by Hammond, Ray
‘We’ve got trouble,’ shouted Jack down the long room as he raced straight for a control panel on one wall. Locating the master panic button that would activate the automated defences around the perimeter of the house and immediate grounds, he punched it swiftly, then unclipped his walkie-talkie.
As he tried to recontact Pierre or Stella he became aware that the rest of the group was now staring open-mouthed out of the windows towards the main lawn. Another familiar sound intruded, as Jack turned to see two large black helicopters hovering three feet above the lawn. He recognized these instantly as Chinese-made Lung-Wi 16s, and a column of black-uniformed airborne marines was already spilling from each. Half crouching, half running, they raced towards the dumbstruck guests standing motionless in the brilliantly lit interior.
Jack’s reactions switched to automatic. ‘Get down, get down on the floor,’ he yelled as he sprinted instinctively towards the frozen onlookers.
A burst of heavy-calibre automatic gunfire shattered the giant wall of glass and sent its huge panes crashing to the stone floor. As Jack tried to negotiate the jagged shards, he was aware of squat battle-suited figures swarming into the reception hall. One of these swung the muzzle of a Chinese-made K’ang-Hsi sub-machine gun in his direction and gestured for Jack to halt. As he stopped dead and looked around Jack reckoned there were about twenty marines in the room, all equipped with the latest automatic laser-sighted weapons.
One of the soldiers fired a short burst into Tommy’s synthesizer. Now there was total silence. In true combat fashion, the helicopters had not even touched down, hovering only long enough for their human cargo to disembark before returning to wherever they had come from.
The defenceless party guests edged backwards instinctively, raising their hands as a sea of gun barrels twitched in their direction. White-faced, Tommy clung to Calypso’s hand with both of his own.
As always, Jack was unarmed – although now he regretted that. He stood perfectly still, hands raised, palms facing forward at shoulder height. A marine stepped forward and motioned with a jerk of his gun barrel for Jack to move across the hall and join the others. As he did so he recognized a captain’s flashes and a small pennant on the man’s breast pocket, but he couldn’t make out the insignia.
‘All of you, face the wall,’ ordered the captain. It was a male voice, guttural and Spanish-accented. The captives did as they were told as four of the soldiers stepped forward and frisked them. Jack was standing near Calypso and he saw a soldier frisk her fast and hard, touching everywhere but not lingering. She didn’t react to this, but turned to push the man away when he bent to frisk Tommy. The soldier retreated a fraction, then gently patted down the boy’s jacket and let it go. As he searched Jack, he removed his VideoMate, viewpers and walkie-talkie radio.
Without waiting for permission, Jack turned round. This was the sort of situation he had been trained for and he knew that it was his own leadership skills that would now be needed to secure all of their safety. He also realized that panic might become the overriding emotion for everyone else. Jack was calculating the numbers and the fire-power for future consideration, but for now the odds were impossible. Short-term cooperation was the only option.
On a signal from their leader, the soldiers lifted their infovisors. Then, in turn, so only one of them was preoccupied at any one time, they each removed their helmets. The leader spoke quietly to two of them, who each summoned two other men and left the room to search the rest of the building. Jack wondered what was now happening elsewhere on the island. Almost all his own team had stood down for a rest following four days of almost continual duty, so only the lightest of defences were now guarding the spaceport and the control centre.
Suddenly Jack caught a proper look at the small flag on the captain’s breast pocket: the single star and cross of the Cuban rebel forces! They must be insane, he thought.
‘Sit down now, backs against the wall,’ demanded the captain.
Hesitantly, the captives did as they were ordered, all ranged underneath a giant Jackson Pollock painting that looked as if a firing squad had already used it as a backdrop.
The leader then took a piece of paper from his tunic pocket. ‘In the name of the Revolutionary Council of Democratic Cuban Nationals we are reassuming control of Hope Island,’ he read out loudly and carefully. ‘This island is part of Cuban sovereign territory, and was sold illegally by a corrupt dictatorship.’
