Debt Bomb

by Michael Ginsberg

  Why can’t I persuade clients to fix their bottom lines and clean up their debts?

  It wasn’t as if she hadn’t prepared to make the case to Cam. She’d even practiced making her arguments just before he had arrived. Fat lot of good it had done. By the end of their conversation, he was as unconcerned about his finances as ever, and she had backed herself into running for Congress.

  If I can’t convince a man on the cusp of bankruptcy to take my advice, how am I going to convince anyone to vote for me so that I can fix America’s finances?

  She stood up and looked at her reflection in the full-length mirror on the wall beside her desk. Her plain, professional pantsuit and unremarkable shoes practically screamed to the world she was the typical unassuming accountant. Two kids, a modest suburban rancher, and the ubiquitous sensible family sedan or minivan in the driveway. Accountants like her weren’t meant to play in the big leagues, and Cam’s dismissive attitude confirmed every bit of the inferiority she felt.

  But the terror of America’s looming debt crisis had been building inside Andrea like the pressure between tectonic plates on a fault line. Cam’s insults had just jarred the plates loose and unleashed an earthquake within her. Most people were completely unaware of how many lives crumble before the nondescript personalities who work within the antiseptic office walls of an office like hers. They could never conceive of a taciturn, bespectacled accountant morphing into death, the destroyer of worlds.

  Her piercing ice-blue eyes, the ones her husband Ryan said reminded him of Steely Dan’s Josie, the Roman with her eyes on fire, stared back at her in the mirror. Ryan always said her eyes were the clue that there was much more buried within this humble accountant.

  But all she saw in her eyes was failure. Failure to persuade her clients to follow her advice. Failure to get anyone to take her concerns about the national debt seriously. She’d seen Cam’s fate on this day. In his impending doom, she also saw the fate of a country.

  Acorn shot out of bed at six a.m. to the buzzing of the same alarm clock he’d been using since high school. He hated crowds, and by eight a.m. the Metro subway train he took downtown to his Capitol Hill office would be a sardine can as riders jockeyed for space to grip the handholds.

  Even though he lived only ten Metro stops from his office, he hated the commute. Trains had a fifty percent chance of having broken air conditioning, a disaster during the hot summer months. He had to go down three levels of escalators to get to the train platform. And he had to pay five dollars one way for the privilege.

  Acorn dressed in his customary suit, draped the lanyard with his Capitol access badge around his neck, and smiled at himself in the mirror. At forty-four years old, he sat at the pinnacle of staff power in Washington as the chief of staff to Congressman Lewis Mason, the chairman of the House Debt Rebel Gang, and damn did he look the part. The badge gave him a feeling of importance and superiority. Other people lived by the rules; he made them.

  His self-satisfaction was well-placed. He’d begun his Washington career fresh out of college as a lowly staffer in a conservative think tank. But he had no patience for climbing the greasy pole slowly. He was on a mission. Within two years he had set up his own think tank dedicated to balancing the budget and cutting the national debt. He stormed cable news and built himself into one of the go-to talking heads in Washington on the budget and the debt. Lewis Mason had taken notice and hired him to be his chief of staff at the tender age of thirty-six. His political rise had been meteoric even by Washington standards.

  On the way to the Metro station, Acorn made his usual stop at the small Tivoli Gourmet shop outside the station for chocolate chip scones. The thought of digging into a scone always lightened the burden of his unpleasant commute. He approached the pastry counter and said, “The usual.”

  “And what is that?” the counterman asked.

  “Huh?” Acorn took his eyes off the case of pastries and peered at the man. It wasn’t PJ, the proprietor of the Tivoli Gourmet whom he’d known for the twenty-two years he’d been living and working in Washington. Today’s counterman appeared to be Chinese, probably in his early twenties. Acorn had never seen him before.

  “Greetings, my friend, I’m Frank Palmer,” Acorn said, using his real name. “You new here?”

  “Yes, I’m a student at Marymount down the street,” the counterman said in perfect English without a hint of an accent. “I’ve started working here mornings. Today is my first day.”

