by Adam Yoshida
CHAPTER THREE
That Which Cannot Go On...
The Capitol, Washington, DC
Terrance Rickover turned the TV off. With a heavy sigh the House Majority Leader turned to his assembled aides.
“Is there any good news anywhere in the world these days?”
“The seventh season of Arrested Development will be out any day now,” his Deputy Press Secretary helpfully volunteered.
“Smashing,” said Rickover, who stood up and walked to face the window that looked out on Washington from office in the Cannon Building.
“Most the military is busy fighting Jihadists from Israel to Iran. The economy contracted by 6% at an annualized rate in the last quarter. Our deficit is approaching $2 Trillion. Why can’t we do anything about anything from here?”
He turned to face the assembled men and women of his staff, practically charging to his desk and punching up an e-mail on his computer.
“Have you seen this? Have you?”
Rickover turned the computer to face them. They didn’t need to read the article. They all had seen it.
“They want more fucking stimulus spending? The deficit is two trillion dollars and they think that the solution is to spend more money? There has to be a point where we stop trying to reason people out of insanity.”
“You know what?” he said with a sigh, “everyone can go home. We’re not doing any good here today. Go and spend some time with your families, because I fear that we are coming to a juncture where your time will be limited indeed.”
New York, NY
The President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s phone was buzzing, but he wasn’t checking it. The fifty-two year old silver-haired banker had had a hellish week - one that didn’t appear likely to get better anytime soon. So he had allowed himself an hour to seek some comfort.
Fighting against America’s seemingly inevitable insolvency was like a fiscal Battle of the Somme. Trillions of dollars were spilled across the same bloodstained ground each day. He - and the other men and women who held together what was left of the world’s financial system - deployed every resource that they had to try and overcome their opponents, gaining a few hundred yards of territory only to be almost-immediately forced to relinquish them in the face of some new calamity. Then they repeated the process.
Blair was twenty-seven and a graduate student at Columbia, working on her Ph.D in the History of Art. Her once-prominent family’s name had been enough to get her into Harvard for her undergraduate studies and their money had almost been enough to pay for them as well. That, of course, had been before the Great Recession and everything that came afterwards. Nor did it seem as though whatever career she might attain once she had completed her education would be able to cover the vast loans that the Federal Government, in a last mad burst of seeking to buy the people’s love with the people’s money, had guaranteed for her.
Faced with a choice between jumping into an increasingly-brutal working world and finding some other accommodation, Blair had jumped an opportunity to pay for her education and the refined tastes that an upper-class Manhattan upbringing had gifted to her by becoming a “Sugar Baby” - a woman who traded her companionship (among other things) to a wealthy man in exchange for his financial support.
Blair had met “David” on a website devoted to facilitating such mutually beneficial arrangements. “David” - whose real name turned out to be Daniel Hampton - was intelligent, sophisticated, very kind, and while he was not someone who Blair would have gone home with under any other circumstances, he was handsome in his own way. Blair, tall and willowy with long blonde hair, was a beauty by any measure. Still, whatever their relative positions in the the world and whatever the nature of their relationship (in her private moments Blair wondered if she was Dan’s mistress or his prostitute or if she fell into a third category altogether), Blair cared for Dan and vice-versa.
When Dan had stepped through the door of Blair’s apartment, he had appeared to be under greater stress than usual. Blair had hugged him and taken his coat and he had immediately walked into the kitchen and poured himself a drink, loosening his tie and he moved.
Standing at her kitchen island, he downed his Scotch and set the tumbler down. Blair stepped softly towards him to kiss him. He softly met her kiss and then broke away, stepping backwards.
“Do you have much cash?” he asked her, deathly serious.
“I... I’m fine for money,” she answered softly. They tried to avoid talking about money directly, both feeling that the subject was at least slightly tawdry under the circumstances.
“No,” he replied, “I mean actual cash. How much can you get out from the ATM?”
“I don’t know. My daily limit is $1000 or something.”
She moved in to kiss him again. He stopped her and walked back across the room to pull something from his jacket pocket. It was a cashier’s check for $9708. He handed it to her.
“You need to cash this as soon as you can. Don’t deposit it into your account. If you have more that you can withdraw immediately, do it. At least assuming that it’s less than $10,000 at once. Do you understand?”
She nodded. He stepped forward and embraced her, holding her for far longer than was the norm. In his jacket pocket, his phone continued to buzz.
Department of the Treasury, Washington, DC
Wayne Gerber, the Secretary of the Treasury, pushed the end button on his phone and returned to the home screen to check the time. 7PM. He set the device down on his desk and looked forward for a moment before straightening his tie. After a moment’s contemplation he stood up and buttoned up his suit jacket. He pushed the call button on his intercom.
“Call the car around. I’m going home.”
