by Hammond, Ray
‘It’s hard to say, sir. It could be Marsello Furtrado, the corporation’s senior legal counsel. The group is very widely distributed. Each division and each subsidiary is run separately by its own CEO and CFO and they report into the corporate office on Hope Island. Tye runs that himself with a very small staff – just sixty or so.’
The banker nodded, wiped his nose again and returned the handkerchief to his jacket pocket. ‘But you know them all – or know of them.’
Joe nodded. He knew the biography of every one and he’d met quite a few at analysts’ briefings. He knew their key technical staff, the finance directors and their marketing executives. He even had a spreadsheet that compared the annual salaries and bonuses of the Top 500 people in Tye’s organization worldwide. Not all the information he had about them was in the public domain, but Joe was content that his information was accurate. His numerous sources and his relationship skills were the key to his success.
‘Then will you develop an organization chart for me, Mr Tinkler?’ asked Chelouche. ‘I want to see the whole Tye empire laid out: the people who run it, their backgrounds, the relationships between the corporate entities – physical, legal and personal On a board, not a screen, if you don’t mind.’
Joe nodded. He already had most of the material he would need.
‘I also want a complete breakdown of the shareholding of each separate corporate identity: how much of each company is publicly available, who owns what percentage – everything above a one per cent stake. And full cross-referencing between different companies and legal identities. Can you do that?’
Now Joe understood how much work was entailed. Creating a cross-referenced and consolidated shareholding register of every Tye-related company would be an immense undertaking.
‘Do I get any admin help?’ he asked.
‘As much as you need,’ huffed Chelouche, with a dismissive wave. ‘This is a political operation. Finances don’t come into it.’
Joe could never recall hearing such a statement from a banker before. He guessed the surprise was showing on his face. Then he remembered there was something else. ‘What’s the second objective of the fund?’ he asked.
‘I can’t tell you that at this stage,’ said Chelouche. ‘And it may never materialize. But I can promise that you would be very enthusiastic about it.’
Joe nodded. As well as admiring Chelouche’s reputation, he was now beginning to like the man. He realized that he was staring at an opportunity to be catapulted to the pinnacle of global finance and he swallowed.
‘So what do you say, Mr Tinkler?’ asked Chelouche. ‘We’ll match the salary Rakusen-Webber provided and the bonus you were due from them. You’ll also be earning bonuses at your previous rate on any additional profit you make for the fund.’
‘When do I start?’ asked Joe.
*
His ashen complexion only emphasized the large dark rings around his eyes. Raymond Liu presented himself, as demanded, outside the Network Control Center, where Connie was waiting for him.
‘He’s in a foul mood,’ she warned as she touched the entry system. ‘Keep your distance.’
Inside, Liu saw a bright display in the Holo-Theater and he waited while his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the room. Tye had the advantage.
‘Get down here Liu,’ he screamed. ‘Look what your fucking networks have done!’
Liu walked down the gently sloping aisle towards the central display pit. Inside the ring he could see a flat two-dimensional display. He didn’t need more than one glance to know that it was an optical view of Los Angeles from one of the visual-wavelength satellite feeds.
Tye was circling the edge of the Holo-Theater, haloed by the bright image behind him. Liu stopped halfway down the aisle. He felt Connie stop abruptly behind him. He could make out several other figures in the front row of seats, just at the edge of the surrounding darkness.
‘Come down here and fucking well look,’ demanded Tye. ‘Nothing is moving down there.’
Liu didn’t need to be told. He had been looking at the crisis on his own monitors all day while he frantically directed the efforts to restore vehicle management to the Greater Los Angeles road network. In the local offices his people had been besieged by the news networks seeking explanations.
‘They’ve been dragging cars off the freeways ever since it happened,’ shouted an ignivomous Tye, ‘and the roads are still fucking full! It will take them days to get all the vehicles off. Their drivers just abandoned them!’
