And Then There Was No One полностью

Slavorigin’s American publishers wouldn’t even touch the book. It was available on Amazon, however, and soon circulated as freely as if it had been published. Naturally, in view of its author’s reputation, it took no time for the first of what would turn into a cascade of newspaper articles to hit the stands. To begin with, and for the next several weeks, these articles did not much more than acknowledge its existence and the vague disquiet which had been occasioned by its British publication. Then there came a full-frontal assault from an influential neo-con monthly published out of Washington DC, followed by another, suspiciously similar piece in the Wall Street Journal. Then, as the rumpus gathered pace, and ordinary Joe Six-Packs were gradually made conscious of the blasphemous affront to that occurrence in their country’s history which more than any other since Lincoln’s assassination had been brushed by the sacred, even moderate rags began to editorialise on its implications for the special relationship between the USA and what Slavorigin scornfully referred to as the UKA. He was savaged by the tabloids. He was denounced, absurdly, as a Twin Towers ‘denier’. Why, there was even talk of a diplomatic incident. The American ambassador in London dispatched a note to 10 Downing Street ‘in protest at this unwarranted attack on the single most tragic event in the history of the United States by a writer who has been honored by the government of our nation’s oldest and closest ally’. (This, as it happens, was slightly misleading, Slavorigin having rejected the OBE which had been offered him.) The response of Her Majesty’s Government was that, while it too regretted the intemperance of the book in question, its author had committed no crime, none at least, save possibly that of libel, added a perfidious little parenthesis, for which he could be held to account in a British court of law, and his views, however offensive, were protected by the right of free speech, that same right, note well, which Slavorigin claimed had been irreversibly undermined by Blair and his yes-men.

It was at this stage of the crisis, just as the original press coverage was petering out for want of a replenishment of new developments, that, like a spider, the Web started to spin its own web. Virtual rumours ricocheted round the blogosphere before converging on an exceptionally eccentric website, albeit one which received many more hits than most such eccentric websites. It was called For a Trans-World America and the man who apparently masterminded it, even though his identity was nowhere disclosed on the page itself, was that Howard Hughes-y individual, down to the very initials of his name, Hermann Hunt V, notorious for never venturing out of his Scottish baronial-style castle in suburban Dallas.

HHV, as he was referred to by his mythologising cronies and toadies, was by no means the self-made billionaire his trumped-up legend made him out to be. His grandfather, Hermann Hunt III, had founded the Hunt fortune in Texan oil in the fifties, a fortune that his father, whom it occurred to no one ever to call HHIV, had neither squandered nor augmented when he died of a ruptured aneurysm at the age of forty-three. While still in his twenties, HHV, coerced by family pressure to forgo youthful ambitions of becoming a writer – with, so word had it, Ayn Rand as his model – began the process of transforming what was still, relatively speaking, a mom-and-pop business into a vast tentacular corporation by diversifying, first, into real estate, then into the liquor business, then agricultural equipment, then timber and forestry, then by a natural extension, the proprietorship of a myriad of ultra-reactionary publications.†† It was whispered meanwhile that an indeterminate number of shady organisations, all of them based in the West and South-West of the country’s hinterland, that ‘mainland of madness’, as Slavorigin had dubbed it, owed their inexplicable solvency to his generous financial backing.

Spoken of in this context were several survivalist communes in the Anaconda Mountains of Montana. A white supremacist group which held covert recruiting sessions in a desert motel, the Clandestine Inn, located seventy miles or so from Reno, Nevada, and owned by a former Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan. The Neo-McCarthy Brotherhood, anti-Jewish, anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-Catholic, anti-French and, although one assumes just for old times’ sake, anti-Communist. The Knights of the White Camelia, a fraternity of Doomsday prophesiers whose mailing address was a shopping mall in Eugene, Oregon, and all of whose members, running their respective businesses on a pleasantly profitable day-by-day footing while in anticipation of the looming Rapture, belonged to divers Rotary Clubs and Chambers of Commerce. These and many, many others had benefited from HHV’s inexhaustible munificence.