3

Con had repeatedly stressed second biggest robbery to Peach and Fitz way back on Independence Day morning at Fitz’s shambolic bachelor apartment in the Mission district of San Francisco.

 He lived and breathed the very idea of bringing chaos and destruction to neXus, and he’d certainly been on a mission for the past year and a half of his life, as they all would be until it was over and they could each go their separate ways.

 Fitz was anchored to his usual dealer’s spot.

 Each sat at one hundred and twenty degrees to the other around his prized circular antique and beer stained green baize card table, a dusty bottle of knocked off Locke’s Irish single malt whiskey holding centre stage below a low card sharp spotlight, Con’s magnesium cased Panasonic computer on charge atop a fade to black leather topped drinks trolley strategically placed between Peach and Fitz. Three full to the brim lead crystal shot glasses faced them at the perimeter apices of Con’s perfectly formed homo sapient triangle.

 “Hell, this has to be the world’s biggest robbery,” Fitz said. “Those numbers defy any rational description. Two hundred and fifty billion dollars? That’s more than some countries are worth.”

 “About the same as Indonesia or Saudi Arabia, give or take. Half the value of Russia’s gross domestic product.”

 “Nice work,” Peach said.

 Con stretched to pat his laptop as if it were a faithful lapdog, his shirt cuff catching Peach by not unwelcome surprise as it tickled past her bare tanned thighs.

 “Nothing left to chance. Our haul will easily surpass a quarter of a trillion if they don’t react quickly enough.”

 Con had studied the quirks of his quarry well.

 He’d presented a simple arrangement.

 All they were told up front was that he needed their help in a one-time life changer. He needed their street smarts, their cunning, their balls; in return he’d give them his inside knowledge, his plan, his mind.

 The setting, their obvious hunger, their constant stream of probing questions were fine with him; he wanted them to pick his logic and methodology to pieces, to tear it to shreds if they could.

 Knowledge was King.

 Planning was everything.

 And while Con certainly looked upon Fitz’s impossibly charmed oaken round table as their quasi-metaphysical playground, the sleek silver computer his blueprint nuts and bolts simulacrum, there was still one priceless ingredient missing from this triangular troika:

 Vladimir.

 Vlad’s binding catalysing presence was essential to the success of Con’s mission, because only Vlad could square the circle and bring the dream to reality for them all.

 Con would dearly have preferred there be a fourth, empty, shot glass facing Vlad’s craving that night, but that would have to wait for another time, another place, another table.

 And he knew Vlad best of all.

 For Vlad there would be no out, no escape.

 His inevitable recruitment had reached the tipping point, only one last nudge needed to slam shut the mantrap. Once Vlad signed on the dotted line he’d have to accept his fate too, no going back for any of them:

 Trussed.

 Vlad was now, well and truly, and Con felt like a complete shit.

 Vlad should never have trusted him.

 The crew needed him.

 The IRS wanted him.

 Vlad was in whether he liked it or not.

¥ ¥ ¥ ¥

 Fitz leaned forward, holding Con’s gaze. “Convince us. Time to lay your cards on my goddam table.”

 Con in that instant of knowing realized their weekly poker games around Fitz’s table had been fixed from the start.

 But he let it slide.

 Make or break time.

 “Listen carefully. The biggest robbery is happening day in, day out, everywhere in the world. So blatant and insidious that we put up with it. We’re in a perpetual whiteout, scammed in a snow job of Himalayan proportions.” Con paused, a sudden, painful memory invading his train of thought. “I’m no churchgoer. I’ve only been sucked back once since I was sixteen. But consider this; it’s outlawed by over two billion Muslims now, and was railed against by Jesus two thousand years ago.”

 No reaction from Peach or Fitz.

 “That’s a third of the world’s population,” Con said.

 Nothing.

 Four beat silence.

 “Taxes?” Peach said at last.

 “Close. Who are the moneylenders in our temple right now?”

 Eight beat silence this time.

 “The banks?” Peach eventually said, involuntarily returning Con’s sudden smile.

 Ngadla!

 I have eaten…

 “You’re talking usury. Loans at high interest, right?”

 “Damn right I am Peach, and our temple is planet blue, rock three, you with me? So if it means anything to either of you, we’ve also got the Quare Fellow on our side.”

 “Queer? Jesus?” Peach said. “You going Benny Hinn on us?”

 “Benny Hill more like,” Fitz said.

 “Well, you’ve lost me now.”

 “You’re right Peach,” Fitz said. “The condemned man. Brendan Behan’s play, The Quare Fellow. It’s complicated.”