  “Good to meet you,” said Acorn, but his antenna went up. PJ had never mentioned about hiring new help. The only other time PJ wasn’t there was when he was at the hospital with his daughter after the birth of his first grandchild.

  “Where’s PJ?” asked Acorn.

  “Meeting with a supplier. Can I help you?”

  Meeting a supplier? That was not like PJ. He’d been in business for twenty years. Suppliers came to him.

  “Two chocolate chip scones, please.”

  “We don’t have any today.”

  “Two chocolate chip muffins, then.”

  “We don’t have any of those either.”

  “I’ve been coming here every weekday for ten years, and there’s never been a day you didn’t have chocolate chip scones or muffins. First PJ’s gone, and now this.”

  “Can I get you something else?”

  “How about a cheese Danish.”

  “May I suggest the red velvet cupcake?”

  “I don’t do cupcakes for breakfast.”

  “This cupcake is more like a muffin and less like a dessert,” the man said.

  “I think I’d prefer the cheese Danish. Do you have any?”

  “I think you’ll like the red velvet cupcake,” the man insisted. “I strongly suggest you try it.”

  Acorn had pressed hard enough. He knew what the counterman’s insistence meant.

  Crap. Over the years, Acorn had half-convinced himself that his minders had forgotten about him. Every day that passed, he became more convinced he would make it to a ripe old age safe and sound.

  “I’ll take the cupcake,” said Acorn.

  “I know you’ll like it.” The man carefully picked the cupcake in the left column and third row of the display tray and handed it to Acorn.

  Acorn paid for the cupcake and left the store. He sat down at a nearby bus shelter and glanced around to see if anyone was nearby. Seeing no one, he unwrapped the cupcake from its paper.

  The paper was blank.

  He took a bite of the cupcake. The man was right. It wasn’t bad.

  He took a second bite.

  Ouch! His front teeth had bitten something hard.

  It was a small coin with a Chinese character on it.

  Acorn stared at it. Exactly as he feared. He was now an active agent.

  He crumbled the cupcake to check if it contained any other signals but found nothing. Only crumbs. He brushed them to the ground and the flock of pigeons camped around the Ballston Metro stop ravenously descended on them.

  Acorn glanced about. No one seemed to be paying him any attention.

  Twenty-two years he’d been living and working in DC with nary a peep from his minders. Now, with no warning, his minders had activated him.

  Why?

  The why would have to come later. For now, he needed to be on alert for his instructions.

  He furtively made his way to the subway entrance, discreetly scanning everyone he passed as he’d been trained. He reflexively hunched his shoulders, hoping it would make him less conspicuous. He spotted the man who distributed copies of the Express mini-newspaper to Metro riders at the station entrance.

  “Morning,” said Acorn.

  “Morning,” the man replied. Usually, he gave Acorn the copy on top of the pile, but today he fumbled through his stack as though looking for a specific copy. He finally pulled one from near the bottom of the stack.

  “Here you go.” He handed Acorn the paper. “Have a great day.”

  “Thanks,” said Acorn.
“See you tomorrow.”

  “As always.”

  As he turned to leave, the man slipped something heavy into Acorn’s pocket. Acorn slid his hand into his pocket as he headed down the station escalator and felt the mysterious gift. When he pulled it out, he saw it was a TAG Heuer wristwatch. He quietly slipped it onto his left wrist.

  Acorn sat on one of the benches on the platform. Usually he’d turn to page two of the Express to read about the hearings happening on the Hill, but now he turned to the sports page. It featured a picture of Washington football players heading into their team headquarters, “the Temple,” in Ashburn, Virginia. The caption read: “Washington players prepare to enter the Temple.” Someone had highlighted “prepare to enter the Temple.”

  There it was: prepare to enter the Temple. Exactly what Acorn didn’t want to see. But he was devoted to the Cause, had handed his life to the Cause, and he was going to see it through.

