SURVIVORS: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 2) (7 page)

CHAPTER NINE / Sunday, 6:44 PM

Brendan decided to walk back from the Holy Rosary Church. Russell Gide stood out front with some of the others. The rain had stopped, and it felt cold enough to snow. The dark clouds hung like bruises in the eventide.

Gide’s tracksuit took on different hues under the streetlamps outside the church. “You sure? It’s no trouble. Hell, we’ve been driving around half the night already.”

Brendan nodded. “The walk will do me good.”

Gide watched Brendan for a moment. Brendan tried to conceal that he’d been left disabled by the Heilshorn case: a fractured hip had left him with a limp, and his right arm didn’t have full rotation – he couldn’t reach a plate on a high shelf. His lower back seized up if he sat for a few minutes, or bent down at the wrong angle.

“Hey, whatever puts the stick in your banana.” Russell smiled and held out his hand. “You’ll be in touch if you need anything else?” His eyes lingered, and Brendan knew he was thinking back to the bit of roughness in the car. It seemed like it had been forgiven.

“I will.”

He shook hands with Russell and offered a quick smile to some of the others standing around on the lawn.

Brendan started walking the same route he had driven earlier that day.

The AA meeting had passed quickly. Brendan had sat in the back, and found it difficult to really invest in what the others were saying at first. Introspection about his own life of addiction drowned out the voices in the room. He hadn’t touched a drink in two years. It had been Argon who’d pulled him out of the relapse. Argon who’d showed up like some crazed disciple in the night. And it had been Argon who’d put Brendan on his feet initially, long ago when even the death of his wife and daughter hadn’t sobered Brendan up – if anything, only tipped the bottle back farther. Would he be able to survive on his own without Argon there to pick him up? Did any of these people really know who Argon was, or even that he was gone? There were only about a dozen people at the meeting. There really hadn’t been a chance to talk with anyone until the break came, and then they had started to come alive, gathered around the urn of hot black coffee.

“I don’t get to drink,” one guy said, his thick curly sideburns bracketing his fat face. “That’s all there is to it. I don’t get to have a wonderful wife and kids and good job – and drink, too. That’s the trade-off. That’s the cost. That’s always been the cost – I just didn’t know it for a while.” He smiled a broad, charming smile.

The talk had turned to business and politics, though old hands seemed to try to steer the conversation to less incendiary topics. After the initial banter, Russell introduced Brendan to the group. Russell had gone four years sober, and knew his way around an AA meeting. He described Brendan as a good friend of Argon’s who had flown in for the funeral. It wasn’t exactly the most tactful way to break the news, Brendan thought, but it gave him a chance to observe their immediate reactions. No one seemed to have known. Condolences were offered all around, the group members shook their heads and talked about the dangers of police work in the violent times.

“See, that’s what it is,” said Henry, a middle-aged building contractor with Celtic tattoos on his arms and neck. “I moved up to Hawthorne from South Yonkers. Argon has always been here. You can’t even be a cop up here, anymore. It’s not safe. Nowhere is safe. I moved because – and I’m sorry, yo, I don’t mean to be un-PC, but the Hispanics are taking all the jobs. Not that it matters, right? I pay the God-blessed government a third of what I make. It just doesn’t make any sense anymore. I couldn’t make ends meet in South Yonkers. I mean, South Yonkers? You kidding me? So, forget it. It’s not worth having a business. Money ain’t what it used to be.”

“And it’s only getting worse,” said Santos. Santos was a large black man who had successfully sold insurance for a number of years before a cocaine habit had brought him down – way down.

Santos said he had been living high on the hog in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, pulling down high six figures annually. One night he had invited over a bunch of friends, colleagues, even some clients. He had so much blow that he was giving it out in repurposed vitamin bottles. However at some point later that night, “higher than the Freedom Tower,” he said, his mood took a turn. He was running out of his own stash of coke, and wanted the giveaway bottles back.

