This Other Eden (39 page)

‘Perhaps
the Minister would rather that the disaster had happened in Lille? Or Ostend?
In the English Channel, maybe?’

As it
happened, the minister, who lived in Brussels, would definitely have preferred
that, but he did not say so.

‘The
point is that the rupture of the tankers has happened. As for years we have
been warning that it would. If it had not happened on this trip, then it would
have been next time, or the time after. The people of Europe should be thankful
to the activists of Mother Earth who diverted this deadly load into the very
seat of government. At least now those whose greed, idleness or complacency
have led to this terrible disaster are having to stand face to face with the
results.’

‘Well,
now, you see that’s absolute nonsense,’ the relevant junior minister said. ‘As
I can make perfectly clear by explaining to you seventeen simple points. Let me
take the second point first, because it relates partly to the first, and partly
to the third. I shall, of course, return to the first point in due course
before proceeding with my other points.’

The
relevant junior minister was very good at damage control. He had scarcely got
halfway through his points before the cameras had been switched off and
everyone including the Natura spokesperson had given up and gone for a drink.

No
direction home.

Puffing and panting and
generally making heavy going of it (Judy’s asymmetric legs were not at all
suited to this type of thing), Judy arrived at a small café which was situated
on the corner of a tiny square on the cross- roads of four little streets.

All the
bottled water had of course been sold, so Judy had to settle for a hot
chocolate with whipped cream, warm cognac and a great big double chocolate
brioche. Holding a handkerchief over his face between swigs and bites, he sat
down to collect his thoughts, some of which had sunk so low that he had to fish
them out of the turn-ups on his trousers. Assessing his situation, he
recognised it for what it was, which was not good. The crossroads upon which the
little café stood offered, Judy thought, something of a metaphor for his life,
for that too was at a crossroads. Unfortunately, it was a crossroads off which
all the roads were cul-de-sacs. Look at it from whatever direction he might,
and Judy tried them all, even standing on a table in the corner of the room to
do it, he was in something of a pickle. A solitary pickle, alone, despised and
unloved, the sort of pickle that is normally only found in a hamburger and
which has to be fished out in order to render the burger edible.

Which
road should Judy take? The road back? It would not be easy, his old colleagues
in the FBI no doubt considered him a traitor and a stoolie and who could blame
them? Judy had, after all, assisted in the escape of a suspected terrorist from
a foreign police force, thus disgracing the entire Bureau. All things
considered, the road back looked rocky. Judy searched for an alternative route.

Could
he take a road forward? No obvious ones sprang to mind. His new colleagues in
Mother Earth would no doubt now also consider him a traitor and a stoolie.
Again, this could scarcely be described as unreasonable. He had, after all, not
only attempted to arrest their Facilitator, but had also accused them of going
about their business with a callous and cynical immorality which made
Machiavelli look like Julie Andrews.

How on
earth had he got himself into such a fix? How had he managed to alienate
absolutely everybody and achieve absolutely nothing?

Judy
rehearsed again in his mind that series of suspicions and conclusions which had
brought him to the lonely position in which he found himself. He had burnt his
boats at the FBI because he had believed he had sufficient circumstantial evidence
to conclude that Mother Earth were agents provocateurs. Nobody at the Bureau
would take his conclusions seriously, so he had been forced to act on his own.
He had successfully infiltrated a Mother Earth unit and correctly predicted
that during their next mission a massive environmental disaster would occur.

After
that, sadly, his theories had collapsed. Rosalie was innocent, he was sure of
that. Her surprise at his accusations had been genuine, and besides, both she
and her unit had been well away when the disaster occurred. What had happened?
Could they have carried out the sabotage before Judy had intervened? It was not
possible, the transporters had been flying along the highway only moments
before Judy had made Rosalie order a withdrawal. Could there perhaps have been
a second unit involved, of which he knew nothing? Perhaps, although Judy could
see no obvious reason for an extra terrorist presence. Had he not intervened,
Rosalie’s unit would have been quite capable of carrying out the sabotage. But
he had, and they didn’t.

Was it
sabotage at all? Could it possibly have been a coincidence that made the first
tank rupture? A genuine accident? No, Judy would not credit it. He had come to
Europe predicting exactly what had happened and it had happened, the fact that
he seemed to have erred on who the culprits might be did not detract from the
fact that, yet again, the pattern had been maintained.

Somebody
had sabotaged that convoy, and since Judy no longer believed that it had been
Rosalie’s unit, that meant that it had been tampered with before they had
seized it. What was going on? Judy did not realise it, but the clue was staring
him in the face.

Soap
internationale.

There was a TV on in the
corner of the bar. Judy’s eye was inevitably drawn towards it, reminding him
momentarily of his finest hour, his achievement in getting Rosalie away from
her Garda minders. Quite a stunt to have pulled off, and for what? Nothing. He
had completely lost the trust he had gained and he was no further towards the
truth.

The TV
was tuned to the omnipresent Tolstoy system. A simucast soap internationale was
playing. These were dramas that were made in English, in Los Angeles, and then
simultaneously dubbed into literally hundreds of languages by means of a
computerised, voice-sensitive translator. The computer ‘heard’ the American
actor speak and then, using a synthesiser with a vast vocabulary of words and
phrases, recorded by actors from other countries, it created new dialogue. Once
an actor had comprehensively loaded his voice into the synthesiser it was
possible for him or her to dub shows for ever, without ever being there, or in
many cases even still being alive. Thus everybody in the world could now watch
the same soap at much the same times, also the same news and the same chat
shows. Everybody now heard and saw the same things. Even the French had all but
given up on attempting to defend cultural boundaries. It was simply impossible
to legislate against the myriad global ways in which information and imagery
could be delivered.

