Even as they gazed, the darkness at the top of the pool suddenly flared into brightness. A glare awoke too through the windows of the Atrium dome. Light was flooding the Terrace above.
‘Ah,’ said the builder. ‘The helipad lights. Our host approaches.’
Rita stared up. In the glow of the spotlights, she could now see wisps of cloud racing across the top of the dome, across the Terrace. It must be getting quite windy outside; she’d had no idea, there was no sound or vibration within. But lord, a helicopter was really going to be landing out there in the wind and fog, all the way up here?
A noise intruded now from outside, kept low by the Observatory’s sound insulation, barely enough to compete with the background jazz, but unmistakable: the thrum of a helicopter. Reflections of light flashed red and blue through the high windows, then came a glimpse of a white body and blurred rotors passing over the dome. The thrum of rotors continued for a few moments more, then died away.
‘Right on schedule,’ said Clara, with a glance at her watch. ‘I’m sure he’ll go to the Cottage first to clean up, but he shouldn’t be too—ah, there we go!’ The major-domo’s phone had just chimed in her pocket. She took it out and inspected a text message. ‘Ten minutes, he says.’
Rita looked at Eugene, who had been sitting silently through the last few minutes, perusing data of some sort on his own phone. ‘How does this all work, by the way?’ she asked, curious. ‘How do we get such good phone reception and internet way the hell out here?’ Only an hour ago Rita had received a phone call from her house- and cat-sitter back in Melbourne, one of the young nurses from the vet hospital, with a question about Simon’s food regime, and the reception had been perfect.
The IT expert slipped his phone away, shrugged companionably. ‘Well, it’s possible for anyone in theory. Satellites cover even remote parts of the ocean these days, and offer a full range of internet access for ships at sea. But the bandwidth is limited, so it’s not cheap, and it’s usually not very fast, especially when demand is high. Of course, money isn’t an issue for Mr Richman, but more to the point, he’s a major stockholder in the company that owns the satellites in question, so we have as much bandwidth as we want, and as fast as can be.’
Rita nodded, noting yet again that when you had enough money, so many of the everyday inadequacies simply faded away.
‘The whole place is a technical marvel, truth be told,’ Kushal enthused. ‘Communications, security, environmental controls, there are all sorts of wonders buried away in the tunnels and back rooms. And yet sitting here there is no hint of any of it, so you’d never guess.’
The conversation ran on about the Observatory and its marvels: about the nearly seven kilometres of passageways and service tunnels that riddled the upper Mount, only a third of which were ever meant to be seen by guests; about the internal artificially lit hydroponic garden growing fresh salad vegetables right here in the residence; about the natural springs that had been found during construction, which now provided all the mega-litres of water needed for the pools.
The discussion was only interrupted at last by a new arrival; a man emerged purposefully from the Dining Hall, and, with a shake of his head to the barman, came over to the group.
‘Kennedy,’ greeted Clara.
‘How goes it all here?’ the newcomer enquired, not sitting down. He was middle aged but muscular, with cropped grey hair and a reddish face. His eyes flicked over the five of them, lingering last on Rita.
‘No problems,’ the major-domo said. ‘How was the flight in?’
‘Getting iffy, if you ask me. But the boss was keen to land up here.’ The man hitched at his belt. For all his brawn his belly was notable, and something about his suit was ill-fitting across the shoulders. His eyes were still on Rita. ‘This is our special guest, I assume?’
Clara nodded. ‘Rita, this is Kennedy Boland, chief of Mr Richman’s security team.’
The man shrugged a greeting. ‘Don’t be intimidated by the presence of armed guards around Mr Richman, Ms Gausse.’ His accent was middle American, deep-voiced, with a twang that slurred the Ms to the point almost of insult. ‘As I hope you understand, a man of his position would be a tempting target for kidnappers or terrorists.’
A gun, Rita thought. Of course. His coat was ill-fitting because of some kind of shoulder holster beneath it. But that was odd, for surely a professional security aide would have his clothes tailored to hide those kinds of protrusions? And yet this man, who presumably was one of the best in his field, if he was security chief to Walter Richman, was wearing a suit that looked too tight, and cheaply made.
‘Of course, I understand,’ Rita answered coolly. Then she added, ‘But is there really much risk, here in such a remote location?’
He considered her starkly. ‘Here more than anywhere. A helicopter could land suddenly, full of kidnappers. A boat might come out of the night full of terrorists. The remoteness is a weakness as much as a strength. There’re no police out here. No help. It’s just us.’
Eugene smiled with what might have been a deliberate flick of his long hair. ‘Never fear,’ he said to Rita, ‘we’re not totally blind here. All flights within five hundred clicks are tracked by radar down at Base, so no landing can be a total surprise. And even if a chopper full of gunmen did touch down out on the Terrace, all the exterior doors are emergency lockable, bulletproof and blastproof. All nearby shipping is tracked too, down to small yachts, and the harbour can be closed with five minutes’ warning by raising chains across the mouth.’
Kennedy’s nod was distant. ‘All decent measures—if they work as they’re meant to. But no system is foolproof.’
