“After two weeks of contentious and often emotional debate, the federal government's far-reaching and historic plan to bail out the nation's financial system was signed into law by President Bush on Friday afternoon . . .
“Advocates say the plan is crucial to government efforts to attack a credit crisis that threatens the economy and would free up banks to lend more. Opponents say it rewards bad decisions by Wall Street, puts taxpayers at risk and fails to address the real economic problems facing Americans.”
—Excerpt from “Bailout is Law”, CNN Money, 10/4/2008 (Jeanne Sahadi)
“When the Justice Department recently closed its criminal investigation of Goldman Sachs, it became all but certain that no major American banks or their top executives would ever face criminal charges for their role in the financial crisis.
“Justice officials and even President Obama have defended the lack of prosecutions, saying that even though greed and other moral lapses were evident in the run-up to the crisis, the conduct was not necessarily illegal.
“But that characterization of the financial industry’s actions has always defied common sense — and all the more so now that a fuller picture is emerging of the range of banks’ reckless and lawless activities, including interest-rate rigging, money laundering, securities fraud and excessive speculation.”
—Excerpt from “No Crime, No Punishment”, New York Times editorial, 8/25/2012
Jones knew he was practically a cliché of the “evil”, high-earning Wall Street money baron, behaving like this. And frankly, he didn’t give a shit. What was the point of having money if you didn’t enjoy it? Jones enjoyed big houses, fine, expensive imported wines costing hundreds of dollars a bottle, rare port, illegally-imported Cuban cigars, Kobe beef—and he didn’t care what all the non-job-creators thought about it. Besides, he was here in the privacy of his well-upholstered, highly-secure Upper West Side Brownstone apartment; not only would no one see him, how would anyone ever know?
Jones leaned his chair back on two legs and propped his slippered feet on the table. His Mom had always given him an earful whenever he had tried that growing up, insisting in that paranoid parental way that it was not only possible, but indeed inevitable that he would some day lean too far back, fall over, and split his head open on the floor. “While you’re under my roof, you’ll obey my rules!” she had always said.
Well, it was his damn roof and his damn table, and he was 57 years old and he didn’t have to listen to that irritating harridan any more. He took a contented puff on his cigar and frowned, wondering if he should call his mother and shuddering at the thought of another visit to that hellish place where he had stashed her. It was nice enough, he supposed, for an old folks’ home, but he hated. It reminded him that he was close to retirement age himself, and he dreaded the thought that he might end up in a hellhole like that. Not living so much as warehoused until he could die and get out of people’s way.
He needn’t have worried.
He was reaching for his glass of brandy when he heard a strange, loud popping noise from the foyer. Almost like the boom of a fireworks explosion, but softer. He thought he felt a slight puff of a breeze at the same time.
“Where . . .” he heard Claude’s voice from the other room, and it was abruptly cut off. Jones frowned and put his brandy back on the table just as a stranger walked into the room. He started to put his chair back on the ground but stopped when the stranger held up his hand, palm out.
“Don’t,” he said in a surprisingly deep voice for such an ordinarily-sized, regularly built guy. His expression was firm and assumed obedience.
Jones obeyed.
The man nodded. “Good,” he said. Jones noticed he was wearing fine leather gloves, but otherwise was dressed casually—jeans, pull-over knit shirt, light canvas jacket with lots of pockets. He smiled, but it didn’t quite make it all the way up to his warm, brown eyes.
“Now see here!” Jones said. The man shook his head and Jones stopped. There was something about his expression . . .
“Just shut the fuck up, you mercernary asshole,” the man said, with no particular anger or force. Jones opened his mouth, the man raised an eyebrow, and Jones subsided. His cigar, forgotten in his hand, continued to smolder, some ash dropping to the expensive dining room Axeminster.
“Good,” the man said. He walked around the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. “You’re a thief,” the man said to Jones, leaning forward and putting his elbows on the table.
“I beg your pardon?”
“No, not a chance,” the man said, disagreeing. “You’re not getting a pardon. Or mercy. Or any of that shit.”
“I’m afraid I don’t . . .”
The man put up his hand again and once again Jones stopped.
“You have stolen money, millions, from folks that couldn’t afford it. You’ve used that money to buy congressmen, state legislators, and influence the governor, various law enforcement folks, bribe SEC investigators, and probably lots of other stuff my research and the New York Times hasn’t shown up yet.” He took a breath, cocked his head to the side and fixed Jones with a look that was simultaneously sad and angry. “You’re a fucking asshole, Mr. Jones. You are genuinely evil.”