  He wrestled an American Express credit card from his wallet where it was tucked into its own pocket behind his driver’s license. The card had seen the light of day only three times in the twenty-two years since Acorn became an agent. The first time was when he put it in the wallet, and the second time was when he transferred it from an old wallet to a new wallet. Today was the third time.

  The front of the card appeared to be a typical American Express card, but the back didn’t have the usual magnetic stripe. Instead, there was a list of stock phrases his minders used as instructions listed in two columns, the code on the left and the translation on the right. Next to “prepare” it read “await instructions.” Next to “enter the temple,” it read “cave.”

  Acorn slipped the card back into his wallet. He understood the message.

  The train to Capitol Hill arrived, and he took a seat feeling a torrent of conflicting emotions. His pulse quickened in anticipation of his coming mission, but paranoia had also set in. He scanned every face, wondering if they were friend or foe.

  Memories of his parents overtook him, and conversations he hadn’t thought about since his childhood emerged from the recesses of his mind. His parents had prepared him for this moment. They’d been gone for a decade now, having failed to fulfill their dreams of bringing capitalism to its knees. His mother and father had gone to work for China after the fall of the Berlin Wall, though Acorn was convinced they’d never emotionally recovered from the Soviet Union’s collapse.

  His parents were Harvard physicists, but they’d never quite made it in the scientific world. Despite their talents, their struggle to win research grants left them serving only as post-doctorate research fellows in an academic laboratory, at the mercy of their boss’s willingness to obtain grants to keep them employed. They were consumed by bitterness at the system that hadn’t rewarded them and barely recognized their years of toil and sacrifice.

  Over the years, their bitterness turned to hatred. Their hatred wasn’t merely ideological; it coursed through their veins. Capitalism had left them nearly broke, living in a ramshackle house on the outskirts of Cambridge while their classmates had gone to Wall Street and made millions doing nothing but moving money around. The “velocity of money,” they’d called it. Meetings, phone calls, balance sheets. Five-star business lunches. “What the hell are they actually doing?” his father would say. His father and mother were the ones inventing things and making things while the students who partied into the wee hours and happily coasted on gentlemen’s Cs in college were considered Masters of the Universe. Under Communism, the roles would be reversed. There would be no Wall Street money boys to swoop in and reap the profits from the scientists and engineers who created the value.

  It wasn’t until Acorn was a Harvard undergrad studying chemistry that he understood his parents’ vision. In his senior year, a colleague at the Harvard Independent, a campus weekly, bragged about his new job at some Wall Street firm.

  “What do they make?” Acorn had asked.

  “They make money,” his colleague had replied with a smirk.

  In that instant, something within Acorn snapped. His hatred of a capitalistic society was no longer ideological. It was visceral. Personal. Everything his parents had been spouting all those years was true. No one made money. People only passed it back and forth.

  “People like us—the scientists and engineers, the workers and laborers—are busy designing, creating, and assembling the computers that Wall Street guy will use, the skyscrapers he’ll work in, the cars he’ll drive, the planes he’ll fly in, and the flat-panel HD televisions and surround sound he’ll install in the screening room of his country estate. We’ll fix the HVAC there too. Hell, we’ll even create the plastic in his pens and the carbon fiber composite in his golf clubs. And he won’t think a thing about it. He certainly won’t appreciate what it took to create all these modern goodies. Without us, that guy would be sick, cold, hungry, and bored. But he’ll be the one who gets to enjoy them because he’ll have the money while schlubs like us toil away in labs for peanuts,” his father had said. “Never forget: financial wizards get rich. Scientists, engineers, and laborers get paid.”

  That was the devil at the heart of modern capitalism, and Acorn hadn’t forgotten. The producers, the labor, the workers got the crumbs while the capitalist got the bread even though the producers and workers baked the bread. For every billionaire tech entrepreneur, there were a thousand scientists toiling in the bowels of company labs and academia, begging for funding while their CEO made seven figures.