Clara spoke to Rita. ‘Kennedy is ex-military intelligence. It’s his job to know everything that goes on around Mr Richman.’
Eugene cocked an eyebrow to the security chief, almost mocking. ‘So how many people are in the building right this second?’
Kennedy didn’t blink. ‘Twenty-two.’
Rita could not suppress a surprised glance, and the security chief’s pale eyes latched on to her instantly. ‘The five of you sitting here,’ he said, ‘me, Mr Richman in the cottage, the barman there, a waitress standing by for you all in the Dining Hall, a chef and an assistant chef in the kitchen, two systems managers in the control room, five cleaners on duty in the lower levels, and four of my own men patrolling the exit points and the upper deck. Twenty-two in all. First thing I did when I got off the bird was to consult the duty roster, and then check that it was right.’
It wasn’t even a boast, simply a description of a fact.
‘Twenty-two is a skeleton crew, really,’ Kushal observed. ‘There’d be more here by day. Cleaning staff, cooking staff, maintenance staff for the air-conditioning plant, the heating system, the electrical systems, the winches, the pools and spas and filtration systems. And that’s not to mention the staff down at Base. The power plant, the radar shack, the docks, the warehouses, gardens, port security. It’s endless.’
Rita had to say it. ‘And all of it, all these people working and living here, all the security, all the money it takes, just because one man wants to make his home on a rock in the middle of nowhere?’
‘Well,’ said a voice coming up behind her, ‘what’s so wrong with that?’
She spun. Her back had been to the Library, and approaching from that direction was a figure familiar from a thousand newspaper photographs and video clips: Walter Richman, billionaire, conqueror of the Wheel, man of history, but real now, in the flesh, and that changed everything.
‘Hi,’ he said to her, ‘I’m Walt.’
12
HOLY BRIBES
Extract from feature article ‘One Man’s Mountain’
by Antony Narev, Sydney Morning Herald, 2014
So how did Walter Richman do it? How did he become the only man to ever stand atop the Wheel? I don’t mean, how did he climb the mountain itself—as interesting a story as that is—I mean, how in the hell did he convince the three other
climbers with him on that last fateful day to hang back just below the peak, and to let him summit alone?
Mountain climbers are hardly retiring types, and with a peak in plain sight are not known for a willingness to let anything get in their way. Summit madness, it’s called, and it has lured more than one climber to an untimely death, pushing on to some taunting crest even as night is falling and the weather is closing in and the oxygen is gone …
But somehow, Richman convinced three of the best climbers in the world to stop short of the most prized summit in all history. He had no excuse involving safety or survival. They had reached the final approach well within their schedule, and with plenty of daylight and oxygen to spare. He did it simply for the sake of gratifying his ego, for no better reason than to let him later claim, ‘I was the only one!’
Even more remarkably, in the years following, he seemed to convince the world that he was right to do so, that he wasn’t acting out of pure narcissism, that it wasn’t one of the greatest acts of bastardry and betrayal ever committed in the climbing world—that he wasn’t, in short, as one anonymous climber further down the mountain called him ‘a deranged, selfish fucking cunt’—but rather, somehow, that he had done the right thing, even the noble thing.
Gobsmacking, really. Except, this is how con men always work. They not only rip you off, they make you thank them for ripping you off; they make you love them for it. And whatever else he may be, Walter Richman is most certainly a con man.
But to fully grasp the enormity of what happened that day on the summit, we have to go back a little, to April 1971 in fact, some four months after the twenty-five-year-old Walter Richman had unexpectedly inherited his father’s staggering fortune, and to the day that he announced, at a specially convened press conference, exactly what he planned to do with all that power and money.
He was going to climb the Wheel.
That’s right, he repeated to the crowd of disbelieving journalists, most from financial newspapers, he was going to lead an expedition to defeat the greatest mountain the world. It would be an effort that would involve hundreds of people, demand a host of technical innovations in several fields, and would take three years at the least—an undertaking as big, in its way, as NASA’s landing on the Moon.
The first journalist to splutter out a question in response to this ignored the whole preposterous idea completely, and demanded instead to know what Walter planned to do about his father’s empire? Who was going to run it, while he was off tilting at windmills?
‘Oh, I will,’ Richman responded casually, as if managing one of the largest multi-national multi-industrial concerns in the world would be no trouble at all. ‘In my spare time, that is.’
Stocks immediately plunged on markets right around the globe. It was awful, said the wise heads of the business world, it was everyone’s worst fears realised. The young fool was going to squander his father’s fortune, a vast economic enterprise would be left rudderless, its capital frittered away with no hope of return, and all to do what? Climb a tower of rock and ice in the middle of nowhere? Madness.
But in fact, the wise heads had it wrong. Richman set about organising his mammoth expedition with extraordinary energy and flair—and with a canny knack for sharing the financial burden around among a long list of corporate sponsors and technical partners (who, incidentally, would spend years chasing down money owed to them by the expedition, long after the mountain had been climbed).
It soon became apparent that rather than embarking on a folly, Richman was instead engaged in what was becoming the great project of the age. After all, space had been broached and the Moon reached, the deepest trenches in the ocean had been visited, the wilds of every continent explored. What was left for man now to achieve but to set foot upon that last untrodden spot of his own planet?
