Stark (27 page)

129: ON THE RUN

D
uring the few short hours that this was going on, Chrissy had continued to chew over any bit of information about financial dealings that she could get her hands on. There wasn’t much because the depression was biting deeper and deeper. It had taken grip with astonishing speed. The world seemed to have just shrugged its shoulders and admitted defeat. Maybe it was the weather. One article did catch Chrissy’s eye. It told how the lucky country was attempting to shrug off the slump more quickly than anyone. Apparently, that brave and individualistic trouble-shooter, Silvester Moorcock, was not taking financial stagnation lying down. Chrissy jumped as she read Sly’s name…The article informed her that he had created a boom town in Western Australia by staggering everyone and starting the construction of a huge leisure complex in the desert. Further to this, it had just emerged that he had gone into co-operation with fellow Aussie Ocker Tyron, who was handling the shipping in of the enormous quantity of material and equipment required to build such a massive scheme from scratch.

Chrissy wondered…

Obviously no way were the world’s financiers going to unite to build a Kangaroo theme park. And, of course, the amount of money that had been syphoned out of the system, both before and during the crash, would have built Disneyland on the Moon…but it was something. It was the only significant financial activity to emerge since the crash and it involved at least two of the figures on Linda’s original list…She was nervous about bothering Toole again, especially with something even less concrete than what she had already given him, but she had to do something with her time. She had given up everything to pursue this investigation. And Toole had said that he would make a call for her…

She picked up the phone. It was a Donald Duck shaped phone which Chrissy had bought because, since all news is bad news, she figured she might as well get it from a cheery source. Cheering up this call was going to need more than a plastic duck…

‘Toole’s dead,’ said Donald, smiling hugely under his little sailor’s hat. The CIA had seen no reason for secrecy and hence informed Chrissy that Toole was dead, having taken his own life. It happened quite a lot in his business.

Chrissy was utterly terrified. She had been speaking to Toole only a few hours previously, there was absolutely no way on earth that he was suicidal. He must have met the same fate that Linda had. But, so quickly. Chrissy could not believe it; they had done it so quickly.

Clearly she had to get away immediately, far away. But where? How? It is difficult to formulate a plan when, all of a sudden, you realize that within minutes somebody may try to kill you. She tried to think as she ran about her apartment stuffing passport and credit cards into a bag; a few clothes, her notes. Her eyes fell on the newspaper she had been reading. West Australia was the single remaining avenue of investigation that remained to Chrissy; it was a long shot but she had to go somewhere. There was a ring at the door. Chrissy froze. It could be nothing; on the other hand, it could be her executioner.

Chrissy’s apartment was on the third floor, as she rushed down the fire escape she could hear the sound of her front door being smashed down. There was a cab rank at the corner of the street. Chrissy jumped in the first one.

‘JFK airport,’ she said.

‘Yeah, yeah. Everybody wants to go to the airport,’ said the cabby. ‘No one stays home no more. Mind you, in this neighbourhood, who can blame them? Blacks, spicks, I ain’t prejudiced, no way, but they’re so dirty, and the mugging and all…’

Even in her desperate state Chrissy realized that she was faced with the classic cab dilemma: do you risk the unpleasantness of telling the guy to stuff it? or do you bite your lip and make non-committal grunts. Normally Chrissy, like most people, would not have had the energy to speak up but she was in a reckless mood. ‘Listen, mister,’ she said, ‘I’m Jewish myself so just can the racist shit, OK?’

‘You’re so right, Lady,’ the cabbie replied. ‘The Jews are the worst, Christ, they should have stayed in Israel. Maybe Hitler had the right idea. Like I say, I ain’t prejudiced, but I do hate Jews.’

Chrissy gave up and tried to plan her escape.

She had just about enough cash for the cab. After that, plastic was her only currency and so it would not be possible to travel under a false name. Chrissy was already beginning to imagine her adversaries as totally omniscient, godlike in their power and penetration — which of course they were. She would have to use her American Diners Card though and hope that it would not be traced, otherwise she would certainly share Linda’s and Toole’s fate.

