by Jon Land
The man named Pierce led Landsdale past a bevy of strategically posted armed guards and into the fortresslike compound. Pierce was a stout, slightly portly man with thinning hair in stark contrast to the tall, lanky, and athletically obsessed Landsdale, whose weight and waist hadn’t changed since high school. A pair of guards armed with assault rifles trailed them at a discreet distance as they climbed a pair of ornate staircases to the top floor where two more guards were posted.
“How much do you know about Mr. Roy, Mr. Landsdale?” Pierce asked him.
“I know I’m not selling him my company, no matter the price.”
“I was speaking of a personal nature.”
“Rumors or truth?”
“Take your pick.”
“I’m only familiar with the rumors. That he went mad, or died, or had himself cytogenetically frozen but his brain is still functional.”
“Rumors.”
“That he hasn’t spoken to the media in decades, that Roy Industries is one of the ten most profitable companies in the world thanks to its energy holdings, and Sebastian Roy himself is one of the five richest men.”
“Truth,” said Pierce.
“And that he’s made his fortune with no regard for the environment. That he’s destroyed millions of acres of forestland the world over, polluted huge portions of the oceans, ravaged the ecosystem, and weakened or eradicated the food chains of thousands of species and subspecies vital to the intrinsic survival of our planet.”
“Absurdities,” noted Pierce, unmoved by Landsdale’s litany of allegations. “What you really need to know is this. Several years ago, there was a fire in a Roy Industries plant reserved for fossil fuel enhancement in Stuttgart, Germany.”
“I think I participated in the protest held outside it,” Landsdale recalled, coming up just short of a grin.
If the lame attempt at humor affected Pierce, he didn’t show it. “The fire was the result of sabotage, terrorism. This is no laughing matter.”
“My apologies,” Landsdale stammered.
“Mr. Roy’s wife, daughter, and son were killed. Mr. Roy was badly burned after rushing back into the blaze to save them. Are you familiar with chronic venous insufficiency, or CVI?”
“A condition that impedes wound healing, I believe.”
“Infection caused it in Mr. Roy’s case. There is treatment, but no cure, treatment Mr. Roy has been forced to make allowances for.”
“I don’t think I understand what—”
“You will,” Pierce said, as they reached the third floor.
CHAPTER 23
Pyrenees Mountains, Spain
Landsdale felt cold as they moved down a hall on the compound’s top floor toward a door that looked more like a bank vault. He wasn’t sure if the sudden chill was the result of the lingering effects of the misty mountain air, his trepidation over his coming audience before Sebastian Roy, or something else entirely. It was the latter Landsdale opted for when they reached the vaultlike door, certain the temperature had dropped appreciably in air totally devoid of humidity.
“This is a hyperbaric chamber,” Pierce explained. “Mr. Roy’s condition requires that he venture beyond it only for the briefest intervals possible to forestall any further spread of infection from his wounds.” With that he reached up to the wall and plucked a surgical gown encased in a plastic sleeve. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Landsdale.”
Landsdale tore open the plastic and pulled the gown over his clothes, tightening the sash in the back before fitting gloves upon his hands and then a surgical mask over his mouth.
Pierce watched, satisfied, then punched in the proper code. Landsdale heard a loud click as the heavy door eased mechanically open. Pierce bid him to enter and Landsdale was struck instantly by the intensity of the chill, like that of a room with the air-conditioning turned up too high.
The chamber wasn’t really a chamber at all, so much as an elegant suite of rooms dominated by a large window overlooking the mountain range beyond, which stretched to the horizon. The room was decorated much like the library of an English manor house, rich in wood and leather, with faux flames burning in an ornamental fireplace, ornamental because Landsdale was certain the fire gave off no heat.
An alcove lay on the far side of the hearth, lit by recessed ceiling-mounted floods. Landsdale found himself drawn by the soft lighting and entered the alcove to find himself surrounded by a magnificent floor-to-ceiling collection of artifacts dominated by jars, urns, and vases that looked, even to his novice eyes, like the products of ancient Greece. Several commanded his eye, especially one brilliantly colored in red and adorned with lavish golden designs.
