The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [85]
Lisa had no idea of what to make of all this. It sounded almost surreal, and completely irrelevant—but she reminded herself that her own far more modest inferences had sounded equally irrelevant to Smith. “If they really are crackpots from way back when,” she said warily, “where does their money come from?”
“Switzerland,” was the terse reply.
Switzerland had long been a world leader in the arcane art of money laundering—which grew more arcane with every year that passed. Ordinarily, “money from Switzerland” was a euphemism for the “Mafia,” which had controlled up to fifty percent of GDP in the post-Communist nations at the turn of the century. During the last thirty years, following the example set by the organizations on which they were modeled, much of that wealth had been rechanneled into legitimate businesses, and the organizations had revamped their image considerably. Some had remarketed themselves as a new breed of revolutionary communists—hence the term “Leninist Mafia”—who were deeply and sincerely concerned with issues of social and economic reorganization. Despite their much-publicized opposition to “Imperialist Global Parasitism,” the Leninist Mafia did not seem to have fared any worse during the worldwide economic upheavals of ’25 than its alleged counterparts in China.
“So now you think they’re gangsters pretending to be crackpots,” Lisa said skeptically. “And you think they kidnapped Morgan because they got the same impression as Goldfarb—that he was deliberately underselling whatever it was he had.”
“It’s a possibility,” Smith said defensively. “There’s also the apocalyptic angle to consider. You said this Leland character inferred from what the women told you that they were apocalyptic cultists. Did he have any particular group in mind?”
“No,” Lisa said. “Do you?”
“The women didn’t mention the Ice Age Elite by any chance?”
“That’s just post-Millennial folklore,” Lisa said. “The Real Woman started sounding off about the Secret Masters and the seeds of a New Order, but those were the only phrases she used.”
Lisa remembered talk of the Ice Age Elite being bandied about during her years as a research student, but she couldn’t remember Morgan Miller ever having dignified their existence with an opinion. When the years 1999 and 2000 had come and gone, everyone gifted with common sense had expected Millenarian cults to wither away, or at least to be effectively mothballed until 2029 or 2033, the two dates most widely touted as the two-thousandth anniversary of the crucifixion. Ever perverse, however, several of the most vocal cults had refused to go away, and their tales of impending woe had grown ever more fanciful. One such tale had fixated on the anxieties expressed by some scientists that global warming might subvert the ocean-circulation mechanism sustaining the gulf stream, abruptly precipitating a new Ice Age.
The contemporary myth of the Secret Masters hadn’t really come into its own until the crash of ’25, but earlier versions had been around long before that, and one of its earliest twenty-first-century manifestations had been the idea that the greenhouse effect was being deliberately stimulated, with the intention of causing an Ice Age. The Ice Age Elite were the plotters allegedly responsible for this scheme. They were said to have made elaborate plans to survive the ecocatastrophe in comfort. Accounts of their motives were widely various, ranging from the suggestion that they were Gaean altruists determined to save Mother Earth from further rape, to the proposition that they intended to buy up all the ruined real estate in the northern hemisphere, whose overlords they would become when they eventually unleashed the biotech that would end the Ice Age as abruptly as it had begun. Little had been heard of the Ice Age Elite since 2025, presumably because the Cabal was now widely believed to be in the process of achieving their alleged aims without having had to go to the trouble of precipitating an Ice Age.
“The problem