  His parents had become Chinese agents because China was the last, best hope for ending the United States’ domination as a superpower. Once the Soviet Union was gone, China was the only country big enough, strong enough, and aggressive enough to bring down the capitalists.

  If Acorn wanted capitalism to go down, he’d need to work for China. And he wanted capitalism to go down to honor his parents and complete their mission. Thus, Frank Palmer, secret red diaper baby, immediately upon his college graduation followed his parents into the service of the Chinese, who christened him “Acorn,” a seed that would grow into a tree strong enough to bring down American capitalism.

  “Next stop, L’Enfant Plaza,” announced the Metro train.

  Acorn snapped out of his reverie. He was two stops away from his Capitol South Metro stop, but his focus was no longer on his daily routine. He awaited the next message from his minders, the message that would explain the mission in store for him.

  The clicking of her heels on the fine marble floor echoed through the hallways of the Longworth House Office Building as Andrea hustled to meet with the House Debt Rebel Gang, the small group of Republican congressmen who had made debt reduction their singular crusade. With a sheaf of papers tucked under her arm and her longtime friend and college roommate, Rachel Samuels, following her, she felt confident and anxious all wrapped into one. She’d barely made it to the Capitol with only ten minutes to spare thanks to the terrible DC traffic and parking.

  Cam Davis had lit a fire in Andrea.

  He’d struck it rich, concluded he was invincible, and overextended his finances. Sure enough, just as Andrea warned, his banks called in their loans and collapsed his entire furniture empire only a few weeks after their meeting. Humiliated and unwilling to face the world, he’d drowned himself in his backyard swimming pool. She was horrified at the sight of another family ruined by debt, and on her watch.

  Cam’s carefree attitude about his crumbling finances was no different from the country’s see-no-evil view of the national debt. She could not bear a similarly tragic ending. His carefree attitude about his crumbling finances was no different from the country’s see-no-evil view of the national debt. Someone had to scream about America’s debt crisis from the rooftops. So Andrea Gartner, small-town accountant, pulled the trigger and declared her candidacy for Congress in 2028. It was her congressional race that brought her to Washington on this crisp November afternoon, almost exactly one year from the 2028 election.

  To win, she’d first have to ge
t the Republican Party’s nomination. If she were the Republican nominee, she’d have at least a fifty-fifty chance of defeating the incumbent Democrat in what was still a competitive congressional district.

  And to win the Republican nomination, she needed the endorsement of the House Debt Rebel Gang and its kingmaking chairman, Congressman Lewis Mason. Whoever the Debt Rebel Gang endorsed would be virtually guaranteed the nomination. Without the Gang’s endorsement, her campaign would be hopeless, so Andrea had come to Washington hoping to convince Mason and the Debt Rebels to endorse her.

  Andrea turned to see if Rachel was keeping up. “You back there?”

  “Sweetie,” said Rachel with her southern flair, hurrying down the hall behind Andrea, “I spent ten years up here as a chief of staff to two different congressmen. I’ve run these halls more times than I care to count. You think I wore flats by accident? Turn around and keep going. We’re almost there.”

  As they rushed down the hall, Andrea caught a glimpse of the House office building’s ornate decor. The walls were marble with brass mail slots built into them. Antique decorative molding framed the elevator doors. Every congressperson’s office had an American flag and the member’s state flag out front. The doors were adorned with bronze plaques with the member’s name and the state seal of his or her state. The plaques weren’t your everyday office nameplate. These giant bronze ornaments undoubtedly cost a fortune.

  Andrea was glad to have Rachel by her side. If Andrea was the fresh-faced novice, Rachel was the grizzled political veteran. Andrea secretly admired people who’d worked their way to senior positions on the Hill. Deep down, she felt inferior among them. They were real Washington insiders. She was just another person at the end of the bar with an opinion.

  She reached the conference room door with about five minutes to spare. The staffer outside the door told her she’d have to wait before going in.

  Rachel caught up.

  “Their staff guy says they’re running a little late,” explained Andrea, as they both struggled to catch their breath outside the conference room. “We ran here for nothing.”