“I use my money to create jobs!” Jones said.
“Bullshit. You use your money to buy Axeminster carpets and cigars and lots of other shit you don’t need and probably don’t even want. That you may have created some jobs is practically an accident.” He looked around the dining room, at the chandelier, the silver flatware, the gold-edged plates, the crystal glassware, the Monet on the wall, and shook his head. “If I sold the shit in this room, I could fund 500 average income workers for a year. So don’t give me that bullshit about ‘job creators’.”
“But I have created jobs!”
“Pfft,” the man said, snorting. “Baldwin-Marks Investments, on annual income in access of $12.4 billion per year, has a total of 150 employees, mostly management. Your company produces nothing, nothing at all; no cars, no planes, no furniture, no drugs; nothing. All you clowns do is move money around, put companies out of business or up for action, and skim a percentage off the top.” He paused for a breath, and Jones didn’t interrupt. “A big percentage. I’d say that you guys were as bad as Vegas, but even in Vegas the house gets less than $10; Baldwin-Marks hauls in way more than that. You guys are fucking thieves, no more.”
“Now just a moment!” Jones said. “The government investigated, so did a number of Attorney Generals! We’re clean!”
“Attorneys General,” the man said. “I bet you say ‘court-martials’ instead of ‘courts-martial’, too. Lucky you had a rich papa to help you get into and through Harvard; you’re too fucking stupid to do something that requires actual brains, like fixing cars or designing bridges or something actually useful.
“We both know you’re a fucking thief. That you’ve managed to stay out of jail is a function of how much money you have, how much influence you can buy with it, and that’s all. The people you’ve stolen from—people who can’t afford a Monet for their walls, who can barely afford to pay their electric bills and can’t pay their medical bills—they don’t have that influence. They’re totally fucked by the likes of you.”
“What are you here for?” Jones said.
“Finally, something worth saying,” the man said, grinning. It was not a pleasant grin. “I’m here for justice.”
“The DOJ already investigated, and they found . . .”
“I said ‘justice’, not ‘the Department of Justice,’ you moron,” the man said. “You’re not only stupid, you don’t even listen. Nepotism at its finest.”
“But then . . .”
“The law isn’t going to do anything, so I’m here to administer justice,” he said, pushing back his chair and standing up. “Don’t move,” he said to Jones when Jones made as if to sit forward again. Jones froze. “Good boy; at least you can follow orders.” He walked around to Jones’ end of the table, scooping up a few items of silverware on the way. He bent down behind Jones chair, and Jones heard some soft clattering noises behind him, then a grunt.
The man came around into Jones’ line of vision again and reached for one of Jones’ feet, the nasty grin still on his face.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you to keep your feet off the table?” he said, and flicked Jones’ foot up into the air, overbalancing him and sending him crashing to the floor. Jones’ last thought before he closed his eyes for the last time and as he heard another strange popping noise, this time from much closer, was that maybe he really should have listened to his mother more.
“. . . apparently-bizarre accident when his chair tipped over, driving a piece of dinnerware into his skull, killing him almost instantly.
“Jones was the CEO and co-founder of Baldwin-Marks Investments, a high-flying venture capital firm that had come under fire from the federal government in recent years for their questionable trading and investment tactics and their role in the 2008 financial meltdown. Baldwin-Marks, after investigation by the State of New York’s Attorney General, along with related investigations by the U.S. Attorney for the State of New York and a separate Investigator General fraud case, was fined in a deal the details of which are sealed until 2015 . . .”
—excerpt from the New York Times obituary for Barton Spencer Marks, November 12th, 2013
Ever since he was a small, comic-reading kid, engaging in those long summer day debates as to who would win a battle (Mighty Mouse or Superman?) or a race (Superman or The Flash?) or was the smartest super-villian (Lex Luthor was usually the consensus choice, though Dr. Doom had his fans, too), he knew the answer to the ultimate question: What super-power would you want? For him it was simple:
Teleportation.
