Malibu.
Maybe it was the jet lag messing with her, but Janet woke up before Simon did.
A thin wash of morning light slipped through the gap in the curtains. It was still early.
Feeling the warmth of the man beside her, Janet wriggled closer and quickly climbed onto him, savoring the skin-on-skin closeness. She leaned in to kiss his face, then burrowed back against his chest and let her eyes drift shut again.
Strong arms circled her waist, pulling them even tighter together.
Knowing Simon was awake too, Janet rubbed her cheek against his chest, her voice husky and soft as she greeted him. "Morning."
"Mmm..."
Hearing his sleepy, half-dead response, Janet giggled.
After lingering for a while, she found she had no desire to sleep anymore. She got up and started getting dressed, announcing that she was going to make breakfast herself.
Simon got up with her.
Today was Saturday, November 18.
When they left the bedroom, it was only 6:15.
With no work scheduled for the weekend, everything could be taken at a leisurely pace.
They played tennis for half an hour. Janet went to make breakfast, while Simon sat at the dining table and skimmed the morning papers.
These days, the upheaval in Eastern Europe was intensifying.
The Berlin Wall had fallen on November 9, and German reunification was now inevitable.
Out of instinctive fear of a unified Germany, Britain, France, and Italy had flipped on their former ally in the blink of an eye. They all but issued warnings that they would go to war if necessary, even threatening that if East and West Germany sought reunification, Britain, France, and Italy would join forces with the Soviet Union and intervene militarily.
With tensions looking ready to ignite at any moment, James Rebould had advised Simon more than once to at least postpone the acquisition of Nokia's mobile communications equipment division. After all, if war broke out, Finland, bordering the Soviet Union, could easily be dragged in, and hundreds of millions of dollars would go straight down the drain.
Simon knew perfectly well there would be no war this time, so he ignored James's advice.
This was the best moment to take control of Nokia. Once Eastern Europe stabilized, it would not be nearly so easy to swallow Nokia's entire mobile communications equipment division for two hundred million dollars.
As Simon read the papers' discussions of the European situation, another piece caught his eye: yesterday, the Bush administration had abruptly halted a 2.3 billion dollar loan to Iraq, citing suspicion that Saddam might use the money to develop weapons of mass destruction.
So the 'weapons of mass destruction' line was already a thing this early.
Ever since the 'U.S.-Iraq Business Forum' in the middle of the year, Simon had been keeping a close watch on the Middle East.
This news meant that after failing to seize control of Iraq's oil sovereignty, the Bush administration had officially begun moving against Saddam.
Simon took up his pen and marked the article for his clipping file. He was just about to check the reviews for the new releases that opened yesterday when Janet walked into the dining room carrying two plates of breakfast.
Simon set the stack of newspapers aside and accepted the food. As usual, Janet slid into the seat pressed close beside him, leaned over to glance at the article he had marked, and curled her lip. "A pathetic excuse."
Simon smiled. "We're all civilized people. You still need an excuse."
Janet had been following the matter too. Next year, Cersei Capital's main focus would be oil.
But she was not in the mood to talk work. With a brief hum, she changed the subject. "I already had Sophia prepare our itinerary. Tomorrow we go to Europe. We'll stay a week in every city where we have property, eat good food, go to fun places, and we can personally pick out even more houses in other cities. Oh, and who knows, we might even run into a war."
Simon glanced at her, at the faintly flushed excitement on her face. "You're actually hoping for a war?"
"Mm-hmm. Watching humanity march step by step toward self-destruction is pretty thrilling."
Deep down, Simon was a pessimist who believed humanity would eventually destroy itself. In that sense, Janet was the same type. Only her impulses ran even wilder. She wanted to put her own hands on the world and break it.
Simon just chuckled. "You're not afraid it'll splash onto you?"
"Not afraid. If things look bad, we'll run straight to Australia."
If a third world war ever happened, the safest place on earth would probably be Australia in the Southern Hemisphere.
And Tasmania, the place Simon had chosen, sat so far south it was practically the last stop before Antarctica, which made it even safer.
Thinking of that, Simon said, half joking and half serious, "Maybe we should build a doomsday shelter in Tasmania. That way, even if nuclear war breaks out, we won't have to worry."
The idea of doomsday shelters was hardly original to video games. During the long Cold War, out of fear that nuclear war might erupt, many shelters had been built across the United States specifically for that purpose.
