Stuck at home with corona, I decided to try my hand at writing science fiction to pass the time. The result was not science fiction at all, but I think it’s still fun to read, so I’m posting it here.
Trevor Norquist, the world’s first trillionaire, died in a fiery explosion. His private jet was hit by a Stinger missile when it was taking off the Köln/Bonn airport. Panic was immediate and widespread: the entire EU closed its airspace in fear of another terrorist attack. Germany erected roadblocks in the area around the airport, searching every single car, and generating monstrous traffic jams.
Videos from the attack made it easy to pinpoint where the missile was fired from: a hunter’s watchtower in the nearby Königsforst. The police was there half an hour after the attack, but the assassin was long gone. He had abandoned the missile launcher there, and nothing else. Forensics went over it with zeal, but couldn’t find anything. No fingerprints, not even a drop of sweat. Clearly they were dealing with a professional.
—/—/—
“How the fuck these fucking eco-terrorists got their hands on a fucking Stinger missile?!” – exclaimed Ernst Dieter, investigator of the Bundeskriminalamt. He was in a terrible mood. Just a week before the eco-terrorists had dynamited the iconic Bagger 288. He was already working overtime to coordinate security for Norquist’s visit. With the threat escalation, the work started cutting his sleep time. He had to get reinforcements from the nearby Hessen. Did anybody know how many forms did he need to sign to get police from another Bundesland to come? And all that because the stubborn prick wouldn’t accept postponing his visit. Norquist’s only concession to reality was giving up on visiting the mines themselves. Still, that left him with the problem of escorting him from the airport to the hotel through thousands of protesters. When he saw the jet taking off he finally relaxed a bit, and dared to dream that he would take the rest of the day off and sleep. “Norquist is not my problem anymore!”, he celebrated, only to have his stomach drop when he saw a bloody Stinger missile hitting the jet.
“We shouldn’t jump to conclusions” – said Robert Weil, his partner – “It doesn’t fit the style of Vergeltung der Klimaopfer, that you insist on calling eco-terrorists. They have never killed anyone before. They insist they are saboteurs, not terrorists”.
“And do you believe their propaganda now? Get serious. They hated the guy more than anything!” – countered Dieter angrily.
“Then why destroy Bagger 288 just before? This only served to increase security” – Weil pointed out.
“Distraction manoeuvre.” – answered Dieter – “It focused our attention on the ground, on the mines, when they knew that the real danger was in the air”
“You are really overestimating their competence.” – dismissed Weil – “We caught the clowns responsible for Bagger 288 in less than 2 days. Both by tracing the explosives they used and the IP address from which they posted the manifest.”
“They are several people, Rob.” – replied Dieter – “They let the idiots handle Bagger 288, and got the real pros to get Norquist, which was the target that actually mattered.”
“I’m just asking you to keep an open mind, Ernst, plenty of people wanted Norquist dead. It could also be the Montenegrins.” – conjectured Weil.
At this moment, both their phones vibrated at the same time. This could only mean something from work, and indeed, it was an email from forensics about the Stinger launcher. It had been tracked to a batch of Stingers that Italy had provided to Ukraine as military help against Russia.
“I knew it!” – Dieter allowed half a smile to flicker through his face – “The fucking Russians gave them the missile.”
“The Russians? Not the Ukrainians?” – asked Weil.
“All the Stingers we gave the Ukrainians are accounted for.” – replied Dieter – “Either safely in storage, used in the war, or captured by the Russians. Guess which ones could end up here?”
“Fair enough, but I doubt the Russians would deal directly with Vergeltung der Klimaopfer” – countered Weil – “Doesn’t fit their ideology, and besides, why not just put the Stingers in the black market? They make a neat profit and don’t get involved in any messy affair.”
“They are involved, and they will pay for this! Selling Stingers to terrorists puts the blood on their hands!” – raged Dieter.
“I’m not sure how we could make them pay. There’s nothing left to sanction.” – replied Weil – “In any case, how many Stingers did they capture in Ukraine?”
After pausing a bit to think, Dieter answered slowly – “Fourteen.”
“Scheiße”.
“Ja, Scheiße.”
—/—/—
After a week of interrogating Vergeltung der Klimaopfer members, Ernst Dieter had to admit they probably had nothing to do with the death of Trevor Norquist. His interrogations were tough and produced results, or so he would say. Others would say that he was nothing but a torturer.
