by Hammond, Ray
*
On the other side of the world, sixteen planes were in various stages of descent for landings at Oakland Airport, across the bay from the southern suburbs of San Francisco. Although mainly a regional, domestic airport with relatively light night-time movements, the air traffic supervisors had the task of overseeing the computers that steered incoming and outgoing flights around the over-busy, delay-prone air lanes that fed SFO, the city’s main international airport eight miles to the west.
Oakland was a modern, well-equipped airport and when the images projected by the air-traffic control computers froze, senior air traffic supervisor Sandy Davis swore. The technical people had told everybody that the modern computer systems couldn’t crash. Then, remembering the drill from her initial training as a manual air traffic controller twenty years before, she simply closed her eyes and started counting to ten. She was trying to calculate the progress of the sixteen planes the computer had been handling even though, in her manual days, the maximum a human controller would have been expected to visualize during a system failure was six.
The back-up system finally kicked in as her count reached eight. As the display in front of her reactivated she saw that her planes were almost exactly where she expected them to be.
‘What’s happening?’ she called angrily over her shoulder. ‘We’re never supposed to lose real-time!’ There were shrugs all round.
When she looked back her planes were once again frozen within their cubic 3D display.
‘Now we’ve lost positioning handshake from the satellites,’ she shouted.
Then Sam Potter, the shift controller was beside her. ‘You’re counting?’
She nodded, also calculating how long she had before she had to declare an emergency and ask for assistance from SFO.
Potter made the decision for her and picked up the desk phone. He prodded angrily at the instrument. ‘It’s dead,’ he exclaimed. ‘What the fuck’s going on around here!’
He fished his VideoMate from his pocket and flipped it open.
‘There’s no radio signal!’ he shouted. ‘That’s impossible. Everything’s down. But they’re all separate systems!’
Sandy’s display refreshed.
‘Jesus,’ breathed Potter. ‘Tell American 114 to turn–’
Sandy was doing it before he completed his sentence. She told the pilot to override his on-board flight control computer, issued instructions that would allow him to turn the passenger jet ninety degrees to the right and simultaneously told him to climb a thousand feet. She cleared two more distant planes from the stack and instructed the bewildered American crew to complete their turn, climb another twelve thousand feet and rejoin the stack forty miles to the east. ‘We’re suffering multiple systems failure here,’ she explained. ‘Please alert SFO.’
There was silence in the room. Sandy exhaled slowly. As she sat back, the phone beside her started to ring.
*
Thomas Tye rose from a couch to greet the British Prime Minister, his Health Secretary and three senior civil servants. The tycoon had changed into another fresh, open-necked white shirt and he had tied his hair back. The favoured TV crews and photographers got the group to repeat their handshakes over and over again and then they were quickly bundled from the hotel suite.
Tye walked his guests to the picture window in the penthouse of the London Hilton and they stood admiring the sun-drenched view down into the private gardens of Buckingham Palace. What a row there had been a lifetime ago when the Queen had first discovered she was overlooked by hotel guests. Now it was no longer the main royal residence and the old, old, widowed Queen walked among the ornamental ponds and privet hedges only on the rare occasions when public duties recalled her to London.
With an exchange of nods, the small party turned and crossed to sit on the sofas that filled a sunken seating area. All the furniture in the room was new, the plastic covers removed only after Tye had arrived and given his permission the previous evening. The suite had been redecorated and new carpets had been laid by the Tye Corporation’s Advance Preparation Unit. It was a procedure Tye insisted on wherever he travelled.
What was not revealed to the host locations was that the APU was part of Jack’s division and the most important part of their ‘redecoration’ procedures was to investigate all wall, ceiling and floor cavities, to replace all communications systems with the Tye Corporation’s own highly encrypted systems, to install electronic ‘white noise’ barriers and to maintain a complete electronic anti-bugging sweep of all areas the corporation’s president would be occupying. Modern business techniques and ethics dictated such precautions for all off-site meetings.
Two stewards held out hot antiseptic towels for the party.
Jack Hendriksen beckoned to Pierre and said he would take the floor duty. The Frenchman nodded and he and Stella Witherspoon, the deputy PPT leader, took up positions at the two exits to the suite. Jack stepped out into the corridor and closed the doors quietly behind him.
Two uniformed British policemen, armed and with full body armour, were outside. They scanned him and received his ident. A small nod from the taller served as acknowledgement. Jack moved along the corridor to ensure that all approaches were covered. The Hilton’s management had insisted its own video surveillance was adequate and had refused the Tye Corporation’s request to install its own system in public corridors. Despite this, the hotel’s prime location, the lure of the penthouse view and its management’s willingness to allow redecoration of three suites had been sufficient for Tye to overrule the PPT’s objections. They had taken the entire floor, of course, but, assuming Pierre’s role for the day, Jack wanted to double-check that the elevators were locked off and that the roof and stairwell escapes were covered. He recognized the tall man in a dark navy suit standing opposite the exit to the four elevators.
‘Hi, Nigel. Good to see you.’
