Stark (16 page)

84: UNLOADING THE EMPIRE

That same night, Sly was also labouring over the business of Stark. It had been soul-destroying work, dismantling even relatively small sections of all that he had worked so hard to create and make secure. But, he had no choice, he had his part to play in the big scheme, like all the others. Quite apart from acquiring the land, he had been charged with getting hold of large quantities of uranium. This required a lot of money — and a lot of money by Sly’s standards was plenty.

The uranium was definitely a problem. He couldn’t just take it out of his own mines. His entire output was strictly monitored. If the government got one whiff that he was creaming any off they’d take him apart bit by bit and the game would be up, for sure. It was so ridiculous, he was allowed by law to flog the stuff to the French, yes, that was fine, no problem there. And what did the French do with it? Blow it up in the Pacific, that’s what! Thus causing the Federal Government endless embarrassment from cancer-ridden environmentalists and luminous Aboriginals. It was so frustrating, the Labour Party seemed to have no objection at all to Sly putting the naughty bit in Froggy Exocets and yet he wasn’t allowed to hang on to a few tons of his own uranium for his own personal use. The world was going mad.

All it meant was that Sly, who personally dug good, top- grade Australian uranium, would have all the trouble of acquiring the stuff on the world black market — probably buying his own stuff back at ten times the price. Still, at least by getting the stuff off some shady character whose address was a portable fax machine, Sly was guaranteed discretion. The dealer Sly was using wanted ten million dollars in two dollar bills, this was not the kind of fellow likely to publish his memoirs. Anyway, the guy wasn’t likely to live long, he positively glowed in the dark.

Sitting in front of a video screen as the dawn came up, unloading cash assets into the market, had been a strange experience. Some of the stuff he sold he didn’t even know he had. Who would have thought he had a shit-dumping operation in the North Sea?

A couple of blips on the screen and he didn’t anymore. Captain Robertson got himself a new invisible boss. It didn’t make any difference, he still hated his job.

He was looking for smallish, easy to dispose of assets, stuff to chip away at. He did not want to unload any major conglomerates, it would be bound to attract attention. Stark had been very clear on that score. In fact he had been trying to discreetly break up his empire into more manageable chunks ever since he got back from the dinner in LA. His people had been pretty surprised.

‘Sly,’ his whole upper-management team had wailed, as if they were but one upper manager, ‘you’re laying us wide open. Putting out the cream and waiting for the cats. We’re gonna get picked off bit by bit.’ Of course they were right. According to every accepted business practice, Sly was inviting major losses. But he wasn’t fighting for profits any more, he was fighting for his life. Unfortunately he could not confide this knowledge to his upper-management team and so he had to allow his upper-management team to think he was losing his grip.

One advantage of this piecemeal sell-off was that it made it much easier to unload assets discreetly. After all, if even Sly did not know that he owned half the stuff he was now selling, no one else would.

85: CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT

A
ctually, somebody else did. As a matter of fact somebody knew Sly’s business better than he did; poor, dullish Linda Reeve of the London Financial Telegraph.

She had long been researching a book called
AN ANALYSIS OF THE SOCIAL ROOTS AND FINANCIAL STRATEGIES PERTAINING TO THE MOST PROMINENT FIFTY BUSINESS EMPIRES CONSTRUCTED SINCE THE SECOND WORLD WAR
or
MEGABUCK: THE LIVES AND LOVES OF THE TOP HALF HUNDRED
, as her publishers wished to call the book.

It had been the detailed knowledge that this research afforded her that had enabled Linda to make the connections she had made regarding Nagasyu’s diverse sell-offs and Slampacker’s and the others that she had noticed.

It was eight o’clock in the evening in London and she was working late, nibbling a chocolate, staring with a puzzled frown at her VDU. It had been luck that she caught the first of Sly’s dumps. The Prince of Wales had recently made a series of major speeches on the state of the North Sea. The death of Mrs Pastel from viral gastroenteritis, after eating a dodgy mussel, had given him the springboard he needed to try, yet again, to force environmental action on pollution. It was beginning to look as if local councils were going to have to pay far more to waste disposal contractors.

Clearly it was a situation from which an unscrupulous but legal killing could be made by any shit-dumper who wanted to double his prices for a 10 per cent improvement in the service he offered.

Hence the Financial Telegraph presumed that trading in waste companies would be fairly fierce. It was while putting together a small piece based on this assumption that a colleague of Linda’s had remarked with surprise that a big player like Silvester Moorcock had elected to buck the trend and pull out of the business altogether. That very evening he had dumped every single share of the Belgian waste disposal conglomerate that he had been so heavily into.