The key
to the mystery was about to be beamed into literally billions of homes in
hundreds of different languages, just as that key had been beamed in countless
times before. Somebody had to work it out some time. That somebody was Judy,
who was about to make a very big discovery, although not quite as big as the
consequences would be.

Global
marketing.

Judy idly began to count
the ‘product placements’ that were featured within the soap internationale
drama. Soft drinks, designer clothes, cars. Some of the items, outside manufacturers
had paid to have featured, others were actually made by companies owned by
Tolstoy and his associates. The term ‘conflict of interests’ had long since
become an obscure footnote in legal history. As Plastic Tolstoy himself had
said during one of the last great court battles to prevent insider trading:
‘Hey! If a conflict of interests bothers you, just let me buy everything, you
won’t see no conflict then.’

These
days, product placement was considered an art form in itself. There were annual
awards in which the drama directors who had most copiously featured their
bosses’ products were honoured. It had got subtle enough for negative placement
to have become a commonly used technique.

‘Did
you see how every time the Slasher killed a girl with a broken bottle I used a
Pepsi
bottle?’ the proud young director of
Slasher
23 would boast. ‘But
the
cops
only drink Coke.’

‘No, I
didn’t notice that,’ the proud young director’s friend would say.

‘Exactly!’
the proud young director would shout in triumph.

‘You
didn’t
see
it, but it was there, and believe me, in your subconscious,
Pepsi ain’t so wholesome any more.’

Judy
noted that one of the groovy young characters in the soap internationale that
he was watching wore a Claustrosphobe T-shirt. Claustrophobe was a clothing
company set up by Tolstoy to exploit the cynicism and bleak humour that young
people had developed about being potentially the last generation on Earth. They
marketed jeans and T-shirts with ironic slogans on them like ‘Better a live rat
than a dead self-righteous bastard’ and ‘Listening to greenies won’t help you
live longer, it’ll just seem longer’.

It was
a source of near despair to Natura that their constant appeals to adolescents
to consider that the end of the world was nigh had actually served to create a
‘Well, fuck that then’ attitude amongst kids. In fact, that was one of
Claustrophobe’s best-selling lines, a sweatshirt depicting a slimey dead Earth
with the simple phrase ‘Well, fuck that then’ embossed underneath it.

Tolstoy’s
clothes on Tolstoy’s TV show. Judy had a vague suspicion that it might still be
illegal to so blatantly self-promote one’s own products but, short of shooting
down satellites, the law was impossible to enforce anyway, so the matter was
entirely academic.

His
mind was wandering. Judy knew that he should be concentrating on planning his
next move, but the TV continued to exercise its mesmeric effect on him. The
adverts came on, as they did every ninety seconds at this time of the day.
First up there was an ad for the very clothes that Judy had just been musing
over.

‘They’re
getting cheeky,’ Judy thought to himself as the sexy Euro kids cavorted on the
screen in Claustrophobe T-shirts and hats. ‘That bastard Tolstoy just can’t
lose. The ads are just an extension of the programme. Control the information,
control the ads and sell anything you want.’

Hard on
this thought came a newsbreak. The terrible toxic spills in the European
capital were of course the top story, and Judy forlornly watched the footage in
the ludicrous hope that some clue as to the source of the disaster might
emerge. He saw none. After the news there was another commercial break, and
suddenly, while he watched the first advert, Judy got his clue. The penny
finally dropped.

Unwelcome
prodigal.

Judy now knew which road
he had to take. He drained his cognac, finished his brioche and went off to
make his peace with the FBI.

He did
not relish returning. He had had no contact with them since absconding with
Rosalie at Dublin airport, having avoided any form of communication on the not
unreasonable grounds that if they had known where he was, they would have
instantly arrested him. However, Judy was pretty certain that he had finally
worked out what was going on and he needed the Bureau’s resources to prove it.

The
preparations which Judy made before facing his old boss were both thorough and
unpleasant. He dropped all of his ID down a drain, a drain now so filled with
dangerous poisons that the chances of the documents ever seeing the light again
were zero. Next, Judy rolled around a bit in the wet gutter in order to give
himself a dishevelled appearance then, finally and most painfully, he selected
the toughest looking fellow in the toughest looking bar he could find and threw
a glass of beer in his face.

Crawling
out into the street ten minutes later, his eyes blackened and his nose broken,
Judy was soon picked up by the police.

‘I am
an FBI agent who has just escaped from terrorists. I demand to see the American
consulate.’

And so
it was that Judy made his way back to the US where the FBI placed him under
arrest and asked him to explain himself.

It did
not go down well.

‘You’re
actually trying to tell me,’ Klaw bellowed, ‘that this
woman
dragged you
on to the luggage conveyor, off the luggage conveyor, through a huge crowd full
of soldiers and cops and yet you were unable to stop her!’

‘That
is correct, sir,’ said Judy through his puffed and swollen lips.

‘No,
Schwartz,’ Klaw insisted, ‘it is not correct. I do not believe it, not even you
could fail so spectacularly in your duty. I believe that for reasons of your
own you helped this girl escape.’

‘Reasons,
sir? What reasons could I possibly have for helping a terrorist?’

Klaw
hurled the photos of Rosalie down upon his desk.