The Chairman

The Chairman of the Nightrise corporation is a mysterious man, he is very vain and has a great fear of boats (when he was twelve, a fortune teller told him he'd be killed in an accident involving a boat). He has obviously spent lots of money trying to make himself look younger and he has long white hair which looks like a wig but is in fact his own. The chairman, like the President, prefers to be addressed as `Mr Chairman` and he lives in Hong Kong, in the town of Kowloon, which means `Nine Dragons.` The chairman constantly maintains contact with his executives throughout the world, and, as he is such a mysterious character, he only appears twice in Nightrise: once in which he is talking to the executives of Nightrise and Diego Salamanda, where it is revealed Salamanda is the chairman's agent in Peru. Salamanda says the Gatekeepers he is pursuing will be in his clutches soon and the chairman is pleased. He appears again when Susan Mortlake rings up to say she plans to have John Trelawney assassinated by using one of the Gatekeepers as a weapon. Despite his brief appearances, he can be considered one of the main antagonists. The chairman likes his position as a billionaire and wants to maintain the division between the rich and the poor as much as possible, and for this he, like all the other antagonists who serve them, requires the assistance of the Old Ones. The chairman is the main antagonist in book four: Necropolis, in which he appears more frequently than in Nightrise. In Necropolis The Chairman turns Hong Kong into a necropolis, a city of the dead, using poisonous gases that smother Hong Kong's streets and suffocate the residents. During the Signal 10 typhoon at the end of book four, The Chairman is killed by a boat which is thrown out of the water and into his office, fulfilling the prophecy a fortune teller told him when he was young that he would be killed by a boat in Hong Kong.