by Hammond, Ray
Chevannes nodded again, even though he barely understood.
‘Others can’t understand what they’re hearing – but I can. And that’s why my work here, my data mining with my decoding software, is so important.’
Chapter Twenty
The great river was at the peak of a spring tide; a billion gallons of water embanked in a swirling equilibrium. Nature’s forces were at stalemate for a few minutes; ancient antagonists brought to yet another temporary cessation in their involuntary reflex to the planet’s pulse.
Jack leaned on the stone parapet of an elevated, gilded Pagoda – a Japanese ‘peace present’ to the people of London – and watched eddies form where the scouring bore of the English Channel met a stately Thames and suddenly, savagely, turned it estuarine. Three hundred yards to his left, on one of the riverside benches in Battersea Park, the elfin figure of Haley Voss sat absorbed in a book. She was dressed for the heat in a loose white short-sleeved blouse and long white linen skirt. Her left hand was resting on the handle of a child buggy but Jack guessed, from the lack of movement, that little Toby was sound asleep.
He had been watching her for nearly half an hour and neither of the two London agents drafted in to assist him had reported anyone who looked remotely like a tail or any other form of surveillance. She was clear.
He pocketed his viewpers, pushed himself away from the parapet and walked down the stone steps. Crossing the monument’s gravelled surround, he began to stroll slowly along the edge of the grass towards her. The heat of the early August afternoon was oppressive – climatic changes were making London summers more like New York’s – and he was glad he’d worn a polo shirt and shorts.
Jack was supposedly now in upstate New York visiting his mother again. He had received a suitably worded message from the hospital – her condition was causing concern, but he should not be over-alarmed – and despite the frenetic activity as Hope Island prepared to host its One Weekend celebration, he had promptly taken compassionate leave.
At UN headquarters he had found Deakin and his much enlarged Operation Iambus team running at a far higher level of activity than before. Jack had been surprised when told that Counsellor Furtrado himself had recently flown to London to visit Haley Voss. Then he had laughed when he heard the outcome. He could imagine their encounter.
‘But that’s not necessarily the best outcome,’ Deakin had pointed out. ‘She could do a lot better working from the inside, if she could get more intimate stuff on him. Do you think we could trust her to work with us, Jack?’
So ‘Bruce Curtis’ had flown to London that same night, feeling irrationally excited by the task ahead. During the journey he had joined his mother for breakfast via his VideoMate, Al Lynch having adjusted both Jack’s unit and his mother’s, to register their current locations as upstate New York. So Jack leaped forward a few hours to UK time and spent ten minutes reassuring his mother that he was safe and well, while observing that she was thoroughly enjoying bossing her younger sister around.
As Jack came within the extreme boundary of Haley’s peripheral vision he noticed that the heavy volume in which she seemed engrossed was a treatise on antitrust and competition law. He stopped and waited, watching her eyes saccade across the print, her pen poised in her right hand, ready to mark any passages of interest.
He saw her head turn, then she glimpsed his feet. She stared up, directly at him and gasped.
‘Hi,’ said Jack. ‘Good book?’
‘Jack!’ Her smile eclipsed the afternoon sun. She leaped to her feet, the book falling to the ground.
Crossing the space between them, she reached up to hug him and kissed him on the cheek.
‘What the hell are you . . .?’ She tailed off. ‘How did you find me here?’
He gazed down into her earnest brown eyes.
Then she groaned. ‘Oh, don’t tell me, you can’t help any more. That lawyer’s sent you to talk me out of it, hasn’t he? Forget it, Jack. There’s no way.’
She turned away to check on her charge, then picked up her book and sat down again, staring out at the water.
He stepped forward and sat down at the opposite end of the bench. ‘That’s not it,’ he said gently.
‘So why are you here?’ She turned her head towards him.
‘It is a lot of money, Haley. I’m not sure I would turn down that much,’ he teased.
‘It’ll make a good intro,’ she said defiantly, looking back at the river. ‘“I was offered eighty million dollars not to write this book!” I recorded it all.’
She put out her left hand to rock the child buggy, as if Toby had suddenly woken and become fractious. One leg was crossed over the other, swinging back and forth in the same rhythm, as she stared straight ahead.
‘Yes, it will,’ he agreed. ‘But there might be an even better one.’
She shot a look at him. ‘Who are you, Jack? How come you just pop up out of the ground whenever you think I need you – like a genie in a pantomime?’
Jack glanced to left and right. There was a jogger approaching from one side, otherwise this part of the park seemed deserted.
‘I’m here to ask you to change your mind, Haley. If I know Furtrado, he’s told you how you can still accept the company’s offer.’
‘I thought so,’ she sighed sadly. ‘You don’t know me, Jack. There’s absolutely no way.’
But Jack knew her better than she guessed – and he still wanted to know much, much more about this woman.
‘No, that isn’t what I mean, Haley. I want you to appear to agree. To take the access to Tom they’ve offered you.’
She turned to stare at him, still not understanding.
‘Oh! I should do “A Year In The Life of Thomas Tye”, should I? Live on his island, attend the meetings, meet the main staff, travel with him – the TV, the performances, the deals. Take my pay-off money, write a hagiography and finish my career!’
