Higher Cause

by John Hunt

  3. A Bleeding-Heart Libertarian

  THE FLIGHT to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport allowed Petur to catch up on sleep and avoid the otherwise inevitable jet lag. He awoke just prior to arrival, as the pleasant blonde KLM air hostess rested her hand lightly on his shoulder to urge him to place his seatback upright. His laptop computer was nestled in his briefcase, comfortably leaning against his foot under the seat ahead.

  Thomas Standall was expecting him by the early evening at his hotel in downtown Amsterdam, which for convenience was where Isaac had made reservations for Petur.

  Clearing customs was easy here. The fact that drug use was legal allowed for there to be little concern for illicit importation. In the airport, he walked up to a foreign exchange counter where he presented his credit card to get euros. He had no idea if it was a good rate. He assumed it was not. The currencies of the world were now racing to see which could be printed the fastest, although the average person didn’t realize this. The euro was in deep trouble, but so was the dollar. Students may be taught the superficial concept that currencies collapse when nations collapse. The reality is the reverse: nations collapse as a result of the erosion of their currency.

  The train into central Amsterdam was to depart from beneath the airport terminal. Petur purchased a second-class ticket and walked down the stairs to the tracks below. So far everyone spoke English, which was convenient since he knew little Dutch. Petur was fluent in English, without a trace of accent, and passable in French. His native Icelandic was not understood anywhere except home, and he used it only when talking to his friends, parents, and sister.

  He had only a few minutes to wait before a gradually increasing rumble declared the impending arrival of his train. It was a large yellow train with no windows on the front . He wondered how the engineer could see the station, and he without thinking took an additional step back on the platform. As the train stopped, doors hesitantly but automatically split apart to welcome the three nearest passengers. It was a typical commuter train, stark but with adequate legroom. Petur tossed his suitcase onto the overhead rack and tucked himself into a forward-facing seat by the window. Within two minutes a shrill whistle sounded and the train began moving down the track.

  After a few moments of darkness, they entered the light and Petur had his first sight of the Netherlands. The train seemed to traverse a thickly settled suburban area, similar in appearance to the outskirts of many smaller European cities. He watched for a while, but the scenery changed little, and he began to reflect on the recent turn of events.

  He had called Isaac from his hotel outside Washington in Crystal City the night before. After the sixth ring Petur’s excitement had begun to fade, for he thought that he would not be able to tell his friend the news of Joseph Onbacher’s support for their plan. Just as he was about to hang up, he heard a clatter as the receiver on the other end was lifted and dropped. Then came a familiar grunt as Isaac leaned out of bed to search for the fallen phone in the dark.

  “This better be good!” Isaac muttered.

  “Hey, look alive! I owe you one from my pleasant wake up call this morning.”

  “Petur, hold on.” Petur heard rustling and assumed his friend was trying to sit upright. “How did it end up with Joseph Onbacher? Do you think he will go for it?”

  “He already has — says he’ll invest four hundred million! Thanks for making it happen.”

  “Damn, I didn’t think he was that wealthy.” He paused momentarily. “Congratulations, it looks like we’re on the road finally! Now we just have to come up with another six hundred million and we can actually start something!”

  “And thanks for deflating me, pal,” replied Petur. “But you know what this means? It means that our special breed of financier actually exists. We just have to find more of them.”

  Isaac sighed, and said, “Onbacher is a unique man. But his fear of what is coming is not unique. You will find more backers. You offer rational hope.”

  “Maybe more than just hope.”

  “Which brings me, indirectly, to another point. I’ve mentioned this before. It’s time again. We are going to need some sort of intelligence network.”

  “You mean, beyond what you provide?”

  Isaac replied, “Yes, way beyond. There will be companies and countries that will try to steal our work before we are ready to release it,, or may try to stop us outright from doing it. We need to be able to anticipate those events. We will need people dedicated to watching out for us.”

  “What, a Secret Service, Isaac? James Bond?”

  Isaac had picked up on Petur’s intonation. “However you wish to think of it. But yes, Petur. Something like that. Don’t get cocky, kid. You got one guy to invest. But he wants return. So does everyone else. They don’t want corporate spies stealing their gold, their money, or their cars either.”

  Silence followed for a moment. It would have been an awkward silence, except the two men had long since moved past any form of awkwardness in their friendship. Maybe Isaac was right.

  The train came to a gradual halt at a small station. A cool breeze coursed through the interior of the car as a few more people shuffled onto the train from the covered platform; he appreciated the contrast with the oppressive heat of that morning in Washington. It was clear as he analyzed the surrounding area that he was not yet near his destination, Centraal Station, which, as its name indicates, is centrally located in Amsterdam. A conductor entered at the far end of the car and shuffled down the middle corridor, stamping tickets as they were presented. When his turn came, Petur handed the official his ticket and was surprised when the man immediately spoke in English, declaring that Centraal Station was the fourth stop of the trip, perhaps 20 minutes away. Petur decided that he must be looking more and more American. He shrugged, and closed his eyes.

