One Trillion Dollars

by Andreas Eschbach

  Nevertheless, it was all in vain. He actually wanted to sell the estate and get an apartment in the city, but he never got around to doing it. He contemplated setting up a bed in another room adjoining his office, but not even that idea got finished. He did not even find the time to call Ursula, but he had to admit that even if she wanted to come back to him, he simply would not know how to integrate her into his all-too-busy life.

  He slept through most of the Christmas holidays, a period of rest he desperately needed. With reluctant respect, he wondered how McCaine had managed such a lifestyle for so long.

  "Unfortunately," the lawyer said, rubbing his ivory hands, and when they were not kept busy, they reached as if by themselves to the cigarette pack in his shirt pocket, but only to flinch back with a twitch at the last moment.

  John looked at him and felt tied and weary. A glow of anger still glimmered somewhere within him, barely noticeable and close to dying altogether. “But what McCaine did was embezzlement, wasn’t it?” he asked.

  “That’s not the question. The question is will we get a conviction? And I doubt it,” the lawyer said in a quiet voice. “It might take years just to settle where the jurisdiction in this case might lie. McCaine is a wealthy man. He could hire the best lawyers there are.”

  “The best lawyers? I thought we had them?”

  “Well, let’s say it’ll be a fight among equally talented sides, which would be very interesting and would certainly keep the legal world well-employed for several years.”

  John stared at the lawyer and the charges listed on the paper and had to think about Lorenzo, who was the true heir and who had died from bee stings because McCaine had other plans. He would never be able to prove it even though he was absolutely convinced that was what had happened. And if he could not get McCaine for that, then he at least wanted to send him to jail for embezzlement. “Sue him,” he said with sadness in his heart. “I don’t care how long it’ll take.”

  “As you wish,” the lawyer nodded showing his thinning crown. “And if it will reassure you, McCaine’s counter-claim is equally unlikely to succeed.”

  “What counter-claim?”

  “I would be surprised if he didn’t sue you for continued pay, allowances, and wrongful discharge. There are some rather odd-sounding clauses in his contract of employment that allows him to do just about anything.” He smiled loftily. “But as I said, this could take years to resolve. We can do the same just as well.”

  During the first few days of 1998, there were an unusually high number of top managers who quit their well-paid and highly responsible jobs within the hierarchy of Fontanelli Enterprises. Only when one of the chief analysts came forward and told John that he had been called by McCaine the day after Christmas, and had been offered a new, better-paid job if he left the firm, did John realize that he had an even more dangerous adversary than just lack of time and overexertion. Those who had already quit never gave John any reasons; only one of them vaguely mentioned something about weak leadership and securing a future, but without telling him concretely who or what he meant by this. During talks with a few of them John had the impression they weren’t leaving willingly, but rather because McCaine had them by the balls, so to speak, for some reason.

  A few of the newly vacant positions opened sensitive holes in the firm’s administrative structure and added more stress. And with time it became clear that there was something even worse than having some managers leave to join McCaine; there was growing corruption among those who remained. Suddenly, warehouses were empty, because someone had “forgotten” to order new goods on time, with the result that entire production facilities came to a standstill. “Stupid” mistakes happened in important announcements, bids and contracts, mistakes that caused a loss of business or troublesome legal battles. “Inexplicable” computer crashes caused entire factories to come to a standstill or left the worldwide logistics system in disarray causing the business to lose money and damaging its reputation. The firm’s foreign exchange sector suddenly had a spell of “bad luck,” after enjoying two years of remarkable success. It incurred such losses that John was forced to close it down.

  John called Hartford in mid-January. Even the somber voice of Professor Collins made it obvious that he had no good news, and after asking how things were going John was not even surprised to hear: “Not good, a computer virus wiped all our data.”

  The days in which Professor Collins had briefly cared for his overall appearance were over. The few strands of hair he had left did what they wanted, the fact that his shirt had stains and his jacket sleeves were torn at the ends seemed not to bother him. Judging by the bags below his eyes he hadn’t been sleeping much lately either.

  “It could only have been sabotage,” he explained. “Not only were the UNIX computers affected, but also those that had the program codes. Everything is gone and there’s no chance of recovering it.”

  The springtime sun shone brightly down from the light-blue sky and flooded the conference room in an inappropriate cheerfulness. John was tempted to lower the blinds, if only to stop the sparkling light reflecting off the coffee pot into his eyes. He made do with moving the coffee pot.

  “I don’t understand it,” he said tiredly. “Surely you must have backed-up the data.”

  “Of course we did, but the disks aren’t readable anymore. Not a single one. Someone must have sabotaged them too.” The scientist wearily rubbed his forehead. “Everything is destroyed. Now we’re in the process of reconstructing as much as we can from our written records, but this will take months. It’s a catastrophe.”

  “When did all this happen?”

  Collins sighed. “In mid-December. It was during the night going on the fourteenth — a weekend.”

  “And why am I only hearing about this now?”