The Secretary sat silently, looking out the window, through his entire drive home. The driver would later observe that this was very unusual behavior: the Secretary of the Treasury typically would spend every waking moment on his phone, either sending messages or speaking on the phone while surrounded by a group of aides. On this occasion, however, he did not speak a single word until the car pulled up to the front of his Bethesda home.
“Miguel,” he said, “thank you for everything.”
Alicia, the Secretary’s wife, was surprised to see him come through the door at just after 8. As the nation’s financial troubles had deepened it had become rare to see him arrive home before midnight. Often, with an eye on the Asian markets, he didn’t even return home at all, spending days at a time in the Treasury building trying to cajole investors into buying up the mammoth debt that had to be issued each day in order to keep the American system functional. She had long ago given up the pretense that this was a temporary or unusual situation and so she hadn’t even bothered making him dinner.
The children - to whom their father had become more of an idea than a physical reality during his three years as a member of the Cabinet - were delighted to see their Dad.
“Do you have your phone?” he asked Alicia.
“Sure,” she replied, “don’t you have yours?”
“I forgot mine at the office,” he replied, taking the proffered device from her hands, “I’m going to order a pizza for myself. Is it ok if the kids stay up and have a slice?”
The pizza came in a surprisingly-quick twenty minutes and together Wayne, Alicia, their six year-old son Andre and their four year-old daughter Julia watched “Star Wars”, which was Wayne’s favorite movie, but which the children had never before seen. Afterwards, Wayne and Alicia made love for the first time in months and blissfully fell asleep just before midnight.
At a little after 2AM, Wayne got out of bed. Moving into his den, he turned on his spare computer and fired up Microsoft Word, printing out a copy of a document that he had e-mailed to himself from his government account earlier in the day. Softly, being careful not to wake Alicia or the children, he took it to the master bedroom and sat it down upon the bed.
After leaving the bedroom, he quietly made his way to
the guest bedroom where he swiftly dressed himself in the old tuxedo that he’d worn on his wedding day. It didn’t quite fit and it wasn’t really suitable to wear to an occasion of state, but he had never been able to bring himself to dispose of it. When that part of his task was complete, he walked out into the tool shed in the back yard. As soon as he closed the door, he retrieved the a gun that he had equipped with a homemade silencer some days earlier. The internet really was a wonderful thing, he thought for a moment. Then, without further reflection, he put the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.
At a little after 5, Alicia woke up and found the document.
“I’m sorry, I tried my best,” it began.
“I’m in the tool shed in the back. Call the police and have them find me. Don’t come in there yourself. Don’t let the children see. I’m so sorry. I love you,” it concluded.
The children had slept through the muffled gunshot, but they awoke when Alicia screamed.
New York, NY
Daniel Hampton was asleep at his Manhattan apartment when his phone rang again. As a general rule, central bankers have good reason to fear and answer early morning phone calls.
Raul Emerson, the White House Chief of Staff, didn’t bother introducing himself before he began speaking.
“Wayne Gerber took his own life,” he said in a soft but urgent voice, before morbidly adding, “with a gun in his shed.”
“What? When?” Hampton groggily asked.
“Sometime during the night. The news hasn’t gone public yet. I think that it’s safe to say that it won’t inspire great confidence in the marketplace today.”
“Do you need anything from me?”
“I called,” replied Emerson, “to ask the same of you. Anything that you boys in New York need - the President stands ready to provide.”
“I’ll make an assessment,” said Hampton, “but, frankly, the Dow goes down every time the President is up there on television these days.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Danny,” replied Emerson before ending the call.’
Dan’s wife, Susan, was already up and had turned the lights on.
“I don’t think I’ll be home for at least a few days,” Dan announced. She nodded grimly.
The White House, Washington, DC
“Why the fuck did he have to go and do that?” President Henry Warren said, his voice carrying with it both the early hour and a certain wariness of life.
“He was under an awful lot of pressure, Mr. President, but in these cases we never really fully know why, do we?” Raul Emerson repeated for a third time that morning.
“We have people over at Treasury trying to sort through the records,” Alexis Jensen interjected, “and they have some preliminary thoughts.”
“Go on,” said the President.
“Well, everyone knows that the fiscal situation is horrible, especially with the worldwide economic decline. But it looks like, going through the preliminary reports that have been filtering through the Treasury and passed through the OMB and the Council of Economic Advisors over the last few days the the picture has grown worse in the last few weeks in a way that has not yet been fully captured in public.”
“We’re coming up close upon the debt limit...” said Jensen.
“We all know that, snapped the President. And we all know that the fucking Republicans making trouble about it - again - are diminishing confidence in this economy.”
“Yes, Mr. President. But what we’re seeing suggested from these numbers is that, while the Treasury has been scrambling to try and keep us under the limit - moving money from one account to another, deferring some payments - all the usual stuff - that an error has taken place.”
“What sort of ‘error’?”