Linda nearly missed it when her colleague made the observation — her mind had been elsewhere. Linda had just been given a small box of chocolates by a cleaner whom Linda had helped with her accounts. It was the end of the day choccy time so to speak — and there were four people in the room. The problem with chocolates is that they operate on a loss curve of massively diminishing returns. The first one out of the box, the strawberry cream say, is of far greater value than the last few left, the despised cracknels and nougats and such like. In fact, these chocolate lepers are often never eaten at all and are left forever, unable to be thrown away because they’re still there, and yet never eaten because they’re so horrid. Linda knew if she offered the chocs around the loss of the four best ones would halve the value of her box.

Of course she knew what she had to do, but she didn’t like it. As Linda’s colleague was telling her about Sly’s sell-offs, Linda was watching both strawberry creams, a turkish delight and a soft caramel disappear. Luckily, neither of the lime barrels were touched or Linda seriously wouldn’t have heard the momentous snippet. But, she did hear it and, still pursuing the half-formed theories that her editor had rejected so dismissively, Linda decided to take a little look at Sly. She rummaged through the huge mounds of books and papers that habitually covered her desk, finally locating her tiny Nagasyu keyboard.

Now, of course, there are tens of thousands of transactions going on at any one moment in the world markets and Sly’s interests were so diverse that normally trying to pick up his trail would take months of painstaking research just to get a clear view of a single half-hour period. But, Linda had already done the research for her book. She had a computer program that detailed over 80 per cent of known Moorcock investments. She knew where most of his money was hiding. All she had to do was to instruct the computer to keep scanning the ever-shifting market until anything connected with Moorcock made a move.

She did not have to wait long. It was extraordinary. Moorcock was undressing like a born again naturist, selling off anything from ouija boards to weapons systems. All for ready cash too. Linda searched in vain for any corresponding reinvestment but found nothing.

She told herself not to get excited. She realized that the fact that she had gone looking for this, and had found it, would make her all the more anxious to prove that there was something in it. But there must be something in it. So much money was leaving the market but only through the big individual players. Middle-range investors, pension schemes, banks, etc., were not moving.

Something had to be going on amongst the big men but Linda did not believe that it was co-ordinated. Above all else, she knew that people like Slampacker, Moorcock, Tyron and Nagasyu would die before they would co-operate with each other.

But something was definitely going on, she thought, trying to clean her great big green glasses and getting chocolate on them. Had all the big men got the willies together? Had they all seen something coming that most people were too small to spot? Were we heading for the biggest crash ever and were the rats deserting the sinking ship? leaving small investors, pension funds and governments holding soon-to-be-worthless stock?

Selecting a horrid hard centre, she attempted to bite the chocolate off without eating the bit in the middle. No chance of course, she soon had half a Brazil nut in her mouth, which she hated.

Hero fantasies flicked across Linda’s mind. Would she be the woman to predict the great crash? Would she ring the warning bell that cushioned the little fellow from the worst of it? She pictured silver-haired grannies thanking her brokenly for rescuing at least part of their pathetic savings and honest young lovers who would still be able to send the tots to good schools because of her prompt action. An MBE!…If she was right…But of course she wasn’t. Linda pulled herself together. She had an interesting little anomaly that was all. There would be, without a doubt, some perfectly ordinary explanation. Still, she might as well ask. Linda reached for the phone.

The telephones in Sly’s office complex did not trill, they rang. His whole body had jerked, he had nearly hit buy rather than sell mid-deal. He’d been trying to unload a plant that produced condensers for fridges and driers, instead he near as damn it purchased half a million ex-U S Army condoms. Sly could think of literally nothing more revolting than a secondhand condom.

Sly, of course, never answered the phone in his office but at that time of night he was the only person there and the thing kept ringing. Eventually he walked through about three secretaries’ offices to where incoming calls were intercepted and picked up the phone.

‘Sly Moorcock speaking.’

He was pretty surprised to find himself doing this but not half as surprised as Linda Reeve was to find herself speaking to the billionaire himself. She had known that somebody would be about because of the heavy trading, but she was astonished to find Sly running his own market stall.

‘Uhm…Oh, right, Mr Moorcock, ahem, excuse me phoning like this…’

Sly didn’t mind. He was in a kind of mischievous mood what with selling off all his stuff. ‘That’s OK. It’s pretty late to call, but that’s OK. Are you in bed?’ Messing around with all his money had made Sly feel powerful and randy. It was very late, he just presumed the woman was a drunk gold- digger chancing her arm.

