I explained what I wanted, and handed him one of Uncle Larry’s hundred dollar bills.
He made the money vanish. “Wait here with my nephews.” He departed to see to my request. The room was small, and the expressionless watchdogs loomed uncomfortably close, watching us impassively. I stared casually into one of their eyes and he returned my stare with an expressionless face that held just a hint of smugness. That wasn’t a contest I was going to win. I admired their professional competence. They were standing closer than they should, but that was a necessary consequence of the cramped quarters. I could easily have landed a first blow on them by surprise. With a knife, it might even be disabling, although the other would be on me in a flash. With my empty hands though, they were confident in their ability to absorb anything I could attempt, and then they’d pound me black and blue. I pretended I wasn’t the least bit intimidated by any of that while they continued to watch us.
“Follow me,” Mr. Hung finally returned, guiding us to the kitchen door. “They’re just leaving.” He pointed to a table in a dark corner where a couple occupied themselves filling a to-go box. As the couple left, Mr. Hung gave the command: “Now.”
First one “bus boy” went out with Caitlin. A moment later, the other covered for Amit. Unless someone was actually paying close attention all they’d see was the bus boys.
A moment later, I joined them at the cluttered table, as if returning from the bathroom.
“We sure ate a lot.” I had to raise my voice to make myself heard over the clamor in the restaurant as I surveyed the dishes.
“Any dessert?” the waitress asked, handing over menus. Amit and I ordered coffee and Caitlin selected sweet tea while we decided on dessert.
“What happens,” Caitlin asked, “if the couple that was here gets caught up in the dragnet? If anyone follows up on their alibi, the police will have two sets of diners and only one set of dinners ordered.”
She must not have followed my discussion with Mr. Hung. “He made a new tab for us. It’ll show we arrived more than an hour ago. Since then, we’ve been eating here. It’s dark in here, and I doubt any of the other diners were paying any particular attention. They aren’t going to construct a timeline of who was at which table for how long, let alone inventory the restaurant’s ingredients to discover someone bought and paid for a meal that was never prepared.”
“So now what?” Amit asked.
“Begin by assuming this is not a private conversation,” Caitlin observed.
“Excellent assumption,” I confirmed. We sat in silence. Knowing the Red Flower Tong would almost certainly have bugged the table put a damper on our conversation.
“We can at least get our stories straight,” Amit finally broke the silence. “What about us did you find so attractive that you were inspired to invite us both out here for dinner.”
Caitlin looked consumed with worry for Bulldog. I understood why. Had that thing finished off Bulldog and then taken after Rob and his team? Or had it realized Rob and his team were getting away, left Bulldog and taken off after them? I’d have expected more gunfire if it had continued across the water somehow. Unless the Civic Circle’s security had managed to get the helicopter Rob’s team had disabled airborne, Rob and his team probably got away.
“Obviously, I’m attempting to pump you two impressionable and naïve young Civic Youth for inside information,” Caitlin interrupted my speculations.
“Using your feminine wiles?” Amit asked.
“In your case, I need hardly try,” she observed dryly, unamused by his banter.
“Oh, there are many things I might do, but betraying a secret is not one of them,” Amit assured her. “You’d be surprised at the secrets women have confided in me.”
Caitlin gave Amit an icy look that made clear she was hardly in a flirtatious mood. Just then, our waitress returned to bring our drinks and take our dessert orders.
That milestone accomplished, I took a sip from the coffee, holding Caitlin in my gaze. “We do need to get our stories straight,” I pointed out to her, “so what reason would you have to be chatting up a couple of Civic Youths?”
She looked up a moment in thought, and back at me. Then she took a deep breath, recovering her resolution to carry on despite her fears and concerns. She said something I couldn’t hear. I leaned in gesturing to my ear. “I suppose I’d be asking if you knew anything about TARP,” she repeated herself.
