Interest (9 page)

16

Neith’s bunker had a 1950s-era cafeteria that had been built large enough to accommodate all of Congress, and it now served as the mess hall for Jefferson’s army. Len sat there the next morning at a table by himself, drinking coffee and mentally replaying the bloodbath the day before. He wanted to feel bad about maiming Burkholder and seeing all those IRS agents die, but he didn’t. In fact, he had to admit to himself that he felt a little bit on the positive side of nothing. He wondered if this was how the freed slaves had felt when Sherman marched to the sea and burned down the plantation mansions of their masters: vindicated but empty. Maybe that was how Jefferson felt all the time.

As if he could hear what Len was thinking, Jefferson stomped into the room.

“Lenny, you should have killed that dirtbag when you had the chance,” Jefferson said, throwing a newspaper in front of him. Circled on page A3 was an article: “Kidnapped journalist believed to be involved in IRS attack.” “It don’t take a genius to look through all the audits that swine did and put two and two together.”

Len read the article. Edward Burkholder had in fact made it out of the building before it was demolished. Len wanted to be angry at himself for a second, then brushed it off. Suddenly he was thankful that Sara and Octavia were out of reach for reprisals. Maybe Neith knew what she was doing after all.

“How did you know about Burkholder and my dad?” Len asked.

“We know everything, Lenny. Hell, we even know which porn websites you look at. If it’s out there in a computer somewhere, Neith finds it.”

“General, what makes you fight the way you do?” Len asked. “What did they do to you?”

Jefferson was taken aback. He was the sort of man who didn’t appreciate being asked about his motivations, nor knew what to do when it happened. This was especially true when he was asked such things in front of his subordinates, who were sitting throughout the mess hall. The general’s face constricted with emotion. “You’ll mind your business, boy!” he said through gritted teeth, a vein popping from his forehead. “Or I’ll make andouille from your fucking Yankee entrails. Are we clear?”

Len felt eyes upon him from the other tables.

“Yes, sir,” he said, not knowing what else to say to defuse the situation.

Jefferson grunted, did an about-face, and stormed out of the room.

Unsure of what the hell just happened, Len avoided making eye contact with the people staring at him. He got up and walked out of the mess hall, finding his way topside to have a smoke.

Len lit his cigarette and took a drag, listening to the tobacco crackle gently as it burned. The air was cool up in the mountains. He listened to the wind rustling the trees. Exhaling, he noticed a large truck parked outside that guys were unloading. Considering the busyness of Jefferson’s command, with supplies coming and going all day long, Len didn’t think much of it until he saw a raven-haired woman in a business suit issuing directions to the forklift drivers in Russian.

He sat there for a while until she noticed his stare. Their eyes met. Her gaze was blank at first, then recognition crossed her face. She averted her eyes and went back to work. A consummate professional.

Undeterred, Len walked right up to her. “Need help?”

“Sure,” she said sheepishly. “Jim, right?”

“Sometimes.” He smiled. “My real name is Len.” Len stuck his hand out, as if to introduce himself again. Natalia, looking unfazed and a tiny bit amused, shook his hand.

Len rolled up his sleeves and helped some of the Russian blokes unload the truck. When they were done, Natalia asked him for a cigarette.

“Sorry about leaving you on the plane,” Len said.

“Is that what happen? I woke up in hotel with luggage.”

“Sounds like magic,” Len said.

Natalia looked at him incredulously.

“I take it you work for the Russian government?” he asked.

“Pfft! Government!” She rolled her eyes. “Government job is for dumb, lazy people. No, I’m entrepreneur.”

“Then how do you get all this military equipment?”

“Russian politicians want America to fail. So they give it to me for cheap if I sell to revolutionaries. I take it here and sell for profit.”

“So you’re a gunrunner?”

“Ha! You Americans have enough guns. No market for that. I run heavy artillery.”

“Jesus. You must make a lot of money.”

“I do OK,” she said, smirking.

“I’ve gotta ask. Why on earth do you fly coach?”

“Rule number one: don’t attract attention. If you are humble, you go anywhere and no one notice.”

“So how exactly does one get started in the gun—I mean, artillery-running business?”

“Family business. My father was general in Soviet army. When USSR collapsed, he got no paycheck to feed brothers and me. So he stole weapons from armory and sold to Syrians, Georgians, Kazakhs. Old government would have executed him for this, but new government secretly helps him because he is destabilizing region. We traveled all over world; he showed me how to do it. Now he is retired and my brothers and me run business.

