“A woman’s heart the hippest hoppest beat ...”
As Billy slowly spoke, Camilla began to feel woozier.
“Her drums the rhythm regulates my pulse ...”
Billy pressed Camilla’s hand onto his wrist and waited. Camilla felt his pulse on his beer-sticky wrist; she didn’t mind.
“I breathe, I sleep, I spit my flow. The heat ...”
Billy gently stroked Camilla’s cheek. She could only gaze back, willingly accepting the seduction, feeling powerless to resist.
“I generate is true and never false.”
Camilla felt herself utterly melted. She stroked Billy’s cheek. One million points. “You’re divine.”
She closed her eyes as Billy kissed her.
Chapter 33
John Venison had spent the entire evening at his desk in his office at home. He was searching the internet for official financial reports and unofficial insider gossip on a handful of IT companies that one of his employees had suggested would be announcing unexpectedly high profits soon. Venison was a paid-up life member of a secretive, insanely expensive, and invite-only internet forum where those working in financial services around the world shared subtle hints scarcely conforming to the spirit of international law about what was going to move and shake the world’s markets in the imminent future. An invite to the forum had to be approved by an anonymous but all-powerful board comprised of the five founding members. Applicants signed detailed non-disclosure agreements tailored specifically for their own situation. The Infamous Five knew the identities of everyone on the board, and retrospectively monitored members’ posts for truth and accuracy. Any misleading information meant the member’s account would be closed, the member banned, and their identity revealed to other forum members. The unspoken but implied threat was that there would be unsavoury payback in that member’s career in the real world. Nobody had yet been banned. The mutual interest of members ensured compliance. The ordinary members officially knew no-one else, although it was occasionally possible to deduce a person’s identity from the information they shared. Venison had earned massive goodwill on the forum for the valuable information he sporadically shared. Like other members, he revealed enough to help them, but he didn’t reveal everything.
He created a new thread called “High IT 5?” in the ‘Info Request’ sub-forum about the five companies his staff member had identified. He knew that within a day or two there would be invaluable information about each of the companies and their profitability.
An advert on the sidebar of the forum caught his eye. Its title was “21/12/12: Mayan Doomsday & Shares”. As a rule Venison never clicked on internet adverts; they were usually for crappy ebooks about making piddling amounts of money online by writing crappy ebooks for people who wanted to make piddling amounts of money online. Breaking his rule, Venison clicked on the link. A website opened in a new tab in the browser – Profiting from Fears of the Mayan End of Time. Venison immediately recognised the overused style of the website’s sales pitch: lurid headlines, gushing testimonials, long, rambling sales copy with bullet-point lists of benefits; just another ebook publicly flogging “insider secrets”. He scrolled down the page. A subtitle in bold caught his eye:
Share price volatility is expected to increase in the days up to 21st December 2012
He stopped scrolling and focused on the subtitle. Opening his desk drawer, he took out a notepad, and started making notes.
Chapter 34
It was Saturday, late afternoon. Despite the impatient air of anticipation that had prevailed all day, a companionable silence currently filled Leon’s living room. Will was idly flicking through a copy of Oliver Twist. He lowered the book. “I finished this again in bed last night. Charles Dickens is a phenomenal storyteller.”
“Only second to yourself,” Leon replied with fawning cheekiness.
“Of course,” Will said vacantly, sliding a bookmark into the book and closing it. “However I’m a playwright. He writes novels, still a new form to me.” Will turned the book over in his hands. “Perhaps I could ...” He rifled through the pages. “But how Dickens climbs inside his times! So vivid! His London sounds similar to mine. The city was like this even in 1838? Still dirty, with thousands of poor people? Children working and living on the streets?”
Leon pictured Will writing a lengthy novel and sending it to agents. “Apparently. He was a subversive writer, always taking the side of the poorer classes in society. He’s credited with inspiring a movement of social activism to help the poor in the 1800s.”