“Impressive, isn’t it?”
The voice took him aback and Landsdale swung to find Sebastian Roy standing at the entrance to the alcove suspended, it seemed, between darkness and light.
“That’s called the Euphronios krater. Such a krater, or vase or bowl as we’d call it, was used in ancient Greece for mixing wine and water. This one was fashioned by Euphronios himself, a legendary artist of the sixth century B.C. who signed the vessel as did the potter who fashioned it.” Roy stepped farther inside the alcove, denying Landsdale a clear look at him in the subtle half-light. “One side depicts Hermes directing Sleep and Death as they transport Sarpedon, a son of Zeus, to Lycia for burial; the other side shows young warriors arming for battle.”
Even in the dim lighting, Landsdale could see Roy smile tightly.
“Is the latter destined to be a metaphor for our meeting today?”
“I wouldn’t be here if I believed that, Mr. Roy.”
“Nor would I have summoned you here, if I wasn’t convinced an accommodation couldn’t be struck.”
“How gratifying,” Landsdale said, even more uncomfortable than he had been before.
Roy came up alongside him in front of the Euphronios krater, a smell of something sharp, antiseptic, and vaguely spoiled wafting through the air now. “You see before you, Mr. Landsdale, the greatest individual collection of Greek artifacts, specifically urns and jars, in the world. Many have been acquired through exhaustive efforts with archaeological brokers normally used to dealing with museums. Others, the bulk in fact, came to me in the wake of a suspicious fire at the Archaeological Museum at Agrigento, Italy, and a flood at a comparable facility outside of Athens.”
Sebastian Roy let that final comment hang in the air between them, his eyes tightening in intensity before relaxing again.
“Do you have a favorite, Mr. Landsdale?”
“All of them, really.”
“Pick one.”
Landsdale pointed to the next artifact to which his eyes were drawn, a deceptively simple jar stitched with strange symbols that seemed woven into the fired clay. Easily the largest by far in Roy’s exquisite collection, the jar stood almost four feet in height. As far as Landsdale could tell in the meager spill of light, the jar’s shape ended where its lid should have been.
“This,” he said.
“Interesting choice. A mystery, a puzzle, dating back to a thousand B.C. or even before. The symbols are believed to be a lost language of the early Minoans no one’s ever been able to translate. Did you notice it has no lid, no top to remove? Quite unprecedented, perhaps best explained by the simple fact that the man who forged it made a mistake. Save for that, I’d venture to say it’s one of my collection’s simplest pieces. Is that why you chose it, Mr. Landsdale?”
“I chose it because it caught my eye.”
“Then perhaps you’re attracted by simplicity in general, that which can be easily explained and isn’t too challenging. Look around you. Virtually all the other items in my collection, and others that fill museums and art galleries all over the world, are prized not for their historical importance but for the scene they depict. Ancient Greek craftsmen used urns to depict narratives of gods and goddesses, along with wars and other significant events. Turning an urn or jar to read its story is akin to unrolling a scroll and seeing the narrative unfold.
And yet this jar that has caught your eye tells no story at all, a blank slate. Like you perhaps.”
Landsdale looked away from Sebastian Roy, his gaze drawn back to the jar.
“Come, sir,” Roy said, leading the way from the alcove back into the spacious great room.
Once the brighter light struck Roy, Landsdale spotted the gauze wrapping peeking out from the arms of his perfectly tailored, truly exquisite suit. His motions looked labored, pained, Landsdale’s imagination left to concoct what awful unhealed wounds may have lain beneath the tropical wool. Roy’s face was remarkably untouched, his sallow skin tone glowing with a sheen of moisturizer he used to combat the chamber’s oxygen-rich dry air.