“Nonsense,” – he thought – “Torture is illegal, and I’m strictly following the new counter-terrorism law, that allows for enhanced interrogation of terrorism suspects.”
But all the enhancement was for nothing, he still could get no information out of them. “Maybe they really don’t know anything.” – he thought as he released another traumatised student.
“Maybe they are indeed the poorly-organised students that can barely afford legal explosives that they claim to be.” – he thought – “A black-market Stinger must cost millions of euros. And they aren’t point-and-click as an automatic camera, one needs training to handle one. No, we are after a wealthy, well-organised terrorist group with military background.”
Reluctantly, he turned to the other suspects Robert Weil had mentioned, the Montenegrins. That was harder work, as their criminal background was clean, so he had to restrict himself to “gentle” interrogations. Still, they were even worse fits for the terrorists behind Norquist’s assassination than Vergeltung der Klimaopfer. To start with, there weren’t many of them. Even in Montenegro itself, there were less than a million Montenegrins. In Köln he managed to find 10 that joined the anti-Norquist protests. Some of them knew each other, but they were not an organisation in any way, shape, or form, just families making a living. Most had come to Köln a long time ago, during the Yugoslav wars, and a couple more had arrived after Norquist’s rise to power. Besides being elated by Norquist’s death, the only thing they had in common was a lack of money. The rich Montenegrins were those that stayed in Montenegro and profited from Norquist’s regime.
“No,” – he thought – “I have to look at the wealthy people that wanted Norquist dead.” There was no lack of those either. In fact, it was hard to find someone who didn’t want Norquist dead. Even he himself couldn’t shed a tear for Norquist, he was only angry at the assassination because it had been his job to keep him alive. “Maybe his ex-wives and children?” – he considered. Norquist had 9 children by 4 different women, that had already started an epic fight for the inheritance. – “Plenty of people would kill for hundreds of billions of euros, but kill their own father? Just to get the inheritance a bit sooner? No, that’s too absurd. Besides, his family could just poison or stab him. Using a Stinger indicates an external enemy.”
—/—/—
Dieter started considering Norquist’s trajectory from the start. He had been a mostly unknown investor, mainly busy with multiplying the couple of billions he had inherited, until he saw a golden opportunity in fossil fuel divestment. As the planet warmed, more and more big banks decided that the damage to their reputation was not worth the profit, and so cut off financing to fossil fuel projects. To Norquist this meant he could charge them higher interest rates, as they didn’t have much of a choice. He had the capital to spare and no use for a reputation, so he slowly specialized in financing coal power plants and oil drilling in Africa and Asia. The more polluting the better; not because Norquist wanted to pollute the planet per se, it’s just that the specially dirty projects had the most trouble in finding financing, and thus he could charge the highest interest rates.
This worked for about a decade, until the demand for his finance started to dry up. The demand for oil was falling too much, nobody was interested in new drilling. As for coal, the international pressure was getting extreme. Any country that wanted to receive foreign aid had to do the bare minimum about global warming, and so African countries stopped building new coal power plants. Only proudly pariah states such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea were still interested in Norquist’s loans. That was not enough. To compound Norquist’s problems, the price of coal, gas, and oil was hitting rock bottom due to the low demand. This threatened to bankrupt the very projects he had financed, and still hadn’t finished repaying, causing him major losses. This is when he decided he had to create his own demand for fossil fuels. It wasn’t enough to start businesses based on burning fossil fuels, as those were getting banned everywhere. He had to make sure that the law would stay on his side. He had to buy a country.
And so it started his hostile takeover of Montenegro. The country’s GDP was only 15 billion euros, or about 5% of his wealth. Money was therefore not a problem. The difficulty lay in that Montenegro was not for sale, and Norquist had the curious idiosyncrasy that he always respected the letter of the law. He started by buying the aluminium smelter in Podgorica and making a major expansion. The investment didn’t seem to make much sense as electricity in Montenegro was not particularly cheap or reliable, but the government of Montenegro was anyway overjoyed with the huge investment. So much that it didn’t think twice about allowing Norquist to build a massive extension of the port of Bar, under his private ownership, necessary to export the increased production of aluminium. Or about allowing Norquist to buy the Podgorica-Bar railway, in exchange for a renovation. At this point Norquist was in a position similar to Nokia in Finland: he was so important for the economy of the country that when he asked for something, the government listened. And what he asked for was so little: a mere reform of the campaign finance laws, so that anybody could donate as much they want to any politician, without having to make the donation public. In other words, legalized bribery.
