“So did you?” asked the chief executive.
“Sabotage the Salvation! No, sir. Didn’t have to. It was doomed before Dr. Lepoint ever set foot on it. I had some pretty clever boys run computer simulations of every inch of the route the Salvation would have to travel. They told me to anticipate severe buffeting somewhere off the coast of Peru, well below the equator.”
“And yet he miscalculated. Why?”
“Trouble is, Lepoint’s a Frenchman. Frenchmen are never wrong–if you press them, they’ll admit as much themselves. Old Lepoint not only snowed Mrs. Red Cloud, he snowed himself. He actually believed his calculations left no room for error, or accident, or intervention by the swift hand of God.”
President Turnbull leaned back in the chair, holding his glass of amber fluid up to the light. “Tell me, Mr. Forte,” said the President. “If the berg hadn’t foundered of its own accord, would you have sabotaged it?”
“You bet. Castle and Red Cloud diddled me out of the prime contract. I don’t hate quick, Mr. President, but when I do, I hate hard.”
“I would never have guessed,” said the President, with a twinkle in his eye. “And speaking of guessing, I don’t suppose you could have guessed that the news that the Salvation will never arrive in San Francisco didn’t exactly break my heart.”
“I didn’t think it would, somehow,” conceded Ripley Forte.
“And as a matter of fact, I knew it wouldn’t even before you did,” the President went on.
“Then why did you appoint Castle secretary of water resources? His failure will blacken your name.”
“A little, maybe. But whereas it could wound me, it’ll kill him. As presidential timber goes, he’s been chopped down to a toothpick.”
“But how about your own chances in 2008, Mr. President? If you don’t solve the water crisis, the voters are going to turn you out.”
“It could happen,” the President agreed. “But I have twenty-five months until the conventions, and I have my people working on alternatives.”
“Conservation, reverse osmosis, electro-osmosis, cloud seeding–things like that?”
“Things like that. Why, do you have any better idea, Mr. Forte?”
“I do indeed, Mr. President,” and Forte spent the next half hour explaining it in detail.
So they wouldn’t be disturbed by golf carts, people who wanted to play through, and distracting shouts of “Fore!” Joe Mansour had booked four hours for his personal use at the Acadia Beach Country Club in Hamilton, Bermuda, off which his great white yacht Linno rode at anchor. There were complaints from the irate members, of course, but the management brushed them aside. After all, Joe Mansour owned the club, the links, the bridle paths, and the stables, and if he could somehow have managed it, he would have owned the balmy breeze that rustled the leaves of the hibiscus and the palms as well.
“A four iron, I think, Rip,” said Mansour, studying the lie.
Forte selected a club from among the three he carried in his bag, addressed the ball, and took a mighty swing. The ball dribbled down the fairway, bounched off a hummock, and came to rest five yards in the rough.
“You should have used a four iron,” said Mansour.
“I have a driver, a five iron, and a putter, as you very well know,” said Forte disgustedly. “If I bought all the clubs, I might learn to play the game and even grow to like it.”
“Well, why not? Every man must have a vice, and you have far too few to be healthy.”
“Hit the goddamn ball.”
Mansour hit the goddamn ball. It went straight and high, seemed to pause in midair, and then fell to the green, no more than ten yards from the pin.
“You ought to be a golf hustler,” said Forte sourly.
“I once tried it, actually. Match play at $10,000 a hole with three young New York investment bankers who had, they thought unbeknownst to me, been on the golf teams at Cornell and Harvard.”
“Smeared you, did they?”
“Indeed they did. I kept losing to all three from noon until nightfall. They went away deliriously happy with $340,000 of my money, only to discover that during their absence from the office my men had bought up a majority interest that afternoon in a $200 million company they had been working for months to acquire.”
“Joe,” said Forte admiringly, “you are a character.”
“I am a businessman. Businessmen have no character. To prove it, let me say at once that I have been beastly to a woman since I talked with you last week.”
“Anybody I know?” said Forte, stamping down the grass in front of the ball and then teeing the ball up on a mound of dirt.
