Today his looks were betrayed by a pallor that had washed away the tan he’d recently honed following a business trip to Dubai. And his normally bright blue eyes, undoubtedly his best feature, were haunted and red-rimmed as though he’d been crying. He touched a finger to the corner of one eye and felt liquid transfer to his skin. He had been crying, only in his gastric distress he’d not noticed.
He coughed, embarrassed by his appearance. Marcel Roland d’Avejan — he detested being called Marcel, and only allowed his wife to call him Rollie — was a self-made mega-millionaire. He had inherited a specialty welding company decades earlier from his bachelor great-uncle and turned it into one of the largest industrial combines in the European Union. Thanks in part to owning old rights to titanium-cutting machinery, the company had been poised to enter the lucrative aerospace business when d’Avejan’s aging uncle had succumbed to a strange immune system deficiency that would only later be known in France as SIDA — and as AIDS in the English-speaking world.
Young Roland had been his uncle’s right-hand man, and took over the rebranding of what had up until then been Nantes Metalworks, as named by d’Avejan’s great-grandfather upon his demobilization following the First World War. Roland d’Avejan shifted focus and built the company into Eurodyne, a conglomerate with annual sales of four billion euros and nearly eighty thousand employees in five distinct corporate divisions. Eurodyne dominated the manufacture of nearly all the jet turbine blades used in most of Europe’s military and civilian aircraft. Under his stewardship the company had long ago branched out from metals manufacturing into precision hydraulic systems, rail stock for freight and passenger service, consumer appliances like vacuum cleaners and refrigerators sold under a number of trade names, as well as energy production — following the acquisition of a power company running four nuclear plants in France and another in the Czech Republic.
In his climb to success, Roland had blurred countless ethical lines. He’d even paid, early on, to have a competitor’s son beaten in order to intimidate the rival and force him to relocate. Of course he’d cheated on taxes, raided workers’ pension funds, price gouged, engaged in price fixing, bribed, blackmailed, and knowingly sold defective equipment, but being party to murder was something he never would have considered.
Now that line had been crossed, and there was nothing for him to do but accept it and move on. He felt steadier. He noticed a few rust-colored vomit stains on his shirtfront. He worked himself out of his jacket, slipped the knot of his two-hundred-dollar tie, and peeled off the shirt. One of his many foibles was the fact he only wore a shirt once. It had started out as a bit of bravado when he first started making money, as if to say “look at me, I am so successful that my shirts are always new.”
Recently, though, as business stresses mounted, his onetime affectation was now the most visible sign of a burgeoning fear of germs. He had a grip on it, for the most part, but when people weren’t around to judge he would indulge in long showers with the most corrosive soaps he could find. Through an OCD Internet chat room he discovered a specialist who made custom lye-based cleaners that were barely fit for human use and would leave his skin rapturously parboiled.
When he was forced to be around others, he kept water-free hand sanitizer on him at all times. If questioned, he would explain he had developed a skin condition that caused him to break out at the slightest brush with unnatural chemicals. Given his well-established credentials as an environmental crusader who had turned Eurodyne “green” before it had been fashionable, people gave him a pass as a bit of an eco-kook and never mentioned it again.
From an eighteenth-century ormolu-accented bureau in a closet near the private en suite he plucked out one of twenty identical bespoke shirts with his monogram on the right cuff and real bone buttons. The cotton was so smooth it felt like silk against his skin. His wife had been out with friends the night before, so d’Avejan had taken one of his special showers. His torso looked like it had been scoured with a commercial sandblaster.
He dressed, knotting his tie so that the dimple was precisely centered, and stepped back out into his main office. The picture window from his thirty-fifth-story corner office looked out from Paris’s commercial center of La Défense over the Bois de Boulogne, the city’s second-largest park and home to the famous Hippodrome de Longchamp horse-racing track, and afforded him a spectacular view of the Eiffel Tower. It was midmorning. The roads were snarled with traffic, the Seine teeming with early-season tourist boats, and yet the city had never looked fresher or cleaner.
D’Avejan helped himself to a Perrier from the wet bar tucked into a low credenza under the window and belched out the last of his inner turmoil. So what if the science team with Jacobs was dead? He didn’t know any of them personally, and their deaths would save untold millions, even billions of people in the not-too-distant future. Was their sacrifice high? Even d’Avejan was sorrowful that they had paid the ultimate price, but it was for a better future for the rest of humanity. He further assured himself that they hadn’t suffered. His special facilitator was too professional to have prolonged their agony. He imagined clean kill shots and vowed not to read any media accounts in case that wasn’t what had actually transpired. Better for his conscience if he could maintain the illusion that they had quick deaths rather than discovering the six scientists had died slowly over time.
He tossed the empty green bottle into the recycling bin and turned his attention to the Bloomberg terminal standing on a rolling cart he could hide away when he had guests. The high-tech portal into the financial world was an invaluable tool but ruined the elegant decor of his office suite with its industrial functionality. Better it remained out of sight when not in use.
He checked the latest price on Eurodyne and made the inevitable comparison to its peak a few years earlier. They were partly the victim of the credit crunch that followed the global real estate market implosion, but the steady downward spiral of his company’s worth could also be blamed on a feckless society that couldn’t see the woods for the trees. Eurodyne had been in position to become a world leader at the forefront of energy production, distribution, and storage. Instead, the energy arm of Eurodyne was slowly eroding away the profits made by the other divisions and dragging the company into the red. Share prices were down another half euro this morning because a contract with a Spanish utility was being “reevaluated,” which in the real world meant canceled.
No sooner had that sour thought raced across his mind than his private secretary buzzed him on the intercom. “Monsieur d’Avejan, Monsieur Pickford is on the line for you. As always, he claims it is urgent.”
D’Avejan’s eye gave a spasmodic tic. Ralph Pickford was a bottom-feeding parasite in the energy market. Or at least that’s what Roland liked to tell himself. In truth, the American billionaire was one of the shrewdest speculators in the business and happened to be the largest shareholder in Eurodyne outside of d’Avejan’s own voting bloc. It was why the Texan had unfettered access to the Frenchman and why he let his secretary’s “as always” gibe go without comment. She hated the abrasive American even more than d’Avejan did himself.
D’Avejan let out a frustrated breath, cleared his throat, and barked, “Put him through, Odette.” He didn’t wait for Pickford to say anything. “Ralph, this is not a good time. If you are calling to tell me the Spanish are pulling out of the deal, it is something I knew last night but could not divulge as it was an inside secret. I also know the stock is down another half euro, and I need not be reminded that if the price falls a further ten percent you will sell in order to claim the loss on your taxes, and that your withdrawal would have catastrophic consequences for my company. Have I hit all the highlights?”