by Ben Elton
‘You too, Saunders. Run,’ he said.
‘I’m going to find you one day, and I’m going to kill you,’ said Saunders, leaving the truck.
Once they were alone, Judy faced Rosalie in the darkness of the deserted piazza. He silently flipped on the little audio recorder in his wristwatch. What he needed now was a confession. Having of necessity stopped the sabotage before it had occurred, he wanted proof that it was to have happened. This would require very careful handling. The police would soon begin to edge their way forward, so Judy had only minutes in which to coax from Rosalie that which he already knew. He had little experience of interrogation, but he did know that the first rule was to show confidence. Lead with the presumption that everybody knows exactly what’s being discussed.
‘I’m curious, Rosalie. How were you going to do it?’ he asked.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, you two-faced little worm.’
‘It would have to look like an accident, wouldn’t it? Corrosives, I suppose. Rusty tankers finally giving way? Is that it? You rupture the tankers yourselves and then claim that you’ve uncovered the criminal negligence of the toxic waste industry. Of course it’s quite a coincidence that the “accident” just happened to occur during a Mother Earth hijack, but so what? Coincidences happen and who would ever suspect the saintly environmental movement of dirty tricks? Not with lots of nice Natura people all set up and ready to scream about the nasty corrupt government. Do they know, Rosalie? Natura? Do all those pretty little hippies know what you do? I don’t think so, they’re as big a bunch of patsies as the public they preach to.’
The gist of Judy’s theory was beginning to sink in.
‘Are you suggesting that Mother Earth causes environmental pollution so that Natura can kick up a fuss about it?’ Rosalie seemed genuinely flabbergasted. Sufficiently flabbergasted for a tiny doubt to appear at the back of Judy’s mind.
‘You wouldn’t be the first to play that trick,’ he said, ‘the Bureau uses agents provocateurs all the time.’
There was a silence. It was strange to be in the middle of that great city, at the very administrative hub of a vast, international federation and yet hear a silence. Not a deep silence, there was noise in the distance as the police cleared the area surrounding the piazza, but in the cab of the Land-Rover there was a genuine pause in proceedings. Finally Rosalie spoke.
‘I have never been so insulted in all my life,’ she said and, ignoring Judy’s gun, she punched him in the mouth. Judy dropped his weapon and Rosalie produced hers.
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘I’m going to hand you over to Saunders.’
They left the Land-Rover and began to make their way across the huge, dark, empty piazza. It was about two hundred yards to the edge and they crossed it slowly and carefully. Rosalie was nervous, lest some brave police officer had finally decided to make his or her way towards the silent convoy.
She was, however, still pretty stunned by the nature of Judy’s accusation and could not resist further comment.
‘I still can’t believe it,’ she whispered, pushing her gun into Judy’s back. ‘It’s got to be a joke, hasn’t it? Surely you’re not going to tell me that the FBI actually believes we’re causing environmental disasters?’
Judy’s confidence was evaporating fast. His theory was suddenly beginning to look a bit stupid. There had, after all, been no disaster, and Rosalie’s indignant surprise seemed worryingly genuine.
‘As a matter of fact,’ he confessed, ‘it’s my own private theory. Everybody else in the Bureau laughed at it.’
‘You amaze me,’ said Rosalie with bitter sarcasm.
Then, just as they reached the edge of the piazza and were about to disappear into the deserted streets beyond, they heard a noise. It was a sort of huge hiss. It came from the toxic waste tankers that they had so recently left. Judy and Rosalie turned to see what appeared to be steam of some sort emanating from the side of one of the tankers. Then the smell hit them, it was horrible, enough to shrivel the hair on the inside of their noses, and both Rosalie and Judy retched in disgust. Just then the steaming, hissing tanker seemed to buckle… it just gave way in the middle. There was a splash and the ground surrounding it began to froth and burn, quite literally, as if the stone had been melted.
