The Wrecking Crew

CHAPTER 3

Charles Bettencourt loved speaking at Ivy League business schools. A beautiful aura of greed hung in the air, so thick he could smell it — hell, he could swim in it. These soft-handed, sharp-minded children of privilege read Liars Poker like an instruction manual, idolized bronzed Wall Street movers, and wanted life fast, dirty, and rich. They wanted to be the masters of the universe. They wanted it all.

He never did this pump-’em-up, leave-’em-wet speech for anything less than a full crowd, hungry adulators packing every available seat. Leaning forward in his too-small folding chair on the stage, he squinted his eyes at the darkened auditorium.

A self-made billionaire, Bettencourt was at the top of his career and he knew it. His adherents called him the man who’d conquered Silicon Valley, but his detractors preferred nicknames like ‘Pink Slip Charlie,’ ‘Bastard Bettencourt,’ or sometimes the unwieldy ‘Charles Wins-in-court’. So what if he’d jumped ship from hedge funds and cut a bloody swath through the California tech industry? Mergers, acquisitions, hostile takeovers, and financial maneuvers were all part of the game. Disruption wasn’t just for blue-collar autoworkers in Michigan anymore; the nerds had it coming just as much as anyone else. But to the media, Bettencourt was a dyed-in-wool, true-blue, goddamn American golden child. His prominence in tech had grown to prominence in everything — private security, energy, global freight, anything that mattered to the world he intended to shape in his own image.

The speaker — some Harvard blowhard who hadn’t been real-world relevant since the ’90’s tech bubble — was wrapping up a second lap on his effusive and wholly unnecessary introduction, lapping up the impatient attention of the audience as if it was his own.

Besides him, a well-coiffed lawyer leaned over to whisper in Bettencourt’s ear.

“I know this is bad timing,” said the lawyer, “but the Conglomerate needs to talk. Soon.”

He frowned deeply. He’d rather stay in the moment, look across the audience, see all the young people who wanted to found the next billion-dollar empire. Even the mention of the word Conglomerate sent a feeling through his spine with which he was thoroughly unfamiliar — fear.

“Make an excuse.”

“They don’t like excuses,” protested his lawyer. “You know the types of people we’re dealing with here.”

“Make a convincing excuse,” Bettencourt snapped.

“And with no further ado or apologies,” said the speaker with a flourish. “President and CEO of Bettencorps, Charles Bettencourt!”

The crowd didn’t applaud. They roared.

Bettencourt rose to his feet, his handsome face catching every ray from the expensive stage-lighting system. He flashed a white grin — not Hollywood white, but white enough to pop in press photos — and waved at the audience with one expansive flourish. Catching the eye of an attractive blonde in the front row, he winked, enjoying her reaction as she visibly blushed.

“I was a marine archaeology undergrad,” he began. “Never mind that only about one in twenty of my cohort would even get a faculty position, and the rest of us would spend the rest of our lives selling life insurance and arguing about feudalism with all the other former humanities majors.”

He knew exactly what to say, just the right mix of self-immolation and cruelty. Every word hurled right into the audience’s ears to rattle around for a millisecond before being pumped out into their brains as the next billion is yours.

“So the US Navy had recently declassified a treasure trove of bathymetric data of the deep sea. I’m talking really deep, like two, sometimes three miles beneath the surface. My academic advisor was determined to suck all the grant money out of this great white elephant he could. He puts these old — and I mean old — printout data sheets through the computer, and the computer starts spitting out possible archaeological shipwreck targets. I mean, we had an entire storage locker of these rolled-up photo-paper printouts, so I’m stuck feeding these through the scanner for an entire summer.

“And then we find something, a great target. It’s on the old Spanish treasure routes. We don’t know much, but the computer says two important things. One — this target is made of wood. Two — this target is old. We had ourselves a mission.

“So the professor sets me on a two year circle-jerk, where I spend sixteen hours a day writing grant proposals, analyzing depth charts, scoping equipment, busting my ass to try to get an exploration mission on the water. We scrimp, save, steal, and borrow, and eventually put together about two and a half million dollars. By the way — who here has a bigger trust fund than that?”

Nervously looking at each other for approval and laughing, a number of the students in the back slowly raised their hands. Legacies — he loved them, one big fat slab of cocky around a tiny-weenie bit of insecurity, all of them. Like they had to get permission from their neighbor to be wealthy. Wait for it. Here comes the punchline.