Liu was as frozen as the stationary traffic in the image. He could see the Santa Monica Freeway clearly. Miles of stationary metal glinted through the late-afternoon heat haze – an atmosphere that was unusually free of smog. When he had been a regional technical director of Tye Satellite Networks he had been one of the original beta testers who had driven the length of each freeway to check the system’s reaction to unauthorized driver intervention, breakdowns, blow-outs and all the other ills that can befall any one of those millions of individual mobile assets within an integrated city traffic management system.
They had taken so much time designing back-ups, fail-safes and extreme-condition survival systems that they had not felt it appropriate to build or act out a scenario for the complete failure of the entire system – not least because there could be no conceivable solution. So the decision had been made to engineer risk out of the system and they had even designed sufficient fault tolerance for the satellites to withstand a meteor shower one hundred times more dense than any ever recorded in the Earth’s vicinity. With two low-Earth-orbit satellites stationary above Los Angeles and a third back-up management system on board a satellite in mid-Earth-orbit, they could not envisage how total failure could occur across three separate systems.
But it had.
Tye bounded up the aisle. He lunged towards Liu and grabbed his shirt front. Connie stepped round and pushed herself physically between them. Liu was suddenly aware of an unexpected strength and muscularity in the executive assistant.
‘Tom . . .’ she warned. ‘That won’t help!’
They stood there, all three, in an embrace of anger. Connie did not budge. The slope of the aisle equalized their heights.
Tye released his grip and turned away.
‘Tell him, Marsello,’ he screamed towards the seated group. ‘Fucking tell him!’
Furtrado stood up. He had a printout in his hand. ‘We’ve been contacted by the attorneys who act for the City of Los Angeles,’ he said with a face like a lawsuit. ‘They’ve notified us that actions will be forthcoming – for the loss to the city’s economy and for punitive damages. The death toll so far is believed to be over seven hundred.’
There was a silence. Tye had gone back to the edge of the Holo-Theater where he was staring again at the image of stationary downtown Los Angeles.
‘Tell him all of it!’ he screamed at the lawyer.
‘The city is at a complete standstill,’ continued Furtrado. ‘There has been no production in any of its major industrial or commercial sectors today. Very few services are operating. LAX is closed and all flights are diverted to San Diego. The police, ambulances and fire crews can’t travel – every road is blocked. Looting has broken out in West Hollywood, Culver City and the lower slopes of the Hollywood Hills. The Governor has called in the National Guard and they have started arriving by helicopter. The police are afraid that when night falls the looters will move west towards Beverly Hills, north into the Canyon and east into the commercial district. I’m afraid we can expect many more civil suits from those affected so far and any who suffer later.’
Liu shook his head in disbelief.
‘Tell him how much, tell him how much!’ shouted Tye.
‘We don’t know how much yet, Tom,’ observed Furtrado. ‘But it’s going to be huge. The city’s action alone could be the biggest lawsuit in history. Then there’s the private suits with their inevitable claims for actual damages, punitive damages and for solatium – payment for ma
king them feel bad. And remember, they’re the richest urban population in the world.’ Furtrado paused. ‘And, necessitously, we are uninsured for this contingency.’
There was a silence and Tye turned back to face Liu. ‘Every traffic management project we were working on has been put on hold,’ he said quietly, as if he could hardly believe it himself ‘Atlanta, Toronto, Singapore, Sydney – they’ve all told us to stop further development. The LA standstill is now the main item on every one of the world’s news networks.’
Tye gathered himself and started up the aisle towards Liu again. Connie stepped further down the ramp to block him.
‘Have you seen the fucking stock price?’ he yelled up at Liu as Connie pressed the flat of her hand against her boss’s chest to prevent him from attacking the engineer. ‘Networks is down forty per cent! The Corporate stock is down five! WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?’
‘We don’t know,’ admitted Liu. ‘There’s been a large increase in faults all over our networks but this was . . .’ He tailed off. There was no adequate description for the disaster.
‘How long . . .?’ screamed Tye, not even bothering to finish the question.
