Mammoth (4 page)

Those who predicted opposition from politicians and city planners had underestimated the determination of Howard Christian, and the power of money. With a combination of backroom horse trading, numerous quids pro quo, bullying, public relation blitzes, and a lot of old-fashioned bribery, minds were changed, including the important minds that held the power of a yea or nay over the project.

What finally sold it was the stainless steel eagle that perched on the tower’s top. Taller than the Statue of Liberty, the eagle’s baleful gaze turned continuously, covering all quadrants of the compass hourly, a fearsome bird of prey ever vigilant to find and punish America’s enemies. At night, two multimillion-candlepower searchlights beamed from the
golden eyes. The tower had weathered the most recent 6.2 quake with only a few cracked windows.

Unfortunately, the tower had never been more than 70 percent full. Even this many years after 9/11, there were many people who would not enter a skyscraper at all. The images of catastrophe were too vivid.

So the Resurrection Tower was a money-loser for Howard Christian. It ate up almost a quarter of a billion dollars of his cash each year. Howard didn’t mind. At that rate, to misquote Charles Foster Kane, he’d be broke in…140 years.

Howard Christian was different from most multibillionaires in many respects, and a big one was this: he bought things. Most members of that very small club that never had meetings and mostly couldn’t stand one another were content to husband their vast holdings of stock, and if they bought something, it was probably another corporation. What they did, mostly, was to move money around. Money in motion generates more money, as surely as one of Newton’s laws.

Christian didn’t much care for money movement, for banking, for the stock market. He had bought companies in his time, naturally he had his bankers, and he owned a great deal of stock, but none of that was his main interest.

He liked real estate, he liked building things on his property, just like the Monopoly games he had played as a child. He liked research and development, spent upwards of three billion dollars a year on projects most accountants would estimate as unlikely to return much profit. More often than not, they were wrong. His own fortune came from blue-sky research, and he never forgot it. He had, in fact, made two huge fortunes, though the second triumph wouldn’t have been possible without the infusion of vast amounts of money from the first fortune.

Infusion.
He liked that. The source of his first fortune was discoveries and patents he held in the field of nanotechnology, specifically in the design and assembly of the kind of molecular transistors currently to be found in the CPUs of almost every computer on the planet, and in outer space, too. He had done the research for these devices in a tiny laboratory, funded with only a few hundred thousand in grant money.

The path to the second fortune was paved and greased with
billions from his first company, Nanobyte. Everybody laughed, all the technobullies had kicked silicon sand in his face and scoffed that it couldn’t be done, but in seven years he had the first practical and functioning fusion reactor. It was beneath him now, over a hundred feet below Resurrection Tower, and it was the chief reason that all the lights on all the floors of the tower burned all night, in spite of southern California electric rates so ruinous that even Howard might not have been able to pay the bill year after year. But fusion power was cheap, once the reactor was built. A dozen such reactors were being built all around Los Angeles by his second company, ConFusion, Inc.

But now that all that was done, now that he had revolutionized technology twice, and on a scale no one had equaled since Edison, Howard Christian devoted most of his time to his twin passions: show business and collecting.

He had the means to be a second Hearst, pillaging the world’s museums for great art, but he had tried it and found it unsatisfying. He enjoyed some of the old masters of the Renaissance, but most of their work was not for sale or came onto the market so infrequently you could grow old waiting to have a crack at a particular Rembrandt or Titian. He was puzzled by the impressionists, and baffled by everything since then. What was he supposed to do? Hang an ugly mess by Pollock in his office and then stand and stare at it, wondering why anybody spent six dollars on crap like that, much less a million, and feeling like a fool? Pretend he really liked some stupid scrawl by Picasso? He owned quite an extensive collection of original Norman Rockwells, a single Monet that he found pleasant to look at, hanging behind his desk, and that was the extent of his fine art collection.

No, Howard Christian’s mania was for things a lot more recent. He collected twentieth-century ephemera, and automobiles and aircraft of any vintage.

