by Hammond, Ray
Tye Corporation’s public relations agency in New York professed amusement at the congressman’s accusations. ‘The Tye Corporation is not in the defense business – period,’ said a spokesperson. ‘We are creating a network of satellites which will provide a navigation and positioning system for research purposes and future missions. The Aerospace Division has many Earth-orbit and deep space experiments, all of them peaceful in nature. We welcome all enquiries.’
Mr Robarts, a long-time champion of the American defense industry, is seeking nomination as the Republican party presidential candidate in next year’s election.
Ron Deakin snapped the screen off. He could recognize a planted story ten miles off. This was getting political!
*
There was a long-standing statute in Swiss law decreeing that if a police officer, Customs investigator, intelligence officer or other official from a foreign power (with or without diplomatic status) was found on Swiss territory asking questions about the provenance, ownership or status of a bank account, deposit box or any other financial or property instrument, he or she would be summarily deported and thereafter denied access to the nation. It was an effective deterrent to inquiry.
In recent years, under pressure from other members of the European Union, the World Bank and foreign governments, the Swiss had paid some lip-service to improving financial transparency and drug barons could no longer be sure of the absolute discretion they were once promised. But apart from this concession to its membership of the EU and its obligations to the international community, it seemed that the Swiss still resisted real change. Keeping and protecting wealth and its privacy, on behalf of all those who were able to pay for the privilege, was their business and it had been so for many hundreds of years. The Swiss would no more readily abandon their economic raison d’être than would the Arabs their oil, the Belgians their chocolate or the Scots their whisky.
Michael Chevannes broke through this veil of state-man-dated secrecy. It took him a week to do so and the one-time coded fax transmissions involved Ron Deakin in New York and Dr Yoave Chelouche in Geneva. Finally, one early-morning phone call from the world’s chief banker to the home of the president of Premier Security Bank Swiss succeeded in negating a tradition of banking secrecy that had begun with the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Perhaps the country is becoming more responsible to the world’s financial community, thought Chevannes later the same morning as he examined the many accounts and the piles of paper correspondence of Rolf Linquist Larsson, one of the bank’s most wealthy and secretive private depositors.
Altogether, Chevannes found the equivalent of over twenty-three billion US dollars in 143 separate accounts, bonds, property companies and shareholdings. He also discovered the two main alternative identities used by the depositor. Interestingly, Larsson kept the majority of his vast investment portfolio in the Tye Corporation and Tye-related stocks. As Chevannes looked back over the six-year history of the accounts he shook his head and muttered to himself in amazement. The Swede had quadrupled his fortune simply by placing his faith in the fortunes of Thomas Tye’s companies.
When he had finished his detailed note-taking – despite his privileged access, photocopying was not allowed – he left the bank and booked himself a one-way ticket to Lima, Peru.
*
‘I’ve never been on a boat before,’ exclaimed Tommy. ‘This is fun.’
‘This is fun!’ echoed Jed. ‘It’s super!’
‘Super,’ shouted Tommy in turn. He was picking up Jed’s English accent and superlatives.
As they passed the outer limits of Hope Town Marina, Jack eased forward the levers controlling the throttles of the mighty GE turbo-diesels. The huge motor yacht lifted up to its full planing height as they gathered speed.
A light spray flew into the high, open flying bridge and Tommy laughed with joy as he clung to the safety rail, Jed clamped firmly under his arm. Despite the size of the craft and Tommy’s swimming prowess, they had insisted he wear a bright orange life jacket. He had asked for one for Jed too but nothing could be found that was small enough. Calypso had found a solution by borrowing a lifebelt-style cup-holder from the bar on the diving deck. She had deftly fitted this around the caterpillar’s middle.
Tommy’s father had put up surprisingly little resistance when Calypso had reintroduced the idea of the trip. For the first time since she had known him, Tom seemed at a complete loss.
‘I shall always be in your debt, Calypso,’ he had begun.