 “Not that complicated,” Con said. “Behan was crucified too wasn’t he? By drink? We each have our crosses to bear.”

 Con leaned forward and steadily held out his shot glass over the lip of the Locke’s bottle. “To all condemned men, wherever they may —”

 “— And women,” Peach said.

 “Oh indeed, and women, wherever they may be. Because we’re all condemned, whether we know it or not.”

 They kissed glasses together with soft, dead clinks, Con knocking the rare smooth Irish whiskey back in one, Peach and Fitz taking their time and savouring the meniscus of smoke and oak-tinged flavours.

 “Damn,” Peach said, looking appreciatively at Fitz. “This stuff is good.”

 Fitz flashed his dimpled Vesuvios smile. “Mellow and pure as nature’s breath.”

 “And that stolen from Winston Churchill,” Con said. “Jesus, the Big Fella’ll be turning in his grave hearing you say that.”

 “You boys are on your own little gay planet. Who’ll be turning in his grave?”

 Fitz took another sip, his pinkie finger at a delicate forty-five degrees. “Michael Collins. Remember the movie? The great Easter Uprising, Dublin 1916.”

 “The yob from West Cork,” Con said. “Where Fitzy, this Yankee yobbo, hails from too.”

 “Oooh, Liam Neeson...” Peach said.

 “Yankee my ass. Julia Roberts; she played his nurse girlfriend Kitty Kiernan. She could give me a bed bath anytime.”

 “And that’s about all you’d get. Only she’d be using tweezers and industrial strength rubber gloves so’s not to get contaminated.”

 “Barbecue tongs.”

 “Dream on. If your luck was really in you might get a New York handshake.”

 “Below the belt, Con, below the belt.”

 “What happened next?” Peach said.

 Con turned to face her. He’d made a detailed study of Churchill and how the genocidal war criminal was elevated to faux hero status. “Churchill checkmated Collins into accepting the Irish Free State. That caused a civil war. Then Collins was assassinated by his own Cork men on his own Cork turf in the South.”

 “And we’ve had the troubles ever since,” Fitz said. “Cunning and devious to get them to turn on each other like that.”

 “When he was Colonial Secretary he came out strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes, as he called the Kurds and Iraqis.”

 “Charming man.”

 “A monster.”

 “He would not admit that a great wrong had been done to the indigenous people of America or Australia because a stronger and higher grade race had come in to replace them. I don’t see any difference between that idea and the mind of Adolf Hitler. Churchill would have gassed the Zulus and Irish if he thought he could get away with it.”

 “He did get away with it,” Fitz said. “Slaughterhouse 5. Dresden. Bomber Harris.”

 “Hiroshima and Nagasaki too. He vowed to wipe out every man, woman and child until there was not one Japanese left on the face of the earth. That’s exactly the same ruthless mindset we’ll be squaring up against when we pull this off.”

 Peach said, “When we pull off what, exactly?”

 Con gently ran his ankle up her calf, as if to say, hold it baby, I’m with you...

 She tensed.

 He could feel her heat when she flushed at his touch.

 He loved looking at her, the way she put her shiny black hair up with just a rubber band, no pretensions, a Voodoo Lounge T-shirt and tight denim mini skirt, she had the body to get away with murder.

 Con let her settle, Fitz none the wiser. “What they’ve been doing to us all this time, even after taxes, gives new meaning to the words daylight robbery.”

 His viewpoint was simple and heartfelt, and he laid it out for them, to be picked over late into that night and the nights to come.

 He began by reading aloud from his laptop screen the basis of the ransom demand-cum-manifesto he’d prepared, explaining how their strategy would work, and how essential it was to ensure their message got out once they achieved their objective:

 That is, taking down, in domino fashion, 23,957 independent banks, from the high Arctic down to Antarctica, together with their millions upon millions of downstream ATM, interbank and merchant computer links:

“Ever since the first credit cards arrived unbidden in our mailboxes almost half a century ago they’ve caused more misery, sleepless nights, divorces, bankruptcies and suicides  than legions of armies of lawyers. We’ve been hoodwinked: press ganged from cradle to grave to spend money we don’t have, to buy stuff we don’t need, to line bankers’ pockets that never end, while their usurious interest rates are nothing short of legalized theft.”

 “Work in progress, but that’s the skeleton so far.”

 “No,” Fitz said. “I think you nailed it.”

 “Maybe so,” Peach said. “But no way do they have banks at the South Pole.”

 “Sure they do. Two Wells Fargo ATMs at the McMurdo Station polar research facility. Seventy-eight degrees south, one six six east. Same thing.”

