He shrugged.
“It sounded like you could use a little help. And Lord knows I need a challenge every once in a while. Besides, what good is being rich and successful if you can’t rub your friends’ noses in it from time to time?”
Mason smiled, holstered his Sigma, and turned to the other silhouette.
“What?” Ramses said. “I get to rub your nose in my success all the time. Least you could do is show a little gratitude. A guy could die of thirst in this place. It’s like the inside of a vacuum bag.”
“Like you even know what a vacuum cleaner looks like, Ramses.”
“Of course I do. What kind of monster makes his cleaning lady bring her own—?”
“Would you shut up for thirty seconds so we can show him?” Gunnar said.
“Show me what?” Mason asked.
“Come around over here so you can see the screen. Ramses, you do the voice again, okay?”
Mason stared at the small black-and-white image on the screen. He didn’t immediately recognize what he was supposed to be seeing. It looked just like any snow-packed road from a bird’s-eye view. A satellite, he assumed. Headlights washed over it from the right and a car appeared. A black Grand Cherokee just like his. It pulled up to the gate in a tall chain-link fence he now recognized as his own and sat there idling.
“Was it ‘push in’ or ‘pull out’?” Ramses said in a voice Mason guessed was supposed to sound like his. Based on how hard Gunnar was laughing, he must have been doing a pretty decent job. “Maybe if I concentrate, I can open it with my mind.”
“Shut up. I saw your tire tracks and didn’t know who the hell was in my house.”
“We thought you might have dozed off, you were sitting there so long,” Gunnar said.
“I was playing with myself,” Ramses said in his Mason voice.
“Those bruises around your eyes are only now beginning to fade, Ramses.”
Mason’s car backed away from the fence and headed back in the direction from which it had come.
“I can’t believe I forgot which one of these crack houses is mine. Maybe if I drive back out and try again, I’ll have better luck.”
“How did you guys know I bought this place?”
“Ancient Chinese secret,” Gunnar said. “Seriously. The Chinese are wired into everything. You can’t sneeze without someone in a red room saying ‘Shang di bao you ni.’”
“Fast-forward to the good part,” Ramses said.
“I get the point,” Mason said. He knew exactly where Ramses was going with this.
“What point? This is just for fun. Wait! Hold up. Right there.”
Another shot from orbit. A line of snowcapped trees. A shadow scaled a chain-link fence and paused at the very top, then dropped down into the snow.
And fell flat on his face.
Ramses roared with laughter.
Mason did have to admit that it was almost comical how he limped-ran across the lot and pressed himself up against the side of the house, but it wasn’t nearly as funny as his wonderful friends seemed to think it was.
“I’m surprised you couldn’t hear us busting up through the wall.” Gunnar clasped his hands together, made a gun out of his index fingers. “Ramses was humming ‘Secret Agent Man’ and everything.”
“I should have shot you both.”
“Then you would have had to deal with our ghosts in this haunted pile of shit,” Ramses said.
“It just needs a personal touch.”
“What it needs is an arsonist’s touch.”
“All right, all right.” Gunnar’s expression became serious in the blink of an eye. “We’ve had enough fun at our less than gracious host’s expense. Time to get down to work. You’re poking around in the wrong people’s business, Mace. These are men you don’t want as enemies.”
“What do you know, Gunnar?”
“Something big is coming. Bigger than anything I’ve ever seen.”
39
“Duh-duh-duuhhhh,” Ramses said. “Could you be any more melodramatic?”
Gunnar shot him a look, and Ramses held up his hands in mock surrender.
“You’re familiar with the volatility index—the fear index—on the stock market, right?” Gunnar flashed through a series of windows on his screen and brought up a jagged line graph under the heading “CBOE VIX.” “That’s what this is. If I broaden the time frame to, say … the last twenty years, and we look at it from a historical perspective, you’ll see exactly what I mean. This line is essentially a graphic representation of the nation’s confidence in our economy. The pulse of the market, if you will. For long stretches of time, the index stays relatively steady, with only mild fluctuations based on variables like agricultural futures, freak natural events … the unpredictable things that cause momentary panics and frenzied trading. This means private investors and brokers are feeling good about their portfolios. Now, these spikes you see every so often? That’s where things get a little dicey. People are starting to sense that something’s not right. A betting man would buy volatility options low and ride these spikes as high as he could bear before selling and cashing out again when confidence in the market returns.”
“So the difference between legal and illegal gambling is the amount of money involved?” Ramses said. “Or is it because Uncle Sam gets his cut in the end?”
Gunnar continued, as if he hadn’t heard.
“What causes these spikes? In a nutshell … fear. When all of a sudden people start moving a lot of money from one place to another, the economy starts to get nervous and the volatility index rises. Slowly at first. As it continues to rise, traders feel something coming and make even more transactions and move even more money. Now the economy’s more than a little nervous. Next thing you know, people are pulling enormous amounts out of stocks that were formerly perceived as solid earners, destabilizing the whole foundation. The economy’s scared now, and rightfully so. It knows it’s only a matter of time before people start bailing out altogether or moving into traditionally low-risk stocks and bonds. We’re talking about stocks that have been on the market nearly since its inception—stocks like JPMorgan Chase, General Electric, Agfa-Gevaert, Siemens, Bank of America. And the newer heavyweights like Apple, Microsoft, Walmart, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo. You get the idea. The economy passes the point of panic and goes straight to doomsday mode. And that’s when the bottom falls out. The market crashes. Companies and investors alike go down in flames. The value of the dollar plummets. You’re following me so far, right?”