She had already discovered that apart from the severed artery and some lesions to the surrounding tissue, Tommy’s forearm had suffered no significant damage. She and Emily Pettigrew had managed to complete the procedure and close the boy’s arm in less than half an hour.
‘That’s what I’m trained to do,’ she had told Tye simply.
As he looked at her, she thought she could detect tears. ‘My mother committed suicide, Calypso,’ he told her sadly. ‘I’m sure Tommy hasn’t inherited the gene, but . . .’
Calypso now knew why Tom could feel so sure about Tommy’s genetic make-up, but he seemed absolutely deflated by his son’s recent actions.
‘Do you see any signs of depression in him, Doctor?’
‘All self-harm is a form of depression, Tom,’ she said gently.
But Calypso had laid down tough terms for continuing as the boy’s protector on the island. She had demanded twenty-four-hour access to the child, had asked for a bedroom to be made available for her close to his, insisted that he be allowed to attend the school again, and she made it mandatory that he should be allowed to make supervised visits to other homes on the island and, under special circumstances like this, even off the island.
She had then read Thomas Tye the accepted lore on juvenile psychosis, as laid down by the paediatric psychiatrists Walsh and Rosen, the ultimate authorities on self-injury in childhood. She had explained how Tommy’s actions were indicative of a deeply buried depression and that without treatment the condition would deepen even more. And she had warned him where that would lead.
‘Eventually to a suicide attempt that does succeed,’ she had said simply but firmly, her voice ringing off the marble walls as she sat on one of the vast white sofas in Tom’s reception hall. ‘The youngest recorded suicide to date has been an eight-year-old girl – another isolated child – in Los Angeles. She was the daughter of one of the world’s foremost female movie stars, and she started self-harming at only six.’
Calypso saw a strange panic on Tom’s face, and pressed her attack home.
‘Yes, he has everything to live for, but because of the way you overprotect him, he feels he has nothing. A child’s values and sense of self are gained not only from parents and guardians, but more especially from others around them – primarily their peers. That’s where a child learns his or her place in the world.’
Tom had at last started to remonstrate. Again he had protested that Tommy was unlike other children. Calypso understood what he meant but to her he was simply Tommy, and she was determined that she would now focus only on securing the boy’s happiness. This, she realized, was more important to her than anything. Even more important than her growing fondness for Jack Hendriksen.
Finally, she had held her hand up. ‘I could not care less if he was the last of a royal line,’ she announced. ‘That boy will only become a happy person if he is allowed to experience a normal childhood. If you want him ever to be proud of who he is, also proud of you and able to play a useful part in managing this incredible empire, you have no choice but to let him find himself in his own way first. That’s how humans work, Tom. Believe me.’
So Calypso had moved into the great house, and into a room next to Tommy’s. Gradually she had helped him talk about the incident.
‘It felt like a dream, Calypso,’ he told her. ‘I thought I’d never see you again. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong, and nobody would tell me where you were.’
She had hugged him unreservedly. Now that she kne
w his true origins, some of her worries about the normal doctor-patient relationship could be discarded. He was not like other child patients, as he had no ‘natural’ parents. There was no precedent in medical history for how he should be treated. Therefore Calypso allowed herself to run on instinct. Far from being repelled by the boy’s scientific genesis, she loved him all the more. She knew clones were a phenomenon of nature – in identical twins, for instance – and she could see clearly what had caused his problems: they were all to do with nurture and little to do with nature. She had prescribed a mild antidepressant for Tommy, although within two days of her moving into the house he seemed to exude an abundance of energy. Although keeping the perception to herself, she felt sure that it was her own presence in the house that restored his happiness so quickly.
She had decided to test Tye’s acceptance of their new relationship, so one day she had simply informed Connie Law that she was going to take Tommy on a visit to Mayaguana, to see her mother, a week hence. She then sat back and waited for another explosion. It never came.
‘Look after him well – and enjoy the trip,’ was Tom’s surprising response in a live video call that appeared to originate in Ethiopia.
