The Mirror Maze

by James P. Hogan

  “That’s what the whole amendment is aimed at, isn’t it?…” Mel said distantly. “Decoupling wealth from political power.” Despite his involvement with the party, he had never grasped it so succinctly before.

  “That, and more,” Newell said. “Most people think of it as rendering the power of government unavailable for making money. That’s true, but as you have just recognized, it works the other way, too: making governments unavailable to be bought by money. And that’s important, because controlling government is the way to obtain monopoly privilege. But monopolies tend to grow fat and inefficient, and a monopoly on a national scale eventually falls prey to foreign competitors. Traditionally, you then try to eliminate them by war. But what do you do when war has become too destructive to be worthwhile any more?” Newell waited a second for Mel to reply, then prompted, “To get a national monopoly, you control a national government. To get a world monopoly, therefore, you have to control a…?”

  “World government,” Mel completed. The implication was already stupefying him.

  “Precisely, which you sell to the people as the road to world peace after using their money to fund an arms race to terrify them into believing that war is otherwise inevitable. But first you have to concentrate the powers of various nations into one point over which you can exercise control. And the perfect instrument to achieve that presents itself in the form of socialism, which started out as a set of ideals with universal appeal, but which in practice has been distorted beyond all recognition—by its alleged adherents as well as its opponents. And here you have the answer to your conundrum of where and how the two apparently irreconcilable ends of the spectrum come together. You have to have some form of bait, because overt dictatorships are difficult to sell idealistically. Socialism provides that through its hopes and aspirations—and don’t mistake me, many of its advocates across the world are sincere. That’s good, because it makes everything all the more convincing.

  “But the real architects of the Grand Design have no intention of sharing out the loot, as their actions through recent history show too well, but to control and consolidate the wealth on a scale that is utterly beyond the comprehension of most sane, ordinary people, who are incapable of conceiving this kind of power-lust. The goal is to preside over a world community of money, freed from the inconveniences of nationalism and competition, first by establishing centralized governments over the various nations, and then consolidating them through a series of grand mergers into the global Superstate.”

  Newell leaned back in his chair but continued staring at Mel. “And that, Mr. Shears, is what it’s all about.”

  There was a long, heavy silence. Mel had thought he was being drawn in out of his depth with a murder and espionage. Then Landis smiled his cynical smile again. “Now you know what we’re up against.”

  Mel looked down at his hands and exhaled a short breath, not knowing what to say. “Do you still want to go?” Newell asked. “ You see, we’re not just talking about people who kill. World wars, revolution, and genocide are more in this league’s line.”

  “Which you knew, of course, when you sent Stephanie there,” Mel said.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t…” Mel checked himself and shook his head. “It’s just… I mean, that drug plant or whatever they plan on doing, that they told her about at Malibu… It just seems too tame. If the stakes are this high, wouldn’t they be aiming at something bigger?”

  Bassen broke his long silence. “Oh, you can forget that fairy tale. That was just something concocted for the benefit of what they thought was a silly girl with more ambition than brains, to get her out there. What they really want her for is something else.”

  “What do they want her for?”

  “We don’t know. That’s what this whole thing is aimed at finding out.”

  Mel was already looking at Newell. “Of course, I still want to go,” he said.

  “To be honest, I’d never doubted it,” Newell said. “Very well, it’s decided.” He stared at Mel curiously for a second. “You know, I would like to think that anyone doing this knows how to take care of himself… Are you any good with a gun? I’d strongly recommend having one. You won’t be able to travel with one, of course, but George Slade will be able to fix you up when you get there.”

  Mel blinked. “I’ve never fired one,” he said. Bassen closed his eyes momentarily.

  “That’s something we’d better put right, then,” Newell said. “How long do we have? Let’s see, we’re all right as long as you get there before they leave Egypt. So that gives us tomorrow. Ron, can you arrange for Mel to get a crash course at a range somewhere? And while Ron’s taking care of that, maybe you can work out some travel arrangements, Warren.” He looked at the clock on the wall. “We have to be moving. Perhaps between now and when Mel leaves, you two can fill him in on some of the background to what we’ve been saying.”

