They mounted the police bikes. A few people in the crowd stared, pointed, whispered.
“Call housekeeping,” Sam said to no one in particular. “Something should be done about this mess.”
Sam and Brock kept their eyes moving as they pedaled back toward Reagan International. The crowd was growing in numbers, and, Sam felt, growing more truculent as the day wore on. “We need to get through here before something goes down,” she told Brock, pointing to the police insignia on their commandeered bicycles. “These people don’t have a police-friendly vibe about them.”
“I think the shootings might have something to do with that.”
Sam nodded. She mulled their next move. The Rome lead wasn’t going to chase itself down, but she needed someone to grind through all the new investigative work that had arisen as a result of their little laundromat foray. She badly wanted to know about the four people whose receipts the crooked laundromat shopkeeper had marked with a red check. She also wanted to know more about Henry Feng and his two friends, the semi-pro muscle she’d rolled up in the airport an hour or so earlier.
She’d normally turn to Dan for help, but he was winging his way to Banff to investigate the origin of a couple of those phone calls. One of those calls had snaked its way through Jeffrey Santos’ DC apartment on its way down to Central America, finally connecting with the phone that bore Slobodan Radosz’ fingerprints. It was the same phone she pulled from the body of the guy who tried to kill her in the warehouse in Costa Rica, which accounted for her greater-than-usual curiosity regarding the particular phone in question.
After Dan, there was an extremely short list of people whom Sam implicitly trusted in the Department of Homeland Security. The list was so short, in fact, that there were no names on it.
She thought again about how quickly the team of three knuckle draggers had found her and Brock. They’d barely had time to get their shit together and make it to the airport themselves. She was even more convinced now that no one could have assembled a snatch op that quickly without inside help. Which meant that there was no way in hell she was going to risk calling anyone at DHS to help her investigate the laundry shop leads.
But one name did pop into her head. Special Agent Alfonse Archer, a buttoned-down Bureau guy. She’d leaned on him pretty heavily over the past weekend. They’d met at the grisly scene of a parking-garage incident that had left a US senator’s driver extremely dead, and Big A, as she’d come to know him, had come through in a big way to help her retrieve Brock from the assholes who’d shot and kidnapped him. And, like Brock, Big A was recovering from a bullet wound. She called his cell phone, slowing down her pedaling to catch her breath a bit.
He picked up on the third ring. “I told myself I was never gonna answer another phone call from you,” he said, only half joking.
Sam laughed. “Big A, how’s life in the crime fighting business?”
“Lots of dull moments this week,” Archer said. “I’m stuck in the office while my arm heals.”
“You’re actually at work? Everyone else is out stealing their neighbors’ TVs.”
“Don’t get it twisted,” Archer said with a laugh. “I definitely thought about augmenting my pay, especially after taking a bullet in the line of duty.”
Sam chuckled. She filled Archer in on the situation, gave him Feng’s name, and read the names from the four dry cleaning receipts with the red check marks on them. “And just for giggles,” she said, “maybe see what you can dig up on a guy named Slobodan Radosz.”
“Sounds like a name that would stand out nicely in our database, if we had a reason to know of him,” Archer said.
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“I’ll get back with you as soon as I can.”
Sam thanked Archer for his help and hung up.
She had another problem to solve, a very important one. She dialed her cousin. “I need a favor,” she said, after brief pleasantries.
6
The Facilitator’s head hurt, the annoying aftereffects of too much gin, a sedative, and his trip halfway around the globe. After the refueling stop in Rome, his private jet made the relatively short trip to Pescara, on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. As the engines spooled to a stop, he had exited his plane and climbed aboard a waiting helicopter for the brief trip out to sea.
His was, by design, the last arrival on the Anzio. The super-yacht was full of European dignitaries, both the public-facing figureheads occupying political office, and the real power brokers, the ones at the helm of the big banks, big corporations, and big lobbies.
In attendance were also an impressive number of obscenely wealthy private individuals, most of whom functioned in the same fashion as the bankers and captains of industry: to dictate pan-European fiscal and social policy. Sub rosa, of course, leaving little surface indication that the various political systems were anything other than what they claimed to be. Power brokers only remained powerful as long as the groundlings remained docile.
“Signore, please accept my warmest welcome to the Anzio,” Captain Maurizio Turcoe said nearly as soon as the Facilitator stepped from the helicopter onto the yacht’s helipad. “It is my pleasure to serve as this beautiful vessel’s captain. I trust that you’ll find all arrangements to your satisfaction, but should you need anything, however insignificant, it would be our pleasure to provide it for you.”
The Facilitator nodded and grunted without making eye contact. He turned to the sour-faced Serb on the captain’s left. “Everyone is here,” Bojan said, “except the parliament president’s chief of staff. He had a… sudden illness.”
The Facilitator smiled knowingly. “Let us hope he recovers.” But not too quickly. Parliamentary politics frequently impeded the sort of progress the Facilitator was after.
