Category: Book Reviews

The bank branch of the Farmer’s Credit Union and Loan nearest “Grid 19” was open for business on a Tuesday morning when a convoy of black SUV’s rolled up in front of the building and a phalanx of men in dark suits and sunglasses marched into the building and converged on the manager’s office.  A security guard intercepted them and was shown some very high-powered federal credentials that backed him right down.  The manager was handed paperwork that required him to begin providing access to all of his files, account data and any other damn thing the feds decided they wanted.

At approximately the same time a similar invasion was occurring at the headquarters of that bank.  And the man heading up that raiding party was from the Justice Department and he wasn’t interested in uncovering some scam that the IRS would be adjudicating.  He was interested in a conspiracy.  He demanded and received access to all transactional data for accounts that were deemed to be colluding in a price fixing conspiracy to control commodity prices throughout the United States.

The president of the bank was a mild-mannered fellow who was basically scared out of his wits and agreed to cooperate as thoroughly as humanly possible but he assured the official that he had no idea what they were talking about.  His bank wasn’t a high-powered financial behemoth.  They were strictly small potatoes.  And after a few weeks of digging through the bank’s accounts, transactions and files they found precisely nothing.  All of the payments were between the private individuals that bought and sold the farm products.  The bank had no control over prices or quantities.  There was no commonality between these transactions and the bank other than the money passed in and out of their accounts.

The Deputy Assistant Attorney General who was overseeing the investigation read the report he had received from his flunkies and shook his head.  This was not going to be well-received by his boss.  He now regretted having allowed himself to be convinced that his old Harvard Law School buddy Dex Hastings was onto something big with this price fixing conspiracy.  He called up Hastings, “Hey listen, Dexter, make sure the next time you have a tip on a conspiracy theory just call up Morning Joe instead.  You can’t have price fixing when the individual prices are up and down all over the map.   I can’t waste a million dollars auditing some penny-ante flyover-country bank looking for super-villains.  Some of us have to work for a living.”  After that he felt better.  But then he wondered if Hastings would still invite him to his summer party on Martha’s Vineyard.  After that he felt worse.

Dexter Hastings got off the call from Washington and he was incensed.  His friend in Washington had insulted him, his dashboard had that red flashing light which the CEO would slam him for and he still hadn’t gotten to fire Barry Carver for his insolence.  This was turning into a hell of a week.

Just then he received a text to report to the C-Suite.  Arriving, he saw that the executive board was assembled and Dexter nervously entered the board room and took a seat at the far end of the table.  Eventually the matter under discussion was resolved and the CEO, Jim Hatcher turned to him smiling and said, “Dex, we’ve been discussing your project.  It seems that wheat just isn’t going to recover soon enough for us to put your plan into action.  We’ve decided to reallocate the capital to another venture.  We’ve had an offer from Typhon Industries to buy up your entire portfolio in the Midwest.  We’re going to have to take a bit of a haircut to get him to take the whole lot but we’re just champing at the bit to pick up that Korean Biotech firm with the hair restoration patent.  I’ve heard it’ll be worth a trillion dollars over the life of the patent so how can we resist.  I’m sorry we won’t be able use you anymore but you know how these things go; here today gone tomorrow.  But we’ve got an excellent package set up for you, I hope.  So, buck up.  You’ll surely bounce back from this.  In fact, if you’d like I’ll put in a good word for you with Typhon Industries.  Who’s that fellow, Paul Connors?  I hear he’s a strange duck, but any port in a storm, as they say.  Well, that’s all Dexter.  See you around the Vineyard next summer, maybe.”

Paul Connors was sitting at his desk, looking at what liquidations he could expedite in order to make the land purchase from Bay Holdings.  He would be forced to sell an embarrassing amount of gold and platinum group metals on the international markets.  It would necessarily depress the prices but more problematically it would draw too much attention to commodity holdings that would be difficult to explain.  For these metals hadn’t been purchased they’d been mined.  And having to account for his mineral holdings would raise too many questions that he could not afford to answer.

Just then a deeply encrypted link appeared on his desktop.  Opening it he saw the face of his most valuable operative, Cutter.  The bearded face looked only slightly worried which Connors took as good news.  “What’s the word Cutter?  Will the gestapo be busting down my door this week?”  Cutter shook his chin, “No, not this week.  You lucked out.  That nitwit Hastings sicced his equally stupid friend in the Justice Department on the poor guys in the bank.  And since they know exactly nothing about our operation, that’s exactly what the feds learned.  We dodged another bullet.”

Connors smiled weakly, “How many more will we dodge?”  Cutter looked down, “Better assume that was your last break.  We’ve got to have a plan to deal with the day after tomorrow when some bright young man kicks over your Potemkin scenery and exposes your operation.”

Connor stopped smiling, “Do I declare war on the United States?”  Cutter looked at him with a glazed expression and said, “Yeah, more or less.”

Barrymore Carver descended like a storm on the research department.  Within an hour he had half of the department digging through the details of the financial records for all fifty of the farms he had failed to take.  By 8 pm he had a systematic database of all the financial and commercial records for each farm for the last ten years.  By midnight he had a pounding headache but he also had a eureka moment that might save his career.  And at 6am he collapsed across his desk with a look of relief on his face.

When Dexter Hastings reached his office at 10am Carver was in his office.  “So, Barry, I hope you have something worth my time.  I have a 10:30 with the HR director to browbeat her for hiring you and I know that should put her in the mood to craft your separation package properly.  What have you found?”