  “Should I really be told any more?” Mel asked uncertainly. “I mean, is it safe…”

  “Oh, I don’t see why not,” Newell said breezily. “You can’t leak it to anyone that matters. I can assure you that the people you really need to worry about know all about it already.”

  CHAPTER 51

  Dressed in his shirt sleeves, Mel stood in a small booth with an entry door and glass observation window behind him, and aimed at the man-sized target that had been raised fifty yards away along the range. “Don’t bend that arm. Keep your elbow locked,” Jerry, the instructor yelled, raising his voice to be heard through the yellow ear-protectors Mel was wearing. Mel had the feeling that it was his normal way of speaking, anyway. “Grip the gun-hand wrist firmly with the offhand… Okay, head-shot again, five rounds rapid fire, go!”

  Mel emptied the clip in five smooth, evenly spaced shots. The electronic indicator at the far end showed three grouped closely near the center of the target area, one drifting, one miss.

  “Not bad. Don’t blink when you fire. It impairs your aim for the next shot. How’s the wrist? Starting to ache a little?”

  Mel smiled wryly. “A bit.”

  “Well, let’s take a break for thirty minutes. You can get some coffee upstairs. I’ll see you back here at, oh, let’s say ten-forty. ” Just then there was a tap on the door. Jerry opened it to reveal Warren Landis. “You couldn’t have timed it better,” Jerry told him. “We’re just about to take a breather.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s good… Got the right eye, and fast reflexes. Get in some regular practice, Mel, and you’ll be top line.”

  Mel grinned as he took off the ear protectors. “Glad to hear it.” As a matter of fact, he was thoroughly enjoying himself.

  They checked the gun back into the equipment room across the corridor behind the firing booths, and Jerry went to attend to some chores. Landis and Mel began making their way to the small coffee lounge upstairs. “Okay,” Landis said. “ There isn’t time to arrange any kind of cover for you, so you’re traveling simply as yourself, Melvin Shears, taking a vacation. To throw off any surveillance you might be under, we’re routing you via Toronto. You get a midnight flight out of there tonight, changing to British Airways in London tomorrow for the connection to Cairo. Your Toronto flight leaves at seven this evening.”

  “Not exactly what you’d call a lot of time for watching the flowers grow,” Mel said.

  Landis shrugged. “You talked yourself into it.”

  They arrived at the lounge and poured themselves coffee from a pot. There was nobody else there. “Where’s Ron?” Mel asked.

  “He’ll stop by later to check through a few things with you.”

  They settled down on leather couches on opposite sides of the narrow room. “How’s Newell doing today?” Mel asked.

  “He’s on his way to Chicago. It’s hectic.”

  Mel sipped his coffee and winced. It was hotter than he expected. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the things he said yesterday.”

  “Quite a story, isn’t it?
Can you imagine the explosions it’s going to set off when it all gets out?”

  “It’s going to, then, is it?”

  Landis looked surprised. “Oh, sure. That’s what they’re panicking about. Once the inauguration’s over and Henry’s officially in charge, it’s beans all over the floor, and they know it. They may have lost the election, but they’re not going to stop there. The real fight’s only just about to start, and now you know what the stakes are, you don’t get three guesses to figure out that it’s gonna be mean and dirty. From here on, anything goes.”

  Mel thought back over some of yesterday’s conversation. “You were supposed to fill me in more on the background,” he said. “Newell seemed to be saying that people like Vandelmayne are the real controlling influence behind both sides of what the public sees—left and right; east and west. How is that possible?”

  Landis paused and contemplated his cup for a moment, then drank quickly from it and looked up. “All through history, in all nations, all cultures, if you want to know who really runs the roost, don’t worry about what the titles say, or who wears the tallest hats. The real giveaway of who hands down the orders and who follows them is where they live: the big wheels own the big houses.”

