Trigger Point

by Matthew Glass

  Across town, Ed Grey was still in his office, still on the phone, and would be for hours. Red-eyed, exhausted, for him, election day was a battle for survival.

  28

  TOM KNOWLES RODE back to the White House with Sarah, who had been with him at the dinner.

  The president’s relationship with his wife was pretty much a working relationship, had been for years. There had been infidelities, thankfully with women who turned out to be discreet even when the affairs were over. But Sarah had found out about them. At one point they had considered divorce, come right to the brink. Fortunately they stepped back. It wasn’t impossible that he might have become governor of Nevada as a single, divorced man with a history of infidelity, but it was inconceivable that he would have made it anywhere near the White House. Sarah herself had causes she cared for, and being first lady of Nevada, and then of the country, gave her opportunities she wouldn’t have had otherwise. She worked tirelessly on behalf of returned war veterans. She campaigned for rehabilitation programs for convicted drug offenders. Tom respected her for her work. He respected her for lots of things. It was possible that after they left the White House they would get divorced. On the other hand, they might not. They had settled into a mutually convenient coexistence that sometimes, not often, flared into something warmer.

  ‘I thought your speech was good,’ she said. ‘You hit the right notes.’

  Knowles smiled ruefully. The mood at the dinner had been more wake than post-mortem, but that would come soon enough. People hadn’t said what they were thinking – not to his face, anyway. Over the next few days Ed Abrahams would work his networks to gauge the way reaction in the party was really developing.

  They went separate ways at the White House, Sarah to the residence floor, Knowles to the West Wing, where he found Abrahams, Ruiz-Kellerman and Devlin all sitting in Roberta’s office, watching the results coming in. The remains of pizzas and sodas and coffees were all over the room.

  He settled into a chair.

  ‘Where are we?’ he said.

  ‘Logan’s conceded in Florida,’ said Devlin.

  ‘What about Morrison?’

  ‘He’s not going to win. Buckley’s safe.’

  ‘Ogden?’

  Devlin shook her head.

  ‘Looks like Anders in Ohio is safe,’ said Ruiz-Kellerman.

  ‘Were we worried about Anders?’

  ‘After yesterday, we were.’

  ‘Jesus Christ. What about the House?’

  ‘That’s borderline. The networks are calling it four to five seats either way. From the polls I’ve seen, I agree. It’s too close to call.’

  Knowles let out a long breath. He looked at Abrahams. ‘This is bad.’

  Abrahams nodded. ‘This is fucking bad.’

  The president watched a bunch of pundits on the screen equivocating over who was going to control the House of Representatives.

  Abrahams had spoken to Jack Harris, national chairman of the Republican Party.

  ‘What did he say?’ asked Knowles.

  ‘Nothing. What could he say? He’ll call you tomorrow.’

  There was silence. The atmosphere in the room was grim.

  ‘Well, who needs sixty seats in the Senate?’ said Abrahams. ‘It’d just give Hotchkiss another lever to pull. He’d threaten to vote against us and pull his little band of acolytes every time he thought it would do him good.’

  ‘He already does that,’ said Devlin.

  Abrahams smiled. ‘True.’

  ‘He’s going to love this. He’s going to fucking love this.’

  ‘I think we should assume his campaign starts today.’

  ‘So does ours,’ said Abrahams. ‘We’ve got two years to put this right. As far as Hotchkiss is concerned, we paint him as a rebel. Disloyal. He’ll go overboard. That’s what he’s like. Every time he makes trouble, we slam him.’

  ‘Ed,’ said Devlin, ‘his constituency wants him to be a rebel. That’s what they like about him. All those redneck anti-abortion gunslinging evangelical bigots don’t have any problem at all with him bringing our programs down.’

  Abrahams laughed. ‘Roberta, you’re talking about the soul of our party! Look, when we had fifty-eight in the Senate he could play his games and it didn’t make a difference one way or the other. Now he does that and our programs fail. He does that, he’s got to pay a price. In their gut, Republicans hate disloyalty. His constituency might like it but everyone else won’t. Now, if he was a Democrat, they’d all love him for it. Not us. That’s how we get him.’

  Tom Knowles stared disconsolately at the screen. ‘We got any good news about Uganda?’ he said suddenly. ‘Every day I get these reports and nothing’s happening. Weren’t we going to get some good news?’

  ‘Just as well we didn’t. Anything we got would have got lost in the noise of the last couple of days.’

  ‘We could use some now.’ Knowles looked at Abrahams. ‘Can we do something about that?’

  ‘I’ll talk to Gary.’

  The pundits on the screen kept pontificating. There were four of them from various parts of the country on a split screen and the anchor was trying to keep control of the discussion.

  ‘Did anyone talk to Custler to find out why they didn’t take the offer?’ asked Knowles.

  ‘Susan’s talking to him. It’s obvious though, isn’t it? The markets worked it out. The Chinese let it fail. You look at what the market did today. Anything they could find with big Chinese government ownership, they dumped.’

  ‘Is that what happened?’

  Devlin nodded. ‘Serves the Chinese right. Crashes the value of their holdings.’

  ‘What happened in Shanghai?’

