by Hammond, Ray
As she kneeled and hugged him, she could feel his small heart pumping violently beneath his pyjama jacket.
‘They told me you’d gone away,’ he sniffed as his tears abated. Then he noticed the three black leather suitcases lined up on the carpet ready for her departure the next morning. Two packing crates of books and the synthesizer flight-case stood against one wall, ready to be forwarded.
Calypso weighed up what, and how, to explain to him. She realized how much damage had already been done to him in his short life and, above all, she wanted to cause no more hurt.
‘I do have to go, I’m sorry,’ she lied. Lying about having to go, not about being sorry. She supposed that if she gave in to Tom and stopped interfering in the way the boy was brought up, she might still be able to stay – but what would be the point? It was her professional judgement that was being challenged here and she couldn’t bear to watch Tommy go on spending his childhood in such damaging phobic isolation. The only possible end result would be psychopathy or severe neurasthenia.
Calypso sat him on the piano stool and gently took the water bottle and chocolate bar away from him. Without a word she pulled the tight-fitting gloves from his hands and undid the bow that secured the face mask around his neck. She tossed the items aside and examined him for injury. She noticed grass stains on the knees and elbows of his pyjamas but he seemed unhurt. As she kissed his forehead, Tommy released Jed from his tight captivity.
‘Hello, Doctor,’ said the caterpillar. ‘It’s a pleasant evening.’
Calypso couldn’t help smiling. She guessed that the Furry must have registered her professional identity during that lunch up at the house.
‘Hello, Jed,’ she replied, grateful for the distraction as she gathered her thoughts.
‘Does your father know you’re here?’ she asked Tommy, sitting down on a low chair, close to him. She could guess the answer.
‘I’ve run away,’ he announced solemnly. ‘I want to live with you now. They said you’d gone away for ever.’
‘Well, I do have to leave tomorrow, Tommy,’ she admitted. ‘But I’m very pleased to be able to say goodbye to you.’
‘Where are you going, Doctor?’ asked Jed.
‘I’m going to visit my mother. She’s not very well,’ replied Calypso, marvelling at the conversation simulation in the latest generation of Furries.
‘Go to sleep, Jed,’ said Tommy irritably.
Then they heard a sound that was unusual on Hope Island. Calypso couldn’t recall ever hearing it since she’d arrived there and she was shocked at how intrusive it seemed. She crossed to the front door and opened it. The petrol engine of the large four-wheel-drive vehicle cut out and Stella Witherspoon swung her lithe frame down from the cab. In the distance Calypso could hear the deep throb of a second engine coming closer.
Stella started along the path that crossed the small lawn and threaded her way through the pile of refuse sacks that held the remains of Tom’s floral apology. Calypso knew very well why she was here but she wanted this situation handled with a very light touch.
‘Hi, Stella,’ she called out as a friendly greeting, though she’d only met the security officer a few times previously and had never really spoken to her before. ‘Come on in.’
Calypso stepped aside to let Stella enter the room. The woman had clearly been out on night patrol when she had received an alarm call. She wore a black shirt, black trousers and black combat boots – and carried a holstered gun on her belt. Calypso guessed that Stella’s dark night-vision viewpers were already transmitting the scene to watchers elsewhere. Calypso made her smile ultra-wide, but her gleaming eyes and flaring nostrils delivered a warning. ‘I expect you’re looking for Tommy,’ she said lightly. ‘We were just going to have a cup of hot chocolate before he went home.’
Stella looked from the psychiatrist to the small boy on the stool, then back at her. Calypso’s hands had moved involuntarily to her hips and she sucked in one cheek. Stella’s orders had been to return the boy home immediately. They were talking in her earpiece.
‘Sure,’ she agreed. ‘Sure.’
‘I don’t want to go home, I want to stay here,’ said Tommy. But the demand was made in a mumble of resignation, not a cry of defiance. Calypso smiled and nodded for Stella to sit on the couch.
