Edge of Apocalypse (20 page)

"No problem, really," the man said in a voice that had the smooth tone of accommodation to it. "I am just minutes from your office right now. I'm sure we can handle the preliminaries in thirty, forty minutes. I can pay you the fee for the initial binder. Then we can finish the details over the phone. That way you can still make your daughter's basketball event. Would that suffice? It really is very important that I get this started before I leave the country tomorrow."

Roger took a few moments to mull it over. "Sure...as long as it doesn't take any longer than that...Mr., uh...I'm afraid I didn't get your name."

"Toby Arthur. I have a London-based business. And getting a certificate of insurance is the last hair on the dog so to speak, the one detail we still need for our financing so we can wrap up our expansion into the American market."

"Okay. Then, five minutes?"

"Brilliant. I'll be there."

Roger hung up and hit his wife's speed dial. After three or four rings, he was directed to her voicemail.

"Peg, this is Roger. I may be about ten or fifteen minutes late for the game. But don't worry, I'll be there. I promised Terri I'd make it this time. Love you."

Atta Zimler, hair dyed red, wearing an expensive pinstriped suit, and carrying a briefcase, walked toward the offices of Consolidated Insurance Brokers five minutes after finishing his call to Roger. Zimler considered this an irritating side trip. But necessary. The dossier that Dr. Banica had furnished him was superficial at best. The Russian agents who had compiled it had only skimmed the surface of the RTS system. And there was zero personal information about Joshua Jordan that would enable Zimler to track him down to his most vulnerable point. Not that he couldn't do it. He would. And Roger the insurance man was going to help him.

After Zimler entered the building's main lobby, skillfully moving his face away from the video surveillance cameras, he went up to the fifth floor. He rang the buzzer for Consolidated Insurance. Roger opened the door, looking a little distracted, but flashed a quick smile to his customer. Zimler took his hand and shook it firmly. While he greeted Roger, he sized him up.

When Roger turned his back to gather a large manila file, Zimler swung his arm around with lightning speed and delivered a karate blow to the back of Roger's neck.

Roger crumpled, hitting a small table in the lobby and scattering magazines as he collapsed to the floor.

When he regained consciousness, he was in a nightmare.

Disoriented, he tried to remember what had happened. Something covered the bottom of his face. Duct tape. But he couldn't reach over to pull it off. He was tied to one of the office desk chairs, his arms pulled tight behind him and fastened at the wrists--more duct tape.

But there was something else. Wires had been taped to several places on his body including his chest, thighs, and ear lobes. Roger's eyes followed the wires, trying to trace them. They led from his body down to the floor and over to some kind of box that had been plugged into a wall socket.

Atta Zimler waved a document in front of his victim. A copy of Roger's email that he had posted to an antinuclear blog.

"So nice of you, Roger, to defend Joshua Jordan in this web posting; let's see, how did you say it?--oh yes--'a personal friend of my father-in-law, who is a former Pentagon general.' So, I have some questions for you, Roger French. Questions about Joshua Jordan. He is a difficult man to reach, and it is very clear from this email that your father-in-law, General Bridger, may have confided certain information about Jordan to you. So you will tell me everything you know about him and his business, his family, everything."

Zimler came down close to Roger's face so he could deliver his sadistic warning in a quiet, calm voice. Zimler would make his victim understand that his body and his life, and everything about him was now in Zimler's control. No use to struggle. No making plans of escape. Help would not come.

Zimler said, "So, now I am removing the tape. There, it's off. You can breathe better now. Right? Okay. Now I will ask you the questions. And if I think that you are not telling me everything, then I will have to punish you with electricity. So, please tell me everything; don't hold back as you answer my questions. Let's begin with Jordan's family."

THIRTY-ONE

"Hanz, this is disastrous. Give me your take on this, will you? I'm looking at my screen right now, and the American dollar is sinking like a stone..."

