by Mike Bond
“I’m surprised you didn’t,” I ventured, not really wanting to discuss it.
“That’s against the law.” He cleared his throat, leaned forward. “Even if we want to we’re not supposed to.”
This didn’t give me the reassurance he perhaps had in mind. And I was getting pissed at their overall disinterest and perhaps pushed too far. “How come you’re not checking her mail? What about that envelope with the red letters? Who took it?”
He eyed me patiently like the hangman waiting for his victim to finish praying. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We didn’t take anything.”
“Have you been checking her mail?”
“That’s for us to worry about.”
“Goddamit did you take that letter?” I realized I was yelling but couldn’t stop. “What does it say?”
He rubbed his face, an exasperated whiskery sound. “Dilfer,” he said to Hemingway, “you think we should bring him in?”
Hemingway took out his chewing gum, looked at it and dropped it in his shirt pocket. “Prob’ly we should. But Jesus Christ he’ll get that woman lawyer from Portland get him out again. And each time it looks more like harassment.”
“Every time we catch a fucking criminal,” Hart said, “it’s harassment.”
SO I’D DUCKED JAIL one more time. But maybe the last. It was clear I needed a backup life. With that in mind I called Smyrna, as Pa had suggested. She has a beauty salon on the rich end of Waikiki, but before that she was a disguise tech for the Agency. And she’s my cousin Sally’s longtime lover, so we’re family too. As I explained you, she once made me a false face so thin and real you couldn’t find the edge between it and your skin.
After all the usual preambles she says, “Why the hell are you in Maine? The weather’s lovely here.”
I explain her a bit about Bucky and all. “Pono,” she says, “what’s going on?”
“What do you mean what’s going on?”
“What do you mean what do I mean? It’s obvious. You’re in trouble again, Pono. I can smell it.”
“Look, Smyrna, don’t you have some poor lady waiting for you to douse her head with chemicals? I’ll call you some other–”
“Don’t you dare shut me off!”
“Alright already. I need a passport, DL, couple live cc’s, whatever else, all in the same name, all valid.”
“I’m not doing this for you. Not unless you tell me what for.”
“You’re out of the game, remember?”
“No I’m not.”
So I explained her about Abigail missing, Don and Viv’s dying in their burning house, my repeated arrests, the whole deal. And that I wanted to see Pa again before he died.
“If you’re on a local hold,” she says, “it’s all over the cop net. They’ll grab you at an airport, bus station, lots of places. It’s what they’re waiting for – so they can put you Inside.”
“I know, I know. So can you do this?”
“Sweetie of course I can do this. I’m just not sure I should, that’s the problem.”
“Problem?”
“Yeah, for your sake.”
“Smyrna, if Abigail turns up dead I am totally fucked, and I’ll never get to see Pa one last time.”
“You always been close, you two. Even when you were a little kid on his shoulders. How happy you were, the two of you.”
“Always have been.” The words caught in my throat but I pretended they didn’t.
“You know how hard this is? To make stuff that works?”
“That’s why I called you.”
“You called me because you don’t have anyone else.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“Yeah but what good are they?”
“Smyrna, don’t be jealous. So if this were possible, how soon would it be?”
“A few days. I’ll let you know. And Pono?”
“Yeah?”
“When you get the passport and cards, use them fast. They got a short shelf life.”
“Like lots of us.”
“Even shorter. At least I hope so.”
TITUS MCKEE was next. I had figured out the links between WindPower LLC and the Demo leadership in the Legislature, and Mitchell was on his way to finding where the money went. But I hadn’t forgotten that someone had shot at me barely two weeks ago, and if I hadn’t been very lucky and very fast I would have died on that snowy bare-treed ridge and long since buried somewhere.
If you’ve ever been shot at you know what it’s like. The snap of the bullet past your head, the echoing muzzle blast, your mind racing to figure where it’s coming from and can you find cover before the next one hits you. It happens in instants though it seems very slow, and the most horrible feeling on earth is being exposed to fire with no way to hide.
