One Trillion Dollars

by Andreas Eschbach

  “O’Shaughnessy,” a somewhat startled sounding voice answered.

  “It’s Fontanelli,” John said. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “Ahem, no sir,” the librarian said. “I was still reading.”

  John nodded. He didn’t expect anything else from the gaunt Irishman with the prematurely thinning hair. “I’m sorry to disturb you so late, but I have an urgent request …”

  $25,000,000,000,000

  ONE WEEK LATER John walked into McCaine’s office in the morning, placed a book on the desk stood there waiting for him to look up. He was clearly not in a good mood.

  “Juan, uno momento, por favor,” McCaine told the person on the other end of the phone, put a hand over the speaker and leaned forward. The title of the book was Mankind’s Autopilot Route to a Better Future. The author was Peter Rawburne. He put the phone to his ear again. “Juan? Lo siento. Podria llamar usted mas tarde? Vale. Hasta luego.” He hung up, took the book in his hands and looked at John. “Good morning, John. Where did you get this?”

  “O’Shaughnessy found it,” John told him, rocking backwards and forwards on his heels.

  “O’Shaughnessy? Well, well. He’s an efficient librarian, I must say.” McCaine opened the cover, flipped casually to the title page. “A well preserved copy. Better than my own.”

  John snorted, “The ideas I trotted out at the dinner party had all been expressed by Lord Rawburne twenty years ago! I feel like an idiot!”

  “Nonsense. He was very enthusiastic. That’s what you yourself told me. He took your side, did he not?”

  “My eyes almost popped out of my head. You knew about this book. Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

  McCaine remained calm. “Because, it was better for you to think such ideas up on your own.”

  “But I didn’t think of those ideas on my own! You talked me into them, each and every one.”

  McCaine shook his head. “We sat together one evening with a bottle of wine and discussed how to overhaul the economy. Us two, you and I. Alright, it’s true that I introduced Rawburne’s ideas, but you accepted them, adopted them, carried those thoughts further and were very enthusiastic about the whole line of thinking. Does an idea change just because another person thought along the same lines?”

  “You should have told me that the spiritual father of the ideas I was about to put forward would be sitting at my table.”

  “Then you would have been biased. You would’ve come across as a proselyte, someone who was converted to a new ideology and wants to convert the whole world.”

  John hesitated. “Was that the reason? You didn’t want me to be biased?”

  “John,” McCaine said as he slowly closed the book and placed it on top of a pile of binders next to John, “I’m not ingenious enough to think of such things on my own, I admit. But I really don’t care where a good idea came from and who had it first. I’m not paying license fees to save the world. If an idea is good I will use it.”

  “What about the others? They presumably knew I was rehashing Rawburne’s ideas?”

  “No one knows about Rawburne’s proposals.” McCaine pointed at the book. “This is a private printing. There were two hundred copies made. Have you asked yourself why? Or why he didn’t tell you himself, and pretended to pick up on your idea even though it was his?”

  “No,” John admitted.

  “Because he believes you, he believes that you had the same idea. And it awakened a hope within him that perhaps the right time has come for his thoughts. When he wrote the book he was maybe twenty-six years old and back then it definitely wasn’t the right time. You can hardly imagine how many people he would have offended back then. Taxes on the use of nature, on land ownership, the use of water and raw materials, on the production of waste! If the English lords of the day hadn’t been half-dead already, they would’ve hanged him.” McCaine leaned back and folded his arms. “The upper classes would never have forgiven him. The rest of the world knows him as perhaps the best environmental journalist there is. When he says something everyone listens — the brokers on Wall Street as well as the politicians in 10 Downing Street, Frankfurt as well as the White House. For us it is worth more to have him clutch you to his bosom than if he had been able to give you BP.”

  “Really?”

  “Did you read the papers last week?”

  “No.”

  “You should, because then you’d see that you have become a hero. There are reports in the English newspapers about our environmental initiatives. American newspapers are calling the greater environmental awareness in industry the ‘Fontanelli trend.’ In Europe there is hardly an editor-in-chief who hasn’t already subscribed to Miss Holden’s 20th Century Observer.”

  John stared at McCaine, his shirt already sweat-stained around the armpits at this hour of the morning. “And this is the result of a single dinner and my tepid speech?”

  “You can bet on it. You’re not the crazy heir anymore who doesn’t know what to do with the money. You have become a popular public figure. People are starting to understand that you are the true heir and that you will fulfill the prophecy. You are a pop star, John. Get used to it.”

  John’s face remained grave. “Anyone could do what I’m doing. I’m a loser who happened to inherit a crazy amount of money.” He was startled by his own words.

  McCaine studied him for a moment. He spun his office chair to the side and looked out the window, over the rooftops of London. “You had failed … in a world that is very wrong,” he told John calmly. “We will make it right. We will see to it that the right people succeed and that proper behavior will be rewarded. Everything else will fall into place.”

