Re: 1976 - Division by Zero
Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2023 11:43 pm
Chapter 21
The Seer’s Office, 13th Floor, National Security Council Building, Washington D.C
The Seer read Achillea’s report of her operation in Aurandel quietly with only a raised eyebrow at some of the more interesting sections. Eventually he put it down and asked her mildly, “Achillea, have you ever heard of the concept of collateral damage?”
“Of course, it’s the thing you try and minimize when we’re doing targeteering.” There was a very long pause before she continued. “I’ve never understood why.”
“Obviously.” The Seer’s voice had a note of dryness in it. “Let’s examine the concept a little shall we? The problem we had was that a move by the State of North Carolina to eliminate the dysfunctional administration of Aurandel and replace it with a functional administration would result in numerous discrepancies between the town and county records being exposed and this would endanger our family. Therefore, the local records would have to be destroyed so their replacement would be by duplicating the state records – whose content is acceptable to us. Agreed?”
“I think so.” Achillea made a mental note to borrow a dictionary later. Without saying a word, the Seer reached into a desk draw, took out a copy of Funk and Wagnalls and gave it to her. She dipped her head in thanks and the two exchanged friendly grins. It wasn’t the first time they’d had conversations of this type.
“The problem is that in doing so, you managed to burn down two buildings and got nearly fifty people killed. And that’s just the start of it. We’ll come on to the longer-term consequences later.”
“Boss, we couldn’t just burn down the courthouse. I know we have before, but those were different circumstances. Given the situation in the town, a courthouse mysteriously burning down would never have been taken as an a accident. There would have been a major investigation of what somebody was trying to cover up and that was something we don’t need. When I found there were four factions fighting for control of the town, I knew I’d have to set up something else. I didn’t care about a gang war but it had to involve the courthouse going up for reasons related to that war. So, I was setting that up when somebody beat the tar out of the Sheriff.”
“Who did that by the way? Your report doesn’t say.”
“I honestly don’t know. We never will know now; everybody who could tell us is dead. Anyway, I also found out that the records weren’t in the courthouse, they were in the police station. That made a world of difference. A courthouse getting burned down is one thing, an attack on a police station is something else. It’s close to civil war. There had to be an extraordinary situation to justify it. I only killed three people, Boss, then they started killing each other. I just watched. Well, before the final fight started, then I was defending myself.”
“Extraordinary, yes. That is the word I’d use. Do you realize you’ve brought almost the entire meat industry to a standstill? Quite apart from everything else, nobody will be getting a turkey for Thanksgiving. Including us by the way; we can’t get a turkey for love or money. Believe me, Igrat’s tried both.”
“She always does, No change there.”
“Agreed. But the point is, in an election year, there is a major food crisis in this country and people can’t get their meat. This is a nation of carnivores. They may not notice an international crisis or two and the complexities of national finance are of no real interest but when Joe comes home from a hard day’s work and finds his wife crying because she couldn’t find a steak for his dinner, he gets mad. The political consequences are going to be disastrous for the incumbent. That doesn’t really worry us; our role here is just to provide a bit of inertia so that they don’t rush into rash decisions. We’ve no real interest in who sits in the White House, or on the Hill either. Well, most of us don’t, but the Senior Chief does. He’s looking for you; he thinks you’re responsible for the prospect of putting a Democrat into the White House.”
“Oh.” For the first time, Achillea looked slightly nervous. “You know, I think I met one of his relatives.”
“Oh, indeed. The problem is that everybody feels this meat business personally. They blame the man in charge for it. Now, the USDA and so on are going to have a whole new set of controls to make sure this never happens again. I’d think that we’ll see each carcass tracked individually and that’s going to cost people. At the moment, there’s no meat in the system at all. It’s all been withdrawn. Every butcher’s shop is closed down while its equipment is checked and sterilized. The authorities are giving priority to the small independent butchers first, they think that they’re more likely to be clean so they can get more back in operation faster. Also, those small family butchers will be hurt worst by the freeze. Frankly, there’s also an element of ‘the big guys caused this, they can suffer’. The cost is going to run into billions though. The government is going to have to carry the cost eventually, one way or another. Add in the tight controls on factory farms that will make them much less profitable and meat prices are going to rise and stay up.