I’d used tarps all the time in camping, as ground cover under a tent, or as an improvised shelter. A couple dozen feet of paracord to support the middle and it makes a decent shelter. I had a feeling that wasn’t the kind of tarp she meant. Some kind of acronym? Amit wasn’t about to admit he was clueless – part of his alpha-male pick-up-artist act – so it was up to me.
“Ok. What’s TARP?”
“Toxic Asset Remuneration Program,” she started down the road to explanation. “It’s a plan the bankers in the Civic Circle cooked up at the Social Justice Leadership Forum two years ago. You see, for the last few years, federal policy has been to offer easy loans to help otherwise unqualified buyers own a home. The Feds guarantee the loan, so the banks can’t lose. They drag warm bodies in off the streets, throw money at them without regard to their ability to pay it back, and pocket a healthy origination fee for the loan. It’s the Federal Reserve outsourcing printing money to every financial institution in the country. The mortgages are bundled together and the resulting securities are resold to financial institutions.”
“Housing prices always go up,” Amit argued. “That’s a fundamental maxim of economics. Sure there are exceptions here and there, but on the whole, ten or even five years from now, the houses are worth more, and the banks can foreclose if the borrower stops paying, right? What’s the problem?”
“No,” Caitlin shook her head. “‘Their maxims are proverbs of ashes. Their defenses are defenses of clay.’ It’s a bubble,” she explained. “Ever hear about tulip bulbs?”
I remembered a book my father made me read – Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. “Prices keep rising in a bubble, fueled by mass hysteria and delusion. Until one day they don’t.”
“Exactly,” she acknowledged, grimly. “Same with housing prices. More and more cheap mortgage dollars chasing more and more houses. Eventually it becomes obvious the cycle can’t continue. It gets harder to find the next sucker willing to buy your expensive tulip bulb. And then the house of cards comes tumbling down, and tulips are back to being pretty flowers instead of sure-fire investments.”
“You know when it’s going to happen? Soon?” Not only was I curious, but also, it was a much safer subject for discussion than how we’d spent the earlier part of the evening.
“Hard to get the timing exact on something like that,” she acknowledged, “but the plan is for it to collapse in a couple of years, just before the 2008 election. With either McCain or maybe Bush as the Republicans’ candidate and Hillary Clinton as the Democrat, they’ll come to a bipartisan deal to force Lieberman as the lame duck to go along. Of course, I don’t think the Republicans realize that it’s all a set up. They’ll play the patsy. The Republican will be “responsible” and will call for the campaign to be suspended in favor of a bipartisan committee to address the emergency. The press will portray him as panicky and unpresidential, and the committee will roll out the TARP Plan as if they just devised it. Of course, they’ll come up with a name more palatable than ‘Toxic Asset Remuneration Program.’ Hillary will cruise to the White House, and the bankers will get the government to buy all their worthless loans and other toxic assets.
“The election is choreographed that far in advance?” Amit looked incredulous.
“It’s not guaranteed, of course,” Caitlin acknowledged. “Bush or McCain will be the Republican candidate. There’s a faction maneuvering to replace Hillary with someone more radical – a disciple of some of the more violent 1960’s radicals. They’ve been grooming him for a while. Gave a big speech at the 2
004 Democratic Convention. An ally of the Professor of yours who got in trouble – Gomulka. Doesn’t seem likely he’ll get in now that Gomulka’s out of favor, though.”
“How does the Toxic Asset…”
“…Remuneration Program,” she completed it for me. “When the bubble bursts, they’ll let one of the big financial institutions fail and threaten that they’ll all collapse unless the government bails them out. They’ll set up a huge fund of taxpayer money to buy out all the worthless securities they’ve generated – maybe as much as a trillion dollars.”
“That’s got to be the single largest theft in history.” Amit whistled softly. “So we’re sitting here and you’re pumping us for information about it? When exactly it’s going to happen?”
