Hatched (18 page)

Steve was animated, and now Tom was aroused. And as the caviar swirled within his mouth, carried by waves of port, he felt uplifted, literally. Once, when he was playing a chess machine that he had programmed for a beginner level, he had dominated and, by the eighth move, had defeated the computer. This wasn’t particularly surprising, given how low the level was that he’d chosen. But the sudden bulge in his pants taught him something about achievement, something he could now actually measure with his own body. And this evening, he felt invincible.

Steve looked down, and for a moment Tom feared that he might be in for a repeat of that night, twenty-five years earlier, when he had shown himself to be allergic to alcohol, or whatever it was that led to that reaction. But he was just back being his usual quiet, collected self. Tom knew that he needed to be his usual enthusiastic one for this plan to succeed. “How much do we need?”

“I don’t know, the presses are already up, the materials . . .” Steve hesitated.

“Not what we need to do this, Steve. You never answered my question, you have never answered my question.”

“I never had to, we kept backing out.”

“That’s all changed now, Steve.” Tom looked around Fabergé Restaurant, which was growing increasingly noisy as the anticipated dinner rush took form.

“I did two calculations. The first one is for them to notice. To get us in the door.”

Tom leaned forward, looking purposely intense and angry, but the side of his mouth indicated a friendly grin. “I’m not interested in that, Steve. Ted was interested in that, I’m not interested in that. How much do we need to make in order to make the whole fucking thing sink?”

Steve looked uncomfortable. “It may not be necessary. . . . It probably won’t be necessary.”

Tom pressed on. “Sink, Steve. Sink. I don’t want for them to notice, I want for them to drown. I told you before, we aren’t going for bankruptcy and foreclosure, Steve, I’m thinking Noah’s Arc. Let’s gather up the animals and get to flooding!”

Steve looked around the restaurant, as though selecting who to sink and who to save.

“Steve, we aren’t killing anyone. They’ll never even know.”

“They’d better not find out, Tom. We’ve got to figure out how to prevent that. At least for as long as it takes to get it going.”

“Steve, Steve, Steve,” said Tom. “This fucking country. They kill your people, and they move my people in, then they segregate my people, and they relegate your people to camps, then they underpay my people, they ignore your people, and they put my people in prison.”

“And what about Ted’s work? Yet another level, Tom.”

“Right. They also kill the indigenous animals, bring in new animals, kill those animals, destroy the vegetation, plant new vegetation—”

“Modify the vegetation so that it doesn’t resemble any earthly crop. Prosecute farmers who don’t use that crop,” said Tom.

“Okay, Tom. I don’t know then. Even a hundred billion doesn’t seem like it would sink it.”

“Obviously.”

“What do you mean, obviously? Do you know what a hundred fucking liquid billion looks like?” Steve was animated as he spoke, and red in the face. Was it the port?

“No, Steve, fuck, man, that’s why I’m asking you. You are the only fucking person who thinks about this kind of shit. I don’t have a fucking clue what this looks like!” Tom’s hot blood, the gobs of sperm that were stirred when grandiose thoughts overtook him, made him, of all three roommates, the most precocious of them. This adolescent, testosterone-driven side also contributed to his ruthlessness, his force, his power, and on some occasions his puerility. But in this particular case, Tom’s catalyst had a name: “Atlanta.” The name evoked a cruel past: “Jim Crow.” The cruel past had been offered a corrective: “Ten acres and a mule.” The antidote has an enemy: “Betrayal.”

“Ten acres and a mule.” Steve looked Tom in the eye and recited it, like a mantra. “Ten acres and mule, Tom? Ten acres? And a mule? Or how about another treaty?”

Tom looked down with a perceptible smirk on his face. “Ten acres and a mule, Steve. Ten acres and a mule. And yah, sure, another treaty.”

There was silence, and it seemed that the whole plan was hovering in the balance. “I don’t know what this looks like, Steve.” Tom might just as well have stood up and declared to everyone in that restaurant that he had acquiesced to the plan, and in so doing guaranteed that a college-years dream would someday become a reality. “I don’t know what this will look like, Steve.”