“Keep those hands up, you rich fuckers. OK, next question. How many of you got that trust fund because your parents were archaeologists?”

Yeah, they were laughing now, especially the jacket-wearing, dinner-club legacies in the back.

“So we raise our two and a half million dollars, which, incidentally is peanuts money, and we book this ancient Ukrainian deep survey vessel and a couple of rusting Russian mini-subs and take them into the middle of the ocean. I get to be on one of the first dives to see this wreck. Naturally, I’m creaming my khakis for a chance to see this target, the deepest wooden shipwreck ever discovered. We launch this old submersible into the water. Takes five and a half hours to descend to the bottom of the ocean. We reach about 17,000 feet deep and start searching for our shipwreck site. Another three hours pass, batteries are already about halfway expended. It’s like an alien world down there, rolling dunes of mud and silt, not much visibility, a bunch of weird fish all around, not that we cared about them. That’s how narrow-minded I was. I was probably surrounded by species that had never been discovered before and may go extinct before they’re ever classified, and I didn’t give a shit because I was an archaeologist, and all that weird fish stuff was for biologists.

“After about three, three and a half hours of searching, eating nothing, breathing stale air and pissing into bottles, we see the shipwreck. It’s like the greatest moment of my life, right? Like my first cigarette, my first lay, and my first time behind the wheel all in one, right?

“Let show you what I was looking at,” he said, and clicked the massive projector on. It hummed for a moment and a grainy, low-resolution image flickered onto the screen. The audience strained to make out the foggy picture. It was still from one of those old analog magnetic tapes, bad quality made even worse by time. Squinting, one could sort of make out the curve of a rotten ship hull, green coppering and exposed nails from where the wood had been eaten away. Rum bottles and preserved coconuts spilled out of the bulging, disintegrating hull.

“Well, we found a ship’s chronometer, a few gold and silver coins, a ‘brace’ of pistols — that means a pair, future MBAs — and a telescope. And a bunch of other junk, the historic equivalent of a Walmart delivery truck.”

He clicked the remote rapid-fire, snapping through photos of all of the described artifacts in front of bland white backgrounds with tiny rulers for scale.

“I actually had all these artifacts tracked down and bought recently. When the invoice came in, I realized I’d spent more on a 1945 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild Jeroboam wine than I’d spent on the entire collection. At least I drank the wine with an excellent steak tartare. This shit just takes up wall space in the bathroom of my yacht.”

Even Bettencourt couldn’t help but chuckle at the laugh line, but the audience positively loved it.

“But none of that is important to my story,” he continued. He clicked the projector off for dramatic effect. “The first thing I saw wasn’t this three-hundred-year-old wreck. It was this—” He clicked the projector back on. The new image was an extreme close-up of the underside of the shipwreck’s hull. A single modern-day aluminum can was nestled underneath the decaying wreck.

“That, my friends, is called intrusion. Some hapless jackass finished his soda and tossed it off the side of his fishing boat. It filled with water and fell three miles until it hit a three-hundred-year-old-wreck. Bull’s-eye!”

The audience chuckled a little, but they held back. They couldn’t tell where he was going with the story. Were they supposed to be dismayed at the sacrilege?

“Suddenly, it all made sense,” he said. “There is nothing untouched by progress. That Pepsi can represented more accomplishment than I’d ever make as an archaeologist. Should that wreck be there in another hundred years, the archaeologists won’t explore it. It will be explored by the industrialists, people like you and me, because it will be our machines that we build down there. The humanities are a true Darwinian dead-end; they do nothing for social progress. The Sistine Chapel may be old, but who cares? A static, moldering monument. Sure, it may be pretty — but I’d tear it down in a second to build a skyscraper. Give me industry, give me progress. In a thousand years nobody will remember the writers. Nobody will remember the philosophers, or the soldiers, or the doctors. They’ll only remember the entrepreneurs. Those who build the future, not those who navel-gaze about the past.”

He stopped for the reaction this time. Smile. Deep breath. He always loved the part where he got to Anconia Island, his crowning achievement.

He’d built a world free of bureaucratic interference, free of governmental taxation and confiscation, free of judicial malpractice and corruption, free of parasitic collectivism, and the thick, chafing ropes of anti-capitalistic leeches. His world, one of truly unleashed free enterprise, embodied by a glittering man-made island rising from the ocean. True creation, an act reserved for the gods alone.

Of course not every potential financier could understand the project, nor stomach the risks. Enter the Conglomerate.