Then the second vehicle arrived outside and cut its engine. As Calypso opened the door again, Jack appeared in shorts and a sweatshirt. He was barefoot and his hair was ruffled as if he had only recently been sleeping.
‘Hi,’ he smiled as his glance took in the scene. ‘May I join your party?’
Tommy looked up at the tall security executive. He had been repeatedly told that Jack would always be his friend but that he must always do whatever Jack told him. The security chief sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of the boy.
‘Good going, Tommy, that was some trip. Are you OK?’
The boy nodded, tightly clutching the now-silent Jed.
‘I’ll make that hot chocolate,’ said Calypso, crossing the room.
While Jack kept Tommy occupied, Calypso poured hot milk into two mugs. She didn’t have enough for four because her fridge had been informed of her scheduled departure and had adjusted its normal restocking order. From the kitchen window she saw Stella standing outside, examining her VideoMate as if her system was suffering problems.
Calypso handed Tommy and Jack each a mug and resumed her seat.
Jack was telling Tommy about some new model plane – with three on-board video cameras – that he’d seen in a Manhattan store. Would Tommy like Jack to buy him one on his next trip, he asked.
Tommy ignored the suggestion. ‘Will you be coming back here when your mother is better?’ he asked Calypso.
She concentrated her gaze on Tommy, even though she could sense the same question in Jack’s eyes.
‘I don’t think so, Tommy,’ she sighed, her heart suddenly aching. ‘My mother is very old and I’ve got to stay and look after her. I might be there a very long time.’
Tommy nodded sadly and hung his head. As Stella reappeared in the doorway, Calypso rose and held out her hand.
‘Come on, Tommy, I’ll take you out to the car.’
Tommy rose, using both hands to place the unfinished chocolate carefully on the small round table on which Calypso normally displayed her family photos. He took her hand and walked with her to the door. There he turned back and silently glanced at Jack still seated cross-legged on the floor. Rising, Jack watched Calypso gently lead Tommy down the path towards the waiting vehicle. He saw her crouch to hug the boy, then kiss the top of his head. Stella stood patiently behind them as Calypso opened the door and Tommy clambered up into the high seat. His actions seemed a bit more animated and Jack guessed that he was excited at the prospect of riding in this commanding-looking vehicle. The four-wheelers were normally garaged underground and used mainly for night-time beach patrols.
Suddenly, Tommy leaned out of the passenger window and threw his small arms around Calypso’s neck, clinging to her. She eventually reached behind her head and gently unlocked his fingers. Jack wasn’t sure whether Stella’s system would have yet started transmitting again. The jamming device in his back pocket was supposed to suppress all radio and display signals within a radius of twelve yards. Then the vehicle started up in a wide turn before heading off towards the mountain road and Tye’s mansion.
Calypso remained at the roadside, waving as Jack stepped back into the living room. A few moments later the door opened again, and he turned to study her face. Her amber eyes were full of tears and he could see moist tracks across her high cheekbones. She looked briefly back at him, then down at the small table where Tommy had placed his mug. He had also left behind the bottle of water and the chocolate bar, the provisions for his escape attempt.
Calypso began to howl and she buried her face in her hands. Jack was beside her in two strides. As he wrapped his arms around her, she slipped her arms about his neck and sobbed into his left shoul
der. Instantly the shape and warmth of her body were evident through her thin silk robe. Despite understanding her sadness, Jack was obliged to ease his hips back so she would not notice his rapidly growing erection.
*
Yoav Chelouche grunted his approval as Joe Tinkler finished his two-hour exposition on the make-up of the Thomas Tye empire. He had started with the main corporation, examined each of the main divisions and then paid special attention to Aerospace as the banker had demanded. He listed all the satellite launches of the last four years and showed a chart of the customers by nation. Clients from almost every developed economy in the world had used Tye’s launch services for its satellites. As Joe discussed the development of the Deep-Space Location and Navigation System, Chelouche had cut in with questions about this technology and its functions.