As he was delivering this short speech, Jack studied one of the other camouflaged marines. He stood larger and taller than the rest, and something about him looked familiar. Then Jack remembered that bulk: the man had once been a US Navy SEAL.
Two of the marines re-entered the hall, herding Thomas Tye and Marsello Furtrado before them, their weapons aimed high at the captives’ backs. Tye and Furtrado both had their hands clasped on their heads. The soldiers gestured for them to sit against the wall with the others.
Calypso watched this performance stonily, then pushed herself up from the floor, grabbed Tommy’s hand and yanked him to his feet.
‘Usted no nos necesita, Capitan,’ she said. ‘Voy a llevar el chico a su cuarto.’
Jack understood enough Spanish to know she wanted to take Tommy to his room.
The captain started to raise his sub-machine gun threateningly, then thought better of that, slung it over his shoulder and stepped forward. He knocked Tommy’s hand out of Calypso’s, and pushed the boy to the floor. Gripping her face hard in his left hand, he pushed the flat of his right hand against her stomach and then downwards.
‘You can take me to his room instead,’ he hissed.
‘Go fuck yourself,’ swore Calypso and spat in his face.
Jack snatched the opportunity and leaped to his feet. His right fist crashed into the captain’s solar plexus just below his armoured vest. Completely winded, the Cuban doubled up. Then Jack had the man’s head trapped in the crook of his other arm, his right hand pushing the soldier’s head over to the left at an extreme angle.
Every muzzle was now pointing at Jack as he backed away, the Cuban’s agonized body suspended between him and their weapons.
‘Just let the women and the boy leave,’ Jack demanded through gritted teeth. He could feel the vertebrae starting to pop in the Cuban’s neck, and turned to catch the ex-SEAL’s eye again. He at least would know how easily Jack could kill his prisoner.
Then Jack felt the chill of a gun barrel behind his ear.
‘Let him go,’ ordered Connie Law loudly.
Unbelieving, Jack turned his head just enough to see Tye’s personal assistant holding her 9mm Browning in a professional two-handed FBI grip. Expertly, she slipped the hammer back with her left thumb. This action was unnecessary to fire the gun, but the adjustment would improve its response time by a few milliseconds. She pressed the barrel harder into the base of his skull.
‘Do it,’ she commanded. ‘Do it now.’
Jack released the Captain who fell to his knees and vomited copiously. Connie circled slowly around in front of Jack, until her weapon was aimed centrally at his chest. That two handed-grip and the careful small sidesteps were moves he knew well from his own training.
Connie backed towards the soldiers who all still kept their weapons trained on Jack. The captain struggled to his feet, purple in the face and still gasping, his sub-machine gun discarded in the pool of vomit.
‘Sit back down, Jack’ Connie ordered. ‘Do it now, Jack.’
Jack looked over at the rest of the small party ranged against the wall. He turned his back on Connie and the armed men and sauntered back to take his seat in the line.
‘Llevarse el chico,’ the captain hissed to one of his soldiers as he wiped his mouth.
A marine stepped forward and yanked Tommy upright. Before Jack could stop him, Thomas Tye was on his feet, pulling the boy’s hand out of the soldier’s grasp.
‘GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM MY SON, DO YOU HEAR?’ he screamed. He was white with fury as he swung Tommy round in front of him. He cro
ssed his arms protectively over his son’s chest, backing away from the captain and his subordinate.
The rebel captain drew his pistol from his waist-holster and, in the manner popularized by Ché Guevara, the hero of all anti-imperialist revolutionaries, he dealt with this small counter-insurrection by shooting Thomas Tye straight through the centre of his beautiful left eye.
The tycoon spun around and then – as if the personality known to the world as Thomas Tye had never emerged within it – his body slid slowly and bloodily down the white marble wall.
EPILOGUE
The New York Times,
Weekend News Digest
US Humiliated In ‘Bay of Pigs’ Re-Run.