How alone she felt in that cab on the way to JFK. She knew something; and she knew nothing, and the driver was a bastard. She had no one to turn to, and even if she had, she would not have done so since contact with her appeared to be the kiss of death. That was the real isolation, she was on the run and as long as she remained alive she would not be able to contact family or friends. She had the plague, the black spot, she was a leper and an untouchable.

130: WAITING AND WONDERING

S
he got into the airport without incident or at least without being killed, because of course her present situation was one extended incident. Having stood in a Stars and Stripes Airline queue she got to a tickets and inquiries person just as she realized that she didn’t really know where she wanted to go. She presumed, correctly, that Bullens Creek would not be a destination covered by an international airline.

‘Yes, how may I help you, my name is Sandy, thank you for flying with Stars and Stripes, we will be pleased to assist you in any way we can, have a nice day.’ The girl in the uniform smiled so wide it was demonic; the parched over-tanned skin, the bones sticking out of the half-starved face, and the smile, a row of gleaming tombstone teeth in a blood red mouth. To Chrissy, struggling to contain her terror, the Stars and Stripes lady was like death itself; a skull in a pretty little uniform. In actual effect she was just a quite good looking woman of thirty-eight, making the major mistake of trying to look like a very good looking woman of twenty-one.

‘Pardon,’ stammered Chrissy.

The Stars and Stripes lady gave her the shorter version of official Stars and Stripes consumer friendly approach. ‘My name is Sandy, how may I help you?’

Chrissy’s mind was blank.

‘Uhm…Oh God…Sandy, have you ever heard of a place called Bullens Creek?’

‘Oh, now, yes I do recall, I’m sure I do…’

‘Great, one ticket please, one way,’ said Chrissy, relief flooding over her. ‘Well, I believe it’s in Texas, now you would want our domestic —’

‘It’s somewhere in Western Australia!’ shouted Chrissy, expecting, every second, a man in a slouch hat to come and shoot her. ‘I want to go somewhere in Western Australia.’

‘Well I’m sorry, Madam,’ said Sandy, switching to the official Stars and Stripes ‘now I hope you’re not going to cause a scene’ voice. ‘But you’ll have to be a little more specific than that.’

Chrissy’s mind was a blank. ‘Listen, I’ve forgotten. What’s the capital of Western Australia? Come on, that’s where I want to go.’

‘Madam, I’m not at all sure you know where you want to go.’ The voice was now pure ‘if you’re a nut I’m calling a cop’. ‘Perth!!’ blurted Chrissy, with blessed relief. ‘I want a ticket to Perth.’ As it turned out, Stars and Stripes only covered the eastern states of Australia and Chrissy was forced to join another queue at the National Australia desk.

She discovered that the first available flight was still eighteen hours away. On inquiry she also discovered that it was unlikely to be full. This was important. She wanted to buy the ticket at the last possible minute, eighteen hours would give them plenty of time to trace her credit card transaction and stop her boarding the plane. The same logic meant that she had to presume that they would be waiting for her at the other end, but Chrissy could only take things one step at a time.

She bought a hat and some dark glasses and sat for fifteen and a half terrible hours in a coffee bar, eating the occasional Danish pastry — which is catering speak for a lump of dough and a blob of sugar and is about as Danish as Tandoori chicken.

Chrissy hoped that they had not thought to check out the cab drivers.

131: A BIT OF LUCK

S
mallish, dark complexion, in a hurry?’ Durf’s thug was asking Chrissy’s ex-driver.

‘Hey, hey, hey, what is this, the third degree?’ the driver replied. ‘Sure I picked up a dame, but I just drive them, OK? I don’t feel the need to commit them to memory.’

‘Come on! It’s only been an hour, think! Was it a Jewish woman?’ the thug added. ‘No way, pal, you got the wrong cab, the dame hated Jews. She told me.’

132: THEORIZING

A
s Chrissy sat, she pondered again, as she had done so often before, what could possibly be the cause of the unholy alliance that she was now quite certain she had uncovered. The swift dispatch of Toole proved to her beyond all doubt that she was on to something very big indeed.

What were they up to? And whatever it was, were they doing it at Bullens Creek? And even if they were and she discovered it, what could she do? Chrissy was quite certain that she would be dead very soon whatever happened.

