The God Principle

 

 

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But to her surprise, she was able to make good progress with her research. It seemed that the system was so sure of itself with its threats of elimination that it looked upon her with amusement, as if in a game of cat and mouse. Through the peasants she could establish contacts into the higher pyramid of the labor force, visit their habitations and collect samples and gather statistics. She made sure that her questions and inquiries were not the probing kind, and instead chose to listen to what each level was willing to divulge. She could always find higher-level people in the labor force who could discuss what they did for a living, for it was often the case that people knew only of their own local operations and had no complete picture of the larger system. And she took discreet photographs whenever she could.

 

After months of research, she started analyzing her information, mapping the points onto one another, looking for consistency. And to her delight a pattern began to emerge. She knew her statistics were based mostly on what she had heard people talk about, but taken together from various strata of the labor force and across geographical regions, much of her information was generally consistent. The numbers began to make sense as she constructed layered pyramids out of her statistics, with each pyramid under an individual drug lord. Various strata of the labor force were segmented across these pyramids, but there was also considerable overlap at the bases where peasants did not seem to be too concerned about who they sold their crop to. And there was some kind of cooperation between the drug lords as well, for many distribution chains were often used by all of them.

 

Then she compiled all the numbers into a single chart, and noticed that she could use a better structure than a typical organizational pyramid. For one, the top portion of the pyramid that handled processing, distribution and exercised control over the system was much too small compared to that of the peasant labor force. But most importantly, the peasants were not really an integral part of the mafia, though the mafia made use of them. And there were no useful pyramidal structures within the peasant population. There were limited interactions between the two, like transfer of goods and money and some control. However the peasant work force existed as an almost independent unit, functionally separate, but subservient to the mafia’s control and coordination machinery. Therefore Aliyah decided to segregate the functional mafia from the peasants as two separate entities. She represented these two factions as two self-contained ovals joined together, a smaller one on top interfacing with and controlling a larger one at the bottom. And from the top oval sprang the distribution channels, a channel of movement for drugs, reaching out to other countries of the world. She drew them as thick lines emanating from the small oval, and all of a sudden the caricature of a spider was staring back at her from the drawing sheet!

 

This image struck her so hard that she paused, wondering at the correlation. For one, were a spider’s legs, really all of them, attached to the cephalothorax or the small oval? All it took for confirmation was to walk over to a corner of the room where she could inspect a spider in its web. Now back at her table, she stared hard at the drawing, brows furrowed. Was her imagination running too wild?

 

She could easily complete the picture with a web, for the first level distribution chains expanded into a proper web that spanned a large number of countries. This was the sticky part of the web that trapped millions of innocents and consumed them. There was also another network at the center of the web, one that handled production and exercised local control. This was quite like the central hub network of the web where the spider lurked waiting for its prey. The mouthparts of the spider, its brains, the numerous eyes, the poison glands and the venom-injecting claws she could easily associate with the small oval. The large oval of the peasants represented the abdomen that processed and generated all the energy required for the sustenance of this spider. Moreover, the silk glands of the spider were located in the abdomen, and it was this silk that was spun by the spider using its legs to weave the gossamer webs that trapped its victims. Likewise it was the peasant labor force represented by the larger oval that produced the drug crop, which was then processed and distributed by the mafia into the web. A further revealing fact was that the rudimentary heart of the spider, a simple tube, was located not in the cephalothorax or the small oval, but rather in the abdomen. The small oval of the spider representing the mafia was literally heartless!

 

The correlation was particularly striking, and it strongly hinted that perhaps there was a real connection between the patterns of a spider and that of the drug mafia. She then remembered that most spiders were cannibalistic by nature and would destroy members of their own species when they could. Such was true of the mafia as well, for they tended to separate into rival factions and kill off one another in bitter contests for power and territory. Occasionally they would cooperate when circumstances favored, but in general they were quite wary of one another, like most spiders. Her picture of a spider in a web in a tropical jungle now represented a greater pattern that existed on a much larger scale!

 

Things seemed to be going well, with her research about to bear fruit, when all of a sudden her world was turned upside down. She had made a crucial mistake in confiding the contents of her dossier to a friend in the police. The dossier she had compiled was now quite large, with photographs and also statistics on production rates, labor force strata, distribution channels and resources, and estimates of drug volumes moving out of the country, among others. With these numbers she could also work out the amount of land under cultivation to sustain outflow rates. Large masses of land literally under the very noses of various governmental programmes had to be used in the production of these drugs, and this was an additional compelling factor to champion her cause. But it seemed too late, for the news of her research leaked and the top bosses had become angry. Then word came that a mafia contract was out on her and if she wanted to live, she had better get out quickly. She found herself running, and running scared, afraid even to ask the local authorities for protection, for she suspected that she would not be the least bit safe with them. She had received anonymous phone calls and messages that confirmed and reiterated threats of death.

 

 

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