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Page 9.

4. Hannah Smith

A private, corporate jet with discreet markings arrived from the direction of Asia and coasted toward a landing in drizzle and fog on the outskirts of Le Bourget, Paris. This was not the common airport for international travelers (Charles de Gaulle, at Roissy) but a hub for cargo jets—as well as corporate executive jets requiring extra privacy and security.

With flashing flight lights and glaring headlamps, the fourteen-seat Embraer Legacy twin engine jet, with two pilots and two flight attendants, touched down at an exclusive and discreet corporate air terminal.

Inside the plush, wheat-themed interior were several passengers, including the fleet's owner, a billionaire named Wan from Shanghai whose industries sprawled across the globe without loyalty to any particular nation. Most of the world's wealth was concentrated in about one thousand families like Wan's, fairly evenly divided between Capitalist China, India, the so-called Islamic Belt, and the remaining West. The West, by mid-twenty-first century, was a shadow of its former self in the previous five centuries, when they had been world's Eurocentric-Christiancentric rulers. The billionaire manipulators of Western cultures, particularly in the laissez-faire U.S.A., had created a global oligarchy whose families and retainers now stepped across the corpses of their former colonial masters, and picked as they wished on the carcasses of former empires from Europe to North America.

Wan—one of the richest men in the world—was a slender, graying man with a deceptively pleasant expression on relatively youthful features, behind which lurked hungry, cold eyes that glistened like dark fruit. He was in Paris to set the ground for his run for the presidency of CEOC, whose parliament of global Chief Executive Officers was due to meet in Luxembourg this month. CEOC had rented the Chateau Ansembourg, lately owned by a secretive Japanese religious cult, in the touristy Valley of the Seven Castles. Wan even contemplated making an offer to these Japanese cultists—the chateau sounded like a useful little toy to own, where you could entertain guests without getting hassled by cops or do-gooders.

As the Embraer came to a landing, the billionaire kept one hand on a slim black leather case on the seat beside him. The little briefcase was important enough to merit a window seat, while its owner occupied the aisle seat beside it.

The four-seat configuration surrounded a compact conference table at the center of the fuselage. With him in conversation, sitting across the table, was his French corporate demi-roi, Armand Pascal, who chaired ten corporate boards under the feudal domain of Wan, and was one of his principal Caucasian faces.

Pascal and his ilk were useful. Using Caucasian shills tended to calm the racist fools. The European and U.S. press were calmed when they saw white faces selling out the works. Good for jobs, they told their fools. When Wan thought about how the British in particular, along with the Germans, French, and other colonial powers, had crippled China in past centuries; how the West had poured thousands of tons of opium into China, ruining millions of lives while an ineffectual native emperor and bureaucracy sort of helped and sort of hindered without much effect—why should anyone care what happened to these European and U.S. swine? The capitalist, industrial class had been the true rulers of the English and other hegemonies during the industrial revolution, so why should things be any different now?

Wan had viceroys similar to Pascal in Germany, England, Canada, and the United States. He owned lesser fiefdoms in Russia, Brazil, Egypt, and Nigeria, and worked tirelessly to increase his world clout. All the zillionaires did this as an unstoppable prerogative of their DNA.

Moving about the plane's passenger space were two tall, slender cabin attendants—blonde Swedish women in sky-blue uniforms and high heels. Wan liked to surround himself with tall blondes. Being one of the wealthiest men in the world, he could afford whatever his heart desired. Women like this were just toys—pets, like owning a nice dog or cat. His own wife was of good Chinese Mandarin stock, discreetly living with their two natural-born children in a fortified compound, on a breezy and temperate plateau inland of Zhuhai on the South China Sea coast. His wife and family were well provided for, he visited them often, and she made no demands on him as he busied himself with his world conquests.

Wan's two chief enforcers were never far—one female, the other male. The woman was a former Olympic gymnast and Judo champion named Savia. She was Cuban-German and had glossy black hair tightly bound into a bun at the back of the head for maximum range of vision and unencumbered fighting motion. Her strong physique had not an ounce of fat, and was usually clad in dowdy, unremarkable earth-tone skirts or pants, sensible shoes, a modest blouse and vest, that sort of thing. She had café-au-lait skin and a certain exotic, brutal beauty including dark, almond-shaped eyes, a strong but feminine nose, and a wide, thin-lipped mouth enhanced with slashes of cherry-red lipstick.

The other chief bodyguard and knight was Yoichi, a gladiator raised in the Tokyo and Macao gambling worlds. Yoichi was of Japanese ancestry. Overcoming prejudice, he had proven his prowess in private arenas of Bangkok and Okinawa, where desperate men fought to the death in duels the police would never know about, or were bribed not to know by men and women of Wan's class. Yoichi was armed with those opposite dragons, a yin and yang of brains and power, plus an amazing speed to combine the two for fast, blurry victories in the ring or in private demonstrations favored by Wan. Where feasible (legal or not), Yoichi carried firearms and knives according to his personal discretion. Whatever other bodyguards Wan kept about, he preferred close and personal associates like Savia and Yoichi, who were prepared to lay down their lives for their owner if need be. In return, they lived lives of incomparable power, luxury, and gratification.

Savia and Yoichi hired their own specialized and discreet agents—spies, assassins, enforcers—as needed. Wan kept close to them, received regular reports while maintaining a legally safe distance, and otherwise did not interfere in how they carried out his orders. The unsaid reality was that they, like anyone else, were disposable and could be replaced at a moment's notice. He knew what they were doing at all times, but rarely ever interfered.

Finally, seated and sulking on a three-seat couch in the rear, opposite Yoichi, was a Caucasian woman named Hannah Smith. She was young, with long blonde (of course) hair swept up in a classic chignon on the back of the head. Her eyes had a hurt, almost tearful weather in them today, which Wan indulgently ignored. Hannah wore an Asian-style garment that might be mistaken for a Chinese cheongsam skirt of deep, lustrously dark blue silk. It was, in fact, a creation by Wan's Paris House of Style, modeled on the Vietnamese ao dai. This was a long, graceful one-piece garment with a tight-fitting top that split down both sides from the waist, reaching almost to the ankles in a light, wind-blown configuration of dance-like elegance. When they stepped out together, Wan required that she wear a Vietnamese-style straw sun hat and walk fifteen paces behind him with the luggage and slaves. Hannah and her class were of course slaves in all but name. She was a so-called Nanny, a female Butler in effect, contracted to Wan because owning blonde U.S. girls of the California surfing type was a status symbol for the oligarch class, of which Wan was a leader. Much of this was also very discreet and under-reported, since Wan's class owned the major global media, whose reporting pretended to be very open when in fact it was very closed—at least, on sensitive topics like the BAN class of indentured servants.

The Swedish flight attendants wore frozen smiles and sparkling, sky-blue eyes as they towered over the table on royal-blue leather high heels. They served hot tea, Viennese tortes, and lingonberry ice cream in round scoops floating in frost-hulled silver goblets. Wan's plane carried a fully stocked bar and wine room, and on occasion a five-star chef as needed.

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