‘All we know so far is that it is being developed by Phoebus Inc., which is a joint-venture research company set up by Hope Island University, the Tye Corporation and several private trusts,’ said Joe. ‘Tye Aerospace has launched a number of deep-space satellites for the company but they have filed nothing about this programme – no patents, just applications for fourteen initial orbit positions in which to construct the craft before they are launched out into deep space. It’s been going on for over ten years and, knowing Tye, there has to be some commercial angle other than simply developing a navigation system.’
‘But what, Mr Tinkler, what?’ asked Chelouche suddenly.
Joe stared at him blankly. ‘I have no idea, sir,’ he admitted.
He hesitated and then resumed his summation. ‘Phoebus sits in its separate corporate identity away from the main corporation,’ explained Joe as he used a laser pointer to show the links between the Aerospace division and its subsidiaries. ‘The majority shareholding is split between Thomas Tye himself, the Tye Corporation, the Tye Foundation and a cluster of small trusts based in Andorra and Liechtenstein.’
‘Not exactly a kosher arrangement,’ grumbled Chelouche, the man who had publicly crucified governments and corporations that had dared to disobey his beloved ethic of transparent and responsible accounting.
Joe had to agree. ‘They haven’t attempted to raise any money, there is no sign of a product or any indication that they’re going to market,’ he explained. ‘That’s why their structure and their secrecy hasn’t affected my rating of the main corporation. If it remains private, it’s their business. They’re certainly keeping this one very close.’
‘How much capital has been raised by the company?’ asked Chelouche.
‘There’s no way of knowing, Doctor,’ Joe admitted.
Chelouche mumbled a series of low asides to Madame Pioline, then asked, ‘Have you cross-referenced the shareholder registers?’
Joe spent the next three and a half hours painstakingly laying out a series of print-outs that showed the detailed shareholdings of the Tye Corporation and the quoted subsidiaries and companies in which it had a partial holding. He explained which shares were voting, which were non-voting, which had special executive powers and which did not. Joe finished by showing Chelouche a spreadsheet he had developed that was automatically updated every time ownership of shares in the Tye group changed hands.
‘In real-time?’ asked Chelouche.
‘In real-time – when a change of ownership is filed,’ confirmed Joe.
The banker took his time examining the breakdown of shareholding patterns and voting power in each company. When he had finally finished, he put his palms down on the edge of Swiss National’s boardroom table and pushed himself upright.
‘Excellent, Mr Tinkler – Joe, if I may call you that. Excellent.’
Then Joe raised the matter of the Baltic islands and Chelouche sat down again.
Chapter Fifteen
Marsello Furtrado knew his boss better than most, but even he hesitated before walking uninvited into the Presidential Lounge. He waited in the companionway beside the executive bar until the clairvoyant Connie turned her head and saw him. She waved him forward.
Tom was sitting opposite her in one of four large armchairs placed around a low coffee table, his back to the aircraft’s nose. It was a typical executive cabin layout for a full-size supersonic corporate jet. Unusually, Tye was poring over a fan of concertina-paper printouts.
‘Marsello’s here,’ announced Connie quietly.
Tom didn’t look up, but Connie smiled at the lawyer and cleared her papers from the seat next to her so that he could sit down opposite Tom. Furtrado knew what his boss was reading.
‘I’ve never seem so much garbage,’ complained Tye finally, as he looked up. ‘Who do they think we are? Total idiots?’
He threw the paper concertina on the seat to his right and stretched, hands clasped together, arms high in the air behind his head.
‘It’s just their starting point,’ reasoned Furtrado. ‘What else can they do?’
