“Exactly,” Dr. Armstrong says heavily. “He’s blowing between five and ten million pounds on wild parties this month.”
Persephone has been scribbling notes on a legal pad. Now she taps the cap of her pen against her teeth pensively. “How much is Golden Promise Ministries worth? And the GP Services subsidiary?”
“Not enough,” says my wife. She flips pages rapidly. “We got our hands on their last filed accounts. They’re both privately held organizations but his Church is a 501(c)(3) body, income-tax exempt—we had to pull strings, but the Treasury were remarkably helpful—Golden Promise Ministries reported gross income of about forty-eight million dollars a year. Their subsidiaries are more interesting: GP Services actually made a loss in 2012, but it’s an artificial loss, they would have been in profit to the tune of seventeen million dollars if they hadn’t plowed it into, uh, ‘business development’ and some heavy real estate and capital expenditure acquisitions. Like that Gulfstream Schiller flies around in.” She frowns in distaste. “Gross turnover was two hundred and sixty-nine million dollars in 2012. There are some other activities—Schiller runs a talk radio station and a cable TV channel, all firewalled from the rest of the business because media outlets are subject to regulatory scrutiny—and then there’s some stuff the Treasury people couldn’t get us. A couple of business units with their own limited-liability setup and some sort of federal contract.”
Persephone whistles quietly. “All right. Call it three hundred and fifty million dollars a year in turnover, and the black budget. That will be cost-plus if he’s subcontracting for the Black Chamber. Why is that not sufficient, Michael?”
“Because.” Dr. Armstrong crosses one leg over the other and laces his fingers around his knee. “How do you spend ten million dollars a month on entertainment on income of three hundred and fifty a year, without it damaging the rest of your business empire? It’s thirty percent of gross turnover! Obviously you can’t do that: it’s a short-term strategy. He can afford to do it for a month or two, maybe three, but he can’t keep it up indefinitely. So, let’s work it through. If he’s greasing palms in order to win outsourcing contracts from the new ministry, he’s doing it too early. The temporary agency MOD is provisioning next week per order in council is a holding action. It’ll take nine months to draft a proper legislative framework, rush it through committee, and get the new portfolio established. Even with the usual large government contracting agencies handling things at our end and Schiller plugging his GP Security people into them as specialist subcontractors. If he’s here to grab a chunk of our work, he should be planning for a long haul, one to two years. So he’s running a short-term plan, people, and he’s going to reach the payoff soon. Which means it has to be something huge enough to justify that level of expenditure, that pays off really fast.”
“There are other loose ends,” Persephone adds in the silence. “Why his people tried to snatch Bob off the streets. And the attempt on Cassie and Alex. The new parasites, the segmented worms.”
“They’re like nothing of his I’ve seen before,” I add, shuddering. “And how did he come back from the Temple on the Pyramid? He’s supposed to have died there. The gate was closed. He shouldn’t be here at all.”
Mo speculates: “Let me take a stab at it? Schiller Mark One was a charismatic evangelical preacher. He’s still running the Church but he’s not so visible on air these days and he’s not throwing any stadium events. So he’s not looking for broad grassroots public support and outreach. Instead he’s making lots of friends among the point-one-percenters, he’s hobnobbing with MPs and Cabinet Office insiders and providing hookers and blow to the elite.”
Persephone joins in. “These parties. Two so far, another next week. I’ve met Schiller. Before the Pyramid he was a true believer: he believed in saving souls from the fiery pit. But he’s also a, a moralist. A quiverful dispensationalist Christian, just with some extra baggage. If Ms. Brewer’s report is remotely accurate the parties are swimming in sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Isn’t this a doctrinal contradiction? I could see him as he used to be, hiring a Christian rock band and having lots of wholesome young Church members to encourage his guests to come to Jesus—his version of Jesus, sleeping in a tomb on a dead alien planet—but this is all wrong. I can’t believe this is the same person. Something has reoriented his moral compass.”
“The Sleeper,” I say baldly. “That’s got to be the answer to how he came back here and it’s probably the reason he’s behaving like this now.”
The SA looks at me intently. “Explain your reasoning,” he says.
“Gut feeling: our man exhibits behavior type A, goes somewhere weird, returns, and exhibits behavior type B, where B and A are, on the face of it, incompatible. If he was a teenager having a crisis of faith I might credit it, but Schiller’s a middle-aged, wealthy Church elder. He’s thoroughly invested in his worldview. People like that don’t bend, much less do a U-turn: they stick to their path or they break. Ergo, whatever is in Schiller’s head isn’t Schiller anymore. At a minimum it’s Schiller-plus.”
“We need to know what’s going on around the Pyramid,” Persephone says, her lack of enthusiasm for this chore glaringly obvious. Not that I blame her. Visiting the tomb of the Sleeper in the Pyramid is on my bucket list of things to do before I die, right between holding a tea party inside the sarcophagus at Chernobyl and infecting myself with Ebola Zaire. “Is the Squadron available…?”
“Not flying this year,” Dr. Armstrong says shortly, “our ground crew got laid off.”
I can’t contain myself: “Oh great, that’s just peachy. We spent how many hundreds of millions back in the late seventies acquiring a top secret aviation capability and now it’s grounded because they can’t top up the brake fluid and lube? What is the world coming to?”
“They were on the books under the Nimrod MRA4 program,” the SA reminds me. “And look what happened to that.” I nod. Unhappy but true: the MRA4 upgrade program was summarily scrapped during the 2010 strategic defense and security review because of “cost overruns.” Ahem, that wasn’t us, there were no witnesses, you can’t prove it, mate … but if it means the White Elephants are grounded while the MOD hunts behind the sofa cushions for pocket change to keep them ticking over, we’re stuffed. “And anyway, high-altitude reconnaissance overflights are beside the point at this time, given that the Sleeper is clearly active to some extent.”
“Someone’s going to have to walk over there and poke it with a stick. And this time, it’s not going to be me,” Persephone adds.