But he had followed up his permission with a mandate that Jack, Pierre and Stella should join them for this excursion and had stipulated that they should take his personal power yacht, not the usual helicopter.
‘Doctor, it’s a matter of odds. The statistics for helicopter crashes are appalling on a per-mile basis,’ he said with monumental insensitivity, ‘So I insist you take Hope’s Dream.’
When this conversation was over Calypso had just stared at his image frozen in the intense sunlight of East Africa. She wondered how any man could care so much for his son’s safety yet understand so little of other people’s feelings.
Hope’s Dream was the ultimate development in large high-speed power craft. It was 160 feet of snarling white-painted aluminium, darkened glass and stainless steel, so raked that it looked as if it was permanently lying in wait. It was a triple-decked Sunseeker with twin flying bridges – one enclosed, one open. On this fine day, Jack, Calypso, Tommy and Jed stood aloft on the open bridge on the top deck. Jack was at the wheel, operating the controls of two 2,800 HP turbo-diesels capable of propelling the huge craft at up to fifty knots.
Jack had taken the precaution of visiting Hope’s Dream on the evening before their trip to give the vessel and the crew the once-over. After his nightly run along the beach, he had caught the Mag down to the marina. Though he had seen the vessel on many occasions, as had everybody else on Hope Island, he had never been aboard it and except for a weekly maintenance check he had never seen it leave the harbour.
The skipper, Henry Singleton, was welcoming. He was a white Jamaican and a Yacht Master, qualified to sail around the globe navigating solely by celestial navigation. Indeed, Jack found the sailor sorely chafed by extended port-bound duties.
‘She’s never been out properly since she was delivered here,’ sighed Singleton as he poured Jack a beer in the vast recovered-walnut and farmed-leather stateroom. ScentSims boosted the aroma of polished wood and rich Connolly-tanned hide. ‘I’ll be proud to let you have her for the little boy’s outing.’
In his early days in the Navy, Jack had been trained to pilot every sort of craft, small submarines included, and also to fly a wide variety of aircraft. It was a proud boast of his unit that they were capable of operating on land, sea and air, and once Singleton had heard the evidence of Jack’s nautical experience, he was delighted to hand over the forty-seven-million-dollar craft to the corporation’s security chief.
‘I’d like you and your crew to come with us, of course,’ Jack hastened to add. ‘As you’ll be skipper, I’d like you to plot the course. We’ll need to stay well away from Cuban waters with things there being as they are. Then I’d be grateful if you would personally pilot us in to Mayaguana. I see there’s a long coral reef across the harbour entrance and I’m sure nobody knows these islands as well as you.’
Singleton nodded. ‘It’s a very beautiful island. But are you sure you only want to visit Mayaguana? We could be in Santo Domingo in the same time, where there’s much more to do and see.’
Jack hated to dash the skipper’s hopes of a trip to a larger island with a real town, but he knew Calypso had her own reasons for wanting to take Tommy to visit her home island.
*
Joe Tinkler had begun to feel like his old self In the seven weeks he had been building his new fund he had already recaptured all his old pension-management clients plus an additional fourteen. He had been particularly successful in raising Asian investments and he was surprised that so many of his new Far Eastern clients expressed pleasure that he had moved to Geneva. He hadn’t realized just how partisan overseas fund managers could be. They simply hadn’t wanted to invest their members’ savings with him while his fund had been based in New York.
Tye’s stocks were still riding high and Joe was spreading his risks with care. He had subscribed heavily to an initial public offering by LifeLines Inc., a Tye Life Sciences subsidiary, even though the flotation of the organ-matching and broking company had been handled by Rakusen-Webber. He hadn’t had to talk directly to Morgenstein yet, but all his other former colleagues were delighted Joe was back in the market – even if he was now playing against their house.