“Let’s put this into perspective, honey. Last year, the meat and poultry industry processed 8.6 billion chickens, 34.3 million cattle, 242 million turkeys, 2.5 million sheep and lambs and 110.4 million hogs. Sales alone totaled 81 billion dollars and by the time salaries, taxes and ripple effects on other industries are included, the meat and poultry industry generates 225 billion dollars per year to the U.S. economy. That’s roughly 6 percent of our entire GDP. Lillith’s had a look at the figures for me and she estimates the country will take an economic hit of roughly 25 billion by the time this disaster plays out.”
Achillea gulped; stunned by the sheer scale of the ongoing disaster. When she spoke there was an edge of panic in her voice. “But that’s not my fault. It was Nathan Stauffer and the people at Pendlewood Farms who came up with this scheme.”
The Seer sighed. “You know, the strange thing is that for all the damage this affair is going to do, the actual extent of the problem is quite small. A relatively small number of infected hogs appear to have gone through the system. Probably no more than three quarters of a million, less than one tenth of one percent of the total. Most of those will have gone to processors where it was sterilized. Most butchers sterilize their equipment every evening, quite a few more often than that. So the damage is probably very limited although I suspect quite a few cases of flu were actually brucellosis. If it had been left alone, the whole business would have been resolved as a series of isolated instances. But, the way it came out at once has magnified the damage out of all proportion. So that much of it is the result of the actions you took. Collateral damage.”
Achillea was thinking. “Seer, did you know that game runs through an entirely different meat processing chain from farm? Goat, deer, pheasant, wild turkey, all of that stuff, they all go through a different butchering system. The two don’t touch. So they won’t be affected. Nor will fisheries. Red Lobster is already doing very well, people queuing down the street.”
The Seer thought for a second, then got up and went to the door of his office. “Lillith, honey, shouldn’t we be buying shares in fisheries and game suppliers?”
“Ahead of you on the fisheries Boss; I started buying in when Achillea sent those first samples up. I’ll get on the game side of things right away. Hunting might take a bump up as well.”
“Thanks, honey.” The Seer closed the door again and returned to the discussion.
“Talking about hunting, what do we do about Randolph Bragan? The FBI as good as said they’ll do nothing about him. He’s covered his tracks too well.”
“And nor will we. In our official capacity, he’s not a threat to national security even by the most liberal of definitions. In our private capacity, he’s no threat to us. So we do nothing. We’re not a group of avenging angels. Understand?” There was a solid note of warning in the Seer’s voice that Achillea knew was not to be disregarded.
“Understood. By the way, somebody might get word to Conrad, wherever he is. Miriam Margolis-Jacobs is doing very well for herself.”
“I’ll see to that. Now, we move on to the next clutch of collateral damage from this Aurandel business. The Savings and Loan scandal. You and Emelia were right, the Savings and Loan industry was taking good money from investors, making excessive loans on worthless or near-worthless properties, and pocketing the proceeds. The Securities and Exchange Commission are ripping them apart. It appears that Emelia was right; the whole Savings and Loan industry is built on a mountain of massively overvalued assets. As of this morning, 747 out of the 3,234 savings and loan associations in the United States have had their operations suspended because the assets securing their accounts are essentially worthless. It’s getting worse hourly; as more have their doors padlocked, they throw additional strain on the others. The public is beginning to get nasty as well. Last night, the Director of Plans/Systems and Logistics was mobbed and had his car overturned when he took his wife shopping. It seems that people thought the S&L parking permit was ‘Savings and Loans’. He’s spending this morning trying to think of a convincing reason why he was using his official vehicle to take his wife shopping. Be that as it may if the government bails out the industry, the seven hundred plus S&Ls I mentioned will take nearly 89 billion dollars to refund. Lillith reckons the total may well go to a hundred and twenty-five billion.”
Achillea whistled. “To think a jerk like Heckman could have been involved in something that big.”
“He was one of hundreds, probably thousands of small fry. The real problem is the damage to the banking system. Lillith thinks that the combined S&L scandal plus the disaster in the meat industry will throw the government into a financial deficit for at least five years and flip the economy into a recession for at least that long. The collapse of the S&Ls is going to make it harder for people to buy homes and that means fewer will be built, hitting the construction industry and creating further damage. It could be a decade before we finally see the end of the repercussions of all this.”