Though by then, most of what he’d doled out was either gone with party guests who’d left, or been snorted by those who remained. Santos had gone into a coke-fueled rage at that point, screaming at the people who remained that they were thieves and leeches. He even called up the departed guests.

“Whoever’s phone number I had, I dialed that shit up and gave them the wrath of God over the phone. It was bad.”

Santos had then gone into a highly respected rehab facility. He had also taken anger management classes, started attending both NA and AA meetings, and found a therapist, who soon suggested that he was cyclothymic.

Brendan knew the term. Cyclothymia was kind of low-grade bipolar. The kind of mood disorder you can generally live with without resorting to meds like benzodiazepine or stabilizers like lithium, but that most people ended up self-medicating for anyway.

Santos lowered his gaze and shook his head for a moment, and then his eyes brightened. “But you know what? Know how I live with that guilt? All that shit? All that ain’t half as bad as our US monetary policy.”

There were groans and eye-rolls.

“No, now, come on. Now, listen. The banks control everything, man. This ain’t a country of the people, by the people, for the people, no more. This is a country by and for
Wall Street
, you see what I’m saying? It’s unconstitutional, man. It’s unconstitutional that we got a private institution like the Fed controlling all the money. And it’s in the Constitution for money to be backed by specie – gold, silver, what have you.”

“The Fed doesn’t control the money, yo,” said Henry, the guy from Yonkers. “The government borrows money by selling securities at auction. Even I know that.”

Santos glared at him. “Who’s gonna buy those securities, Irish, you?” He started ticking things off on his large fingers, chocolate brown on top, pale pink underneath.

“Listen to me. You want to argue that the Fed doesn’t buy government bonds? Last year the Fed bought bonds in the secondary market at a rate of about forty-five billion dollars per month. As long as people believe the Fed will buy enough government securities to keep interest rates low? Buyers will stick around – buyers at auctions grabbing up bills, notes, and bonds. Hell, half the people who used to come to my parties were bond-traders. But you want to know what actually happens when you cut through all this mumbo jumbo, Irish? I’ll tell you. When the government runs a budget deficit, it borrows the money from the Fed at interest. Period. Not even the conspiracy theory debunkers argue that. You or anyone else wants to tell me that the Fed is not responsible for the national deficit, then fine. It’s Congress. And as far as I’m concerned, whether you believe the Fed was created by an act of Congress, or a meeting in private and then was pushed through, it’s a revolving door.”

Santos’s eyes were wide, his voice was getting loud. His antics had attracted the attention of another AA member across the room. She was young, probably mid-twenties, speaking to two other women. She met Brendan’s gaze for a moment and then looked away.

“Look at the seats in Congress, look at the money that got almost every one of them there. Then follow that dollar to the private banks and multinational corporations working with those banks. The Federal Reserve is a banking cartel, plain and simple. And in a hundred years, what has it achieved? It’s supposed to sustain maximum employment and stabilize prices. Has it achieved this? No. Instead its so-called duties have expanded into conducting the nation’s monetary policy. So, back to what I was saying, the Fed controls the money, and if you don’t get that, then God help you.”

Henry took a sip of his coffee, glaring over the rim of his mug. Brendan could feel the heat rising in the room. His own heart was pumping a bit harder as the adrenaline kicked on.

Brendan felt like things were getting dangerously close to someone swinging a fist. Santos barreled on. “You want to know why your business failed, Irish? Because the dollar is dying, and the economy is losing liquidity. When the government deposits its loans into a bank account it becomes legal tender. All electronic; only three percent of the money supply exists in actual currency. The government promises to pay that back to the Fed, money that has been created out of
debt
. Okay? So now we got fractional reserve banking. The bank the government put its money into has to keep a minimum portion, loan out the rest. This goes on and on, from bank to bank. About nine times can be created out of nothing for every deposit. What gives that new money value? Nothing. The fractional reserve system of monetary expansion is inflationary, is what I’m saying. The system is fucked.”