“Arguably, the Federal Reserve was a much bigger theft,” Caitlin pointed out. “In less than a century, the Federal Reserve has debased the currency to the point where today’s dollar is worth about four cents in the gold dollars from before their ‘intervention.’ And the Fed’s explicit policy is to continue debasing the currency at a rate of two percent a year.”
Amit frowned, his curiosity getting the better of him. “How is it people don’t notice the devaluation?”
“Because costs are going down at almost the same rate,” Caitlin explained. “Today’s highly-skilled professional makes about the same wage today – in gold – as an unskilled laborer did forty years ago. The net effect is that the purchasing power of the average worker has been on the decline for a generation. The decline itself appears modest, but only because wages and costs have both been falling at about the same rate. The difference? It goes straight into the pockets of the bankers and funds the Civic Circle’s Deep State bureaucratic allies.”
“I know the whole thing was planned out here on Jekyll Island,” Amit observed, “but how did they push it through? Were they all in on it? Surely it was obvious to other bankers what was going on.”
“Oh, it was,” Caitlin confirmed. “John Jacob Astor, Isador Strauss, and Benjamin Guggenheim all suspected that Morgan and his allies were up to something. They agreed to take a cruise together back to the U.S. from Europe to discuss it and resolve their differences. Morgan became sick at the last moment and cancelled. Astor, Strauss, and Guggenheim all went down on the Titanic. The Federal Reserve was established without opposition a few months later.”
Just then, the waitress brought our desserts. I asked for more coffee. It was going to be another long night.
Caitlin picked weakly at her cake, then put her fork down. I saw her take another deep breath, then force herself to continue despite her fears and worries.
“Anyway, what everyone wants to know is who gets thrown to the wolves by the Thirteen. Some big institution has to collapse to demonstrate the seriousness of the situation. The Thirteen haven’t decided yet, or if they have, they’re not saying who. Every one of the potential victims has their own man in the Thirteen, or in the Council of 33. One of them gets screwed, it’s only a matter of who, and whether they’ll get the carrot of an inducement to make them play along, or the stick of some kind of extortion or even murder to remove them as an obstacle.” She seemed awfully confident about what was going on behind the scenes.
I swallowed a delicious bite of cake. It stuck in my throat. I felt a deep sense of dread in my stomach, not knowing if Bulldog, Rob, and the rest were OK. I put my fork down, too, and gave up on trying to eat. All we could do was sit tight, establish our alibis, and hope for the best. “You have an idea who it is, don’t you? Who’s going to get thrown to the wolves?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t be discussing it with you two at a restaurant that’s surely under surveillance by the Red Flower Tong. Everyone in the circles of power knows the basics. It’s the details that count. If anyone asks, I’m pumping you for information – you two actually met the Thirteen. Who seemed on the outs? What was their body language? What hints can you offer? Which way are they going?”
She already had good sources if she knew that much, but it could have been someone seeing us summoned into the meeting.
“Of course, we can neither confirm nor deny that we have any information whatsoever,” Amit pointed out, “assuming we took an oath of some kind, which we can’t confirm or deny, either.”
“I asked you, you declined to answer, I pressed, you refused, and I told you I’d make it worth your while if you came to me with any information. All part of my job as a Vice President for Client Relations at the Holy See Bank Corporation.”
“So we don’t have to wait to be asked about it,” I clarified, “we can go ahead and report this conversation, and you won’t get in trouble.”
“Business as usual with the Civic Circle,” she noted with a bitter smile, “equal parts power politics and behind-the-scenes treachery.” I saw her smile fade as she looked out toward the door.
“Mr. Hung has someone watching for him,” I tried to reassure her. “He could come in that door at any minute, and they’ll bring him right here to our table.”
“Don’t kid yourself.” I could hear the tension in her voice as she held back the emotion. “That… thing. If it took out…” She thought better of saying any details. “I don’t believe we’ll be seeing him again.”
“I’m amazed the police haven’t been here yet,” Amit said. “I expected them to have the whole island locked down by now.”