 “Jeez,” Fitz said, with an involuntary shiver. “I sure wouldn’t want to be the poor frozen asshole refilling them.”

 “Me neither. The ATM’s have satellite uplinks to feed transactions to and from Wells in the States and other major credit and debit card players around the world via intervening hubs and switches. Depends on the amount being withdrawn, floor limits and such, on who gets to authorize or decline. But the response time from there to here and back is sub three seconds.”

 “What are they gonna spend their money on down there?”

 “Beats me Fitz,” Con said. “Polar bear dancing maybe?”

 A leer from Fitz. “Lapland dancing?”

 Peach had a part-time profession along the same lines.

 Con blinked back an unbidden image of her long legs sinuously curved around a brass pole, the muscles in her arched back built like an Olympic swimmer’s. Steady now, back to work...

 “I’d sure have a captive audience down there,” Peach said. “Plenty of ice cold crispy greenbacks looking for a nice warm home.”

 “So it sounds,” Fitz said, “all of them crawling up their igloo walls with pussy drought.”

 “That’s the North Pole and Lapland,” Peach said, “where they have igloos and polar bears.”

 “Okay, you got us; three strikes.”

 “We should open a club down there,” Fitz said. “Call the Sopranos; put them out of their icicle-dick misery.”

 “They have ATMs and take plastic on cruise ships in Alaska and points north too,” Con said, reeling them back in to the discussion at hand. “They have every base covered, believe me: all air traffic circling the planet; turboprops on up to the largest Boeing and Airbus heavies; aircraft carriers; prisons, you name it...”

 Carefully, he refilled their three shot glasses to the brim and placed them in a precise equilateral triangle around the tabletop once more.

 He pressed on. “Little criminals rob banks, big criminals own banks. We need to respect the power they have, and that their power answers to no one. We’re pulling the tiger’s tail. Or, more accurately, amputating 23,957 tails. The collective pain’ll drive them all —”

 “— Apeshit,” Fitz said.

 Con let the word hang in the air.

 It described perfectly the Neanderthal reaction from the Enforcers that Con fully expected.

 “Worse Fitz,” Con said. “Much worse than that.”

 “Pulling is one thing,” Peach said. “Chopping tails off without an anaesthetic is another. I’m not sure I like that.”

 “Neither will they,” Con said. “But that’s our game plan, so that immediately gains us 23,957 powerful enemies worldwide, bumps us up a few notches, puts us in a certain amount of danger. No way to avoid it.”

 Con sensed his words were hitting home. The atmosphere within the cluttered room had changed. He could hear bubbles from the soothing glow of well-stocked matching six foot saltwater aquariums either side of a heavy oak bookcase.

 He took his time, examining this microcosm of Fitz’s life: a battered surfboard stood propped against a wall in the corner, wetsuit crumpled over an adjacent chair; a weights station with too much dust on it, the incline bench a repository for jeans and baseball caps and assorted bars of Mr Zog’s Sex Wax; dusty Nikon camera bodies with motor drives and oversize grey telephoto lenses; hexagonal dumb bells on the floor used as Playboy and Penthouse bookends; a Leaning Tower of Pisa stack of Fitz’s Surfer magazines showcasing his photographs from a decade covering the West Coast scene.

 Con picked up the information flow again. “Let’s examine some twilight tracks. 1975: an outspoken gold commentator in Indianapolis, thrown out of a high-rise window to his death, one of their favourite techniques. Upset the wrong people just as gold was about to go legit again in the USA. 1982: Italian P2 member Roberto Calvi —”

 “— P2?” Peach said.

 “Propaganda Due. An Italian right wing neo-Nazi Masonic Lodge, friends of the Vatican, now gone underground as P7, Propaganda Sette. Calvi was found at dawn hanging from an orange rope tied with a lover’s knot under London’s Blackfriars Bridge. He suffered from vertigo and we’re fed the line he staggered four miles from his apartment with a heavy rope, twenty-three grand in currency and twelve pounds of masonry in his pockets, then he walks the plank and throws himself off scaffolding?”

 “Insomnia,” Fitz said.

 “A sleepwalker,” Peach said.

 “A pharmakos sacrifice and a warning, the horse’s head in a bed routine, only taken further. 1991: Robert Maxwell, goes night diving without his water wings from the back of his yacht off the Canaries.”

 “I heard he Promis’d to sing like a canary,” Fitz said. “Rumours he was a Mossad spy. Maxwell wasn’t his real name. He was buried in Jerusalem with a state funeral. Mossad.”