  “How about the White House?” Mel asked “Does the president qualify?”

  Landis snorted derisively. “Who’s he? That’s just assigned while he holds the job. He’s subject to dismissal anytime, and out on his ear after eight years anyway. I said who own the big houses—not who just get temporary rights to shack up in them.”

  “Give me an example, then,” Mel suggested.

  “Jordan Vandelmayne would be a good one.”

  “Okay.”

  Landis elaborated. “The main family drag is a multiple estate of over a thousand acres in Maryland that contains a score of separate residences for the head-honcho family groups and a few hundred staff—a far cry from the beach hut in California that Stephanie went to. That was typical habitation for the supporting nobility and priesthood, but hardly the ruling caste. Jordan himself occupies a forty-room mansion, modernized Georgian, with all the obligatory paraphernalia of art collection, Oriental rugs and so on that you’d expect—it even has an entire paneled room imported from a European chateau. He also has town houses in New York, London, and Paris, and a ranch in Paraguay. To list the real estate owned by the whole tribe of lesser Vandelmaynes would take us all day.”

  Mel was nonplussed. “How could one small group have created that kind of wealth?” he asked.

  “No way that I know. You have to own a piece of a lot of people breaking backs for you out there.”

  “How did it happen?” Mel asked. “I mean, at one time most people in this country owned at least a patch of land and could look forward to a future with some measure of self-sufficiency. It seems as if they’ve been systematically stripped threadbare and reduced to a propertyless class of wage earners.”

  “That’s exactly right,” Landis agreed. “As liable to dismissal from their means of livelihood as the peons of any banana republic. Any surplus is siphoned out of their pockets every year by your friends and mine, and anything substantial they manage to hang onto in spite of that is confiscated when they die. So their kids end up being sucked into the same trap of debt and dependency. The results could hardly have been different under a dictatorship. Do you think that’s what Jefferson wanted?”

  “I guess a lot of people have been asking something like that,” was all Mel could say.

  “All the vast hereditary fortunes were made with the connivance or outright collusion of agents of the state,” Landis went on. “Oh, sure, they can muster processions of housetrained professors to make noises about freedom, but what they mean is their freedom to eliminate any risk of competition. The only new, smaller enterprises that are allowed to survive are the approved ones—the ones that don’t threaten the system—precisely a la Russe.”

  “You’re making it sound as if we had a second revolution,” Mel said. He started to smile, and then saw that Landis was looking at him with an expression of absolute seriousness.

  “But we did. The original one was betrayed. So was the Russian one, for that matter. By the same interests. They were both inspired by the same thing: the expression of individualism, and the realization of human potential. Marx didn’t say what people are told he said. What’s pointed at as socialism today isn’t the original at all.”

  Mel shook his head. “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “I’m saying that the essential control of this country was taken over by a small inner circle of the financial elite in a bloodless and practically invisible revolution that was pulled off in the first two decades of the twentieth century,” Landis said.

  Mel stared back, unsure of how to respond. Finally he smiled uneasily. “That’s… one hell of a proposition. Would you care to explain?”

  Landis nodded, having expected it. “One of the best paid ways to make a living is by funding the debts of governments. That’s how the international banking system arose. People think that when governments need money they borrow it from the people, but that’s largely a myth. The return in interest can be huge, obviously, but as may have crossed your mind already, there’s a problem…”

  Mel thought for a second. “Well, what’s the collateral? I guess. How do you collect if the king doesn’t want to pay?”

  “Right, first time—and especially when he has an army and you don’t. Well, basically there are two ways to do it. Henry said yesterday that when a business borrows money, the creditor gets a voice in management to protect the investment, right? Well, in the same kind of way, the guys who lend hundreds of billions of dollars to countries around the world have a lot of pull on their policy-making. In fact, that’s the key to controlling governments to your advantage. If you have a government in your debt, then as creditor you can demand, and get, what we were talking about: monopoly privileges.”