There were lots of policemen about. How she longed to fling herself on the protection of one, but protection from what? A dinner party in Los Angeles months before? Maybe another one in Singapore? Linda died in a burglary, Toole killed himself. The best she could hope for would be to be locked up as a lunatic. Besides, she had no reason to believe that she could trust the police, her adversaries’ tentacles seemed to be everywhere, her CIA liaison had lasted a matter of hours.

No, there was no doubt about it, she was alone, alone and mystified; starting at shadows and expecting every waitress to stab her with a poisoned plastic fork.

Chrissy tried to hypothesize what advantages the world’s biggest producers could gain by starting some kind of war. It felt distinctly foolish even to be considering the possibility, but what else could she work on?

Collecting her thoughts, Chrissy made a concerted effort to dedramatize the situation; to come up with a slightly less catastrophic theory to fit the information that she had. After all, the murders meant nothing, people killed for money, it didn’t mean that they were trying to change world history.

Putting aside the strange purchases that some of the people who had been at the LA dinner party had made since the crash, it seemed possible to Chrissy that they might be trying to set up some kind of illegal investment bank to buy out or out-produce competition and create some kind of hybrid giant multinational; a world super-company without a nationality. If this were the case, secrecy would obviously be essential because it would, of course, ride rough-shod over trade and monopoly legislation worldwide. Besides this, it would take the competition out of capitalism; it would be a kind of communism for billionaires. Try as she might, Chrissy could not bring herself to see much in this theory. And there was the rocket fuel and the guidance systems…Australia…were they going to hold the Japanese to ransom? Blow them up? The Japanese dominated so completely in almost all the new industries, their removal would be a huge new profit stimulus to everyone else. But she knew there were Japanese businessmen at the Los Angeles dinner…Of course that didn’t necessarily matter, capital knew no patriotism; that was for workers, to keep them working. Chrissy had lost count of the number of millionaires who lived in tax exile, or had even changed citizenship in order to get over local investment laws. That famous citizen of the world, Rupert Murdoch — a man who owns newspapers that preach arch patriotic xenophobia in their individual countries — had taken US citizenship with the drop of a hat in order to penetrate the US media.

Chrissy’s head was spinning, she could no longer get bombs off her mind. Maybe it was the apocalyptic nature of the newspapers she bought in her long long wait. The French power station disaster dominated for the day but the sea-level thing was still big news. It was getting higher and what’s more, the floating scum slick had reappeared. That one wasn’t going away either, the record high temperatures of the previous Northern summer had wiped out half the US cereal crop and now it looked like European agriculture was going to be contaminated as far as the wheat bowl in the Ukraine for years to come. What arable land remained in the world was going to have to be farmed more intensely; which would mean more chemical fertilizers; which meant more nutrients getting swept into the sea, thus feeding the microscopic algae, who multiply into the floating glob and suffocate the sea. There was a huge picture in one of the papers of the mid-Atlantic, and poking out of the slime that covered it were the fins and tails and noses of a huge school of dead dolphins. The caption noted that under the slime were literally millions of dead fish and various sea creatures.

It being such a long wait, Chrissy finally got around to buying the English papers that were stocked at the airport. She was relieved to discover that The Princess of Wales had been shopping and that lovely Mandy, seventeen, thought feminists were silly killjoys and she was flattered if men admired her body.

Contemplating the accumulating natural disasters, Chrissy again found herself wondering whether the sick old world would last long enough for whoever it was, to do whatever it was, they were going to do. But that was silly. ‘They’ would think of something and the world would be OK — ‘they’ of course were scientists. At that moment, all over the world, scientists were waking up and wondering what they were going to do. They were looking at a snowball. It seemed like only yesterday that they had held that snowball in their fists; they could crush it, shape it, control it. They turned away for a minute and suddenly the fucker was the size of a house, hurtling towards them, too big to hold and too big to control.

But Chrissy herself had more pressing problems to occupy her mind as the hours crawled by in the coffee lounge at JFK. Maybe they would try to hold the world to ransom; maybe Slampacker was going to demand of the world that they either ate more of his Chicken Slammers or he would nuke them?

What with trying to study every approaching face to see if it looked like an assassin, by the time Chrissy got up from the hard plastic chair to finally go and buy her ticket, her head hurt almost as much as her backside.