“Mrs. Jennifer Red Cloud.”
Forte swung and missed. He looked up at Mansour, his lips a thin line. “Tell me about it, Joe.”
“Nothing much to tell. As you know, Raynes Oceanic Resources is severely overextended. Mrs. Red Cloud, like the gambler she is, put about everything Raynes owns on the Salvation. She’s borrowed from three institutions, spreading the grief around. So I followed in her footsteps with my little money bags and bought up all the notes.”
“She doesn’t know about this, does she?”
“Not the slightest suspicion.”
“Keep it that way,” said Forte.
He swung. The shot was a beauty, landing between Joe Mansour’s ball and the pin.
On the clubhouse terrace, Joe Mansour added up his score. It was 83.
Forte, who had reached 110 before he stopped counting on the fourteenth hole, tore up the card and dropped it in the ashtray. “Enough of this kid’s game,” he said, before telling the waitress to bring them something as long, cool, and refreshing as her gorgeous legs. “Let’s talk icebergs.”
“Let us, indeed.”
“Got lots of loose money laying around?”
“I’ll tell you when you’ve overspent your allowance, Rip.”
“Well, then, item one: a refrigerating plant, portable, capable of supercooling 5 million liters of water daily to -18° Centigrade. I’ll give you the specs when we get back aboard the Linno.”
“A refrigerating plant–for the Antarctic?”
“Check. Item two: Ultravac, the Alcor Company in Vestry, Alabama, makes material for ski suits. It’s called Supervac. Buy the plant.”
“Check,” said Joe Mansour, wondering if his was going to cover Ripley Forte’s growing needs.
“Item three: Sol Brothers of San Antonio manufactures a photovoltaic panel that comes in rolls six meters wide. We need half a million square meters. I see no reason to buy the company if they’ll supply it.”
“I marvel at your consideration.”
“Ever heard of a Japanese corporation named Masayuke Kara, Inc.? No? Well, it doesn’t matter. Buy it.”
“I don’t suppose you could tell me what it makes?” said Joe Mansour plaintively.
“At the moment, oceans of red ink, but we’ll turn it around.”
“Sure we will,” said Mansour without conviction. He raised the glass that the leggy waitress had brought and made a mental note to give Forte a crash course in finance.
“Item three–”
“Item five,” amended the little Lebanese. “If you must think in millions, at least learn to count to ten.”
“One of these days, Joe,” said Forte with a shrug. “Item five: In Sandusky, Ohio, there’s a rolling mill for specialty steels named, surprisingly enough, Sandusky Specialty Steels. It filed for bankruptcy two months ago. You should be able to pick it up cheap. Kindly do so.”
“Anything to oblige. Any other little thing?” he said, prepared to cringe.
“As a matter of fact, no, unless real estate interests you.”
“You aren’t about to suggest I buy the United States, are you?”
“I once tried it, actually. Match play at $10,000 a hole with three young New York investment bankers who had, they thought unbeknownst to me, been on the golf teams at Cornell and Harvard.”
“Smeared you, did they?”
“Indeed they did. I kept losing to all three from noon until nightfall. They went away deliriously happy with $340,000 of my money, only to discover that during their absence from the office my men had bought up a majority interest that afternoon in a $200 million company they had been working for months to acquire.”
“Joe,” said Forte admiringly, “you are a character.”
“I am a businessman. Businessmen have no character. To prove it, let me say at once that I have been beastly to a woman since I talked with you last week.”
“Anybody I know?” said Forte, stamping down the grass in front of the ball and then teeing the ball up on a mound of dirt.
“Mrs. Jennifer Red Cloud.”
Forte swung and missed. He looked up at Mansour, his lips a thin line. “Tell me about it, Joe.”
“Nothing much to tell. As you know, Raynes Oceanic Resources is severely overextended. Mrs. Red Cloud, like the gambler she is, put about everything Raynes owns on the Salvation. She’s borrowed from three institutions, spreading the grief around. So I followed in her footsteps with my little money bags and bought up all the notes.”