by Hammond, Ray
Following two years of similar tactics in the rest of the world, the new sovereignty had received grudging, enthusiastic or coerced diplomatic recognition from all major countries and was even expected to seek a voice within the United Nations. The Tye Corporation, which also acted as Hope Island’s government, said it would not be seeking diplomatic status for its international staff nor for its four hundred regional offices around the world and that it deemed consular presence and exchange of diplomats unnecessary.
Despite eschewing a formal diplomatic role, the new state worked hard to present a neighbourly face in the West Indies, a task that was eased immensely by local investments and technology gifts to schools and hospitals on the neighbouring islands. The cost of such gestures for the Tye Corporation was more than offset by the new state’s generous tax regime and the income from its offshore virtual casinos, network auctions, purchasing-aggregation syndicates and tax-free global retailing. Most lucrative of all was the new Tye Global Bank for Personal and Commercial Finance that attracted three million new depositors in its first month of operation. The world knew and trusted the Tye brand and the opportunity to make discreet deposits in a safe tax-free zone proved irresistible. And it wasn’t just cash. Intellectual capital, the new core asset of the information economy, found a natural and secure home in the data haven offered by Hope Island. Without making any announcements, the island suddenly started to become the Switzerland of the virtual economy. These initial businesses were established from temporary accommodation during the corporation’s first few months of occupation and served customers in 146 countries and operated in over forty languages.
After a two-year construction effort had built the main campus, the Tye Corporation had moved its world headquarters to the island. Work had continued unabated and now the state boasted a semi-permanent population of 14,500 residents whose transportation needs were served by a sophisticated network of super-fast underground maglev shuttles. Above ground, a floating concrete spaceport capable of accommodating orbital launches, wide-body jets, supersonic corporate aircraft and presidential jet fleets extended the island by six miles and provided access to the outside world – and beyond.
An unexpected bonus for the corporation was the discovery that the fresh water that welled up from deep within the volcanic rocks was so plentiful and pure that they were able to sell a concession to a Florida-based company to collect, transport and bottle ‘Hope Island Natural Spring Water,’ a brand that was later to attract such cachet that it outpriced many table wines.
*
Jack Hendriksen had left Haley’s London apartment in time to catch an early evening train from London to Cambridge. On the way he drafted a letter of resignation on his reactivated VideoMate. He didn’t know whether he really intended to submit it. He just knew that he had an increasing sense of unease about the way Tye conducted his affairs. Perhaps all big business was like this, but on two recent occasions he had been present when Tye, or one his lawyers, had not hesitated to destroy the businesses – perhaps lives – of individuals who stood in their way. He had seen companies and families wrecked as Tye had masterminded hostile takeovers or used his uncanny business intelligence network to pre-empt or disable even the smallest and weakest competitors. He was also alarmed by the momentum for territorial acquisition building up inside the corporation and by the aims of its founder and president. Some of the new projects were breathtaking in their audacity.
Like every other employee of the Tye Corporation, Jack had signed a binding non-disclosure agreement when he had joined the company. When he had been made a corporate vice-president he had also signed several additional heavyweight long-term confidentiality agreements – which included powerful media gags – and he understood better than any outsider how ferociously the Tye Corporation’s in-house army of attorneys pursued and protected the corporation’s many rights across the globe. But some things had to outweigh mere legal agreements.
At first he had thought about simply calling up some of his former colleagues inside the US intelligence community. But he had quickly thought better of it. He knew how friendly Thomas Tye was with President William Wilkinson and he understood that nobody still in the Service would want to champion any cause likely to be unpopular in the White House. He came to the realization that if he wanted to do anything about his worries he would need to speak to an independent attorney, and do so quickly, not least to protect his own position and his future stock options. Only then could he decide whether his concerns were really justified and, if he could protect himself from any legal pursuit by the Tye Corporation lawyers, decide how best to approach his Washington contacts. It would have to be an attorney who understood international law and who wouldn’t be frightened by the bizarre nature of the disclosures he would make. It would also have to be a professional who wouldn’t be cowed by the immense financial muscle the Tye Corporation could apply to a lawsuit. He had smiled to himself as he realized the irony. It had been thanks to the Tye Corporation’s share performance and the tax-free status of Hope Island that he could even contemplate seeking such expensive counsel.