“What about the people who run those S&Ls.” Achillea was both angry at the extent of the disaster and bewildered by the way her actions in a small town appeared to have caused it. Above all, she wanted to know that the people behind the rackets had been punished. “I know they must have ordered that attack on the police station. Heckman didn’t have the guts to come up with that on his own.”
“They probably did, and that’s something that’s being investigated right now. There’s a new definition of fraud running around. The FBI calls it control fraud. The events in Aurandel are both examples of control fraud in that the CEO of the companies involved used their positions to remove the checks and balances on fraud within a company through the use of selective hiring and firing. These tactics can position the executive in a way that allows him or her to engage in accountancy fraud and embezzle money, hide shortfalls, or otherwise defraud investors, shareholders, or the public at large. In the S&L case, they involved investments that have no readily ascertainable market value. The CEOs used appraisers that will assign unrealistically high values and auditing firms that will bless the fraudulent accounting statements. Again, though, this is nothing to do with us in either of our sets of interests. The most we can do is make sure legislation to stop it happening again is well-crafted and goes through smoothly.”
The Seer sighed slightly. “And that, Achillea, is collateral damage. Now scoot, we’ve both got things to do. Oh, and head up to Saranac sometime and shoot something edible for our Thanksgiving dinner.”
A few minutes later, the Seer was immersed in a file when Lillith knocked on the door and came in. “I thought I’d let you know, I’ve looked into game and hunting supplies and bought some small shareholdings. Prices are already going up so other people are onto the same line of thought. Did you have to send Achillea to sort that problem out?”
The Seer grinned. “Achillea isn’t really a person, she’s a force of primal chaos. Whatever she does has consequences far beyond her initial actions. I think Howie Lovecraft had her in mind when he invented Nyarlathotep. Anyway, she did what we needed which was to get those records destroyed in a way that didn’t link back to us, and in doing so, she’s cleaned out a set of problems we didn’t even know existed. That’s good enough for government work.”
The Seer’s Office, 13th Floor, National Security Council Building, Washington D.C
The Seer read Achillea’s report of her operation in Aurandel quietly with only a raised eyebrow at some of the more interesting sections. Eventually he put it down and asked her mildly, “Achillea, have you ever heard of the concept of collateral damage?”
“Of course, it’s the thing you try and minimize when we’re doing targeteering.” There was a very long pause before she continued. “I’ve never understood why.”
“Obviously.” The Seer’s voice had a note of dryness in it. “Let’s examine the concept a little shall we? The problem we had was that a move by the State of North Carolina to eliminate the dysfunctional administration of Aurandel and replace it with a functional administration would result in numerous discrepancies between the town and county records being exposed and this would endanger our family. Therefore, the local records would have to be destroyed so their replacement would be by duplicating the state records – whose content is acceptable to us. Agreed?”
“I think so.” Achillea made a mental note to borrow a dictionary later. Without saying a word, the Seer reached into a desk draw, took out a copy of Funk and Wagnalls and gave it to her. She dipped her head in thanks and the two exchanged friendly grins. It wasn’t the first time they’d had conversations of this type.
“The problem is that in doing so, you managed to burn down two buildings and got nearly fifty people killed. And that’s just the start of it. We’ll come on to the longer-term consequences later.”
“Boss, we couldn’t just burn down the courthouse. I know we have before, but those were different circumstances. Given the situation in the town, a courthouse mysteriously burning down would never have been taken as an a accident. There would have been a major investigation of what somebody was trying to cover up and that was something we don’t need. When I found there were four factions fighting for control of the town, I knew I’d have to set up something else. I didn’t care about a gang war but it had to involve the courthouse going up for reasons related to that war. So, I was setting that up when somebody beat the tar out of the Sheriff.”
“Who did that by the way? Your report doesn’t say.”
“I honestly don’t know. We never will know now; everybody who could tell us is dead. Anyway, I also found out that the records weren’t in the courthouse, they were in the police station. That made a world of difference. A courthouse getting burned down is one thing, an attack on a police station is something else. It’s close to civil war. There had to be an extraordinary situation to justify it. I only killed three people, Boss, then they started killing each other. I just watched. Well, before the final fight started, then I was defending myself.”