Sean, a currency trader in a large brokerage house on Oxford Street in the heart of London was sitting in front of his computer. He was on the phone with the manager of the Munich branch of the same company.

"I was looking over my open positions at the close of the day. The dollar versus the Swiss franc. The dollar versus the yen. The dollar against the pound..."

From his office on Goethestrasse in Munich, Germany, Hanz blurted out, "Yah, we see it too. The dollar trend slipping. Every day. But this is bad...there's still time for trades today. We'll dump our positions in the dollar. We're not waiting..."

The money traders in the Amsterdam office of the same trading house were also watching the debacle with the American currency, and the order went out to sell the U.S. dollar and sell fast. In recent days they had all been making a dizzying number of dollar-carry-trades because U.S. currency had been so cheap to obtain. But that was coming to a screeching halt. The dollar was now just too risky to carry.

It was early morning in Washington, D.C. The sun had not yet hit the top of the Washington monument. An irate federal official was making another call to the White House. This time the president's chief of staff took the call personally.

"Sorry for the delays. I'm very familiar with the treasury secretary's urgent matter. But with the president's schedule, it's been virtually impossible to arrange this earlier..."

The treasury official wasn't going to be sandbagged this time. "Hank, the secretary has to see the president. Today. No more excuses. If we don't do something quick, you're going to see our nation experience a financial Chernobyl. And I'll personally see to it that the whole world knows that Hank Strand, the president's chief of staff, is the one responsible. You'll make Bernie Madoff look like a Boy Scout."

"I don't like threats--"

"And I don't like incompetence. Do your job. Make this happen--today."

The assistant secretary of the treasury had called twice in the last two days to schedule a meeting between the treasury secretary and President Corland. But Strand had given orders for the meeting to be delayed. He knew Corland had been unable to make a decision on the issue. It was clear that once America headed down this road, there would be no turning back.

But time was running out. Today's reports from the monetary markets showed the dollar was no longer treading water--it was drowning. Pretty soon it would be unable to compete even with the Mexican peso. American currency showed signs of a catastrophic failure, and everyone in the Corland administration knew it.

Whether it was because of the unpredictable devastation of U.S. agriculture, the oil crisis, spiraling unemployment, crippling federal taxes, or the gigantic debt that America owed to China and Russia--all of that seemed irrelevant now.

Hank Strand cut the telephone conversation short and told the second-in-command at treasury that he would personally deliver the message to the president.

Thirty minutes later, Strand was in the Oval Office with President Corland, who was on his feet and was pacing like a caged animal. The chairman of his board of economic advisors, who had been seated on the couch, made a gesture of rising to match the president's position. But after a few seconds, Corland impulsively dumped himself back down into an upholstered chair. The chairman thought the president's behavior had been increasingly odd of late. He looked over at Corland's chief of staff, hoping to glean something from his expression. But he should have known better.

Hank Strand was a master of the blank poker face. He continued to sit, his hands open and relaxed on the arms of his chair. He had seen this all before. Corland was a smooth, steady communicator on television, but in moments of crisis, he was a man who couldn't sit still. And then, as Strand knew full well, there was that
other
issue with the president.

Fewer than a handful of people knew anything about President Corland's strange medical situation. Strand was one of them. He thought if he remained calm, paced and confident, around Corland, that one of the president's "incidents" would be avoided.

The economic chairman finally spoke up.

"Mr. President, this is simply the next inevitable step. Another stage in America's financial evolution."

The president was trying to control his emotions. His face was frozen into a tight-faced grin--trying to look pleasant, but the resulting expression was almost ghoulish.

"I don't want to be the one who goes down in history for...you know...killing the U.S. dollar. Washington's face is still on the one dollar bill, remember? The American public is not going to like this--"

The chairman blurted out, "I think that what the American public wants is an economy that doesn't look like Germany at the end of World War I."

Corland turned to look at his chief of staff.