So needless to say it had pissed me off. Fury, a determination to get even, which of course is how wars start small and grow big – the more people harmed the more wanting to get even, and from there it’s a geometric progression.
None of this concerned me right now. I’d let Titus slide because I’d had to visit Pa in Hawaii, illegally of course since the Maine cops had a restraint on me, and then Don and Viv had died and Abigail was still gone, and I was running out of hope for her, for Maine and myself.
Titus worked for Stearing Motors, the regional trucking garage. For this I envied him, as few things are more peaceful and rewarding than working on an engine, long as you have the time, you’re not cold or wet, and you know what you’re doing.
Mitchell’s recon of Titus’ phone had brought little. They’d put the house up for sale but their realtor said no one was interested. Not surprising, with that howling wall of turbines on the mountain above them.
Titus’s wife Doris’s father in Machias was ill so she called him daily and also her two sisters. She also called constantly other residents near Eagle Mountain, sharing tactics for reducing the noise, to keep the kids from bouncing off the walls, that kind of thing.
Titus had a few buddies that he talked with briefly, mostly about going ice fishing or working on motorcycles, but he was pretty much a homebody.
The rest of the household was even less rewarding. Their three daughters emitted an avalanche of emails, FBs, twits, tweets and other foolishness. Though they’d done well in school before, this year was a disaster, and everyone was having trouble sleeping.
Titus never sent emails nor responded to the random ones sent his way. Doris had a full email life but all of it innocent. Most significantly, the McKees had never received anything from the industrial wind developers or their lawyers or political accomplices.
But I didn’t really care about all this because I’d already decided he was my shooter and I was going to get even.
How I had not yet figured out.
First was a little night recon on the McKee estate. That it would be minus thirty-eight plus a wind factor of twenty really didn’t matter. Even though I hated cold weather, in SF I’d learned to live with it, and live well. And there was plenty of Bucky’s yellowed long underwear to get me through.
About 20:00 I was on the slope above Titus’s house, shivering in a little ice hole I’d made in accordance with the latest SF instructions. If I’d had any brains at all I would have been in bed with Erotica (add “ot” in the middle of “Erica” and that’s what you get). Or with Lexie for that matter. I’d wanted to bring earphones and my collection of every recording AC/DC ever made, but feared someone sneaking up behind me through the frozen night. Like happens in Afghanistan.
But this wasn’t Afghanistan. By 21:30 all the McKee lights were out. The turbines howled dismally on the ridge, the red strobes flitted across the snowy hills like dervishes, wind hissed through the pines and the birches cracked with cold.
03:21. HIGHWAY TO HELL on my phone. “Look,” I says, attempting to be polite, “I’m trying to get some sleep here.”
“I broke in,” Mitchell says.
“Nice,” I says, trying to end t
he conversation so I can go back to my semi-frozen sleep.
“What are you,” Mitchell says, “in bed with some chick? Lemme talk to her.”
I look out at the snow plumes spinning in the bone-eating wind. “She’s right here,” holding the phone so he could hear the wind.
“I broke in,” he repeats. “Got inside WindPower LLC.”
Even my blood began to throb. “How?”
“They set up all these barricades. After last time…”
Last time was when Mitchell got into their system and discovered everything they did from kiddie porn to murder to buying governors and legislators and killing the necessary journalist or two.
“…but they forgot the safeguards.” Mitchell sounded like a proud father, and this, sadly, was the closest he was ever going to get. “So I go through this guy in Estonia, he has a key, and I’m inside.”
“Cool,” I says, still trying to stop shivering and wake up, not giving a damn about who in Estonia might have a path into their system, or why.
“Bastards have a program,” Mitchell says. “Pretty sophisticated. In each state, how much they have to give to each politician for how much in return. Same for the enviro groups. How to buy them all at the lowest possible price.”