“Extraordinary, yes. That is the word I’d use. Do you realize you’ve brought almost the entire meat industry to a standstill? Quite apart from everything else, nobody will be getting a turkey for Thanksgiving. Including us by the way; we can’t get a turkey for love or money. Believe me, Igrat’s tried both.”
“She always does, No change there.”
“Agreed. But the point is, in an election year, there is a major food crisis in this country and people can’t get their meat. This is a nation of carnivores. They may not notice an international crisis or two and the complexities of national finance are of no real interest but when Joe comes home from a hard day’s work and finds his wife crying because she couldn’t find a steak for his dinner, he gets mad. The political consequences are going to be disastrous for the incumbent. That doesn’t really worry us; our role here is just to provide a bit of inertia so that they don’t rush into rash decisions. We’ve no real interest in who sits in the White House, or on the Hill either. Well, most of us don’t, but the Senior Chief does. He’s looking for you; he thinks you’re responsible for the prospect of putting a Democrat into the White House.”
“Oh.” For the first time, Achillea looked slightly nervous. “You know, I think I met one of his relatives.”
“Oh, indeed. The problem is that everybody feels this meat business personally. They blame the man in charge for it. Now, the USDA and so on are going to have a whole new set of controls to make sure this never happens again. I’d think that we’ll see each carcass tracked individually and that’s going to cost people. At the moment, there’s no meat in the system at all. It’s all been withdrawn. Every butcher’s shop is closed down while its equipment is checked and sterilized. The authorities are giving priority to the small independent butchers first, they think that they’re more likely to be clean so they can get more back in operation faster. Also, those small family butchers will be hurt worst by the freeze. Frankly, there’s also an element of ‘the big guys caused this, they can suffer’. The cost is going to run into billions though. The government is going to have to carry the cost eventually, one way or another. Add in the tight controls on factory farms that will make them much less profitable and meat prices are going to rise and stay up.
“Let’s put this into perspective, honey. Last year, the meat and poultry industry processed 8.6 billion chickens, 34.3 million cattle, 242 million turkeys, 2.5 million sheep and lambs and 110.4 million hogs. Sales alone totaled 81 billion dollars and by the time salaries, taxes and ripple effects on other industries are included, the meat and poultry industry generates 225 billion dollars per year to the U.S. economy. That’s roughly 6 percent of our entire GDP. Lillith’s had a look at the figures for me and she estimates the country will take an economic hit of roughly 25 billion by the time this disaster plays out.”
Achillea gulped; stunned by the sheer scale of the ongoing disaster. When she spoke there was an edge of panic in her voice. “But that’s not my fault. It was Nathan Stauffer and the people at Pendlewood Farms who came up with this scheme.”
The Seer sighed. “You know, the strange thing is that for all the damage this affair is going to do, the actual extent of the problem is quite small. A relatively small number of infected hogs appear to have gone through the system. Probably no more than three quarters of a million, less than one tenth of one percent of the total. Most of those will have gone to processors where it was sterilized. Most butchers sterilize their equipment every evening, quite a few more often than that. So the damage is probably very limited although I suspect quite a few cases of flu were actually brucellosis. If it had been left alone, the whole business would have been resolved as a series of isolated instances. But, the way it came out at once has magnified the damage out of all proportion. So that much of it is the result of the actions you took. Collateral damage.”
Achillea was thinking. “Seer, did you know that game runs through an entirely different meat processing chain from farm? Goat, deer, pheasant, wild turkey, all of that stuff, they all go through a different butchering system. The two don’t touch. So they won’t be affected. Nor will fisheries. Red Lobster is already doing very well, people queuing down the street.”
The Seer thought for a second, then got up and went to the door of his office. “Lillith, honey, shouldn’t we be buying shares in fisheries and game suppliers?”
“Ahead of you on the fisheries Boss; I started buying in when Achillea sent those first samples up. I’ll get on the game side of things right away. Hunting might take a bump up as well.”
“Thanks, honey.” The Seer closed the door again and returned to the discussion.