Ah yes… the Conglomerate. An organization of a thousand shifting faces, shell corporations and nested subsidiaries, offshore bank accounts and untraceable assets.

Truth be told, Bettencourt knew only three things about the Conglomerate. First, they operated with total anonymity. Second, they had unimaginable quantities of money. And third, they were very serious. Serious in the wake-up-dead sense of the word.

He purposefully directed his mind away from his increasingly impatient backers to continue his blockbuster speech.

“Okay, everybody wants to know about the Anconia Island project, right? It’s the culmination of everything that Bettencorps is about. You know we do tech manufacturing, we do contracting, subsidiaries, private security, blah, blah, blah. But what we really do is globalization. Products, talent, energy — anything that needs to be moved from one place to other. From supply to demand, it’s really that simple. But what does that all have in common?”

He pursed his lips, allowing the question to linger on the audience. Energy? Some of them whispered to each other. Communication? Or maybe the information economy? That had to be it—

“Security,” he announced. “Security is the lynchpin, the prerequisite, the quintessential element to the structure of economy and existence.”

He didn’t wait for a reaction, just clicked the projector forward again. A grainy cell-phone video played, the lens wet with ocean spray. The shaking image showed a shivering, pale young man as he bled out onto the black carbon-fiber deck of a sleek experimental trimaran racing yacht.

“My name is Klea Ymeri,” spoke a tinny voice through the projector’s speaker. Her voice shook in time with the shaking of the camera — the voice came from the woman filming. The camera panned up, and the audience could now watch the experimental racer cutting through crashing waves on the open sea with dangerous speed. Too fast for the video compressor to keep up, the camera whipped around 180, spotting two grainy skiff speedboats in hot pursuit. Muzzle-flashes erupted from the closer speedboat, followed by the sharp crack of high-powered rifles. The camera hit the deck as splinters of carbon fiber cut through the air in sharp relief against the spray of the ocean. Suddenly, Klea’s face occupied the entire camera frame — too close, too intimate for the silent audience. Though a pretty girl with short dark hair and a soft pale face, the look in her eyes brought the shocking intensity of the video to an uncomfortable level.

“My name is Klea Ymeri, aboard the vessel Horizon,” she repeated with more urgency this time. “We’re under attack at ten-mark-seventeen-mark-fifty-four north, fifty-six-mark-forty-seven-mark-twenty-one east. Kyle Harrison and Molly-Anne Ivanovich are dead. Colin White is badly wounded and I can’t stop the bleeding. We won’t be able to hold out long, they will overtake us in minutes. By their actions I do not believe they mean to take us alive. It will be over soon. Tell my family I love them.”

The transmission ceased, leaving her terrified face frozen in the frame.

“Clever girl,” mused Bettencourt. “Her presence of mind is amazing. This took place off the Horn of Africa, a few hundred miles from the failed nation-state formerly known as Somalia.”

The audience murmured, not sure if he’d made a joke or not.

“She stuck the phone in an empty mayo jar,” he explained. “Tossed it overboard. The US Navy traced the signal, found the phone. She’s been missing and presumed dead for about four years now. That vessel? You may not remember, but the Horizon was an MIT project, an electric-biodiesel hybrid meant to set a round-the-world record.

“And the handsome young man bleeding to death in the first frame? He’d proposed to her the day the Horizon left port. They were going to have their engagement party the day they arrived in back in Bordeaux. Presence of mind, intelligence, bravery, and devotion… this means nothing if you don’t have security.

“So we played this to the International Mercantile Shipping Association. Got us the first contract to secure the area with a private security force.”

He let the crowd sit for a moment as he prepared to change the subject. Too easy. He could make them feel sadness just as quickly as ecstasy, fear as quickly as hope.

“Think these pirates respect international waters? Hospital ships? Missions of mercy or exploration? No, they respect force. A borderless world, that’s where we’re headed,” he mused.

“What about territorial integrity? The rights of the indigenous peoples?” shouted a female voice from the audience. Bettencourt snapped around, but couldn’t identify the source of the interruption. He smiled.

“Sister, the automobile was tough on the carriage industry.”

“What about quality of life? Raising social standards?” she shouted back. Ah, yes — the attractive brunette near the back. Why did the activist types always wear glasses?

“I love this topic,” he shouted. “Let’s pretend we focus on social justice nonsense. Bettencorp’s medical subsidiaries start paying their janitors enough to drive a Cadillac and retire at fifty-three. Guess what? We just made less profit. That means less investment. That means we don’t come up with a new cancer treatment. We don’t add the next drug to the AIDS cocktail. But at least you feel good about it because our low-level staff drive caddies they didn’t earn.”