  After a brief nap, he was awakened as the overhead speakers declared, in several languages, the arrival at Centraal Station. There was a short walk on the platform, and then a staircase led him down to a long broad corridor that coursed under a series of twenty-eight tracks. One thousand trains left this station daily on those tracks — the busiest train station in Europe. He came out to the front of the station, queued for a taxi, and arranged for a ride to his hotel near the Dam.

  His hotel was a structure indistinguishable from the surrounding four story brick buildings that rested side-by side along a narrow street adjacent to a canal called the Princengracht. He paid the driver, who seemed surprised by Petur’s generous tip, and then he climbed the rather innocuous cement entrance stairs as a bellhop reached out to take his luggage. A friendly Asian woman greeted him in English at the front desk. He checked in and left a message for Thomas Standall.

  After settling into his room, he luxuriated in a long hot shower, but he was interrupted by the harsh buzz of the telephone. Petur pulled the too-small bath towel around his waist, waded across a floor flooded with water because of the European disinclination to supply functional shower curtains, and moved quickly to the phone stand. His hair was dripping into the receiver as he answered. Standall was on the other end.

  “Welcome to Amsterdam, Mr. Bjarnasson. When would you be able to meet?”

  “I’m available anytime, since meeting with you is my purpose for coming here. I’m currently standing in my towel, so right this minute might be inopportune.”

  Standall laughed. “Sorry about that. Take your time, settle in. It’s seven o’clock now, can you come ’round at about eight? I’m in room 418. Maybe we can get a casual supper.”

  The idea of a casual supper at which he would present a request for hundreds of millions of dollars made Petur smile. In his experience, these meetings were held either in an office setting or during an elegant meal. This Standall fellow sounded surprisingly informal.

  Petur toweled down and settled in to read a fax that Isaac had sent to him in DC. It was a brief summary of Standall’s career — Isaac was always able to get him some information about the potential financier
s. He had never asked Isaac where he got it, and Isaac never volunteered that information. Isaac was not a normal professor. He had his tendrils in tightly with all his most powerful and useful former students. Petur was certain that Isaac leveraged those contacts well.

  Standall was a doctor. Trained in the early 1990s at Harvard, he practiced as a family physician for several years, but had become gradually distracted by research interests. He was a prolific publisher of medical research, but most of the articles were rather esoteric, at least from a layman’s perspective. He seemed to have a proclivity for obtaining private grant money and always had several projects underway. Although primarily involved in basic research, he also was fully aware of the potential business benefits of his inclination, and he had patented his ideas. He hit pay dirt about a decade earlier with a device that was now nearly a household item and used the income from that to pursue other medical devices. His innate business sense plus his experience and inside knowledge of medicine was a combination that served him well. He was the ultimate capitalist, and without doubt one of the most successful and affluent of his kind.

  Isaac usually included an estimate of the prospective financier’s net worth, but this time that information was absent. Standall’s company, IntensiMed, was less than a decade old, but already boasted yearly revenues greater than three billion dollars. There was also a tremendous profit margin, probably the best in the industry. Standall was sole owner until twelve months earlier, when the company had announced an initial public offering. The hungry brokerages on Wall Street jumped all over it because IntensiMed actually produced real product that real people wanted to buy. The frantic young stockbrokers had clawed and scratched their way to get each available share. Despite the high initial valuation which the stock possessed, these eager marketeers still managed to obtain a substantial early return, as the stock price increased by two hundred percent within the first day. Then it was highly unstable in its pricing and had become one of the most watched stocks in the market, occupying spots on the evening business television channels daily. Poor timing and impatience had been very costly to many individuals and mutual funds, but those who were patient and stayed invested in the company seemed likely to obtain an excellent return over time, especially because the company’s market was worldwide and not dependent on the uncertainties of the whimsically regulated medical industry of the United States.

  During the past year, Standall had been farming out his corporate responsibilities to several carefully picked and very experienced executives. It appeared he was trying to withdraw from the business world. Perhaps he was trying to retire.

  Petur dressed in a pinstriped, cuffed, gray business suit, out of style but always a safe bet anyway. It was also the only suit he owned, and it fit very well. He picked up his briefcase, left the room, and headed down the narrow hallway to press the button that hailed the elevator. No staircase was visible nearby, which was irritating since the elevator was intolerably slow. It finally arrived. In impatience, he started through the doors as they parted and almost ran into a woman trying to exit. She was much shorter than Petur, her face not visible as she looked down and pushed her way past. As she walked away he could see she was a young brunette in a black mid-length skirt that fitted a perfect figure. About five feet five inches tall, she walked like a goddess, and as she did so she exuded sensuality and confidence. With that sort of grace and elegance, she could have been royalty, and Petur had to wonder if she was. She headed toward the back of the hotel. Then the elevator door closed and he saw no more of her. Although he had not seen her face, at least the image of the most perfectly honed calves he had ever seen was carved in his mind.

