Apocalypse (31 page)

‘So why doesn’t he just use the thing to win the lottery?’ Ethan asked.

‘Because it would be too obvious,’ Purcell said, ‘and because Joaquin’s ambitions don’t stop at money. He has his eyes on changing the world, with him at its
head.’

‘How?’ Lopez asked. ‘Supposedly he’s all about helping the needy.’

‘That’s his cover story,’ Purcell replied, ‘and one he intends to stick with. However, his plan is not to just wait for disasters to come along so that he can sail in and
rescue the needy. His plan is to create the disasters himself, and become the savior of mankind.’

Olaf Jorgenson crouched low on the bow of his airboat as it drifted silently on the still water, ignoring the swarms of mosquitoes that hummed on the heavy air. Through the
swaying reed beds that rose like islands from the water, he watched as the big man with the eye-patch sat idly on the deck of his airboat and smoked a cigarette.

Olaf scanned the island ahead and guessed that the man’s two accomplices had gone ashore. He had recognized them both, the Americans who had chased him back in Miami. He could not
understand how they had arrived here in the Everglades before he had, but that could not be changed. Now his only thought was to overcome this unexpected adversity and complete his mission. Luck
had favored him and he had spotted their airboat several miles back as he searched the Everglades for Charles Purcell. The news feeds that Joaquin had accessed had not been accurate enough to
pinpoint the scientist’s location, but the images had been good enough to put Olaf within a few miles. Spotting the airboat with the two Americans aboard had been a shock initially, and then
an opportunity.

But there was a problem.

They had guided their boat with unerring accuracy to this one tiny spit of land marooned amidst the wilderness. That could only mean one of two things: that they had already been in contact with
Charles Purcell, or that somehow they had access to the same images as Joaquin Abell, visions of the future that had allowed them to find Purcell. Olaf could only assume that Joaquin’s
missing camera was what had enabled them to move one step ahead of him and find Purcell in the middle of nowhere.

Olaf would no longer be able to stay ahead of them. This had to be finished now, and then he would be forced to flee back to Joaquin’s yacht. Olaf intended to ensure that he took the
contentious camera with him before Purcell could hand it over to the authorities as evidence that would sink Joaquin, and with him, Olaf.

Olaf carefully used one of the emergency oars to push the airboat forward out of the dense reed bank, using his immense strength to shift the vessel and then letting the boat’s momentum on
the water do the work for him. The boat drifted silently across the lagoon, closing in on the big man in the boat.

It was rare for Olaf to encounter a man who was bigger than he was, and such an event required delicacy and planning. Much of Olaf’s impressive physique had been forged by the steroids he
had for years forced into his unwilling veins, and the gains he had made in musculature had been paid for by the weakening walls of his equally inflated heart. Olaf was incredibly strong, but was
only able to sustain his exertions for a short duration. As he had found out to his cost years before, his labored heart’s ability to pump oxygen into his grossly overgrown muscles failed him
after a few minutes and his strength vanished as swiftly as it had arrived.

A quick glance at the man ahead suggested that he was born large but did not work out. That might have satisfied Olaf, were it not for the large SEAL tattoo adorning the man’s shoulder.
Impressive physical fitness and an almost psychotic will to succeed meant that this opponent would be incredibly dangerous. Worse, Olaf could not shoot him without alerting his companions.

Only one thing was in Olaf’s favor. He was approaching from behind and to the man’s right, the side obscured by the eye-patch he wore. The big man reached down into a cooler by his
side and lifted out a bottle of liquor. Olaf smiled, waiting and watching as the man took a deep mouthful from the bottle and wiped his lips across the back of his forearm. A drinker. His reactions
would be slowed, his judgment impaired.

Olaf looked down into the water around him. Although the surface was smooth and reflected the blue sky above, he knew that alligators and snakes swarmed in the murky depths below. To slip into
the water now could be tantamount to suicide, and even if he were able to reach and board the boat ahead, doing so would quickly alert the former Navy SEAL to his presence.