Strangely enough, Richman himself, in all his mountaineering career up to that point, had never climbed an inch on the Wheel, even though his contemporaries had made ascents there as high as twelve thousand metres. Indeed, Richman had only even seen the mountain once, during a cruise in his youth. He now claimed that this omission was deliberate. ‘I’ve been saving that mountain until I was ready to go all the way to the top. Why climb half a peak? I want it all.’
He put the call out, meanwhile, for other climbers to join his team—and they answered, signing on in their hundreds. Richman’s reputation was not good among his fellow climbers, but this expedition was simply too big to ignore. What was more, as news leaked out about the technical advances he was making with his new high-altitude climbing suits, it seemed more and more likely that he really might succeed. There had been other great attempts on the Wheel, but none like this, none with NASA as a partner, and none with limitless wealth to back it up.
Work began at the Wheel itself in early 1972. There was little climbing initially; the first months were spent in stockpiling supplies on Theodolite Isle and on improving facilities at the notoriously fickle Bligh Cove upon the shores of the Wheel itself. The latter involved excavation of the sea floor, and the building of concrete walls to create a proper deep-water port, for Richman’s plans called for the berthing of two large ships in the cove for months at a time, in all weather.
With money no object, it was all done by June 1971, and the two ships took up station. One was a twenty thousand tonne former cruise liner, renamed the Artemis, after the Greek goddess of mountains. Its purpose was to serve as accommodation for the support staff and for the climbers when they were off duty. The other ship was a converted oil freighter, renamed Vulcan after the Roman god of fire, and it would be a floating power station and pump house, feeding electricity up the mountain, and fresh water too, through heat-jacketed pipes.
Why were electricity and water considered so vital, even at the huge expense of laying cables and pipes all the way up the Wheel? The answer is simple: one of the heaviest burdens that normal climbers must haul up a mountain is fuel, either in the form of oil and gas for cooking and heating, or—for pressure-suited climbers—in the form of batteries to keep the suits running. To have electricity on hand, for cooking, heating and recharging, would simplify things vastly. Another great burden is drinking water. True, on most mountains snow can be melted as needed, but on the Wheel, above the fifteen thousand metre mark, there was no snow, it was drier there than any desert. So piped water too was a necessity.
In July 1971, climbing began. Not serious climbing, however. On the lower slopes a path was already well laid out. Most earlier expeditions had also started at Bligh Cove, and taken this same route up the West Face. In truth, the expedition did not even consider this early stage to be part of the climb, but merely the ‘walk in’, to use a Himalayan phrase, leading to the establishment of a Base Camp. In this case, Base Camp was founded at five thousand one hundred metres, on the great ledge that runs for miles across the West Face at that altitude, smooth and level and thirty metres wide, known in the climbing world as the Plateau. Many earlier expeditions had used the Plateau likewise—it was littered with the remains of old camps—but the Richman effort would in time see a thriving small town develop there, narrow, but with all mod cons, and with a population close to a thousand.
The real climbing began in November. In rotation, teams of four climbers at a time set out from the Plateau to carve new routes up the slopes of the West Face, laying fixed lines behind them as they went. This would be a ‘siege’ campaign, with teams repeatedly ascending and descending the mountain, building camps higher and higher until at last the summit was within easy reach of the final camp.
It was now also that climbers began to don their suits, Richman’s game-changing High Terrain Function suits. Of course, they had not needed these in the thicker airs below Base Camp. And even above the Plateau, from five thousand to eight thousand metres, they wore only lightweight versions of the suits, not yet fully pressurised. Many climbers in fact could have survived without even those as far as nine thousand metres; it had been done before. But climbing to
nine thousand metres unaided is an exhausting, body-wasting, often lethal process. Richman wanted his climbers fit and healthy at all times, not hollowed-out wrecks, so from five kilometres on it was suits only.
Trailing the climbers, two lines of HAEV huts also crept up the West Face from Base Camp. The duplication was a precaution, in case avalanche should wipe out one line or the other. On each line, the huts were an average of about three hundred vertical metres apart, though there was much localised variation dictated by the terrain. Likewise, the two lines of huts were usually held about a kilometre apart horizontally, although as the lines ascended beyond the precipitation limit at fifteen thousand metres, this distance was reduced as the risk of avalanche was gone and even the threat of rock fall lessened.
In all, one hundred and twenty-two huts would be painstakingly installed. This involved, for each hut, hauling its ninety-four individual components—frames, panels, seals, internal fittings, pumps and other machinery—as far up the mountain as necessary, then locating or clearing (sometimes by explosive) a large enough piece of level ground to host it, followed by construction and connection to the water and power network, and finally stocking with supplies, to leave it ready for habitation. It was tedious work, and, as with all things on the Wheel, dangerous. It took five months for the climbing teams to gain the previous high mark of any other expedition, twelve thousand metres—and cost the lives of four climbers, caught in two different avalanches. But as the experience of the teams grew, and as they began to reach heights above the worst of the weather, the ascent accelerated, pushing into completely virgin territory, twelve, thirteen and fourteen kilometres up.
The Rich Man’s House Page 13
