The United States Treasury and the Federal Reserve found themselves in a quandary. There wasn’t enough gold to back more than a fraction of the paper currency they had floated around the world. If a run on the American gold supply began, it would certainly mark the end of the US economy, and maybe the country itself.
So the President of the United States stepped in. On August 15, 1971, Richard Milhous Nixon unmoored the US dollar from the gold standard.
The Fed and Treasury were now free to print as much money as they desired, and there was no requirement to continue the charade of a fully backed currency. “The dollar went fiat, baby,” Levitow had said with a sardonic smile.
Nixon had blamed speculators as the evil forces his decision was designed to thwart. But Levitow had characterized Nixon’s dismantling of the Bretton Woods agreement quite differently. “That was the day the oligarchy achieved nirvana. The most powerful man in the world had handed the plutocrats the keys to the world’s treasures.”
The world had acquiesced with barely a whimper. Hardly anyone understood what had happened. Those who did understand lacked the wherewithal to do much about it, Levitow explained.
Protégé knew that every fiat currency in history has ended in collapse due to hyperinflation. He had long suspected that the dollar-backed financial system was headed for a spectacular meltdown as well.
How could it not be? It was impossible, Protégé reasoned, to create an endless supply of worthless pieces of paper and expect the world to behave forever as if that paper held real value and significance. It just couldn’t be done. Sooner or later, people needed something of real value in exchange for their goods, services, or life energy.
Unfortunately, the really valuable items were the first things to become scarce in any monetary crisis.
Levitow’s next sentence had chilled Protégé to the bone. “Ladies and gentlemen, unless the monetary reset can be accomplished without the destruction of physical infrastructure and items of real capital value—those things that produce food, shelter, and energy—human society will cast itself back into the stone age.”
Levitow’s dramatic pause had seemed to last forever. Protégé spent the entire time thinking of how the eloquent physicist might be wrong.
He had failed. Sure, humanity might get lucky and avoid a complete meltdown. But probably not.
If the way people behaved after the recent hurricanes in the American South was any indicator, society was well and truly screwed, Protégé decided.
Levitow’s basso had resumed, this time in a much warmer tone, his gentle smile finding its way into the sound of his words. “But I’ve spent the better part of the last decade making sure that doesn’t happen. The world’s economy is a patient suffering from a horrific malignancy. But I don’t intend for the cure to prove more fatal than the disease.”
Skepticism was Protégé’s normal stance, and it had always served him well. He had affected a skeptical view of Levitow’s discussion as a matter of habit, and had applied his normal arsenal of logical weapons against the physicist’s assertions. It was nothing personal. It was just how one survived in a world full of bullshit artists.
But Protégé could find no holes in Levitow’s account, particularly with respect to the way the American establishment had used Nixon’s loosing of the fiat currency genie to sidestep the collapse of their gold scam by building the largest pyramid scheme the world has ever known.
Levitow had explained the process clearly and eloquently. The Fed and the US Treasury drew currency up out of thin air and lent it to subordinate banks. Subordinate banks, in return, lent it to borrowers. Each borrower was responsible for repaying the dollar he was lent—which was conjured from nothing by the power of fiat—plus interest on that dollar.
If the dollar came from thin air, where would the interest come from?
The answer was simple, Levitow had said. The interest had to be paid with another newly-conjured dollar. There was no other way to do it.
Somebody had to buy the debt by exchanging another currency, or worse, an item of real value, in order to lay claim to the newly contrived dollar, which was hatched, in part, merely to pay the interest on the dollar created just before.
The game depended on the next sucker, whether it was a lender, a credit union, or a sovereign nation. It was a classic pyramid scheme. Only in this particular game, a few smug bastards were perpetrating the con against the entire world, Levitow had said.
The trouble was that Ponzi schemes didn’t wind down slowly. They imploded in an instant. People became upset, impoverished, and violent.
So how would mankind end the charade? Would those at the top of the scheme stop of their own volition? Protégé agreed with Levitow’s assessment: undoubtedly not. The Ponzi scheme was far too lucrative. It was going to have to implode.
The fiat currency scam was going to have to come to a brutal end in a fiscal meltdown of nuclear proportions.
No implosion of that magnitude was going to be free of turmoil and massive re-normalization. The West of the past fifty years, which Levitow had called the “sinkhole for every gadget manufactured in impoverished currency-debased regions the world over,” was due its comeuppance. The last bastion of conspicuous consumption would simply cease to be.
At least that was how Levitow had described it. Protégé might have used less apocalyptic language, but he couldn’t find fault with the argument.
There was a parasite starving the world of its value, Levitow had said, but he knew how to starve the bloodsucker of its oxygen.
The mechanism of the parasite’s operation was the daily movement of currency. Stopping this movement would cause the death of the parasite in a matter of days. The establishment couldn’t continue to perpetrate massive redistribution of wealth without a fiat currency to manipulate.