If you could teleport, you didn’t need a car. You didn’t need a plan, or be able to fly, or to run super-fast. You could even go easy on the martial-arts, Batman-type skills, if you could teleport out of the way of someone’s fist, pop back up behind them, and whack them on the back of the skull with a blackjack or something (though martial arts skills would be helpful, for sure). No more walking up all those damn hills to school; no more having to ask Mom to drive him places, or ride his bike on the bike-lane-less roads to the local pool a mile and half away. Nope, you could keep your spider sense or your bullet-deflecting bracelets or your telepathic ability to call whales or whatever (no that those wouldn’t be cool); he wanted to teleport.
He knew it was a ridiculous thing to wish for. And he would have forgotten it except that as a Navy Brat, with his dad changing assignment every few years, he got moved around so damn often that, with email not invented yet and long distant phone calls being so expensive and snail mail being so snail-like, teleportation was the only way to keep in touch with his friends.
So he worked on it. For years. Reading Charles Fort and Ambrose Bierce and J.B. Rhine. Parapsychology. Weird, bizarre magazines and news-letters and books that no one took seriously. He read and practiced meditation, studied stories of flying and levitating monks (both Eastern and Western), Indian fakirs. And beginning with his dad’s most recent transfer across the country from the paradise of San Diego (sun, surfing, beautiful women, big L.A. so near) to the hellhole of Northern Virginia for his dad’s new Pentagon assignment (humid summers; horrible traffic; terrible smog that in his opinion put L.A. to shame; snotty politician’s kids) just as he hit puberty, just in time for high school, just as (he thought) he was starting to make progress with Missy Morris in his Middle School class, that’s when it became an obsession.
If you asked him, he would tell you that he didn’t really believe it would ever work. “No, of course not, Mum! I’m not crazy, you know.”
“Sometimes I wonder, honey.”
“Ha ha ha.”
“Don’t get snotty, honey.”
“Sorry. But you know I’m too smart for that.”
His Mom, who he had only recently grown taller than, looked up her eldest son. He was smart, damn smart, even—that was his father in him, she thought—but he had been so distant and removed since they had settled in here in Fairfax, and she was worried about him. He looked down on her with as guileless an expression as he could muster. That is: Not very. She looked doubtful.
“All right, honey.” She sighed. “Just try to get out more, okay? This meditation is fine, but you need more sun.”
“Maybe when the humidity drops below a million percent.”
She smiled a bit. “I know it’s humid, sweetheart, but do try; it’ll be a good change for you.”
“Okay Mum.”
She smiled. “Good.” She turned away. “Dinner at 7 tonight, honey.”
“Okay Mum.” He left the house and went to the private spot he had located months before. It was in a small copse of woods near the upper-division little league field. Halfway in was a small shed or something that had been abandoned years ago. He had fixed it up and cleared out the debris—getting a nasty case of poison ivy in the process, damn this fucking place!—and used it as a hideaway when his mum, as she frequently did during the summer, kicked him out of the house. It was there he did his hardest work on the teleportation problem.
Because of course he believed it would work. Not only believe, but wanted it, with all his heart. For the beach. And the sun. And Missy. And the friends left behind. He knew it would work. But that final little shred of doubt wasn’t completely erased.
Until it did finally work.
“The body of Glass, former Reagan Administration official and close advisor to the current President, was found washed up near South Beach, the victim of an apparent drowning after becoming intoxicated. The search for Glass, who had spent the weekend on his private yacht, began when his wife reported him missing Tuesday afternoon. Mrs. Emily Glass’ suggestions of foul play were dismissed by the Miami P.D. spokesperson, who told the Herald, ‘While we will of course examine all possible causes, it appears clear that this was a simple case of intoxication followed by accidental drowning.”
—excerpt from Miami Herald obituary for James “Jamie” Glass, December 3rd, 2013
Chip didn’t hear the loud “Pop!” of suddenly-expanding air that heralded the arrival of his uninvited hunting companion—his heavy-duty, state-of-the-art, $12,500 set of noise-suppresors protecting him from any noise whatsoever; keeping his hearing was important to Chip—but he did feel a slight puff of breeze on his cheek.
Chip lowered his double-barreled shot-gun, the beautiful, antique 20-ought Winchester that he had managed to pick up on Craigslist from a desperate, out-of-work collector and former software engineer who had reached the end of his unemployment benefits and was now selling his various treasures, hoping to stave off foreclosure.
“What the fuck?” said Chip, turning and lowering his gun. He pulled down his Oakleys and squinted at the man opposite him; a medium height, brown-haired, ordinary-looking dude in jeans and knit shirt pullover, somewhat under-dressed for the chilly winter morning. The man gestured at Chip’s gun and said something.