His idea of a wonderful day was to drive his silver-gray 1937 Packard V-12 convertible coupe to a toy collectors’ convention and spend ten or twenty thousand dollars on a few rare tin robots from Japan. Or even better, to toodle along Melrose Avenue in his Hispano-Suiza H6B, made for Andre Dubonnet by the Nieuport Astra Aviation Company from copper-riveted
tulipwood—the only car of its kind in the world—and turn in under the fabulous white gate of the Warner Brothers Studio, which he owned, gate and all.

He also owned a major television network, several cable channels, a chain of theme parks, and Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus.

He stood now in the eagle’s right eye and looked out in satisfaction at the entertainment capital of the world, much of which he owned. As the mighty bird turned, he could pick out all the major sites. Over there was Culver City, where MGM once reigned as the big dog of the silver screen. Now its old backlot was full of condominiums. There was CBS Television City. And there, to the west, was the abomination of Century City, and the corpse of 20th Century Fox Studios, now just a depressing collection of uninspired skyscrapers.

He loved standing there. It made him feel like Batman.

A bell sounded discreetly.

“Warburton here, Mr. Christian. I have Professor Wright.”

“Good. Bring him right up, please.”

MATTHEW
Wright was first out of the elevator. “Oh, wow,” he said, and strode straight for the eagle’s eye, not seeming to see Howard Christian standing there. He looked out over the city, and down the steep side of the tower.

Christian was somewhat taken aback. No more than a dozen people had ever been in the eagle’s head, other than the maintenance crew. He brought people up to impress them, of course, and it was a measure of the reputation Matt Wright had in the small world of cutting-edge physics that Christian had known immediately that no other place would do for their first meeting. But he had expected to control it, as he always did, and in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on, he felt he had lost control already, before he could get two sentences out.

“Oh, boy,” Matt said, shaking his head as he stepped back from the window. “I’m doing it again. I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of social graces, Mr. Christian. I’m Matt Wright.” He held out his hand.

Christian took it, slowly, and allowed his hand to be pumped. Christian saw a man who might be in his late twenties,
but whose eyes were considerably older. The dossier Warburton had given him pegged his age at thirty-four. He wore hiking boots and heavy canvas pants, a lumberjack shirt, and, absurdly, a khaki vest with dozens of pockets, festooned with the bright tinsel and feathers of trout lures. Christian himself disdained business clothing almost entirely, preferring cheap jeans and western shirts and outrageously expensive hand-tooled cowboy boots made from all manner of exotic leathers. The last time he could recall wearing formal clothing was three years ago, picking up the Academy Award for Best Picture.

“I understand you’ve accepted my offer, Professor Wright.”

“Your man said something about a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Of course. Will you take a check?”

“How long would it take to get it in cash?”

Christian looked at Warburton.

“Five minutes,” Warburton said, and reached for a telephone.

“Never mind,” Matt said. “I just never held that much money all at once.”

“Neither have I, come to think of it,” Christian said.

“What, you don’t have a money bin someplace where you shove tons of coins around with bulldozers?”

Christian’s smile became genuine for the first time. “You know Uncle Scrooge McDuck! I’ll have to show you my comics collection sometime.”

“It would be a pleasure.”

Warburton was looking at his wristwatch, and he cleared his throat.

“Ah…yes,” Christian said. “I’m sorry to have ripped you so abruptly from your fishing trip. But I hope to make it up to you with a late lunch at the Polo Lounge. We have a reservation.”

“Okay. But didn’t I read that you’ve said you’d rather eat at Burger King?”

“I grew up eating Burger King,” Christian said, with a tight smile. “Never developed a taste for the finer things, I guess.”

“Well, I’m not a gourmet, either. You clearly have something
you’re dying to tell me. Why don’t we save time, eat on the way to wherever it is we’re going?”

ON
the way to lunch, Matt decided he could get used to this way of life.

