The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 37

A week of investigation.

Why had Byron14 sent me to Japan?

Prometheus, owner of Perfection. Subsidiary offices: Mumbai, Shanghai, Dubai, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Paris, Hamburg, New York, Seattle, Mexico City, Caracas, Santiago, Grenville (tax purposes?), Geneva (absolutely tax purposes) and Tokyo.

The Tokyo office was registered to a building in Yamanote. I walked by it twice, counting twenty-eight floors to the top of its sheer glass and concrete sides, before going in search of a business suit.

Out of curiosity, I lay on my belly in my hotel room and poked on a laptop at Prometheus. Dragging data off the net was slow, but not impossible. Like a huge number of companies across the world, the majority of Prometheus’ value was owned by a holding company, a multi-fingered corporation whose sole purpose was to own other things. At the top was Rafe Pereyra-Conroy. I recognised his face: he’d worn black in Dubai, and smiled at the royal family, and as I walked away from the robbery he’d been in the lobby, screaming down a mobile phone.

At my fucking party stole her fucking jewels do you know what this fucking does for us, do you know how much we’ve just fucking lost?!

Searching in depth for Rafe Pereyra-Conroy, you mostly found his father.

Matheus Pereyra, born in Montevideo, carried by his mother to England aged three years old, grew up in a two-bedroom bungalow in West Acton with a violent stepfather and a mother struggling to survive. Aged sixteen, Matheus left home to start work on the print floor of a Fleet Street journal, hauling reams of paper and gallons of ink into the noisy belly of the machines. There he was “Matty”, and though he hated his English stepfather, he used his surname and became Matty Conroy, one of the lads. He bought a tie and a suit, and every Friday night went down the pub with the journos, learning how to swagger and smoke, until one day someone turned round and said, “Bugger me, Matty, you’re wasted in the print room…” So began Matty Conroy’s journey into the world of media.

“Work, work, work,” he was quoted as saying. “Young people just want everything to drop on their plate, but I know, you have to work, and you have to believe. People tell you you’re too small: you prove you’re bigger than them. They say you’ll never make it: you remember those words and every time you fall down, you remember, you’ll make it, you’ll make it, you’ll make it.”

As a journalist, he was a disaster; as a seller of advertising space and developer of market strategies, he was a genius. Within five years he’d quit the newspaper that first hired him, and aged twenty-six he started his own.

“You know the difference between a tabloid and a newspaper?” he asked. “A tabloid actually gives people stories they’re interested in.”

Aged thirty he controlled 23 per cent of the print media market in the UK; aged thirty-four he bought his first TV station. When, aged thirty-five, the Royal Ascot Racing Club declined his membership on grounds that he did not conform to their requirements, the two newspapers and four tabloids under his control ran headline stories on the subject, with tag-lines ranging from a moderate “Old-Fashioned and Out of Touch?” through to “The Bigoted Berks of Berkshire”. To his surprise, the ancient white-gloved gentlemen of Ascot, rather than yield to this pressure, dug their heels in deeper.

“Mr Conroy’s campaign of harassment only serves to emphasise the validity of our initial judgement in declining him membership, as is our right,” explained one spokesman in a top hat.

The aristocracy of England had survived revolution, emancipation and war. Time was long, memory faded, but they never changed.

Two years later, Matty Conroy was Matheus Pereyra again, owner of a luxury cruise-ship line, a chain of chicken restaurants, a hire-car company, half a bank, and an island near Nassau. The day his value exceeded £1 billion, a rival newspaper in the UK ran an article pointing out that he paid an estimated 0.7 per cent tax on his fortune. The newspaper was sued for libel, and though the case was dropped — “for reasons of fact” as the editor put it — the lawyers’ fees crippled the paper for years to come, and it ran no more such articles.

The year his daughter, Filipa, was born, a controversy broke out as one of his US TV stations chose fourteen individuals from Washington DC and tagged them as a “Sleeper Homosexual Infiltration Squad”.

“I firmly believe,” explained Matheus, “that the government of the United States of America is being infiltrated by units of liberals and homosexuals wishing to force their atheist agenda on the people of this nation through the top-heavy institution of centralised government.”

When accused of speaking without any evidence, Matheus Pereyra added: “There is evidence — there is evidence, I have seen it. But the government’s repressive bodies make it impossible to share with the world what I know.”

Fifteen months later, his son was born, and Matheus Pereyra acquired American citizenship and a three-thousand-acre plot of land in Colorado from which he could “consider what next to do for the world”.

What he did was buy more stuff, and fill the newspapers and airwaves with celebrity scandals, Hollywood gossip, unconfirmed rumour and domestic bigotry. His control of the airwaves surged, and when he was sixty-one years old, he was found poisoned in his home, the murderer never caught.

Aged eighteen, his son, Rafe Pereyra-Conroy, took control of a company whose net worth was estimated at approximately £3.8 billion. Groomed, confident and assured, Rafe gave a speech in public on the greatness of his father’s legacy, but also the need for a new, conscientious company which strove for the betterment of mankind. His sister, Filipa, three years his senior and nearly through her first degree in biochemistry, stood behind him and a little to the left, and said nothing. I knew her face too; I had met her in Dubai.

All of thought is feedback. Charm falters in the face of hypertension. Are you with the 106? Ten years later, with the company now worth £5.09 billion, work on Perfection began, with Filipa Pereyra-Conroy at its head.