It was exceptionally rare for the Facilitator to attend meetings such as this one, though he’d called the meeting, massaged its attendee list, and, of course, authored the script. Though no one on board knew it, the yacht belonged to him. Accounts under his control had made the appropriately sized donations necessary to rent the various politicians for the afternoon. And the meeting’s keynote speaker was a longtime member of the Consultancy, all of which was usually more than good enough to faithfully serve the Facilitator’s interests.
But this time, much more was at stake. It was in his best interest to be a fly on the wall, to witness both context and subtext, to watch for askew glances between attendees, to hear the questions in person, the ones that were asked and the ones that were merely implied.
Many of the people in attendance would recognize him, but only two would recognize him for who he was. He possessed little of the usual megalomania that accompanied the kind of weight he threw around. Consequently, he possessed little of the attendant yearning for the spotlight that those in power frequently felt. Such a yen would be exceptionally hazardous. Anonymity was absolutely essential.
Bojan accompanied him to the yacht’s ballroom. The Facilitator took a seat in the back of the room, and Bojan watched the door. Johann Froehlich, the current president of the European Central Bank, and the Facilitator’s highly-placed shill, spoke from behind the podium.
“The American situation requires some difficult choices,” Froehlich said, his Austrian accent leaving sharp edges on the words. “My staff and I no longer view the US dollar as a viable reserve currency, which places many of us in an awkward situation, given the size of our long positions in the dollar.”
The Facilitator paid more attention to the crowd than to Froehlich. He had approved Froehlich’s message, so he was intimately familiar with its contents. He was much more interested in the audience’s receptivity to what came next.
“Naturally, this raises the issue of conversion from the dollar to a more suitable reserve currency,” Froehlich continued. The Facilitator noted nods from the distinguished audience, a positive sign. “From an optical perspective, it seems most appropriate for us to hold the Euro in exclusive reserve at the dawn of w
hat many of us believe to be the post-dollar era. The Euro is, after all, the currency of the land.”
“Not mine!” announced a voice with a Londoner’s accent. “Pound Sterling or nothing at all, my good man.” All heads turned to witness a sardonic smile on the British banker’s face.
Froehlich smiled. “As our English friend has humorously pointed out, some of us have made the Euro switch in all but the name. But we’re all equally exposed to what has become just as leveraged a currency as the US dollar was, which brings me to the topic of our purpose here today: determining the right currency for us to invest in now.”
The audience murmured. The politics behind the Euro provoked strong feelings on both sides of the argument. But the crowd was hand-picked, and the Facilitator was confident that everyone in attendance understood the degree to which the Euro was just as vulnerable to a crisis of confidence as the dollar had proven to be.
What only a few people understood was that every currency was subject to a similar crisis. Even gold, Libertarian squeals about some monumental but indiscernible difference between “money” and “currency” notwithstanding. Money couldn’t be eaten, didn’t keep one warm at night, didn’t provide shelter from the elements. It was therefore only valuable as a marker, a shorthand for the relative value of the things that provided the necessities of life, and as such, all money was equally vulnerable to the shifting tides of circumstance and popular opinion.
Sure, humans had valued shiny gold pieces for eons, which made gold, empirically speaking at least, a more durable trade lubricant than anything before or since. But it was still just a proxy.
As the Facilitator had recently come into possession of an ungodly amount of a different kind of proxy — the kind that existed as a string of ones and zeroes inside of the world’s computers — he stood to gain a great deal if this august coterie of European heavies chose to cast their fortunes with Bitcoin.
“There are two major advantages,” Froehlich intoned in his precise Austrian-accented English, “to a digital currency. First, none of the digital currencies under consideration are yet leveraged. They are not susceptible to multiple claims against the same unit of denomination, which is the major problem that every other fiat currency has today. We will, of course, maintain the mechanisms that allow borrowing against the currency of choice, even if we elect to adopt a particular digital currency. This ability to earn leveraged gains will still provide for the kind of profitable inflation that our various institutions have come to rely upon, and that our consumers have come to crave as well, but at a sufficiently slow pace to ensure stability.”
The Facilitator watched as the crowd digested Froehlich’s last statement. The Brit raised his hand and was recognized. “So we throw out the poisoned currency, and set about poisoning the new one, then?”
Froehlich smiled indulgently. “One might regard it that way. Or, if one happens to enjoy the institutional profits that inflationary borrowing permits, one might view the change as a move to greener, more fertile fields, ripe for planting.”
The audience laughed, the Brit right along with them. “Right, then,” he said. “Sign us up. Only, why don’t we just go back to the gold standard?”
Another voice piped up, this one with a Swiss-German accent. “You know how to gain access to the Americans’ vaults?”
The Facilitator smiled. Of course not. Even if the US government somehow agreed to let the Europeans have back all the gold that the American vaults had “safeguarded” on the Europeans’ behalf over the past half-century, there was no way that he, the Facilitator, would allow the transfer to take place.
Froehlich fielded the delicate question expertly. “There is an access issue,” he said. “Not all of us are in physical possession of the gold to which we have a claim, and there are security concerns associated with transporting large quantities of precious metals in the current, chaotic environment. So returning to a gold-based currency system, at this moment, would likely create an unfavorable situation for most of us. Hence, my belief, and that of many of my colleagues, is that investment in one or more digital cryptographic currencies would provide an attractive combination of opportunity and security.”