  He took the elevator to the fourth floor, guessed which way to turn as he emerged, and searched for room 418. The hotel was not what an average American would call luxurious, but then it was not advertised as such. It seemed best described as “middle-class.” There was a fresh coat of ivory paint on the walls, which were already well-coated with dozens of layers. The carpet was simple, new, and clean. The brass lamp fixtures were plain.

  Around a slight crook in the corridor he found the correct room, paused, took a deep breath, and knocked.

  Standall was not a large man, but he had a large smile. He stood perhaps no taller than the young woman on the elevator. He looked significantly younger than his 48 years. In fact, he appeared to be in his twenties. Although his hair was graying, and crow’s feet lined his eyes, he nonetheless had a boyish face. He was trim and tan and his eyes gleamed as he welcomed Petur into his room.

  “It is a great pleasure to meet you, Mr. Bjarnasson. I’m sorry to drag you all the way here — I hope you plan some vacation time also?”

  Petur responded with some similar pleasantries and glanced around the room. Like his own, it was small, unimpressive, but clean. Petur noted with amusement that the bathroom floor was flooded. A suitcase rested at the edge of the bed, closed but not latched. One of the closets was cracked open and revealed several suits and an unzipped hanging bag. There was nothing about Standall that would indicate that he was an extremely wealthy entrepreneur. Petur’s inclination was to like this fellow.

  Standall waved his hand around the room, indicating the lack of seating available, and said, “Any objection to doing some touring as we talk?”

  The two men, dressed lightly, dropped off their keys at the front desk and headed out into the street. It was still daylight in the northern latitudes of Holland, although dusk was coming soon. A black BMW with a sign on top marked “taxi” rushed by at high speed, and then the street was empty of traffic. Petur was watching the BMW disappear over a small hill as he stepped onto the narrow rough street. He turned to the unexpected sound of a ringing bell, and a bicycle swooped by, missing his toes by inches. Long blond hair trailed in the breeze behind the tall thin bicyclist who had almost knocked him down. Petur vowed never to rely on his ears to warn him of impending danger in this city full of bicycles.

  Across from the hotel and parallel to the street ran the Princengracht, one of the larger canals in the city and an important part of the business district. The Princengracht was one of several concentric arc-shaped canals that encircled the man-made island on which Centraal Station was built. Other canals, like spokes of a wheel, served to connect the arcs and gave complete access to the city by water. Once used as a primary mode of transportation, commerce and sewage disposal, the canals now served a much more limited use as surprisingly long tour boats carried visitors through the city while multilingual university students recited historical facts.

  Standall said, “Amsterdam is an easy city. You can walk the length of it in about an hour, or pick up canal taxis for reasonable fees. There are plenty of cafes and drinking establishments too.”

  Petur added, “Which reminds me: I’m hungry.” They decided to walk around until they saw a nice place to snack. Neither one was aware of the two men who had slipped out of an alley by the hotel and followed them discretely.

  “Why don’t you give me the scoop on your grand scheme, Mr. Bjarnasson? I’ve heard only minimal second-hand information, but it intrigued me — very much.”

  Petur chose his words carefully. “I, with several others, have spent two years working out many of the details, and several possible routes which we could follow. A dozen of the top minds in the country, in a variety of fields, have donated their time and effort to make this dream into a reality. It is investment dollars and the directions of the investors that we require now.”

  “So I understand. Tell me some details.”

  Petur had his presentation loaded into his notebook computer in his briefcase, but walking down the narrow streets of Amsterdam limited its utility. He would present without his slides.

  He began by discussing the same facts he had told Joseph Onbacher the previous evening. He did his best to convey this information with words, although it was much more compelling when expressed visually. “Most people who are paying attention to anything other than r
eality-television shows in the United States know that something is wrong with their country and with the world. They attribute this feeling of wrongness to a variety of political movements, greed, climate change, political corruption, loss of morality, or anything else that provides a simple box for their uncertain dismay. But the explanation for their dismay is more sinister, and more hidden. Over the last fifty years, a few brave economists and politicians have tried to get the word out, but it is so terribly difficult to comprehend without serious effort and education that their message is lost, or ignored out of laziness and lack of motivation. Most of the political leaders of the United States and Europe have little or no comprehension of the problem. They cannot get their head around it. Indeed, it is very hard for anybody to grasp.”

  Standall nodded his head. “There is a similar problem with the health care system in the United States. We know it is wrong, but can’t see how or why.”

  “That health care debacle in the US and Europe is actually a symptom of the wrongness that I speak of. The whole mess that is the world today can be made sense of with an understanding of the key problem.”

  “And you have found the key problem?”

  “Not I. Others found it. I simply recognized that they were right and came up with a solution previously not considered. I certainly performed my own root cause analysis for what is wrong in the world, and it lines up with what the few brave souls have been preaching about.”

  Standall sat down on a bench and looked up at Petur, squinting his eyes. “I know you are going to say that the problem is with the world’s money. The money is diseased. That much I heard about. And by the fact that I am here with you, you know that I agree with you.”