  The researcher looked at John, confused. “Yes, that’s what I’ve been asking myself … No, no, but I did send you a fax. I remember precisely. We spent the entire Monday trying to determine the extent of the damages, and then on Tuesday I sent you a fax. I didn’t want to phone you because I was too upset. I can remember that too. I had to let you know because of phase two.”

  “Phase two?” John shook his head. “The fax never got to me, professor. Unfortunately, such things have been happening quite often lately. And I never heard of a phase two either.”

  “But, did McCaine never…”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” He nodded, understanding suddenly. Then he explained the details of the meeting with McCaine that particular evening and how he told him about the results of phase one. “The following morning McCaine came back, and wanted a version of the program put on a laptop. That took quite some time and while we waited we discussed the specifications of phase two. It was rather fanciful. For instance, he wanted to know the results of a worldwide epidemic in the year 2008, and so forth…” His overtired eyes blinked. “That reminds me … that laptop! He should still have it. He didn’t leave it here somewhere, did he?”

  “No, he probably took it with him.” John made a dismissive gesture. “I hope it makes him happy.”

  Towards the end of 1998 one topic more than any other gradually made its way up the headlines until it was the lead item in every news bulletin: President Clinton’s sexual antics. No sooner had he testified under oath in the case after a judicial tug of war, which went on for months, than new names and suspicious tapes appeared, taking the debate to new heights. It was said that the president incited a female trainee to commit perjury to get the case dropped. While his opponents called for impeachment, the president denied ever having had an affair with the woman. His wife accused right-wingers of conspiracy. The dollar’s value fell in the international monetary markets, and the financial crisis Southeast Asia, which was reaching a new peak, threatened to spill over to the United States.

  John followed the news reports on TV with an oddly surreal feeling. He still heard the conversation he had with McCaine on the phone when John was in the Philipp
ines. He let the anchorman on TV talk as he got up and went over to McCaine’s old file cabinet. In it he found a folder titled Clinton, William, and found it contained a well-planned outline for defaming him. Attached to the cover was a short dossier on the special prosecutor of the so-called Whitewater Affair, and next to the image McCaine had scribbled some notes: Born in Vernon, Texas; father pastor; owns a thriving law practice (1997: one million dollars), clients, among others, tobacco industry. It was followed by the summary of an agreement, which the U.S. government tried to force upon the tobacco industry: to protect the cigarette manufacturers from further lawsuits they should, in return, pay a total of 368.5 billion dollars for medical costs to ailing smokers over a period of 25 years. How much do they earn? McCaine wrote, and next to that: Clinton wants to up the sum to 516 billion dollars.

  A vague feeling of impending doom crept over John, like some evil premonition.

  It was like having all his fears confirmed when he opened the Financial Times shortly afterwards and read that Malcolm McCaine was appointed chief executive of Morris-Capstone. There was little more known about this company other than that it was almost entirely in the possession of an old American family of entrepreneurs, for whom the term "publicity-shy” must have been invented; there weren’t even any photos of most of the family members in the public domain. John had to quiz all his analysts to learn that, besides owning shares in some of the most secretive genetic engineering companies and a factory for handguns, Morris-Capstone was also one of the largest tobacco manufacturers in the world.

  Also owned by the aforementioned old American entrepreneur family was the television station that granted Malcolm McCaine the first interview after his departure from Fontanelli Enterprises. He had given an extensive statement but never directly answered the relevant question as to whether he had been dismissed Instead he claimed he had had enough of John Fontanelli’s escapades, especially after his last trick — faking his kidnapping in Mexico, and had no other alternative but to resign.

  “Imagine being kidnapped,” he said to the interviewer, “and then getting released again. What would you do? You would go to the police, right? Everybody would do that. Not John Fontanelli. He simply disappears without a trace, only to suddenly reappear in miraculous fashion weeks later apparently unharmed in London six thousand miles away from the scene of his abduction. Do you consider this normal?”

  Of course the female interviewer thought it anything but normal.

  McCaine fervently argued that he had used all his energy to create a stable company that would secure jobs for millions of people even during this age of globalization. “Fontanelli thinks he can do everything alone,” he went on. “But he’s been at the helm for barely two months and already the company is in dire straits. It hurts having to watch this,” he said with a bitter expression. Then he described in detail the crises in every nook and corner of the Fontanelli empire in such detail that he might as well have admitted to having internal informants in the company.

  “What is your prognosis?” she asked him. “Are all those jobs in danger?”

  McCaine nodded earnestly. “Absolutely.”

  John had to turn off the TV after seeing only part of the interview. He told the secretary not to disturb him for the next hour then stepped over to the window to watch a wild snow shower coming down over London. He asked himself what in the hell was going on around here.

  The snow, interspersed with drizzle, doused the high windows, making the city scenery behind it look blurred in black and white blobs. A secretary had served some coffee and cookies, but Lord Rawburne had not touched anything yet. The economic and environmental journalist, wearing a thick white Irish-made wool sweater, dark green corduroy pants and boots instead of a business suit and dress shoes, sat comfortably in his chair and listened attentively to John explaining why he had invited him.