“Which bastards?”
“Not just WindPower LLC, a whole bunch of wind developers. They share this data on Legislators, how much to give each one.”
“And?”
“And my ass, baby. I’ll send you the file.” With a click he was gone.
For a moment I feared I’d hurt him somehow, realized I hadn’t. Just the hurt of knowing what life is like, for other folks.
At 06:58 the sun pretends to cross the horizon but it’s a chimera, a mirage. At 07:24 it actually lifts itself portentously off the tips of the distant conifers and floods us with its miraculous warmth, bringing us way up to twenty below. Face flushed with its radiance I cross the ridge and hustle my way down to the logging road and along it, boots crunching, breath freezing to my face, the last 2.5 miles back to Lexie’s.
I smell bacon before I get in the door. “It’s not bacon,” she says. “It’s fatback.” I take my coat off and stand shivering by the woodstove, its heat not reaching me, for the night had gone into my bones. Bucky’s thick wool trousers wouldn’t warm so I stripped them off and stood in Bucky’s long underwear beside the hot iron stove.
She dumps scrambled eggs and bacon on my plate. “So what’d you see?”
“Not a damn thing.” Even the hot coffee cup wouldn’t warm my fingers. “Got a call from Mitchell.”
“Oh?” Her eyebrows raise. She’d know him when she and I had our hot days and nights together in Honolulu before my last tour in Afghanistan. As much as Lexie loved me I always thought she loved Mitchell even more. Which was fine with me – he’d saved my life. But sadly she was never going to have him, or he her. You can read all about it in The Sun Also Rises.
And believe me I’d give any woman up if it’d make Mitchell whole again. Or give almost anything else up, too.
Lexie went out to the bunkhouse and brought back my Toshiba, finds the email from Mitchell –
“Hello dears,
Hope the Maine winter is treating you well. Following is a copy of a WindPower LLC internal document which initially came from another wind company, and has been forwarded by WindPower to several more, as well as to 5 DC and Portland lobbying firms and a Portland law group which turns out to be more hustlers from the wind developers.
FROM: Byron Spaeth, President and CEO, WindPower, LLC
TO: WindPower LLC Board of Directors and Vice Presidents
RE: CONTRIBUTIONS RATE OF RETURN
DATE: January 7, 2015
Because wind power makes no sense economically, electrically or environmentally, wind companies must purchase politicians if they are to succeed. But it is always difficult to determine how much to pay individual politicians. Many things influence this choice: how well the politicians follow instructions, their willingness to undercut opposition, their reelection potential, and their relative cost.
Needless to say, the more regional or national a politician the more they cost; however in Maine some Legislators with the power to make or break us can be bought quite cheaply compared to states like Massachusetts or New York.
The attached formula will make such decisions easier and more profitable. Please review it carefully and get back to me with any questions or comments.
1. CALCULATING YOUR CRR – CONTRIBUTIONS RATE OF RETURN:
It is not only possible but essential to rate expenditures on politicians versus the resulting profits. In general: PE = < 1.4% RP.
Thus PE (Political Expenditures), such as direct & indirect lobbying, cash under the table, plane rides, dinners, vacations, hookers, etc. should never exceed 1.4% of the RP (Real Profits) that will result from them. To put it another way, Real Profits should always be more than 70 times the Political Expenditures necessary to obtain them.
Real Profits, of course, is how much we actually make on a project, not what we show the IRS. And remember, the losses we show the IRS means we make even more money avoiding taxes.
So for a given politician if PE is $5 million (say you max out on contributions, be sure all your employees, subsidiaries, wives, boyfriends and girlfriends max out also, host banquets, campaign flights, plenty of hookers of all shapes and persuasions, lots of under-the-table money, certain drugs as appropriate, trips to Honduras, Paris and Goa, a private table weekend in Vegas – all the usual), it should lead to a minimum of $350 million in RP – direct after-tax real profits for the corporate entity or industry which has purchased all or part of this politician.