“You, now. I guess you are not travel writer?”

“I don’t know what the hell I am anymore.”

Natalia laughed. “No one does. It’s way of life. I’m whoever I need to be each day.”

One of her helpers said something to her in Russian.

“We must go,” Natalia said. “Plane will leave soon. It was good to see you again. Maybe we see each other some other time.”

“That would be nice. Besides, you owe me a bottle of Applewood.”

Natalia smiled—bashfully, almost, if international arms dealers were in fact capable of bashfulness. Then she climbed into the truck and drove off. Len stood there and watched her disappear through the gates.

17

“Hey, wake up!”

Len opened his eyes. He’d been sleeping uneasily in one of the rickety old steel cots in the bunker. It took him a few seconds to remember where he was. One of Jefferson’s soldiers, a gawky young man, was standing over him.

“Huh?”

“We caught one! Wake up!”

“What? Caught what?”

“A Dranthyx, or whatever the hell they’re called. Neith says to bring your camera and notepad.”

Len jumped out of bed, threw on some clothes, and grabbed the requisite items. He followed the young soldier down two flights of stairs to a lower part of the bunker and into a large concrete room containing nothing but a huge plexiglass containment device in the center. Spotlights were trained on the apparatus, and it seemed that air was piped into the ceiling of the glass enclosure.

There, sitting in the middle of the tank, was a man in a business suit. He appeared to be about sixty, with gray hair and a goatee. He had no shoes, was missing one sock, and his sleeve was ripped, indicating there had apparently been a struggle to bring him to the bunker. He appeared to be slightly dazed.

“The Ich-Ca-Gan told me the Dranthyx weren’t human,” Len said. “This guy looks pretty human to me.”

“Well, he’s awake now!” exclaimed the young man. “When we first found him at his house, he looked like a person. But the dude is strong as a bull! He bent my damn rifle in half! We had to knock him out with ether. After the ether, you shoulda seen it, he changed into a goddamn sea monster! Never seen anything like it! Now the ether’s wearing off and he’s human again. I don’t know what that thing is, but I’m glad it’s locked in there.”

“Hello, Mr. Savitz,” said a voice behind him. Turning, Len saw that it was Neith’s robot.

“What’s going on here?” Len asked.

“After performing a comprehensive statistical analysis of corporate structures, political contributions, financial transactions, and real estate holdings, my data indicated something interesting. A small handful of influential individuals, numbering only in the hundreds and scattered across the globe, control roughly 99 percent of the world’s resources and 100 percent of its political and military power.”

“You needed to analyze data to find that out?”

“Indeed.” Neith seemed oblivious Len’s sarcasm. “And it confirms what the Ich-Ca-Gan told you. I further determined with 83 percent probability that this individual you see before us is in fact a member of that elite ruling class. So we kidnapped him. In that tank is one Mr. Samuel Winston Endicott, majority shareholder and chairman of the board for Überbank, NA, and several other major corporate conglomerates. And as PFC McKean was saying, we believe this is a Dranthyx.”

“So what’s this about him being a sea monster?”

“Mr. Savitz, I want you to see this for yourself. Get your camera ready. I am about to pump ether into the holding tank.”

Neith turned a valve and mist spritzed out from where the air pipe came into the top of the plexiglass enclosure. Len watched the man inside intently to see if there were any changes. Samuel Endicott’s eyes rolled back into his head until he lost consciousness.

Slowly Samuel’s muscles went limp. His skin began to turn pink. His arms and legs elongated into snake-like appendages. Like an airbag deploying in slow motion, his head expanded into an oblong shape. The part that freaked Len out most was when Samuel’s eyes constricted into yellow slits. Sitting there on the plexiglass floor of the tank was the most grotesque creature Len had ever seen—and it was wearing a three-piece suit that cost as much as a yacht.

“See! What’d I tell ya?” shrieked Private McKean, clutching a crucifix around his neck. “That thing is Satan’s handiwork!”

“Oh my God,” Len stammered. “What in the hell is that?”

“I don’t know,” Neith said unemotionally. “However, after taking tissue samples, I found it has 95 percent of its DNA in common with organisms of the order Octopoda.”

“An octopus? That thing is a fucking octopus?”