“Neither do I, Tom.” Steve sensed that he’d have to answer the query, lest Tom begin to make a scene and bust the entire Fabergé egg. The subject seemed entirely theoretical, but Steve, catching the moment, transformed it into reality. “Here’s what it looks like. It looks like our whole fucking warehouse, Tom. Full. Of hundreds. And we have to use hundreds, and maybe fifties and twenties, too, assuming you still want to build our own sequences. But we need mostly hundreds, especially if we don’t want to build sequences.”

“I do,” said Tom. “Each time they print a new color into the bill, they build a new sequence, it has become standard practice after the Italian bullshit,” he explained. Two years ago a gigantic effort had been undertaken in Italy, probably fueled by Mafia earnings, and the EU had barely caught it.

“If this is going to work, we have to do the same thing, one more color, and an as-yet unused sequence. Then anything other than hundreds might be a serious pain in the butt, because we’d have to multiply the whole fucking thing by five if we use twenties. And Ted’s right, we don’t want fifties, they attract too much attention.”

Attention, for whatever reason, was the kiss of death for forgery on a grand scale. Tom had followed that gigantic, bond-forging scandal in Italy with passion and fear, coming as it did just a year before the three roommates were to put their own plan into effect. Lucky for them, it had indeed been nipped in the bud, and for some reason the story was barely even mentioned in the media. This may have been the result of efforts made by authorities who feared that someone might notice how close they’d come and try to copycat. Undoubtedly, established forgery rings had noticed, but to date, no large-scale effort had been initiated to make either bills or bonds. This added to the urgency, but now the Canadians, acting peremptorily, had upped the ante. And the US was just waiting to follow.

“Actually, it’s going to be harder than we thought, not because of the technology, but because I never thought they’d move this fucking quickly.”

“Bloody Canadians!” blurted Tom.

“But I also think that they have one less dog in the race. If they’re getting rid of the paper version, then they’re not going to watch it as much. This is one giant fucking move, and they’re going to bank on getting it changed over before anyone can make a major move.”

“Ah! So you really are thinking about this, Steve! You bastard!” Steve smirked. “Okay Mr. Bastard, how much do we need?”

“For argument sake, we need to have a trillion. And that’s just to start.”

“I’ll need more fiber.”

“Then get it now, because it’s only into the second or third trilly that it’s going to be significant enough for us to go to them. And I don’t know how much time we have.”

Forging a trillion dollars seems, of course, farfetched, but scams like this had been run as long as money, or even bullion exchange, existed. And some of them, including the Nazi presses run in death camps, had produced significant amounts of currency, almost enough to maintain the war effort. The Nazi plan actually called for a whole lot more, and, at least with the British Pound, it had worked with them producing almost 150 million forged pounds sterling by 1945, more money than was in circulation from the British Royal Mint. Had the Nazis been able to sustain that level of production, they would have destabilized Britain, and possibly won the war. But as it turned out, they made a crucial mistake. They redirected their production and design interests towards producing the dollar. By the time they had produced a decent facsimile, the war was almost over. Nevertheless, they had come really close. Really, really, close. The world had been saved from Nazism by the Nazi fetish for the dollar, just like the world was saved from the Nazi enigma coding machine by the Nazis’ obsession with themselves. There were only two great powers left in the world still making paper money, and one of them was the British. But neither Tom nor Steve was talking about pounds. They were talking about dollars.

