Emergency

by Neil Strauss

  “I’m executing a ten-year plan to make sure everything that could go wrong is protected against,” Spencer said, his face glowing with the pride of feeling one step ahead of everyone else. “It’s about creating revenue sources and residences in multiple locations, so that if you have to flee one country, your daily existence won’t change.”

  “Do you know the problem with your plans?” challenged the mortgage company vice president, Howard, a pasty, heavyset man with an incongruent passion for mountain biking. “You don’t know what’s going to happen, so there’s no way to prepare. If there’s never a disaster, then you’re just wasting your time like all those people who built bomb shelters in the sixties. And if there is a disaster and someone drops a nuke, it’ll probably be in New York and you’ll get vaporized. So why not just relax and enjoy life, instead of worrying about everything that can go wrong?”

  “Because this makes economic sense,” Spencer replied coolly. “Do you have insurance for fires, theft, and illness?”

  “Of course,” Howard replied.

  “Which means you agree that a certain portion of your income should be allocated to protect you against catastrophes, even if they’re low-probability events.” Spencer took a small, prudent sip of wine, then continued. “Because that’s all this is: an insurance policy. When you think something will never happen to you, that’s usually when it happens.”

  The next morning, as Spencer and I sat on the patio, a tall, sullen man let himself into the house and stormed to the kitchen. He acknowledged no one, and no one acknowledged him. Evidently, he was the cook. As he grabbed pans and utensils with quick, angry movements, the maid moved through the house at a defiantly slow pace, collecting dirty linens.

  “We need to make you a ten-year plan,” Spencer said, beginning my next business lesson. “Before I started my company, I sat down and planned everything. It took a decade to execute, but in that time, nothing happened that wasn’t part of the plan. So to start, let’s make a list right now of the projects you’re working on.”

  I gave him a thumbnail sketch of future books. Most recently, I’d received a call out of the blue from Britney Spears. I had interviewed her for an article and we’d exchanged phone numbers. Almost a year later, she had called and invited me to her house in Malibu.

  “Do you think I can try surfing with you like this?” she asked with touching naïveté when I arrived and told her she lived across the highway from my favorite surf spot. She was at least five months pregnant with her second child.

  She had called me over, she explained as we sat down on her couch, because after I’d interviewed her, she’d researched me and seen my books. Now she wanted me to write her life story.

  “I want it to be something like this,” she said. In her hand was a copy of Goldie Hawn’s A Lotus Grows in the Mud. In her other hand was a crumpled piece of white paper. On it, she had written notes from her life: about cheating on Justin Timberlake, about resenting her parents’ control, about sexually acting out.

  “So are you going to write it?” Spencer asked after I told him the story.

  “I think it’ll be a good book if she’s going to be that honest,” I said. “But afterward, things got really strange. Her manager, her agent, and her lawyer were all fighting for control of her. Some of them wanted to do the book; others didn’t. She started calling me, but for some reason they took away her phone and it became impossible to get in touch with her.”

  Spencer went silent and thought for a while. “Okay,” he said, “so we have the Britney situation, the passport situation, and the ten-year plan. What if we put them all together?” I loved the way his potato mind worked. I needed more people like this in my life.

  “I don’t know if I want to put them together. The Britney book is probably a bad idea. Her people would never let the truth come out.”

  I noticed the cook talking to the maid in a hushed French accent. It was the first time I’d seen either of them smile. As soon as they realized I was looking, they separated and went about their business. It felt like a class war was brewing in the house.

  “You know what would be great?” Spencer went on. “Find a killer place in some third-world paradise and spend a relatively insignificant amount of money building it into a compound.” The word compound filled my head with images of the House of Yahweh. I couldn’t believe I was seriously contemplating this. “Then start a publishing company. If someone like Britney wants to work with you, you can bring her and her entire entourage there. Make sure they’re taken care of. Every day her friends can play while you work. The property will pay for itself, because not only will you be the writer everyone wants to go to, but you can start publishing books by other celebrities as well.”

  “But I don’t have the kind of money you do.”

  As the cook chopped vegetables with no affection for the task, I thought about how little it would take for the have-nots to revolt against the haves. When those who feel like they’re being treated unjustly have a target for their resentment, they become coiled springs pressed toward the ground. Whether you add more pressure or take it away, the result is the same: they will rise against you.

  “You don’t need money,” Spencer responded. “No intelligent person spends his own money. Have your publisher fund it as a joint venture. They can bring other writers and clients there too.”

  Suddenly, leaving the country felt less like an escape from the rat race and more like an opportunity to run it better and faster than the other rats.

  That night, after a house dinner during which the B boys gossiped about a friend who almost brought the New York Stock Exchange to a standstill, Spencer and I sat in the living room and watched television. On the news, North Korea, upset over sanctions imposed by the United Nations after the country conducted a nuclear test, was threatening to “mercilessly” retaliate.

  Spencer and I didn’t need to say a word to each other. We were both thinking the same thing.

