LH: Try to focus, Dr. Stokes. That was not the indicated goal of this mission, nor does it move the needle according to the operative metrics. The goal of this mission is to monetize the skill set we already have on deck in the form of the Asset and the ODEC.
MS: Yes, but only after we have monetized the skill set by gathering low-hanging fruit. Blue Team’s road map is to utilize the transport modalities available to us due to the Asset and the ODEC, to incept a diachronic network and exploit resulting network effects that will enable DODO to scale.
LH: That level of strategic vision is above your pay grade, Dr. Stokes. Your task is to maintain laser-like focus on Phase 1 deliverables. And the fact is that in all of your dozens of diachronic transport insertions, which have taken weeks to accomplish and have generated operating costs now far exceeding your allowed budget, you have found a total of three potential but unauthorized Assets in two DTAPS, without any confirmed achievement toward actually securing the monetizable artifact by liquidation of the blocking factor.
MS: You mean we still haven’t yet secured the psalm book by preventing the maple syrup boiler.
LH: Isn’t that what I just said?
With this example, it should come as no surprise to hear that the other five of us got into the habit of meeting away from the office, at Frank and Rebecca’s home. I have no idea what Les was doing most of the time, and I didn’t much care, because he was just an irritant and I’m sure he was getting paid as much as all of us together. He also slightly resembled his uncle, Roger Blevins, chairman of my former department, only without the grey hair, and more slender. But a trick of the voice and the general body language was enough that I had a visceral desire to simply avoid him.
And I enjoyed the ambience of my alternate workplaces: Rebecca’s home, and Widener Library.
It was in the latter that I began to dig into the history of the Fuggers. This was the third time in the short history of DODO that the name had unexpectedly come up. And even though they were a famous old banking family, well known to any student of European history, this seemed like too many coincidences to me.
They had first entered the story very early, when Tristan and I had been going through the boxes of old documents that needed to be translated. Some of them had been marked with a logo that looked familiar to me. I couldn’t place it at the time, and it nagged at me until a few months later, when I was leafing through a copy of The Economist in my dentist’s waiting room and saw a similar logo in an advertisement in the back of the magazine. It was an international charity announcing a job opening. When I pulled on that thread, taking advantage of some of the secret government databases we had access to at DODO, I learned that the charity in question was the non-profit arm of a complex of holding companies that, to make a long story short, was the survival into modern times of the medieval Fuggers.
The second incident had occurred shortly before General Schneider’s brief but tragically eventful visit to DODO HQ. Tristan had asked Erszebet whether she could turn lead into gold. As I later understood, he didn’t really care about gold at all—what his higher-ups at the Trapezoid really were after was plutonium. But Erszebet had scoffed at the idea and spoken about the “Fuckers”—her pronunciation of “Fuggers”—in a tone of voice that bordered on fearful. Not her usual style at all.
And now here was a real live Fugger, one Athanasius, who seemed to be directly intervening in Tristan’s DEDE in Elizabethan London.
Even with the combined resources of Harvard’s library system and U.S. intelligence databases, I wasn’t able to find much. The medieval part of the story has been common knowledge for centuries. The Fucker family had migrated to Augsburg in 1373 and prospered in textiles. In 1459 the family had produced Jacob, the seventh surviving child in a large brood. Seeing few opportunities at home, where his older brothers were dominating the Fucker family business, Jacob had traveled over the Alps to Venice, where he had served an apprenticeship in the German merchants’ warehouse on the Rialto and learned about banking. Upon his return to Augsburg, Jacob had begun lending money to broke but powerful nobles on stiff terms and, to make a long story short, become the richest person in the world.
The Fuggers (somewhere along the line, they’d switched to a more palatable spelling of their name) had become as famous and as well documented as they were rich. The research skills I’d developed while earning my Ph.D. weren’t even needed; hundreds of books about Jacob Fugger and his family could be summoned up with a few keystrokes. The great man had died at the end of 1525 and handed the business off to his nephew Anton, who seemed reasonably talented, and made some investments in the Americas. But he’d been caught in the mangle of the Catholic/Protestant wars, lending money to warmongering kings who didn’t pay it back. In the end he had essentially liquidated the business and distributed the proceeds among a few dozen family members who were content to live off the interest as members of the titled nobility or the landed gentry.
By 1601—the year that Tristan was visiting—the trail had gone cold. There was no one single entity that could be pointed to as the Fugger bank. The last person to wield any kind of central authority over it had been Markus Fugger, a grandnephew of Jacob, who had died four years earlier after distributing most of the remaining assets to the family. And Markus seemed like someone who would have been interesting to idle away the hours with: a patron of arts, a history buff, a collector of old artifacts, an ancient-languages geek.
Athanasius Fugger—at least, the Athanasius Fugger described by Tristan—was completely absent from the historical record.
Which was not a big deal. No one knows better than a historian how tattered that record is. But it did whet my curiosity. The obvious explanation was simple enough: he was some descendant of Markus, sharing the same family name, who had inherited a share of the money and was now hanging around in London just because he liked it there and had the freedom to live wherever he wanted.
And yet, judging from Tristan’s story, this Athanasius wasn’t merely a drinking buddy. He was acting as some kind of financial advisor to Sir Edward Greylock, which probably meant he was still active in the banking business.