“Maybe, maybe not. However, I believe it is genetically related to the octopus. It very clearly has the ability to camouflage itself and mimic other organisms, as octopuses do. As we have seen here, it can imitate human beings flawlessly. Octopuses are also known for their high intelligence and their tentacles, both of which seem to be present in our captive. Conversely, it has several features that are unexpected. It appears to have lungs; it has only four limbs instead of eight; and its mouth is located where a human’s is, instead of at the center point of its tentacles.”

“Holy…” Len exclaimed. “And these things are running the planet? How many of them exist?”

“I don’t know,” Neith answered.

“Can I interview it?” Len asked. “Let’s see what it knows.”

“That’s the plan, Mr. Savitz.”

18

Two days later, walking past Neith’s warehouse full of Russian military vehicles, it suddenly occurred to Len that Jefferson’s battle plans for taking DC were missing a piece or two. Jefferson’s matériel was way up in the mountains of West Virginia, over two hundred miles from the capital. Was he planning to drive his tanks for several hours to get to the city? They’d see his convoy coming miles away and bomb the crap out of him.

However, after Len went to the surface to have a cigarette, the plan became evident. Tanks were being raised to the surface with a massive freight elevator, then driven up ramps onto flatbed rail cars. Jefferson’s men covered the tanks diligently with tarps. The mine had several large rail spurs, and each had a train fully loaded with tanks. Jefferson was going to sneak his tanks into the city by rail, then launch a surprise attack.
No way that jarhead came up with that himself,
Len thought;
that was all Neith.
He almost had to chuckle at the cleverness of it.

Just then, PFC McKean came out of the mine, spotted Len, and ran over. His hurried gait was all knees and elbows.

“You’ll never believe it. Neith got it to talk!” McKean wheezed, out of breath. “It responds to sodium thiopental.”

“What’s that?”

“Truth serum.”

Len crushed out his cigarette and followed McKean down to the octopus tank. The Dranthyx, in its natural, nonhuman form, sat in the middle of the tank in a semilucid state, rocking back and forth. Neith stood off to the side. Len took the recorder out of his pocket and pressed record.

“Hi,” Len said. “Can you hear me?”

The creature looked up at Len. Its yellow, slitted eyes had the same sort of vacant, homicidal look that a shark’s had. Len felt a stabbing jolt of unease—it could see him through the glass.

“Who are you?” Len asked.

“I am Samuel Endicott,” it said. “Who are you?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“It’s OK. I know who you are, Leonard.” It smiled at him.

Len felt his heart pound. “How do you know who I am?”

“I read the newspapers. I understand you were involved in the IRS attack. Tsk tsk.”

“What do you do for a living, Samuel?

“Why, I’m in the banking business,” Samuel said with a dead calm that made Len’s arm hairs stand up. “I’d give you my card but it seems I’m fresh out.”

“Where did you come from?”

“Connecticut. I have a lovely estate there, on the sound. The missus and I would love to have you over for dinner sometime.” Just then, Samuel’s tentacle lashed out and pounded against the plexiglass between him and Len, startling Len out of his chair. “Truly,” Samuel yelled, “come on up, I’ll cut out your fucking tenderloins while you’re still breathing!”

“Jesus fuck! Are you sure he can’t get out of there?” Len asked Neith.

“It is improbable,” Neith said.

“Oh, I will get out. Don’t you worry,” Samuel said assuredly. “And when I do, Leonard, I will painstakingly remove your body parts one at a time, and you’ll watch as I do it.” He grinned, revealing a hard, black beak under his lips.

Len composed himself and tried to remain unflapped. “I can’t place your accent.”

“Con-nect-i-cut. Are you deaf?”

“But you sound English almost.”

“You’ll never believe this, gorilla, but they speak English in Connecticut. In fact, it so happens that Connecticut was a proper English colony when I moved there and learnt the language.”

“Colony? So how old are you?”

“Let’s just say that your tenth great-grandfather would have been lucky to pluck the corn from my shit.”

“I’ve never seen one of you before. Where did your people come from? Are you from another planet?”

“We crawled out of the slime just as you baboons did. Only we had our act together fifty million years earlier and came out much better looking.”

“So you’re from Earth?”

“Yeah,” it said, rolling its eyes. “How about you, come here often?”

“You look like an octopus. Did you descend from octopi?”