Thomas Tye in Coma
Military Invasion of Hope Island was ‘organized and funded by covert American Agencies’
UN sources are claiming last Sunday’s invasion of Hope Island by a military brigade purporting to be members of Cuba’s democratic rebel forces was, in fact, carried out by a militia covertly organized and funded by American intelligence agencies. A UN spokesperson today named two of the CIA operatives it claims took part in the operation and added that the invasion was launched from a US Navy aircraft carrier. The White House and the Pentagon strongly deny any involvement.
Over 1,500 military personnel were involved in the surprise action to take possession of the island by force last Sunday evening, just as the Tye Corporation was passing into new ownership. The United Nations Security Council passed a majority resolution condemning the attack as ‘US-sponsored imperialism’ and the World Bank, now the largest shareholder in the Tye Corporation, demanded the return of all its assets on and including Hope Island.
A unit of the UN’s emergency-response peacekeeping force subsequently made an unopposed landing on Hope Island on Wednesday night and discovered that Thomas Tye himself had been the only serious casualty of the invasion. All invasion forces have since withdrawn.
Thomas Tye who, as reported earlier, was shot in the head during this incursion, remains in a state of coma in the Hope Island Clinic.
Families of LifeWatch Victims File $198 billion suit.
Page A3
ABA Airlines Claims Tye Energy Satellites Responsible for Denver Crash. Page A3
Lawrence-Antico Oil Co. Sues Tye Corporation for $16.5 billion oil-spill claim. Page A2
‘This is where the landlines came ashore.’ Jack pointed as he stopped by Calypso’s rock. Ron Deakin turned and nodded. It was a perfect February evening on Hope Island and, six months after the brief invasion by the ‘Cuban rebels’, he was finally getting his first tour round the corporate state that had occupied so much of his time during the previous three and a half years.
The older man stared into the setting sun, then back at Jack Hendriksen. ‘Sorry to be leaving?’
‘Not in the slightest,’ laughed Jack. At the end of the week his contract with the Tye Corporation would come to an end and he was due to join Haley in Naples. He was already organizing the final transfer of his belongings from this island to his new life in Florida.
He had been up to visit Calypso and Tommy at the big house earlier in the day.
‘He’s just the same,’ sighed Calypso when he had asked about Tom. ‘I feel that he knows we’re there, but we’ve no way of being sure.’
‘Is it right, to keep him going on the machines?’ Jack had asked.
The question had drawn a sharp look from Calypso. Jack had already noticed a new thinness, almost sharpness about her.
‘We can afford it,’ she had answered simply.
‘So your life’s back to normal?’ asked Jack as he and Deakin resumed their stroll.
‘If it’s considered normal to spend your life monitoring all the greedy bastards of this world,’ agreed Deakin. ‘Technically I could retire next year, but with the Chinese economy developing so fast . . .’
Jack knew how much worry the new corporate powerhouses in the East were causing for the UN. ‘But now you do have an advantage.’
Deakin raised his eyebrows. ‘The SecGen’s being very tough on that. We have to apply for new permission every time we want to use Larsson’s software to decipher anything. It’s no use against the US government, of course. We now know they rumbled what Tye was doing years ago, so they’ve already moved up to quantum networks.’
Jack decided to ask the question that had been on his mind for nearly a year. ‘So who really did kill JFK, Ron?’
Deakin grimaced.
‘Come on, who was it?’
The older man stopped, pulling another face, and turned to look back along the shoreline as if to be certain they were alone. He seemed to be engaged in an inner debate. Then he looked into the low sun again.
‘It was all before my time, of course, I was only an infant when it happened . . . But I’ve read the files, the unreleased stuff. Three guesses, Jack.’
‘Well, it was either the Mafia or our own people.’
‘Right on both counts,’ grunted Deakin. ‘The Mafia fired the actual shots that killed him – it was the Marcello mob, from New Orleans. Set Oswald up to be caught, in the best Sicilian tradition, then hid the real shooter behind a fence, on that grassy knoll. It was all intended to stop JFK’s brother Bobby, the Attorney-General, going after them.’
Jack nodded. That had always been the assumption in the intelligence community.
‘Only . . . the FBI were involved as well.’ Jack frowned.
