The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [175]
Ernst obviously believes in his own moral rectitude, but I had to ask the obvious questions, just for the record.
“Yes, I was chief executive of SPECTRE for twelve years. But you know, SPECTRE was entirely honest about its activities! We had nothing to hide because what we were doing was actually legal. We’ve been mercilessly slandered by those rogues from MI6 and their friends in the newspapers, but the fact is, we’re no more guilty of criminal activity than any other multinational today: we simply had the misfortune to be foreign and entrepreneurial at a point in time when Whitehall was in the grasp of the communist conspirators Wilson and Callaghan, and their running-dog, so-called ‘Conservative’ fellow Heath. And we were pilloried because what we were doing was in direct competition with the inefficient state-run enterprises that my good friend Lady Thatcher recognized as mosquitoes battening on the life-blood of capitalism. That cad Fleming put it about that SPECTRE stands for ‘Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion’—absolute tosh and nonsense! Would a group of criminals really call themselves something that blatant? I’ll remind you that SPECTRE is actually a French acronym, as befits a nonprofit charity incorporated in Paris. The name stands for ‘Société professionelle et éthique du capital technologique réinvesti par les experts.16 Venture capitalists specializing in disruptive new technologies, in other words—commercial space travel, nuclear power, antibiotics. Not some kind of half-baked terrorist organization! But you can imagine the threat we posed to the inefficient state monopolies like the British Aircraft Corporation, the coal mining industry, and Imperial Chemical Industries.”
Blofeld paused to sip his tea thoughtfully.
“We were ahead of our time in many ways. We pioneered business methods that later became mainstream—Sir James Goldsmith, Ronald Perelman, Carl Icahn, they all watched us and learned—but by then, the commies were out of power in the West thanks to our friends in the establishment, so they had an easier time of it. No need to hire lots of expensive security and build concrete bunkers on desert islands! And yes, that made us look bad, don’t think I’m unaware of it—but you know, you want bunkers and isolated jungle rocket-launch bases? All you have to do is look at Arianespace! It’s fine when the government bureaucracies do it, but if an honest businessman tries to build a space launch site, and hires security to keep the press and saboteurs from foreign governments out, it’s suddenly a threat to world security!”
He paused for a while. “They put the worst complexion on everything we did. The plastic surgery? Well, we had the clinic, why not let our staff use it, so the surgeons could sharpen their skills between paying customers? It was a perk, nothing more. We did—I admit it—acquire a few companies trading in exotic weapons, nonlethal technologies mostly. And that business with Emilio and the yacht, I admit that looked bad. But did you know, it originally belonged to Adnan Khashoggi or Fahd ibn Saud or someone? Emilio was acting entirely on his own initiative—a loose cannon—and as soon as I heard about the affair I terminated his employment.”
I asked Ernst to tell me about Bond.
“Listen, this Bond chap, I want you to understand this: however he’s painted in the mass media, the reality is that he’s a communist