‘Same here,’ Sam said. ‘Coffee?’
‘No, not for me thanks,’ Sarah said, ‘I’ve got to get the jet lag out of my system with a good sleep. That champagne made me surprisingly woozy.’
Sarah checked her smartcom and then frowned.
‘It looks like I’m starting tomorrow after all,’ she said, squinting at the screen. ‘I wonder where Paddington is. I’ve got to be there at ten.’
‘Oh, I’ve heard of Paddington,’ Sam said. ‘We’re off to a winery tomorrow, so we can drop you off if you like.’
‘That’s a stroke of luck, thank you. Oops!’ Sarah said, standing with a wobble and a grin. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow then and, by the way, the lives you consider mundane and boring would actually be fascinating for some people. Come to think of it would you like me to weave us into a novel sometime? The way you ask questions and seem so coordinated you could easily be super spies. How does that sound?
Sam and Ben looked at each other and laughed.
‘Oh, no, she’s going to blow our cover, we’ll have to kill her,’ Sam said in mock horror.
Sarah gave them a wave and threaded her way unsteadily through the packed bar. Ben stood up to watch her carefully until she’d made it to the hotel foyer. The slightest inadvertent bump could trigger a flare of belligerence these days, resulting in an instant brawl.
‘Phew, that was interesting,’ Sam said as he sat down.
‘Yeah, sorry about that last leading question,’ Ben said. ‘I could see that she was fading fast and thought to give it a shot before we ran out of time.’
‘I agree,’ Sam said, ‘and she wasn’t suspicious at all. She was being professionally careful. And what a result, we know where she’s headed tomorrow and, hopefully, we can find out the exact address.’
‘How do you know this Paddington then?’ Ben asked, checking his smartcom.
Sam laughed.
‘I’ve no idea where it is, but I was damn sure we’d be going through it on the way to our fictitious winery.’
‘Brilliant,’ Ben said, looking up from his screen with a smile. ‘Although it’s not far from here and, if she’d known, she could have walked. And, hey, what’s with your friend, Mr Geoffrey?’ he added.
‘Buy me a drink and I’ll tell you,’ Sam said, pointing to her empty glass.
‘This stuff? On my salary as what—“a mid-pointer bureaucrat”,’ Ben said, signaling the waiter, ‘It’s back to the bar stock, I’m afraid.’
‘What! I thought I was cavorting with a super spy. Don’t worry about the expense, our darling Geoffrey’s taking care of everything including our dinner tonight and accommodation in one of the skyline suites.’
‘Ahaa! I knew it,’ Ben said. ‘It’s you that’s been cavorting with the staff.’
Sam held up her hand.
‘Whoa, hang on a sec, can you hear that, Ben?’
He nodded. As the bar had filled over the evening, the band’s sound had gradually increased in tempo and volume. They were laid back and knew their stuff, playing in the newly popular roofie-style.
Around Ben and Sam the conversational chatter started to die down as people began to listen to a drum solo that was grabbing the attention. The two of them stood to see better and immediately spotted the sax-playing front man. He was looking bemusedly at the other band members who, in turn, had lowered their instruments and were staring at the drummer. Ben had seen the drummer earlier, a bespectacled and peaceful looking dude who was playing with soul before, and now appeared demented.
The crowd were spellbound as the drummer, showering sweat in every direction and totally oblivious to the glasses askew on his nose, began to build layer upon layer of intricate beats. As Ben watched, uneasily, feeling the wild rhythm begin to stir his guts, he saw the fiendish grin the man was wearing suddenly melt into a silent scream of rage. The front man stepped towards the bouncing drums to shout, but still the man thrashed on, lifting the cadence to an impossible speed. Caught by the thundering frenzy, the crowd began to cheer. With eyes popping frighteningly from their red-rimmed sockets, the drummer looked up at the crowd. And stopped. He then stood, panting like an animal, and flung down his sticks. As he walked off the stage with a snarl the crowd clapped tentatively and then fell silent. They watched the lead man pick up the sticks and sit behind the drum kit. He leaned towards the microphone
‘I’ll have what he had barman,’ he said with a grin. ‘Let’s hear it for our man, Wozzy.’
