----------------- [excerpt, You Belong to Me] -------------
"You know who he is?"
"No."
"The phones?"
"Nothing, no calls either way."
"E-mail, anything?"
"Not so far as we can see."
"They have to be communicating somehow." His cousin was silent. "Just keep watching her."
"If they find him?"
"Let me know. He will show up again sooner or later."
"Okay." ...
"Just please make sure you are using our people." The Middle Eastern security companies all had connections in Paris and London and New York and could initiate professional surveillance within a day. The billing would go to Ahmed's French banker, who would pay it using an Algerian
account that Ahmed replenished once a year. All the electronic transfers would take place outside the U.S. and avoid American banks and EU regulations. He was acutely aware of the necessity to avoid any personal controversy that might attach itself to his company....
He hung up and watched Manhattan approach. This is the old world, he thought. But the next new world is being made now, in the melting Arctic cap -- the deep-pocketed oil companies quietly knew much more than the UN, or the CIA, or the university climatologists -- and in a generation the whole zone would be populated by millions of people, most of them working for resource-extraction companies like the ones he did business with, even as the fiscal strength of the world kept migrating to China, India, Brazil, Indonesia.
The United States, meanwhile, was steadily fracturing into two populations: those few who had enough money and those many who didn't. Vast sections of the country were economically dead,
their inhabitants hypnotized by the Internet, zombied by pharmaceuticals, illegal drugs.... Most of he baby-boom generation had no money for retirement, and the great howling sound coming from the next decade would be the millions of old white people living hand to mouth, increasingly infirm, demented, and politically irrelevant....
In a generation, America would be run by the remaining elites....
This was a truth you would hear no American politician utter, because it had history in it, and no one, especially the politicians, had any answers when it came to the constant pressures of history.
He had learned from his father and uncle about how nations changed relentlessly. They had been successful builders in Tehran in the 1970s, favored by the Shah, and had the foresight to establish secret Swiss bank accounts
as young men. The Mehrazes had been Westernized -- spoke and read English, wore business suits, stayed clean-shaven. Bell-bottom jeans, Camel cigarettes, Johnnie Walker black, and American muscle cars....
When the revolution came in 1979,
and with it the rise of the Islamic fundamentalists,
his uncle had gotten everyone in the immediate family out of the country, much to their confusion and protest, and they ended up first in Turkey, where Ahmed was born, then London, and then years later in Los Angeles....It had been a precarious journey for a proud family. They had not gotten all of their money out of the country, but enough of it to start over....
...So it was that Ahmed, whose bandy-legged grandfather never left his village
in Iran, could now be standing on the promenade deck of the Queen Mary 2 as it sailed into New York, having just completed a $719 million private deal.
He wished his uncle could see him now.
But Ahmed was losing his family, he knew.
They did not really understand what he did.
They were Iranian, but he was not, not exactly.
He had gone to boarding school, spoke French better than he spoke Farsi, had finally become a naturalized U.S. citizen after college, dreamed in English, understood the American legal system, felt a residual allegiance to Islam but didn't practice it, and had married an uber-white American woman who had probably lied about her past.
----------------- [end, excerpt. Author: Colin Harrison. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2017.]
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