He had met the Prime Minister’s senior protection officer twice before. They swapped greetings and the Brit confirmed that his team had locked off the elevators the moment the press had left.
With a wave, Jack continued his journey around the circular corridor. As he passed the open doors to another suite he saw Connie Law, Tye’s personal assistant, and her staff busily confirming the final details of Tye’s short European tour. Tomorrow it was Brussels to see the Commissioner and then on to Berlin for Tye to give another performance; Paris on Friday for lunch with the President of the Republic, and then, unannounced and, it was to be hoped, unreported, one of the two supersonic Tye-Lear corporate jets ferrying the Tye Corporation presidential entourage around the world would change its flight plan in mid-air to bring Tye and a smaller retinue back to an airfield in Cambridgeshire. Tye would then spend two private days visiting his investments in the many biotechnology companies that had sprung up in the science parks of the area.
Jack watched Connie work. Her highlighted blonde hair was cut short and a pair of gold-rimmed personal viewpers were suspended around her neck on a thin gold chain. He regarded her as the most efficient and unflappable human he had ever met and he felt his interest growing as he admired her long, elegant neck. Suddenly he found himself thinking about the vacation he was due to start in six days. He was looking forward to getting back to the apartment in Manhattan he so rarely saw. He often thought about selling it but each time he remembered how important it was to keep somewhere that was your own, something that had no connection with the Tye Corporation. A place that still felt clean, he realized, untainted by this business.
He pushed away the weariness and a vague, unseated sense of disgust. It was just a reaction to mental fatigue and he had been well trained to cope. He had enjoyed the demands his twelve-year career in the US military and government intelligence services had made on him and he was grateful for the resources it had forced him to discover in himself. When he had been finally discharged, after he had abandoned two previous attempts to quit just as new crises had erupted around the world, his section head had
described his service as ‘outstanding and distinguished’ in front of the few men and women who were permitted to witness the small ceremony in Washington.
Jack hadn’t been able to talk much about those years. During most of his time with the US Navy and, subsequently, various loosely associated government agencies, he had been involved with intelligence activities. He had simply given his commendations and medals to his mother and watched her smile broaden as he asked her to mothball his ceremonial naval uniforms.
‘Is it for good this time, Johnny?’ his mother had asked as she reached up to push back a short lock of blond hair that had fallen across his forehead. No matter how old or experienced he became, he would always be her first-born.
He had smiled and kissed her.
‘It’s for good, Mom,’ he had assured her. ‘Although I’ve no idea what I’m going to do now.’
Jack had seen a frown cross his mother’s forehead. Although little mention was made of it, his father’s premature death had left small provision for her later years and, for the last twelve years, her two sons had jointly shouldered the responsibility of providing her with a comfortable retirement.
She need not have worried. The Tye Corporation’s director of corporate security services had made contact within forty-eight hours of Jack’s discharge. Jack rejected the offer outright during the first voice call. He knew nothing about corporate security and he didn’t want to learn.
Then his predecessor had called back and had told him a little more about the job. He had made it plain that it was Jack’s Navy-assessed IQ rating of over 140 points that was his main attraction. He said Jack had been strongly recommended by Ron Deakin, his original SEAL intelligence instructor. Jack had applied to join the elite Marine corps just as it had been changing from a brutally physical fighting force to a ‘smart’ operations unit. Although the induction had been gruelling, the Navy had finally abandoned the ultra-macho, close-to-death training methods that had been necessary to train covert-killing troops when combat was principally physical and at very close quarters. Just as Jack arrived, the SEALs were donning smart suits, adopting information-distance weapons and substituting robot incursors for men in as many operations as possible. When that was not possible, they were using non-American mercenaries, mostly would-be immigrants from Venezuela, for all physical combat, although neither the media nor the public were aware of the policy. Losing an American life in a conflict had become political suicide.
It had been Jack’s systems skills and his analytical abilities that had prompted Instructor Deakin to lift him out of the corps for tactical intelligence training and, for the rest of his four-year career with the regiment, he had directed many of its active-service operations from a communications command post many miles away from the action zone. Then he had transferred to a US government intelligence agency.
‘We’re not looking for a tough guy, we’re looking for a clever guy who can run a large team,’ the persistent Tye Corporation recruiter had explained. He said that Thomas Tye operated an unwritten rule that nobody with an IQ of less than 135 would ever join his senior management executive.
Jack had been seduced by the idea that anyone was prepared to send one of the new generation of supersonic corporate jets to collect him for a job interview. Two weeks later he found himself on the small island in the West Indies that had become the Tye Corporation’s world headquarters.
Thomas Tye had conducted the first interview personally. He probed Jack’s intellect and played mind games with him. At first he asked him about everything but security: how he felt about the ecology of the planet, his attitude to money, women, genetics, music, politics – even his knowledge of communications systems and software. Jack did his best to keep up, wondering at the trillionaire’s polymathy and high-speed acuity. He found himself caught up in Tye’s infectious enthusiasm.
