Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk (29 page)

RESET

B
ARNABY’S NOSE RECOVERED
, although the same could not be said for his reputation. But then, his reputation had never been that great to begin with.

A doctor reset the nasal bones and said there was nothing further he could do. Time and ibuprofen were all that were needed.

Barnaby resumed work at GloCo, making money. The corporation was a massive entity with an annual turnover equivalent to the gross national product of a small Asian democracy. Its assets were distributed worldwide, most of them in the field of energy generation and distribution. Oil, gas and coal formed the lion’s share of its business portfolio, but GloCo owned and ran a handful of nuclear plants as well.

It almost went without saying that GloCo boasted very few green credentials. Its primary concern was making profit from fossil fuels and enriched uranium. It did not, as a corporation, consider the long-term consequences of its activities. It could not afford to. Its horizon extended no further than the next set of quarterly accounts, the next share dividend payout, the next round of end-of-year bonuses.

Barnaby perched at the vertex of a pyramid he had built, with thousands of employees below him, spread across the world. He orchestrated their symphony of industry with an unerring hand. The staff of GloCo moved in unison to do their CEO’s bidding, reaping the earth’s natural resources and transforming them into cold hard cash.

The corporation was popular with its stockholders. It was blue chip, firmly ensconced in the FTSE 100, a steady, reliable source of income and capital growth. Barnaby was a celebrity among the City fraternity. Those in the financial know feted him.

The wider world took a somewhat dimmer view of GloCo. In recent years there had been a groundswell of hostility rising against all the energy corporations. Investment banks still headed the anti-capitalists’ shit-list, but energy giants such as GloCo ran them a close second. They were icons of greed and rapaciousness, in the eyes of many. Unprincipled. Unaccountable. Crazed monolithic gods gorging on the meat and muscle of the planet. Giant assemblages of human beings who had collectively lost their humanity and their individuality, becoming no more than cells in a mindless-brute body.

So there had been a constant background hum of carping and criticism, mainly in the left-wing newspapers and academic journals; GloCo was not well thought of by the
bien pensant
. There had been the occasional protest rally outside one or other of its places of business, including the corporate headquarters at GloCo Tower. It was nothing, though, that the company could not shrug off, much as an elephant might shrug off the stinging of flies.

Until Tarquin Johnson threw that dead seagull.

This was a catalysing moment. An inciting incident.

What Tarquin had done was actually quite funny. It was an ironic, apposite act of vengeance against a man whose corporation had indeed, as Tarquin claimed, suffered a number of unfortunate escapes of crude oil which had resulted in large, lethal slicks. These were all accidents, of course. Tankers ran aground in foul weather. Offshore drilling platforms experienced wellhead blowouts. It happened. It couldn’t be prevented. But what people remembered most vividly about these events were the pictures of sea birds with oil-sodden feathers, wings flapping ineffectually as they struggled to free themselves from a beach that had become a black, tarry mire. The pathetic plight of a stricken guillemot or tern became indelibly etched in the public’s minds. They saw a creature that was natural, noble and free, besmirched and doomed by the clumsy, ruinous hand of man. GloCo was to blame. Tarquin’s seagull had been a neat, pithy way of making that point.

THE SEAGULL MOVEMENT

A
ND SO THE
Seagull Movement took shape.

It began in low-key fashion. Overnight, somebody dumped a couple of dead sea birds on the doorstep outside the ground-floor lobby of the GloCo Tower.

The next night, it was ten birds.

The night after that, dozens.

Barnaby made a call to the Commissioner of the Met, who was a friend of a friend. Out-of-hours police-car patrols in the area were doubled. A number of suspects were arrested, caught acting furtively in the vicinity of GloCo HQ. They were found, most of them, to be carrying dead seagulls in their backpacks.

The subsequent phase saw a group of demonstrators turning up at the Tower during the daytime, dressed as seagulls. They prostrated themselves on the pavement and lay stock still, transformed into a representation of avian slaughter. TV stations had been alerted beforehand and reporters were there to capture the protest on camera. It made the lunchtime and evening news bulletins, and featured prominently in all the following morning’s papers.

In no time at all, it was an international phenomenon. Wherever there was a GloCo subsidiary, a GloCo plant, a GloCo holding of any sort, there was a flashmob flock of activists outside it, mostly youngsters, clad in bird costumes, playing dead. They didn’t necessarily come as seagulls. Some were canaries or eagles or ostriches or swans. The rules were loose. As long as the outfit was suitably birdlike, it was allowable.

They filmed themselves doing it. They posted clips online. They set up Facebook pages. In the space of a month the Seagull Movement went from daft stunt to worldwide meme, and an albatross around Barnaby’s neck.

GloCo became the punchline to jokes by stand-up comedians and chat show hosts. Someone at Barnaby’s squash club yelled, “Caw, caw!” across the changing room, and elicited a ripple of chuckles. In parliament, the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition described the Prime Minister’s policies “lying in tatters around him like a heap of dead seagull impersonators in front of a GloCo building,” not the wittiest quip ever made, but it still brought the House down.

The net result of this campaign of sustained mockery was a small but significant drop in GloCo’s market value. The corporation had become a laughing-stock, but that was no laughing matter for anyone who held stock in it.

Something had to be done to arrest the decline. If GloCo shares continued to dip, there might be a panic, a run on the company, investors scrabbling to extract their money before the slide turned into an unstoppable avalanche.