‘The master system on board SATMAN-6 is now working again,’ reported Liu. ‘I’ve personally reloaded the entire system. But there’s no back-up and we can’t restart without one. We’ve got to launch replacements for LAT-6 and 7. Then we’ve got to test them.’
‘How long?’ repeated Tye. ‘Every day will cost billions.’
Liu had been dreading this question. He had put fourteen staff to work on preparing two replacement satellites the moment he’d heard the news.
‘About five days, Tom,’ said Raymond Liu.
‘Make it two,’ shouted Tye as he sprayed his mouth. ‘Or get off my island.’
Chapter Fourteen
‘Hope Island Control, this is Tye Flight Five, over.’
‘Good morning, Tye Flight Five, this is Hope Island Control. Good to see you, Jack. You’re flying manual?’
And so Jack Hendriksen had been welcomed back. He had disengaged the computer system that normally flew the plane and he confirmed the aircraft’s unusual status to Hope Island ATM. Jack liked to feel a plane in the air, as did most pilots, but every commercial airline flight was now operated automatically, from take-off to landing. Insurance companies would no longer accept the risk of humans flying planes, except in extreme emergencies, and today’s pilots flew with the aircraft simply to reassure the passengers. The problem was that the one in ten take-offs and landings that the human pilots were allowed to handle, for purposes of practice, were not enough to maintain their general flying skills or their preparedness for emergencies, despite a significant increase in simulator training. As a result every passenger preferred the ultra-smoothness of a computer-controlled landing and many had started to book seats only with carriers and on flights where this could be guaranteed. It looked liked commercial-airline pilots were going out of business. Such shop talk had occupied the team on the flight deck throughout their short supersonic trip from New York’s La Guardia airport back to Hope Island.
Jack accepted his flight-path-approach instructions from the tower, made the course and height alterations necessary, trimmed the aircraft for subsonic speed, winked at his co-pilot as the controlling computer pointlessly communicated a heading error of one degree – an error no human pilot could correct – and watched as the island and the Cape Hope spaceport came into view.
He had cadged a ride back to the island with a group of returning patent attorneys and he’d asked the pilot for permission to fly the Tye jet personally in order to keep himself occupied. There was nothing he could do to advance his new mission during the flight but he knew that the moment he landed he would be overloaded. UNISA wanted answers urgently and he realized that he was flying into a corporate maelstrom: the hysterical media coverage made it sound as if Los Angeles had been completely shut down by the failure of the Tye Corporation’s traffic-management systems.
He also knew that Tom would be screaming for him to approve the security aspects of plans for the forthcoming anniversary celebrations.
In two months, on 30 August, it would be Founder’s Day on Hope Island. In previous years that day had been marked by a public holiday and with company-sponsored barbecues on the beaches. But this year, for the state’s thirteenth official anniversary and celebration of sovereignty, the corporation was planning to use the occasion for a major product launch. Jack knew it would also be a belated celebration for Tye’s fiftieth birthday but that would remain unannounced. Rumours suggested that the event was being designed to be ‘the party to end all parties’, with a guest list intended to be the most exclusive of the twenty-first century. By coincidence, Tye’s ambitious plans would provide Jack with a perfect excuse for a complete review of the island’s security – not that it wasn’t needed. As UNISA had made clear, Tye’s continuing safety was essential for global economic stability.
Connie had greeted Jack with an affectionate smile when he arrived at the corporate offices in the ground-floor quadrangle of Tye’s house. Yes, he had enjoyed his vacation. No, he didn’t realize that Connie had been in New York at the same time. She’d been trying to reach him? Ah, well, he’d spent time upstate with his mother: her birthday and she wasn’t at all well. In fact, she might have to be admitted to hospital.
Jack detected no suspicion in Connie’s gaze as she listened to him. Perhaps there was a hint of something else, he realized. Once again he considered the elegance of her long neck. He knew he would need an ally on the island but . . . well, Connie was just too close to Tye. Nobody knew the origins of the fierce loyalty she showed to her mercurial master.