“But—”

“One more word from you, young woman,” he said, pointing. “And I’m going to have to hire you. Then you’ll really be in trouble. Look, you’re also entitled to believe the world is flat.”

Wait for it — line it up — get ready to take that swing—

“And when you make your first billion, I’ll let you debate me all afternoon.” He shrugged at the chuckles and flipped to the next slide, the big reveal. It was a beautiful shot of open ocean with a massive city rising up out of the water like the lost civilization of Atlantis. He’d paid top dollar for the shot, flown the film crew out from Tokyo, put them on a top-of-the-line helicopter with a gyroscopically stabilized camera mount and high-definition video system. Light glinted off the ocean waves like rolling gold. It was, in a word, perfect.

Bettencourt spoke as the camera rotated around the oceanic megatropolis.

“This is Anconia Island. Started initially out of the security concerns we talked about earlier. The goal was to have a stable, permanent presence off the Horn of Africa — one that could provide economic opportunity, private security, and a workforce free of national interests. These structural underpinnings were actually three different massive oil-drilling platforms at one point, all scheduled for decommission. We dry-docked them in the South Pacific, decontaminated everything, stripped all the equipment off and built these office-building and condominium-style high-rises.

“Don’t let the glass fool you, these are built for tsunamis, lightning strike, even a class-four typhoon. Each building has a specialized function. We have our own greenhouse and hydroponics gardens. We have deep-water portage and a jet-rated floating runway. We’ve already developed plans to expand that runway to accommodate passenger aircraft. Communication to the outside world is handled by a dedicated communication satellite, capable of supporting sustained traffic of 800 megabytes per second per terminal—that’s right, per terminal. That’s a must-have, considering that the population of Anconia is now approaching 3,000 souls. This includes a large contingent of IT personnel supporting Fortune 500 companies nationwide, including offshore software development, banking and datastorage. All of this in a non-extradition, non-national, untaxed environment where nobody can be involuntarily subpoenaed. We sublet fully forty percent of our facilities to like-minded corporate interests, and we intend to double the size of Anconia Island every five years for the next two decades.

“Anconia Island is already a shining beacon of security and prosperity for a lawless region. The local Somalis are a little slow to get on board, given a complex combination of political and cultural factors. But Bettencorps has a standing invitation to the Somali people. If you remember nothing else, remember this — we want them to be a primary beneficiary of this great endeavor. We intend to train them, we intend to employ them, and unlike the UN and their revolving-regime neighbors, we’re in the region to stay. Already we’ve set forth several strategic alliances with the local powers and engaged in some of the first sustained economic development in Somalia in more than a decade.

“I have a vision,” he said. “I want masses of Somali professionals commuting to Anconia Island for extended rotations. I want satellite facilities on the Somali mainland. I want white-collar workers, blue-collar workers, green-collar workers. I believe the people of the Horn of Africa are the single largest, untapped economic resource on the planet and they’re just waiting to be unleashed on the world.”

Time for the big wrap-up. He had them all, every single wide-eyed student.

“And here’s why I think this. You want to leave an impact on the world? Don’t write a textbook; invest in a company you believe in. Don’t graduate and become a literary critic; quit school and start a business. Don’t be an academic; be an entrepreneur. You, quite literally, own the future. And the only type of progress is economic progress.”

Cheers streamed from the audience, and he raised both hands in triumph. He wouldn’t be taking any questions, not today.

“Thank you everybody!” he shouted. And with that, Charles Bettencourt took three steps down to the auditorium floor. The pressing crowd surrounded him, massing together to try and get an up-close look, a handshake, the chance to shout a too-brief question.

A tiny, unwelcome thought crept into the back of his mind. Unknown to the enthralled crowd, the success of Anconia was far from assured. The glittering skyscrapers atop the island were still less than half occupied and the entire project painfully over-budget. To make matters worse, the Conglomerate had begun to demand certain… concessions.

An attractive young woman — a blonde? No, there were too many people for him to get a good look — pressed her entire soft hand into the immaculate woolen pocket of his tailored designer suit. She left something small and crisp behind as she withdrew her hand, no doubt a phone number.

Through the questions, the handshakes, the congratulations and the half-joking job requests, Charles couldn’t help but notice that nobody asked him what the local Somalis called Anconia Island.

They called it the Death Star.