One might suspect that because the Nazis had come so close, that the Fabergé Restaurant discussion was futile from the outset, doomed to failure. In fact, no. The Nazi plan was widely known because of the consequences of losing to them, but actually almost every war ever fought, as far back as we know, had featured some kind of counterfeiting: of paper currency, of coins, of bonds, but also of propaganda pamphlets or other documents relating to the effort. And Tom, Ted, and Steve were convinced, and had always been convinced, albeit for very different reasons and to very different ends, that the TSP was historically distinctive, first by its amplitude, and also by the very nature of those who were hatching the plan. Even though FBI and CIA worked in concert with every spy agency in the world, almost all of their efforts were focused either on terrorist activities or government-initiated plans aimed at destabilizing enemies for the purpose of colonization. The US had engaged in that effort ever since they’d become a country. But what do you get when three respected members of the bear-and-bull communities of Wall Street not only participate in but actually initiate an effort to undermine Wall Street? You get Steve, Ted, and Tom, sitting together, plotting. The fact that three billionaire Americans would work on a plan to bring the US Treasury to its knees was altogether unprecedented. And diabolical.

The problem with most, perhaps every, counterfeiting scheme directed against the US currency was that they all came up short. The colors aren’t right, the paper feels wrong, and the security features integrated into the bills aren’t addressed. What Tom, Ted, and Steve were attempting, though, had nothing to do with washing off existing ink and printing new numbers, like 100 in place of 1. And they never followed the more recent efforts to employ color scanners to perfectly reproduce existing bills, an idea that had already been anticipated by the feds who forced the manufacturers of these devices to integrate anti-counterfeiting technology that sullies, purposely, the final product. Their idea was to actually replicate the process of making bills, as though they themselves were in that business. Everyone in the counterfeiting milieu knew that only the intaglio printing machine, which reproduced that raised texture of money by embossing ink right onto the paper, would be sufficient to that task. But there was a problem; a single, impenetrable company called Bain Currency produces the ink and the paper with exacting, unreproducible standards
. Steve, Ted, and Tom had researched this odd entity, a banknote maker that had been in the business for over two hundred years, for fifty countries.

Steve was the one who had done most of the historical research, and it proved crucial to the plan. The last time the three of them had been together, he had read out from his notes, imitating the task of the professors whose classes he often skipped. It had led him to a greater appreciation of their preparation, their knowledge, and their pain.

“Okay, look,” he began. The game of producing currency is complex, and requires careful attention to be paid to what is known as paper-based security features, including fibers, threads, watermarks, and other details that are actually embedded in the bill.”

“Is that what they are known as?” inquired Ted with big eyes and huge sarcasm.

“Shut up, you stupid Yid,” continued Steve. “The Canadians and Europeans decided to opt out of their traditional paper-based currency, because they realized that there were serious limits as to what can be imbedded into paper, and, moreover, even if they invested in the most up-to-date security features, older bills, if still accepted by merchants and banks, were necessarily vulnerable. As such, it was necessary to move to some other type of bill that could embody more security-feature options, and, moreover, to use this transition as an excuse to phase-out paper money by making it un-cashable anywhere except banks. This was a momentous move, but one that the Canadian Central Bank, and the European Central Bank, consider necessary. That the Americans and the British had delayed this move was to pretend to play the nostalgia game, for those dyed-in-the-wool Americans who imagined that the good ol’ greenback still ran the world.”

“It does!” proclaimed Ted.

“You are stupid,” said Steve. Tom grinned. They were back in college, around the table, lying about the past and dreaming up a new future.

“That the Americans had suddenly changed their minds, and were now following the Canadians and the Europeans, was based entirely upon pragmatism. As far as I’m concerned, the decision was taken late enough to give them the advance they needed, if they acted immediately. Once the transition to plastic is made, though, the TSP is going to be our own college prank, a guffaw from another era, an era of idealism, of youthful enthusiasm, of utopia.” Steve looked up from his notes. The three of them had been silent, thinking about the day when these new bills would be released, and knowing that when it came, they’d be forced to act.

And here they were, that day came.

The problem with these new bills, now slated for entry into the marketplace next fall, was not that they incorporated all sorts of very expensive bells and whistles that went beyond color-changing ink, the 3-D security ribbon, and the newly complex texture of Benjamin Franklin’s collar previously integrated into the $100 bill. The problem was that the new bills were going to be the only official currency accepted by banks in the US. Previous updates to bills that were designed to fight counterfeiting were all well and good, but they had limited effect as long as banks continued to accept older, easier to replicate, versions.