Stark (18 page)

88: DINNER NEAR SINGAPORE

S
ly and Tyron shared a private plane to Nagasyu’s private island off the coast of Singapore. They barely spoke for the whole journey, that is until five minutes before touch-down when Sly noticed an ominous grey frigate hanging around in the little harbour.

‘Jesus,’ he said, pointing, ‘what the hell are the navy doing here?’

Tyron looked.

‘That’s not the navy,’ he said, ‘that’s Nagasyu’s.’

‘He owns his own warship?’ asked Sly in surprise.

‘Four of them, and four M16s. He’s a very big player, Silvester,’ was the patronizing reply.

On landing, Sly was shown to his chalet by a uniformed and armed guard. This was a distinct change from the gay maitre d’ at ‘California Dreaming’. Sly felt uncomfortable, he wished he’d brought a gun himself. Dinner was held under a beautiful South-East Asian sky, with the lights of Singapore City turning the vast canopy a fabulous dappled orange.

‘Well, there’s one thing I’ll say for pollution,’ said Tyron bluntly as they took their seats, ‘it’s certainly improved the views. The damn stuff’s so thick the light just bounces back at us…and the heat,’ he added more morosely. The terribly unnatural heat of that southern summer was scarcely relieved at all by the coming of night.

Even in the time that had elapsed between the dinner in Los Angeles and this, Sly’s second session of the World Government of Money in Singapore, he could sense a gathering urgency in the proceedings. There was less preliminary chatter, people wanted to discuss the project and nothing else. Despite the fabulous tropical spread that Nagasyu had laid on, nobody felt like eating much. They picked at the odd irradiated bit of fruit but the atmosphere was too tense and edgy to really hop into it. Besides, a starlit picnic loses some of its charm when the waiters are packing machine guns and there’s an armed warship in the bay. A lot of this security was, of course, to do with Nagasyu’s own private operations and nothing to do with Stark but it all contributed to the general air of fatalistic doom.

‘See about that sludge slick in the Eastern Atlantic?’ Slampacker observed gloomily. ‘Jesus, we weren’t expecting those for years.’

Slampacker was still in the chair. He seemed to be the unofficial president of the board. Many of the other faces had changed though. Understandably, due to the location, there was a larger contingent of Asian billionaires. As with Los Angeles though, it didn’t really matter who attended because any conclusion that the discussion produced would be instantly beamed to all interested parties.

‘I’ve seen pictures,’ Slampacker continued, ‘yeuk! Green and yellow and red bubbling goo. The damn thing looked like one of my burgers with the lid taken off Slampacker spoke in English. Much to Sly’s relief English remained the lingua franca despite the majority of the group being Asian. Tex Slampacker was referring to yet another man-made ecological disaster. A horrible, stinking, messy disaster — but that wasn’t what worried him. It was the timing. It had come too early. He felt like a man who conscientiously plans his dental appointments and suddenly an unwise toffee pulls half a pound of metal out of his teeth.

89: GOD’S SPIT AND THE DOMESDAY GROUP

I
n order to provide some parameters to their desperate rearguard action some twenty years before, the Stark consortium (which Sly was discovering was much older than he had first thought) had set up a top secret research team to predict the point at which world eco-balance would become critical, and drastic final action would have to be taken. For example, they had known about the connection between aerosols and ozone a decade before public research reached the same conclusion. This was partly because the Domesday Group, as the research team was called, were far better funded than government research, and partly because with the edge that their extra knowledge gave them, Stark were able to perpetrate a highly effective disinformation campaign. Hence, holding back aerosol bans for ten years, causing countless cancers and making an awful lot of money.