The Facilitator noted nods of assent from many in the audience. A good sign. Froehlich had appealed to the crowd’s lust for more wealth, and had played on their fear of losing the wealth they currently had. It was the oldest and most effective one-two punch in salesmanship, and it appeared to have been well-received by the crowd of European luminaries.
“But there is a further question that requires our consideration,” Froehlich went on. “The matter of which, or which combination, of the dozens of virtual currencies in existence is most suitable for our purposes.”
“Are we sure this currency can be safeguarded?” The speaker was a Swiss banker, caretaker of several of the Facilitator’s own accounts. “I have read of thefts.”
“Anything can be stolen,” Froehlich said. “For years, we’ve all dealt in cash, which is the most-stolen item in the world. And the digital systems our banks have employed for years are also vulnerable to exploitation.”
The crowd murmured, but Froehlich continued. “But digital money can be stored on small memory devices, which can be physically and electronically isolated from any computer system until they’re needed for a particular transaction. And since it’s nothing more than an account number and an associated passkey, it can also be stored on a slip of paper and locked away in a safe. So just like the currencies we currently employ, it is simply our own diligence that is necessary to safeguard our assets from misappropriation.”
“But there are two dozen of these currencies out there,” said a man with a thick Irish brogue. “Half will be gone in five years. So where will that leave us if ours disappears?”
“It’s a concern. But it’s no less and no more a problem than we face today with our existing systems,” Froehlich said. “Let us not forget that we are here today because the US dollar has just disappeared from beneath our feet, for all practical purposes.”
The Facilitator detected uncertainty in the crowd. They had arrived at the crux, the decision point. He looked back at Froehlich, who was already delivering the coup de grace.
“But by virtue of our collective participation in one or several of these digital currency markets,” Froehlich said quietly, his calm voice assuaging uneasiness as effectively as his words, “the currency or currencies we choose to adopt will enjoy a substantial boost in legitimacy and consumer confidence. We will, by our mere presence in the market, create the market strength that we require.”
Heads nodded. The Facilitator smiled. He exchanged a congratulatory glance with Froehlich, who nodded a discreet acknowledgement. It was all down to the details now. They had carried the day. The Facilitator’s mountain of stolen Bitcoin was about to triple in value, maybe more.
Before week’s end, his position would be solidified. He would remain damn near the most powerful man on the planet; that was never much in question. But he would soon wield reach and influence on a scale he’d never before imagined possible. What he had just accomplished was a hair shy of overt global dictatorship.
The meeting adjourned, and the Facilitator made a quick exit. He had another item to attend to. He nodded to the dour Serb on his way out of the yacht’s enormous conference room.
Bojan followed the old man to the captain’s quarters belowdeck. The Facilitator rapped three times on the door. Maurizio Turcoe opened the door, an obsequious smile on his face, but the Facilitator walked past the captain, into the captain’s own private chamber, as if Turcoe did not exist.
A familiar face greeted him inside the captain’s quarters, reclining behind Turcoe’s desk. Fyodor Alexandrov had aged considerably since last they spoke in person, the Facilitator noted. His skin was pale, almost translucent, and dark purple rings encircled his eyes. But Alexandrov’s high Russian cheeks, square jaw, and piercing eyes made for as intimidating a presence as ever. He was equal
parts feral thug and calculating statesman, characteristics that undoubtedly accelerated his rise to the top of the KGB, the most feared intelligence service on the planet. Until the Soviet Union disintegrated in disgrace, that is, and Alexandrov was forced to channel his vision, will, and absolute lack of human empathy in a more entrepreneurial direction.
“My friend,” the old Cold War spymaster said, rising to shake the Facilitator’s hand. “Thank you for your business. I trust things are proceeding to your satisfaction?”
“Quite so,” the Facilitator said. “I have need of further services, as well.”
7
Sabot was drenched, but sweat was only part of the problem. It was more that the wet, sweet, heavy air of the jungle condensed on his face and body as the small motorcycle, struggling under the combined weight of Sabot and his corpulent companion, cut through the pre-dawn darkness. The air was impossibly thick, and Sabot felt a wheeze in his chest with every breath.
His neck was sore. He’d craned it around hundreds of times since leaving the strange underground garage buried deep in the jungle, searching behind them for signs of anyone following them. To his utter amazement, he’d seen nothing. Had they really gotten away from that god-awful nightmare of a place?
His arms were wrapped reluctantly around Fredericks’ sweaty hulk, gripping the pudgy mass only as tightly as necessary to keep from toppling off the back of the motorcycle. The odor was intense, and the combination of the loamy jungle air and Fredericks’ foul funk was enough to turn Sabot’s stomach. “Can you go any faster?” he asked.
“Not unless you want to get decapitated by a tree branch,” Fredericks called over his shoulder in reply. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s still dark out here.”
Sabot grunted. His arm stung. Technically, he’d been shot while Fredericks tried to start the motorcycle, but it had turned out to be such a glancing hit that the slug had done little more than shave the outer layers of skin from a spot on his upper arm. But it still hurt, especially as his salty sweat found its way into the wound.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 184
