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technical problems thrown up by the complex’s construction were spectacular, too, such as driving dozens of steel-and-concrete monopiles half a mile deep in order to create foundations which could support the immense weight of such a structure. Without them it would have crushed the stack of compressed coral it stood on and sunk beneath the waves like Atlantis.
    The Trinity Syndicate Grand Hospitality Project was also entirely self-powered, using the photovoltaic properties of the paper-thin solar tiles – alternating layers of graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides – with which every exterior surface apart from the windows was covered. Electricity was abundant and free.
    And now I was staying there myself, as a guest – or a something, I wasn’t yet sure what. But I had been given a set of clean clothes which fit and were made of light cotton, just right for the climate, and I’d had an amazing super-hot multi-nozzle shower before coming out for breakfast, and I’d shaved, and now I was eating heartily, and I felt, in a word, resurrected. 1
    My upbeat mood was in no way diminished by the arrival of the lovely Aanandi.
    “How are you feeling, Zak?”
    I patted a belly that resembled an expectant mother’s. “Gloriously stuffed.”
    “Ready for a meeting?”
    “What? Now? Who with?”
    “The bosses. The Trinity Syndicate. Busy men, like I said, but they’ve made time to fit you in. They’re eager to say hi.”
    She led me through the complex’s outer ring in a clockwise direction, up and down a number of staircases. The place had that new-building smell, all freshly poured concrete and just-dried plaster. Pot plants glistened. Slabs of slate and marble gleamed.
    What I was seeing now confirmed the impressions I had gathered the previous night: if this was a hotel, it was the oddest one I’d ever been in. There was no reception or main lobby that I was aware of. The communal areas seemed more like rec rooms at an office, full of low chairs and discreet soft furnishings, with drink dispensing machines, flatscreen TVs and table football. There were staff, Maldivians all of them, but their uniform was informal – T-shirts and sweatpants bearing a three-heads logo that was a bit like the biohazard symbol – rather than the trousers and ties that were regulation dress for employees at a posh hotel.
    We passed people who I took to be fellow “guests” like me. They were a motley assortment, ranging from pudgy bespectacled boffins with Doc Brown hair to smoothly efficient and smartly groomed city types who could only be dabblers in the dark arts of corporate public relations.
    In short: hotel, shmotel. This was no more a resort destination than Disneyland was a concentration camp. The Trinity Syndicate Grand Hospitality Project was a front, hiding something utterly other.
    Finally, after a lengthy indoor trek, Aanandi ushered me into a conference room. One wall was an unbroken, floor-to-ceiling window, showing me two equal fields of flat colour, the aquamarine sea and the cerulean sky, like something Rothko might have painted in one of his mellower phases. That triple-head logo was embedded in the ceiling as a quartz mosaic, and repeated in the pattern of the carpet.
    “I’ll leave you here,” Aanandi said. “They won’t be long.”
    “Any advice? Handy tips for dealing with them?”
    “Be honest. Don’t lie. Smile. Be yourself.”
    “Oh, shit. I’m doomed.”
    “You’ll be fine.” She gave my shoulder an encouraging rub. “Don’t forget, they want you, Zak. You’re not auditioning. They’re the ones who need to be schmoozing you, not the other way round. You’re in the driving seat.”
    I was alone with the Rothko view and the whisper of the air conditioning for several minutes. Then three men filed into the room via a side door, not the one Aanandi and I had used.
    I recognised the first of them straight away: Dick Lombard, Australia’s pre-eminent media mogul and only one of the best