This was one of the few occasions on which Hunt had seen Danchekker genuinely moved. And he felt it too. He thought back again to the scenes from the Lunarian war and the visions that the Jevienese had created of Earth stampeding toward exactly the same catastrophe. And yet it had almost come true. It had been close-far too close. If Earth had not changed course when it did,
just two or three decades more would have made that come true. And then Charlie, Koriel, Gorda, the efforts of the Thuriens, the struggles of the handful of survivors that he had just seen-and all that they endured after that-would have been for nothing.
It brought to mind Wellington’s words after Waterloo: “It was a close-run thing, a damned close-run thing-the closest-run thing you ever saw in your life.”
chapter twenty-one
After hearing Norman Pacey’s account of the events at Bruno, Jerol Packard lodged a confidential request with an office of the CIA for a compendium of everything that had accumulated in its files over the years concerning Sverenssen and, for good measure, the other members of the UN Farside delegation as well. Clifford Benson, the CIA official who had dealt with the request, summarized the findings a day later at a closed-door session in Packard’s State Department office.
“Sverenssen reappeared in Western Europe in 2009 with a circle of social and financial contacts already established. How that happened is not clear. We can’t find any authenticated traces of him for about ten years before then-in fact from the time he was supposed to have been killed in Ethiopia.” Benson gestured at a Section of the summary charts of names, photographs, organizations, and interconnecting arrows pinned to a wallboard. “His closest ties were with a French-British-Swiss investment-banking consortium, a big part of which is still run by the same families that set up a network of financial operations around Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century to launder the revenues from the Chinese opium trade. Now here’s an interesting thing-one of the biggest names on the French side of that consortium is a blood relative of Daldanier. In fact the two names have been connected for three generations.”
“Those people are pretty tightly knit,” Caldwell commented. “I don’t know if I’d attach a lot of significance to something like that.”
“If it were an isolated case, I wouldn’t, either,” Benson agreed. “But look at the rest of the story.” He indicated another part of the chart. “The British and Swiss sides control a sizable part of the world’s bullion business and are connected through the London gold market and its mining affiliations to South Africa. And look what name we find prominent among the ones at the end of that line.”
“Is that Van Geelink of the same family as Sverenssen’s cohort?” Lyn asked dubiously.
“It’s the same,” Benson said. “There are a number of them, all connected with different parts of the same business. It’s a complicated setup.” He paused for a moment, then resumed, “Up until around the first few years of this century, a lot of Van Geelink- controlled money went into preserving white dominance in the area by undermining the stability of black Africa politically and economically, which is one reason why nobody seemed interested in backing resistance to the Cuban and Communist subversions that were going on from the ’70s through ’90s. To maintain their own position militarily in the face of trade embargoes, the family organized arms deals through intermediaries, frequently South American regimes.”
“Is this where the Brazilian guy fits in?” Caidwell asked, raising an eyebrow.
Benson nodded. “Among others. Saraquez’s father and grandfather were both big in commodity financing, especially to do with oil. There are links from them as well as from the Van Geelinks to the prime movers behind the destabilization of the Middle East in the late twentieth century. The main reason for that was to maximize short-term oil profits before the world went nuclear, which also accounts for the orchestrated sabotage of public opinion against nuclear power at around the same time. A side effect that worked in – the Saraquezes’ interests was that it boosted the demand for Central American oil.” Benson shrugged and tossed out his hands. “There’s more, but you can see the gist of it. The same kind of thing shows up with a few more who were on that delegation. It’s one happy family, in a lot of cases literally.”