‘You wouldn’t need a career after that.’
‘I’m not like that,’ she replied simply.
‘Leaving aside the money on offer, don’t you think all that inside stuff could be useful?’ he reasoned. ‘For producing the sort of book you want to do.’
Haley looked at him, wondering. ‘What do you mean? How could I?’
Jack, in his turn, contemplated the river. He allowed thirty seconds to pass as the jogger – not one of those marathon dromomaniacs but a reluctant middle-aged male – panted past on the grass running-track behind them.
Then he turned to face her, resting his arm along the bench.
‘Haley, your book, as you originally planned it, needs to be published and it will have to be as hard-hitting as possible. It was you yourself who said that no one man should be able to control the future. The world should know the real story about Thomas Tye, about the genetic experiments, about Tommy’s birth, about the anti-ageing technologies, about how he abuses people. But your book could be even better, more insightful, if you appear to take their offer and use the privileged access they’re offering. The future you’re concerned about really is too important to leave to chance – or one man.’
The proleptic future by her feet gave a sudden gurgle. Haley leaned forward, temporarily distracted by Toby’s reminder of his presence, but the child had merely turned over in his sleep and was peaceful once more.
‘You know that’s not possible. I’d have to sign a binding contract. Once I take their money, I’m gagged. End of story.’
‘Not necessarily,’ countered Jack. ‘You wouldn’t end up keeping the pay-off, but I could fix the legal stuff so they couldn’t touch you.’
She turned to stare at him, then flicked her head away in anger. She folded her arms, head bowed in thought.
He wanted very much to hold and kiss her.
‘How could you do this?’ she asked, with her chin almost touching her chest. ‘Who the hell are you, Jack?’
‘Sloan will still be your publishers, but you’d be able to add all the inside stuff –
the details of his life and how the company works. Sloan will go along with it.’
‘You can speak for the Sloan Press.’ It was a statement of realization rather than a question. ‘OK, Jack. Tell me about it.’
So he had to tell her – and the tide started to turn.
*
Meanwhile, a few miles to the north-west, the secretary to a large and very vocal committee carefully recorded its vote as unanimous. Chair had made the suggestion in what would now be the last full meeting before the big day itself. But, despite the lack of time for creating replacement publicity, it was agreed that this year’s event should be dedicated to the Thomas Tye Appeal for Ethiopia.
The Notting Hill Carnival, now in its fifty-first year, had become the largest street party in the world, eclipsing New Orleans’s Mardi Gras and even Rio de Janeiro. Over eight million people now pilgrimed each year to the fashionable streets of West London, but no one intellectualized this rite, no one noted or cared that its timing roughly coincided with the ancient harvest festivals of the northern hemisphere. One of the planet’s ancient rhythms had been given a West Indian accent and new lyrics. But the committee members were all aware how it coincided with that rather more exclusive celebration on Hope Island – ‘that other little party’, as Chair had called it – and her appeal to help out the brothers and sisters in Ethiopia won the day.
So arrangements were made for each of the floats in the procession to accept electronic donation transfers from the LifeWatches and VideoMates worn by millions of spectators along the route, and permission was granted for the Tye Network News channel to integrate coverage of the Carnival with both their live feed from Ethiopia and the One Weekend In The Future celebrations on Hope Island. The Carnival organizers then congratulated themselves on seizing the opportunity to contribute significantly to the greatest philanthropic and ecologically correct gesture in history.
*
Joe Tinkler was unused to so much jet travel and although he knew his body occupied a seat, he felt as if he were still hovering somewhere behind, over some distant continent, just visited. He had experienced the bizarrerie of watching the analog time display on his Rolex LifeWatch readjust itself to accommodate seven time-zone changes in one week. He had already turned the jet-lag compensators to ‘full’ in his viewpers, but his system seemed unable to cope merely by adjusting the light levels that reached his eyes or the level of melatonin delivered by his LifeWatch.
He had just spent four days in London, three in New York, then two days each in Boston, Minneapolis, Denver and San Francisco before crossing the Pacific to visit Hong Kong, Singapore and the royal states of the Middle East. He had finally met in person those he had known for years only as network representations: there was little time for conventions and other industry get-togethers in corporate finance and the participants rarely got to meet face to face. In the flesh they seemed so familiar but, at the same time, so different. Their corporeality flavoured their character in a way that even the most advanced holo-image theatre failed to capture. He wished he had made the effort years before. The only major house he hadn’t yet visited was Rakusen-Webber.
Joe Tinkler was also in unfamiliar territory in another sense. As was true for so many analysts, fund managers, investors, traders, economic forecasters and financial journalists, the prospect of personally operating in real business terrified him. It was one thing to judge the efforts of others, to identify winners and losers and bet other people’s money on it; quite another to imagine how one might fare in such activity oneself Chelouche had instructed him to form a number of shell corporations based in the United States and Europe that would own the Tye Corporation stock purchased during a take-over. In all of them, Joe was named as president and chief executive. Even though Chelouche reassured him that consultants would be brought in to manage the businesses, suddenly what had before appeared as a game now seemed brutally real. Joe was honest enough to admit to himself that if handed any real decision-making responsibility for day-to-day activities in any part of the vast Tye empire, he would not know where to start. That would require manipulating people, not numbers, and Joe had little experience of that.
