A Hologram for the King (5 page)

They drove another mile toward the sea until the trees appeared again. Groups of workers, some in hardhats, some wearing scarves on their heads, huddled under the palms. In the distance, the road ended a few hundred yards from the water, where a handful of buildings stood, looking like old gravestones.

—This is it, basically, Yousef said.

The desert wind was strong, and the dust came over the street like fog. Still, two men were sweeping the road.

Yousef pointed and laughed. —This is where the money's going. They're sweeping the sand in a desert.

T
HE ENTIRETY OF
the new city thus far comprised three buildings. There was a pastel-pink condominium, which was more or less finished but seemed empty. There was a two-story welcome center, vaguely Mediterranean in style, surrounded by fountains, most of which were dry. And there was a glass office building of about ten stories, squat and square and black. A sign attached to the facade read 7/24/60.

Yousef was dismissive. —That means they're open for business every day, every hour, every minute. Which I doubt.

They parked in front of the low welcome center, located just off the beach. It was adorned with various small domes and minarets. They got out of the car, the heat profound. It was 110 degrees.

—You want to come with? Alan asked.

Yousef stood before the building, as if deciding if anything within could be worth his time.

—Add it to my bill, Alan said.

Yousef shrugged. —Could be funny.

The doors opened outward, automatically, and a man emerged, in a gleaming white thobe.

—Mr. Clay! We have been expecting you. I am Sayed.

His face was thin, his mustache wide. He had small, laughing eyes.

—I'm sorry you missed the shuttle, he said. I understand the hotel had some trouble waking you.

—I'm sorry to be late, Alan said, his eyes steady.

Sayed smiled warmly. —The King won't be coming today, so your tardiness is inconsequential. Will you come inside?

They entered the building, dark and cool.

—Alan looked around. Is the Reliant team in here, or…

—They're in the presentation area, Sayed said, waving in the general direction of the beach. His accent was British. All these high-level functionaries in the Kingdom, Alan had been told, had been educated in the Ivy League and U.K. With this guy, Alan guessed St. Andrews.

—But I thought maybe I would give you the tour, Sayed said. Does that hold appeal for you?

Alan felt like he should at least check in with the team, but did not say so. The tour seemed harmless and was likely quick.

—Sure. Let's do it.

—Excellent. Some juice?

Alan nodded. Sayed turned, and another helper handed him a glass of orange juice, which he handed to Alan. The glass was crystal, something like a chalice. Alan took it and followed them through the lobby, full of arches and images of the city-to-be, into a large room where an
enormous architectural model, waist-high, dominated.

—This is my associate, Mujaddid, Sayed said, indicating another man, who stood by the wall in a black business suit. Mujaddid was about forty, sturdily built, clean-shaven. He nodded.

—This is the city at full completion, Sayed said.

Now Mujaddid took over. —Mr. Clay, I give you the dream of King Abdullah.

The model's tiny buildings, each as big as a thumb, were all cream-colored, with white roads winding throughout, curving gently. There were skyscrapers, factories and trees, bridges and waterways, thousands of homes.

Alan had always been a sucker for a model like this, vision like this, a thirty-year plan, something rising from nothing — though his own experiences with bringing such a vision to fruition had not been so successful.

He'd commissioned a model once. The thought of it brought a twinge of regret. That factory in Budapest was not his idea, but he'd leapt upon the task, thinking it was a step to greater things. But converting a Soviet-era factory to a Schwinn-owned, capitalist model of efficiency—this had been madness. He'd been sent to Hungary to tackle the project, to bring American bicycle manufacturing to eastern Europe, to open up the whole continent to Schwinn.

Alan had commissioned a scale model, he'd had a grand opening, there were high hopes all around. Maybe they could send the Hungarian bikes beyond Europe. Maybe back to the U.S. The labor costs would be nothing, the craftsmanship high. Those were the assumptions.

But it fell apart. The factory never worked to capacity, the workers
couldn't be trained, they were inefficient, and Schwinn didn't have the capital to properly modernize the machinery. A colossal failure, and from then on Alan's days at Schwinn, as a man who could get things done, were numbered.

And yet looking at this model now, Alan had a sense that this city might really happen, that with Abdullah's money it
would
happen. Sayed and Mujaddid were staring at it with him, seeming just as fascinated as he was as they explained the various stages of construction. The city, they said, would be complete by 2025, with a population of a million-five.

—Very impressive, Alan said. He looked for Yousef, who was roaming the lobby. Alan caught his eye, urged him into the room, but Yousef shook his head quickly, dismissing the thought.

—This is where we are right now, Mujaddid said.

Mujaddid nodded to a building directly below his nose, which looked precisely like the one he was standing in, though this one was the size of a grape. On the model, it stood on a long promenade running along the waterfront. Suddenly a laser's red dot appeared on its second story, as if a spacecraft had targeted it for disintegration.

Alan finished his juice, and then had nowhere to put his glass. There was no table, and the man with the platter had disappeared. With his sleeve, he dried the bottom of his glass and placed it on the surface of what he took to be the Red Sea, about a half mile from shore. Sayed smiled politely, took the glass, and left the room.

Mujaddid smiled grimly. —Should we see a film?

Alan and Yousef were led into a high-ceilinged ballroom, bright with mirrors and gold leaf, where a series of yellow couches, arranged in rows, faced a giant screen covering one full wall. They sat down and the room darkened.

A woman's voice began speaking in a clipped British accent.