“Dickens inspired a social movement?” Will asked incredulously. “With his writing?” His hand moved back to the book. “Is such influence possible?” he asked, his voice barely more than a mumble.
Hermione interrupted them when she entered the room and clapped her hands bossily. “Ok, costume up, gentlemen! Time to go!”
“I’m just gonna go like this,” Leon said. “Will, you gonna go all John Bull?”
“Of course! The nation expects!” He left the room and returned a minute later, wearing a Union Jack T-shirt, a plastic Union Jack bowler hat, and with a Union Jack flag hanging loosely around his neck. “How do I look?”
“Like you’re going to the Last Night of the Proms,” Hermione replied, giggling.
“At Ibrox,” Leon added.
They were going to meet Paulina and Tony and go to watch the Olympic athletics at the Olympic Stadium in east London. Will had become obsessed with London 2012. Leon had tried to explain what the Olympics were about to Will during the weeks building up to the Games, but Will hadn’t seemed remotely interested beyond the ancient Greek connection – until he had seen the opening ceremony. On that Friday evening, they had all headed down to Haggerston Park in Hackney, where the local council had erected a giant screen to show daily coverage of the Games. When they had arrived at the park at 8:45 pm to watch the opening ceremony which began at 9:00 pm, they were told by stewards that the park was full. Hundreds of other people were also outside the park. Just before the ceremony began, people outside the park started climbing over the perimeter fences and walls. Seeing their success, others copied. Quickly, the stewards couldn’t cope with the numbers breaking in. Some of the crowd outside pushed a barrier aside and walked through one of the gates, past the single steward trying to control access. Seeing this, Leon swiftly walked through, and the rest of the gang had followed.
There were thousands of people sitting on the grass in front of the screen, but there was still plenty of unoccupied space behind them. Everyone was sitting in loosely defined groups of friends, families and neighbours, with bags of drinks and picnics spread out for sharing. Hermione threw a sleeping bag on the ground near the back of the crowd for their little crew to sit on. It was a mild, dry, July night. There was a merry festival vibe in the park, with a shared sense of happy expectation. When the countdown to the ceremony started, a huge, prolonged cheer and buzz of excitement emanated from the crowd. Hermione immediately felt the surge of emotion flow through the park. Her intuitive antennae for picking up both the obvious and the subtle energies of people began receiving a sudden rush of powerful signals. There was a unique force brewing in the park and throughout the city beyond, an energy she’d never experienced before. At that moment, billions of people around the world were watching London, and east London in particular, and the people in east London were revelling in the global spotlight. Hermione instinctively felt the deep, collective sense of pride within the crowd, mixed with a crackling air of magical possibility. As the show kicked off, the crowd in the park were expectant, happy, united; during the ceremony, the atmosphere became profoundly joyous and jubilant.
When an actor passionately recited some lines from The Tempest near the start of the ceremony, Will immediately sprung to his feet and screamed “My Caliban!” People sitting around them in the park cheered Will’s spontaneous outburst and raised cans of lager to toast him. He turned to them and roared “My Caliban speaks to the world!?
??
Leon lifted his can of beer and called out, “To two billion people!”
Will lifted his can of beer to the sky and howled, “To the world!” People nearby cheered and repeated his toast, “To the world!”
From that moment, Will had been addicted to the Olympics. He had been entranced with the drama of the segments in the ceremony depicting the changes in British society, culture, and history across the centuries. He had become mesmerised with the parade where each country’s athletes marched into the Olympic Stadium behind their national flag wearing their national dress. He had spent hours each day hopping through the BBC’s twenty channels of coverage of every sport. He had insisted to Leon that they were going to watch the men’s and women’s cycling road races in person. The day when Team GB won its first two gold medals, he had bought a Union Jack flag and had worn it draped over his shoulders everywhere he went for the rest of the day.
Since the first day of sport, he had been pestering Leon to procure them tickets to some events. Like millions of others, Leon had tried unsuccessfully to land any; the frenzied demand was far too great for the limited supply. And then Tony had come through with five of the most expensive tickets to the gala event: the Saturday evening of athletics when several British athletes would be competing for gold.