He had arrived back in Cambridge just before seven p.m., in time to check arrangements for the group’s departure. As Tye’s return visit to the UK had gone unnoticed by the media, Pierre Pasquier’s watchful team estimated that the risk of assassination, kidnapping, assault, journalistic intrusion or trouble from the Touchers had dropped to Status One, the lowest level. Jack was, therefore, able to allow his mind to wander in a way not normally possible when he was on the road with Tye.
Tye Flight One with its eighteen passengers had taken off to the east from the remote Cambridgeshire airfield just after ten p.m. GMT and had turned right to execute its sonic boom over the English Channel. The moment it was in the air Jack had been able to switch off fully and, once again, go back over the information Haley Voss had provided and see how it connected with what he already knew. In particular, he wanted to weigh up the likely authenticity of the report he had been shown. Even though he could find an excuse to approach the report’s main author for verification, he knew that even raising the question would trigger an alarm.
He also wanted to consider the things he had not told Haley and analyse whether they should be made public or whether there was another way, as he now realized he saw it, of blowing the whistle on Tye’s plans. This wasn’t an attractive phrase, but it described an unattractive activity and it suited his mood perfectly. No one man, or no one company, should gain the sort of power Tye was now contemplating. Jack scowled as he pondered the options. This evening he wouldn’t exercise his privilege of joining the crew on the flight deck. His pilot’s log was already crammed with hundreds of recent hours in the air and he could do without the flight-deck banter.
The pressurized cabin air was laced with an odourless antiseptic and in the forward Presidential Lounge the world’s greatest-ever tycoon was feeling comfortable once again in the mask and gloves he liked to wear whenever possible. Jack could hear him conducting a flurry of video meetings – laughing, shouting, snarling, abusing and, occasionally, praising – before a brief silence reigned as the meal was served.
Jack relaxed sufficiently to savour a dish the chef called a piperada – a Basque omelette with tomatoes, peppers and tofuham with fries and salad served on the side. Only genetically modified and organically grown vegetarian produce and beverages from Hope Island Farms were served on the Tye flight of aircraft and the jet had made a transatlantic round trip earlier in the day to pick up fresh supplies.
It had become part of accepted Tye culture that no matter where he was in the world, Tom would eat only fresh, medicinally active produce from his island: vegetables, beans and pulses grown in natural conditions to provide meat-level nutrition but with cholesterols, fats, sugars and other undesirable calorie carriers modified to block biological absorption. Active pharmaceutical and agriceutical ingredients were added to the protein to aid the human body’s struggle against heart disease, can
cers and other potential ills. It was rumoured that some years earlier Tye had upturned a plate of South African soya-bean bobotie over the head of an in-flight chef who had been foolhardy enough to serve alternatively sourced ingredients, confident that his demanding boss would be unable to tell the difference within the hot curry spices.
When the meal was over Jack checked in with Pierre, who had returned to Hope Island on the provisioning run. His Director of Presidential Protection confirmed that everything was ready for Tye’s return and for the official state visit by the Russian leader the next day. After signing off, Jack yielded to habit and clicked through the dozen most important cameras on the island. In the dim lighting of the jet cabin, the sunlit images projected in front of his eyes seemed bright and slightly surreal. He flicked over to Locate Mode and Tye Network’s private Global Positioning Satellite network gave him a map of the island and the position of every one of his team members on duty. Everything was in order, as he had suspected. From the standpoint of security and privacy, the acquisition of the island base had been masterful. It was virtually unapproachable by air or sea without detection and, once the corporation’s president was on the island, Jack felt reasonably secure from outside incursion. Any problems would come from inside.
