Читать книгу The Fund - Jeff Edwards - Страница 13

The current board meeting at The Fund was taking place in their underground boardroom next door to the bank’s vault.

‘But why can’t I go out to Africa to supervise my project?’ demanded Eliza Strang, her usually deathly pallor giving way to a flush of frustration.

Nori spoke slowly and quietly, trying to calm the girl down. ‘Eliza, dear, if you even attempted to enter the country looking as you do, you would instantly be marked as a person of interest.’

‘The clanging of metal detectors would be enough to get you kicked out before you stepped foot in the country,’ laughed Toby.

Nori shot him a withering glance. She was trying to calm the girl down and Toby’s offhand comment would only make Eliza more intractable.

‘Eliza, you must realise that the culture as well as the climate will simply not allow you to operate out there. You would pass out with heatstroke within hours of your exposure to the tropical sun and I can’t imagine anyone racing forward to revive you if you did,’ said Nori quietly.

‘But it’s been my project all along. I have to go out there and oversee its implementation.’

‘When would you want to be out there?’ asked Lana.

‘The equipment is ready to be packed into containers. I only have to ship them out there and have them transported to the site. That should take a month.’

Nori said, ‘But even if it gets there that quickly, you can’t get it set up until the government agencies give their seal of approval to the project. The equipment could be sitting on the docks out there for months.’

‘Can’t you see! That’s why I have to get out there. All my planning will be for nothing if we can’t get government approval.’

Nori persisted quietly. ‘And how do you think the government officials will react to a very youthful female Goth trying to tell them how to run their country?’

Eliza’s frustration was all the more difficult for her to swallow because she could see exactly what Nori was trying to say to her. She looked around the table at the others and realised that none of them were trying to talk down to her. Even Toby’s comment, she accepted, was him attempting to lighten the situation rather than an attempt to put her down. It was now up to her to decide the correct course of action.

She took a deep breath. ‘So, if I want to go out to Africa I have to become “normal”, do I?’ she said with a disgusted expression.

‘Well, Eliza,’ began Nori, ‘if what you mean by “normal” is that you dress in a manner appropriate to the climate and that you wear an amount of jewellery that will not set off all the airport detectors and that you conduct yourself in a dignified and professional manner, then “normal” is what is required. I daresay they have any number of citizens travelling through their country as backpackers, but you’ll be there on business, so even a casual mode of dress will be insufficient to gain their trust.’

‘No jeans?’ asked Eliza.

Nori nodded. ‘Not even a hint of jeans! You will be on a mission to gain their trust. You will need to dress appropriately.’

Eliza sighed deeply, wondering if she were capable of such a drastic change. Up to now all business had been conducted by phone and she had established a good rapport with some of the officials. To lose them at this late stage would be disastrous for the project.

Lana looked at Suzie and gave her a wink. ‘I think it’s time for some of your fellow directors to come to your aid. I hereby nominate myself and Suzie as re-modellers.’

‘Okay,’ nodded Suzie, ‘I accept the challenge and I think Justine should be done over as well.’

‘Me! Why me?’ asked Justine.

‘Well, if conservative dress is the order of the day for overseas travel, then you’ll need a new wardrobe as well,’ said Lana, ‘especially if you want to oversee your first project. After all, the one you’re working on is in a predominantly Muslim country.’

Next to Justine, Ali reached out and touched her lightly on the hand. ‘My wife and I thought it would be best if, when you do travel out there, that we went with you. It is an unfortunate fact that a middle-aged Muslim male would be better able to get things done than a very young and Christian female.’

‘Yes,’ conceded Justine, ‘I’ve already found that out. It was very hard at first, but then I found out that if I simply told one of the boys in the office what to say, they could ring up on my behalf and were actually passed through to the official we wanted to speak to.’

Ali smiled. ‘You shall remain in charge. I will simply be your voice.’

‘All right. I’d appreciate that,’ smiled Justine.

Suzie spoke up. ‘Then it’s agreed. We need complete makeovers for two. I think Paris is called for. Don’t you agree, Lana?’

A broad grin spread over Lana’s face. ‘Paris? Definitely! And we’ll need at least two, no, make that four, days.’

‘Hang on! How much is this going to set The Fund back?’ asked an alarmed Brian.