After this law went through, things went much quicker. The media market was completely deregulated, and Norquist promptly acquired all the major newspapers, radio stations, and television channels. This ensured his portrayal as the saviour of Montenegro, the man that had doubled the country’s GDP overnight, and the silencing of his critics. The next step was privatising the whole electricity generation system of the country, coupled with complete deregulation, allowing Norquist to deny power to whoever he wanted for any reason. Legalized extortion. This was followed by abrogating the international treaties Montenegro had entered to fight global warming, allowing fossil fuel power plants to be built again. Norquist then built massive coal and oil power plants to power his aluminium smelter. With the price of coal and oil so low, he managed to produced aluminium at a price that even Iceland couldn’t beat. He didn’t stop there: Bitcoin mining, hydrogen electrolysing, Norquist started any energy-intensive industry that he could think of, and built more fossil power plants for them.
By the time the Montenegrins realised that they were losing their country, it was too late. Anybody that dared to oppose Norquist’s plans found themselves subject to a barrage of negative media coverage, highlighting real or imaginary corruption affairs. The recalcitrant ones were forced into economic ruin by strategically timed power cuts. Social media became tightly controlled, and protest was criminalised. Montenegro became a Singapore-style “democracy”: elections were still held, and votes were still counted with strict correctness. It’s just that the government openly retaliated against those that voted against it, ensuring that it always won with huge majorities. Norquist had no taste for fake elections or murdering the opposition like in Russia. No, it was vital to him that the rule of law was strictly respected.
The final touch was a radical reform of the tax code. Norquist had an almost religious opposition to income or property taxes, and changed the state to rely only on consumption taxes, effectively eliminating his own tax burden. This proved wildly popular with the global super-rich, who parked their wealth in Montenegro en masse. The country quickly overtook Switzerland as the country of choice for tax avoidance, and thus became a massive financial centre, rivalling London, New York, and Tokyo. This sudden influx of cash would easily wreck the currency of such a small country, but Montenegro had the unique advantage of using the euro without being a member of the European Union. It thus enjoyed the stability of the currency without having to obey any of the European Union’s regulations.
And thus it came to pass that Montenegro rose from poverty and stagnation to be one of the most wealthy and dynamic nations in the world. It also achieved such an astounding air pollution that one often couldn’t even see the Sun, a feat that had only been achieved before by China in 2012. Internationally, it was a scandal. The brazen disregard for international norms caused it to be hit with sanctions after sanctions after sanctions. It was slowly becoming as isolated as Russia. There was even talk of war. Norquist didn’t care, he had already made his profit. Après moi, le déluge.
He had been yet another billionaire asshole, and now became the most hated person in the entire world. He wore his infamy with relish. He always bragged about being a self-made trillionaire, having started as a mere billionaire. To those that accused him of being unethical, he always replied that he had never broke any law. Deep down he believed that making money was the only measure of morality that mattered. Since he was so rich he must have been doing it right. It seemed to be working, until Norquist flew to Germany to make a deal to buy their brown coal at negative prices, and got hit by a Stinger.
—/—/—
Dieter shook his head. It was going to be hard to find out who killed a man with so many enemies. His primary suspects were still environmental organisations, as he assumed that Norquist’s secret police would neutralise any threat from the Montenegrins themselves. Which organisation, though? So many had been popping up since the climate shit had hit the fan. In Italy there was the Partigiani Padani, a particularly violent one, made from farmers that became destitute as the river Po dried up. In Spain there was Rebel·lió Unida, an unlikely union of Catalans that had been losing Barcelona to the rising sea and Spaniards from the interior, that were spooked as heatwaves claimed ever more, ever younger, and ever healthier lives. In Austria the Österreichische Alpenverein had morphed from a leisure organisation into a terrorist one as the Alps became too hot to climb in the summer and had too little snow to be skied in the winter. In Britain there was one of the oldest, Extinction Rebellion, that had already started as a radical protest group, and turned into bombing campaigns as the collapse of the Gulf Stream made Britain as dry as Spain. And so on, and so on, and so on…
He was proven wrong when another Stinger hit a private jet. This time the victim was Zhang Shaopeng, a Chinese electric vehicles tycoon, that was landing in Warsaw to close a deal to convert its bus fleet from diesel to electric ones. Now Zhang wasn’t a nice person – the reason his vehicles were consistently cheaper than the competition was his passion for using Uyghur forced labour – but he was hardly a prime target for environmentalists. His electric buses alone were responsible for cutting oil demand significantly, and he was the first manufacturer of electric cars that managed to produced them at lower cost than comparable fossil cars. This was a critical point in the transition away from oil: fossil cars became rich people’s toys, and electric cars the financially sensible choice.