He smiled to himself as he realized he had automatically re-entered work mode. With no public exposure of Tye’s entourage ahead, at least for this evening, Jack felt sufficiently mellow to order another half-bottle of red wine (with unrestrained alcohol) and put his seat into full recline. He had chosen to sit alone in the mid-cabin this evening, rather than join Pierre’s team, ‘the flying doctor’ and the paramedics in the aft lounge where some serious poker would already be under way.
Despite his distance from the Presidential Lounge at the front of the aircraft he could hear his tireless master revving up again and reeling off a string of instructions and asides to Connie while he harangued his executives, business partners and contacts around the world.
Many things Haley Voss had written or said had completed or complemented scraps of information Jack had picked up on his travels with Tye. The boyish Croesus seemed to be moving into territory far beyond conventional corporate life or even political activity and Jack had frequently questioned his own sense of unease, arguing with himself that he was simply being old-fashioned. Perhaps his naval training and years of government service had made him too old and conventional at thirty-eight to accept the new lifestyles and the astonishing commercial opportunities that computers, satellites, networks, biotechnology and space exploitation promised. Perhaps the strangely conservative nature of the government’s intelligence community had left him unprepared to face the new and increasingly bizarre moral and ethical issues of the early twenty-first century.
In the end he had decided that wasn’t the reason he felt so uncomfortable with what he had learned. He recognized that his feelings stemmed from a simple conclusion: not only did Tye trample over people, he was a monumental hypocrite and some of the things he was doing were simply wrong; wrong in the most basic of human senses and, Jack felt rather than thought, wrong in the natural order of things and most definitely wrong for the future of the world’s population. Thomas Tye was out of control, in all meanings of the phrase, and Jack realized that he was one of the very few people who had the right contacts to be able to do something about it.
Jack had called his mother in upstate New York, waved at Skipper the red setter and sent him into a barking frenzy and, when he had listened to his mother’s news and sent his love, had allowed himself to doze briefly. After they had landed in Hope Island’s early-evening sunshine, he had spent a couple of hours with Pierre and the HQ team going over plans for the next day’s state visit before enjoying a nightcap and turning in for a proper sleep.
*
‘It’s not that they won’t sell. They won’t even talk to us. That’s our problem.’
Tye lashed out at the figure of the senior counsel for the Tye Corporation. His hand went clean through the head. At the other end of the Holo-Theater videoconference in Washington DC, Marsello Furtrado instinctively stepped back as Tye’s fist evaporated around him. HVCs had made the videoconference experience ‘just like being there’ – as Tye Business Systems’ marketing slogan promised – but none of the glossy ads that were showing around the world depicted participants striking each other.
‘No, that’s YOUR FUCKING PROBLEM,’ screamed Tye in the darkened conference pit of his home office on Hope Island. He was surrounded by four men standing in a circle around him. All were wearing suits that had been treated and optimized for holographic representation. All were three-dimensional images of Tye executives many thousands of miles away. All were used to Tye’s physical ‘approach’ to meetings and all knew he enjoyed it every bit as much when they were actually present.
Tye stepped towards Furtrado and electronically levelled his boyish face with his counsellor’s.
‘Do I have to personally call every student who’s had a good idea? You’re our senior counsel. You still need ME to help you acquire a six-person outfit?’
Furtrado nodded again and then altered the movement to a shake. He knew how important it was. For a month interceptions made by the Competitive Threat Analysis department proved that the little start-up in Sâo Paulo had microwave multiplexing software that could instantly double the capacity of the Tye Corporation’s ageing fibre networks. Or anybody else’s.
‘I’ve offered them IP protection, non-disclosures, goodwill escrow deposits, the whole nine yards,’ insisted the counsellor. ‘The little shit just laughs and goes off air. I’m not even sure he’s legally competent. He may still be a minor.’