  Landis smiled, but in a strange, humorless way. “It always comes down to creating monopolies, doesn’t it? But this one’s the bonanza. Governments that need money have granted all kinds of monopolies, for example in natural resources, oil concessions, and transportation… But the really big payoff is when you get control of a nation’s money supply. And everyone who’s gone after that kind of control has understood the necessity of power being concentrated in a central bank. Lenin knew it. He said that establishing a central bank was ninety percent of taking over a country.”

  Mel thought back to Landis’s mention of the turn of the century. “Are we talking about the Federal Reserve Act?” he asked. It had been set up to exercise centralized control over the U.S. money supply and interest rates in December 1913.

  Landis nodded vigorously. “Quite.”

  “But wasn’t that after a series of scares that undermined confidence in the decentralized private system?” Mel said.

  Landis nodded again. “Which have since been shown to have been manufactured. It was publicly hailed as a victory of democracy over the ‘money trust.’ In fact it was nothing of the land. It was engineered by the very people whose power it allegedly curbed… So, the instrument was created to launch the national debt into orbit—obviously you want big debts, because it means big interest payments. But what good is being able to run up the debt unless you have a mechanism for collecting the dues?”

  “Go on.”

  “Two months before the act was passed, the amendment was enacted to impose a progressive income tax on the population. It was sold on a soak-the-rich hook, but in fact some of the wealthiest supported it. Probably some of them were being genuinely altruistic, but the main reason was that the escape hatch for superwealth had been provided by legislation that enabled the creation of tax-free foundations. Thus, the big monopolies, such as in oil and steel, that the antitrust acts were supposedly passed to break up, could continue to consolidate their holdings without hindrance, while the competition took the brunt of the tax system. Neat, eh? So that gave us the i
nstrument for raising the debt, and the means to collect. All we needed then was a reason to escalate it. And the fastest way to get a country up to its ears, of course, is war.”

  Mel’s eyes widened. “War?”

  “Of course. The same circle that we’re talking about had run the central banks in Europe for centuries. World War I has been called the most unnecessary big war ever. Wilson was reelected in 1916 after a campaign based on promises that American soldiers would never be sent to foreign wars. And yet inside five months, we were in it.”

  Landis shrugged. “And the rest is a matter of record. Since 1913, the national debt has increased by—wait for this, Mel—four hundred thousand percent! Can you imagine what the payments have been on that? The Reserve was foisted on the public with a lot of chicanery including an absolute guarantee that there would be no more boom-bust cycles. But that was as much a fraud as the rest of it. Between 1923 and 1929 the money supply was inflated sixty-two percent and the small investors lured into an orgy of speculation before the rug was pulled for the big killing. It wasn’t the inside club who were jumping off the ledges. They all sold out at the top of the wave, and bought everything back later at bargain-basement prices. Now, do you think that all these things can be coincidences?”

  Mel found himself afflicted by a kind of paralysis, unable to react. He had accepted the Constitutional movement as representing essentially the reaction against Big Right and Big Left that the rest of the country had applauded, too—and like most, had seen the election result as its gleeful way of pronouncing a pox on both the houses. He had appreciated that there was a deeper side to it which didn’t lend itself to electioneering… But he’d never dreamed that it involved things like this.

  But Landis hadn’t finished yet. “We said there were two ways to ensure collection on a national debt. The first was that you get some seats on the national board. The second is that if the king starts falling behind on his payments, you can always fund his rivals. In fact it turns out that the same group of interlocked financial interests that I’ve been talking about have been responsible for funding both sides of all the wars of recent times, including our own Civil War. All the shufflings and realignments of alliances in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that you read about seem pretty confusing until you study the pattern of who owed money at different times. Then it all makes sense, and you can see who was getting his overdue notice.” Landis paused for a moment, and his voice took on a curious note. “And if the king doesn’t have any natural serious rivals, then maybe you have to make one.”