“Huh?” said Chip, then shook himself and pulled off the ear protectors.
“I said, ‘Nice gun’,” the stranger said.
Chip was about as nonplussed as it was possible for a man to be. Rather than being suspicious or on-guard, all he could think to say was, “Um, thanks.”
“Sure. Mind if I look?” Brainlessly, Chip handed the weapon over. The stranger cracked it open, expertly checking that it was loaded, then snapped it shut. “Very nice. How much?”
“Huh?”
“How much did you get it for? Looks like an antique.”
“Oh.” Chip thought a moment, his brain finally coming back into gear. “Wait a minute; why the fuck should I tell you? And just who the hell are you?”
“You should tell me because I’m pointing a loaded shot-gun at your chest, Chip,” the stranger said, raising the gun and doing just that.
“Oh.” There was a pause of about three heartbeats. Well, exactly three; Chet counted. Though his seemed to be going by more quickly than a few minutes ago. “Well, $1250.”
The man looked shocked. “What?”
Chip looked pleased with himself. “Some software clown. Lost his job.”
“Jesus,” said the stranger, as if this just confirmed something for him. “You really are an asshole. Sit down,” he said, gesturing with the gun.
“What?”
“An asshole, and deaf to boot.”
“I’m not deaf,” Chip said. “These are the best damn ear-protectors . . .”
“Sit the fuck down.”
Chet sat, the wet, swampy ground squinching into his hip-waders, crawling up his underpants. He hated getting his underwear wet, dammit.
“Good,” said the man. He pressed the butt of the gun firmly against his shoulder, squatted down, and shot Chet square in the face. He waited a few minutes for the blood to finish spurting, then carefully placed the weapon in Chip’s hands.
“Steagall, one of the so-called ‘architects’ of the previous administration’s roll-backs of the various protections that many experts say were a great cause of the recent financial sector melt-down, was an avid hunter.
‘I don’t see how it could have happened,’ Mrs. Steagall told the Times; ‘He was a very experienced hunter, and knew better than to look down the barrel of a loaded weapon!’
“Despite Mrs. Steagall’s protests, the local coroner ruled the incident ‘death by accidental gun-shot wound’. Many Republican Party members and former colleagues of Steagall have expressed their sorrow at the loss . . .”
—excerpt from the Los Angeles Times obituary for Dennis Rupert “Chip” Steagall, January 9th, 2014
It took a while to learn how to control it. And for the longest time, he had no idea how to reproduce the conditions that caused that first, surprising teleport event that took him from that hated North Eastern hellhole back to his beloved house in San Diego. He was just glad that it had worked so early in the morning; he shuddered to think what would have happened if the new occupants of their old house had seen him popping up in the family room at, say, dinnertime rather than 4:30am when he did happen to appear.
And he was damn glad to find out about the rubber-band effect that seemed to snap him right back to his origin with only a tiny amount of effort. Even so, he learned to take a backpack with him, stuffed with warm-weather gear, shorts, money, a swiss-army knife, a flashlight, and his cell phone. Rubber-band or not, you couldn’t be too careful.
But repeating it, that took effort. Until it came to him what might have made the difference.
Emotion.
He had wanted, oh so badly wanted, to go home. Really home. To California. And that powerful longing must have had something to do with it, right?
It was silly, and illogical, and unscientific, but it worked because it was true.
He found out a couple of other things, too. Longing was good. But love worked better, best of all in fact. (There had been considerable love in his jump to San Diego.) But rage, pure unbridled rage, strangely enough that worked, too. Enough, anyway.
He got better over time, of course. It did become a bit tricky to hide, although his girfriends through college and his early twenties appreciated having a boyfriend who was, quite literally, at their beck and call. They didn’t question the ability, and he took pains to hide it. Well enough for love-struck young women, anyway; the human animal can overlook a lot of illogic when it wants to, one finds.
But as he got older, and married, and settled down, he wondered to what good he could put this. This . . . talent, gift, ability. He had no idea, really.
Until he re-read Zelazny’s “Angel, Dark Angel,” about a (government-sponsored) teleporting assassin. Whose job was to remove people from society who had become detrimental, useless, destructive to the world. The same morning that he read a newspaper report about yet another Wall Street baron getting off scot-free from the financial crisis.
Then he knew.
“While it is of course possible for all these deaths, so close together, and so highly-placed in the Wall Street community, to be the product of random chance, it strains the laws of probability.