When Tye had, at last, asked about Jack’s views on the job, he hadn’t seemed surprised by the reply.
‘If you want a physical bodyguard, I’m not your man,’ the former intelligence officer had told the tycoon. ‘It’s been many years since I carried a gun and I don’t intend to do so again. Not having a weapon provides a different perspective on a situation before, during and after any given event. I would leave your personal physical security and any weapons-handling to others in my team. I would consider that it would be my job to plan situations in such a way that they’d never need to use them.’
Tye had seemed to like what he had heard.
On his second interview, conducted via a four-person ‘wraparound’ videoconference, Jack had agreed to a six-month contract assignment after which both sides would review the situation. The salary offered was tax-free and was several times what he had been making in his final year in US government service. He was also told that if he decided to join permanently, stock options could make him seriously rich in a short space of time.
Three years later Jack had discovered they had been right about the stock options. Despite some analysts’ concerns over how such a large company could sustain its phenomenal growth, the Tye Corporation’s results had beaten even the most optimistic expectations and in the last two years the stock value had soared to stratospheric heights. His options had become extremely valuable and he had exercised many of them, investing the proceeds in a broad-based portfolio of equities, property and bonds.
But he hadn’t realized how little he would like big business. He had discovered it was a world completely without honour or truth – or, at least, that was how Thomas Tye’s empire operated. It made government intelligence activities seem almost ethical and they, at least, pursued ends that could sometimes justify the means employed.
But Jack knew he had done a good job. He had now replaced the man who had recruited him and had restructured the PPT of thirty to bring in additional foreign-language skills, better systems skills and a greater number of women. A modern Praetorian Guard, for that was finally the PPT’s function, was unlikely ever to face violence if they pre-empted, protected and performed properly and, as he knew from personal experience, female insight was invaluable in preparing for the unpredictable.
Despite his frequently repeated exhortation that any need for physical engagement would always be seen as a sign of failure, Jack had constructed a four-mile training course on the Hope Island University campus. Through frequent use of this, combined with regular visits to the gym and the island’s many pools, he ensured that he and his team stayed in peak physical condition.
He checked that the service lifts were indeed locked off and walked on around the corridor.
‘Roof access secure?’
Pierre’s man at the foot of the stairs nodded. ‘We’re not allowed to lock it, for safety reasons – it’s a fire escape. But there’s no one on the roof and a chopper can’t get into this part of London air space – the Palace.’ He gestured along one of the radial corridors, towards the panoramic view.
Jack nodded. He walked down the corridor towards the dead end of the picture window and leaned gently against it, taking in the view of Westminster, the Houses of Parliament and across the Thames to south London.
He felt the press of the package in his inside pocket and her face swam back into his mind. He removed the package, lifted the flap and took out a sheaf of papers. He scanned the first sheet. He had half expected it to be legalistic and it was. But the second wasn’t, nor the third, nor any of the pages that followed. He turned the sheets slowly, reading carefully, totally absorbed.
Then Stella spoke in his ear. ‘Party preparing to leave.’
He stuffed the papers back into the envelope, returned it to his pocket and walked back around the corridors. He arrived just as the double doors opened.
Tye walked the Prime Minister towards the elevator chatting about a recent soccer game. His cultural-variance advisers had briefed him on the politician’s obsession and Tye had watched a few edited highlights in preparation for the meeting.
With handshakes briefer an
d more businesslike than those produced earlier for the cameras, the British politicians departed. As the doors closed on them and their security staff, Tye walked towards his temporary administration centre, followed by his small coterie of senior executives.
He went into the bathroom just inside the entrance to the suite and dipped his hands in the basin of hot, antiseptic water that was waiting for him. He emerged, drying his hands on paper towels. He turned and threw them into a trash can in the bathroom.
‘Connie, we’re taking over Britain’s National Health Service,’ said the world’s most eligible bachelor as he took two plastic bags from her and broke the seals.
He extracted a face mask from the first pack, hooked it over both ears and pulled it up over his nose. Then he pulled a pair of latex gloves from the second pack.
The radiance of his smile spread from under his mask. He looked like a dental surgeon who had made a particularly rewarding extraction of wisdom teeth.
‘Get our press people to talk to the Department of Health,’ he said. ‘Nothing goes public until the PM announces it in Parliament. But I want us to be prepared!’
*
Haley Voss slobbed out most Sundays. She rose late, didn’t shower and wore her old glasses to give her eyes a rest from contact lenses. She spread the quality newspapers all over the floor, sat amongst them with legs outstretched and read, a pair of scissors in her hand poised ready to clip any stories about Thomas Tye, the Tye Corporation or any associated topic. But that was the most work she allowed herself for the day. She didn’t wake up her computers and she didn’t log on to the networks. It was a rule she had made after Kevin had finally given up grumbling about her work obsessions and had left with his bag of dirty underwear and his only (unread) book, How To Quit On-Line Gambling Today! At least Barry, her new man, understood that she wanted her thinking time. She had quickly come to enjoy the frequent Sundays she spent alone in the privacy of her inner-London apartment.