Caitlin gave a grim smile. “The tension these days is between the American and European wings of the Civic Circle,” she explained. “The Americans are all occupying the Jekyll Island Club Hotel and the surrounding cottages. The Europeans are in the Westin by the Convention Center. The rapid response team would respond to an attack by securing the Jekyll Island Club Hotel, the cottages of the Historic District and the causeway to the mainland. Then they’d secure the Beach Village – the Convention Center and the Westin, and then work south from there. All the other hotels are on the south end of the island. It’s just residences, condos and the golf course to the north. That’s why…” she was about to say his name. “That’s why we agreed to undertake this operation up here. Figured we’d have plenty of time. We didn’t know about that… that thing.”
She shivered at the memory of the ominous dark figure leaping relentlessly toward us, breathing blue flame. “A demon,” she concluded. “A devil? Straight from hell. Or maybe Satan himself.”
After what I’d seen, I was willing to keep an open mind. I was pretty sure, though, I knew where to look to find out more about our unexpected visitor.
We recovered many books from the Tolliver Library, using the Civic Circle Technology Containment Team’s own list of proscribed books as our collection guide. One of the books we recovered was The Devil of Devonshire. In the 1850s, mysterious footprints appeared overnight along a hundred-mile-long trail in the southwest of England in Devon. “The Devil’s Footprints” they called them. The author of the book argued that the maker of the footprints was an entity called “Spring-Heeled Jack:” a bipedal figure capable of incredible leaps who also reportedly breathed blue flame. Was there a similar stronghold or refuge in Devon? Were there many of these things, or was this the only one?
I really needed to pay better attention. Every book on the Civic Circle’s list was there for a reason. I’d at least skimmed through them all, but I had no idea why most of the books were included on the list. Most of them appeared completely innocuous. Until, of course, a seemingly-mythological creature from one of them shows up to kill you.
What was it really? A robot? An ancient Chinese god? An alien? Maybe Caitlin was right and it was a demon. I needed to go back through that list of books and re-read… Why was it suddenly getting quiet? I saw Caitlin’s gaze shift to the…
“Your attention please!” I turned to see a couple of Georgia State Patrol Troopers standing by the door of the restaurant. They’d finally arrived. Two more were heading back to the kitchen. I needed to work on my situational awareness. I’d completely missed their arrival. The hum of conv
ersation and the clinking of silverware completely died out.
“There’s been an incident on the island,” the trooper continued. “Nobody can leave until we get the all clear. In the meantime, we need to talk to everyone here, particularly anyone who just recently arrived.”
I could see his partner already talking to the receptionist. She pointed to a couple who’d just arrived. He went over to speak with them. I could hear the questions: identification, when did you arrive, where’d you come from, did you see anything out of the ordinary?
They made their rounds. When they got to our table we bumped back our arrival time by an hour, placing it comfortably before the operation began. They checked our IDs, made a couple of notes, and moved on to the next table.
We got our check from the waitress, and Caitlin picked up the tab. The troopers were talking to the wait staff, confirming everyone’s stories and arrival times. They told us to wait in the front of the restaurant for further instructions. The troopers corralled the late arrivals and took them to the back for further questions.
In the close proximity of other people, we couldn’t carry on our conversation. Amit struck up a conversation with a girl sitting next to us, much to the obvious annoyance of her companion. Caitlin sat lost in her thoughts and quietly mourned for Bulldog. I saw her fondle her ring and spin it round and around her finger. Meanwhile, I sat and contemplated the ruin of my plans.
The reality of it all struck home for me, standing there, helpless, in the restaurant. Maybe the debris and clutter we collected from underneath the Horton House would be worth something. I thought about that. Old Spring-Heeled Jack wouldn’t have shown himself if he weren’t defending something of value. Was there something in the stronghold he had to keep hidden? From the devastated look of the place, whoever had visited before us had done a pretty thorough job wrecking whatever was there. Was it merely the existence of the stronghold itself?
The Brave and the Bold Page 31