  ‘Their market was down four per cent.’

  ‘Their investment funds will be buying to keep prices up,’ said Abrahams. ‘It’s an unwritten law. Shanghai never falls by more than four per cent in a day.’

  Knowles still couldn’t understand why the Chinese president had refused to step in. Having to stem the fall in Shanghai by state intervention, however he tried to conceal it, did him no favors.

  ‘Zhang could definitely have made the PIC do what he wanted, right? Hell, I got the toughest bankers on Wall Street to make an offer for a bank none of them wanted to touch. And I told him what would happen. I told him there was no more. You heard me tell him.’

  ‘Maybe he’s trying to send a message,’ said Devlin.

  ‘What’s the message? Don’t call me up? Don’t disturb me after 9pm?’ Knowles paused. He found that suddenly he was fuming. ‘That guy, I tell you, I just hate dealing with that guy. If there’s one leader I’d like to send an exploding cigar to, it’s Zhang. Anyone ever seen Zhang laugh? It’s like they’ve botoxed him round the mouth.’

  Ed Abrahams chuckled.

  ‘Probably wouldn’t smoke the damn thing anyway even if I did send him one,’ muttered Knowles.

  Abrahams laughed out loud.

  ‘I wish you were the guy who had to talk to him, Ed. I’d hand it over to you gladly.’

  ‘I don’t think President Zhang would appreciate that.’

  ‘I don’t think he would either. I don’t think he appreciates anything.’ Knowles looked at the screen, which was showing a schematic of the projected seats in the House of Representatives with a surge of blue and the shrinking Republican majority in red. Knowles stabbed his finger at it. ‘You know, you’re forced to the conclusion that this was a deliberate, carefully planned conspiracy to make that happen.’

  ‘It’s an interference with our democratic process,’ said Abrahams, utterly serious now.

  ‘It is. It’s outrageous.’

  ‘Outrageous.’

  ‘What are we going to do about it?’

  ‘That’s something we need to figure out.’

  There was silence.

  ‘Do we have any idea who leaked about Fidelian refusing the offer?’ asked Ruiz-Kellerman.

  ‘It was always going to come out,’ said Abrah
ams. ‘Enough people knew about it and the Street would have figured out there must have been a rescue attempt. The really damaging leak would be if they knew we’d spoken to Zhang. That would make us look bad. First, we have to go calling a foreign leader for help, then he refuses to give it.’

  Knowles nodded. If that came out, it would make him look terrible.

  29

  ON THE MORNING after the election, with the sense of political turmoil growing by the hour, Marion Ellman was pulled out of her regular staff meeting for a conference call with Bob Livingstone, who was on a visit to the Philippines. Doug Havering, the deputy secretary of state, was on the phone from Washington, together with Steve Haskell in Beijing. A National Security Council meeting had been scheduled for Friday to discuss the events leading up to the Fidelian bankruptcy and Bob Livingstone wanted to put a State Department paper to the president ahead of the meeting.

  Marion didn’t know why a matter like that would be an issue for the National Security Council or why State should be called on to give a view. Within the State Department, only Livingstone and the deputy secretary knew what had taken place between Tom Knowles and the Chinese president in the hours before Fidelian failed. Five minutes after the call started, when Livingstone had given his summary of events, Marion knew as well.

  By the time she got home that night, having been waylaid by the British and Dutch ambassadors in a corridor of the UN building for an impromptu meeting on the South Africa resolution, Daniel was asleep and Ella was just about ready for bed. Marion read to her a little before she went to sleep. Then she checked her email and found a draft paper for the president in her inbox. She wouldn’t get any other time to look at it so she sat down to work on it right away with a warmed-up dinner at her desk. By the time she was done another couple of hours had gone by.

  Dave was in bed, reading a book.

  He looked up as she came in. ‘You done?’

  She nodded and sat down on the bed. ‘I’m beat.’

  ‘You know our net worth fell another ten per cent today.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. That makes us around twenty-five per cent down on the week. Not bad. I thought your boss might want to know. What’s his name again?’ Dave clicked his fingers. ‘Knowles? Somebody Knowles.’

  ‘I’ll be sure to tell him,’ said Marion.

  ‘You know, you should read this.’ Dave closed the book and tossed it across to her.

  It was Joel Ehrenreich’s book, which had arrived a couple of days earlier. Marion had left it on her desk, fully intending to look at it, but hadn’t had a moment.

  ‘It’s good,’ said Dave.

  ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘Parts. You should read chapter 5.’

  ‘Is that one of the ones Joel mentioned?’

  Dave shook his head. ‘Trust me, you should read it.’

  She got ready and came back to bed. Dave had turned on the TV and was watching it with the volume low. Joel’s book was still on the bed. She was tired but picked it up anyway. She’d at least glance at it, she thought, before she went to sleep.

  The next time she looked up, Dave was lying asleep, mouth open, and the TV was showing the closing credits of the Late Show.