  “To be honest, I’ve been waiting for this moment since that memorable dinner at your house,” he told John and then clasped his hands together. “Back then I thought I had managed to get you curious, but … well.” He lifted his hands and then dropped them on his lap again. “So, you want to know how Homo sapiens can still be saved.”

  John nodded uneasily. “I guess you could put it that way.”

  “Good.” He smiled briefly. “Well, the first step is a simple one; get rid of income tax.”

  For one moment John thought he was watching a stand-up comedian telling a bad joke on stage. “That’s a joke, right?”

  “I assure you, I’m totally serious.”

  John groaned. “That’s not at all what I was expecting.”

  “Of course, that’s because you had read my book. But that was twenty years ago. I haven’t stopped thinking about the problem since then. And when you think about something long enough and hard enough you will eventually come up with new ideas.” Rawburne shuffled in his seat. “I admit that the abolition of income tax would be primarily a way of winning general acceptance for my other reforms. If you consider what people are willing to do just to save on taxes, you will find that a measure like this will win them over to making the necessary changes. Besides,” he added with a smirk, “I love this idea because it elicits such great reactions.”

  John folded his arms and leaned back. “That it does.”

  Rawburne fell back into a lecturing tone, as if he said all this more than once. “It is interesting to study the history of taxes. Duties from the general population have been collected since the first urban civilizations. It was a method for the ruling classes to finance their livelihood, their military adventures and other projects. By the way, many of the taxes invented back in historic times are still around today, even if they have changed a bit. They actually represent only a tiny fraction of government revenue and in some cases it costs more to raise them than they bring in. One reason is that we pay more taxes, relatively speaking, than ever before. For many centuries even the tithe, which was a ten percent tax, had been considered a burden too high for most.” He raised his eyebrows and smiled in an aristocratically sarcastic way. “We would drop onto our knees with thanks if our taxes were to be cut to such a low level, which, by the way, they never will be. Ever since the industrial revolution and the associated changes, such as higher costs for weapons and warfare, increases in social spending, and the invention of subsidies for certain sectors of the economy and so on, government spending has been growing much faster than the economy, so high in fact, that today virtually all countries are in debt and you can only wonder how they get away with it.”

  “That’s real simple,” John said, “they borrow it from me.”

  Rawburne did not go into that. “Great Britain conceived the idea of income tax in 1799 to finance the Napoleonic Wars, and disposed of it in 1815. But they had tasted blood. They reinstated it in 1842, supposedly as a temporary measure, but as we all know it is still with us. And that’s more or less the way it went in all Western nations in which taxes on revenues, yields, wages, and income make up the lion’s share of government revenue.” He raised his index finger. “What I want to say is that income tax is neither God-given, nor untouchable. It can be abolished the same way it was introduced, at the flick of a switch.”

  “But why?” John asked. “I mean, although I agree that no one loves income tax, I don’t see it being so evil that we have to get rid of it.”

  “Naturally, something else would have to take its place,” Rawburne explained. “After all, a modern country can’t exist with a tax on salt alone.”

  “Your idea is for a tax on environmental pollution.”

  “You’re close, but, as I said, that is a twenty-year-old concept. My deliberations have since gone a few steps further.” Rawburne made a vague gesture with one hand. “At first, you have to keep in mind that taxes influence the direction of the economy; they dampen whatever they are levied against. Taxes on value-added activities such as work, investments or trade have a direct effect, because they are calculated as a percentage, which
increases over time. They are a factor you can never neglect, no matter how much you earn. Tax on wages in the USA brings in about 500 billion dollars, but, of course, labor costs go up at the same time, and that means that fewer jobs can be created, simply because the hurdles to overcome before a new job is worth it are higher. The consequent loss to the economy has been calculated at around a hundred and fifty billion dollars. You can do similar calculations for all forms of taxes in all countries, and there is no trick to uncouple the relationship, because we are dealing with a mathematical law, as eternal as the stars and immutable as the law of gravity."

  John thought for a while. “But these consequences come with every type of tax, don’t they? You can’t avoid them unless you abolish tax altogether.”

  “Correct,” the journalist agreed. “The point isn’t trying to prevent them, but understanding the way in which taxes affect people’s behavior and decisions. Taxes govern: they punish whatever they are levied on — they damage it.” He turned his hands palms up. “The foundation of my ideas, as you said, was to levy taxes on pollution. Sounds good at first, right?”

  “Yes, and that’s why we’re sitting here.”

  “And thus the sins of youth catch up with you,” he sighed, though he did not really sound troubled. "The devil is always in the details, because how do you calculate environmental impact? In my book I dodged these issues. How much tax should we pay on what amount of emissions? Should cadmium-contaminated soil be taxed more heavily than carbon monoxide in the air, and if so, how much more? Should a tax on waste be calculated by volume, weight or composition? And how should I measure the heat emissions of machines? All this is a complicated topic that is literally asking for manipulation and trickery. Back then I thought these were questions of a secondary nature, but then I put more thought into it and spent a decade or so doing different calculations trying to find a simple and fair system until I realized what the fundamental problem was.”