He’d told her to come on down, figuratively speaking, and two days later, she was swishing through the door in her Barbie doll outfit with stiletto heels and a full set of accessories, all sugar and spice, you know, even commenting that she was impressed by his office space. Said she wished she had something as nice and roomy down at 50 Rock or wherever, which should have clued him in about what was coming next.
Then the videotape starts to roll, and what do you know, what do you know, Barbie doll changes into the She Creature before his eyes, goes into a jam about how when he bought the building “for a song,” he’d hired contractors to “totally gut and renovate the lower stories that would house your offices, putting off repairs and improvements to the thirty or so crumbling rental apartments on the third, fourth, and fifth floors—in large occupied by working poor black families—for some unspecified future date.”
All the while she’s saying this, she’s smiling at him like a shark.
“Do you see,” she asks, moving in for the kill, “how it is that charges of opportunism and hypocrisy have been leveled against you from various quarters?”
For a minute Grover was tempted to ask what she expected to find here, somebody in a Huggy Bear pimp suit sitting around some kind of piss-and-shit stinking junkie shooting gallery, and you want to please explain who you’re referring to with that phrase “various quarters” ? But even though she’d got an irritation going in him, Grover reminded himself that this was what you called a media opportunity, a chance to mainstream himself, and took a deep breath. The plan here was to give her Reverend Nate Grover Lite, formulated for popular consumption so the Great White American Unwashed didn’t develop a mass case of acid reflux.
“Try doing too much at once, no way anything gets accomplished,” he replied. “The improvements to the rest of the building have been temporarily delayed, I underscore the word temporarily, because as a civic leader representing the black community, I’ve been forced time and time again to react to various acts of unprovoked brutality by the authoritarian powers that be, whose agenda is the continued oppression of my people.”
Grover figured he’d done okay, given her an earful while staying cool for the camera, but She Creature was determined to stay on the attack.
“Speaking of agendas,” she said, “I’d like to give you the chance to explain some of your own recent statements, which polls indicate the vast majority of white people and African-Americans find incendiary and frankly disturbing. You have in numerous speeches accused the federal government of flooding urban neighborhoods with narcotics and automatic firearms, specifically targeting high-school-age children in—this is a direct quote—‘a covert program to instigate their mass suicide-murder through the evils of violence and addiction.’ You also called for African-Americans to refrain from all transactions with white-owned businesses, withdraw from the democratic election process until a political party open only to black candidates and voters is established, and, I’m quoting you again now, ‘assume the license to make war upon our enemies and achieve a noncapitalist economic system,’ referring to the police as ‘a demonic army of persecution that must be brought to its knees by any means necessary,’ which seems to espouse the very violence that you acknowledge is devastating inner-city black youth. What’s still more controversial, you’re said to have begun echoing the separatist policies of the Black Panther movement in its earliest days, explicitly advocating ...”
The partition of several states into an independent black territory, possibly in the South, that was absolutely what he’d been talking about at his campus engagements, though he’d known it to be about as achievable as an exodus of the people to Shangri-la on a giant magic carpet. But every so often, when he was in front of a crowd, something would kind of pop out of his mouth that caught their attention, just shook the room, you know, and when that happened, he’d take off improvising, get them more fired up, reasoning that part of his job as an orator and motivator was to keep his listeners from falling asleep in their seats, and moreover that it didn’t actually matter if some his declared goals were way, way in the outfield, as long as he stuck to his general message. In his mind, he was like a kid making a wish list, asking for twenty, fifty, a hundred different presents for Christmas, figuring he’d be lucky to see even one or two of them... but also figuring it couldn’t hurt to ask, because you never knew what might turn up under the tree, all gift-wrapped and shiny. That was the thing in life, you really never did know.
Still, as Grover had sat in his office with the television cameras from the big-time, number-one-rated network news magazine rolling away, conscious that his interview would be seen in millions of homes across the country, it had occurred to him that maybe he ought to ease off some of his positions, soften his earlier comments, take another deep breath and remember that he was supposed to be Reverend Nate Grover Lite.
And then, just as he was about to respond, he’d seen this out-for-blood look in She Creature’s eyes, seen that she was ready to get in his face again no matter what he said, and all at once he flashed red hot with anger. And he’d thought, What the fuck, give her what she wants.
“I have come to believe that coexistence between blacks and whites within a single society is impossible,” he’d abruptly found himself answering. “I have come to believe that until the day all my brothers of color remove themselves from this wicked nation and form a North American state governed by and for themselves, they will continue to wear the chains of enslavement that brought them to its cursed shores. I have come to believe anything short of complete separation of the races is futile and will bring on their mutual destruction. And as to the comments you’ve mentioned, I emphatically and unapologetically stand by them.”
Grover’s single modification, which had jumped right off the top of his head, was that he would be willing to consider the state of New Jersey and sections of Pennsylvania and Ohio as components of an exclusivist black territory, should the southern states prove somehow unobtainable.
