"Near the gates and within the two cities, there will be two scourges the like of which was never seen. Famine within plague, people put out by steel, crying to the immortal God for relief." Nostradamus
Concerned by sombre visions of the future, Pat Kennedy had increasingly sought the experience and advice of his friend John Francis, not regarding markets and economics, but the future of humanity as it stood. The response was not encouraging.
The idea that he should protect his family and friends slowly took form. Quietly he set about a project he named Salvator Mundi, one that would not only offer protection, but an alternative future. He developed it as a business plan to attract a core of very wealthy and privileged investors, those seeking a doomsday safe-haven, ready to invest in a project that offered them the comfort and security they were used to.
Like Pat Kennedy those investors had deployed all their energy to build and protect their fortunes only to realise the world in which they lived was an increasingly dangerous, unstable, unhealthy, overcrowded and overpolluted place to live, and it was time to concern themselves with their own and their family’s survival, far from the masses on whom their wealth had been built.
Prologue:
WHAT KIND OF A STORY IS THIS? Well I suppose some might call it meta-fiction. I mean by that much of it is true and the rest is fiction, but perhaps it’s not fiction at all. You the reader will have to decide what part of my story is imagination and what is made-up, but be warned, remember the hackneyed saying that fact is often stranger than fiction.
Against a background of uncertainty, asset prices had rocketed, and in spite of persistent bad news with Brexit, Trump, the Middle East, hunger, disease and climate change, markets continued to progress. Since 2008, following the crash of Lehman Brothers, the Dow Jones had re-emerged from the economic crisis, rising a dizzying 450%, with more and more billionaires chasing assets and property, pushing prices to unbelievable heights.
Democratic activists, ecologists, anti-climate change and extinction groups, collapsonauts, equal gender rights, anti-capitalist, and those opposing the neo-liberal model, along with political activists, were among those leading protests movements, forming what could be collectively called a save-the-planet-revolution.
In the forefront were many determined and highly vociferous men and women, some writers, others actors, television and media personalities, and business men and women. Amongst them was Pat Kennedy, his family, friends and their families, a Clan of extremely wealthy men and women.
They included Tom Barton and his wife Lola—a Colombian, mother of two young children. Tom had gotten rich by investing in Latin America—industry, minerals, oil, gas and agriculture.
Spanning two continent Latin America covered more than 19 million square kilometres with a population that would reach 500 million by 2050, offering limitless possibilities for business, but Tom Barton’s ambitions ran contrary to those of many investors, his vision was one of equity, between the needs of men and the safeguard of the natural environment.
The Clan now collectively stood at the head of a diverse 100 billion dollar empire of cross holdings that straddled the planet, managed mostly by the men of the Clan, founders of the different businesses that constituted their respective family fortunes. The wives of such men had in the recent past been passive, apart from their engagement in charity, watching their husband’s business from a distance, silently observing. Now that had changed, some wives enjoyed extravagant public lives, aboard their yachts, or in their outrageously extravagant homes, others were drawn to more serious roles, no longer content to look on, but since they had no legal role in their partners business activities, they joined one of the many in vogue movements to defend women’s rights, minority rights, anti-somethings, often enrolled into the crusade to save the planet.
The unspoken question was, save the planet, okay, but from what, from whom, and for who?
The Clan gravitated around Pat Kennedy, the head of a leading international banking and investment group, an empire onto itself. The INI Banking Corporation projected a clean image, those who visited the bank’s gleaming glass and steel towers were greeted by images, conjured up by its public relations department, of an environmentally friendly business group, backed by glossy brochures, filled with bright images and descriptions of businesses in manufacturing, mining and agriculture, spread across a broad geographical spectrum, where factories and fields were filled with happy smiling workers.
The reality was different, not that Pat and his friends were slave drivers, exploiting the poor and the natural resources of their countries, but the bank invested in innumerable business through a vast network of markets, where few if any really knew where and under what conditions workers and resources were exploited.
The bank was a triumvirate, and one of its headquarters rose out of the heart of the City of London, amongst the many towers that resembled a cluster of sparkling crystals.
Beyond those towers lurked a more sinister world, one driven by corruption, dirty money, narcotics, human trafficking, workers exploitation and a kingdom where the gig economy left a trail of human desolation, where knife crime was rampant, where a punitive state had forgotten many of its citizens and those who had made it their home.
London was nevertheless far from the desolation of the kingdom’s former manufacturing and mining regions, towns and cities forgotten in a wilderness of industrial ruin and social collapse, where large swathes of the UK’s population struggled to survive. It was a contradiction when compared to the front page stories of the Daily Mail, filled with the adventures and love lives of the rich, royals, celebrities and footballers, their extravagant marriages, their ultra-spoilt children, their sumptuous villas, their yachts, jets, supercars, and wild holidays.