Anyone with the slightest knowledge of what that buckled tanker contained could see that a major environmental disaster was about to occur. Both Rosalie and Judy had that knowledge. It was like being there at the moment the bomb doors opened.
‘It’s going to spread to the other trucks,’ said Rosalie. ‘The whole bloody lot will go.
Judy was completely astonished. This was exactly the thing which he had just prevented, and yet here it was, happening anyway.
‘Rosalie,’ Judy said, ‘You didn’t do this, did you?’
‘For God’s sake, man, of course I didn’t, you mad idiot!’ she replied. ‘This is the bloody stuff we try and stop.’
The fire and the corrosion around the stricken transporter was beginning to take hold. Pandora’s Box had definitely been opened and all the evils of the world were flooding out.
‘I think we should run,’ said Judy. But Rosalie did not hear, she was already gone.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The penny drops
The Minister replies.
Judy pushed his way through the terrified crowds and shouting policemen and away from the scene of the ruptured tankers. He would have liked to have hailed a cab but of course there were none to be had. Only endless emergency vehicles screaming and wailing, hurtling through the streets, hurrying towards yet another stable from which the horse had well and truly bolted.
The toxins were in fact heading out from the piazza more quickly than Judy himself. Within minutes, they had hissed their way across the piazza floor, poured straight down the storm drains and into the water system. In doing so, they had, as it happened, brought about one positive result amidst all the horror. They had destroyed the much loathed and completely incomprehensible symbolic mosaics which covered the whole Euro piazza. Although, interestingly, the chewing gum which covered the mosaics remained unaffected, no toxin in the universe having the power to remove chewing gum once some anti-social bastard has decided to drop it.
Even as the burning poisons poured into the storm drains, bio-suited Natura scientists were on the spot, addressing the media.
‘All tap water in Belgium will very shortly be undrinkable,’ the principal spokesperson stated to the robot news cameras which surrounded him.
‘Now hang on, hang on, hang on, things are nothing like that serious,’ said the relevant junior minister, who had been sent out to attempt a little damage control, and who was wearing a bio-protection outfit the size of a bus. ‘Let’s not be alarmist about this now, shall we? It isn’t that the water will be undrinkable, you can drink it, of course you can drink it… and if you’re a fit person with no history of liver disorders and if you remember to induce vomiting immediately after swallowing, well, then you should suffer nothing worse than a mild, or perhaps severe case of the trots. So you see? The word “undrinkable” scarcely describes the situation at all, and alarmist generalisations, of which my radical friends here seem so fond, are really no help to anyone.’
‘All rivers and streams leading out of Belgium must be damned at the frontiers,’ the Natura spokesperson insisted. ‘Also infants and the aged must be evacuated. The atmosphere will be lethal to them and to anyone with respiratory difficulties for at least a month.’
‘Now hang on, hang on, hang on,’ said the relevant junior minister. ‘Let’s just get our terms straight here, shall we? Bandying words like “lethal” about is really no help to anyone. What exactly do we mean by “lethal” exactly? Hmm? If my alarmist friend here means that breathing the air will kill babies and grannies, well, then, yes, perhaps there is some foundation to the basis of his remarks, but really it’s much too early to be counting bodies, surely? And as for sealing the borders of B
elgium, may I remind my sanctimonious chum that it was his terrorist pals who dumped the damn stuff in Brussels in the first place.’
‘Perhaps the Minister would rather that the disaster had happened in Lille? Or Ostend? In the English Channel, maybe?’
As it happened, the minister, who lived in Brussels, would definitely have preferred that, but he did not say so.
‘The point is that the rupture of the tankers has happened. As for years we have been warning that it would. If it had not happened on this trip, then it would have been next time, or the time after. The people of Europe should be thankful to the activists of Mother Earth who diverted this deadly load into the very seat of government. At least now those whose greed, idleness or complacency have led to this terrible disaster are having to stand face to face with the results.’