The Domesday Group had also predicted the terrible slime slick to which Slampacker was referring. They had informed their masters that in the not-too-distant future, the pointless over-farming of the industrial world would cause large quantities of nitrates and phosphates to gather in the sea, caused by agricultural run-offs. These would eventually turn the sea into a kind of nutritional soup for the ever present microscopic algae which thrive on these elements. Having been given such a good free meal, these oxygen consuming algae would multiply rapidly and gel into a vast floating, slimy glob, doubling in mass every twenty-four hours and continuing to do so until they had used up all the available nutrients. The problem with this glob, apart from the obvious bummer of having two feet of scum covering part of the eastern Atlantic, is that these algae use up so much oxygen in their phenomenal reproduction that they stifle everything else in their bit of sea. A level of three million algae to a litre of water is fatal to marine life. Underneath the slime slick that had so upset Slampacker, levels were running at ten million a litre. That is a very overcrowded jug of water.

‘God’s Spit’ as the Domesday Group had called their prediction, for obvious reasons, was one of thousands of documents that they had submitted to Stark over the years, and now, yet again, they had been proved right. God had spat on the ocean. But what was worrying Slampacker and his companions so much that night was the timing. This particular disaster had not been predicted for at least another five years — it had happened too early. As an isolated incident this would be acceptable but the Domesday Group were having to constantly revise their predictions backwards as events overtook them. Species of animals that were not meant to die out until mid-twenty-first century were already extinct. Trees were proving far less resilient against acid ‘die back’ than had been hoped.

This meant that the bottom line, Vanishing Point, the moment at which the world will cease to be able to sustain balanced life, was approaching much faster than had been expected.

‘It is coming towards us quicker than we are going towards it,’ Slampacker explained, unnecessarily.

The original Vanishing Point scenarios arrived at by the Domesday Group had been really quite optimistic. They reckoned we had three generations at least. They did not see a total breakdown happening until at least the second half of the twenty-first century. At the time the fledgling group that was to become the Stark consortium had taken great comfort from this, hoping that perhaps technology might come up with eco solutions that did not require them to take a drop in profit. Thus relieving them of the terrible necessity of having to intervene directly.

It should be remembered that the first article of the unwritten constitution of the notional World Government of Money is that under no circumstances should anyone be expected to take action that would reduce their profits, whatever the consequences of not taking action. Stark’s central assumption being that there is no point in curtailing antisocial activities, because if you don’t do it someone else will.

Unfortunately, ever since those heady, optimistic days, Armageddon had been getting closer. The consortium had already decided that the time had come to take drastic action even before Sly joined, now some alarmists in the group were beginning to wonder if they had made their move too late.

‘That kind of speculation is quite pointless,’ snapped Mai Wo, a small South-East Asian bloke who Sly knew well by reputation. He was much admired for managing to employ more labour for less cash than anyone else since the Pharaohs built the pyramids. Mai Wo brought the same calm logic to his assessment of the Armageddon plan.

‘Whether we are too late or not is a non-variable, we cannot affect it,’ he said, accepting a cheesy nibble from a waiter in a steel helmet with a small howitzer under his arm. ‘We must presume that vanishing point is upon us and that we must act immediately. This we have done. So, let us put panic from our hearts, our shoulders to the wheel, and act as swiftly and as efficiently as we are capable of.’

He spoke as if they were embarking on some great public work, rather than the cruellest and most selfish plan imaginable. He made the others feel good about themselves. Possibly this was how he managed to persuade his enormous workforce to labour so philanthropically on his behalf maybe it was because in his country trade unions were virtually illegal and the opposition were all in prison.

‘Mr Mai Wo is, of course, absolutely right,’ Slampacker said, ‘and hence I have asked Professor Durf of our Armageddon Co-ordinating Group, to say a few words on what measures we are going to have to employ in order to accelerate our preparations to meet Vanishing Point when it hits us. Professor Durf…’

90: PROFESSOR DURF AND THE AVALANCHE EFFECT

T
here was a smattering of polite applause as the dynamic young South African rose to his feet and fixed them with his one eye, the other one having been lost doing his national service. He claimed that he had lost it at the hands of a black soldier, which was true in a way. It had been a black orderly who had over-polished the floor of the officers’ mess on which Durf had skidded stabbing himself with a cocktail stick and thus fixing a small sausage to his left eye.