“For the reasons Mr. Pierce explained to you,” Roy resumed, “I must keep my time outside this chamber to a bare minimum. So, in large part to compensate, I’ve surrounded myself with treasures that remind me of the beauty in the world I can never see firsthand again. Strange, isn’t it, how much you learn to live without when you are given no choice?”
Landsdale caught that dark glint in Roy’s gaze again, chose to remain silent.
“You should feel honored,” Roy said to him, his tone the same and yet more conciliatory at the same time. “For obvious reasons I have very few guests. But we’ve never met and I felt this was the opportune time.”
“I appreciate the courtesy, but—”
“You say ‘but’ with no knowledge of what I intend to say.”
“My companies are not for sale, Mr. Roy,” Landsdale said, feeling his spine stiffen.
He was shivering slightly from both the temperature in the room and the fact that he’d come to realize that Sebastian Roy looked above all else like a perfectly preserved corpse. His skin was pale, his cheeks sunken. Beyond that, he appeared not to have aged a day since pictures taken of him from before the explosion and fire that had killed his family seven years before, his face the spitting image of the visage that had once graced the covers of Time, Fortune, and Money within a two-month span. To Landsdale’s knowledge, Roy had given only a single interview since then, to an antiquities and architectural magazine of all things, choosing a life apart from humanity in this mountain fortress he’d had constructed at incredible expense.
“Everything’s for sale,” Roy said, smiling so tightly the expression looked more like a sneer, before the smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “And everything has a price.”
CHAPTER 24
Pyrenees Mountains, Spain
“What do you know about my company, Mr. Landsdale?” Roy continued.
“I know all its various subsidiaries champion the very sources of energy I’ve been waging war on all my career. I know you have no problem destroying the environment to fuel, no pun intended, your profit motive.”
Roy clapped his hands dramatically.
“Nice speech. But I notice you left out the fact that the need for energy is growing at an exponential rate in direct contrast to the drain on available supply. You talk a good game, Mr. Landsdale, but I wonder if you’ll still talk that way when the lights won’t turn on and there’s nothing to heat your home with.”
“Oh, there will be such times,” Landsdale said. “On that much we agree. The source is where we differ and I don’t see much middle ground there.”
“Of course you don’t—I never expected you to. After all, you are the foremost party involved in green and renewable energy. You’ve been investing in it for decades, way ahead of the curve, starting literally with the first paycheck you ever received. So many of your contemporaries laughed at your obsession and excess.”
“But they’re not laughing now,” Landsdale reminded.
“Indeed,” Roy agreed. “When the world finally smartened up, you were positioned to reap the lion’s share of the rewards. Your companies run the gamut of solar, wind, and water power. One of your companies just won an exclusive contract to manufacture the batteries that power every electric or hybrid car manufactured inside the United States. And you control no less than two hundred patents on emerging technology you believe will form the next generation of alternatives to the fossil fuels that, let me see if I can quote you properly here, ‘had raped the environment and threatened to destroy the planet as Roy Industries seems inclined to do.’ How’s that?”
“Close enough.”
“You have my admiration and respect, and I don’t believe our aims or our methods are as disparate as you think.” Roy hesitated long enough to hold Landsdale’s gaze. “I’m prepared to prove that to you in a tangible way by offering you a hundred and fifty percent of the market value of your companies in an amicable merger that will leave you as president with a seat on the board.”
“I’m not interested.”
“Maybe you don’t fully understand the terms.”
“I understand them perfectly. I didn’t come here to sell or negotiate.”
“I have no interest in negotiations either,” Roy told him. “What’s the point if the original offer is as fair as mine is? Life is too short to mince words or play games. It’s like that Minoan jar that so caught your attention. It has survived more than three thousand years, but if I were to drop the jar, it would shatter into a hundred unrecognizable pieces.” Roy hesitated to better make his point. “Life is just as fragile, Mr. Landsdale. I believe we’ve both learned that the hard way. You’ve experienced your own share of hardship, haven’t you? That daughter recently diagnosed with Huntington’s disease, for example.”