Leon, Hermione, Will, Tony, and Paulina had to walk slowly through the Olympic Park because of the vast crowds buzzing around the paths between the different sporting arenas. Hermione thought Will looked lost in absolute wonderment. “A dreamland,” he had murmured several times. Before entering the stadium, he made the group stop so he could have a Union Jack painted onto each of his cheeks. “Gotta make sure nobody thinks you’re French, eh?” Tony joked.
“Wow!” all five exclaimed, awestruck and in unison, when they entered the cavernous arena. The sky was darkening and the floodlights were on, lighting up the verdant field and the brick-red athletics track around it. The Olympic Stadium was packed, and bristling. Huge flags of every country in the world were strung up under the stadium roof. The Olympic flame was burning away to their right. Four immense screens, two at each side of the stadium, showed video footage of the sporting action and information on the participants and results. Four smaller screens were perched on top of the stadium roof at opposite points. The stadium looked majestic and felt alive.
Hermione wasn’t a sports fan, but she relished the intensity of feeling generated by large, passionate crowds of supporters. She had been to two big football matches with Leon before: a crucial England match at Wembley Stadium, and a Spurs versus Arsenal derby at White Hart Lane. She had acutely felt the raw, visceral, confrontational, male energy at the matches, and sensed how the players responded to the urges and heckling of the crowds. There had been untamed, untapped, uncontainable forces washing around the stadiums, which Hermione instinctively recognised but could neither pin down nor explain, but she accepted their power to influence the players’ performances. Her experiences had only strengthened her belief in the power of the collective consciousness, both positive and negative.
In contrast, the atmosphere in the Olympic Stadium, whilst as intense as a football match, was purely positive. The crowd was almost entirely British, and uncharacteristically, noisily expressive in their support of British competitors. However there was no resentment or ill-feeling towards non-British athletes, all of whom received warm support whether medal winners, also-rans, or underdogs.
Tony had procured five of the best seats in the stadium, in the lower tier near the finish line on the home straight. The atmosphere in the stadium had been raucous during the early events, especially when a British athlete was participating. However, the first phenomenally earth-shaking cheer from the crowd was when a British long jumper realised he had won the gold medal when his rival’s last jump was too short. Hermione began to feel her body tingling just as the awareness of the victory passed around the stadium. Will screamed deliriously and lifted the two pints of beer he was holding aloft.
The second thundering cheer came when the British poster girl of the Games appeared for the 800 metres race, the final of seven disciplines in the heptathlon. When the athlete burst through to the front of the pack after the start of the race, Hermione was astonished by the unfathomable swirling cauldron of noise from the crowd. The runner seemed to tire and was overtaken during the second lap, and looked like she may finish the race in third or fourth place, albeit still with a time fast enough to win the gold medal. However the crowd were insisting she also won this particular race. Leon, Will, Tony and Paulina had all joined 80,000 others in repeatedly screaming “COME ON! COME ON!” over and over and over as loud as their straining vocal cords could bear. As they roared, Hermione could feel her consciousness lifting higher and higher, soaring ever upwards on the astounding volume pushing the young athlete towards the finish line during the second lap, but even more so on the staggering tsunami of positive energy the unified crowd were generating from their own collective willpower. In that moment, Hermione knew the British runner was going to win. In the last hundred metres, the athlete visibly responded to the crowd’s desperate encouragement, and sprinted away from the pack to cross the finish line metres ahead of the rest. The cheer from the crowd when she crossed the line threatened to rip the sky apart. Leon, Will, Tony and Paulina dragged Hermione into a screeching, ecstatic group embrace. People all around them were crying with joy. There were unprecedented scenes of wild euphoria all throughout the stadium. Hermione felt she was going to faint from the intensity of the emotion; her acuity to the energy was threatening to overwhelm her.
