The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 772

The crowd went home talking, and Alexander went upstairs to the governor's office and sat down with the truth.

A tax haven is not a law. A tax haven is a reputation.

You can write anonymity into your statute in an afternoon. Getting a man in another country to move nine million dollars to an island he has never heard of, through a bank with four staff and a door for a vault, on the word of a twenty-year-old prince the whole Empire calls an idiot — that takes something else entirely.

He had no name. Harland had no name.

And the island had nothing to sell. No ore under the chalk, no port, no factory, a fishing fleet older than its crews and a tourist season dying a little every year.

To attract outside money, Harland had to create something people actually wanted to buy.

It was the only way to launder the proceeds into clean, legal cash.

He wrote to the head steward that night.

"If I want to borrow for Harland, how much can I have? I need it to start a business."

The answer came back inside a day, and it was precise the way that man was always precise.

The maximum credit available to the Governor of Harland was fifty million dollars, at ten per cent per year.

...

Alexander read it twice, and then picked up the phone instead of writing.

"Fifty."

"Fifty million, Your Highness."

"I've read the figures for the other territories." He kept his voice slow and mild, the voice of a man still learning how sentences worked. "Governors take a hundred million. Two hundred. Three, for the northern province last year."

The pause on the line was longer than it should have been.

"That is correct."

"Then why fifty?"

...

The steward chose his words the way a man walks on ice.

"Your Highness, there are people at court who understand perfectly well that a governor without money cannot do anything at all. Some of them consider that a satisfactory outcome."

A breath. "A number of interests have already ensured your government won’t see approval above fifty million. The matter was decided before your proposal was even drafted."

Alexander turned to the window, watching the grey hulls resting in the harbour. The Second Queen's hand, without question.

"Fine by me," he said. "Fifty million, then. When can I have it?"

"If your proposal reaches me today, the money will be in the territorial account tomorrow morning."

"Good. I'll write it now."

...

In the capital, the Second Queen laughed so hard she had to put her cup down and wait for her chest to settle.

"Fifty million." She said it twice, to enjoy it twice. "The poorest island in the Empire, and the great Tenth Prince has gone begging for fifty million dollars."

Her head maid said nothing and refilled the cup.

"What does a person do with fifty million? Nothing. There is nothing on that rock to spend it on." She waved a hand at the room, at the silk, at the cabinets. "It is less than one of my necklaces. I have a necklace upstairs worth more than his entire government."

She sat back, pleased, breathing shallowly.

“Failure is already your destiny, your fate, so accept it!"

...

On the island, Felicia found him at the kitchen table with paper all over it.

"Prince." She put a cup down at his elbow. "What are you actually going to do? Everyone in town is asking me and I have to keep saying I don't know."

"I read a book," Alexander said.

"A book."

" Think and Grow Rich." He turned a page around. "It said there is a great deal of money in a gold mine, but there is far more money in selling the idea of one. The man who digs gets tired. The man who sells the idea gets rich."

Felicia looked at him.

"So I'm going to sell an idea," he said. "Not a thing. Not fish, not fruit, not chalk. I am going to sell thinking."

"So for that I need two things. An enormous amount of electricity." He looked up. "And water."

Felicia was quiet for a moment.

"Do you want some lunch?" she said.

"Yes," said Alexander. "Please."

She took the cup away and went to the stove, and he watched her go and did not mind at all.

She had not understood one word of it. She never did.

She could run a house on nothing, patch a coat so you could not find the seam, sit with a broken boy for fourteen years without once complaining — she was the hardest-working and most decent person he had met on this planet.

Thinking simply was not her gift.

The second meeting in the square was bigger than the first, because people had talked.

Alexander came out onto the steps with a folder under his arm and did not bother with a greeting.

"All of you are poor," he said. "Do you want money?"

There was a beat of startled silence, and then a big old man in the third row put both hands in the air.

"Money?" He had a voice built for shouting across water. "Even the ghosts love money! How is a living man supposed to not like money?"

The square laughed. Alexander waited it out.

...

"Good. Then here is what you're going to do."

He opened the folder.

"Every house on this island is going to have solar panels. Not the old frames bolted on top of a roof — the new kind, the tile sort, shaped like a roof, because they become the roof. You take the old one off and you put this one on."

He held up a photograph of one.

"You'll use the power you need. And everything you don't need, you sell. To me. To the territorial government, at a fixed price, in writing, for twenty years."

...

"And who's paying for the panels?" a woman called out.

"That's the good part. You choose."

He held up one finger.

"Option one. The government buys and installs them, free, on your roof. Nothing out of your pocket, not one coin. Then, when you start selling power back, the money you earn pays the panels off instead of coming to you. When the panel is paid for, the payments start arriving. After that it's yours forever, and so is everything it earns."

"And the second?" somebody said.

...

"Option two. You pay for your own panels and installation, out of your own pocket, and you start selling power to the government from the first day. Every coin from the beginning." He let that sit. "And one year later, the government pays you back what the panels and the fitting cost you. In full."

The square went noisy.

He stood on the steps and let them argue, and watched which faces lit up.

Because he knew something about poor places. Poor is not the same as empty. There is money in this island, in tins and under mattresses and in thirty-year savings books — small money, frightened money, money that has never once been offered a safe way to grow.

Every household that chose option two was a household funding his power grid for him.

Fifty million was not very much. Fifty million plus the savings of two hundred thousand people was something else.

...

They agreed, in the end, in both directions.

Some paid up front, mostly the shopkeepers and the older families with a little put by, and they argued about it in the bar for a week first and then went and did it. Most took the free installation.

And the work started, and that was the first thing anybody had seen start on Harland in fifty years.

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