  John discovered another rock star. It was during an evening in front of the TV. He was still too wired to go to sleep so he turned it on and zapped his way through the countless channels until Marvin’s face stared out at him on MTV. Against a mountain of wrecked cars he sang his all but incomprehensible lyrics to the accompaniment of little better than white noise. The music was still terrible, but the video looked impressive, especially during the refrain when Constantina sang along, wearing only what looked like a few scraps of clothing from a junkyard. Her lascivious moves reminded him of a certain evening on his yacht, unused for months now, not exactly a memory he treasured

  At any rate, it didn’t look like she was still aiming to be a lawyer.

  There were still so many cartons of threatening letters stored in the cellar of the Vacchi law firm in Florence that they could’ve filled the entire police station evidence room. Until John Fontanelli’s move to Britain, the specially created police unit had been busy investigating the letters, which resulted in many arrests around the world and put many people in jail or in psychiatric wards.

  In June of 1996, odd sounds coming from the courtyard of the building lured many people to their windows. Standing there in the courtyard they saw a truck from a firm that specialized in destroying documents. The machine on the back of the truck devoured the full cardboard boxes almost as fast as they were tossed in. The rotating metal teeth grabbed the cardboard and ripped it open spilling countless letters into its steel maw. Each piece of paper and envelope was reduced to tiny bits as the hungry machine swallowed the sealed cartons one by one. It took just under two hours before all the threats against the richest man in the world were nothing more than kindling stored in three sacks.

  “A direct order from the minister of justice,” the DA told his visitor as they watched through a window. He tried to remove a speck of meat stuck in his teeth since lunchtime. “I heard the minister of finance was actually the one who asked for them to be destroyed.”

  “Really?” the visitor said.

  He got the meat out. What a relief. Disgusted, the DA examined the small brown lump between his fingernails. “That’s the right thing to do, if you ask me. Fontanelli promised to stay in this country and pay taxes here when he was naturalized, and then three months later he went off to England. I don’
t see why we should go through so much effort for someone like that.”

  “We’re not paying any taxes?” John looked up from the financial report. “Is that true?”

  McCaine was busy writing a long note in the margin of a document. “This is an internal document for our eyes only,” he told John without looking up. “I hope the numbers on it are as accurate as possible.”

  “It says here thirteen million dollars.”

  “That’s thirteen million too much, if you ask me. But it was unavoidable.”

  “I don’t know … I had promised the Italian finance minister to pay taxes for at least one year…”

  “The seven billion I couldn’t save last year should be enough for him.”

  “I made a promise. Do you understand? I shook his hand.”

  McCaine finally looked up. “Don’t make me cry. Excuse me, John, but we’re talking about twenty or thirty billion dollars and more. You could buy the Ukraine for that or half Africa. I’m not even going to think about throwing so much money away.”

  “But we can’t … I mean, we’re earning money. And if you earn money you have to pay taxes. That’s the way of the world, isn’t it?”

  “We are an international company. We can choose where to pay taxes. And because I can choose, I will choose the tax-rate of the Cayman Islands, and that is zero.”

  John nodded awkwardly and stared at the paper again. Thirteen million dollars. “How can we get away with this?” he asked. “We don’t live on the Caymans, we’re in London.”

  “We have companies on the Caymans, just like on Sark, in Belize, Gibraltar, Panama, and any other tax paradise you care to name. Those companies do nothing, they have no employees. They exist only as entries on trade registries in the town halls and have small signs on mailboxes. And those signs have inconspicuous names on them, because not everyone should know that they belong to you. One of them, for example, is called International Real Estate, and is the firm that owns our high-rise office building and your stately home, and it charges us a lot of money for them. The rent we pay reduces our profits and thus the taxes we must pay. But what is the finance department going to do about it? They can’t prohibit us from living and working in rented places. You can play the same game with transport, investments, consultation fees, and so on, until you practically pay no tax at all.”

  “Is the money even safe on all those islands?”

  “Don’t be so naïve. The money is moved only by the computers in the banks, from one hard drive to the next. Not a penny leaves this country, not even in the form of bits.”

  John found this hard to believe. But he had got used to being in a realm where the unbelievable was normal. “All this doesn’t seem quite right to me.”

  “No one said it is. On the contrary, it is amoral and perverted. But take a look at the statistics of the International Monetary Fund. It states that there are over two trillion dollars deposited in off-shore accounts. Our position would be severely hampered if we pay taxes and the others don’t.”

  John scratched his neck. “Every little working guy has to pay taxes. My father has to pay. Everyone. What right do I have not to pay?”

  McCaine leaned forward in his chair, put his fingers together, resting his chin on them, and looked thoughtfully at John. “You are a businessman. You are one of the largest employers in the world. You supply half the world with daily, everyday items. You provide a service that not a single government is capable of. So, if you ask me, I don’t see any reason why you should pay tax.”

  “The attack continues!” McCaine bellowed as he entered John’s office. They had been traveling around the globe for weeks and had recently returned to London for a while and McCaine was already creating a hurricane of activity in the building.