“I’ve heard enough,” said Henry with a growl in his voice.

Santos wouldn’t be stopped. “Expanding the money supply without there being a proportional expansion of goods and services debases the currency, Irish. Always. Historically. The money supply goes up, the value of the dollar goes down. So your cost of living, your cost of business goes up, but wages stagnate. It’s called inflation. We create money out of thin air, it has no value, we distort that value, and we try to solve the problems inflation creates with more inflation. That’s why your small business is dead in the water, Irish.” Santos poked one of his massive fingers at Henry. “It ain’t the Hispanics.”

Henry lunged for Santos, shoving him in the chest, making the big man take a step back. “You big black mother. . .”

Santos grabbed the smaller man’s hands and grinned. “Whoa, whoa Irish. Hey man. I’m not okay and you’re not okay – but that’s okay.”

Brendan took a step forward. “Guys, come on.”

Henry yanked his hands away from Santos and cocked his fist back. Russell Gide grabbed Henry’s forearm and held back the blow. Brendan, meanwhile, stepped alongside Santos and put his hand on the big man’s shoulder.

Steven, who had been talking to someone on the other side of the room, hurried over. “Alright, alright,” he said. Steven seemed to be the one in charge of organizing the meetings. He had been a lawyer; now he built furniture and drove a city bus.

“Come on, get out of here with that. You kidding me? You two assholes? What are we doing?”

Santos, still grinning, turned to Steven. “We’re paying into that monster debt, is what we’re doing. And it gobbles it up, gobbles it up, and it ain’t even making a dent.”

“Alright, goodnight, Santos. Henry, see you next meeting.”

Henry yanked his arm out of Russell Gide’s grip and stormed out, tossing a searing look back at Santos.

“Hey, Irish!” Santos called after him, making his way slowly out of the church basement. He then turned and came back, and his eyes locked on Healy. “It ain’t even making a dent. Federal government is
still
in the hole,
still
got their pockets turned out. You feeling me? They take everything they get. I was in insurance for ten years, Healy. Ten years, man. You know how much money New York Life has got? Three hundred and eighty
billion
in total assets under management. Now, how much sense does that make? How come we’re paying into the deficit, guy like Irish can’t stay in business, and yet these companies got so much money? And they’ll do anything to keep it. Hell, Argon knew that. He understood that shit.”

Brendan’s ears pricked up. “Argon? How do you mean?”

Santos lowered his voice and looked Brendan in the eyes. “He had his sights set, man. He knew how to fight back.”

And Santos finally turned and left. Brendan started after him but Steven stepped in the way, grinning sheepishly.

“We’re always solving the energy crisis or putting an end to stagflation here at the Holy Ro’,” Steven said. He turned away and urged everyone else back to their seats for the second half of the meeting. Brendan saw the young woman looking at him again, but then she looked away and sat down on the other side of the room.

Brendan walked the streets now, thinking about what he’d heard. He imagined the “Hispanics” grinning as an angry, flat-nosed, ex-boxer Irish Hank took his shit and got out of South Yonkers; and looming, larger-than-life Santos calling all his friends thieves in a voice that shook the penthouse windows. But there had been no opportunity to inquire further what Santos had meant about Argon. When the meeting was finally over, Brendan got Santos’s number from Russell Gide and planned to call him in the near future.

As Brendan walked, the wind blew cold from the direction of Thornwood, and hunted the gaps in his suit jacket. He had his collar turned up and his hands thrust deep into his pockets. His face felt chapped without the protection of the beard he’d grown out west.

By the time he got to East Street he’d warmed up a little from the vigorous walking. He felt good for the first time since the plane’s landing gear had barked onto the tarmac at Albany Airport. For the first time in a long time. He hadn’t exactly felt “good” in Wyoming. He had just felt obsessed. He’d been on the computer every night. While he should have been trying to drum up more clients, he had been consumed by something else.

He thought of the girl he had seen at the AA meeting, looking over while Santos ranted.