by Hammond, Ray
‘Mr Hendriksen, welcome to the United Nations,’ began the Secretary General. ‘You probably bypassed our informal immigration procedures, but you realize you’re no longer on American soil?’
Jack nodded, although the thought hadn’t really occurred to him.
‘This is United Nations territory, so it belongs to all of our two hundred and twelve member nations, not to any one country. Neither the US government, nor any other, has any independent legal rights here. We possess similar territories inside many of our member states and globally we are considered a sovereign power, you understand?’
Jack nodded again. He had already noticed the big ‘Duty Free’ signs hanging over a large International Bazaar in the atrium upstairs, but he doubted whether this man ever concerned himself with discount retail opportunities.
‘Now, I presume that during your years with the US Navy and the Government you would have signed US National Secrecy Regulations?’ said Dibelius.
‘Yes sir.’
‘Well, as you know, that remains in force throughout your life but, unfortunately, it concerns only US confidentiality and the US constitution limits the government’s powers of enforcement.’
Jack nodded again, his mind racing as he tried to guess what all this was about.
‘The United Nations is not restrained in such a way and we have a document that is fully enforceable, it’s closer to the Official Secrets Act used by the British. It’s called the International Security, Diplomatic and Military Confidentiality Undertaking and it is drawn up under the international jurisdiction of The Court of the Hague. Would you be willing to sign it?’
Jack hesitated, unsure of his response.
‘We need your help,’ added Dibelius quietly. ‘The trouble is that we can’t even tell you in what way without your signing it. The information we have will compromise you.’
‘This is about Thomas Tye, isn’t it?’
For a moment he thought he saw acknowledgement in Dibelius’ eyes. But then the Secretary General turned to Amethier and held out his hand. The director of UNISA handed him a printed document.
‘Please read it, if you wish,’ said Dibelius, as he slid it across the table to Jack. ‘This may well conflict with undertakings you have given to the Tye Corporation. Technically, it even overrides your loyalty to your own country. From this point on, your oath of allegiance will be to the United Nations.’
‘You mean I give up being an American?’ asked Jack, surprised.
‘You can keep your US passport, Commander, but your first loyalty will be to the United Nations. You will also have a right to a UN Diplomatic Passport should you ever need it. A UN passport is a very special thing: it guarantees a holder entry, domicile and work rights in all member nations.’
Jack let out a low whistle, sat forward and picked up the document.
‘It’s a standard form, but it is globally binding and will supersede all other legal commitments you have made,’ continued the Secretary General. ‘Unauthorised use of UN information acquired after you have signed that form will be an offence under The Hague’s international military jurisdiction. The maximum sentence for an offence is life imprisonment. We call that part the Silence Resolution.’
Jack turned the form over in his hands. He read the first few lines, then skipped through the four pages, scanning the paragraph headings. He flipped it over so the back page was uppermost, took a pen from beside the deskpad and signed it. He passed it to Deakin.
‘He was my best man,’ smiled Jack. ‘He can act as my witness again.’
Deakin nodded then added his signature and the date.
‘It is about Thomas Tye, isn’t it?’ he asked again.
‘Welcome to global citizenship, Commander,’ said Dibelius. He smiled and turned to Amethier. ‘Jan?’
The UNISA director retrieved the document from Deakin, placed it in his briefcase and watched as the electronic catches shut on recognition of his thumb prints. He lifted the case from the table and placed it beside him on the floor.
‘Yes, it’s about Mr Tye,’ he confirmed in his careful, lilting English. ‘We know you are already concerned at some of his activities.’ He touched a button on a small black box of controls in front of him and waited as a flat screen rose from a housing at the far end of the table. He pressed another button.
Jack saw an image of himself sitting on a sofa, he couldn’t place where. Then Haley Voss came into the shot as she leant forward to pick up her mug from the coffee table and Jack heard himself start to speak.
‘I know one of the authors named on the cover. He’s a geneticist – on the island. I might be able to check whether he really did write this.’
Amethier hit a button and the replay stopped.
‘We don’t need to watch the rest of that conversation,’ he said. ‘We know Mr Tye intends to live forever.’
Jack turned back to his old friend with an eyebrow raised. ‘You’ve had me under surveillance?’
‘No, not you Jack,’ corrected Deakin. ‘Haley Voss – for about eight months. She was sending her sister a video feed of her meeting with you.’
‘But why? What has she got to do . . .?’
Amethier held up his hand. ‘We’ll explain why in a moment, Commander Hendriksen,’ forestalled the director, also choosing to address the visitor by his former rank. ‘The important thing is that you already seem to be concerned about Mr Tye’s behaviour. Frankly, so are we – very, very concerned. And not just by that report Miss Voss showed you.’
The Secretary General leaned into the table assuming control again. ‘How much do you actually know about the United Nations, Commander?’
It seemed as though they were determined to militarize this meeting.
‘Not a lot, I guess. Only what I read. It seems the UN has been doing a pretty useful job of ironing out the knots here and there.’ He gazed up at the world map smeared with its clusters of war zones.
