Apocalypse

13

Joaquin Abell stood at the ceiling-to-floor windows of his penthouse suite and looked across the water to the Miami skyline, where the British Consulate dominated the scenery. The channel between the hotel and Bricknell Key, a wedge-shaped island just off the shore, glittered in the morning sunshine as it flowed south in deep eddies before trailing away to be lost into the endless ocean, like time irretrievably passing him by. Lost, but still there.

And at what price? The late, great Isaac Abell watched him from history and gave a deep and disapproving shake of his head. Joaquin swallowed thickly.

‘This is worth it, Father.’

The words spilled from Joaquin’s lips without conscious effort, as though even now he was compelled to justify himself. Once, he had been intimidated and dwarfed by the incorruptible morals of his father, which seemed too pristine and too perfect to follow. And then the towering monolith, the indestructible center of Joaquin’s entire universe, had toppled and fallen, his father’s life extinguished not by disease or years but by the insufferable disgrace of suicide.

‘What’s worth it?’

Joaquin bit his lip and cursed his melancholic reverie as he turned to see Katherine walk over to join him. She had changed into a smart, knee-length suit with a crisp white shirt, and as usual looked stunning.

‘Everything that IRIS is doing,’ he replied with a smile, as she slipped her arm round his waist.

‘And what is IRIS doing?’

‘Right now?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Right now it is on the verge of being able to not just come to the aid of those suffering natural disasters around the world, but to prevent those disasters from happening in the first place.’

Katherine looked at her husband for a few moments and smiled brightly, but a veil of confusion shadowed her green eyes.

‘You can’t save the entire world, Joaquin,’ she said. ‘It’s too big, even for you.’

Joaquin chuckled. ‘Never say that. Nothing is impossible.’

‘The government wouldn’t let you do it, even if you could,’ she replied. ‘You know that.’

Joaquin sighed.

‘They’re far too busy looking after themselves to be concerned with the needs of so many anonymous lives.’

It was that same truth that had so embittered Isaac Abell and sent him into alternating paroxysms of fury and despair over the callousness of humanity and the self-interest of those charged with representing and protecting their fellow human beings.

There were approximately seven billion people on earth, yet their lives were governed by just a few thousand politicians, many of whom struggled to serve honorably under the crippling demands of corporate capitalism, the twisting arm of the media and the machinations of countless narrow-minded pressure groups concerned only with their own personal or religious views of the world. Such idiocy enraged Joaquin as much as it had infuriated his father. No president, no matter how adept, could reach the White House without asserting their belief in God, despite the fact that nobody on earth even knew if any such deity existed. The media and major corporations funded the very campaigns that launched the careers of presidents, safe in the knowledge that their investments would result in policies carefully tailored to ensure their profits. The whole charade was a circus of self-serving, profiteering bullshit, democracy lost at the expense of civil liberties and justice.

And so Joaquin had infiltrated the halls of power and set his organization to work rebuilding lands devastated by natural disasters, ravaged by disease and scoured of life by the horrors of man’s endless conflicts. Contracts were awarded by Congress, often after months of lobbying by IRIS, to reconstruct entire cities shattered by war, while at the same time IRIS was fighting off the equally determined lobbying of corporate giants which sought those same contracts purely for profit. Those contracts that IRIS won were used to bring peace where once chaos had reigned. Over, and over, and over again. It was becoming harder and harder to secure funding for charitable ventures, forcing Joaquin to entertain ever more radical ideas to force the hands of the politicians.

‘Your mind’s wandering,’ Katherine interrupted his thoughts with a gentle jab to his shoulder, ‘and the look on your face suggests weighty concerns that you can’t solve alone.’

Joaquin sighed again.

‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘as ever. Maybe soon this will all come to an end, but for now I must try to convince the governor of Florida to lobby Congress to provide us with the funds we need to get supplies and medical equipment on the ground in Puerto Rico.’

Katherine’s features sagged.

‘I thought we were staying here for a few weeks,’ she complained. ‘I only have to defend IRIS against a civil action, for which there is no evidence, and then I’m done. The kids have barely seen you these last two months and school’s out in a couple of weeks. You promised them.’

Joaquin nodded and rubbed his temples.

‘I know, it just can’t wait. I’ll have to spend some time out on the reef at Deep Blue. It should only take a day or so at the most — in fact I know it will, and then we’ll be free.’

Katherine sighed. Joaquin could see in her eyes that, despite her disappointment, she understood that the work he did took precedence over their own needs. One more day was often the difference between life and death for those in need. A delay in funding, or one of the infuriating legal barriers that often blocked IRIS’s access to disaster areas, could result in the loss of thousands of lives.

‘What’s so important, Joaquin?’ she asked him. ‘What did Sandra say to you this morning? And why do you need to be out on the coral reefs?’

‘I’m not going there for the coral,’ Joaquin explained patiently. ‘One of our aircraft was lost yesterday in the Florida Straits. I want to find and retrieve it before the damned media start swimming around like hyenas looking for corpses.’

Katherine’s face fell again as one hand flew to her lips.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Were there any survivors?’

Joaquin shook his head.

‘The situation’s under control but I want to oversee this personally, identify the victims, and then hand the aircraft over to the National Transportation Safety Board so they can figure out what the hell went wrong out there.’

Katherine nodded, and he felt her arm slip from around his waist.

‘I’ll tell the children we’ll be away for a few days,’ she said. ‘They’ll be in school anyway.’

‘Okay,’ Joaquin replied. ‘The helicopter will meet you later today and will take you to the yacht when the court case is over. All I need you to do is keep the damned litigation wolves at bay for a little longer and then we can walk away from all of this and spend some time together, just like we used to.’

Katherine nodded and smiled. Joaquin remembered the days before IRIS had taken on its mission to change the world, when he and Katherine had lived high on the company’s immense profits. They had met during a fund-raiser in New York for victims of the attacks that had so irrevocably changed the world in 2001. Katherine had been the legal representation for many of those victims, Joaquin a beneficiary and contributor to the fledgling plans to build the Freedom Tower. One night dedicated to the lives of others less fortunate had brought them together and neither of them had ever looked back. A whirlwind of travel followed, official appearances as a couple and then marriage and children, all of it featuring in glossy magazines on newsstands across the globe. And yet, despite all of that, they shared the same yearning for those early years that seemed so far away now — years of excitement and new love familiar to every couple, wealthy or not.

‘The prosecution doesn’t have a leg to stand on,’ she reported. ‘My guess is that the court will rule that there’s no case to answer. Damn it, the family wouldn’t even be living in the United States if it wasn’t for what you and IRIS did for them.’

Joaquin smiled and kissed his wife on the cheek.

‘Give ’em hell,’ he said finally.

Katherine picked up her bag as she left, and Joaquin turned to look out across the bay once more. The clouds across the immense sky above were being torn to shreds by high-altitude winds gusting through the atmosphere, invisible yet deadly. The oncoming storm.

The door to the suite opened and Olaf Jorgenson walked in before closing the door behind him. Joaquin turned as the huge man lumbered across to his side, his eyes cold points of ice, as though still reflecting the bitter glaciers of his Nordic home.

‘What would you have me do?’

Olaf’s thick, stilted accent only served to accentuate his appearance, that of a ruthless terminator unhindered by such pitiful emotions as remorse or guilt. Utterly reliable, the big man was nonetheless several lifetimes short of genius, and Joaquin chose his missions with care.

‘Watch after Katherine,’ he said finally. ‘She’s likely to be targeted by activists or maybe enemies of the state: we don’t know who might try to prevent her from doing her job. Do what is needed to ensure the outcome we require.’