Barnaby held an emergency meeting with his public relations department. His PR team were all bright young things, wedded to their BlackBerrys and iPad minis, Prada-neat, gym-honed, skilled in the arts of looking good and making others look good. They spoke in a pidgin of buzzwords like some futuristic cargo cult: “next-gen,” “turnkey,” “mission-critical,” “bleeding-edge,” “client-centric.” They advised Barnaby that GloCo should “repurpose its iconic best-of-breed status” and “develop a groundbreaking, feature-rich solution” to its current “cross-platform synergistic perfect storm” if it wanted to stave off the likelihood of a “never-before top-down paradigm shift without an available exit strategy.”

Barnaby translated this as: the company needed to do something urgent and radical
now
, or else it was up shit creek without a paddle.

“Ideas, anyone?” he asked.

The PR people had ideas. Oh, they had ideas.

Restructuring. Repositioning. Rebranding.

“Change?” said Barnaby.

“Yes,” said someone.

“Genuine change? Or the appearance of change?”

This was a moot point with the PR department, for whom “genuine” and “appearance” were synonyms.

“Whatever you feel comfortable with, Mr Pollard.”

As was so often the case with PR meetings, Barnaby found himself having to devise a strategy in spite of, rather than thanks to, the advice he was being given. He treated his PR people as a kind of Delphic oracle: they delivered vague, gnomic pronouncements which he interpreted as he saw fit, to the best of his own abilities. They helped him by raising a cloudy mirror to his thoughts, whose reflection he could then study and clarify. This was their main use to him, and the sole reason he kept them on the payroll. In every other respect they were just a gaggle of jargon-obsessed, otherwise unemployable morons.

“How about we court the eco lobby?” he said. “Woo them? Show them a different face of GloCo, a caring, friendly one?”

Nods all round. Yes, yes, that was exactly what the PR people had been driving at. Exactly. They couldn’t have phrased it better themselves. Well, possibly they could have. But yes. Exactly.

“Make nice with them,” Barnaby continued. “Let them see we’re not heartless, plundering ogres. Slicks and spills and suffering wildlife matter to us,
really
matter. How about that?”

From the gathered PR people there was something like a massed sigh, a mutual, near-orgiastic gasp of delight. Of course. Of course. GloCo cares. These things matter to GloCo. GloCo is good.

“Get onto it,” Barnaby instructed them. “Find me some relevant and pliant journalists – green ones in every sense. Line them up. I’ll schmooze them. The Seagull Movement started with me. It can end with me.”

Smartphones and tablets pinged into life.

The PR department set to work with a will.

LA CIGARETTE

T
HAT EVENING,
B
ARNABY
consoled himself with dinner and a girlfriend. Not both at once; in series rather than in parallel. He ate by himself at Nobu on Old Park Lane, starting with an appetiser of beef tenderloin tataki followed by lobster tempura with creamy wasabi, washing it all down with a 1999 Chambertin-Clos De B
è
ze Burgundy. Then he met the girlfriend at a rooftop bar round the corner.

She was called Zurie, Marseille-born, Paris-based, sometimes a catwalk model, mostly a woman who liked to hang out with very rich men. She smoked incessantly in order to keep her weight down. Her dependency on cigarettes seemed to sum up everything she was: slim, pale, bad for your health in large doses.

Hence Barnaby had nicknamed her La Cigarette. He nicknamed all of his girlfriends. Pigeonholing them according to quirks or character traits – The Complainer, Persistent Hair Flicking, Licks Teeth, Coke Hound – made them easier to remember. Easier to tell apart, too. Otherwise they might all meld into one amorphous whole, indistinguishable from one another.

Because Barnaby had a type. Whippet-thin. Blonde. Desperately insecure. Clingy. Neurotic. Eager to please.

Zurie, La Cigarette, was a classic example.

“You have eaten?” she asked as she sipped her cosmopolitan, which the barman had made, at her request, with sugar-free cranberry juice.

It was past 10PM. Barnaby could not realistically deny it.

“Why do you not invite me to join you?” Zurie lit her next cigarette from the stub of the last. They were outdoors on the terrace, under a pergola and a gas-fired space heater. “You are ashamed of me? Do not like to be seen with me?”

Barnaby could have told her the truth. Why
would
he want to dine with her? She was hardly the world’s greatest conversationalist, her talk usually revolving around fashion designers and her fellow models, every one of whom, if Zurie was to be believed, was a bitch of one kind or another. Also, she seldom touched her food. She would run her fork through it a few times, perhaps nibble a salad leaf or two, meanwhile tapping her foot agitatedly as she counted down the minutes until she could nip out and light up. It was pointless taking her to a decent restaurant. Barnaby could afford it, but there was the principle of the thing to consider. Why waste money on a perfectly good meal if it wasn’t going to be consumed and enjoyed?

That was what he could have said. But since he itched to have sex with this woman, what he actually said was, “It was a business dinner. Very boring.”

“With who?”

“What?”

“This business dinner. With who were you having it? What did you discuss?”

“An associate from Australia, Bob Shearwater of Port Kembla Collieries. We talked about exploitation rights in New South Wales.” He
had
had dealings recently with said man on said topic, but it had been a ten-thousand-mile videoconference exchange, not an intimate restaurant tête-à-tête.