‘They got wind of it, Jack. The Bureau had been tipped off. Someone in New Orleans thought the mob was planning to go too far. But a decision was taken to do nothing about it. The tip-off was suppressed – at the highest level.’
‘Hoover?’
Deakin nodded. ‘He discovered JFK was about to fire him, despite all the dirt he had on the Kennedy family. Hoover even had bugs planted in the White House.’
Jack shook his head as he digested the news of old treachery. After a while he shrugged, and they resumed their stroll.
‘Are they still denying that Connie Law was in the firm?’
‘Officially, yes,’ confirmed Deakin. ‘But we do know she transferred to the CIA soon after she finished FBI training at Quantico. She assumed her cover in the Tye Corporation eight years ago, way before we got interested in him. She must have proved very useful to them – not least because of that encryption stuff. You haven’t heard anything more?’
Jack shook his head. Connie hadn’t been seen since the dramatic evening of the invasion. ‘Haley’s sure it was Connie who sent her those anonymous reports.’
‘She wasn’t doing that herself Jack. Connie smuggled them out to her HQ in Langley and they sent them on. They wanted Haley’s biography to discredit Tye just as much as we did.’
Again they walked on in silence for a few moments.
‘So it’s the quiet life for you now, eh, Jack?’
‘It won’t be so quiet. Haley’s pregnant.’
End of Empire? The Rise and Fall of Thomas Tye
Haley Voss
Chapter One
Thomas Richmond Tye III, founder of the worldwide Tye Corporation business empire, underwent a surgical procedure for ‘sexual clarification’ when he was eighteen months old. He was the victim of a craze for gender reassignment that briefly, but tragically, swept the paediatric psychiatric clinics of the United States and several other countries in the nineteen-sixties and -seventies. He was the patient of the now notorious Dr Charles Eon.
Tye was born with an underdeveloped penis and cryptoorchidism – his testicles had failed to appear. This condition is caused by an inherited genetic mutation or lack of hormonal stimulation of the Hox gene during gestation; this gene governs limb-bud growth – specifically hands and feet – and penis development.
Thomas Tye’s original birth certificate classified his sex as male but this was later replaced by a revised entry as ‘Thomasina Rachel Tye, female’. This revised certificate was, in turn, replaced some years later by a third certificate, the only copy sti
ll available for public inspection, that restored his original name and his sexual status as a male.
The launch venues had been carefully selected: the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, and the Earth Gallery at London’s Natural History Museum. The times were arranged to suit transatlantic television coverage: three p.m. in Washington, simultaneously eight p.m. in London. The guest list was impressive enough for Jack to spot at least two separate layers of discreet security as he and Haley made their way through the waiting crowds to the VIP entrance. It resembled a film première and Josh Chandler would be just one of the celebrity guests here in London. Rarely had the launch of a book been so fêted.
‘Excited?’ asked Jack as they climbed the steps to the vast Earth Galley and its giant revolving model of the planet.
‘Shit-scared,’ Haley replied hoarsely. ‘I’ll never get through it.’
Jack grinned. He had heard her rehearse her lines a dozen times, but he understood her nervousness at her first-ever globally televised speech. He could sympathize: he himself would be terrified.
‘Just keep it brief,’ he advised. ‘Everything you really have to say is in the book. Just thank them for coming, then encourage them to read it. That’s all they need.’
End of Empire? The Rise and Fall of Thomas Tye was already the number one seller in every major territory, despite half a dozen spoilers rushed out by Sloan Press’s rivals. Advance orders had been larger than for any other book published so far this century.
The infant was first referred to Dr Eon’s Clinic of Psychosexual Medicine at the University Hospital of Philadelphia when he was eighteen months old. At this period, Dr Eon was famous for his theories and publications on gender confusion in children and he made many television appearances in which he repeatedly explained that a child’s sexual identity is created primarily by the way he or she is treated by parents and caregivers during the early years of childhood. He believed absolutely that adult sexual identity is the product of ‘nurture’ and, only minimally, the result of chromosomal and hormonal make-up.