Lana smiled warmly at her husband. ‘Don’t worry, my love. Consider this an investment. The Fund will benefit from it in the long run.’

‘And what are Brian and I to do while our wives are wasting our funds in Paris?’ asked Toby.

Nori looked up. ‘I thought your accountant friend Mr Marks was about to call out to Jersey and Jamaica to investigate the banks we now own. Shouldn’t some of us go out there with him to check them out?’

‘Jersey and Jamaica? How does that sound to you, Brian?’ asked Toby.

‘Very worthwhile!’ agreed Brian with a grin.

‘Well, if they’re going to be away for a while I think Paris will have to put up with us for at least a week!’ countered Suzie.

‘Ye gods! There’ll be nothing left in the shops by then!’ exclaimed Toby.

‘In the meantime, Nori and I will look after matters here at home,’ said Ali.

‘I’m sure that when all get back my husband and I will be able to slip away for a short time to be with our children,’ said Nori.

‘We’ll make sure you do,’ agreed Brian.

‘Well, now that you’ve all arranged holidays for yourselves, I’d like to bring up something that Eliza and I have been discussing. It’s important,’ said Justine.

They all knew by now that Justine did not have a frivolous nature and that if she said a topic was important then it meant that she had turned it over many times already in her own mind.

‘What is it?’ asked Ali.

‘The future direction of The Fund,’ said Justine.

‘I would have thought that The Fund had an almost unlimited future,’ said Brian.

Justine nodded. ‘Given sound financial advice, that will be the case. But what I’m talking about is The Fund’s real power. The videos.’

‘What about them?’

‘How long do you think it will be before the videos are considered to no longer be a threat to the government?’

‘Years!’ said Toby.

‘How many years, Toby? One, five, ten?’

‘I don’t know. What are you saying?’

Justine rose and began to pace the floor. It was how she expressed herself when she had something difficult to say. Her hands and arms became part of her speech as she waved them around to emphasise a point.

‘True, the videos are important today. They have the power to change governments, to bring people in high places down. They are of people in the highest positions in the land at this time. That’s the trouble. In a few years from now those people will be gone. They’ll be retired, or worse, dead. You can’t threaten to expose a dead person. It just won’t work. Besides, people’s attitudes change. People of my generation just don’t care if a politician visited a brothel twenty or thirty years ago. We weren’t born then, so it’s just history to us. When Eliza and I look at those videos it just makes us laugh. For us it’s just like watching Funniest Home Videos on TV.’

‘Are you saying we should turn the videos over to the government?’ asked Brian.

‘No! Certainly not! They’re still important, and we’ll make full use of them while we can, but you all have to face facts!’

‘What facts?’ asked Toby.

‘Eliza and I looked at the figures. When we placed the PM’s brother on the Internet the site had nearly two thousand hits before the government shut it down. That was for two days.’

‘Well, that shows how much interested people were in it,’ said Toby.

‘No Toby, it doesn’t. The site was mentioned in newspaper articles.

Everyone with a computer and modem could have accessed it. On those same two days over forty thousand people around the world accessed a Harry Potter website!’

Eliza interrupted her. ‘That’s two thousand for a PM’s brother. In two years time the current US President will have completed his last term in office and must retire. Any hope of using his video then ceases to be an option. I don’t think we’d even get two thousand hits if his video were released after his retirement. Our generation is taking over and we just don’t care that much about men behaving badly decades ago.’

Brian pushed back his chair. He knew Justine well by now. ‘I can understand what you’re saying because the same idea had occurred to me. It’s worried me as well, but I thought we could have used the videos for a lot longer yet.’

Justine nodded. ‘We have a few years at best. Definitely not decades.’

‘Okay. What’s your solution?’

‘What makes you think I have a solution?’

‘Because I can hear your devious mind cranking over from here. Justine and I know you wouldn’t have brought the subject up if you didn’t have a plan.’

Justine rewarded Brian with one of her few smiles. ‘The answer is intelligence. The videos were all right for their time, but today they’re too limited. Sex is nothing now. What we have to do is collect information on a variety of people, particularly those in power. We need to collect all manner of what may seem to be useless information. We have to know everything from their shoe size to how much he has in the bank and where they’ve secreted their secret funds. There are lots of data gathering groups around that are already trying to do some of this, but we have to go beyond. We have to become a version of “Big Brother”.’