It went without saying that Grover’s interview had made a huge splash in the ratings. It also went without saying that he’d for sure kissed his ticket to mainstream U.S.A. good-bye, along with any frequent flyer offers that might have come along down the line if he’d held his temper. But he had refused to worry about what might’ve been if he’d done this or if he’d said that, because he’d done what he’d done, said what he’d said, and none of it could be taken back.
And besides, look what it had led to.
Just look.
The day after the program aired—the very next morning, in fact—was when the E-mail arrived. Who it came from was a surprise; Grover hadn’t done business with him for ages, since he’d agreed to wash some dirty money through the movement’s tax-free charitable accounts in exchange for a percentage, which had gone toward subsidizing his first Liberty Uprising March. And before that, it had been the ecstasy distribution deal in Los Angeles... but the e thing was years ago, a lifetime ago far as Grover was concerned, when he was just a few shaky steps out of Rampart and needed the green to make sure he didn’t fall flat on his face. These days, he practiced what he preached, damn well did, and would never again under any circumstances help put poison into the bodies of black youth.
No way he was going to do that again.
Out of curiosity, though, he’d opened the E-mail before any of the others on his queue.
That was when Reverend Nate Grover learned about the Sleeper bug.
If the message had been from anyone besides the man who’d sent it, Grover would have dismissed it right off as a weird prank. But he’d known that man didn’t play games. That his bulletin about the super germ he’d developed, customer satisfaction guaranteed, was something that could be taken dead seriously, wild as it seemed.
Grover had awaited the actual offering ever since. Hoped it would appear each time he switched on his computer. And today, now, at last, it had:
AWAKEN THE SLEEPER
FEE: 50
MILLION
INSTRUCTIONS TO FOLLOW WITHIN ONE WEEK
Suddenly, items one through one hundred on Grover’s wish list could be his for the asking.
Wild as it seemed, for the asking.
The North, the South, the Midwest... to hell with grabbing slices of the American pie when he could have the whole thing laid before him in shiny gift wrapping, like the best and biggest present under the tree on Christmas morning.
At fifty million dollars, Murdock Williams considered it a bargain. A first grader could calculate the profit-versus-loss margins easily enough; he wasn’t talking quantum physics here but simple checkbook arithmetic.
Williams’s lawyers had already offered that elderly couple on the Upper East Side, what, two, three million dollars to relinquish the lease to their rental apartment and vacate, guaranteeing them a two-bedroom elsewhere in the city. This was far more than the building’s other occupants had gotten—Williams believed the highest any of them had been paid was 1.5 mil—and they’d all jumped at the offer. You were talking about handing over a pot of gold, giving them the chance to strike it rich by ordinary standards, how many people wouldn’t?
Well, those two fossils Mr. and Mrs. Bognar, obviously. Husband something like eighty, wife only a few years younger, living in the same York Avenue apartment for half a century, you’d think they might appreciate a change of scenery before God lowered the boom. Instead, they were sticking like old wallpaper.
It wasn’t that Williams harbored any personal animosity toward them—would he have upped the buyout offer if he did? In fact, there was some sympathy in him. Some understanding. His own great-grandparents had been from Russia, fled the pogroms, arrived in America with next to nothing. He was sure he still had a photograph, or daguerreotype, whatever, of Fred and Erna Waskow, bearers of his pre-Ellis Island family name, hanging on a wall somewhere in one of his homes. The Bognars, they’d come over as refugees when the Russkies pushed into Budapest in ’56, so there was a definite feeling of kinship in Williams’s heart. But no real estate developer ever reached his level of success by shying away from the bottom line, sympathy and understanding aside.
The Mews was what they called those East Side apartment houses, erected around wide, gated courts and area-ways in the late 1800s. Williams could see how historic-minded types found them appealing, although history didn’t cut it for him personally. Occupying big hunks of river frontage, they had started out as sanatoriums where moneyed tuberculosis patients could come for the then fresh air, and thirty or forty years later were converted into dwellings for the city’s growing middle class—predominantly Hungarian and German immigrants displaced by one overseas conflict or another. In the 1980s, the addresses became fashionable, attracting droves of yuppies from hither and yon, but a sizable number of Europeans from yesteryear had clung to their rent-stabilized apartments throughout the neighborhood transition.
When Williams acquired the properties from their former owner, he’d paid top dollar, knowing full well that the purchase price would represent only a fraction of his eventual expenses. But his bean counters estimated his long-range profits to be in the hundreds of millions, possibly over a billion dollars, way off the board like that, the real value being in the airspace above the existing structures.
Just six stories tall, they were a colossal waste of prime living space as they stood. Because the row of four contiguous buildings included a corner lot, Manhattan zoning regulations allowed them to be torn down and replaced with a single high-rise skyscraper that would dominate almost an entire square block and soar at least ninety-five stories above the city, surpassing in height the residential tower that Williams’s famous rival was raising opposite the United Nations ... the very same competitor-slash-mogul who was always getting his picture on the front pages, and who had presold penthouse units in his building for upwards of ten million dollars apiece before so much as a single drop of concrete was mixed for its foundation.
