The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [174]
It is all too easy to make fun of the likes of Fantômas and Dr. Nikola, and even their modern-day cognates such as Dr. Mabuse and Ernst Stavro Blofeld—for do they not represent such an obsessively concentrated pinnacle of entrepreneurial criminality that, if they really existed, they would instantly be hunted down and arrested by INTERPOL?
Careful consideration will lead one to reconsider this hasty judgment. Criminology, the study of crime and its causes, has a fundamental weak spot: it studies that proportion of the criminal population who are stupid or unlucky enough to get caught. The perfect criminal, should he or she exist, would be the one who is never apprehended—indeed, the one whose crimes may be huge but unnoticed, or indeed miscategorized as not crimes at all because they are so powerful they sway the law in their favor, or so clever they discover an immoral opportunity for criminal enterprise before the legislators notice it. Such forms of criminality may be indistinguishable, at a distance, from lawful business; the criminal a paragon of upper-class virtue, a face-man for Forbes.
When the real Napoleons of Crime walk among us today, they do so in the outwardly respectable guise of executives in business suits and thousand-dollar haircuts. The executives of WorldCom and Enron were denizens of a corporate culture so rapacious that any activity, however dubious, could be justified in the name of enhancing the bottom line. They have rightfully been charged, tried, and in some cases jailed for fraud, on a scale that would have been the envy of Mabuse, Blofeld, or their modern successor, Dr. Evil. When you need extra digits on your pocket calculator to compute the sums you are stealing, you’re in the big league. Again, when you’re able to evade prosecution by the simple expedient of appointing the state prosecutor and the judges—because you’re the president of a country (and not just any country, but a member of the rich and powerful G8)—you’re certainly not amenable to diagnosis and detection in the same sense as your run-of-the-mill shoplifter or petty delinquent. I’m naming no names (They have intelligence services! Cruise missiles!), but this isn’t a hypothetical scenario.
Interview with the Entrepreneur
In an attempt to clarify the mythology surrounding James Bond, I tracked down his old rival to his headquarters in the Ministry of Inward Investment in the breakaway Republic of Transdniestria. Somewhat suspicious at first, Mr. Blofeld relaxed as soon as he realized I was not pursuing him on behalf of the FSB, CIA, or IMF, and kindly agreed to be interviewed for this book. Now at age seventy-two, Blofeld is a cheerful veteran of numerous high-tech start-ups, and not a few multinationals where, as a specialist in international risk management and arbitrage, he applied his unique skills to business expansion. Today he is semiretired, but has agreed to work in a voluntary capacity as director of the state investment agency.
“It took me a long time to understand the agenda that the British government was pursuing through the covert activities of MI6,” he told me over a glass of sweet tea. “Call me naïve, but I really believed—at least at first—that they were honest capitalists, the scoundrels.”
Over the course of an hour, Ernst explained to me how he first became aware that the UK was attempting to sabotage his business interests. “It was back in 1960 or thereabouts that they first tried to destroy one of my subsidiaries. Until then I hadn’t really had anything to do with them, but I believe one of my rivals in the phosphate mining business at the time put it about that my man on site was some sort of spy, and they sent this Bond fellow—not just