‘We’re really quite different from our public image,’ explained Dibelius. ‘You’ll be familiar with our peace-keeping activities, our refugee efforts and so on. What you may not know is that the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization and the International Space Agency are all UN bodies – part of our executive, if you like. Since we expanded the Permanent Membership of the Security Council to include all major economic powers, since we adopted majority decision making and abandoned the veto, and since we finally managed to persuade the US to pay its full dues, the UN has become the closest thing the world has to a global government. That was, of course, the dream of visionaries like H. G. Wells who laid out the blueprint for a world state – and it was the original goal of our founders nearly seventy years ago.’
He smiled and held up his hand. ‘Oh, you won’t hear people talking like that, of course. National pride, especially within member states such as the United States, France and China, prevents them acknowledging that fully, at least in public. After all, the biggest nations spent over half a century working to ensure that we didn’t fulfil the aims of those who brought us into being – none of the superpowers could really hope to lead the world, but they weren’t prepared to let us do it either. Thankfully, those days are past. In the last ten years, we’ve had the power, the money and, most importantly, the mandate, to try and deal with issues that are supranational in character.’
The Secretary-General’s mellisonant tones held Jack and the others riveted. It was a party trick, Jack realized. A master politician’s magic. The power of charisma.
Dibelius gestured towards Chelouche. ‘Doctor Chelouche’s team at the World Bank is a good example, Commander. Since the dollar and the euro stabilized as the world’s reserve currencies, the bank has done a superb job in softening the gyrations of the smaller currencies and we’re finally getting IMF money – in fact, the world’s money – into places where it can really help the emerging nations.’
Jack nodded, although he wasn’t sure why the
y were telling him all this.
‘I don’t suppose Exec Deakin has told you much about the role of UNISA?’
Jack shook his head. ‘Not really, Mr Secretary.’
‘No? Well, that was before you signed the Silence Resolution. I’m going to hand back to Director Amethier in a moment and he can give you an outline of the agency’s function. But before I do so, I want you to know that, with the exception of the representatives of a few member states, the members of the World Trade Standing Sub-Committee and the International Security Standing Sub-Committee have been informed that this meeting with you was due to take place. They also know the substance of the information that will be imparted. What you are about to hear is of the utmost importance to the future of the world’s peoples.’ The Secretary-General’s eyebrows lifted, questioning whether Jack had fully understood.
Jesus! What could matter so much that UN members would be informed of this meeting? It had to concern the Phoebus Project, the development that had first made Jack consider approaching his old Washington contacts.
He nodded and realized his throat was dry. Abruptly, the Secretary-General stood up and Jack found himself rising along with the others at the table.
‘I hope to see you again, Commander Hendriksen,’ smiled the Secretary-General leaning forward and extending an arm across the table. Jack rose and shook the large hand again. Then Dibelius turned and left the room.
‘Right, let’s get on,’ said Amethier as they resumed their seats.
‘Could I get some water?’ asked Jack.
Chapter 1
When he was thirty-two, Thomas Tye personally invested four hundred and thirty million dollars in Erasmus Inc., a start-up corporation that had been spun out of the genomics department at the Johns Hopkins Research Center in Baltimore. The company had filed a patent application identifying a string of genes that, it claimed, were the principle cause of a condition known as progeria. This disease affects only one in 240,000 people, but its effects are horrific, with the most prominent visible symptom being premature ageing. A sufferer as young as twenty-five can appear to be in advanced old age and early death is inevitable. In adults, progeria is called Werner’s Syndrome and most adult sufferers contract the disease in their early twenties and die before the age of forty.
Erasmus’s discovery promised the first effective treatment for Werner’s Syndrome but, seventeen years later, no therapy based on this gene string has yet reached the market. Twelve years ago, Erasmus Inc. and its thirty-six genetic researchers relocated to the Tye Corporation’s science park on Hope Island and thus escaped the routine progress filings required of biotech companies under American FDA regulations. The company also closed its articles of incorporation in the state of Delaware and became a closed company within Hope Island State. For over a decade, therefore, the world has remained ignorant of progress towards a treatment for this horrendous condition.
But a treatment was developed a few months after the original patent filing, though it had nothing to do with Werner’s Syndrome, which is best described as an ‘orphan disease’ – where there is no incentive to develop treatments because there are not enough sufferers to generate profits. The genes that produce the startlingly premature ageing symptoms of progeria are also responsible for controlling most, but not all, of the human ageing process. Erasmus Inc. identified the remaining age-control genes, in particular those that govern the sclerosis of the central nervous system. So they learned how to switch off the ageing process, or delay it almost indefinitely.
After a series of trials, the first human ‘patient’ to undergo such long-term treatment, and the resultant therapy, was Thomas Richmond Tye III himself.
Chronologically, Tye will be fifty years old at his next birthday. Physically he is still thirty-four. Every three months the researchers at Erasmus take cell and tissue samples from his body and submit them to detailed analysis to detect signs of ageing. Their confidential internal report (see the full report at this book’s network resource) reveals that there has been almost no change in Tye’s basic cell structure for seventeen years. It explains how the normal release of the toxic oxidative by-products of metabolism (known as free radicals) that damage human DNA is halted. The report also reveals that twenty-two of Erasmus’s scientific staff have since joined Tye in the experiment.
