DOSSIER: ANITA MARIE HALLECK
She was born in the Outback, the only child of a sheep rancher and his schoolmistress wife. Anita Marie was barely three when the abrupt greenhouse climate shift struck Australia, flooding the coastal cities while parching the arid Outback worse than ever. One of her earliest memories was of her father’s fields littered with scruffy, bone-thin sheep dead and dying of thirst in the brittle brown grass while the merciless wind blew gray dust over their bodies.
The little family moved to Sydney, which was also dying—of too much water. Together with nearly a million other refugees, they lived in one of the tent cities that dotted the hills above Sydney’s flooded downtown. By the time she was ten, Anita Marie was contributing to the family’s finances by scuba diving among the city’s drowned high-rise towers, fetching souvenirs for tourists who cooed over the fearless little girl who swam like a dolphin.
By the time she was sixteen she was orphaned, her mother killed in one of the horrific tropical cyclones that blew in from the Tasman Sea and tore the refugees’ tents to tatters, her father slain soon afterward in a drunken fight. Anita quickly learned that she could obtain protection, and even kindness, by using her hard, lively intelligence and her lithe, very feminine body.
She climbed through a succession of lovers, adroitly avoiding the pitfalls of other girls who fell in love too easily or succumbed to the need for drugs or other palliatives. She stayed clean and sober, and rose to a comfortable and almost secure life.
Then she met Morgan McClintock. He was a generation older than she, incredibly wealthy, and attracted to her from the moment they met—at a party celebrating his fiftieth birthday. Within a week Anita dumped the hard-muscled construction engineer she’d been living with and moved into the McClintock mansion.
Morgan McClintock gave her everything: sophistication, luxury, education, social contacts, even employment in one of the corporations he controlled, McClintock Securities Ltd. Everything except marriage. After living as a widower for years, the thought of marrying this slim young mistress of his never entered his mind. And Anita never pressed him on the subject. She knew that Morgan did not truly love her, not in the starry-eyed way of romantic fantasy. She didn’t care. She had fallen truly in love with Morgan McClintock.
She became an astute businesswoman and an accepted part of his international social set. Eventually he wangled a position for her on the governing board of the International Astronautical Authority. She had to resign from McClintock Securities, but Morgan was delighted with her new situation, expecting her influence to send lucrative IAA projects to his web of interconnecting corporations.
When she began to show some independence, and failed to follow his demands for contract favors, a rift began to grow between them. She begged him to consider her obligation: “I can’t throw contracts your way, Morgan, I simply can’t. It wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t be ethical.”
“Ethics be damned,” he growled. “This is business.”
Gradually Anita realized that security, even love, were not enough for her. She wanted to be somebody. On her own, of herself. She wanted to be Anita Marie, not Morgan McClintock’s mistress, not a woman who was known by the man she slept with, not even a woman who was known by her job or career. Herself. For herself and by herself.
The IAA’s work was interesting, in a cerebral, non-visceral way. But directing that work, making decisions that influenced giant corporations, decisions that moved stock markets around the world and affected thousands of men and women, agreeing to fund this project and withholding support from that one: that was power, and Anita enjoyed wielding it.
Morgan McClintock grew increasingly unhappy with her increasing independence. They argued, more and more heatedly. The end came when he angrily accused her of sleeping with Dan Randolph, the womanizing founder of Astro Manufacturing, and handing juicy deals to Astro. Furious, Morgan accused her of stabbing him in the back and slapped her face. Then he threw her out, actually emptying her closets and hurling her clothing out the window onto the lawn below.
It wasn’t the slap: she’d been hit much harder by other men. It wasn’t even the humiliation of her expulsion from his home. It was the realization that his industrial empire meant more to Morgan McClintock than she did. And that she’d been foolish not to have gotten a signed financial arrangement with him in the first place.
They parted bitterly, for she truly had loved him—for a time. But the love had withered into a painful husk of resentment and regret. While they were together Anita had never looked at another man, not even Morgan’s handsome young son.
Morgan McClintock immediately found another mistress. A younger one.
Anita found an even richer man, an older one: Brian Halleck. And this time she married him.