‘Well, now, you see that’s absolute nonsense,’ the relevant junior minister said. ‘As I can make perfectly clear by explaining to you seventeen simple points. Let me take the second point first, because it relates partly to the first, and partly to the third. I shall, of course, return to the first point in due course before proceeding with my other points.’
The relevant junior minister was very good at damage control. He had scarcely got halfway through his points before the cameras had been switched off and everyone including the Natura spokesperson had given up and gone for a drink.
No direction home.
Puffing and panting and generally making heavy going of it (Judy’s asymmetric legs were not at all suited to this type of thing), Judy arrived at a small café which was situated on the corner of a tiny square on the cross- roads of four little streets.
All the bottled water had of course been sold, so Judy had to settle for a hot chocolate with whipped cream, warm cognac and a great big double chocolate brioche. Holding a handkerchief over his face between swigs and bites, he sat down to collect his thoughts, some of which had sunk so low that he had to fish them out of the turn-ups on his trousers. Assessing his situation, he recognised it for what it was, which was not good. The crossroads upon which the little café stood offered, Judy thought, something of a metaphor for his life, for that too was at a crossroads. Unfortunately, it was a crossroads off which all the roads were cul-de-sacs. Look at it from whatever direction he might, and Judy tried them all, even standing on a table in the corner of the room to do it, he was in something of a pickle. A solitary pickle, alone, despised and unloved, the sort of pickle that is normally only found in a hamburger and which has to be fished out in order to render the burger edible.
Which road should Judy take? The road back? It would not be easy, his old colleagues in the FBI no doubt considered him a traitor and a stoolie and who could blame them? Judy had, after all, assisted in the escape of a suspected terrorist from a foreign police force, thus disgracing the entire Bureau. All things considered, the road back looked rocky. Judy searched for an alternative route.
Could he take a road forward? No obvious ones sprang to mind. His new colleagues in Mother Earth would no doubt now also consider him a traitor and a stoolie. Again, this could scarcely be described as unreasonable. He had, after all, not only attempted to arrest their Facilitator, but had also accused them of going about their business with a callous and cynical immorality which made Machiavelli look like Julie Andrews.
How on earth had he got himself into such a fix? How had he managed to alienate absolutely everybody and achieve absolutely nothing?
Judy rehearsed again in his mind that series of suspicions and conclusions which had brought him to the lonely position in which he found himself. He had burnt his boats at the FBI because he had believed he had sufficient circumstantial evidence to conclude that Mother Earth were agents provocateurs. Nobody at the Bureau would take his conclusions seriously, so he had been forced to act on his own. He had successfully infiltrated a Mother Earth unit and correctly predicted that during their next mission a massive environmental disaster would occur.
After that, sadly, his theories had collapsed. Rosalie was innocent, he was sure of that. Her surprise at his accusations had been genuine, and besides, both she and her unit had been well away when the disaster occurred. What had happened? Could they have carried out the sabotage before Judy had intervened? It was not possible, the transporters had been flying along the highway only moments before Judy had made Rosalie order a withdrawal. Could there perhaps have been a second unit involved, of which he knew nothing? Perhaps, although Judy could see no obvious reason for an extra terrorist presence. Had he not intervened, Rosalie’s unit would have been quite capable of carrying out the sabotage. But he had, and they didn’t.
Was it sabotage at all? Could it possibly have been a coincidence that made the first tank rupture? A genuine accident? No, Judy would not credit it. He had come to Europe predicting exactly what had happened and it had happened, the fact that he seemed to have erred on who the culprits might be did not detract from the fact that, yet again, the pattern had been maintained.
Somebody had sabotaged that convoy, and since Judy no longer believed that it had been Rosalie’s unit, that meant that it had been tampered with before they had seized it. What was going on? Judy did not realise it, but the clue was staring him in the face.
Soap internationale.