Hank Strand wanted to interject an attitude of calm. But he knew that the handwriting was on the wall, and so he added soothingly, "Mr. President, the secretary of the treasury wants you to give him the go-ahead for the U.S. to begin the monetary conversion process. It can be gradual, of course."

"But not too gradual," the chairman added. "We don't want a meltdown of our markets, Mr. President."

Corland was trying somehow to tie a rhetorical bow on the whole thing. Then his face lit up. He had it. "We can describe this as historic. An end of an epoch, perhaps, and yet the beginning of a new age of financial freedom..."

The chairman relaxed back in his chair when he saw the president coming around. "We've been in global markets since the end of the twentieth century, for heaven's sake. Is it really so radical that we now become part of a unified global currency?"

"And the precedent you talked about?" Corland asked.

"Yes, the International Monetary Fund. Right. It's a little known fact that the IMF's had the authority for years to issue a financial form of paper called Special Drawing Rights--SDRs--as a global form of money."

"And these SDRs--"

"They're just like an international currency, Mr. President. So this move for the United States to join the rest of the major nations in adopting the new international currency--the Currency Regulation Drawing Order--the CReDO--as part of our national currency, well, that's not that new after all. Besides, the CReDO is already a dualpurpose form of money. It's being used in the paper version, yes, but it also is available as an electronic form. Like an international debit card. A major plus since the entire world will be going the way of cashless currency very shortly. Besides, Americans are primed for this. They've been making more purchases with cards than they have with cash since 2007. So we are way overdue for this worldwide system of money."

Corland looked at Hank Strand to help him through the politics of this one.

Strand smiled and said, "The Congress is with you on this. You've got them behind you, sir."

"And the vice president?"

"Oh, Vice President Tulrude hasn't ever wavered. She believes that the United States needs to become a more evolved international entity. More integrated in the world community. Yes, she is very excited about this."

"Okay," the president said, "get our press secretary working on this. A series of short announcements about a 'monetary enhancement.' Something vague. That we'll still permit Americans to use the dollar. That sort of thing. But pretty soon, the American people will see their dollars are worthless but that they can use the CReDO, and suddenly they'll be saying, hey, you know, I can buy more with the CReDO than with the old currency. Right?"

There were nods all the way around.

The secretary of the treasury was scheduled for a 3:30 meeting in the Oval Office. President Corland would give him the good news then. America was soon going to join the new form of global currency.

By 4:30, however, someone in the White House, no one ever found out who, leaked the information to an underground blogger who ran a website called the Barn Door.

At 4:48, the Barn Door reported that the president had approved the U.S. disbanding the dollar and changing America over to the CReDO.

Seventeen minutes later, the big telecom Internet server that hosted the Barn Door blogsite, fearing reprisals from the White House, without warning shut it down permanently. So the webmaster for the Barn Door blog immediately called all the major news networks to complain about it.

None of them reported it.

THIRTY-TWO

The suffocating stench of death permeated the room.

After years of investigating crimes of violence for the FBI, John Gallagher had developed the knack of picking up the pungent smell of decaying human flesh. He was known to have a nose like a corpsesniffing police dog.

But John Gallagher never really got used to the odor.

Ever.

Even with the organic vapor-filtering mask he was wearing, Gallagher cringed as the county medical examiner from Northern New York State used a heavy duty pair of scissors to cut away the soggy bag that contained the corpse. But the body wasn't in one of those plastic contractor bags like an amateur criminal might use.

That was the first thing Gallagher noticed, after the smell, of course. The person who had dumped the body had used a burlap bag.

"The killer knew what he was doing," Gallagher said, standing next to the body on the stainless-steel table in the coroner's office. "Wrapped this poor guy in burlap, so the elements could start the decaying process sooner rather than later. Then added lime to the mix."

The coroner opened the mouth of the cadaver to examine it. But he wasn't prepared for what he saw there. Gallagher saw it too.