“You don’t need to stay with me,” Milton Abrams said to Viz McBride, sitting on his couch. “It’s not like I’m in any personal danger.” “I’m not the guy you have to convince,” Viz said. “Graham is.” “And if I asked you to leave?”
“I’d tell you that you’d have to call 911 and have me arrested. Graham wants me with you until he gets back and can figure out who killed Tony Gilbert, and why.”
“Then maybe your time would be better spent doing that.”
Viz rose from the couch. He hoped that his six-foot-four height, supplemented by his cowboy boots, might help accomplish what he hadn’t through argument: put an end to the discussion.
“I do two things,” Viz said, looking over at Abrams sitting at the dining table. “And two things only. I protect people and I do electronic surveillance and countersurveillance. That’s my role in Graham’s firm. He may send someone out here to look into the murder or he may not. There’s a reason why he hasn’t and I’m not going to second-guess him.”
Viz walked past Abrams and into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee.
“What about my privacy?” Abrams asked when Viz returned.
Glancing over at the DVD player in which Abrams had watched him locate a bugging device, Viz said, “You haven’t had any privacy for a long time.”
Abrams reddened. “You know what I mean.”
Viz caught on to what the real issue was for Abrams.
“You want to get laid, get laid,” Viz said. “It’s not like I’ll be sitting in your bedroom.” He sat down on the couch again. “You sleep with her before?”
Abrams nodded.
“Then it ain’t no secret.” Viz pointed at the table. A couple of legal pads lay in front of Abrams, along with a stack of Federal Reserve research papers. “Don’t you have testimony to prepare?”
Abrams opened his mouth to speak, as if to keep arguing the point, but closed it again in surrender. He then nodded and said, “I think it’s more of a public suicide.”
“Graham says you’re a straight shooter,” Viz said. “Makes it more likely that you’ll catch a ricochet. You want to try it out on a civilian?”
“You follow the markets? “ Abrams asked.
Viz shrugged. “Not really. I look at my retirement account statements, but Graham and his people make all of the decisions.”
“That bother you?”
“No. We’ve ridden out all of the…” Viz grinned. “What do you all call them? Corrections? I’m not sure what was being corrected, they all seemed like collapses to me.”
“And I think there’s going to be another one.”
Viz’s grin died. He didn’t like to hear from a Federal Reserve chairman that his retirement account was going to tank. He leaned forward on the couch.
Abrams turned fully toward him, resting his arm on the back of the chair.
“You know what an equity bubble is.”
Viz nodded. “Like the stock market in the late 1990s and the real estate market in the 2000s.”
“We now have a government debt bubble. We have about ten trillion dollars of treasury bonds and treasury bills out there, but they’re not worth that much. Not even close, because we can’t pay back all of the money. The only way we’d ever be able to is to turn over chunks of the country to the holders of the bonds.”
Viz pointed toward the window. “You mean hand over Central Park to the Chinese in exchange for the paper?”
“And Yosemite and Yellowstone and Ellis Island and Alcatraz.”
“What’s gonna happen when people figure that out?” Abrams smiled. “We’ll have what we used to call a correction.”
Viz thought for a moment. “But if you come out and admit that, then the whole thing—”
“Collapses.”
Abrams rose and walked toward Viz, stopping in the middle of the room.
“The year before the Berlin Wall fell,” Abrams said, “Graham told me a story he heard in Dresden.” He pointed upward. “A kid watching a circus asks his father, ‘What’s the man on the tightrope doing with that pole?’ The father answers, ‘He’s using it to balance himself.’ The kid then asks, ‘What if it gets away from him?’ And the father answers, ‘It won’t. He’s keeping it steady.’”
“Sounds like at least some people recognized that the Soviet Union was on the verge of falling,” Viz said.
“But not the CIA, not Reagan, not Bush, not Kissinger, not Rice, not Rumsfeld, not Cheney, not the State Department. Nobody. They all got it wrong. They were completely, even ideologically, oblivious.”
“But they all took credit for it when it happened.”
Abrams locked his hands on his waist. “This time around it will all be about blame.”