As the crowd roared their approval, the front man began to tap out a sedate rhythm, the rest of the band sliding into the new tune right alongside him.
‘One angry young man,’ Sam said as they sat down.
‘Yes, and most of the people in here thought it was all part of a cool act,’ Ben agreed. ‘I can guess what his bed-time reading has been.’
‘And talking of bed-time,’ Sam said, watching Ben’s eyes light up, ‘You know, Geoffrey’s quite macho under that girly act. He was thrilled to be involved in our little diversionary tactics but thought we were pussyfooting around. He decided to hurry things along a bit.
‘Pussyfooting!’ exclaimed Ben. ‘It could have blown up in our faces. What if we’d needed to stay incognito?’
‘He never got that far with his thinking, Ben. He just saw an opportunity to befriend someone he liked and then instinctively realized that the best way of extracting the information we needed was to introduce us and supply heaps of rather good alcohol to loosen things up. He did beat a diplomatic early retreat too, bless him.’
Ben reluctantly agreed. Geoffrey had orchestrated his own mission with faultless ease and it had turned out to be a gilt-edged bonus for them. He passed his smartcom to Sam who looked at it and nodded. The screen was displaying a schematic of the hotel, a pulsing green light indicated the location of Sarah’s purse and, hopefully, Sarah herself up in the presidential suite.
‘Remember when we could track people’s cell phones and smartphones?’ Sam mused. ‘These smartcoms are too good with signal security these days.’
‘That’ll soon change,’ Ben said. ‘We can track and hack most of them already. We just need the carrier’s permission which we haven’t got here. Anyway, the team reports that she tottered into her room ten minutes ago and is now snoring softly, so let’s eat.’
‘And then?’ Sam asked.
‘And then I want to give you a naked bed-time tour of Sydney’s skyline.
‘As a mid-pointer, or a super spy?’ Sam said, standing up.
‘Can you manage both tonight?’ Ben asked, taking her hand.
23.
Getting the message
‘I don’t know why we developed this—it sucks,’ Kralinsky said.
While Ben and Sam were enjoying fresh seafood and a bottle of Australian perfectly chilled pinot gris, Ethan Cross was sitting with his friend via holocast, eating pizza.
‘People love it,’ Ethan told him. ‘It’s far better than the old VOIP system. You just miss sharing the food.’
‘No, to be honest,’ Kralinsky said, ‘it’s the real people contact I miss. You know sometimes I feel like Oppenheimer or Tim Berners-Lee. We’re the pathfinders leading the technology race and that’s all rather wonderful. But, at the same time, I wonder if what we’re inventing is ruining our lives and the lifestyles of future generations. How much of our work will ultimately come back to bite our arses?’
Ethan had never seen his friend look so morose.
‘How do you mean?’ he asked.
‘Well, OK, how many times have we met face-to-face recently?’
‘Not enough, but isn’t this better than not at all? We haven’t had the opportunity over the last few weeks. It’s been too hectic.’
‘Hmm, in the old days people made time.’
‘Yes and they traveled through streets knee deep in excrement, died early of disease if they made it past the perils of childbirth, and ate atrociously. I don’t really fancy that.’
‘And I don’t fancy being ha
uled out of a cab by someone who thinks they need it more than I do, punched in a theatre queue, or told by my dentist to “fuck off until I learn to clean my teeth properly”. There is a way to behave towards other people and we’re losing it. It’s getting worse out there, Ethan, and fast.’
Kralinsky was right. Argon’s plans were going too well. Mark Payne must be well pleased. Ethan remembered his own incredulity, and reluctant admiration, when his CEO told him what he’d planned and executed.
‘Ethan, my boy,’ Payne told him, ‘you’re never going to believe this.’
They were sitting in Payne’s office—the only place Mark believed was secure enough for a conversation. In between the detector sweeps, the environment was being constantly bombarded by rapid frequency, white electronic noise designed to blot out any form of eavesdropping. And with what little Ethan knew of Payne’s plans, he had every reason to be paranoid.