Tom nodded, yawned and sat back. He picked up a small spray from a well in his armrest and absently sprayed his mouth again, despite the atmosphere of antibacterial compound that was constantly refreshed by the cabin’s recycling system. Many of the females in the flight crews of the Tye Corporation planes had started to complain about the dryness of their skin and the chapped lips they suffered in such a hostile environment, but they didn’t use as much face moisturizer as Thomas Tye. His frequent applications weren’t for cosmetic purposes, however: like every bar of soap, every scrap of food, every beverage and all the unguents he used, his face cream was medicinally active. It delivered preventative and proactive agents that hunted down all embryo carcinomas, others that boosted the elasticity coefficient of epidermic cells and some that simply maintained his skin tone at the precise shade he wanted.
The printouts were from an old Russian-made computer that its operators had programmed to print English-language lists of the assets in the region concerned. Tom turned to his right and fingered a line at random.
‘Two hundred and twelve oil and refining facilities, total capacity twenty-two million barrels a day. Is that the real number?”
Furtrado slipped his DigiPad from his pocket, put on his viewpers and quickly searched.
‘Maybe forty of the plants are working properly. The capacity for all the refineries in the designated zone was only one point two billion barrels in the whole of last year and much of that was astatki or mazut. That’s from OPEC figures.’
Tom nodded. ‘So why do they send us this shit?’ he asked, flicking his fingers disdainfully against the pile. ‘Let them keep it. We’re not interested.’
‘They’ve got nothing else to offer, Tom. Ease up. Save them some face. We can accept every figure they produce and still close within our own deal parameters.’
And what parameters they were! It was the largest deal Furtrado had ever worked on. It was larger than any deal his previous global law firm had handled and, he knew, it was larger than any commercial deal that had ever been undertaken. Only efforts to reconstruct continents after major wars – like the American Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after the Second World War – came close in scale.
But Tom knew how to create value where none existed previously, as he had demonstrated so clearly to Furtrado in Cape Verde. Sometimes, to his wife or himself, the international attorney would dismiss his boss as just lucky, an opportunist who had secured one vital commercial advantage. Then Tom would amaze him with master plans like this that were dependent on nothing but the youthful tycoon’s vision, imagination and drive. The ideas that underlay this deal were pure genius and that, in the end, apart from the twelve-figure personal fortune he was amassing for himself and his family, was why the lawyer tolerated the arrogant antics of his temperamental leader.
But this afternoon TT was in relatively benign mood. The LA traffic system was functioning again and Marsello’s team had responded to the 1472 lawsuits so far prompted by the system failure with such aggression and arrogance that the plaintiffs and their attorneys began to wonder what sort of battle the
y were getting into. The Los Angeles City Authorities were not faced down so easily, of course, and Tom had already ordered a substantial provision to be made in the corporate financial projections for the payment of an interim award, pending a court hearing. Tye was insistent that nothing would be finally settled for at least eight years, by which time even a gigantic liability pay-out would still be only a pinprick in the hide of the vastly enlarged corporate entity he was planning. As he told his inner cabinet so often: ‘There are no rules! Today, a global corporation can become anything it wants to be – if it has the ambition.’
As his team of in-house lawyers instructed the twenty-three different law firms in their stonewalling, denial, disbelieving and offensive postures towards all plaintiffs, Furtrado had found himself wondering whether he might have been earning just as much if he had stayed in private practice with the Tye Corporation as a client. At least he would have got to see his family occasionally. But then, he realized, he wouldn’t be part of a history-making deal like the one that would be closed over the next few days. The shape, productivity and economic balance of power in the world would be changed for ever because of what Tom and he were now doing. The power to change the world no longer lay with politicians. It belonged to business leaders like Thomas Tye.
‘Let’s go over the designated area again,’ sighed Tom, nodding to Connie. She touched two buttons in her armrest and the lights dimmed, the window shades closed and a wall screen on the front bulkhead flickered to life.
‘Come and sit here, Marsello.’ Tom indicated the empty seat next to his. Both seats swung round on electric motors to face the screen. Furtrado eased around his boss, stepping over his small, dainty feet, and flopped into the left seat, putting his pile of papers on the floor in front of him. A map appeared on the wall screen with a new boundary outlined in red.