Landsdale’s mouth dropped above his lowered surgical mask. “How could you know that?”
“You mean because you only found out recently yourself? You mean because the only way I could know was if I had access to your daughter’s private medical records which, of course, should be impossible? Anyway, I’m sorry too. So we have that much in common. I was hoping we could find more.”
“What makes you think there’s any chance of that?”
“Because in spite of our differences, Mr. Landsdale, we want the same thing: energy for all at the lowest price possible.”
“And in your mind at the expense of the environment.”
“I didn’t invite you here to rehash old arguments.”
“No? Did you think I’d have a sudden change of heart? Did you think your knowledge of my daughter’s illness would intimidate me somehow?”
“What if there was a cure?”
Landsdale found himself speechless again, wondering if there was a message behind Roy’s question. He had vast holdings in the medical and pharmaceutical industries as well, after all. Maybe, just maybe . . .
“There isn’t, of course,” Roy said, deflating Landsdale’s hopes as quickly as he had raised them. “But I imagine you would’ve signed over all your companies to me if I could have provided you one. How did it feel, that slight glimmer of hope?”
“Bastard,” Landsdale muttered under his breath.
“Am I?” Roy asked, stepping farther into the spray of the lamps, his face shining in the light. “For giving you something I have lost in entirety myself? There’s no hope for my family, Mr. Landsdale. Everyone I ever loved is gone. All I have left to live for is the world beyond these walls, a world I can never live within again. What I have left, Mr. Landsdale, are my dreams of a country and a world no longer dependent on oil alone to sustain itself.”
“That should make you my ally, Mr. Roy, not my rival.”
“Rival? You aren’t my rival. You’re an inconvenience, a joke filling the minds of the miseducated with distractions collected under the phrase ‘green energy.’ Green for money, since that’s what all your efforts are a waste of. You distract people from the truth of their plight and fill them with the illusion you hold the answers for providing them with a safe and secure future. And these efforts of yours, which have forced up the prices of real energy under the mistaken assumption that taxing it and eliminating my tax incentives in favor of your own would improve costs, have led to you progressing from minor inconvenience to major im
pediment to my far-reaching goals.”
Landsdale felt cold, dank sweat starting to soak through his shirt, sticking the fabric to his surgical gown. “You brought me four thousand miles to lecture me?”
“I’m aware that you and the truth are not well acquainted, Mr. Landsdale. Unlike me, you live with windows that open, but you’re not really seeing the truth of what lies beyond them.”
“My companies are not for sale,” Landsdale repeated.
“Do you recall what I just said about how much you learn to live without when you are given no choice?”
“What’s the difference?”
“The difference lies in the fact that your companies no longer hold very much value at all.”
As cold as Landsdale felt before, he now felt chilled to the bone, Sebastian Roy’s words more icily potent than any thermostat.
“While you were in transit, I purchased four of your five leading suppliers. A terrible investment financially, given the fact I’m about to issue stop orders from their leading buyer, but you forced my hand.”
The breath caught in Landsdale’s throat. He’d taken every possible precaution, thought he had insulated himself from anything Roy, even with all his power, could do. But he had never considered his archenemy would squander a billion dollars in an effort to destroy him.
“My offer is still on the table. We can still fight this battle together, though on my terms. Yes or no?”
“No,” Landsdale managed.
“Then I reduce my level on the order of half, to seventy-five percent of your companies’ market value. Refuse again and the offer drops to fifty percent.” He shook his head, looking almost amused. “People like you never surprise me; you’re all so predictable. I brought you here because I wanted to see the look on your face in person. Since I’ve lost so much myself, I take great pleasure in having others join me in that particular agony. I have more money than I’ll ever have cause to spend now. But before I die I will control all the energy on this planet. Every drop of oil, every ion of natural gas. The nuclear plants, the coal refineries—everything. You know my company’s motto.”
