So there you have it. Operation Fear and Trembling.
A short postface to the shocking events just described. Starting with some gripes. Who named this operation? Was it Berger? The son of a bitch always fancied himself an aesthete. What was his mania for themed operations? Kierkegaard, blah blah blah, Greetings from Copenhagen, please, come on. First thing moving forward, if I have any say, we’re going to lose all this cutesy shit and get back to fundamentals, hire some competent business analysts to do a workflow assessment. I’m certain this is Berger’s work. Such a colossal dumbass, that guy. May he rest in peace.
And by the way, who signed off on a nerve agent? In a chutney jar, no less? Were we staging a grand opera or something? That’s state-sponsored nonsense, that’s trying to get noticed. We should have just gone in there with a mouse gun, one of those little Ruger LCP .380s, and shot the great Mr. Linera in the orbital cavity while he was having a shower. No fuss, no muss, a quick wipe down for the cleaners. Instead, our poorly vetted third-party vendor panics in the face of mild adversity. (Did anyone check this asshole’s references?) The nerve agent gets spilled, Linera lives, and his two bodyguards go down the old-fashioned way: in a hail of bullets. Not even deHoog, whose hapless disposition might suggest such an outcome, got a taste of the good stuff: his post-mortem chemistry was clean. A total waste of resources.
And while I’m at it, how many hotels have we staffed, exactly? I’m curious. I know about the buildings in Berlin, in L.A., London, of course. Cape Town, maybe? Am I misremembering? The casino in Macau, the golf resort in Florida. What else? We are everywhere, aren’t we? Is the Board even in charge anymore, or has it relented completely to the activist shareholders?
Rant over, with apologies.
A quick summary of the events that followed the operation, offered here for the historical record, and for my own peace of mind:
Carlos Linera, being alive, being not dead due to our operational failure, went on, two months after the operation, to become president of his country, democratically elected by a plurality of his fellow countrymen. One has to appreciate the irony of this, that Linera’s landslide was in no small part due to Operation Fear and Trembling. Our attempt on his life stoked the outrage of his people and turned him into a national hero. Not exactly the outcome we were aiming for.
One of Linera’s first acts as president was to nationalize the country’s rare earth metals, along with its crystal-clear mineral water reserves and its guavasteen crops, the exploitation of which would allow his country to build roads and schools and hospitals and to become a force in the international economy.
In synchrony with this act, many thousands of miles away, a swarm of furious traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange watched the stock price of several technology companies, upstream energy concerns, and private equity firms take a deep dive into the toilet. Spooky action at a distance. Rotate a photon in England, a different photon rotates in France.
Among those affected was a little-known but handsomely backed biotech start-up called GuaVax Ltd., which had spent several years hyping and had staked much of its future earnings upon its development of plantibody serums. What are these? Well, let me lay it out for posterity. Since Covid-19 swept its ultraviolet wand over the earth, exposing for all to see the douchebags and sociopaths who had overrun and debased it, disaster capitalists everywhere smelled opportunity. Plagues are the future, et cetera. And so the smart money flooded into any and all of the immunotherapeutical agents that might deliver a decent return on investment. Enter the plantibody.
Plantibodies are the Frankensteinian fusion of plant and human DNA; in the language of the venture capitalists, they’re versatile and scalable and effective against a variety of immunological insults, i.e., coronaviruses and what-have-yous. For reasons that only Zeus himself understands, the plant whose chemical components fuse most effectively with human DNA is the humble guavasteen, that delicious staple of the fruit smoothie. And not just any old guavasteen either, but only those that are cultivated in a very particular part of the world. Which part of the world? You guessed it, that which is now overseen by one Carlos Linera. Something about the composition of the rainforest soil. This was soil that GuaVax Ltd. and its shadowy investors very much wanted to occupy, in a perpetual sort of way, in the manner of the great rubber barons of yore. But now, with the election of Carlos Linera’s ACP Party, an elected government, not a Western enterprise, is in control of said soil and all of the magical potions that might arise from it.
As you’re well aware, this was a problem for us, because GuaVax Ltd. was our client. Was, I repeat, was our client. The very one, in fact, that had commissioned Operation Fear and Trembling. The failure of the operation voided our contract with GuaVax Ltd., leaving us in a vulnerable position, as the revenues that our plucky little company had depended upon for its continued ability to thrive were suddenly gone, poof. Which brings us to today. Here we are, under new ownership, a hedge fund naturally, and you and me now answerable to effete little Nasdaq knobs who have no appreciation for our delicate work.
“Merchants have no country,” a fella once said.
What’s trickled down to me in the last few days from our interim management team is a desire to mop up any spills. Operation Fear and Trembling is a New Coke–level fuck-up that the shareholders want no part of. Most of our loose ends have been easy enough to tie off, and if I’m not misremembering, most were dealt with preemptively, in anticipation of a hostile takeover.
Most, I say.
One, however — one is outstanding. And I’m told must be our priority for at least Q1 and likely through Q3. Can you guess which?
Don’t answer. I’ll just tell you.
Summer Johnson has gone missing, we’ve been unable to locate her. Last week we sent Company operatives to her flat, but she was nowhere to be found, and the place looked to have been hastily vacated. Clothing still in the closet, leftovers rotting in the fridge. Someone, presumably Summer Johnson herself, had discovered and pulled our bugs from all the various light switches and electrical outlets; our cameras were snipped and dropped on the floor where we’d find them. As a consequence, we have no audio or video of her, nothing, from something like August onward. Her landlady — a civilian, not on our payroll — said she hadn’t seen her for months.
I don’t know what to say, Nadja. I’d love to blame this on organizational rightsizing, but we both know it runs deeper than that.
We have eyeballs on the ex-boyfriend’s place in Toronto. He’s moved apartments since her disappearance, and in recent days seems to have found some new companionship, quite a bit of it actually, none of whom is the party in question. I don’t know how much longer we can maintain this level of surveillance; there’s no accommodation for it in the revised quarterly budget. So for now, I guess, Summer Johnson has gone dark.
I’m mixed on this, Nadja, you won’t be surprised, as I am ambivalent about most things in this world. In my middle age, I’ve forsworn certainty. Certainty is a plague upon the populace; it corrupts and divides. And so I’m torn between the interests of the Company, which is to say “my interests,” and my investment in the adventures this young lady is having. I wish her a long and happy one, what can I say? She reminds me of the guy I used to be, the aspiring painter in that long-ago city. It’s romantic. I’m jealous.
Enough. See you at the Board meeting. It’s scheduled for 7 a.m. (not a typo) next Monday morning. Try not to drink too much the night before. It really doesn’t help, believe me.
Until then.