‘What!!’ said a shocked voice, to Sly’s satisfaction.

‘I said, are you in…’

‘I’m phoning from London.’

Linda did not like his tone. She put on her firm voice. This was the voice that she always dreamt of using to the horrible young men whose job it was to hang off scaffolding all over London and make women feel uptight. Linda, although by no means particularly attractive, had a big bust. This one quirk of fate had meant that for her entire life, since the age of thirteen, the mere sight of scaffolding or road works had made her tense up and scurry along, blushing with anger and looking at her feet. Of course you don’t need to have big tits to get intimidated, all women are scrutinized. All over any city, at any time of the day, there are women crossing roads to avoid the men hanging off scaffolding. They should add a bit to the road work warnings on the radio, ‘and a lot of building in the High Street today so delays for motorists, and, of course, female pedestrians can expect to be biting their lips with anger and embarrassment as their bodies are assessed and commented on.’

On the phone Linda would be the toughie she would love to have been in the streets. ‘I am not in bed, I am working, Mr Moorcock. My name is Linda Reeve, I’m with the Financial Telegraph.’

All Sly’s smugness evaporated instantly. It wasn’t that he was doing anything guilty, he just felt guilty and who could blame him? After all, he was personally involved in attempting to perpetrate one of the greatest moral outrages in history, including the invention of Pot Noodles. Anyone would feel guilty.

‘Oh yeah, what do you want?’

Sly was making no further effort at flirtatious charm. He didn’t care if it was Marilyn Monroe on the other end of the line, she was a journo and the last thing on earth he wanted right now was interest from journos.

‘Uhm-uhm, we-we at-at the-the FT-FT,’ Linda said, the line had suddenly got worse and she was trying to ignore the off-putting echo of her own voice coming back at her as it bounced around the globe.

‘We were wondering why you’re selling so much of your stuff-stuff.’ She had not meant to put it as frankly as that, she had meant to speak briskly of ‘asset stripping’ and ‘large scale dumps’, but the echo, and the fact that she was actually talking to the man himself, had pretty much thrown her. Not half a much as she had thrown Sly though. What the fuck did she have on him?

He was sufficiently shaken to make a big mistake. He started to deny something that clearly she had already established.

‘Selling my stuff? Come on, what are you talking about?’ Sly realized as he spoke that with this tack he would hang himself. The bitch wouldn’t have phoned him if she didn’t have something. Sly turned mid-sentence, ‘Listen lady, I don’t know who you are, or even why I’m talking to you, but you’d better get back to the woman’s page, OK? Do some fashion stuff or something. Selling? I’m rationalizing, OK? Dodging and weaving, pulling out, putting in. Nobody hits a moving target and you can quote me. Now I’ve really got to…’

Sly’s second mistake was trying to patronize Linda. He guessed it as he was doing it. People who got to work for the Financial Telegraph, especially women, couldn’t be bullshitted as easily as that.

‘Mr Moorcock,’ replied Linda, now feeling a lot better, ‘Mr Moorcock, you have dumped a ouija board factory, two local newspapers, a pharmaceutical lab, part of an oil-well, a chain of sweetshops, a TV station in Papua New Guinea, electronics, fertilizer, weapons, do I have to go on? And yet I cannot detect a single reinvestment. You must have over a hundred and fifty million Australian dollars in your wallet now.’

‘Woah! Hang on a minute here, Ms Reeve,’ snapped Sly, shaken. ‘What is this? Snooping? We have laws you know…’

‘The information is there for anyone who cares to look,’ Linda interrupted, thrilled that she seemed to have got to him. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’

Sly wanted to finish the conversation before he put his foot in it any further.

‘The information is there, my dear, now it’s up to you to interpret it. Let me give you a hint. I am a very rich man while you probably make no more than 20K sterling per annum. This is because I have ideas. I have ideas and you snoop. If I told you my ideas, maybe you’d be as rich as me, which is why I’m not going to tell you them. So far your facts are correct, I’ve flogged a few of my small holdings. But any peeping Tom could come up with that. Ring me back when you’ve figured out what I’m up to, baby. G’day from WA.’

He put the phone down and he was shaking.

His last shot had been good, Linda thought he sounded like a confident man with an idea to make money…maybe he was. On the other hand, she had definitely got to him at first, and there were the others…Her search would continue, to discover what, if anything, was going on and if there was one last edible choccy in the box.