“Scheiße!” – exclaimed Dieter – “Not again!”
“It was bound to happen” – said Weil sombrely – “I told the Kanzler that we couldn’t reopen the airspace before we recovered the thirteen Stingers on the loose, or caught the terrorists. But no, the planes must keep flying! Everybody believed that Norquist was the only target. That was just wishful thinking.”
“Fools!” – concurred Dieter – “There’s nothing we can do to defend civilian aircraft, the whole idea is that there will be nobody shooting at them!”
“Indeed.” – added Weil – “Civilian aircraft are sitting ducks. They broadcast their position, don’t have flares, can’t do high-g manoeuvres…”
“Yeah no shit Sherlock.” – interrupted Dieter – “Instead of blathering about military tactics, tell me what the Polish found out.”
Impervious to Dieter’s rudeness after long years of working together, Weil answered calmly – “As you know, everybody has been watching like crazy the forests near airports, and Las Kabacki was no exception. The Stinger was not fired from there, but from a communal garden, Kępa Służewiecka, right next to the Chopin airport. As before, the launcher was abandoned on the spot, but this time somebody saw the assassin.”
“Aha!” – exclaimed Dieter – “So watching the forests was not in vain!”
“Indeed it wasn’t” – agreed Weil – “A Polish pensioner was trimming his hedge when he saw somebody climbing on the roof of a shed a few blocks away. He was a bit surprised, people in the communal garden are usually too old for that. He was even more surprised when the guy put something on his shoulder and stared directly at the airport. He thought it was a TV camera. Then the “TV camera” spit a Stinger and he saw the private jet exploding. Then he got really scared and hid inside the hedge. Got a few scratches from that.”
“I don’t care about his scratches!” – interrupted Dieter – “Do we have a description of the assassin?”
“I was getting there” – complained Weil – “White, tall, strong, short dark hair. The Polish couldn’t get more out of the pensioner, he wasn’t very close and his eyesight isn’t particularly good.”
“That describes half of Europe” – grumbled Dieter – “Doesn’t help much”.
“It does exclude the other half” – Weil pointed out – “You know how Bild has been making noises about Zombie ISIS being behind it.”
“Bild can write whatever nonsense they want” – Dieter replied curtly – “We’re in charge of the investigation, not them”.
“There’s more” – Weil closed his eyes and breathed deeply, his patience wearing thin – “While among the bushes, the pensioner heard a petrol engine starting up and going away.”
“That does make things easier, petrol engines are getting quite uncommon” – Dieter got a tiny bit happier.
“This is Poland we’re talking about, Ernst.” – countered Weil – “Petrol engines are still the majority there. But it allows us to exclude the environmentalists as the culprits.”
“You’ve got to be joking. You think some eco-terrorists would go as far as requiring their assassinations to be carbon-free?” – replied Dieter incredulously.
“I’m dead serious.” – replied Weil – “They are downright religious about being carbon-free. Have you forgotten that time when Partigiani Padani tried to hijack a cruise ship, but were quickly turned into minced meat by the police? It turns out that they were using a carbon-free alternative to gunpowder, which meant that their guns failed more often than not.
“Meh. It’s not as if the eco-terrorists would be after Zhang anyway.” – replied Dieter – “I’m still struggling to see any connection between him and Norquist. Do they have any enemies in common at all? Why would anyone want both of them dead?”
At this point an assistant barged in: “Ernst, Robert, you’ve got to see this. They posted a manifesto.”
“Where? How?” – asked Dieter.