 “No doubt,” Con said. “Some say he may even be in South America. Whatever, you don’t rob the Mafia. 1999: Edmund J. Safra, a Lebanese. Another powerful billionaire banker — just like Calvi — offed in his fortified Monaco apartment after two masked intruders broke in. 2005: the pattern continues with Edouard Stern, part of Delta and the Lizard Brothers empire, shot to death in his allegedly impregnable six million dollar apartment right above a CCTV-surveilled police station in Geneva’s Old Town. He was under the illusion he was safe in his castle keep there.”

 “Maybe a cop did it,” Peach said.

 “He disabled the alarms and opened the door to the killer, who pumped in multiple double taps, so that’s not inconceivable. He sported a dildo and was dressed in a clear full latex bodysuit at the time.”

 “I need to get out more,” Fitz said.

 “2005: Art Zankel, the Citigroup backchannel consigliere in New York, another high-rise jumper testing the malleability of Ground Zero concrete. Soon after that, Wim Duisenberg, Godfather of the Euro, another high diver into the shallow end of his villa’s pool in the south of France. Now that’s seven powerful individuals, worth untold billions of dollars. Cult water carriers that needed erasing. In each case a clear message sent to those in the know.”

 “And I thought bankers were so unimaginative,” Peach said.

 “The day before Calvi went walkabout, his secretary, who kept the books for P2, went BASE jumping without a chute from the fourth floor window of Banco Ambrosiano in Milan. And Safra’s widow’s first husband — he died from two bullet wounds, an alleged suicide.”

 “Not three?” Fitz said.

 “A professional double tap,” Con said.

 “Not every day you hear of someone capping themselves twice on the way out,” Peach said.

 “Lame ass shooting,” Fitz said.

 “Gun in the wrong hand too.”

 “Ambidextrous?” Peach said.

 “Ambiguous more like. Nope, he was offed. The City of London Police investigated Calvi’s murder. They made certain a suicide verdict came in, despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s not called the Square Mile for nothing.”

 Fitz gave a knowing nod. “Shriners...”

 “Spare me,” Peach said. “The worst. Never keep their hands to themselves.”

 “Joseph Stalin once said, ‘Death solves all problems — no man, no problem.’ The common denominator with all these murders are the central banks. Each hit contracted to known or unknown intelligence agencies and or freelancers. Throw in gold price fixing, the Russian Mafiya, the usual octopus of suspects that keep cropping up like Soros and Sindona and Gelli, Archbishop Marcinkus and Greenspan, the Bank of England and Goldman Sachs and The Fed...”

 “Murky,” Fitz said. “Very murky...”

 “You sure you’re not just being over-paranoid?”

 “No Peach. Paranoia is my middle name. Paranoia is merely a microscope on reality. The same thing is happening now to microbiologists, war journalists, investigators, activists...”

 “You said controlled danger,” Peach said.

 Con nodded. “It’s vital we control the danger. We have to become the ultimate little criminals; anonymity is power. Power is complete invisibility.”

 “You never hear the bullet that kills you,” Fitz said, pulling the trigger on an imaginary rifle aimed between Peach’s breasts.

 “You do if it’s a gut shot,” Peach aimed back, right between Fitz’s balls, “and you die twenty minutes later from blood loss and shock.”

 “...Absolutely,” Fitz said. He threw back his Locke’s too quickly and coughed.

 Peach winked at him.

 “You’re both right. But a hit man’s bullet needs to be aimed at someone Peach. We’re insignificant to them. We’re lilywhites. We’re cleanskins. None of us have criminal records. Fitz, a barten —”

 “— Gigolo,” Fitz said, regaining his composure. “Cocktail God extraordinaire.”

 “That’s all the ladies ever do when they hear your lame lines at Vesuvios,” Peach said. “Giggle and leave.”

 “With me, at the end of the night, arm in arm.”

 “Arm in armlock. And as for your cocktails, extraordinary is the word.”

 Fitz looked askance at Peach, unsure if it was a compliment or not.

 Con continued. “Peach an exotic —”

 “— Sensei,” Peach said. “Dancing’s just rent money. Burns a few calories. Keeps me limber, keeps me supple.”

 “Limber is good,” Fitz said. “Supple is better.”

 “And me a washed up Yellow Cab —”

 “— What a crock,” Peach said. “You’re working a major software contract in Denver now Con. You don’t have to drive. You just detest computers. Get over it. Admit it.”

 “Occam’s razor. The bastards are on an exponential curve. One day they’ll do a HAL and overpower us all. Art Clarke was right, he’s always bloody right.”

