Greenhouse Summer Read Free Page B

indignantly.
    “How nice to know . . .”
    Speak for yourself, Monique thought sourly.
    Not that she had anything in particular against cannabic confections, eptified cocaine, or for that matter the Bad Boys syndic, which, after all, was no more a capitalist wage-slaver than Bread & Circuses.
    What made the blimp ride back to Tripoli even more disagreeable than the trip out was not so much the deal that Appelbaum and Al Fawzi worked out between them along the way, as the entirely correct expectation that Bread & Circuses, and she herself as its representative, would do their professional duty to sell this particular icebox to the local Eskimos.
    Even at the thirty percent that Al Fawzi got Appelbaum down to, the Libyan Water Authority was still going to be pouring funds into this scheme which would have to come from somewhere, and whether through taxes or water-rate raises, there was no place for them to come from but the parched and threadbare hides of the local populace.
    Winners and losers.
    Bad Boys would have a large cost-effective supply of cannabis and cocaine. Advanced Projects Associates would make out like bandits just by putting the deal together. The subcontractors would do well even after APA dipped its wick. B&C would get the lucrative interfacing contract. The Water Authority or some other Libyan entity would collect considerable taxes. And all along the line mucho baksheesh would pass along from one hand washing the other.
    The Libyan citizens, however, who, as was common in these Land of the Lost jurisdictions, were not shareholders in even what was leftof the oil revenues, would get little more than a thorough hosing. Bad Boys’ syndic charter might require them to grant citizen-shareholder status to a few thousand field hands, but those servicing the workers and their families would be on their own as wage slaves. The desert would not bloom. The “Gardens of Allah” would be sealed terrariums. They might as well be on the Moon or the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
    Winners and losers.
    Bread & Circuses would earn its hefty fee from the former for selling this scam to the latter, if not exactly what Monique could call honestly then certainly not without strenuous labor.
    In some elusive way, the unfortunate roll of the climatological dice always seemed to lead to even more bad karma in the Lands of the Lost. In some less than elusive way, with the truest of Blue sentiments, Monique could not avoid adding to it.
    First-class and supersonic though it was, the flight back to New York had been too long and the movie too short for Monique to avoid conversing with Mervin Appelbaum, nor did the unlimited champagne with which she sought to ameliorate the experience do much to enhance her taciturnity.
    Besides which, she was, after all, in VIP services, and it was her self-interested professional duty as a citizen-shareholder in B&C to not only keep the client happy and represent his agenda but to do so creatively and at least simulate enthusiasm.
    And while she was no spinner or imageer, wittingly or not, she knew damn well she had been all too creative when she had tagged the project “The Gardens of Allah.”
    Appelbaum had at least had the grace not to get down to the down and dirty until they were well into the Strawberries Romanoff. “We may have a bit of a problem selling the project to the local electorate,” he ventured, a gross understatement by Monique’s lights.
    Nevertheless, she chose to play the ingenue. “As I understand it, there isn’t exactly any such thing as a Libyan electorate,” she said. “And even if there was, the Water Authority is a trans-sovereign entity. . . .”
    “Call it public opinion then. I mean, the tunnel network is fairly vulnerable to sabotage, the desalination plants even more so. Nothingthat a good security syndic like Road Warriors or the Legion couldn’t handle, but they don’t work cheap, and even low-grade terrorism would eat into the profit