“They uploaded a torrent to ThePirateBay, and have been posting links to it all over social media: Twitter, Facebook, Reddit… it’s spreading like wildfire. Here is the file” – the assistant showed in his tablet.
“For fuck’s sake, it’s 200 pages! And it’s written in German, French, English, and Spanish! Self-important lunatics.” – exclaimed Dieter.
A while later, Weil started summarising:
“They’re promising to always kill the richest person in Europe, until no billionaires are left. Norquist was the richest man in the world, so that fitted the bill. After he died, the richest person would be Jules Hermet, a banker. But then Zhang visited, and Zhang was richer, so he became the target instead. They write that they don’t want to kill anybody, just redistribute wealth, so anyone can stop being a target by giving money away. Then there’s some blah blah about class war, media brainwashing people, democracy being a tool of oppression, and taking direct action. Lots of pages lamenting the death of the staff in the private jets, praising their heroic sacrifice, and warning anybody working for billionaires to get away.”
“Communists!” – cursed Dieter – “We’re in 2041 and have to deal with communist terrorists?! What is this, a 20th century revival?”
“Call Mr. Hermet” – Dieter told the assistant – “his security is not our responsibility, but we can help with intelligence.”
“Why Europe?” – grumbled Dieter, who was not listening – “Why only kill billionaires here? This will just make them flee to the Caribbean or their bunkers in New Zealand or whatever. This makes no sense, communists are always about bringing the revolution to the entire planet.”
“If you want my guess, Ernst” – interjected Weil – “it’s just an operational limitation. They are not powerful enough to assassinate people everywhere in the world. And they must succeed in their assassinations in order to be taken seriously.”
“Then it was really stupid to promise to always kill the richest” – replied Dieter – “it’s much easier to defend a known target.”
“And the more spectacular if they succeed.” – countered Weil – “I think spectacle is the only thing they are after. There’s no way they’ll manage to kill hundreds of billionaires. Probably their goal is to get a couple more, and make the rest panic into submission.”
“Do you mean submission as in giving away their money?” – asked Dieter surprised.
“No!” – laughed Weil – “Not even these lunatics can believe that. Submission as in running away from Europe until things calm down.”
The assistant chimed in again – “Just got a message from the linguistics analyst. She says that the German version of the manifesto has some grammatical mistakes that are typical of native French speakers. She is now trying to find experts in English in Spanish to see if the pattern repeats”.
“French communists, hä!” – exclaimed Dieter – “We are after a French communist soldier. Someone that probably has experience with Stingers, and is no longer active in the military.”
“There can’t be so many.” – concurred Weil – “Let’s ask the French military for a list. Emphasis on those that are working on private security after leaving the military, it’s the perfect cover for a terrorist.”
—/—/—
“Ah these loudmouths. They couldn’t resist posting the damn manifesto.” – thought Pierre Barère annoyed – “at least they agreed to wait until I got the second target down. Otherwise the mission would certainly be a failure. Now it will just probably be a failure.”
His thoughts were interrupted by the train announcing the stop at the station of Lille.
“Argh how I hate trains. Stuck here with all this noise all these peasants. With an airplane at least the torture is over quickly. But no, the airspace is closed. Motherfuckers.” – he chuckled as he realise the non-sequitur – “Ok, no, that’s my own fault.” – he laughed out loud. The feeling of power was good. His good mood quickly evaporated as his thoughts turned to the mission ahead.
“It had to be this fucking country! I had to show my real passport to board the train, and can’t even bring any weapons.” – cursed Barère mentally – “Knives! I have to terminate the target using bloody knives like a street thug. And I don’t even get a car. My “getaway car” is the bloody metro. Argh. Just want to get this over with and move on to the next target, that will be a proper operation with glamour.”
—/—/—
“Two days! Two days to get us the damn list! The bloody French are as stubborn and cranky as always. They act as if they’re doing us a big favour, when we’re the ones trying to save their asses!” – complained Dieter.
Weil ignored the whining and read the report from the IT specialist:
“It’s very promising. There are less than a hundred former soldiers employed in private security, we can tail them all. Most have social media accounts, and of these the vast majority have expressed right-wing opinions. Excluding these, we’re left with 27 suspects. One of them is employed as a bodyguard by the French Communist Party!”
“The French Communist Party?!” – snorted Dieter – “Do they still exist? I thought La France Insoumise had taken over the French far-left completely.”