 “You really believe that?”

 “A Sufi prophet predicted it in 1922.”

 “Not a chance,” Fitz said. “Never in my lifetime.”

 “He was a Khan,” Con said. “They generally know what they’re about. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan. How long you both plan on living anyway? Another sixty, seventy years if you’re lucky?”

 Con pulled his laptop over and displayed the quote that had fascinated him. He read it aloud. “The Khan said the conveniences and comforts of humanity will be linked by a single mechanism that will produce benefits beyond human imagination. ‘But the smallest mistake will bring the whole mechanism to certain collapse. In this way the end of the world will be brought about.’ He was right.”

 “So what’s your point?” Fitz said.

 “My point is he prophesied the invention of the silicon chip, which has evolved into a worldwide Borg-like network of computers. The smallest mistake is stage three — the introduction of skin chips linked to one enormous supercomputer, every human being tagged with a chip embedded in the hand. Stage four is goodnight Vienna, AI, Artificial Intelligence.”

 “Back to the robbery,” Peach said. “We’re getting off base here.”

 “But in a roundabout way Peach the prophecy is the key to pulling this off. The neXus system architects also made the smallest mistake. neXus has a fatal flaw, and we’re the ones to exploit its vulnerability. They won’t know what’s hit them. We’re perfect to pull this off. They won’t know who did it. They won’t know how. But the whole world will know why.”

 Con’s fledgling crew’s Corporate Mission was to remain little, SAS compact, a soon to be four-man cell with an emphasis on global customer service, discretion, the personal touch.

 In keeping with his little criminals speech Con delivered the coup de grâce which finally convinced them: a laptop projector slideshow meticulously detailing Con’s little plan to own a little piece of all 23,957 parasites for just a little while.

 His presentation finished, they stared at him in mute disbelief. Con calmly drained another shot glass, brought it down like a gavel, and waited for his words and images to do their job.

 “I need a drink,” Fitz eventually said, “is what I need.”

 “Me too,” Peach said.

 Con obliged, and another for himself, the triangle once again. Con’s golden rule: three menisci; any spillage and the perpetrator was immediately cut off.

 “So we do what the big boys do,” Con said, breaking the spell. “We host a little party, a little cardfest of our own. Our fourth quarter goal for this fiscal year a 23,957-bank hostile takeover. Now you see where I’m coming from?”

 “I do now ... one more time Con,” Peach said.

 “We have asymmetric advantage — surprise, left field technology and the luxury of time. No one gets hurt, just the banks. The stakes are more than a quarter of a trillion US dollars. We hit them over Christmas and New Year to cause maximum financial and publicity impact in every country. We steal their system over six consecutive days using state of the art focused electromagnetics to secretly erase their system backup tapes. On the seventh day we disable their ability to recover their system by setting off simultaneous controlled flux compression generator bombs at their transcontinental computer nerve centres. They immediately start haemorrhaging tens of billions of dollars a day worldwide, every single day until we return their system rebuild tapes. This happens between four and seven days later, once the gravity of their situation sinks in. We do not go directly to jail, we do pass go, we do collect.”

 Con looked from Peach’s serious expression to a bland, poker faced Fitz.

 “Fitz, you in?”

 “I’m in.”

 “Peach, you can handle it?”

 “Hai. No sweat.”

¥ ¥ ¥ ¥

 Trust.

 Con had outlined his Corporate Vision.

 And in return, they could live their rightful due for the very first time in their sorry, short changed lives, the ultimate long con, the American dream promised to them since birth in an everlasting media snake oil blitz of greed.

 Fitz and Peach drank to Con, menisci and spillage intact. They’d brought up excellent points that needed to be brainstormed, but they had committed in principal. They believed in his expertise and knew it would work. All Con had to do was fulfil his part of the bargain and come up with the guns, chemicals and hardware in San Francisco and London, and that was already coming together on schedule.

 Con slowly brought the Locke’s toward his lips, but just before docking, the merest of amber trickles snaked down the curved glass between his fingers and thumb and hung for an aching second at the base. Con focused his full attention on the pear-shaped droplet, willing it not to fall, but it languidly elongated, then morphed into a perfect golden sphere which plummeted with a slow motion splash onto the green baize directly opposite his solar plexus.

 He lowered his still full glass and centred it directly over the wet black bullseye, then slid the glass slowly past the stain so that it clinked dully against the Locke’s bottle.

 “Hell,” Con said to no one in particular. “Sign me up for the American dream too.”

 I’m not proud.