At stake, therefore, was a staggering bundle and also the posterity Williams would finally achieve by owning the largest residential structure in New York City, ergo the country, ergo the world.
With the t’s crossed and the i’s dotted on his owner- ship papers, Williams had lost no time making lavish buyout offers to the residents of the buildings, about 75 percent of whom had happily taken the deal. A smaller group of tenants had waited for him to sweeten the pot, which he’d done by somewhat upping the dollar amount and in some cases tossing in the free relocation proviso.
It wasn’t long before the remaining holdouts cleared the premises—except for the Bognars, who refused to budge from the Mews to which they were sentimentally attached. The Bognars, who would not change their minds regardless of how much cash was shoved at them, be it over, under, or around the table. The Bognars, who, despite their advanced age, appeared to be in sufficiently good health to stay put in their apartment for years to come before finally giving up the ghost.
And years was longer than Williams intended to wait.
After having his last buyout offer snubbed, he’d instructed his attorneys to start eviction procedures against the Bognars, but even the Legal Aid interns they got to represent them had possessed the savvy to call his bluff. The rent-control laws were ironclad when it came to validating their current lease and giving them a renewal option once it lapsed. Moreover, as sitting tenants, they were by the same legislation entitled to renew indefinitely.
Blown out of the courtroom, catching heat from senior-citizen advocacy groups that had salivated over the chance to make the Bognars a cause célèbre, Williams in desperation got in touch with certain admittedly shady operators about providing what might be called extralegal recourse. He was thinking that these operators—who had their hands in the construction industry among many others around town, controlling the unions, drywall suppliers, plumbing and electrical companies, you name it, from behind the scenes—might be able to throw a scare into the couple, something of that nature. But when he’d made his request to one such acquaintance over dinner in Little Italy, Williams was told that the fuss made by the various senior-rights organizations on local media outlets had created an awkward hitch.
“Think about it,” his acquaintance had explained. “All the bad publicity you’ve gotten on this, a wasp stings one of those decrepit old farts, and he or she cries ouch, somebody’s going to claim the fucking thing was trained and sent on its mission by Murdock Williams.”
Williams had looked at him pointedly across the table.
“You people are supposed to be experts at persuasion, and I can’t see how this is a tall order,” he’d insisted. “Besides, I’m not the only one losing out while the old farts sit on a fortune. Or don’t you understand how much of this wealth your organization could be sharing?”
The other man had stared at him a moment, then slowly lowered his fork onto his plate.
“Isn’t me who’s misunderstanding,” he’d replied. “I said there were problems, not that we couldn’t get past them. You sit tight, I need to approach somebody I know of. He’s on another level from everyone else, so I’ll have to go through the Commission. If he thinks he can help, he’ll reach you.”
And reach Williams he did. The original notification had been E-mailed to him within a week, and it struck him as the craziest damned thing. A designer virus, that was what the sender had declared he could provide. There might have been a hundred other proposals Williams wouldn’t have questioned for an instant, recognizing that his acquaintance moved in a realm that was beyond his experience. But it had seemed absolutely far out. He’d had trouble giving credence to it.
Little by little, though, a belief in the claim’s legitimacy had begun to emerge in his mind. Something about the way his unidentified contact had been spoken about at the Little Italy meeting had impressed Williams. This cyberspace phantom commanded deference from a man who was almost nobody’s lesser.
Nor was it just that. Under the advisement of his broker, Williams had bou
ght heavily into the genomic futures market, but not before doing his homework. Projects that involved the mapping of human and non-human DNA were on the verge of leading to a scientific revolution on a scale with the coming of the industrial age, the harnessing of atomic energy, and the advent of the microchip in its ramifications for society. Genomic research promised rapid breakthroughs in the prevention and diagnosis of disease, drug treatments, the farming of lab-cloned body parts for transplantation ... there was no telling what advances to expect, no keeping pace with those that had already been made. Nearly every day some new application of biotechnology was announced, so why be skeptical that a customizable virus had been hatched? The longer Williams contemplated it, the more the idea that one hadn’t was what started to look far-fetched.
In fact, he’d thought, it would be selling short his own biotech investment folder to doubt the probability—and Murdock Williams never bet against himself.
He replied to the E-mail with a note requesting that he be advised when the product was ready for issue and then tried his best to focus on other business. Still, in his idle moments, Williams would visualize his building soaring above the riverfront, a lasting, commanding monument to his mastery of the developer’s art. And as far as it went for that old couple, how much time could they have left before they reached their expiration dates, anyway? Cancer, heart attack, stroke, everybody got hammered sooner or later. Williams honestly felt he’d just be hastening along the inevitable.
As his appreciation for the beauty of the solution increased, his craving to gratify his drive and ambition became unbearable. Had the “cyber-phantom” taken any longer to respond, the impatience would have eaten him up alive.
Bio-Strike (2000) Page 15