‘Why?’ asked Lana.

‘The more information we have on someone the more power we have over them.’

‘I don’t see what knowing their shoe size will do for us,’ laughed Lana.

Justine didn’t laugh. This was totally serious to her. She regarded Lana with the look of a stern schoolmistress trying to teach a naughty child. ‘Suppose we needed a favour from a government official in a very poor country. Suppose he has an unusual shoe size that doesn’t allow him to purchase the correct size locally because they couldn’t afford to stock them. So, he’s getting around in ill-fitting shoes that constantly hurt his feet. We go to him for a favour and just happen to have a spare pair of shoes in his correct size. Will he do the favour for us? To stop his feet from hurting, I think he will.’

Lana conceded that Justine had a point. ‘But this means collecting a vast amount of information. It’s too big a task for anyone. Besides, we have almost unlimited funds. We can get what we want, anytime we want. It’s just a matter of paying the asking price.’

‘The example of the shoes is an oversimplified one,’ conceded Justine, ‘but it is an example of how I want to go.’

Brian broke in. ‘I’m afraid I have to agree with Justine. Money will not get us what we want on every occasion. In fact, if we try to buy our way out of every situation it’ll create precedents. Word will get around that we’re prepared to bribe all and sundry to get our projects under way and people will deliberately place barriers in our path just so they can get a share of the pie. Our unlimited funds will soon become very limited. If we can get a project through for the price of a pair of shoes it will be well worth us investing in the background information.’

Lana conceded their points. ‘Well, now that we’re to become spies, how is all this information collection going to work?’

‘I’m glad you asked,’ acknowledged Justine. ‘You see, we’re going to have projects going on all over the world and the other workers here at The Fund will be dealing with hundreds of government officials from many nations and at all levels of government. When we talk to them about our projects we’ll do so in a friendly way and encourage them to make small talk with us. They’ll tell us things during these discussions that may seem unimportant at the time but could be very significant in the future. We simply record all these discussions and then enter them into our computers. The computers will cross reference the information with other data fed into it and you’ll be surprised what sort of intelligence we can turn up without even looking for it.’

Eliza added, ‘A minor official told me the other day that the person who I will be dealing with when I arrive in Africa is a big fan of Disneyland. Apparently he’s been to Anaheim several times, so I’ve purchased some rare editions of Donald Duck comics to take with me.’

Nori smiled at the thought of Eliza the Goth handing over some Donald Duck comics to the leader of an African country in exchange for The Fund receiving water rights to a distant river. That water would then allow an impoverished tribe to move from their previously war-torn lands to start a new life in a safe zone.

‘We simply ask to record each conversation?’ asked Brian.

‘I doubt that any government official in any country would allow that. They couldn’t cover their gold-plated behinds if something went wrong. They can’t afford to be recorded giving their permission,’ said Toby.

‘I agree,’ said Eliza. ‘It must be done secretly. I know just the sort of equipment we’ll need. I’ll get Dad to work on procuring it.’

Justine continued. ‘After each meeting, or whenever the information comes to hand, it’ll be entered into a laptop computer that everyone will carry. Once a day the information will be encoded and transmitted to our core computers here, where it will be held pending verification. Nothing will be accepted as fact until we can obtain some form of verification from another source.

‘It’s still going to be a monumental task,’ said Suzie.

‘Of course it is,’ confirmed Justine. ‘We’re going to need a lot of specialised help with this, not only collecting the information but in confirming its accuracy and finally deciding how and when it can be used. We’re going to need professional help for that. However, if we start now, while the videos still have their power, then by the time they’re obsolete our dominant position will remain.’

Nori smiled. ‘I can just imagine how much information you girls will be able to collect in Paris. I know the way shop assistants like to talk about their other customers.’

Suzie’s face dropped. ‘I was looking forward to a week of indulgences. Now you’ve turned it into an assignment!’

‘The same goes for the boys in Jersey and Jamaica,’ said Ali.

‘Spoilsports!’ glared Eliza.

‘I’m sure our trip to see the children will be just as harrowing,’ laughed Ali.