  Back in Los Angeles, I bought the book I’d seen at Spencer’s house, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy, which, from the first page, was eerily prophetic.

  Written in 1987, the book meticulously traces the histories and economies of world superpowers of the last five hundred years. Its thesis, born of an endless array of historical examples, is that the collapse of every superpower in modern history has been due not just to lengthy fighting by its armed forces, but to its interests expanding internationally while its economy weakens domestically. In other words, empires collapse when they stretch themselves too thin.

  Furthermore, Kennedy explains, “Great Powers in relative decline instinctively respond by spending more on ‘security,’ and thereby divert potential resources from ‘investment’ and compound their long-term dilemma.”

  Though he doesn’t discuss America for most of the book, every word and every example has parallels in the United States today. For example, he writes of the declining Spanish empire in the sixteenth century, “Spain resembled a large bear in the pit: more powerful than any of the dogs attacking it, but never able to deal with all of its opponents and growing gradually exhausted in the process.”

  Similarly, two hundred years later, the British, “like all other civilizations at the top of the wheel of fortune … could believe that their position was both ‘natural’ and destined to continue. And just like all those other civilizations, they were in for a rude shock.”

  As each successive empire fell on the same economic sword, Hegel’s words kept echoing in my head: “What experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history.”

  By the time I finished the book, it seemed clear that whether or not there was another devastating terrorist attack in America, the end of the empire as we know it was approaching. The only remaining questions were: Would it simply become a smaller player, like Spain and Britain after their zenith, or disappear altogether, like Rome, Austria-Hungary, and the Soviet Union? And
what world power would eventually take its place: China, the European Union, maybe India?

  Either way, I was now convinced that, as surely as one tucks money into a retirement plan, I needed to build a backup life offshore immediately—and maybe even take Spencer’s advice and look into other ways to protect myself. In a time when nuclear, chemical, and biological weapon technology is for sale to the highest bidder, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of a great empire today could be a lot messier than in the past.

  After returning home from the Hamptons, I’d also called the lawyer Spencer had recommended, Holland Wright.

  “Your clients Spencer Booth and Adam McCormick recommended I speak to you,” I told him, my voice slightly nervous, as it was every time I knew I’d have to say the next sentence aloud. “I’m looking for a second citizenship and wanted to see if I could work with you.”

  “That’s not something I do,” he replied brusquely.

  “It’s okay.” I assumed he was just trying to protect his clients’ confidentiality. “I was with them in the Hamptons this weekend. They told me to call you.”

  “No, that’s not something I do,” he repeated. Maybe I wasn’t B enough for him.

  “But—”

  “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  I hate lawyers.

  “Thanks for your time.” I hung up dejectedly.

  I needed to find someone who understood the advantages and disadvantages of each country, the benefits and restrictions of each passport, the various legal shortcuts to obtaining quick citizenships. If necessary, I was even willing to consider getting married.

  But no lawyer would help me.

  Before leaving for the Sovereign Society conference, I researched one other option: a tombstone ID. Spencer had told me he’d considered getting one but changed his mind because it was too shady.

  To obtain a tombstone ID from a foreign country, I’d need to fly there and go to a local cemetery. Then I’d have to find the grave of a boy who’d died between the ages of three and ten, write down his name and birth date, and take out a mailbox in his name.

  After researching information about his parents on a genealogy website, I’d have to apply to the government for a birth certificate. With that certificate, I could get the country’s equivalent of a social security number and card. And with both those documents—and perhaps, for extra security, a utility bill in that person’s name or a fake student ID—I could get a driver’s license.

  Finally, with all those documents (and, in some countries, a local friend to vouch that I was a citizen), I could get a brand-new passport.

  But in addition to being risky—especially since more municipalities were starting to store birth and death certificates in the same database—there was also something degenerate about having my face on a passport above the name of a dead child.

  As I boarded a plane to Mexico, I hoped someone at the Sovereign Society conference would have the answers I was looking for. I was running out of legal options.

  A few words of advice: never go to a conference of paranoid people looking for information.

  I’ve spent fifteen years as a reporter. I’ve accidentally found myself swept up in riots, coups, and Kenny G concerts, and always gotten the story. But the Sovereign Society Offshore Advantage Seminar was no place for the casual question.

  The wide hallways outside the conference rooms of the Sheraton Hotel in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, were packed with middle-aged men and women. They weren’t well dressed, but they weren’t badly dressed either. They weren’t attractive, nor were they ugly. They didn’t appear to be rich, but they didn’t seem poor.

  What bound them together was that they all appeared inconspicuous. Unlike me, they weren’t the type of people selected for random searches by airport security. Yet there was one thing that separated them from the rest of the guests at the Sheraton: they were alone. None appeared to be with spouses, children, or families. Their mission, and perhaps their life, was a solitary one.

  As was mine. I hadn’t yet told my family or friends about what I was doing. As far as they knew, I’d gone to Mexico to surf, drink, and meet girls. Which definitely would have been more fun.