Durf was present at the dinner because, obviously, a group of people whose talents are centred around making money, could not operate the sort of project that they were planning on their own. Hence, over the years, a carefully selected and heavily controlled group of experts had been recruited to the team. All were shadowed and monitored, day and night, by a vast army of agents who had no idea what they were watching for. Just as most of those being watched, like the Domesday Group for instance, were completely in the dark as to the nature of the ultimate plan that they were unwitting parts of. Sad to say, science is no longer pure: commerce pays for it and commerce calls the tune. Domesday Group scientists produced results for their corporate masters just as they produced aerosols, defoliants and new methods of sticking sugar frosting to cereals. Professor Durf, head of the Armageddon Co-ordinating Group, was one of the handful of people outside the actual World Government of Money who knew the true nature of the plan; he was a part of it. Since the death of his predecessor, Professor Blakely, he was one of its principal architects.

Despite his central role in the Stark Conspiracy, there had been nothing sinister about Blakely’s death. He had not been on the verge of spilling the beans — people just die, that’s all. Although, with hindsight, the more thoughtful members of Stark realized that the cause of his death was chillingly ironic. He had been on a skiing holiday at Klosters in Switzerland and had been killed by an avalanche. Killed directly by an avalanche that is, but at one remove he was killed by the fires on the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne.

Klosters used to be pretty safe, it still is, relatively, but none the less all over Europe the ski resorts are becoming ever more plagued by avalanches. In fact so bad has the problem become that whole Alpine villages are being forced to evacuate themselves when the warnings sound. Now one might say: more fool them, how stupid to build their Alpine villages in the paths of potential avalanches. The point is, of course, that for hundreds of years the villages have been perfectly safe. The thick tree cover on the mountain sides had anchored the snow to the ground, and that which did slip away was soon stopped and dispersed by the tough little highflying forests. Not so anymore, unfortunately. Acid rain sweeping across Europe for a hundred years or more has dissipated the forests. The mountains are going bald. It is possible to filter the factories and power stations that produce the sulphur that turns the water to acid, but it’s expensive, so of course it is not done. Little fir trees on frozen mountain tops do not carry a lot of weight when it comes to balancing market forces — but they carry a fuck of a lot of weight when an avalanche lands on your head.

Professor Durf was addressing the assembled party.

‘Gentlemen, as you have been discussing, the Domesday Group no longer feel able to make a prediction as to when the world’s chain of being will collapse under the pressure of having to generate capital. We may have two decades: we may have two minutes. The avalanche factor teaches us that we are simply not sophisticated enough to compute the myriad possible knock-on effects that could result from any one of the millions of environment shifting activities in which you and your colleagues are engaged.’

The ‘avalanche factor’ was a term coined in honour of Professor Blakely, whose death graphically demonstrated the fact that it is relatively easy to deduce a cause from an effect, but a mental nightmare to predict effects from causes. Who could possibly have figured out that a factory in Manchester would cause an avalanche? You’d need a brain the size of Heathrow airport. But, once it’s happened, then it’s comparatively easy to work backwards to the cause through a process of deduction. Causes do not become identified as causes until they have taken their effect. Meanwhile you’ve got a mountain on your head or an ocean completely covered in smokers’ phlegm.

This was what the World Government of Money feared most, the rogue eco-catastrophe, so unexpected, so obvious after the event. The unpredictable disaster that would cheat them of their prize in the race for a solution to their predicament. The avalanche factor.

‘It is because of this terrible uncertainty,’ continued Professor Durf, ‘that we have decided to reassess our timetable. It would be most regrettable, I think you’ll agree, to achieve all that we have planned and then to die of skin cancer or suffocation on the morning that we had decided to push the button.’

This was a joke. Professor Durf was a smug fact-head. The sort of idiot who would annoy a whole cinema full of people by sighing and laughing loudly at the very scariest bits of a horror film, then come out at the end saying, so that everyone can hear, ‘But it was absurd. It is a bio-physical impossibility for anti-matter to transpose itself in that manner.’

One of the reasons that Professor Durf had been selected for the project was that he had no friends and hence was less likely to breach security in idle chatter.