IZion sat in a small canoe and watched as late afternoon turned to dusk, the pink from his wide view of the western sky reflecting off the surface of the sea.
IZion was fishing, but fishing wasn't his living, he made his living in a much more dangerous way than that, and he was thinking that for the danger he faced he shouldn't be poor; so poor that borrowing this lowly craft to leave the city and go to the other side of the harbour for the space and time to think was the one pleasure he could really afford. He loved to go and sit out there and watch the planes circle and land and rise again from the city's airport ... people who could make planes, and fly them and buy them and sell them, what kind of world did those people really live in, wondered IZion. How did they get that rich? How did they think that big and make it happen? Did they really want to keep poor people poor, or did putting cash in poor peoples pockets make them richer because they sold more goods? Who in the city across the bay was really the biggest guy? Was he big enough to make the others bow? For how long?
For IZion these were not idle questions. Whoever was in charge, things weren't going well with him ... whatever was at stake was worth killing for and IZion lived on the firing line. It was one thing to live dangerously and get rich, but to live dangerously and stay poor ... no ... that couldn't go on ... he had to find the secret to success, he had to find out what was really going on in the minds of those who controlled his destiny ... that's what he was thinking as he started paddling back towards the docks in the distance.
The city, downtown, looked much like many others in the Caribbean in the seventies ... Panama, Santo Domingo, Kingston ... sweltered in heat, smothered with smog, square miles of slum rooftops stretched like waves of rusting zinc on an ocean of rotting wood; horizons of poverty unbroken, except that in the middle of the waterfront, like ocean liners at sea, there stood out six dramatically modern high rise buildings.
The tallest of these buildings was the hotel; the next in height was the Central Bank, and at the top of the Central Bank building Winston Bernard was looking out across the harbour to the airport, looking out for Hugh Clifford's plane.
Winston Bernard was tall, brown, thin in an athletic way, with highly intelligent eyes, the eyes of a mimic, taking everything in.
Winston had done well enough in the outside world, starting with a Rhodes Scholarship and ending at the World Bank, to feel at ease where he sat at the top of the town. His cousin was Prime Minister, his brother ran the army, his wife ran the most popular radio station. His father had been the head of the civil service under the British and he'd been knighted for that, but there was relatively little nepotism in the British Colonial Civil Service, everybody got where they were going on their own steam, and because he'd been born into a meritocracy and had surpassed the norm one might assume that Winston Bernard was comfortable with the idea of being in charge; that he was happy with the assumption that others would look to him for orders in a crisis - provided that he was in full control, provided that he was pursuing a plan of his own choosing, and provided there was nobody blocking his way, because when blocked Winston could be very unhappy indeed, and he'd been blocked now for the last several months.
Winston Bernard and his brother Mark came from that generation of leadership in the tropics who were born in the forties, and who had spent the first ten years of their lives under colonialism; who then in the fifties saw the Independence Movement triumph all over the world just as they themselves were coming of age, and who, during the sixties, were conscious of the vast resources and enormous riches that were theirs to control, now that they controlled the destinies of truly independent nations.
But while the sixties brought independence, the seventies brought the oil shock and the end to innocence. Only ten years had elapsed since the fireworks lit up the sky for the freedom night celebrations, and already the cupboard was bare.
As the price of oil doubled and doubled and doubled again those countries who had previously had money in the bank found that their reserves had been wiped out in a few months.
Once more ministers were expected to go to London and Washington to beg for preferential tariffs, to wait in the same ante- chambers as their forefathers during colonial times, accepting the fact that someone else would take their decisions for them. For ten years the former colonies had been banking their own cash, but now everyone who didn't have oil would have to go back into the begging business; merely back to business as usual for most of those involved, but not for Winston Bernard. He knew the opposition, he had been trained by them and had succeeded in their system, and he was determined to beat them at their own game.
As he walked around the terrace that surrounded his penthouse office, Winston's gaze shifted from the harbour to the hills and mountains that formed the backdrop to the city, rearing up to disappear into cloud at seven thousand feet, and as he continued his circle to the west Winston's eyes swept over urban sprawl that stretched for ten miles to end in the swamp that separated the city from fifty thousand acres of sugar cane; then he came back round to see the docks and harbour and airport again, and this time he saw the dot of Hugh Clifford's little jet coming in to land, its wings glinting in the rays of the setting sun.
Winston's mood lightened immediately. If he could swing Hugh Clifford behind him he stood a chance of winning. He was the only man in the world who could help Winston right now.
Inside the plane, Hugh Clifford's wife, Molly, called him over to look at the sunset outside her window as the Lear banked and lined up for landing.
Molly wasn't one to miss a good sunset, she didn't like missing anything, and she hadn't missed much ever since she first invaded London as the daughter of a rural Earl to become deb of the year, 1936.
Hugh Clifford looked out of the window, settled his long frame back into his seat, finished off his scotch and soda, picked up the cards from the game he'd been playing with Molly, and watched as she packed up a wide variety of music cassettes and magazines and shoved them into a large leather carrying bag together with her walkman and the two novels she'd brought along on the trip.
Hugh Clifford was one of the last of a dying breed; Kaiser, Bronfman, Paley, Niarchos, even the young Howard Hughes, who everybody thought was nuts, but who, as Hugh happened to know, was so busy designing and building the first satellite system ever that he couldn't remember to cut his nails ... these were his peers at the prime of his life, and he missed them. There were only two classes of people in business so far as Hugh Clifford was concerned, those who could say yes and those who had to ask somebody else, and he was bored at his age to find himself surrounded by those in government and the corporate world who had to consult with others in endless succession.
Hugh Clifford's father had been one of five railroad barons who'd envisioned the plan, got it financed, employed the labour, moved the earth, cut the logs, embedded the sleepers, and laid down upon them the lines of steel that crisscrossed North America. He was as rich as such a man would be if he was given the land on either side of the railroad for thousands of miles, and sold off the plots for all the towns along the way. He was as rich as a man could become if he chose where the rails would go and when they would get there, and this was at a time before there were any paved roads or trucks; as rich as such a man would become if he got together with the steel and oil cartels to put competitors out of business with high rail charges, getting a big piece of big oil and big steel for his cooperation... Hugh's father was already as rich as that before Hugh was born to the sole inheritance of all that the old man had accumulated.
He was so rich that throughout his childhood he never ever heard money discussed. It just didn't come up when his mother was around, and later, when it did, it was always in reference to how much wealth he had, so he didn't think about it, he certainly didn't crave it, and he found the challenges to his ego entirely outside considerations of money altogether.
His skill in sport, for example, was much more important to him than money. How well did he ride? ski? play tennis? dance? What help was money at sixteen when facing a ski slope that could break your legs? When someone else could simply beat you at a game you were trying to win or take away the girl you wanted on the dancefloor? Right from the start Hugh was brought up to believe that the really important possessions were courage and style and a taste for the quality that rendered his mother passionate, the quality that money couldn't necessarily buy, either in things or in people, and especially in people...
So all his long life Hugh Clifford had been fascinated by other forms of power; he'd been fascinated by the power of great lovers, he was fascinated with the power of scientists, and artists and politicians; he was fascinated by what they did with their power, and he was even more intrigued by what it did to them...
For decades he'd been watching ambitious men climb, and seeing them fall, calculating the height at which they would lose their grip and slip and barely hold on, knowing that they could climb no further because they knew not the secret of success at the highest levels of power - they were only now discovering that there were tests to be passed which they had failed, tests which they hadn't even known existed.
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