His only chance was to let his own boat slip alongside and then leap across and kill the man before he could turn to defend himself. Olaf quietly slipped a huge hunting knife from a sheath
secured beneath the shirt on his back, holding the blade low against his thigh as the boat drifted silently closer.
Ten feet. Eight feet. Six.

The man took another long pull on his bottle, scanning the forest ahead intently, and oblivious to Olaf’s approach.

Four feet. Two feet.

Olaf crouched down, his legs coiled like giant springs beneath him.

The boats’ hulls bumped together with a dull thump.

Olaf thrust himself forward, almost spread-eagled in midair as he hurled himself onto the other boat’s deck. The big man responded instantly and whirled in his seat, with the bottle
already swinging with impressive force and speed. The glass smashed into Olaf’s wrist with a jarring pain that sent the blade spinning from his grasp to splash into the water alongside the
boat.

Olaf slammed his head into the man’s chest like a freight train and they smashed down onto the deck together, the big man’s head cracking against the hard deck. Olaf saw his eyes
roll up into his sockets and he raised a chunky fist ready to finish him off. To his surprise, the SEAL exhaled a foul blast of alcohol fumes and his head rolled to one side.

Olaf screwed up his face in disgust. The impact had knocked the man out cold – he was probably already halfway there from the liquor. Olaf considered retrieving his knife from the water,
but there was no time.

Olaf made to roll the body off the boat and into the water, but then hesitated. The SEAL probably knew the Everglades well, enough so that he could be of use if any kind of law enforcement
showed up.

Instead, Olaf tore off a length of his own shirt and used it to gag the man. Then he stood up and walked across to the boat’s fuel tank, yanked the rubber feeder pipe out and strode back
to the unconscious man. He heaved him onto his front and bound his wrists with the length of rubber hose, then vaulted back across to his own boat and pushed away from the shore, once again letting
the momentum take him away downstream until he was sure nobody on the island would be able to hear the engine. Then he started it and turned the boat around, aiming for the far side of the island.
He would come at them from there, and his first priority would be to silence Purcell.

He looked down into the hull of the boat, where a Dragunov SVU-A sniper rifle lay in its case alongside an M-16 assault rifle and a small pile of hand grenades.

‘What’s Joaquin’s endgame?’ Ethan asked Purcell, as they stood on the little spit of land. ‘What’s he going to do with this black hole of
his?’

Charles Purcell sighed.

‘Joaquin’s great plan is to use the enormous energy contained within his black hole to create seismic events in the deep-water channel off the coast of Puerto Rico. It’s a
geologically volatile area, one that could easily be destabilized by the gravitational influence of Joaquin’s device.’

Ethan and Lopez shared a confused glance.

‘What’s the point of that?’ Ethan asked. ‘He’s going to wreck countries and hold them to ransom?’

‘No,’ Purcell shook his head. ‘He’ll appear to be the only private company willing to help developing countries hit by natural disasters because he’ll have foreseen
the disaster and will be on the scene first, which will continue to increase his international popularity. But even that’s not why he’s doing all of this.’

‘What then?’ Lopez asked.

‘Have either of you ever heard of something called economic shock-therapy?’

‘Economic enhancement, used to break communist state-controlled economies and replace them with capitalist free markets,’ Ethan replied. ‘It’s been the way forward for
decades.’

Purcell grinned tightly.

‘The way forward
is one way of putting it,’ he replied, ‘but it’s also been the cause of the collapse of economies, the murders of millions of people and the
transformation of governments into regimes as bad as anything communism had to offer.’

‘How come, and what’s this got to do with Joaquin’s insane plan?’ Lopez asked.

‘Joaquin’s plan is a natural extension of economic shock-therapy. It happened under Reagan here in America, under Thatcher in the UK, under Gorbachev in the former Soviet Union,
Pinochet in Chile . . . the list is endless.’

‘Wait,’ Ethan said, ‘you’re talking about privatization, right?’

‘At the expense of human rights,’ Purcell replied, ‘to the financial benefit of foreign governments and large corporations bent on securing the profits to be had. Essentially,
economic shock-therapy is used to take over entire countries and bind them to debts that they cannot possibly repay.’