Those abandoned by the system looked on, separated by an impenetrable glass wall as the wild party continued, as Bojo fiddled and parliament tore itself to pieces in the UK’s never-ending Brexit saga, not helped by the opposition, led by a sour old time Marxist, with his fifties style discourse, as though he and his party were trapped in a time warp, although any comparison would have been unfair to Karl Marx.
It was a tale of two cities, both prisoners of the gig economy, with entire districts abandoned to gangs that controlled the illicit traffic of drugs and contraband cigarettes, prostitution and illegal immigration, where the only alternative for the disinherited young and forgotten was the kind of diliveroo job that made the Amazon economy work. A world of zero-hour contracts, few holidays, no sick leave, no hope, where businesses drove their workers to extreme limits under the threat of punishing penalties or job loss, which Ken Loach described as ‘Labour that could be turned on and off like a tap.’
The film-maker was a lifelong crusader fighting a losing battle against social injustice, in a society where nearly five million people worked in precarious jobs, relying on food banks and handouts to supplement near starvation wages.
Paris intramuros was the home of the bobos, an inner-city elite—champagne socialists, bankers, lawyers, IT engineers, architects, fashion designers, marketing and communications specialists, actors and artists, served by a low-paid precariat, living in the less well-off arrondissements and to a greater extent beyond the périphérique—the circular urban highway that separated the rich core from the poor periurban sprawl, both of which had been stripped of their industries, the bobos taking over the heart of the city and the best paid jobs, whilst the traditional working class disappeared or ended up on the pedals of deliveroo push-bikes.
It was little wonder countless young people dropped out, choosing a life of indolence, drugs and petty crime.
Poverty, homelessness, inequality, the slow car crash of health systems, were symptomatic of globalisation, where the politically correct refused to look at the causes of pollution and climate change—the unrestrained growth of population and rampant immigration, the twin fuels of growth and globalisation.
Pat was haunted by the idea his bank’s image would be harmed by investigative reporters, exposing pollution and bad working conditions in the industries it financed, as was the case in many of its investments in Russian mining and metallurgy, Chinese manufacturing or Brazilian agricultural.
The bank funded the Fitzwilliams Foundation, headed by John Francis, through which it could bail itself out by developing projects via scientific and humanitarian agencies, dedicated to defending indigenous peoples and protecting their homelands from the encroachment of ruthless industrialists and criminal organisations.
One such agency, a struggling underfunded association, headed by Alfonso Martinez, had been brought to the attention of the foundation, thanks to Anna Basurko, for its remarkable efforts and progress in defending the land rights of the Wayuu, a Native American ethnic group whose home lay on the Guajira Peninsula, situated in northernmost part of Colombia and north-west Venezuela.
Anna first met Martinez in Colombia during her research into marine archaeology off the Caribbean coast of the country. She had introduced him to Lola Barton who had expressed her concerns about the Wayuu Indians and their struggle against the vast coal mining complex that had despoiliated their region, transforming its people into dependent slaves.
Alfonso was a self-effacing Spanish lawyer dedicated to helping others. He had first worked with Franciscan missionaries, then set up an association to carry out what he discovered was to be his life’s work. A native of the historical town of Tudela in Navarre, Alfonso had created a following in the wealthy region that bordered the Pyrenees, where the Basques had won their struggle for autonomy and built a solid experience in structuring the legal means to defend their rights against big government.
Alfonso’s family had been marked by the brutality of the Spanish Civil War, his grandfather murdered in the massacres perpetrated by Franco’s men. The war had pitched families against families and atrocities had been perpetrated by both sides—as in all wars, but Alfonso saw nothing was to be gained from reigniting the conflict, aside from preserving the memory of the victims and the need to avoid falling into the extremist trap.
The story of the survival and courage of the indigenous peoples of South America, recounted by Anna, against the worse kinds of adversity, had fired Pat’s imagination, and his realisation that perhaps there was a lesson to be learnt from their experience.
Concerned by sombre visions of the future, Pat had increasingly sought the experience and advise of his friend John Francis as to the future, not markets and economics, but the future of humanity as it stood. The response was not encouraging.
The idea that he should protect his family and friends slowly took form. Quietly he set about a project he named Salvator Mundi, one that would not only offer protection, but an alternative future. He developed it as a business plan to attract a core of very wealthy and privileged investors, those seeking a doomsday safe-haven, ready to invest in a project that offered them the comfort and security they were used to.
Like Pat Kennedy those investors had deployed all their energy to build and protect their fortunes only to realise the world in which they lived was an increasingly dangerous, unstable, overcrowded and overpolluted place to live, and it was time to concern themselves with their own and their family’s survival, far from the masses on whom their wealth had been built.
The Doomsday clock stood at less than two minutes to midnight. Time was short, government solutions non-existent, as ecocide, pandemics, climate change and mass extinction stalked the planet.