As a stunning example, our wind industry paid Obama $71 million for his first campaign and got $62 billion in taxpayer subsidies in return. Real Profits were only about 1/3 of that, say $20 billion. Still, that $20 billion is nearly 300 times the cost to obtain it – not bad for a no-risk operation. And remember, that’s national, and Maine politicians are far cheaper.
2. HOW DO I DECIDE HOW MUCH OF A POLITICIAN TO BUY?
There is an equation for this, too:
Or put another way:
Put simply, Real Profit (RP) less Political Expenditure (PE) divided by PE times the politician’s Proportional Value (PV) equals CRR, the Contributions Rate of Return. In essence, how much money we make divided by how much we invest times the politician’s proportional value will tell you not only their CRR, but also what percentage of them you need to buy.
Assessing a politician’s PV can be complicated. A lot of them will work for us then their voters find out and dump them, and we have to start all over again with whoever gets elected to replace them. It’s frustrating, but keep your eye on the ball: We can make many more billions here in Maine.
By the way, politicians will always say things like “You’ll have to do better than that; the other side just offered me a quarter million.” With this formula you can rate easily if more expenditure is necessary, and in the meantime learn how to trim their egos, put them back in their place.
Reading this I realized the corporate contributor looks down on the politician the way an intelligence agent looks down on someone he’s bribed into betraying their country.
Not that the contributors wouldn’t troll for the same money if they were politicians.
But as the old saying goes, even crooks don’t like crooks.
Strobes
THE TURBINES WERE BAD so Lexie’d gone to the Wilderness Motel in South China. Exhausted from my frozen night with Titus, I hunched in my bunk with hands over my ears, mad at myself for not going with Lexie, turbine shock waves rattling the windows and throbbing my bones. Lobo was gone, Max too. I went into the house for some TP to spit on, wad up and stick in my ears but that didn’t help either.
The sound was maddening, made you want to run, throw up. It was like a very slow explosion, the unending 747 touchdown, a howl of tortured steel and sky. The blinking red strobes made
you dizzy and sick; they bounced off the snow and shot a steady flicker through the windows. Like Don and Viv had said, it was like a cop car outside your house with its flashers on all night.
Finally I sat in the kitchen with a glass of gin in the hopes that might make me sleepy. It didn’t. I went outside to call Lobo, no response, the red lights going round like a mad carousel.
That’s when I got the crazy idea of visiting Titus again.
AN HOUR’S HIKE up the mountain brought me to the wasteland of red-flashing howling turbines then another hour down to Titus’s, where I dig my snow hole again and settle in for a long winter’s night.
There was no question of sleeping. With nothing to do but shiver and watch Titus’s motionless house, till at 20:23 something dark stepped out Titus’s back door, crossed the back lawn and started climbing through knee-deep snow toward me.
Titus McKee. With a rifle in his hand.
I was unarmed; he could kill me and no one’d ever know.
No point to run; he’d shoot me in two seconds. That shiver of awareness down the back, what a bullet will feel like. I hunched silently in my hole, waiting to leap on him if he gave me time.
He reached a little gully below me and swung to his right, climbing through sparse junipers and bare-stemmed willows till he passed on my left, rifle slung over his right shoulder, his frozen breaths rising cloudlike in the semi-lunar night.
The shock of expecting to die then not dying nearly knocked me out. Forcing myself to breathe deep and steady I sat on the edge of the snowhole and tried to figure what next. Then I followed Titus up the mountain, keeping about fifty yards to his left and below him, ducking from bare trunk to bare trunk as he barged his way uphill through deepening snow never bothering to look back.
It was insane to follow an armed man who wanted to kill me when I had no weapon. But something kept me going despite the fear, despite the anger at my own stupidity. That maybe I’d be able to take him down and leave him up there.
Titus broke out on the ridgetop to a line of nine turbines that were still turning.