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© Copyright, Arthur Levine, 2009
Driving home John, the number two man in the FBI, felt the power of his new Mercedes as he opened it up on the highway. It leapt to sixty miles an hour in nothing flat. Too fast John thought, too damn fast. He was thinking about what was happening with the Iranians, not his new car.
As he sped to his new temporary hotel apartment home in his new Mercedes, he was shaking his head wondering what was going wrong in America and why? He felt like one of those people one saw interviewed on TV after a tragic school shooting or a murder struck there small community, and they mumbled in a daze that they thought it couldn’t happen here. No, not here in the good old USA: no homegrown terrorists suicide bombings, no dissatisfied underclass, no greedy banks ruining the economy, no Iranian backed junta ready to take over. But it was happening. It was all too real. The shear horror of what was taking place hit John with full force. He had to pull over to the side of the road to compose himself. How could these people possibly make a deal with the Iranians?
As soon as John got home he called his boss Casey, the head of the FBI, and said they had to meet in Philadelphia, that it was urgent. Casey told him to make it the following morning around 10 AM and got off the phone muttering that this better be worth it.
The following morning John met Casey at their favorite Deli as planned. The first words out of his mouth were, “The Iranians gave me a brand new Mercedes for setting up Ross Phalen. I feel like a crook.”
Casey replied, “You mean more like a traitor. What do you expect, you’re a double agent?”
“I’m only doing this because it’s in our National interest.”
“Are you sure?”
John said, “I don’t like the way this conversation is going. I have something urgent to tell you. I feel like I am being set up to take a fall if something goes wrong.”
“Not by me John. Just be sure you aren’t setting yourself up. You are walking a fine line. Now what is this urgent information you have to tell me that forced me to cancel an important meeting with the future Director of Homeland Security?
“I have to tell you, Casey that the Iranians handle things in a more pleasant manner than you do.”
“I am not in the pleasant business, John. What do you have?”
“Okay Casey, you asked for it. This is the down and dirty of it. Dawa and an associate who is a professor of economics at New York University by the name of Alhali Huseini met me for lunch yesterday. After giving me the car for a job well down, they told me they had a new project for me. I was to find a respected reporter for a major newspaper and give him the story that our major banks and investment brokerage houses were hiding off balance sheet losses of about two trillion dollars in CECOFS and it could very likely wreck our economy. I am to get the details from the good professor when I’m ready to talk to a reporter and reveal this monumental scandal.
The Iranians say they are in a conspiracy with the Chinese who will sell a trillion dollars worth of the CECOFS to drive the price down to near zero as they were inflated to more than four times their real worth to begin with by the banks so they could show huge profits and recover from the sub prime disaster of 2007 – 2009, from which they have never really fully recovered. I am also to fill in some of the more aggressive bloggers on the Internet so the story will have legs.
The Iranians figure this could cause our financial institutions to crumble, and out economic system to self destruct leaving them in a position to put a junta of their choosing in control to take advantage of the ensuing chaos without the need to explode another terrorist bomb. There is more, but I can’t remember it all. The Russians are in on this in some way. I have a week to find a reliable reporter and destroy the United States. Do you have any thoughts?
John thought Casey was going to choke on his buttered bagel.
Casey said, “What the hell is a CECOF? How did this happen? Who let the banks and brokers get away with this? Where were the Banking Commission, the SEC, and all these new regulatory agencies Congress created in 2010 when all this phony profit stuff was happening? How could the banks have concocted these financial instrument and priced them at four times what they are worth? What the hell do you expect me to do about this? This could be a catastrophe. It could cause our economy to collapse.”
“The CECOF stands for Carbon Emission Credit Option Funds. I don’t know who let these financial institutions get away with this scheme. I don’t know how they manipulated the price of the options. My guess is they now have these computer geeks who make up these crazy formulas, and I’m not even sure the CEOs of the major financial institutions know what kind of a pile of manure they are sitting on top of. These computer geeks get paid fortunes, as I understand it to come up with exotic financial formulas. All they have to do is change a decimal point here and a symbol equaling something else there, and they can inflate the value of whatever phony financial instrument they have created.”
Valuing saving the Nation from pollution and Global Warming is a very subjective thing. These computer guys can have a field day determining what these Carbon Option certificates should trade for. They can raise their value by determining that the underlying Carbon fines they are supposed to protect against are going to go up sharply because Global Warming due to carbon emissions is much more of a problem now than it was six months ago. “
“Who knows what ephemeral nonsense they base their valuations on? The problem is that people and financial institutions have been buying them at these inflated values. It has something to do with the initial Cap and Trade legislation Congress passed in 2010 where certain companies got Carbon Credits verses the new taxes they were supposed to pay as fines for not curbing carbon emissions, and then traded them to other companies that needed them more because they had worse carbon emission problems and fines to pay. It’s all very confusing, and the legislation made it even more difficult to comprehend as politics dictated, which companies got what Cap and Trade credits, not actual need.”
“The problem has been exacerbated because these inflated CEOF’s have gotten into a lot of pension plans whose investment officers thought they were doing the patriotic thing. “
“The heads of these Investment Companies go along because they don’t really understand the underlying liability to their Companies, and they want big bonuses for showing profits phony or not. It is like a giant game of musical chars. Unfortunately it looks like the music is about to stop and our Country is going to be without a seat at the table of credit worthy Nations. As you have told me, greed must have driven them to this. Sounds familiar, sounds like I’ve heard this song before. I don’t have the answers. I’m only speculating based on my limited knowledge. What I expect you to do is to tell me what to do. I need answers from you. I could arrest Dawa, Alhali, and there boss Wady Hussein, but I don’t know how deep their organization is, and this information will probably get out anyway. What do you want me to do?”
Casey frowned and said, ‘Do nothing until you hear from me. I have to see the Secretary of the Treasury, the head of the Federal Reserve, and the President. I can’t make a decision here on my own. This is too big. I can hardly believe it. Wait until you here from me.”
“I only have one week.”
“Just go home and do nothing and say nothing for now. I will get back to you as soon as I can.”
“Why do I have the feeling that either way I’m going to be screwed by you or the Iranians”?
“Look at it this way John. If we screw you at least history will recognize you as a patriot instead of a traitor when the truth eventually comes out if it ever does.”
“Great, but will any one I care about know the truth? What about my family? What about me?”
“Don’t leap to conclusions John. You have been reading too many spy novels.”
“Why do I feel like you wrote them?”
“Go home John.”
As John drove home he noticed that sweat was starting to form on his upper lip again. He tried brushing it away with his sleeve, but the fear wouldn’t go away. He didn’t trust Casey any more. He didn’t trust Wade. He didn’t trust anybody. He felt alone, horribly alone. He missed Alice. He yearned for the good old days when he was a junior officer in the New York office of the FBI, and weekends meant mowing the lawn, ice cold beer, hamburger barbeques, and making love to Alice. He could almost smell the burgers, or was that him being grilled on the hot seat?
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