Ethan was sure that Payne completely accepted his supposedly vicious takeover of Dayton Products. Whatever level of investigation he’d made stopped short of discovering that the whole thing was an elaborate setup—a carefully devised operation put together over a couple of years by himself and Kralinsky and the additional help of several truckloads of money.
Setting up companies ripe for acquisition had been the easy part. Where they had to tread carefully, and where Kralinsky’s extraordinary hacking skills were stretched to the limit, was in creating the illusion that Ethan was in some way responsible for the death of a man who didn’t actually exist, fabricating his suicide on some lonely country road. There was no father, and no sons. It was all electronic smoke and mirrors, and the master of deception, Mark Payne, swallowed the lot.
Similarly, his two porn-favoring colleagues who’d publicly opposed Ethan’s perfectly sound business proposal were now extremely wealthy and worked for Kralinsky. Ethan knew that nobody in Argon believed they’d downloaded the porn, but it was impossible to prove otherwise. There was no trace of his culpability. Only his arrogance over the matter and a barely discernable electronic footprint had people warily pointing the finger in his direction.
As his reputation as The Beast soared and the myths around him multiplied, Payne finally stretched out his claws, hoisting him into the inner sanctum. Suddenly Ethan found himself exactly where he’d aimed to be—sitting right alongside a deadly spider in the centre of the world’s most evil web.
Ethan knew that Mark Payne had been one of the people who visited his mother shortly after his father’s death. He’d found the paperwork, filed away in an old-fashioned buff folder in the company vaults. In his report, Payne had been quite detailed about the tactics he used to con his mother into believing that his father may have been responsible for the accident. In fact, quite the opposite was true. His father had repeatedly requested maintenance on faulty equipment with Payne vetoing the repairs as too costly. When an explosion ripped through one of the factories, Ethan’s father, ignoring the danger, had charged into the flames to rescue five of his workers. Going in for the last man, the factory walls had collapsed and he hadn’t made it back out.
He wondered what his mother and father would have thought if they were still alive. Would they have applauded his tenacity and spirit in his quest to crucify Payne? Somehow he doubted it. He could have engineered the man’s demise many times over and yet he’d held back. How much he’d changed. Once he’d been so sure of his destiny, honoring the memory of a dead father and a broken mother with vitriol and hate—but then what? The avenging angel who’d haunted his anguished dreams had all but gone, leaving him with a burning need to make all things right with the world not just his own life. And here he was at the top rung of the very company that had murdered his father and then lied and cheated to destroy his reputation, ruined them as a financially secure family, and killed his mom through ill health.
‘Here, see these two books?’ Payne said, handing Ethan two novels. Ethan recognized them.
‘We made sure that these books were phenomenally successful,’ he said, giving Ethan time to absorb his words.
‘How?’
‘By cheating. We poured money into promoting them through every media imaginable, manipulated the New York Times best seller list, paid hundreds of reviewers, bought hundreds of thousands of copies to shatter sales records—that sort of thing,’ Payne said, with obvious pride. ‘Once the ball started rolling, we just got behind it, and the second book was easier—people just love a best-seller.’
As Payne talked, Ethan ran his eye through the acknowledgements.
‘Agreed,’ Ethan said, ‘but where’s the commercial advantage to us here? All I see is considerable expense. There’s no mention of Argon, or any of our interests anywhere.’
‘Exactly my boy,’ Payne chuckled. Ethan inwardly squirmed at the sound. He’d once seen a duck being throttled in a market and Payne’s laughter reminded him of that wet sucking sound as the poor creature met its end. ‘We don’t want to be associated with these books in any way.’
Ethan stared at his CEO as the man began to pace.
‘You see,’ he continued, ‘what is critically important to us is the content.’
He stopped and faced Ethan.
‘How much do you know about subliminal advertising?’