He had most of his options now in place and he was going home – well, back to Geneva. The meal in the first-class upper cabin of the Airbus 1000 had been excellent and, after the flight attendant had cleared his tray, he had opened his VideoMate to return to the vast spreadsheet in which he was keeping an updated total of the commitments he had been making on behalf of the World Bank. Tye Corp’s core stock price had been rocketing in anticipation of the Ethiopian technology launch and several of the Tye Corporation’s institutional shareholders had insisted on prices so high that exercising these options in the future would be fabulously punitive. The amount he had already potentially committed exceeded his largest estimate and he wondered how Dr Chelouche would react on learning the sums involved.
As his exalted shadow-employer had requested, Joe conducted every negotiation in person and he had filled out the option agreements by hand in front of his wondering counterparts. Joe’s cover story was a small truth, which is often the best servant of a larger lie. He wanted his option on their Tye Corporation shareholding to be kept a secret, he explained. He was contemplating some power plays in the market and he didn’t want to signal his intentions in advance. Only Joe Tinkler could have got away with such a ploy: he had already been the world’s best-known Tye Corporation analyst and investor and, since his spectacular move from Rakusen-Webber to the largest bank in Switzerland, his personal reputation had made him the brightest star in his own arcane firmament. The options were for ninety days; there were non-execution and get-out clauses galore to protect the sellers, but all were subject to ultra-strict confidentiality clauses.
The net effect was that, if Chelouche so wished, the signed papers in the pilot’s bag lying on the seat beside Joe would, on receipt of the stipulated payments, deliver nearly twenty-one per cent of the core Tye Corporation’s voting stock into the hands of the World Bank. This would provide Joe with an almost unassailable position from which he could begin buying on the open market with the aim of reaching a position of overall control. If this happened, Joe realized, it would in turn deliver the whole Tye business to the UN and, ultimately, to the people of all its member states. These days, that was almost every nation in the world.
Joe flipped open his communicator and noticed he had AgentMail waiting. It came from one of the software agents he had reprogrammed to search for any new land deals entered into by Tye International Real Estate. He read through the government-published documents the agent had retrieved. Now Tye was buying vast tracts of real estate in Northern Canada! One deal alone was for a strip of land around Hudson Bay that ran for nearly a thousand miles through Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec! Another was for thirty-two islands in the Bay of Alaska, off the coasts of Yukon Territory and British Columbia. He pulled up an atlas and zoomed in to inspect the territories concerned. He noticed that they were at similar latitudes to Tye’s Baltic acquisitions.
But none of this made sense. Canadian zoning and planning laws were every bit as strict as US regulations and commercial or industrial developments must be out of the question in areas of such natural beauty. Nothing about the purchases suggested a prospecting operation either and Joe already knew that there was not a single mineral or petrochemical operation in the entire Tye empire. It certainly wouldn’t be oil: for one thing Tye was the major global opponent of the fossil-fuel industry – and, more practically, the price per barrel had stubbornly remained below $10 for over a decade. As global warming had continued to increase – despite many late-twentieth-century experts who had predicted the opposite – most analysts believed that the solar-fuel capture and delivery systems produced by Tye’s Solar Energy Division, and two or three less prominent competitors, would completely eliminate the fossil-fuels market by the end of the century.
Joe studied his map again, then reviewed the deal announcements his agen
t had found. Some of these purchases were freehold, others were for very long leases. He made a PopUp reminder for his assistant to get hold of copies of the original conveyance deeds.
*
Haley was incandescent with rage. ‘You bastard!’ she screamed at him. ‘You allowed me to think Sloan Press wanted my book on its merits and all along you and your friends in the UN were paying them to publish it!’
They were back at her flat after a still-slumbering Toby had been returned to Felicity’s care. Jack had walked around the park with her to where Haley’s twin sister was due to collect the boy in her car. The sister had eyed Jack knowingly as they were introduced. She already knew about him, Jack recalled. He had been astonished to see them together again: they were identical.
‘We’re not paying them, just underwriting their legal liabilities – protecting them from the Tye Corporation’s lawyers. They bear all the normal costs of promotion, marketing and so on.’
Jack had told her as much as he was authorized to during the last half-hour they had been back.
‘But you allowed me to continue thinking this was a straightforward publishing deal. You fed me information! YOU SET ME UP!’
She turned away from him, trembling with anger, and stared unseeingly out of her window at the trees in the park she knew so well.
He stared at her back, at her slender neck with its wisp of dark hair curling down towards her white collar. Feeling an instant and urgent longing, he wanted to cross the room and hold her. In comparison, Calypso’s beauty now seemed abstract, something too perfect, something chiefly to admire. But this seemed real and very close. He realized suddenly that his long sleep of emotional regeneration was finally over, and that he had woken to a desperate longing for the woman standing with her back to him. Helen’s face swam into his mind and he was able to imagine her granting permission.