We are completely appalled by the fact that both the government of this great state, as well as the U.S. Attorney’s office, refuses to investigate any possible connections between these deaths. To continue to hide behind state and local coroner and police reports withought acknowledging the obvious similarities between the victims is contemptible. The editors of the Journal demand that the government . . .”
—excerpt from the article “What’s Killing Wall Street?”, Wall Street Journal, January 23rd, 2010
The Attorney General of the United States was a relatively-young Asian American, only 2nd generation, and widely regarded as one of the most brilliant—and toughest—law enforcement officials in the country. Alex Chang had made his bones as the New York State A.G., where his reputation had reached a point where he was actually genuinely feared by not only the remnants of the organized crime syndicates, but by the corporate barons on Wall Street who had been his most consistent targets.
Chang had often lamented aloud to the press that he “lacked all the weapons” he needed in his fight for justice. He had no idea what weapon would fall into his lap shortly after accepting the new President’s offer of the U.S. A.G. office, the top law enforcement official in the country.
Chang was an immigrants’ child; his parents had escaped from China in a shipping container, surviving a hellish two-week trip in on a giant container ship across the Pacific—which wasn’t so damn “pacific” when they had been crossing it—through the Canal, and on up to New York where, like hundreds of others, they found marginal jobs in the city.
Chang’s parents were luckier than some; they managed to work hard enough, live long enough, and scrape together enough scratch to ensure that their son, their only son, was able to go to college. Better himself. The American dream. But they never gave him any illusions. They were Chinese, had lived under a brutal communist dictatorship. Life was harsh. You used the tools you got, or that you could find.
Or that found you.
“Really,” said Chang. “Accidental gun-shot to the face?”
The man smiled. It really wasn’t a nice smile. It put Chang in mind of sharks. “He ‘hunted’.” He hit the word so hard, Chang could see the air quotes. “You know how he hunted? They stuffed the birds, upside down and partially-tied, in bushes around the hunting area. Then they would walk around, some clown would beat the bushes, literally, hard enough to shake loose the birds. They would fly up into the air and ‘Bang!’, dead bird.” The man snorted angrily. “I can’t believe a doctor could interpret his duty to the Hippocratic Oath in such a way as to put a new heart into that asshole.”
Chang shook his head. His . . . well, “friend” was certainly too strong a word. “Partner in crime” was probably more accurate. His partner’s passion was certainly compelling.
“Next time,” Chang said, “Please do try to make it look a bit more accidental.” The man shrugged.
“I’ll see what I can do.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “You’d really be amazed at how fucking dumb some of them are.”
Chang shook his head. “No, my friend; I’ve been prosecuting them for years. I don’t think I would be.”
The man smiled almost warmly this time. “No, no I don’t suppose you would.” He took a paper from Chang’s hand and stepped back. “See you.” And with a loud “Pop!” of inrushing air, he vanished. To wherever it was he went. Chang didn’t know.
Chang didn’t want to know.
“When asked about the rumored connections between the administration and the unusual increase in the deaths of Wall Street executives over the past several months, junior assistant White House press secretary Biff Bigglestein was firm in denying any Administration involvement.
“‘I am not aware of any evidence to suggest that those deaths are anything other than what they seem: Tragic accidents. Our sympathies go out to the friends and family of the deceased, and we do not believe their grieving process is served by bringing up bizarre conspiracy theories involving secret assassination programs.’
“When pressed, Bigglestein responded angrily, ‘I have commented all we are going to on this topic,’ before asking if there were any further questions.
“Despite the administrations denials, the rumors continue to swirl that the recent spate of deaths are not accidents. A recent poll taken since the story has broken, however, shows that public support of the administration has actually risen as the rumors have reached the public, and the President’s personal approval rating has reached a 5-year high of 63%, up from just 49% six months ago.
“‘I don’t know if there’s any connection between those [jerks] being killed and the President, but I sure hope so,’ one poll respondent noted, going on to engage in an obscenity-laced tirade against the Wall Street executives involved in the 2008 financial crisis that cannot be reprinted in a family paper. Other comments received include ‘Finally someone’s making those [jerks] pay’, and ‘If someone’s killing them, I think he deserves a [explicative deleted] medal.’”
—Excerpt from “Administration Denies Connection to Wall Street Exec Deaths”, ABC News, 6/25/2014 (James Scaludi reporting)