Tye sighed. Furtrado had been with the Tye Corporation for almost three years and he was still thinking the same way he had when he had been a senior partner in a global law firm. Today’s business demanded direct methods.
‘Go down there with a bag of money, Marsello,’ he snapped. ‘Go find one of the senior technologists who isn’t a major equity partner. Wave the money under his nose, go schmoozing. Hire him, promise him a long-term contract, debrief him and dump him. You know how to do it. We need a defection for cover.’
‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea. The boy wonder’s father is in the government.’
Tye held up his hand. ‘That’s it, gentlemen.’ He snapped the system off and remained standing alone in the glaze of the lights that had lit him for the holographic scanners. His first morning back here after the European trip had been frantic.
He was wondering if there was any way of creating a dummy audit trail of in-house developments that might show that Tye NetWare had been working on a similar approach to multiplexing when Connie entered to remind him that the time for the President’s visit was approaching.
*
Haley sat with her literary agent, cappuccino stains drying in the empty cups on their pavement table. Since traffic had been banned during daylight hours, the streets of London’s Soho had become fashionable promenades filled with tables, sun umbrellas and people: atmospheric warming had its benefits, many Londoners agreed. This morning, the elegantly suited agent had suggested going out for a coffee to sit in the sun amongst the tourists. Haley knew that the real reason for an outdoor meeting was that she wanted to smoke.
‘To describe them as nervous would be an understatement,’ sighed Rosemary Long. She and her client had been discussing how Haley’s various publishers around the world had been reacting to the Tye Corporation’s flurry of injunctions. Rosemary wasn’t telling her author just how colourful some of her exchanges with the editors had been.
‘I’m afraid Nautilus definitely wants out. They say you can keep the part of the advance already paid. That’s unconditional, and all rights revert to you.’
‘But the USA’s my biggest market,’ objected Haley. ‘Can’t we persuade them to change their mind?’
Rosemary sighed again, hoping her client would grasp the implications of the developments without
her having to spell it out.
‘It won’t be easy,’ she warned. ‘Also, I think their Chairman knows Thomas Tye. Rumours are that he maintains a liver on Hope Island.’
‘So it’s the old pals’ act,’ groaned Haley. ‘How about some other US publisher?’
Rosemary shook her head.
‘The trade knows Nautilus bought the book. It was all over Publishers Weekly. They’ll figure that there must be a good reason for Nautilus not going ahead.’
‘But we can get the injunction lifted. It says I intend to publish libellous, defamatory untruths. I can prove what I’m saying.’
‘We can only get the injunction lifted if Nautilus or some other publisher wishes to fund the appeal,’ explained Rosemary patiently. ‘That’s the problem. You know how much litigation costs in America. Even if a publisher did win the first round, the Tye Corporation would only start again in a higher court. It would be never-ending.’
‘So they’re simply caving in to the big money,’ cried the biographer.
Rosemary sighed for a third time. Her authors, while necessarily brilliant in their own fields, rarely understood the pure commercialism of publishing. There were always other books to fill gaps in publishing schedules.
‘Let’s have another coffee,’ she said, catching the waiter’s eye and indicating their empty cups.
She had good reason to be patient with her youthful-looking client. Haley was a best-selling author, although that description didn’t imply the vast riches that other people often assumed. A revised edition of her first biography, a detailed and insightful portrait of the film star Josh Chandler, was still selling strongly nine years after the original had been published, although Haley was honest enough to admit that her special access to the actor owed more to luck than professional perseverance.
Her ‘friendship’ with Josh had started shortly after her room-mate at Cambridge University had met the teenage star at a Hollywood party. Haley had already guessed that Abbeline’s family was rather better connected in LA than she let on but when, a few weeks later, her fellow second-year student had felt compelled to make a late-night confession that she was dating one of the world’s most desirable bachelors, Haley had also discovered the full details of her friend’s family’s involvement in the film business. Abbe’s father had produced the film in which Josh had first found international stardom.