Lopez began putting the pieces together.

‘You think that Joaquin is targeting countries hit by disasters, providing them with funds to rebuild, and then tying them into debts to IRIS.’

‘Precisely,’ Purcell nodded. ‘This is what economic shock-therapy is designed to do – to convert a struggling country’s economy to free-market capitalism, with
loans provided by organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. But in doing so the country in question is placed forever in thrall to world markets and its own debt. A
country’s natural resources are partitioned out to major corporations who have a stake in the funding, so the country loses its own natural wealth and the profits that it could have reaped
from those resources. No self-respecting government would admit to being so heavily indebted to a private company, so IRIS would remain free from public criticism of his charitable
status.’

‘Iraq,’ Ethan said, as images flashed in his mind of the destruction wrought there by the coalition forces. ‘Huge sums of money were handed to private companies by our
government to rebuild Iraq, but instead of hiring local people the big corporations went in with their own staff, did nothing, blamed their lack of activity on insurgent attacks and then left.
Before we even got there the oil fields had been divided up between international petrochemical companies. Iraq never needed rebuilding at all until it had the crap bombed out of it, and we saw
half of the population out of work, while foreign corporations kept their staff in luxury compounds. The supposed handing back of the oil fields to the Iraqi people is just a thin veneer, a
corporate subterfuge – America owns Iraq’s oil because we own their debt.’

‘And Joaquin Abell intends to do something similar,’ Lopez surmised, ‘but this time
causing
the catastrophe that drives the economic change.’

‘He intends to test the device off the coast of the Dominican Republic this afternoon,’ Purcell confirmed, ‘as a proof of concept to major figures in government and business.
Once he has their support he can move forward and start lobbying Congress. The lawmakers will easily be won over by the colossal advantage the IRIS device will bring to American supremacy, both
economically and militarily, and Joaquin will almost certainly engineer the nomination of a suitably obedient president. Anybody who opposes him will be branded in the same way that anybody who
opposes unbridled capitalism: as
un-American
or
unpatriotic.
Joaquin needs to make a lot of money to fill the gaps in IRIS’s accounts, to replace the money he has laundered over
the years to build his device. Holding entire countries to debt is the perfect way of doing that. If he achieves his goal, there will be nothing to stop him, because the missing money will have
been replaced, and IRIS will appear to be saving lives instead of destroying them.’

‘We need to stop him,’ Ethan said, ‘and we need your help to do it.’

‘You are already helping to stop it,’ Purcell replied.

‘By changing the future that you saw?’ Lopez asked.

‘No,’ Purcell smiled, ‘by fulfilling it. Joaquin Abell has the ability to see into the future, but just as he does not know the true scope of what he has achieved, so he does
not know of its limitations.’

‘What limitations?’ Ethan asked, frustrated. Time was running out.

‘His device can only capture light,’ Purcell explained. ‘There is no sound to accompany what he sees on these cameras. Therefore, the images can be taken out of
context.’

Purcell explained how the cameras viewed the rolling news feeds capturing not only footage of future events but also the anchors as they narrated at their desks.

‘He must rely on the scrolling text banners as much as the speaking anchors,’ Lopez guessed.

‘Exactly,’ Purcell agreed. ‘He always employs somebody on his team who can lip-read, which gets him some extra information from the reports; but often the image quality means
he must rely purely on the pictures.’

‘He still has the advantage,’ Ethan said.

‘Only to a certain extent,’ Purcell replied. ‘There’s something else about light that Joaquin does not know, and it could tip the balance in your favor, if only for a
while.’

‘We’re listening,’ Lopez said impatiently.

‘It’s called the Observer Effect,’ Purcell said, ‘one of the deepest mysteries of quantum theory. Put in the simplest terms, the world around us reacts to the act of us
looking upon it.’

‘It does what?’ Lopez uttered.

‘It reacts to us observing it,’ Purcell repeated. ‘A stream of photons of light fired through a single opening onto a screen that are not observed produce multiple patterns on
the screen instead of a single dot, as though they had passed through several openings and not one.’