The collateral damage would be real but minimal, Levitow explained. Bridges wouldn’t suddenly fail. Houses wouldn’t collapse. Fires wouldn’t erupt. Pestilence wouldn’t overrun cities.
Sure, the plutocrats would squeal, and their histrionics might incite broader panic, possibly even large-scale chaos. But eventually, people would figure it out: Nothing would have changed except the agreement.
Growers would still grow. Creators would still create. Builders would still build. Teachers would still teach. Shelter would still keep people warm, and food would still spring from the earth. It would be just as it had always been.
But in this brave new world, the beast would have relinquished its stranglehold on humanity. At least that was how Levitow, Archive – and, now, if he was honest with himself about the weekend’s impact on his thinking, Protégé himself – happened to see things.
After Levitow’s speech, Archive had asked Protégé to do a particular thing in support of the effort. Protégé had agreed.
But now, sitting in the Aspen airport, he was having second thoughts. What if they were wrong? What if the current situation wasn’t nearly as dire as Archive’s crowd believed?
More importantly, what if the plan didn’t actually go as smoothly as Archive’s illuminati expected? They could be setting off a bloodbath of catastrophic proportions.
Protégé’s reverie was interrupted by a familiar voice in his ear. “Hello, my well-hung new friend.” His heart began to pound as he recognized the strong, sexy voice of Allison the flight attendant from Friday’s flight. He turned his head to look at her, and her gorgeous blue eyes seized his attention.
“Going my way?” She smiled playfully and kissed him on the lips, her tongue darting briefly to meet his.
“Yes,” he said. “I most certainly am.”
59
Alexandria, VA. Monday, 8:23 a.m. ET.
It was usually the simple things that got spies caught. Sam Jameson had exposed more than one burgeoning network by tugging on the smallest of threads.
Time, attention, and patience were the keys to discovering the hidden relationships that betrayed a person’s loyalties, and eventually, hi
s connections. Sam didn’t have time or patience at the moment, but this particular problem certainly had her undivided attention.
The clues to finding her lover, kidnapped by the mongrel-looking giant of a pipe-swinger, all seemed to dead end at one man: The Intermediary.
The same apparition was apparently haunting other happenings as well. If there was indeed a connection between Senator Frank Higgs’s dead acquaintances, CIA stooge Avery Martinson’s tearful confession, and Brock’s brutal but professional kidnapping, Sam was determined to find it.
As emotionally charged as those events were, she knew that emotions weren’t going to find the Intermediary. There might come a time when rage and fury would come in handy, but that time wasn’t now.
Now was the time for cold, rational focus.
She began comparing the chronological telephone records on her computer screen, hoping someone in the Intermediary’s network had left a clue for her to find and follow.
It wasn’t an entirely absurd hope. How many times have I sent a text using the wrong phone? At least a half dozen times she had inadvertently used her work phone to send a text to Brock or a friend. Other times, she had done it simply because her personal phone’s battery had died. The reverse was also true—she had conducted business using her personal phone.
She had a hunch that somewhere in the Intermediary’s network of agents, someone had done the same thing. Keeping track of numerous, constantly changing telephone numbers was an extremely difficult thing to do.
And it wasn’t just the phone numbers that changed all the time. Sam knew that agents operated by using a handful of different telephones as well, each linked to multiple phone accounts.
All of this cloak and dagger made the probability extremely high that someone had made a mistake. Humans never stopped being human, even after they became double agents.
Especially then.
Associating the various phone accounts to each of the individuals now represented on her screen had been no small task, and it had taken Dan Gable, her eminently capable deputy, the better part of two full days to get it done.
In addition to a “white world” phone—the kind that wives and children could leave messages on—each of the men had used dozens of “burner” phones. The records themselves had been assembled using a combination of billing records, usage patterns, and secret cell phone geographical location technology used by Homeland and a few other three-letter agencies.
It wasn’t a perfect, dead-on accurate way of associating a person with a set of telephones, but it had stood up in a trial or two.
And it was all Sam had to go on.
It didn’t take long for her to discover a small set of telephone numbers that appeared in the phone records belonging to each of the people of interest: Avery Martinson, Frank Higgs, and the late Monsignor Worthington.
She also found three slightly larger groups of phone numbers that two of the three men had in common with each other.
In all, she had thirteen phone numbers to track. That was progress.
Hang on, Brock. I’m getting closer.
60
Crystal City, VA. Monday, 9:13 a.m. ET.
The day was just starting to get uncomfortably warm as Stalwart stepped through the doorway into the nondescript mid-rise office building in Crystal City, trailing Secretary of the Air Force Lewiston by half a step.
Vice President Arquist and his direct employees had temporarily relocated to an office building to accommodate renovations in their primary offices, and it was this man—the second most powerful man in the world, by some accounts—that Stalwart was here to see.
He placed his briefcase on the metal detector conveyor belt and placed the contents of his pockets into the incongruously grubby plastic bowl. The security-screening lane emptied into a wide corridor bounded by bulletproof glass, which ended at a single elevator in a corner of the lobby.
