment of theatre was all that was needed to sweep away seventy years of tyranny and lies. You know the history of Russia from there. Cronyism and corruption, a system worse than it was before.

  ‘I arrived here with the simplistic thinking of a fifteen year old. I reasoned that since communism had made a mess of the Soviet Union, the right-wing parties must be correct. I joined the Young Liberals at the first opportunity and my political activities from there set me on the path to where I am today, elected to the Senate and a cabinet minister in your administration.

  ‘I lost those naive eyes of my fifteen-year-old self. From inside the political system here, I could see it was plagued with problems—problems not so different from what was happening in Russia. There were cronies in our system: mining magnates who thought they were entitled to endless privileges for plundering the nation’s resources; casino owners demanding concessions, as if operating roulette tables was the highest calling of civic duty; media moguls of unspeakable greed. Were they really so different from the rogues who swirled around Yeltsin and Putin and now Kharlamov? At least those rogues knew they had to …’ she paused over the phrase, ‘doff their caps to Putin. Here, the scoundrels don’t even have the decency to show deference to you, the prime minister.

  ‘Then there was the managerial class of business and bureaucracy here, with their meaningless babble of “total quality assurance”, “key performance indicators”, “creativity-based solutions”. These managers and business elite truly believe they are the engine that powers this country, when all they really do is rebrand dung as Dung Plus or Dung 3.1. In the Soviet Union, everyone knew the system was based on lies. Everyone. Those telling the lies and those hearing them. What shocked me was when I realised that managers here actually believe the nonsense they speak. They call a place a “centre of excellence” and believe it has become so simply by their naming it that.

  ‘Then we have our political system, Prime Minister. Two parliamentary parties obsessed with opinion polls. Focus groups, sound bites, endless fundraising, policies and messages so filtered they have become diluted to almost homeopathic levels. The inanities of question time. It goes on. I came to the conclusion that the system did not need reform, it needed to be brought crashing down and rebuilt from the ground up. The political class was incapable of reform.’

  She paused and smiled. ‘I realise, given my accent, this speech must sound to your ears like the ravings of a James Bond villain.’

  Fitzwilliams had been mesmerised throughout her long dissertation. Had he ever known the real Olga? For all three terms of his government, she’d been his most capable cabinet colleague, his fixer. He also recalled having once told Alan Chandos that Olga had the accent of a James Bond villain. Had bloody Chandos repeated that to her?

  ‘It’s all very well to bring a system crashing down,’ Olga continued, as if toppling a political regime was a routine matter, ‘but it’s difficult to ensure that something better takes its place. Revolutionaries are very good at making revolution, seldom good at government; good at capturing a radio station, but hopeless at producing any radio shows worth listening to.’

  ‘What does any of this have to do with the Luddites?’ Fitzwilliams was intrigued by the full explanation, but it wouldn’t hurt her to get to the point.

  ‘The political parties themselves inevitably develop unsavoury attributes. Our donors would be an example, Prime Minister. There’s that expression—’ she paused ‘—about paying the piper and calling the tune. However, the major flaw of our current system is that one party has the role of generating all the ideas to govern and the other party has the responsibility of barking and frothing at them like a pack of rabid dogs. We need an entirely different approach. Everyone in parliament should be there to govern. Everyone should be there to listen to each other in order to decide matters.’

  ‘Is that what the Luddites are then?’ Fitzwilliams asked. ‘A new model of government, an anti-party party?’

  ‘The Luddites are a different way of doing things. Over several years, I recruited a nucleus of people to the Luddite Party—one hundred and fifty people initially, and I have quietly added more over the years. They were people of ideas. I didn’t look for people with my political ideas, but people who were both informed and original thinkers and, most importantly, people who listened discerningly to the ideas and opinions of others. I wanted to remove personal ambition and ego from t
he political process as much as possible. That was when I hit on the idea of Ned Ludd. Give everyone the same name, then you do not spend your time thinking about who proposed something but, rather, what was being proposed. They all agreed to change their names officially to Ned Ludd.’

  ‘You recruited one hundred and fifty Luddites?’ Fitzwilliams queried. ‘But two thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven people changed their names to Ned Ludd back then.’

  ‘You remember the figure?’ Olga remarked, surprised.

  Fitzwilliams shrugged. ‘It’s a prime number.’

  Olga seemed impressed he knew this. ‘Most of those people were there as distractors. I knew there’d be a great deal of curiosity around the renaming, so I also recruited a large number of people who thought the name-changing was some sort of postmodern joke and were willing to be part of it.’ Fitzwilliams didn’t comment. ‘If the media wanted to make a story of it, the postmodern joke story would be the one they found.

  ‘With you entering your fourth campaign, the timing was correct for the Luddites. Yours—ours—was a weary government and the opposition was weak. Several years ago, when you had me draft the Demonstration Protection Act—an underhanded act of repression by the way, Prime Minister; I thought it unworthy of you—I deliberately left a loophole within the legislation. That loophole enabled the Luddites to carry out their nude protest march at the start of the campaign. Having the Luddites call the election before you had, and call it in such a starkly revealing way—’ she paused, as if considering whether that phrase had worked or not ‘—made the public curious to know what the Luddites were about, and with Ned Ludd, everyone would know their candidate’s name. Also, by encouraging the public to confuse the pollsters, we disrupted the logistical supply of information that both major parties depended on.’

  ‘So everything you’ve done has been a set-up all along,’ Fitzwilliams challenged her. ‘The Demonstration Protection Act, the legality of the nude march.’ He suddenly found himself both angry and hurt. ‘That filmed tennis match where you told me I was old and past my prime and then released it on YouTube!’