On the office display, Carver queued up a slide deck that he had assembled sometime after 3am.  In his best corporate jargon, he detailed the data he had unearthed.  He demonstrated that each of these farms managed to pay all their bills with an absolutely precise balance sheet.  Each of the accounts managed to match debits and credits down to the penny.  And this occurred regardless of how many separate sales the farmers collected or what random setbacks or emergencies befell them.  And in fact, these farmers didn’t seem to sell their products to wholesalers or even retailers.  They sold their products to private individuals.  And even the prices they charged were constantly changing without any rhyme or reason.

Dexter listened to this exposition for about ten minutes then shut off the display from his desktop and disgustedly said, “That’s enough Barry.  This gibberish is meaningless.  All you’ve shown is that these dirt-poor farmers are dirt-poor farmers barely scraping by.  It means you were defeated by the most pathetic individuals imaginable; penniless yokels.  You might as well go now before I really get mad.”

Carver did something very strange, he smiled condescendingly at his boss and said, “Sure Dexter I’ll go, but if you had a little more attention span you would have learned why you haven’t been able to increase the price of wheat in three years.”

Anger and confusion battled with curiosity on Dexter’s face, “What are you talking about?  What could these fifty farms possibly have to do with the price of a commodity like wheat?”  Carver walked over to Dexter’s desk, turned the display back on and started an animation that showed the fifty farms colored in red geographically on the GRID 19 map and then expanded out to the Midwest and showed hundreds of thousands of additional parcels in the same color, “How about half a million farms?”  Our fifty farms have all their financial accounts in the same bank.  This bank has an additional eight hundred thousand accounts.  Not all of them are farms.  Some are small businesses and some not so small businesses but the great majority of these accounts have the same kind of screwy bookkeeping.  Apparently, none of them make any money worth talking about and yet none of them go out of business.  And I’ve looked at the owners of these businesses.  All of their homes and businesses are financed through this same bank and on paper none of them seem to have enough money to be able to buy a toaster without a loan and yet based on a random selection of social media accounts they all seem to have large families and are active members in all the community groups around them and none of them look like they’re starving.  And when I built up the customer list for our fifty farms every customer is an account holder at that same bank.

This isn’t a coincidence.  This is a highly developed and carefully orchestrated hidden network.  This is a secret society.”

Dexter Hastings looked out of his office window of the corporate offices of Bay Holdings, the largest corporate real estate owner in the United States.  He smiled as he looked into the sun glinting off of the mostly empty skyscrapers of Manhattan Island.  Far below he could see the tent cities of homeless immigrants squatting on the once frenetic streets of this former bastion of American prosperity.  He shrugged his shoulders knowing that his escort and armored sedan could get him through any street provocation without the need for him to get involved.  He could reach a heliport or major highway to leave this troubled metropolis if it was necessary for another “demonstration” for the bourgeoise of who was in charge of this country.  At this thought he smiled again and went back to his enormous mahogany desk.

Looking at the quarterly acreage goal he nodded to see that all the quotas were met and the reductions in private ownership of wheat, corn and cattle farms had been reduced to the levels specified in the quarterly dashboard.  Everywhere he looked he saw green lights.  Except one.  Up in the northern quadrant of the Great Plains there was one red light on his board.  What the hell is that!  He clicked the red icon and a file; Grid 19, opened up.  It listed the farms that had been targeted for foreclosure by their local bank.  There were fifty farms all clustered within a radius of twenty miles that had looked like easy pickings last year.  All pressure points for their owners had been applied.  They even got the IRS to audit half of them to see if any fines could be levied against them.  And all the buyers they typically worked with had been instructed to lower the commodity prices they would pay.  Most if not all of those farms should already be in bankruptcy.  But not a single one had folded.  That was impossible.  Sure maybe a few might have found a private source of funds to allow them to limp along.  But all of them?

Dexter muttered to himself, “Something is fishy here.”  He rushed out of his office and barged into a conference room where some of his direct reports were having a meeting about the company team-building trip to Auckland.  He rapped the door behind him and said sternly, “I’m gonna need you in my office now, Barry.  Grid 19!”  And he rushed back to his office with a black look on his patrician face.

Barrymore Carver hustled into Hastings office with a worried expression and stood nervously in front of the huge desk.  He looked surprisingly like a frightened boy standing in the principal’s office.  He knew Grid 19 would be a big problem.  If there was a red light on the dashboard, whoever owned it had to have a story to tell Dexter that included a speedy resolution and a penalty prize to pay for the outrage.  Otherwise, the penalty was a walk of shame to HR and an armed escort out of the building.

“What the hell is going on Barry?  Oh for fifty?  Are you just tired of working here?  Have I brutalized you so thoroughly that you sabotage my dashboard like this?  Talk to me Barry.  Quick!

“Dexter, I worked on this Grid for months I put pressure on these people you wouldn’t believe.  I managed to cut off their power in the middle of a deep freeze.  I even had the government inspectors declare half of their beef cattle substandard.  I did everything but light their fields on fire.  But they made all their mortgage payments they cleared all their supply bills and paid all their taxes.  There was nothing I could do.”

Hastings shook his head, “And it never occurred to you that this wasn’t normal?  When have you ever seen fifty targets fail to succumb?  Never!  Now you are going down to the finance boys and you are going to find out where the money came from and if you don’t have an answer by tomorrow then just go find another job.”

Carver flushed, spun on his heel and took off for the elevators at high speed.  A smile broke out on Dexter’s face.  He loved pulling the wings off of flies.  It was what he was born to do.  He looked down at that red light blinking on his board and the smile left his face.  “Where the hell did that money come from?”