“Talking about hunting, what do we do about Randolph Bragan? The FBI as good as said they’ll do nothing about him. He’s covered his tracks too well.”
“And nor will we. In our official capacity, he’s not a threat to national security even by the most liberal of definitions. In our private capacity, he’s no threat to us. So we do nothing. We’re not a group of avenging angels. Understand?” There was a solid note of warning in the Seer’s voice that Achillea knew was not to be disregarded.
“Understood. By the way, somebody might get word to Conrad, wherever he is. Miriam Margolis-Jacobs is doing very well for herself.”
“I’ll see to that. Now, we move on to the next clutch of collateral damage from this Aurandel business. The Savings and Loan scandal. You and Emelia were right, the Savings and Loan industry was taking good money from investors, making excessive loans on worthless or near-worthless properties, and pocketing the proceeds. The Securities and Exchange Commission are ripping them apart. It appears that Emelia was right; the whole Savings and Loan industry is built on a mountain of massively overvalued assets. As of this morning, 747 out of the 3,234 savings and loan associations in the United States have had their operations suspended because the assets securing their accounts are essentially worthless. It’s getting worse hourly; as more have their doors padlocked, they throw additional strain on the others. The public is beginning to get nasty as well. Last night, the Director of Plans/Systems and Logistics was mobbed and had his car overturned when he took his wife shopping. It seems that people thought the S&L parking permit was ‘Savings and Loans’. He’s spending this morning trying to think of a convincing reason why he was using his official vehicle to take his wife shopping. Be that as it may if the government bails out the industry, the seven hundred plus S&Ls I mentioned will take nearly 89 billion dollars to refund. Lillith reckons the total may well go to a hundred and twenty-five billion.”
Achillea whistled. “To think a jerk like Heckman could have been involved in something that big.”
“He was one of hundreds, probably thousands of small fry. The real problem is the damage to the banking system. Lillith thinks that the combined S&L scandal plus the disaster in the meat industry will throw the government into a financial deficit for at least five years and flip the economy into a recession for at least that long. The collapse of the S&Ls is going to make it harder for people to buy homes and that means fewer will be built, hitting the construction industry and creating further damage. It could be a decade before we finally see the end of the repercussions of all this.”
“What about the people who run those S&Ls.” Achillea was both angry at the extent of the disaster and bewildered by the way her actions in a small town appeared to have caused it. Above all, she wanted to know that the people behind the rackets had been punished. “I know they must have ordered that attack on the police station. Heckman didn’t have the guts to come up with that on his own.”
“They probably did, and that’s something that’s being investigated right now. There’s a new definition of fraud running around. The FBI calls it control fraud. The events in Aurandel are both examples of control fraud in that the CEO of the companies involved used their positions to remove the checks and balances on fraud within a company through the use of selective hiring and firing. These tactics can position the executive in a way that allows him or her to engage in accountancy fraud and embezzle money, hide shortfalls, or otherwise defraud investors, shareholders, or the public at large. In the S&L case, they involved investments that have no readily ascertainable market value. The CEOs used appraisers that will assign unrealistically high values and auditing firms that will bless the fraudulent accounting statements. Again, though, this is nothing to do with us in either of our sets of interests. The most we can do is make sure legislation to stop it happening again is well-crafted and goes through smoothly.”
The Seer sighed slightly. “And that, Achillea, is collateral damage. Now scoot, we’ve both got things to do. Oh, and head up to Saranac sometime and shoot something edible for our Thanksgiving dinner.”
A few minutes later, the Seer was immersed in a file when Lillith knocked on the door and came in. “I thought I’d let you know, I’ve looked into game and hunting supplies and bought some small shareholdings. Prices are already going up so other people are onto the same line of thought. Did you have to send Achillea to sort that problem out?”
The Seer grinned. “Achillea isn’t really a person, she’s a force of primal chaos. Whatever she does has consequences far beyond her initial actions. I think Howie Lovecraft had her in mind when he invented Nyarlathotep. Anyway, she did what we needed which was to get those records destroyed in a way that didn’t link back to us, and in doing so, she’s cleaned out a set of problems we didn’t even know existed. That’s good enough for government work.”