The printed evidence had arrived in Haley’s letter box two months earlier. It had been posted in Amsterdam but did not carry a sender’s name. At first, Haley had had trouble even understanding what it was all about. But the appearance of Thomas Tye’s name in the opening paragraph had made her persevere and finally, with the help of medical, genetics and biotechnology dictionaries and glossaries on the networks, she had managed to decipher the gist.
Her first conclusion was that the document had to be a hoax. At that stage the story about her book and the large advance Nautilus had paid for the US rights had only recently appeared in the publishing press and Haley guessed that someone with a grudge against Tye or one of his companies was trying to feed her highly inflammatory material. Or perhaps it was the Tye Corporation’s own people trying to trip her up?
Then she found reasons to reconsider. She recalled that a cousin was sharing his Islington flat with a researcher who worked at one of the Wellcome-Parke laboratories in East Finchley, north London. A quick call to cousin Maurice had led to a conversation with his flatmate and a subsequent meeting in a brutally bright Bloomsbury bar that catered for students at nearby London University. While Haley waited for him to arrive, she thought about security and patched herself into Felicity’s system in Ladbroke Grove. She and her impending contact had agreed to swap locator codes for the evening so as to avoid rendezvous mishaps, and the twins watched as Haley’s VideoMate displayed his slow progress along Gower Street.
There! The lost-looking man in the entrance had to be him. Haley crossed the floor.
‘Doctor Evans?’
He was short and bearded, with a thick red facial growth compensating for a hair-line that had already receded to his crown.
‘Maurice tells me you’re a writer?’ He smiled as he took her hand. He had a very broad Welsh accent, as if he’d not long been in London.
Haley bought the drinks and thanked the geneticist for meeting her. They found a quiet corner and, after a few exchanges about the bar’s noisy young patrons, she handed over the document that had been posted to her.
Fifteen minutes later, her new acquaintance laid it down.
‘Where did you get this?’ he asked, his eyes accusatory.
Haley explained how it had arrived, then asked if he thought it might be a hoax.
‘If it is, it’s a bloody good one and they’re using the name of one of the world’s leading genetic engineers,’ Evans mused. ‘It claims it’s by Professor Eli Kramer. He’s really a biogerontologist, you know, studying the biological causes of ageing. There’s only half a dozen people who know as much in this field as he does.’
Haley begged him to keep quiet about the document, until her book was published. He bought her another drink and flipped through parts of the report again. Then he smiled and asked if he could buy her dinner ‘somewhere quieter’.
‘Go for it!’ Felicity had urged in her ear.
*
Jack sipped the mineral water Deakin had called for. The others at the table had followed his lead, and all now had glasses in front of them as the door closed behind the catering assistant.
Amethier put his water down. ‘Commander Hendriksen . . .’
‘Jack, please. I’m no longer attached to the Service.’
‘OK, Jack, UNISA is the sort of agency the National Security Agency always wanted to be but couldn’t quite manage to become. We’re not answerable to any type of congress or parliament, we answer to the Secretary-General and the Security Sub-Committee alone. We employ eleven thousand people, located in almost every nation across the globe. We work closely but quietly with the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, Interpol, FSB, Mossad and every
other intelligence service in the world. We’re information-led in approach, closer to the American National Security Agency than to any of the “dirty-tricks brigades”, as the Brits put it. We’re non-combatant, so we rarely get involved in physical action ourselves. When something of that nature needs to be done, covert UN or NATO forces usually do it for us.’
Jack nodded, surprised that during his years of service with the US government he had never heard of this agency. But then he realized that he had not heard of dedicated covert forces within the UN or NATO either. Perhaps the American intelligence agencies were not as omnipresent as they liked to think – or, at least, not in UN circles.
‘Ron Deakin’s been on the Tye case for three years now. In fact, it was he who suggested your name to Bob Grant, the man who hired you into the Tye Corporation in the first place.’
Jack shot a look at his friend.
‘It was the first thing I did when I took the case on,’ acknowledged Deakin with a smile. ‘I wasn’t sure what I was getting you into at the time, but you’ve done very well by it, haven’t you? Now you’re in a position to return the favour.’
‘So, what do you want from me?’ asked Jack, mystified.
Deakin picked up the thread from his boss. ‘The Tye Corporation has grown too big, too powerful, Jack. There comes a time in this world when however much presidents and prime ministers like to schmooze with trillionaires, they get worried about their power and influence. Eight years ago the former United States president put the CIA on to the case, to examine just how dangerous the Tye Corporation could become, and he didn’t like the report that resulted. It suggested Tye would end up calling all the shots. And, in the end, if somebody gets too big, things get political.’ He stressed the last word as though it was distasteful.
‘That’s not wholly fair, Ron.’ Amethier rebuked him lightly. ‘Some very legitimate causes for concern have now surfaced, as you’ll know better than anybody.’
He turned to Chelouche. ‘Would you mind, Doctor?’