  I looked around the hallway—at the potbellied man in the Hawaiian shirt, the greasy-haired woman in the blue business suit, the unshaven man in the Panama hat. And I wondered if they’d already escaped, and where and when and why and how it went. But I would never know. Outside of a few pleasantries, none of them would talk to me.

  I took a seat in the back of the conference room, hoping to glean something from the presentations. A man in a business suit with black hair cut over big ears was speaking onstage. His name was Rich Checkan. His company was Asset Strategies International.

  He said that when a country’s trade deficit is greater than 5 percent of its gross domestic product, the currency typically falls 20 to 40 percent.

  He said that the U.S. deficit was at 5.7 percent of its gross domestic product, making a substantial dollar devaluation practically unavoidable.

  He said that people trying to escape wars had been able to barter diamonds and gold to get airlifted out of the country.

  He said that to protect ourselves, we should invest in foreign currencies and precious stones and metals, particularly gold.

  He said he happened to offer just such a service.

  None of the presentations that day were about obtaining a passport and fleeing America. The world of the Sovereign Society was much more involved than that. Thomas Fischer of Jyske Bank in Denmark urged attendees to keep their money offshore, where it wouldn’t get confiscated by the government or lost in a lawsuit. Mark Seaton of Armor Technologies tried to sell computer privacy to prevent hackers from accessing private data. Chatzky and Associates urged attendees to open foreign trusts and LLCs to protect their assets.

  I looked over the schedule for the second day. Most were also about keeping money safe from high taxes, lawsuits, asset seizures, government regulations, and inflation.

  The paranoia here was different from mine. The members of the Sovereign Society were suspicious of the United States government. And while the events of the last few years compelled me to agree with them, I was equally worried about the suspicion other countries had of the U.S. government—and the preemptive or retaliatory measures they might take against it. In short, they wanted to save their money. I wanted to save my skin.

  By the end of the day, I still hadn’t made a friend or been in a discussion longer than three minutes. Some people seemed to know each other, but whenever I tried to join their conversations, they ignored me. By this point, I was pretty sure I was the most suspicious-looking person there.

  Though paranoia is often used as a derogatory term, the truth is that it’s a survival instinct. If you think your postman is stealing your checks or your nurse is poisoning your food, even if it’s not true, the accusation is rooted in an innate desire for self-preservation. When a cat perks up its ears or hides under a bed when a completely harmless stranger approaches, it’s the exact same response, developed through millennia spent living in the wild, where the unknown was a threat.

  And because the future is unknown, no matter how good or bad things may be today, it will always be a threat. So, ultimately, the sole arbiter of what’s paranoia and what’s common sense is what happens tomorrow. You’re only paranoid if you’re wrong. If you’re right, you’re a prophet. St. Slim Jim, patron saint of offshore bank accounts and paranoid cats.

  Though the presenters were easy to mock, the next day I found myself picking up a flyer for Jyske Bank in Denmark from the conference information booth. If I was going to set up a new citizenship offshore, then I might as well put some money there to protect my savings against hyperinflation, bank failures, and lawsuits. Just in Case.

  By writing books and articles, I was exposing myself to litigation and violating one of the key principles of escape artists everywhere: privacy. The less people kn
ow about you, the less open you are to attack. I’d had many lawyers—including attorneys for Celine Dion and Michael Jackson—threaten me while I was at the Times.

  My friend Craig, who’d recently received his silver cryonics wrist bracelet in the mail, had been sued by a former business partner. The litigation had wiped his bank account clean, he still had $150,000 in legal bills to pay, and the case hadn’t even gone to court yet. Then there was my friend Frank, an Internet marketer who used the wrong disclaimers on his website. He was consequently accused of running a pyramid scheme by the Federal Trade Commission, which seized every penny he had without filing a single criminal charge.

  I wasn’t rich by any means, but it would still be cool if my net worth was zero. If I didn’t own anything, then nothing could ever be taken away from me.

  The speakers had clearly gotten to me.

  We make fun of those we’re most scared of becoming.

  As long as I was gathering intelligence, I grabbed a USB stick with information about Armor Technologies on it as well. Considering that I was about to take nearly every step the U.S. government and the IRS considered suspicious, it was time to protect my computer from prying eyes.

  As I turned to walk away, I noticed a short woman shuffle into the information booth. Her name tag identified her as Erika Nolan, president of the Sovereign Society. Maybe she would talk to me.

  “I need some help,” I told her. “I want to get a second citizenship somewhere. And I was hoping you knew the easiest way to do this.”

  She hesitated, as if weighing her options for escape, then relented. “What kind of places are you considering?”

  “I’m not sure. But it needs to be somewhere safe and with a credible passport that allows visa-free travel.”

  “Well, I’m not an expert in all the different immigration laws.” As soon as she said this, I wondered if I’d ever find what I was seeking. “But tomorrow there are two speakers you may want to see. One is Wendell Lawrence, who’s here from St. Kitts. He used to be an ambassador there. The other is Ramsés Owens, who’s going to discuss economic investment programs in Panama.”