"Great idea. Over the next few days we can have someone draw up a plan," Janet agreed readily, nodding. Then she added, "Oh, and Aunt Veronica is negotiating another tract of forest for us, in central-west Tasmania. It's huge this time, more than six thousand square kilometers. The Tasmanian government originally wanted to designate it as a state nature reserve. As long as we can guarantee the ecosystem stays intact and we won't damage the environment, and we can provide the government with an extra source of revenue, it shouldn't be difficult to secure the deal."
Simon already owned roughly 150,000 acres in Tasmania. The largest parcel was a woodland tract of more than five hundred square kilometers by the Arthur River in the island's northwest, which he had bought for seven million dollars.
Using the rough conversion of one square kilometer to 247 acres, a forest of over six thousand square kilometers came to around 1.5 million acres. That would increase Simon's private landholdings tenfold in one stroke. Tasmania's total area was about 68,000 square kilometers, so buying that tract would mean Simon owned nearly a tenth of the entire state.
With that in mind, Simon asked, "How much are we talking?"
"We're still negotiating," Janet said. "But if we take it over at the standards of a state nature reserve and don't seek economic returns, their ask shouldn't exceed one hundred million. After negotiation it'll definitely be lower. I brought the documents. I'll show you after breakfast."
They finished breakfast chatting like that, and Janet pulled out the dossier on the land tract Veronica was negotiating for Simon.
Because of a few loose ends in Los Angeles, they did not leave for Europe immediately. They stayed one more day, checked the construction progress on the villa at the Point Dume estate, and at noon accepted an invitation to lunch from Qintex chairman Christopher Skase.
With Simon's butterfly effect in play, Australia's Qintex acquiring MGM was now essentially a done deal.
Since that was the case, Simon no longer treated Christopher Skase with the same cold distance as before. Building a good relationship now would make it easier later to arrange for other Australian capital to take over MGM when Qintex inevitably ran out of road.
Their afternoon and evening schedules were packed as well.
Then the next morning, they boarded the Boeing 767 early and took off from Los Angeles. After a brief stop in New York to pick up Westeros Corporation's acquisition team, who were heading to Europe for Nokia's final negotiations, the group flew straight to Helsinki, Finland.
When they arrived in Helsinki, it was not yet six in the morning local time.
It was deep winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and near the Arctic Circle the nights ran longer. At six a.m., Helsinki and its surroundings were still wrapped in darkness.
Nokia had cars waiting to pick up James Rebould and the others. The Boeing 767 took off again for Florence.
The 'first stop' of Simon and Janet's European trip was London. They went to Florence only because Sophia had prepared a great deal of their necessities there, including the maids and chefs who would handle their day-to-day needs.
After all those transfers, Simon and Janet finally settled in on the evening of November 20, at the townhouse on Kensington Palace Gardens in central London.
More than fifteen thousand kilometers of long-haul flying, and thanks to the luxurious Boeing 767, neither of them felt much physical fatigue, aside from the annoyance of time zones.
On the plane, Janet had also given Simon a detailed rundown of the results from Cersei Capital's sub-funds No. 6 through No. 10.
After the 'mini-crash' on October 13, Cersei Capital had made a massive 1.6 billion dollars in just one week by closing out its S&P 500 index futures and other short positions across various stocks and bonds.
Over the following month, as the North American market quickly regained stability, after taking that first, fattest bite of profit, Cersei Capital shifted into a slow simmer, patiently managing the remaining positions.
As of November 17, on top of the initial 1.6 billion, sub-funds No. 6 through No. 10 had added another 700 million in profit.
So, excluding the No. 1 through No. 5 funds held by the Japanese, the net asset value of Cersei Capital attributable to Simon and the other investors had reached 7.3 billion dollars.
After discussing it, Simon and Janet planned to fully liquidate all positions related to the U.S. junk bond market around December, then turn their focus to oil futures.
In Simon's memory, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait would come on August 2, 1990, and oil prices would spike violently during that period.
But before the Kuwait war, to pressure Iraq into moving against Kuwait, Western countries would coordinate with Middle Eastern oil powers to flood the market, driving prices down hard. Crude would briefly fall to thirteen dollars a barrel. That meant the first half of the year would be perfect for shorting.