Free Grand Master by D.W. Buffa Page B

looks at them at all. I noticed, though; which, when you
think about it, only makes me worse. I was as eager as anyone else
to get what I could from him, or rather from the organization he
controls, because, of course, I never did any business directly
with him. He left that sort of thing to other people, Americans
mainly, who worked for one of his subsidiaries.”
    Burdick started making notes again.
“Americans. Can you give me names?”
    “Sure, but it won’t do much good. They didn’t
do anything criminal, they didn’t break any laws. They acted just
like any other interest that has business before the Congress. They
made their case for legislation, and I listened. They didn’t come
with envelopes stuffed with cash. It isn’t what any one of them
did; it’s the connections that exist among them all, the way that
all these supposedly separate entities are held together at the
top: like puppets on a string, and the string held by one man, but
the string all tangled up, twisted in a dozen different directions.
Here, let me show you what I mean.”
    Morris took Burdick’s notebook and quickly
drew a parallel set of boxes connected by two different lines.
    “You have a company operating in the United
States. It’s a subsidiary of another company with headquarters in
Great Britain, which in turn is a subsidiary of a company owned, or
apparently owned, by a company in Bahrain, a company in which a
controlling interest is owned by - you guessed it - a certain
French investment firm. Then another American company, controlled
by another company based overseas, and that company in turn is….You
get the idea. Add to that the ability to move money from one
company to the next, from one country to another, and to do it
endlessly, back and forth, move it electronically at the speed of
light. - No one can trace it, no one can keep up; no one can
measure how much influence it is buying and what the people who
control it are going to do next. All you can know is that whoever
sits on top of all this, whoever is in control, can do damn near
anything he wants - bring an economy to its knees if that serves
his purposes.”
    Morris was breathing hard. Beads of
perspiration had started to form on his forehead. He leaned back
and shook his head, his eyes full of regret at what he had done.
“Jean de la Valette, that’s the Frenchman’s name. Maybe the most
powerful man in the world and there aren’t six people in this
country who even know he exists. Even the people who head the
companies he controls don’t know anything about him. They report to
other people, who don’t know much more themselves. A European
financial consortium, that’s the phrase you’ll hear; a group of
institutions that contribute to the efficiency of the financial
markets. What could be less threatening than something that sounds
as dull as that? The country is being sold right in front of us,
and we’re too damn blind to see it. And I get to go to my grave
knowing I helped.”
    Morris scratched the back of his head. A look
of discouragement swept over his eyes. “I’m not sure there’s a
difference, but I didn’t think I was selling out my country. I
thought I was doing myself a favor, and while I didn’t kid myself
and think what I was doing was honest, I didn’t think it was going
to hurt anyone else. Some people were going to make a lot of money;
some people always do. And this time I was going to be one of them.
And then, when I found out what they were really up to, it was too
late. But Constable - he knew what was going on and it didn’t stop
him.”
    Morris rolled his shoulders forward until he
was hunched over the table. His jaw moved slowly side to side as he
reconsidered the judgment which just the moment before had uttered
with such certain. “Maybe he had to do it; maybe he had to buy her
off.” Morris leaned back again, stroking his chin. “The one thing
you always knew about those two was that whatever kept them
together, it