“Well, it would appear - and I emphasize that it appears this way at the moment but, because of all of the factors in play, we cannot be certain, that the present debt limit was exceeded yesterday.”
“Yesterday? How the fuck could that happen?”
“Apparently there was a math error somewhere along the way,” said Jensen sheepishly.
“Shit,” the President cursed.
“Jesus Fucking Christ,” the President slammed his fists on the desk and stood up, beginning to pace the room.
“We have a second fucking Holocaust, our soldiers fighting fucking Jihadist crazies across the whole Middle East, I have the Goddamned Prime Minister of Goddamned Canada calling me every day to tell me that the fucking Canadians are shooting each other over politics now and asking me to send our troops into that mess and now you’re telling me that the whole fucking country is out of money? Is there any good news?”
“The lobster catch in Maine is better than it has been in many years and, consequently, the price of lobster has dropped significantly,” the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury flatly replied. The President slumped down at his desk.
“If we’re over the limit, we need the Congressional extension today,” Jensen asserted.
“If we need the extension today then the Republicans are going to make us pay and pay,” said Emerson.
“No. Fuck that,” replied the President, who again stood and began to pace. He reached into his pockets for a cigarette and, with shaking hands, laboriously lit the thing.
“I want options and I want them now. Every time that we’ve had this debate we’ve seen these options floating around for these... These so-called ‘nuclear options.’ I want recommendations on my desk in two hours. I’ve had enough of this debate and I’m sick of paying the Republicans their danegeld every single time that this comes up, never mind what they’ll demand once this comes around.”
Washington, DC
Their first date had been simple, but Christopher Sorensen had been smitten from the first time he spied her across the Starbucks crammed into the back of a Barnes & Noble (it was hardly the world’s most romantic location, but it was geographically convenient for them both). Sarah Watkins wasn’t what might be objectively classified as a world-class beauty - her complexion was slightly marred by acne scars and she carried a clearly visible extra few pounds around the waist - but she carried herself with such enthusiasm that these quickly, in Sorensen’s mind, become markers of her unique virtues. She had bounded across the coffee shop and practically dropped into the chair.
“Hi!” she’d simply begun.
Now he was sitting in her kitchen, waiting for her to finish breakfast. It was not only good to have a homemade meal - for Sorensen’s culinary skills had never advanced beyond grasping the rudiments of microwave programming and McDonald’s ordering - but the plain truth was that Sarah was actually a good cook. In fact, she’d recently taught him what “broiling” was. Christopher had assumed it to be some kind of advanced cooking technique when, in fact, it turned out that it was actually what the top of the oven was meant to be used for.
Because they both needed to get to work - he at the document review mill and she at the elementary school where she taught - breakfast today was simple enough: Eggs Benedict (though with homemade Hollandaise sauce). As he continued reviewing the morning’s news, Sarah glided into the room and sat two plates down on the table, kissing him on the cheek before grabbing her chair.
“It’s terrible over there, isn’t it?” she said as she unfolded her napkin and sat it in her lap.
“Hmmm?” Sorensen asked, looking up.
She gestured in the direction of his tablet.
“I thought that the whole reason for sending all of those soldiers over there was to stop the fighting. It only seems to be making things worse.”
“Well,” he replied, venturing towards offering his opinion, “the problem is that we should never have gone in if we weren’t prepared to use overwhelming force. Of course, if we’d just backed the Israelis to the hilt in the first place...”
“The Israelis,” she pointed out, invoking a now well-worn Democratic talking point, “have used more nuclear weapons than anyone else in the world.”
“W
hat choice did they have? The Arab armies were already invading.”
“They could have chosen to make peace years ago...” she shot back, before stopping.
“Anyways... Weren’t you looking for a new hard drive? I think I saw a good price for a 16TB drive in my e-mail this morning,” she said, flipping through her phone.
U.S. Central Command Forward Headquarters, Jerusalem
There had been some initial controversy when General Dylan Mackenzie had decided to locate his headquarters in Jerusalem but, given the pace of world events, most of it had quickly subsided. Officially the decision had been made because of Central Command’s need to be located in a major city and justified on the grounds that lingering radiation from the nuclear blasts in Haifa and Tel Aviv posed a possible long-term health danger to American soldiers. Mackenzie’s staff lawyer had even managed to produce an EPA regulation that arguably prevented the deployment of civilian personnel of the Federal Government in either city, even though the Israeli government, such as it was, continued to operate out of Tel Aviv. In reality, the command was in Jerusalem largely because it appealed to a certain streak of grandiosity that ran through Mackenzie’s veins to have it there.
The forces at the disposal of US Central Command, totalling some 400,000 members of the Armed Forces plus 100,000 supplemental civilian personnel, were scattered across the entire Middle East from the Sinai to eastern Persia. Those men and women were fighting and dying somewhere each and every single day.
“An IRGC platoon shot up a supply convoy on the road to Tehran,” one aide whispered.