There was a TV on in the corner of the bar. Judy’s eye was inevitably drawn towards it, reminding him momentarily of his finest hour, his achievement in getting Rosalie away from her Garda minders. Quite a stunt to have pulled off, and for what? Nothing. He had completely lost the trust he had gained and he was no further towards the truth.
The TV was tuned to the omnipresent Tolstoy system. A simucast soap internationale was playing. These were dramas that were made in English, in Los Angeles, and then simultaneously dubbed into literally hundreds of languages by means of a computerised, voice-sensitive translator. The computer ‘heard’ the American actor speak and then, using a synthesiser with a vast vocabulary of words and phrases, recorded by actors from other countries, it created new dialogue. Once an actor had comprehensively loaded his voice into the synthesiser it was possible for him or her to dub shows for ever, without ever being there, or in many cases even still being alive. Thus everybody in the world could now watch the same soap at much the same times, also the same news and the same chat shows. Everybody now heard and saw the same things. Even the French had all but given up on attempting to defend cultural boundaries. It was simply impossible to legislate against the myriad global ways in which information and imagery could be delivered.
The key to the mystery was about to be beamed into literally billions of homes in hundreds of different languages, just as that key had been beamed in countless times before. Somebody had to work it out some time. That somebody was Judy, who was about to make a very big discovery, although not quite as big as the consequences would be.
Global marketing.
Judy idly began to count the ‘product placements’ that were featured within the soap internationale drama. Soft drinks, designer clothes, cars. Some of the items, outside manufacturers had paid to have featured, others were actually made by companies owned by Tolstoy and his associates. The term ‘conflict of interests’ had long since become an obscure footnote in legal history. As Plastic Tolstoy himself had said during one of the last great court battles to prevent insider trading: ‘Hey! If a conflict of interests bothers you, just let me buy everything, you won’t see no conflict then.’
These days, product placement was considered an art form in itself. There were annual awards in which the drama directors who had most copiously featured their bosses’ products were honoured. It had got subtle enough for negative placement to have become a commonly used technique.
‘Did you see how every time the Slasher killed a girl with a broken bottle I used a Pepsi bottle?’ the proud young director of Slasher 23 would boast. ‘But the cops only drink Coke.’
‘No, I didn’t notice that,’ the proud young director’s friend would say.
‘Exactly!’ the proud young director would shout in triumph.
‘You didn’t see it, but it was there, and believe me, in your subconscious, Pepsi ain’t so wholesome any more.’
Judy noted that one of the groovy young characters in the soap internationale that he was watching wore a Claustrosphobe T-shirt. Claustrophobe was a clothing company set up by Tolstoy to exploit the cynicism and bleak humour that young people had developed about being potentially the last generation on Earth. They marketed jeans and T-shirts with ironic slogans on them like ‘Better a live rat than a dead self-righteous bastard’ and ‘Listening to greenies won’t help you live longer, it’ll just seem longer’.
It was a source of near despair to Natura that their constant appeals to adolescents to consider that the end of the world was nigh had actually served to create a ‘Well, fuck that then’ attitude amongst kids. In fact, that was one of Claustrophobe’s best-selling lines, a sweatshirt depicting a slimey dead Earth with the simple phrase ‘Well, fuck that then’ embossed underneath it.
Tolstoy’s clothes on Tolstoy’s TV show. Judy had a vague suspicion that it might still be illegal to so blatantly self-promote one’s own products but, short of shooting down satellites, the law was impossible to enforce anyway, so the matter was entirely academic.
His mind was wandering. Judy knew that he should be concentrating on planning his next move, but the TV continued to exercise its mesmeric effect on him. The adverts came on, as they did every ninety seconds at this time of the day. First up there was an ad for the very clothes that Judy had just been musing over.
‘They’re getting cheeky,’ Judy thought to himself as the sexy Euro kids cavorted on the screen in Claustrophobe T-shirts and hats. ‘That bastard Tolstoy just can’t lose. The ads are just an extension of the programme. Control the information, control the ads and sell anything you want.’