The Rule of Nine

EIGHT

The United States Senate was without question the most exclusive club in the world. But tonight Joshua Root was wishing he had joined the Rotary Club instead. He was sitting alone in the darkened living room of his home in Chevy Chase holding a single sheet of paper, a printout of a personal e-mail from his computer upstairs. It was the second message in less than a month from an old acquaintance, someone he hadn’t seen or heard from in years, a former friend from the dark days of his youth. Root had promptly responded to the earlier e-mail and thought it was over. But apparently it wasn’t.

He had survived in the snake pit of Washington politics for three decades. Now in his senior years, he thought about the fact that at the peak of his power, his past was finally catching up with him. It seemed that everything around him was suddenly collapsing. He seemed to be suffering from increasing bouts of anxiety and confusion. Whether it was age or his worsening physical condition he couldn’t be sure. But lately it seemed that he was constantly perspiring.

The mess in Washington, the disarray within his own party, was rapidly transforming the achievements of the previous year into a nightmare. They had come to power on the shoulders of voters with a promise of fresh politics and openness in government. Now, little more than a year later, they were left to founder on an agenda of costly social reforms that few on either side of the aisle embraced. In the end they had to be negotiated in the middle of the night behind locked doors, and purchased with billions of dollars in pork.

Root had been through tough times before, but never anything like this. With high unemployment and an ever present recession, voters across the country were growing restive. Their mood was increasingly ugly. An invitation to a tea party could mean anything from tar and feathers to a lynching.

The powers in Washington had lost control. In their place was a mob of itinerant Internet bloggers, constantly picking through political trash looking for dirt. The minute they found it, the story would play in a continuous loop over the national bullhorn, the round-the-clock cable news networks looking for ratings.

To Root, the delusional mood among leaders in Washington resembled the sense of serenity at Versailles the night before the French Revolution. Of course, his sense of dread was heightened by the knowledge he possessed.

The most odious scandal in American political history was bubbling like a hot yellow cauldron just beneath the surface of the nation’s capital. And with millions pounding the streets looking for work, the timing couldn’t have been worse.

For as far back as Josh could remember, senior members of Congress had been raking in large sums of money from interested parties on legislation. The casual observer might ask, “What else is new?” But this money was not in the form of campaign contributions, and the sums being transferred would have dwarfed the national treasuries of a few small countries. It had been going on for years, long before Root arrived in Washington, and was without question the best-kept secret in town. Over the decades sizable personal fortunes had been transferred from multinational corporations, and in some cases foreign governments, into secret numbered bank accounts owned and controlled by powerful key members of Congress.

It was never discussed. No one ever talked about it. It was considered the poorest of form ever to put anything in writing. Votes were peddled with a wink and a nod, and the money wired in from overseas accounts where U.S. authorities had limited reach. The practice was of long standing, and was clearly understood by all the players, almost as if it were written in invisible ink and included in the Senate rules.

Virtually all of the numbered accounts were in Europe, in countries where the sanctity of bank-secrecy laws was not only time honored, but a principal pillar of the national economy. For a considerable fee these banks would quietly roost on your growing bag of gold with never a name attached to it, just a number, along with written instructions for periodic disbursements.

Senior members of Congress, including Root, were now sitting on stacks of money that would have shamed the Rothschilds. This while they beat their gums and railed over bonuses paid to corporate executives, people who were forced to genuflect because they flew into town on private jets.

For Root, his lifetime under-the-table earnings now amounted to more than a billion dollars, all of it illegal and on which he paid no U.S. tax. After all, the 1040 IRS form didn’t include a line for “income derived from bribery.” It must have been an oversight.

Then it happened. Forty years of corruption and incompetence and the national economy suddenly tanked. Who could have guessed? They found themselves busy holding hearings and pointing fingers, mostly at everyone else, when some do-gooder at Treasury lit a fuse that legislative leaders on the hill were still trying to stamp out.

The government was strapped for cash, so it was natural that the Treasury Department would be looking for a new group of taxpayers to shear. It didn’t take long to find a pigeon. Who more deserving than American citizens hiding large amounts of income in banks offshore? Somebody slipped an amendment into a bill allowing Treasury to turn the diplomatic and economic screws on foreign banks holding deposits belonging to U.S. citizens. What they wanted were the names of Americans holding secret numbered accounts so they could impose taxes and penalties on undeclared income. And it would be an added bonus if they threw a few of the tax dodgers in prison as a warning to the rest.

Before Root and his friends could move to kill the bill, a number of foreign governments similarly strapped for cash jumped on the idea. What had been a private food fight in Washington suddenly turned into an international free-for-all and was threatening to get out of control.

Neglecting to report a modest amount of income on foreign rental properties was one thing. Explaining away vast fortunes in numbered accounts in what was clearly an institutionalized system of public corruption dating back decades was another.

Root and his friends began scrambling for some way out. They couldn’t transfer the funds without creating a paper trail and shooting off international warning flares for money laundering.

Quietly they appealed to the manhood of their Swiss bankers, questioning whether any sovereign nation should cede such intimate powers as bank secrecy to a bullying superpower. If the bankers would only push back, members of Congress would quietly knee the Treasury Department in the groin from behind.

It took nearly two years of testy negotiations with the State Department and Treasury before Josh and his friends could get the genie back in the bottle and hammer the cork into place once more.

Under the plan only a limited number of American account holders would be identified. These were to be selected at random. At least that was the theory. Since no one could be sure whether they would be in the group to be outed or not, the theory was that the random disclosures would force a large number of U.S. citizens to come clean. It was a good argument, except for one thing. The names of current and former members of Congress suddenly went off the banks’ official books. They would never be dropped in the hat, and therefore would never be disclosed. Business would go on as usual. At least that was the dream before Josh received the first e-mail.

Root couldn’t be sure, but he had a good idea of who the man was. In the two e-mails received so far, he’d signed off using the name “the Old Weatherman.”

The Weathermen were a loosely knit organization of student radicals dating back to the late 1960s. They were a splinter group of the Students for a Democratic Society. Their goal was the violent overthrow of the United States government. Eventually the organization died like everything else, of old age.

Root knew all about them because he had once been a member. It was during the early seventies. Using a different name and a false ID, Josh had participated in a number of acts, including the bombing of two federal buildings and a Bank of America in Southern California. The bank bombing, which had taken place in the middle of the night, resulted in the unintended death of a guard no one knew was present. It was this that brought Root to his senses. He quietly dropped out of the organization a few weeks later and cycled back into the real world.

But the Old Weatherman, now sending missives to him, knew about it. Not only did he know about Root’s past, but he had details and evidence that could tie Josh to the bank bombing.

Root looked down at the single sheet of paper in his quivering hand. He’d known when he made the first payment that there would be no end to it. Now he wanted another half million. This to keep quiet. Or else he would send the information to the police. The Weatherman had already collected two and a half million, wired from Root’s Swiss bank account to another numbered account in Lucerne. The Old Weatherman was forcing Root to take dangerous chances wiring large sums of money around in the open. It was almost as if he was enjoying it. No doubt a true believer who never gave up the cause and was angry with Root, who had sold out and was now part of the power structure.

It was as if he knew that Josh had a bottomless pit filled with cash. But how could he know? He crumpled up the e-mail in his hands, balled it into a tight wad, started to throw it at the wall, then saw himself in the mirror and stopped. Sooner or later he would have to deal with the man, one on one. Root couldn’t chance going to anyone else. “Better the devil you know than the one you don’t.”