“Not completely.” – answered Weil – “The communists refused to join. Maybe they still dream about the power they had back in the 20th century.”
“Let’s interrogate this… ” – Dieter looked at the file – “Pierre Barère then.”
“He took the Eurostar to London a couple of days ago.” – replied Weil – “and Jules Hermet is in France. We should focus on the other suspects now. We can always get Barère when he comes back to Schengen.”
—/—/—
“Doesn’t this freak ever leave his house!?” – thought Barère more annoyed than ever. He had installed a microcamera across the street from Frederic Hoyle, to establish his routine. It turned out, there wasn’t one. He saw a man coming every morning and leaving every evening, presumably his butler, but that was it. No sign of Hoyle. Lots of packages being delivered, though.
“I’d never seen such a low-key billionaire.” – thought Barère. “He owns a detached house in London, so he obviously has millions, but there’s nothing else! Where are the armies of servants, the fancy cars, the women, the parties? Is he trying hard to pretend to be poor, or is he just a freak?”
From the satellite pictures he could see a pool in the backyard, but that was pretty much it, no hidden helipad or similar extravagances. He was mildly interesting by the roof as he noticed that it was a solar roof, consisting entirely of solar panels. Such a large roof must generate a serious amount of power. Barère didn’t think much of it, and assumed that Hoyle was just a clean energy freak.
“This guy is supposed to be richest man in Europe, the secret identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.” – thought Barère dismissively – “At least that’s what the Party says. Not my problem. They gave me a job, I’ll dispatch it, and go back to having fun. The first two targets were a lot of fun, I can’t complain.” – he basked in the memories of firing Stingers for a while, and slowly let his mood sour again as he came back to the reality of being holed up in a hotel in London with no end in sight.
“Am I going to have to break in his house?” – he thought with a tinge of desperation – “The Party couldn’t get the blueprints, or any information about the security system. That would be just foolish. Maybe I’ll catch the butler and beat some info out of him? That’s still dangerous, I’ll just have one night before Hoyle discovers that something is up and vanishes.”
At this moment, his camera showed what he had almost given up on seeing, Hoyle leaving the house.
“That’s my lucky break!” – Barère thought – “He’s alone, I might even manage to end this tonight.”
He ran out of his room, and calmly walked out of his hotel, that was strategically situated between Hoyle’s house and the nearest underground station.
“He’s walking straight towards me!” – Barère couldn’t believe his luck, and tightened the grip on the knife in his pocket.
“This is going to be so easy! Nobody on the street either, even the escape will be easy” – Barère could almost sing, until he noticed that Hoyle noticed him. First Hoyle slowed, then stopped, and then started walking back to his house.
“What a paranoid freak! Who turns around just because they saw someone looking at them on the street?!” – cursed Barère. He kept walking towards Hoyle with the same pace. Until Hoyle looked back discretely, and tightened his pace. Barère also tightened his pace. Hoyle looked back again, and started running at full speed.
“Merde! It’s now or never!” – exclaimed Barère, and started running at full speed as well.
Hoyle was no match for Barère’s fitness, but he had a dozen metres of advantage, with the result that both reached Hoyle’s house at the same time. Barère had jumped with his knife out, aiming for Hoyle’s heart through his back, when the scene became visible to Hoyle’s security cameras. In less than a millisecond Hoyle’s AI correctly deduced that Hoyle was in mortal danger, and fired the house’s weapons.
Those were laser effectors that Rheinmetall had developed for the German Navy, but never used in combat. It turned out that atmospheric dispersion limited their range too much, and the power supply for a 60 kW pulse was too bulky. Neither were problems for a house. Laser effectors also had the critical advantage that they were unknown, and their components passed for research lasers to untrained eyes. As such Hoyle had no problem smuggling them through the British customs, that were extremely effective at blocking explosives and firearms.
The lasers instantly vaporised Barère’s head, while making Hoyle’s skin only slightly warmer. In this respect they were completely successful. The fatal problem was completely unforeseen. While photons do carry momentum, despite being massless, the momentum of even a 60 kW laser pulse was still too small to make any measurable difference for Barère’s headless body, that drove the knife into Hoyle’s heart purely out of inertia.
(thanks to Flavio Baccari for the photo)