“Octopuses, chimp. I suppose ‘octopodes’ is OK too, but ‘octopi’ is piss-poor Latin. And yes, that sushi you stuff in your hairy ape faces happens to be made from my noble cousins. Once I get out of here, I intend to repay the favor.”

“If you’ve been here for fifty million years, why haven’t I heard of you before? Why aren’t there historical artifacts all over the place?”

“Because unlike you apes, we don’t smear the world with our feces so people know where to find us. In fact, we have rules about cleaning up after ourselves. The less you lemurs know about us, the better.”

“I don’t get it. Where are your cities?”

The Dranthyx smirked at Len’s question, then answered in a mocking, drawling Texas accent. “Well, there’s this thing called the ocean. It’s where we keep all our stuff. Maybe you’ve heard of it, pardner.”

“Why isn’t there any fossil record of your kind?”

“You know, it’s the damnedest thing,” Samuel said, now speaking in his actual dialect. “If one has no bones, one leaves no fossils.”

“If you have no bones, how are you sitting upright? How do you walk on two legs like that?”

“Muscular hydrostasis. Look it up, monkey. Any more imbecilic questions? I want to be sure your curiosity is perfectly sated before I disembowel your mother and force you to eat the feces from her intestines.”

“I hear there’s going to be an Xreth cull. Tell me about that.”

The smile fell off Samuel’s face. “Where did you hear that?”

“So it’s true?”

Samuel stared at Len for a while, then answered slowly. “Leonard, let me explain something to you. You are my property. You are chattel. I own you. I will do whatever I want with you. End of story. In fact, I own all the humans in this Federal Reserve district because that is how the Directorate divided it up. The problem is, there are too many of you around the world who do not know your place, so we’ve decided to reduce your numbers. This is nothing unusual. We’ve done a cull once every few decades since ancient times. And I must say, I enjoy that part immensely. Oh, you have no idea how I look forward to the culls! I revel in listening to you orangutans begging me to spare your stupid, short little lives. I relish your wails of grief and pain while I murder your families in front of you. If I had a dick, Leonard, it would make me hard.”

“When will this happen?”

“Sooner than you think,” Samuel said, curling his lips into a vein-knotting smile.

“Mr. Savitz, may I speak with you?” Neith asked, pulling him aside. The Dranthyx eyed them carefully. Len followed Neith down the hall to the warehouse where her desk was, where Samuel couldn’t hear or see them, and closed the door.

“I must terminate your interview with Samuel. He now knows that we’ve learned about the cull and Xreths. It would be inadvisable for us to disclose any more of what we know.”

“I wanted to ask about the cull while he was still under the influence. Killing billions seems like a pretty big deal.”

“I understand,” Neith acknowledged. “Let me handle that part. Mr. Savitz, by now you may have realized why I chose you for this assignment.”

“Yeah. I have an idea.”

“I want to make sure you understand it all. Have a seat. Please record this conversation so that you may refer to it later.”

Len got out the recorder and took a seat. Neith’s robot awkwardly pulled a chair over and sat down in it.

“You exposed some minor corruption at the United States Federal Reserve System, but it’s deeper than that,” Neith explained. “My research indicates the Federal Reserve itself is
corruption perpetrated by the Dranthyx. All central banking across the globe is. Debt is the means by which the Dranthyx control the human race.”

“That’s what the Ich-Ca-Gan said, but I’m not sure I understand the mechanics of it. So people borrow money and pay it back, so what?”

“Let’s start with the basics.” Neith’s robotic avatar sat bolt upright in the chair in a way that would be uncomfortable for humans. “Do you know what the Federal Reserve System is?”

“Yeah. It’s a government bank—”

“No! It’s a
private
bank. A private bank, by bankers and for bankers, beyond the rule of law. The government has no control over it, no oversight. There’s an old expression: the Federal Reserve is about as federal as Federal Express. It controls us, we cannot control it.”

Len found it odd that the first time Neith had shown anything like emotion, the conversation was about banking.

“Are you familiar with the history of central banking, Mr. Savitz?”

“Refresh me.”

“Central banking is centuries old. European countries like England had central banks since the 1600s, but America was unique in that it had no permanent central bank for its first 137 years. The founding fathers believed central banks were evil incarnate and did their best to resist any form of central banking during the early part of this country’s history.”

“So why do we have one now?”