‘Very little,’ Ethan admitted. ‘It was popularized during the mid nineteen hundreds, but the results were sketchy or faked at best. At one time in the 60s it was taken seriously enough to be banned from television and the movies but still went on—again with limited success. From what I understand product placement became the thing everyone was into.’
‘That’s about right,’ Payne beamed. ‘Now, what if I told you we had mastered the art of subliminal suggestion?’
Ethan kept his eyes on Payne’s.
‘Mastered? In what way?’ he asked. Payne’s face began to glow with an evangelical fervour as his enthusiasm mounted.
‘We have developed a text algorithm, a sort of matrix if you like, that we can insert into the pages of a book and affect a reader’s behavior.’
Ethan’s mind hummed.
‘How? What sort of behavior?’
‘The how is not relevant right now, my boy,’ Payne said, resuming his pacing. ‘You’re an astute young man. Let me ask you—what’s been happening to our world social structure over the last couple of years?’
‘It’s experiencing a rapidly escalating breakdown of common decency is the way I’ve heard it described,’ Ethan replied, careful not to report his own feelings of confusion and dismay at what was happening.
A rise in antagonism was confounding every level of psychological study and causing global concern. But psychobabble aside, and there was endless supply of that, the fact was that people were rapidly becoming less and less tolerant of each other. Simply put, people were nastier. To innocently negotiate the streets and go about one’s day-to-day business had turned into a minefield of foul insults, flaring arguments and unpleasant jostling at best and outright fist-fighting at worst. With no specific demographic leading the charge, grandmothers squabbled with pregnant mothers over bus seats, whining restaurant patrons were served their meals directly into their laps, and airline pilots wrestled their differences in full view of the passengers. Day-to-day life had become extremely unpredictable.
Payne stopped his pacing and leaned towards Ethan for effect.
‘Exactly, and all caused by us,’ he said.
‘Let me get this right,’ Ethan said, feeling quite sick. ‘You’ve inserted a form of subliminal suggestion into the text of Zachary Corsfield’s two books that have made readers into …’
‘….crazies and nut cases,’ Payne said, clapping his hands together with
unashamed delight.
Sitting down opposite Ethan, he continued.
‘Well, sort of nutty. The effect of reading the books and being exposed to our sub-messaging is creating a gradual increase in the readers’ stress levels in a way that systematically impairs certain cognitive con
trol functions of the pre-frontal cortex. This allows the raw, animal-like emotions to surface. After that, they get into a kind of loop, reacting irrationally to other people and blowing up over things that would normally be smoothed over with an apology. Isn’t it great?’
‘So all this extreme social unrest is your doing?’ Ethan managed, with an evenness he didn’t feel at all. He could have happily leapt across the space between them and strangled the bastard and he hadn’t even read Corsfield’s books. Instead he mirrored Payne’s inane grin.
‘Love it,’ he said, ‘but what does it get us exactly?’
‘Get us? Think about it. It gives us a platform of social discontent we can manipulate very nicely and opens all sorts of possibilities.’
Ethan nodded.
‘What have you in mind?’ he asked.
‘All in good time, my boy,’ Payne said, wagging his index finger. ‘First of all we have to get the third book written. And that’s where you come in.’
Over the next couple of hours, while his CEO filled him in about the impasse they’d reached with the book and Corsfield’s writers’ block, Ethan’s efforts to discover the source of the algorithm, how it was inserted into the text, and Payne’s ultimate goal—were neatly sidestepped. It soon became clear that the only way to stop Payne’s arcane plans from coming to fruition was to go right along with them and do exactly what he was asked. If he didn’t, Payne would ensure his silence without a second’s thought and find someone who would.
‘We’ve given him all the time we can,’ Payne told him. ‘He’s turned into a drunk and his wife is beginning to get ideas.’
‘Ideas?’ Ethan asked.
‘She’s too close to the action—noticing trends, putting two and two together. The problem is that she’s starting to blab to a friend of hers here in the States but, don’t worry, we’r onto that. You need to focus on a solution to getting the book written.’
‘Can we find someone else to write it?’ Ethan suggested.
The Last Book. A Thriller Page 19