  The last thing they did was to have talks with firms in Eastern Europe, the Near East and in Africa. They viewed factories that sometimes looked like museums, or dingy cells filled with slaves, they saw crusty pipes discharging foamy liquids directly into rivers, walked through oily mud and neglected depots, always accompanied by chairmen or directors who needed financial aid.

  “The Syrians want us to forego investing in Israel,” he told John during one of their frugal lunches, which they had got used to eating at the conference table. “And the Israeli government didn’t want us to invest in Syria. I told both to listen up, if that’s their attitude, then I won’t invest in either. Suddenly they changed their attitudes.”

  “Well done,” John thought, who never got used to the power he could wield.

  “By the way, we will get a government subsidy for three hundred million for the construction of the new microchip factory in Bulgaria, and the government will also cover ninety percent of the losses for the first five years, which are fairly inevitable.”

  John looked bewildered. “Don’t we have any more money?”

  “Don’t look so petrified, John. We have more money than ever before. You can go down to our currency traders and watch them multiply it.”

  “Then why do we need government subsidies?”

  McCaine put the salad fork on the table. “It is like I told you during our first meeting; one trillion dollars isn’t enough to buy the world. That’s why we must get as much outside money under our control as possible if we want to succeed. That’s one way. Each dollar the Bulgarian government gives us they don’t have available to spend. They are weakened and we get stronger. Because of that, we’ll be able to get even more out of them the next time, and so on. An endless process.”

  “Got it.” Such tricks still made him feel a bit bad, even though he was trying to accept the fact that these were the rules of power. “But what advantage does a government see in us investing in their country if they pay for almost the whole thing?”

  “That’s what I talked them into. Besides, they knew that we could just as easily build the chip factory in Romania or Hungary, and that they would gain international esteem with investors instead. It’s like the motto, where Fontanelli Enterprises invests, others could too.” He shook his head and laughed mockingly. “You know, I love it when I sit down in old palaces with those heads of government with all their grand titles and pomp, knowing they are like putty in my hands. When they look at me and realize who has the say-so. That their supposed power is little more than show. There are no governments, John, there are only people sitting in offices. Some are so stupid that you can make them believe anything. The rest only want to be voted back into office — to them creating jobs is more important than a balanced budget.”

  “It’s about time that you got to know about the miraculous way you can make money work for you,” McCaine said a little later, adding sarcastically: “Seeing as you seemed so worried our cash might be running out.”

  John involuntarily conjured up the image of Marvin, who was always involved in money-making schemes, and who got John to join him sending chain letters and other rackets. He promised to pay attention but wasn’t expecting to learn much.

  “First, we’ll create a new corporation,” McCaine said. We’ll call it Fontanelli Power. The company deals in electrical power. Europe will have a liberalized electricity market in four years, so this will be a lucrative market. For capital we’ll use our various power plants, so they will henceforth belong to Fontanelli Power, whose stocks belong to Fontanelli Enterprises. So the ownership won’t change.”

  It took just four days to set up Fontanelli Power. All that was really required was for some of the smaller companies to be outsourced and given new names. The company’s new logo was designed for next to nothing by a New York-based ad company, which Fontanelli Enterprises partially owned.

  “Now step two. We will announce that Fontanelli Power will launch on the stock market. That’s a little more work because there are a bunch of legal regulations to follow. Above all, we have to get potential investors interested, which should be no problem with the name ‘Fontanelli’ involved.”

  The legal niceties were dealt with by the company�
�s own lawyers. The meetings referred to things John didn’t understand such as a stock market prospectus and Initial Public Offerings, even though he took notes so he could read up on them later. The ad company designed a campaign, which turned out to be unnecessary because the newspaper articles were enough to rouse interest in Fontanelli Power stocks.

  “We will put only a small amount of stock on the market, say fifteen percent, which will make the stock overpriced…”

  “What?” John asked. He was getting pretty annoyed by the use of so many terms he didn’t really understand.

  McCaine went back into teacher mode. “That means there will be more buyers than there are stocks. We will sell the stocks in a lottery. Those who get nothing will want them all the more. Just wait and see.”

  The initial share price was $28. By the end of the day the price was $59, and after a week it had leveled at $103.

  “Did you see what happened? We still own eighty-five percent of Fontanelli Power, but this eighty-five percent is worth three times as much as the entire company before the stock market launch. The money we invested has tripled, totally legally and within the rules.”

  John thought it was all surreal. “So now we sell the rest of the stock?”

  “No way. That is what’s so crazy; the moment we release the rest, the supply would surpass the demand and the price would plummet.”

  “So this only virtual money then?”

  “What do you mean by virtual money? All the money you have is nothing more than magnetic impulses in computers. Not a single bank could pay out your money in cash.”

  “But what good is having a company three times what it’s worth if you can’t change it into cash?”

  McCaine grinned. “That’s easy. So far we bought companies and paid for them. Now we can buy companies by trading stocks of Fontanelli Power. We only have to make sure to keep fifty-one percent of it, and then we remain in control. To look at it in another way, this maneuver allows us to buy companies with money that does not even exist.”