‘Inspired by the exemplary leadership and far-reaching vision of King Abdullah…' A computer-generated version of the city model appeared, now animated and glowing at night. The camera swooped down and over a gorgeous mountain range of black glass and lights. ‘We present the dawn of the world's next great economic city…'

Alan looked to Yousef. He wanted Yousef to be impressed. The movie must have cost millions. Yousef was scrolling through messages on his phone.

‘…to diversify the Middle East's largest economy…'

Soon it was daytime at KAEC, at street level, and there were speed-boats careening through the canals, businessmen shaking hands by the water, container ships arriving at the ports, presumably sending out the many products manufactured at KAEC.

‘Inter-Arab financial cooperation…'

A series of flags appeared, representing Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the UAE. There was a segment on the mosque that would be built, one that could accommodate two hundred thousand worshipers at once. A brief shot of a college lecture hall, women on one side of the classroom and men on the other.

‘A twenty-four-hour city…'

A port that could process ten million containers annually. A dedicated hajj terminal that could process three hundred thousand pilgrims a season. A giant sports complex that would open like a clamshell.

Now Yousef was interested. He leaned over to Alan. —A stadium shaped like a vagina. Not bad.

Alan wasn't laughing. He was sold. The film was spectacular. It looked like the greatest city since Paris. Alan saw Reliant's role in it all: data transport, video, phones, networked transportation, RFID tagging for shipping containers, technology in the hospitals, schools, courtrooms. The possibilities were endless, beyond even what he or Ingvall or anyone else had even imagined. Finally the film reached its crescendo, the camera lifting skyward to reveal the whole of the King Abdullah Economic City at night, glittering, fireworks blooming over it all.

The lights came up.

Again they were in a showroom of mirrors and yellow couches.

—Not bad? Mujaddid said.

—Not bad at all, Alan said.

He looked to Yousef, whose expression was blank. If he had a joke to make, doubts to express, and it seemed he did, he knew better than to do so now, in this room, with the lights on.

—Let's see the model of the industrial district, Sayed said.

They were soon in a room filled with drawings of factories, warehouses, trucks being loaded and unloaded. The idea, Sayed explained, was that they would be manufacturing things that used Saudi oil — plastics, toys, even diapers — and shipping them all over the Middle East. Maybe Europe and the United States too.

—I understand you were in manufacturing for a time? Sayed asked.

Alan was at a loss.

—We do our research, Mr. Clay. And I owned a Schwinn as a kid. I
lived in New Jersey for about five years. When I was in business school, Schwinn was one of our case studies.

Always the case studies. Alan had participated in a few of them, but after a while it was too depressing. The questions from those wise-ass students masquerading as earnest young go-getters. Why didn't you anticipate the popularity of BMX bikes? And what about mountain bikes? You got murdered there. Was it a mistake to have shopped out all the labor to China? This coming from kids whose experience with business was summer lawn-cutting. How did your suppliers become your competitors? That was a rhetorical question. You want your unit cost down, you manufacture in Asia, but pretty soon the suppliers don't need you, do they? Teach a man to fish. Now the Chinese know how to fish, and ninety-nine percent of all bicycles are being made there, in one province.

—It was interesting for a period, though, wasn't it, Sayed said, when you had the Schwinns made in Chicago, the Raleighs made in England, the Italian bikes, the French… For a time you had real international competition, where you were choosing between very different products with very different heritages, sensibilities, manufacturing techniques…

Alan remembered. Those were bright days. In the morning he'd be at the West Side factory, watching the bikes, hundreds of them, loaded onto trucks, gleaming in the sun in a dozen ice-cream colors. He'd get in his car, head downstate, and in the afternoon he could be in Mattoon or Rantoul or Alton, checking on a dealership. He'd see a family walk in, Mom and Dad getting their ten-year-old daughter a World Sport, the kid touching the bike like it was some holy thing. Alan knew, and the retailer knew, and the family knew, that that bike had been made by hand a few hundred miles north, by a dizzying array of workers, most of them immigrants — Germans, Italians, Swedes, Irish, plenty of Japanese and of
course a slew of Poles — and that that bike would last more or less forever. Why did this matter? Why did it matter that they had been made just up Highway 57? It was hard to say. But Alan was good at his job. Not such a difficult job, to sell something like that, something solid that would be integral to a thousand childhood memories.

—Well, that's gone, Alan said, hoping to be finished with it.

Sayed was not finished.

—Now it's a matter of putting different stickers on the same bikes. They're all built in the same handful of factories — every brand you can think of.

Alan didn't have much to say. He agreed with Sayed. He wanted to continue the tour, but the business student in Sayed was deep in his case study.

—Do you ever feel like you might have done it differently?

—Me? Personally?

—Well, whatever part you might have played. Might it have worked out differently? Was there a way Schwinn might have survived?

Might have
.
Might have
. Alan parsed the words. He would bludgeon the man if he used these words again.

Sayed was waiting for an answer.

—It was complicated, Alan mumbled.

Alan had gotten this before, too. People felt nostalgic about Schwinn. They thought that somehow it must have all been squandered by a bunch of imbeciles running the brand, imbeciles like him. How could a company like Schwinn, which owned the majority of the U.S. market for about eighty years, have gone bankrupt, sold to Trek for next to nothing? How was it possible? Well, how was it not possible? The men behind Schwinn had tried to continue making bikes in the U.S.
According to some, that was mistake No. 1. They hung on in Chicago till 1983. Alan wanted to shake this MBA prick. Do you know how hard it was to hold out even that long? To try to make bicycles, very complicated and labor-intensive machines, on the West Side of Chicago, in a hundred-year-old factory, until 1983?

—Alan?