When the group untangled themselves, Will, red-faced and elated, hugged Hermione. “Now I understand! Now I get it! This is the power of crowds!”
The next event was the men’s 10,000 metres final. A male British athlete was the home crowd’s great hope for a scarcely imaginable triple of gold medals. The race was twenty-five laps of the track. Starting off from a mad frenzy, each lap seemed to whip the crowd into a deeper and deeper whirl of noise and hysteria. A crescendo of perpetually peaking screaming circulated around the stadium, following the deafened runners, whilst those elsewhere in the arena maintained a phenomenal backdrop of explosive noise. Hermione’s four friends had merged their voices into the general madness, and were roaring continuously. As the race neared the last laps, the British runner moved to the front of the pack. The increase in volume was as if each person in the crowd had acquired an extra voice and found a spare lung. Hermione could barely stay on her feet amidst the heart-staggering fervour. The emotions inside her were soaring higher and higher, generated by the crowd’s primal mania. The power emanating from the crowd’s encouragement to the British athlete was almost paralysing Hermione, and she felt like she was going to be literally blown away by all the energy she was feeling.
Suddenly there was a tap on her arm. Amidst the madness, she turned her head. Will’s eyes were blazing, elsewhere. He leaned his head close to Hermione’s ear. “I feel it,” he said, seriously. Hermione tried to speak, but her chest felt constricted, like her heart had swollen to fill her body. Her lips wouldn’t move, she couldn’t respond. She could only look back at Will with appreciative acknowledgement in her eyes.
“I feel it,” he said again, like he was confessing something intimate. “Behind this noise. Behind this madness. I feel it. This shared will. This shared emotion. This is the collective consciousness?”
Hermione nodded, speechless.
A bell rang. The endlessly increasing, guttural roar from the now shamelessly feral crowd peaked to its latest crescendo. The British runner was desperately racing on the last lap. On the home strait, just below them, he responded to the crowd’s passion and found the strength for a final burst of speed to run clear of the pack. The runner crossed the line to win Britain’s third gold medal inside an hour. The crowd in the stadium descended into an uninhibited, uncontrollable mess of blubbering ecstasy. A delicious, long quiver passed through Hermione?
??s body. She turned and met Will’s startled, jubilant, comprehending eyes. From his joyous expression, she knew that they were on the same wavelength, that an identical quiver had passed through him too.
Chapter 35
Emerald was worried. There hadn’t been a highly profitable trade for Venison Investments for weeks. The pressure was on to produce something lucrative soon. Finding daily positive slants on the paucity of progress had become more challenging. Emerald didn’t have an idea for an angle to use during his morning briefing with Venison. He didn’t like to wing it, but unarmed and slightly late, he didn’t have any choice.
“Good morning Emerald!” Venison announced cheerily when Emerald closed the door. “How is our billion pound bank run going?”
Venison’s punching straight to the head as usual, Emerald thought. “You mean the one that is going to ruin life for millions of people?”
“Except us. But yes, that one.“
Emerald quickly reviewed the state of the project in his mind. “We’ve got the futures on the Bank of Wales, distributed thinly across subsidiary companies, well below the radar. It’s all set up to roll when we want to cash them in.”
“Excellent. There is one more detail we need to discuss.”
“Where to flee to after the sugar hits the fan?”
“I’m going home to savour Newsnight. But no, not that.” Venison flicked the flimsy cardboard triangular calendar on his desk around to face Emerald. “But when? When do we want to cash in our chips?” He nudged the calendar toward Emerald with his pen.
Emerald sat down and picked up the calendar. “I see. Well, when we think there’s maximum profit, as usual.”
“Precisely!” Venison said, throwing his pen onto the desk. “I have trained you well. And when do you think that will be?”
Emerald looked at the calendar. The secret of the bank’s unbearable toxic debts would be a major news story. It would knock everything else off the headlines, but Emerald knew Venison was leading him to the answer. “Not sure ...”