‘Never mind, it wasn’t important,’ she said with a smile. ‘Well, you have come back at a busy time. Tom’s got meetings all day about the LA situation – you can imagine! But he wants you to see the event organizers – they’re in from Washington, and standing by in Network Control. They gave Tom and me a briefing this morning on their plans for the anniversary weekend. It all sounds wonderful but your people will have a lot to do. Oh, and there’s the Moscow visit. Tom had to postpone that, so you might want to review the new arrangements. Pierre is currently scheduled to lead the Presidential Protection Team for that trip.’
Jack nodded as she ticked off her list one by one. He wanted to talk with Tye in person, even though strictly he didn’t have any urgent need. He guessed he wanted to see him in the flesh again, now that he knew more about the supposed secret of the man’s success. He also wanted to push him a little, to see if any cracks appeared.
It had just been the busiest vacation, or non-vacation, of his life. He had arrived in Manhattan intending to talk to a lawyer about Tye’s dubious activities, and he had returned as a newly sworn intelligence officer of the United Nations International Security Agency. Despite his protestations, a second salary was now being paid into a new bank account for him as ‘Bruce Curtis’ in Manhattan. ‘It isn’t legal unless we pay you, Jack,’ Deakin had smiled. ‘That’s our part of the contract.’
Jack’s part of the contract was still unclear. He knew that to a large extent that would be decided only once he had uncovered more information about Tye’s presumed interceptions of network traffic.
He had also attended four more UN briefing sessions on what was now known as ‘Operation Iambus’ – a code name specially selected for the purpose. At each one he had seen the team grow steadily larger. By the time he had left it consisted of over 190 men and women from all parts of the world, who were busily taking over the entire twelfth floor of the UN Secretariat building.
As well as an increasing number of UNISA intelligence officers, the team now included technical officers, satellite-surveillance analysts, patent lawyers, two insolvency practitioners, aerospace consultants, three jurimetricians – jurisdictional experts in antinomic international law (who seemed unable to agree on anything) – economists, energy consultants, media specialists, corporate lawy
ers, a former White House Chief of Staff, a professor of solar radiation, two meteorologists and an ecologist.
Research into every aspect of the Tye Corporation and its many subsidiaries and interests was punctuated by endless discussions about what might be the long-term aims of the mysterious Phoebus Project to which Jack had alerted them. Just before he had left, this topic of speculation was replaced by a sense of quiet awe at the scale of the standstill the Tye Networks malfunction had inflicted on Los Angeles.
He had also submitted himself to six days of exhausting refresher courses during which he had been supplied with the small selection of specialist tools that were stowed in his luggage. There were no Customs or immigration barriers on Hope Island and, if such a need ever arose, it would be Jack’s own team that would provide the personnel. After the training and his rendezvous with Haley Voss, he had indeed travelled upstate to visit his mother, despite the fact she was as fit as he was and regardless of the fact that it wasn’t actually her birthday.
‘How would you enjoy a trip to Europe, Mom?’ he had asked, though he didn’t immediately explain that she would have to travel under an alternative identity. Gently, as the evening progressed and she watched her son enjoy the dinner she had prepared, he told her that he was once again working for the government, although he allowed her to assume he meant the US administration. He admitted that it was to do with his boss, the Thomas Tye she saw so often on the television, but the investigation was so secret that he had to remain in place as a Tye executive in the corporate offices.
His mother nodded her understanding. ‘That young man is getting a little big for his boots,’ she observed.
With suitable meiosis he explained that he would need an excuse for regular return trips to the mainland and that he would therefore like to pretend she was unwell and that he needed to visit her regularly. He told her that his government agency could arrange for her to be registered as a patient at a nearby hospital while she was actually spending time in Birmingham, England with her younger sister. This was because people in the Tye Corporation might try to check on his whereabouts or her condition of health.