“Before the Federal Reserve System was created, there were regular economic panics in the United States. Using retrospective forensic accounting, I have determined that it is likely that these panics were caused intentionally by major Wall Street investment bankers. In 1907, there occurred a crash so profound that the entire nation was on the verge of financial ruin. In an act of desperation, President Theodore Roosevelt pleaded with the banking tycoons of the day to bail the country out. Think about that for a second: the president had to openly beg wealthy bankers to save the nation.”

“I have to say, that doesn’t seem weird to me, Neith. Every president since has sucked their dicks, too.”

“To stall the crisis, the bankers lent money out at interest to failing businesses. Once the panic was over and out of the public’s mind, the bankers agreed to meet covertly to discuss how to further their profits. The meeting took place in abject secrecy at an exclusive hunting club on Jekyll Island on the Georgia coast. To avoid the attention of the newspapers, the bankers traveled to the meeting in a secret unmarked train under fake names. Also in attendance were an assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury and one Senator Nelson Aldrich, a close friend of J.P. Morgan’s, whose daughter had married into the Rockefeller family. Together, working in seclusion for ten straight days, they conspired to create a banking cartel and a system of moneylending so pervasive and insidious that the entire nation could be controlled through debt without anyone realizing it. Their brainchild was an ingenious conspiracy known as the Federal Reserve System. Even the name was brilliant, as it seemed to suggest some sort of government stockpile, when the truth was the complete opposite: it was a private IOU-printing machine.”

“Why on earth did people go along with it?”

“They had no choice. When a debt-averse American voting populace wouldn’t buy into it, the banking coterie exerted tremendous political pressure to get it through Congress. Behind closed doors, the bankers threatened to destroy the US economy if the scheme wasn’t passed into law. However, the backbone of Congress hadn’t yet been broken in those days, so they resisted it. A number of Congressmen, such as Arsène Pujo and Charles Lindbergh, refused to bow to the pressure. The bankers made good on their promise in 1913 when they decided to stop lending money. The country immediately went into financial chaos. The coercion worked. Congress authorized the Federal Reserve System later that year and simultaneously signed over its money-printing powers to the new central bank. In essence, the US government used to create its own US dollars for free, but in 1913 it was strong-armed into giving that authority away to a powerful banking cartel.”

“Unreal. Neith, have you considered bombing Wall Street for a change?”

“That same year, Mr. Savitz, 1913, is when the sixteenth amendment to the Constitution was ratified. The exact same people were behind that change, too. The amendment gave Congress, for the first time in our history, the permanent power to collect income tax. Why? Because without an income tax, the banking cartel’s scheme wouldn’t work. In other words, their banks could lend the money to the United States, but until there was a large revenue stream, the United States would not be able to pay interest.”

“OK, so what? I happen to know the Federal Reserve isn’t allowed to keep profits. The profits are public.”

“That is where it gets tricky, and I need you to follow closely. If I lent you money at 1 percent interest, would it be profitable for you to turn around and lend it to someone else at 5 percent interest?”

“I guess so, sure.”

“You’d be collecting the interest in the middle. Imagine now that the person you lent the money to was the US government. In order to pay you 5 percent interest, what must the government do?”

“Collect taxes?”

“Exactly. That’s exactly what’s happening. The Federal Reserve, the institution that creates money in this country, creates it out of thin air, then lends it to for-profit banks at extremely low interest rates, at a far lower rate than would be available to you or me. This is called the discount rate, and it’s only available to those in the banking cartel. The discount rate is no fluke—it was
the
central issue of the clandestine Jekyll Island meeting. After borrowing at the discount rate, those for-profit banks turn around and lend it back to our own government at higher interest rates by buying treasury instruments like bonds and notes. The taxpayers are paying the interest on this money—money that was created for free and borrowed at a discount!”

“It sounds like a Ponzi, almost.”

“That’s exactly what it is, Mr. Savitz, a pyramid scheme. And this occurs not just here in America, but all over the world. There are over a hundred central banks just like the Federal Reserve, all of which are controlled by Dranthyx. The central banks create funny money and lend it to large corporate banks, also run by the Dranthyx. To make matters worse, these banks aren’t just robbing you through taxes, they are also stealing from you with inflation. If I put 100 dollars in your bank account, but inflation is 3 percent annually, then the money in the account will only be worth 97 dollars next year.”