Two large Secret Service men flanked the elevator doorway. The one on Secretary Lewiston’s side of the door was a large African-American man whose features appeared to be carved of stone.
The Secret Service agent on Stalwart’s side of the hallway was a tall blonde-haired man whom Stalwart knew very well. Stalwart called him Whitey.
“Mr. Secretary, Mr. Charles, pleasure to see you again, sirs.” The large African-American Secret Service agent extended his hand to Secretary Lewiston, who returned the greeting. Stalwart shook hands with Whitey. He felt a small slip of paper pass from Whitey’s hand into his own.
After their warm handshake ended, Stalwart returned his right hand to his pocket, where he left the slip of paper that would, he thought, change the world.
Then he got on the elevator. It took him to see the Vice President of the United States.
Three blocks away from the vice president’s offices, in an overpriced but otherwise nondescript DC apartment, Mullah laid his head on his pillow for a much-needed nap.
He had been awake most of the previous night coordinating the efforts of a widely dispersed network of operatives. Secrecy demanded grossly inefficient communications to avoid leaving clues that might jeopardize one of the most important operations in history, at least by his reckoning.
As a result, he had communicated relatively few messages, each containing very few words, but the associated effort was considerable.
His brow was furrowed in the familiar way of men with responsibility but no direct control over events. Placing trust in others was a difficult matter for men such as Mullah, men of both faith and action, but it was the age-old curse of command.
He hated to think of his role as that of a commander, but that was really what it was. Sure, he ultimately answered to Archive, but the old man largely stayed out of operational matters. Distance assuaged the old man’s conscience, and afforded some measure of plausible deniability
The operation in his own backyard had Mullah most troubled. It carried the greatest risk. Senator Frank Higgs held crucial information beneath his thinning mane, and Mullah intended to extract that information by any means necessary.
But time was of the essence, as Mullah’s informants weren’t the only ones who suspected Higgs’s head contained uncommonly useful knowledge. Others apparently suspected it as well, if Mullah’s assessment of the senator’s recent travails was correct.
Someone wanted Higgs silenced. Mullah knew who.
Rather, he knew that person’s title. He didn’t know the name.
It was the name that Mullah needed most. The name of the Facilitator.
He closed his eyes, hoping for sleep to overtake him. There was nothing to do but wait, an activity best done unconscious.
61
Las Vegas, NV. Monday, 6:52 a.m. PT.
Mondays were always a madhouse at the Cooper residence. Margot and Jonathan Cooper always seemed to be running late. It wasn’t entirely their fault, as they had a fair-haired young entropy machine working against all semblance of order, and she was currently resisting her parents’ increasingly aggravated attempts to dress her.
The utility van parked across from the Coopers’ home had been replaced by a floral delivery van. The paint job was different, but the innards were the same. A man sat with headphones on, listening to young Hannah Cooper’s squeals of laughter as she frustrated her parents’ efforts to get her dressed and into the car.
Finally, exasperated, Margot had simply scooped her up and carried her to the car in just her diaper. “We’ve got to get Daddy to the airport, Hannah. We don’t want him to miss his flight, do we?”
Margot’s voice sounded remarkably patient, the man in the floral van thought. The kid was a holy terror this morning.
The man heard the sound of the garage door opening, and the Coopers’ white minivan backed out of the garage. Jonathan was at the wheel. He was talking to Margot, and he didn’t notice the van as he drove past.
Inside, the man used his smart phone to log into another obscure blog. He left a comment on an old post: “The Monday routine. Alwa
ys the same!”
The clients back East would be pleased. The physicist hadn’t shown any evidence of flaking.
The Coopers’ trip to the North Las Vegas Airport was punctuated by Hannah’s tears as she watched her daddy leave. It tore at Cooper’s heart. Her separation anxiety was normal, but he still felt terrible about it. He thought the same thing he thought every time she cried at his departure: I can’t do this shit forever.
Today, however, a different feeling had followed the usual pain and guilt.
Power.
Today, Jonathan Cooper was going to do something important. He was going to make a difference, for himself, for Margot, for Hannah, and for the unborn Cooper kicking the bejeezus out of Margot’s belly.
He had forced himself to stare at his book during the half-hour flight from North Las Vegas to the hidden airstrip near the Senior Quantum site. He had read the same sentence a dozen times. Thank God this is going to be simple, he had thought. I don’t know if my nerves could handle anything more.
Now, as he opened the top-secret Senior Quantum vault for the first time since the preceding Friday, Cooper was comforted by the relaxation that only comes with action. He was finally going to stop thinking about what lay ahead. He was finally going to do something.
He did the following: he unplugged his computer from the red power outlet, and he plugged it into the normal, white power outlet.
That was how Jonathan Cooper committed treason.
Would this simple act really help? Would it halt development of a weapon that could be used to cast millions into darkness and poverty? He hoped so.
He also hoped the darkness and poverty that his own act might cause would be short-lived.
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