“It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Mason said.
Gunnar gave a crooked smile and tapped the tip of his nose.
“Exactly. The people who have the largest stake in the market, the point zero one percent whose investments are myriad and so diversified that it’s impossible to track, let alone monitor … they control the market. All it takes is for these guys to shuffle their own financial decks, and next thing you know, the entire market is in chaos and we’re all scrambling to get our money someplace where we know it will be safe. And where is that?”
“Right back into the pockets of the people who own those companies.”
“The same people who initially caused the furor, then reap the rewards of it, and all without taking the slightest risk. And no one suspects them because—superficially, anyway—they appear to have the most to lose when the stock market crashes.”
“And I’m the criminal?” Ramses said.
“Now you have to look not only at the timing of these spikes, but also at the stocks involved.” Gunnar touched the screen on each of the volatility spikes in turn. The program zoomed in on them, isolated the chronological points on each upswing where investors lost confidence, and produced a list of the stocks most impacted by the panic. “This huge one here? Black Monday. October nineteenth, 1987. Suddenly there’s a lot of money being funneled out of oil. See that right there? You know what happened that very same day? U.S. warships destroyed a pair of Iranian oil platforms in the Pers
ian Gulf, in what most believed to be an unprovoked attack. You probably didn’t hear about that, though. I know I didn’t. So when oil prices plummeted in response to the aggression, the very same people who had just sold those stocks when prices were high bought them back when the market bottomed out, and made an absolute killing.”
“Could be coincidence,” Ramses said.
“Really? How about this one? Three years later. August 1990. The price of oil is at a record high; then all of a sudden confidence plummets, people yank their money out of the market, and within a matter of days Iraq invades Kuwait. This next spike here is just five months later. January twelfth, 1991. Congress authorizes the use of military force in Iraq, the price of oil falls, and the same people who sold the stock are snatching it back up again, hand over fist.
“After that there’s a long period of relative stability until August of ’98, when the Second Congo War kicks off. We’re talking about one of the bloodiest wars in the history of civilization. And within days of that, our embassies start getting bombed. Who gave the order? Osama bin Laden. Our former Saudi ally, who three years later takes credit for the destruction of the Twin Towers, and only then do we decide to go out of our way to track him down?
“And how about nine/eleven itself? That’s this spike here. Did you know that mere moments before the first plane hit, there was a frenzy of trading by major brokerages like Salomon Smith Barney and Morgan Stanley, which not only placed orders for an extraordinary amount of ‘put’ options on United and American Airlines stocks, but also occupied two of the towers that fell. You understand what I’m saying, right? Buying put options means they were betting those stocks would tank. Citibank, owner of Travelers Insurance, which stood to pay an estimated five hundred million dollars in damages, experienced forty-five times its ordinary volume of trading in the days leading up to the attack. Six times more ‘call’ options for a defense contractor called Raytheon were placed on September tenth than in the entire history of the company. A lot of people made a lot of money from a supposedly unexpected terrorist attack. So many, in fact, that the SEC launched an insider trading investigation, which was inherently hampered from the start by the fact that both its office and the regional office of the IRS were located in building seven of the World Trade Center, which fell several hours after the attacks. There’s even a coalition of architects and engineers that believes it fell as the result of a controlled demolition that was instigated on the ninth floor. And who was the tenant on that floor? The United States Secret Service. The same entity charged with the protection of the very man who ordered the air force to stand down.”
“My old partner was part of the investigative team,” Mason said. “If there was something underhanded going on, he would have found it.”
“How? Not a single one of the hard drives retrieved from the rubble was salvageable. Not one. All proof of potential wrongdoing was destroyed. All of it. And apparently no one thought to actually investigate any of the people who worked in building seven, despite the fact that not a single person died when it fell.”
“You realize how you sound, right?”
“Like a total conspiracy theorist. I know. But this is what I do for a living. These are the kinds of threads I tug on to see what unravels. There are aspects of my profession that aren’t necessarily pretty. From time to time, I have to utilize leverage—”
“You mean blackmail,” Ramses said.