  Chapter 5 was one of a number in which Joel dissected the strands of global enmeshment, as he called them. It dealt with what he called the corporate strand. It was customary, Joel argued, to think that the sphere of corporate transnational companies was the one most free of national influence. It was efficiency-maximizing and nation-neutral, stretching across political boundaries in search of the lowest costs and highest profits. Yet in reality, on one critical criterion, this wasn’t the case. An analysis of a hundred publicly owned US-originated transnational corporations across all economic sectors, none of which had any US government ownership, showed that fewer than twenty were entirely free of known ownership by foreign national investment funds, and over thirty had ownership exceeding twenty per cent – enough, in most instances, for those owners to exert a prime if not controlling interest over the company. The chapter went on to outline the evolution of this situation: the avid acquisition of basement-priced stock by sovereign investment funds in the aftermath of the financial crisis; the provision of capital to enterprises hungry for funding as the upturn started; the continuing incremental accumulation of stakes in key corporations as the recovery gathered pace and surpluses built in oil-producing countries like the Gulf states and manufacturer-exporters such as China; and the tacit acquiescence by western governments in this program of acquisition in exchange for sales of the huge volumes of government bonds that were issued in the years during and after the recession.

  In effect, Ehrenreich argued, the last decade had seen a massive recycling of the profits from western consumption obtained by the world’s oil producers and manufacturer-exporters into ownership of the west’s major businesses by state-owned funds, creating a situation in which the main economic engines and wealth creators of the free markets of the developed world were, to an unprecedented degree, government-owned. What the US government had never wanted to have – state ownership of private enterprise within the United States – had been achieved by the governments of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, China, Russia, Singapore and Kuwait. In benign conditions, this was unlikely to be an issue. But who could tell how these governments might use these holdings in conditions of stress? The world had sleepwalked into a situation in which the politics of global enmeshment, with all its tensions and potential flashpoints, was embedded deep inside the world’s major transnational corporations.

  Ehrenreich’s point wasn’t that this shouldn’t have happened, or that it should be reversed. The reality of free markets was that in order to function as markets they had to be free. His point was that this situation would create an inevitable series of tensions so long as the world’s global governance was unaligned with this and other thickening strands of global enmeshment. Every one of these strands was like a fault line. Sooner or later, if governance didn’t come into line with them, the tension in one of these faults would cause a quake.

  Dave looked around sleepily. ‘You still reading?’

  ‘I’m done,’ said Marion. She closed the book and put it on her bedside table.

  Dave turned off the TV. ‘What do you think? I’m not sure if he’s made a point of incredible insight or if he’s talking out of his ass.’

  ‘I think if I hadn’t seen what I’ve seen over the last few days, I’d say it’s … interesting.’

  ‘Interesting?’

  ‘Joel-interesting. Thought-provoking. Paradigm-challenging. Rich in historical context.’

  ‘But about as likely to happen as me becoming a supreme court justice?’

  Marion smiled.

  ‘And now?’

  ‘It gives me goose bumps.’

  Dave looked at her in surprise.

  ‘There’s a little more to what’s been happening than most people know.’

  Dave waited.

  ‘TS.’ That was their code. TS, Top Secret, for anything she knew she shouldn’t be telling him. ‘I only found out today. Before Fidelian crashed, apparently we tried to get the Chinese to stop it.’

  ‘We …?’

  ‘Tom Knowles spoke to Zhang.’

  Dave took a deep breath.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Marion. ‘I know.’

  30

  TWO DAYS AFTER the election, pressure on the administration continued to build. The right-wing press was lacerating the president, using the results of the midterms as proof that the future of the Republican Party lay to the right. The liberal press was crowing, using the midterms as proof that the future of the country lay to the left. From within the party shots were being taken across the spectrum, with senior figures who should have known better, or who were positioning themselves for the race in two years’ time, making grave statements about the implications for the president’s ability to govern. There is nothing like electoral defeat to expose the fault line
s in a political party. Tom Knowles had made a statement acknowledging the results of the midterms and affirming his determination to work with the new Congress to carry through his program, expressing optimism that events in the markets would prove to be temporary and contained. The markets had stopped falling but now they drifted, jittery, agitated by rumor, waiting for something to show them direction.

  In the White House press briefing room, Dean Moss faced a pounding at the daily press conference. He had known a few tough days as President Knowles’ press secretary but there was nothing in his experience that equated to this. Every presidency has its defining moment, a crisis that takes it by the scruff of the neck and hurls it across the room followed by a braying press corps breathless to see how the administration will pick itself up and recover, hoping to sink a few kicks into its ribs while it’s down. After two relatively placid years in which Tom Knowles seemed to have lucked in for an easy ride, this was it. The pack hadn’t been impressed by the president’s statement and Moss bore the brunt of their dissatisfaction. They wanted more. They wanted to know what programs Knowles would be prepared to compromise on now that he had lost control of Congress. They wanted to know whether he had been involved in trying to broker a deal over Fidelian and, if so, why it had failed. They wanted to know whether there were going to be any cabinet changes, changes at the Fed, changes in the White House. Then someone put up a hand and wanted to know if the president had spoken to President Zhang.

  There was pin-drop silence in the room. Everyone who heard the question immediately understood the implication if it was true that the president had spoken to Zhang. So did Dean Moss. Only the most senior figures at the Fed, the Treasury, the State Department and the White House were supposed to be aware of it.