His fund now stood at 1.76 trillion in US dollars, although, at Chelouche’s request, he was converting to the European common currency at the end of each of his allotted trading ‘days’. At the current exchange rate that was just over three-quarters of a trillion euros. Then there was that other pot: although Tye’s stocks had performed well, Joe had made a few experimental but discreet market interventions and, as Chelouche had promised, the World Bank had settled every claim – and without question. Joe once again controlled the world’s largest external shareholding in the Tye Corporation and its subsidiaries and he had unequalled power to influence the market prices. As requested, Joe intervened judiciously and discreetly, learning when an ‘irrational’ purchase or disposal had the greatest effect on other investors.
‘Good evening, Joe,’ greeted Chelouche, entering the room. Madame Pioline had requested that Joe should ‘drop in’ at the World Bank’s European headquarters for an early-evening cocktail. Although all global stock markets traded on a twenty-four-hour basis, seven days a week, Joe chose to limit his personal activities to a nine-hour working day. During the rest of the cycle his software agents bought, sold or held according to the daily parameters he set them. His VideoMate would only be paged if any of his pre-set limits were breached.
Joe put down his Bloody Mary and rose. He sank back into his seat as the banker waved him down and came to sit opposite. A neat whisky had been poured and was waiting for him on the low table. He raised it in salute.
‘Are things buoyant in the Tye markets?’
Joe nodded. ‘Holding well, sir.’ He couldn’t yet bring himself to call the esteemed banker by his first name.
‘No worries over what that congressman says – that this Phoebus Project has weapons potential?’ asked Chelouche as he flipped open the lid of his humidor.
Joe had read the story several times. He had discussed it with half a dozen other fund managers. ‘Who are they going to scrap with?’ James Dodd at DRKB in London had asked dismissively. ‘Doesn’t make any sense, Tinkler.’ Efi Arazi at Lehman Brothers in New York had laughed. ‘Another crazy Republican. There’s an election next year. You should know better, Joe.’ Joe was forced to agree. None of the markets had paid any attention.
‘No, sir. It’s had no impact,’ he confirmed as he lifted his drink again.
Chelouche nodded. He held out the box to Joe. The fund manager shook his head and he watched as the banker selected a large Havana cigar, cut the end and lit it carefully from an oversized match. Chelouche blew out a great cloud of smoke and returned his attention to Joe.
‘Do you consider the Tye Corporatio
n could be vulnerable to a takeover?’
Joe almost choked on his cocktail. Then he looked up to see if the banker was serious. He seemed to be.
Joe shook his head and put his drink down. He had to let a laugh escape. ‘No way, sir. It’s the world’s richest corporation. The core stock is trading at two hundred and eighty-four, maybe two eighty-five times annual earnings. No other company could get close to the necessary finance, no matter how much debt leverage they managed to find.’
Chelouche nodded. ‘But what would it cost – theoretically?’ he asked.
Joe felt his eyes widening as he considered. He shook his head. ‘I’ve no idea, sir. I’d have to build some models.’
‘Then build them,’ instructed the world’s banker. ‘That’s your second objective, Joe. I want you to build up positions that allow your fund to take control of the majority of the shareholding in the core Tye Corporation.’
Chelouche had said it quietly and Joe felt an urgent need to have him repeat it. But he knew what he had heard. He wasn’t sure if it was even possible.
‘Do it quietly, Joe, and use a large number of proxy accounts. Get option agreements from the other main institutional shareholders. I know you will have to guarantee significant premiums, but do it. And above all, don’t allow word to spread – tie a confidentiality agreement into the options. Each one of them must think it’s an exclusive deal for them. Now, listen carefully Joe . . .’
Joe looked up and saw the basset-hound eyes boring into him.
‘Do not discuss any of this operation on the networks. Don’t make video calls, send e-mails or talk to anybody on your VideoMate. You’ll need to travel to see the main shareholders personally and, when you discuss this, you must ensure they do not record any part of the conversation. Use paper option forms. This is absolutely vital. Do I make myself clear?’