The helicopter in Oregon had whisked him quickly to PDX, where one of Howard Christian’s private jets awaited. It was an all-black vintage Boeing 727 that had once belonged to Hugh Hefner. A bunny head had been painted on the tail. At the tower, he had been swept up into a high place, as Satan had done with Jesus; only, unlike Jesus, Matt had accepted the offer. Not that he intended to fall on his knees and worship at the monetary altar of Howard Christian, but he recognized the billionaire was now his boss, and he knew bosses could turn out to want many things, some of them impossible.

Then down in the private elevator to the fifth subbasement, where there were a dozen fantastic automobiles. Howard Christian didn’t believe in letting his toys gather dust—he liked to get them out and play with them. He was probably the richest man in the world who actually drove very much.

Matt paused at a pale yellow convertible with red trim that looked longer, taller, and wider than any car he had ever seen, and yet managed to seat only two people. It had big globe headlamps and four chromed pipes coming out of the hood cowl on each side.

“I see you like this one. It’s a ’36 Duesenberg Model J, special built with a short wheelbase, standard Deusy V-12 engine.”

“This is the
short
version?”

“It was built for Clark Gable. He drove it to and from the studio while he was working on
Gone With the Wind.
Or up and down Hollywood Boulevard with Carole Lombard sitting beside him. Get in, we’ll take this one.”

CHRISTIAN
drove them out of the basement and down Wilshire Boulevard, both of them content to enjoy the soft purr of the engine, the smell of the pale yellow leather, the luxurious suspension and road-handling ability, and the stares of other drivers.
Sports car enthusiasts might sneer, but only if they were profoundly ignorant of precision engineering.

Matt asked, “Howard, could I buy this car?”

“It’s not for sale.”

“No, I mean, could I afford it?”

Christian glanced at him.

“What am I paying you?”

“Two million dollars a year.”

“You could make a down payment.”

Christian looked over at Matt again, with a smile that was a bit smug but with enough sense of almost adolescent wonder that Matt could forgive him.

He said, “They say in Los Angeles, you are what you drive.”

“So what does that make you?” Matt asked.

“Anybody I want to be.”

THERE
was no one in the drive-thru at the Jack in the Box. Christian pulled up to the window and nearly shut the place down as most of the patrons and employees craned their necks to get a better view.

Warburton got out of one of the two heavily armored Mercedes SUVs that had been preceding and following the Duesenberg, each carrying two heavily armed men, and hurried to Christian as he was about to pull out with the sack of food sitting next to him. He handed Christian a brown envelope and went back to his car, where he would sweat profusely in the plush air-conditioned interior until his employer was back in the relative safety of a building Warburton controlled.

Christian handed the envelope to Matt, who opened it and found one hundred new-minted thousand-dollar bills. At least, he supposed it was a hundred; it wouldn’t seem right to count it just then.

“Now we’ve both held a hundred grand, cash, in our hands,” Christian said.

*    *    *

ON
an impulse Christian drove to the Santa Monica Pier, where he parked in the lot and was instantly hemmed in by his security crew, who were the very best money could buy, and who, to a man, wished Howard Christian had never learned how to drive.

Christian unwrapped a hamburger, studied it critically, removed a dangling string of Bermuda onion, and took a bite.

“Professor Wright,” he said, “do you believe time travel is possible?”

“Oh, brother,” Matt said. “Howard, stop calling me Professor, and please, tell me you don’t want me to build you a time machine.”

Christian stopped chewing.

“I had a lot of time to think on the plane ride down,” Matt said.

“And what did you think about?”

“What you might be willing to pay me two million dollars a year for,
plus
a large research and development budget. I was pretty sure it wasn’t fly-tying lessons, and aside from that, I don’t have a lot of special skills other than a knack for mathematics.”

“Some knack. I can’t follow your papers. Mentioned for the Nobel Prize.”

“It’s just a beauty contest. And don’t feel bad about not understanding the equations. It’s only on my best days that I understand them myself. Your reputation precedes you, Howard. I’m not talking of the engineering breakthroughs that made you rich. I mean your…enthusiasms. Your penchant for…”