“—to convince people to see things my way. I should say, the way I’ve been paid to see them. These things I’ve been telling you? These are facts that are easily corroborated. The paper trails are so easy to follow, it’s as though no real effort was invested into hiding them. It’s like the people who wield the nation’s wealth—the world’s wealth—have the government so deep in their pockets that they see themselves as untouchable. I mean, look at this monster spike in 2008. That was an outright cash grab if I’ve ever seen one. October third. The global financial crisis. The Emergency Economic Stability Act was put into place to resuscitate the economy. Remember good old TARP? The Troubled Asset Relief Program, which instigated all of the bank bailouts? We’re talking about seven hundred billion dollars in taxpayer funding going straight into the banks, the majority of which found its way into the Federal Reserve’s newly formed Maiden Lane Transactions, which consolidated JPMorgan Chase, Bear Stearns, and AIG. All of that money, no less than four hundred billion dollars, funneled into the Federal Reserve itself, and the Fed isn’t even owned by the government. The people who own it, the families hiding behind generations’ worth of interbred corporations, are the very same people the act was established to bail out! Everything that’s happened has been orchestrated to transfer what amounts to nearly a full three-quarters of the world’s wealth into the hands of a small group of people. A plutocracy. A global elite, if you will. And this is a group that not only has aspirations to rule the world, but the financial backing to make it a reality. A single global economy with them sitting right on top of it, in the seat of power, from which to pull the strings for a puppet government that serves no other interests than its own.
“These are the same people who supported the United Nations’ World Summit on Sustainable Development and the Good Club, entities that are actively pursuing agendas related to population control. The people who formed the League of Nations, the International Congruity Alliance, and the Global Societal Reform Federation. Patient people who’ve been gradually building up to whatever’s about to happen since the late nineteenth century, when industrialists first dreamed of their own empires. And those are just the financial threads. The threads of power and influence are every bit as intricately woven.”
Mason looked at Ramses, who matched his stare for a long moment before raising a single eyebrow and turning back to Gunnar.
“I could run out to the store and pick up some tinfoil to make a hat for you, bro. Keep the satellites from picking up your thought waves.”
“You’re suggesting this shadow organization, for lack of a better term, is consolidating the world’s wealth in preparation for making some kind of global power play,” Mason said.
“Look, Mace. You, of all people, should understand that power is a much more valuable asset than money. In fact, when you’re dealing with the people who wield significant power, they all have such sizable fortunes that finances don’t really even factor into the equation, unless that money is being used for the acquisition of more power. And even then, there are much more effective ways to gain influence and secure loyalties. Anyone who can be bought like a common commodity can be easily co-opted or outright bought again. The key is to find the proper leverage to bend any given situation to your will. That’s where I come in. My job essentially boils down to figuring out and ascertaining the desired leverage for whoever’s willing and able to pay for my services.
“I know these people because I’ve worked with them, for them, and against them. I know how they think. I’ve seen what they’re capable of doing. I’ve unraveled some of the most convoluted paper trails to find things that would flat out blow your mind. These are people who see themselves as some sort of superior race, a worthier class that has ruled the world from the shadows for hundreds of years and has patiently bided its time, waiting for the machinations it set in motion generations ago to reach the prescribed hour of destiny, when they can finally step into the light and assume what they feel is their God-given right to rule not just this country, but the entire world.”
“Like Cobra from G.I. Joe?” Ramses said.
“I’d nearly forgotten how maddening it is trying to talk to you.”
“Maybe you’re right, Gunnar,” Mason said.
“Maybe? Haven’t you been listening?”
“Hear me out. Let’s say that everything you’ve said is true. Every last word of it. Tell me how it relates to what’s happening to me now? How does some global financial conspiracy relate to the smuggling of viruses and the deliberate infection of immigrants in the Arizona des
ert? To the death of my partner? To the murder of my wife?”
“That’s just it, Mace. I don’t know. And that’s what makes me so nervous. I’ve been following this since long before you reached out to me. It started slowly, but everything’s moving so fast now that I can only assume the finish line is in sight. The sudden surge in trading that’s causing the volatility index to rise. The extreme amount of interest certain people have taken in everything going on here. Something earth-shattering is coming, and we don’t want to be anywhere around here when it hits.”
“Who are these people who’ve shown an ‘extreme amount of interest’? How do you know these things? Quit dancing around it and give it to me straight.”
“Why don’t I show you instead?”
40
“You have to understand that I’ve signed legally binding confidentiality agreements with these clients, any violation of which would mean the end of my career for sure, and more than likely a Guantánamo Bay kind of prosecution, with an anonymous deep-sea burial.” Gunnar looked at each of them in turn. “You get what I’m saying, right? These people don’t screw around. Serve them and you’re family; cross them and you’re dead. And, believe me, there are many, many people just waiting for me to cross the wrong person.”
“Even our government?” Mason said.
“Especially our government. You’re familiar with DARPA, right?”
“It’s a division of the DoD. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. What’s the connection?”
“In 1969, it commissioned the development of ARPANET, which was a wide-area computer network that connected several dozen organizations. The first of it kind. As technology advanced, so did ARPANET. The U.S. government recognized the massive potential for this level of interconnectivity and designed an application that utilized synchronously orbiting satellites, called SATNET, which was then integrated into ARPANET. But in order to accommodate this expansion, they needed something like a phone number for each, so that one user could call another directly and not the group as a whole. And they needed some sort of gateway between these different networks to compensate for differences in data size and interface specifications. These gateways also needed to check the destination ‘phone numbers’ and forward the communications to the right recipients. The solution was a kind of software developed by Cerf called TCP, which produced a steady flow of data from source to end user.
The Extinction Agenda Page 19