He entered a smaller room which was filled floor to ceiling with computer equipment. This represented the nerve center of his operation. The flat screens told him in real time how his many worldwide interests were doing. Everything from stock exchanges to futures markets to late-breaking news stories was captured, catalogued, and eventually analyzed here by him.
He craved information, absorbed it like a three-year-old learning a foreign language. He only needed to hear it once and he never forgot it. His eyes scanned each of the screens, and from long habit he was able to separate the important from the mundane, the interesting from the obvious in a matter of minutes. Investments of his colored in soft blue on the screens meant he was doing very well; those mired in harsh red meant he was doing less well. He sighed in satisfaction as a sea of blue blinked back at him.
He went into another, larger room that housed his collection of mementos from past projects. He pulled out a scrapbook and opened it. Inside were photographs of and background information on his twelve precious pieces of gold—the dozen individuals upon whom he had bestowed great wealth and new lives; and who, in turn, had allowed him to recoup his family’s fortune. He flipped idly through the pages, occasionally smiling as various pleasant memories flickered through his mind.
He had handpicked his winners carefully, culling them from welfare rolls and bankruptcy filings; logging hundreds of hours tramping through poor, desolate areas of the country, both urban and rural, searching for desperate people who would do anything to change their fortunes—normal law-abiding citizens who would commit what was technically a financial crime of immense proportion without blinking an eye. It was wonderful what the human mind could rationalize given the appropriate inducement.
The lottery had been remarkably easy to fix. It was often that way. People just assumed institutions like that were absolutely above corruption or reproach. They must have forgotten that government lotteries had been banned on a wholesale basis in the last century because of widespread corruption. History did tend to repeat itself, if in a more sophisticated and focused manner. If Jackson had learned one thing over the years it was that nothing, absolutely nothing, was above corruption so long as human beings were involved, because, in truth, most people were not above the lure of the dollar or other material enticements, particularly when they worked around vast sums of money all day. They tended to believe that part of it was rightfully theirs anyway.
And an army of people wasn’t required to carry out his plans. Indeed, to Jackson, the notion of a “widespread conspiracy” was an oxymoron anyway.
He had a large group of associates working for him around the globe. However, none of them knew who he really was, where he lived, how he had come by his fortune. None of them were privy to the grand plans he had laid, the worldwide machinations he had orchestrated. They simply performed their small slice of the pie and were very well compensated for doing so. When he wanted something, a bit of information not readily available to him, he would contact one of them and within the hour he would have it. It was the perfect setting for contemplation, planning, and then action—swift, precise, and final.
He completely trusted no one. And with his ability to create flawlessly more than fifty separate identities, why should he? With state-of-the-art computer and communications technology at his fingertips, he could actually be in several different places at the same time. As different people. His smile broadened. Could the world be any more his personal stage?
As he perused one page of the scrapbook his smile faded and was replaced with something more understated; it was a mixture of discernible interest and an emotion that Jackson almost never experienced: uncertainty. And something else. He would never have characterized it as fear; that particular demon never bothered him. Rather he could adequately describe it as a feeling of destiny, of the unmistakable conviction that two trains were on a collision course and no matter what one or the other did, their ominous meeting would take place in a very memorable manner.