Free The Paper Factory (Michael Berg Book 1) by Norrie Sinclair Page B

recant.
  “Ladies and gentlemen …”
                                                                                        ---
      She glanced at the watch on the podium. Twenty minutes had passed. Time to wrap up. Elisabeth looked her audience in the eye and drove home her message. Success would be marked if she noted fear in their eyes.
      “Within six months there will be a cataclysmic financial event. It could be a bank. It may be a sovereign state. It will be cataclysmic because it will drag everything else down with it. Many of you have known, for two, three years, that global financial markets were out of control.” She paused, they needed to hear the truth. “You might have stopped it then. You could have stopped it then. Not now. It’s too late. You’re still dancing, waiting for the music to play out.”
      “ Well, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t like it and I’m sure you don’t like it, but this is the last dance. There’s only one thing we can do to avoid total collapse. Flood the system with money. I have to say I find it distasteful. Distasteful to provide a backstop to the people we should be relying on to look after our money. People, who decided instead, to bet their customers’ money like chips on a gigantic roulette table. There is no choice. Liquidity will be provided. If not, the consequences are too painful, too damaging, too costly to contemplate.”
      There was silence. Elisabeth took a step back. The applause began. It wasn’t fear that she sensed. The opposite. The chairmen of several global banks appeared most relieved, happy, including her friend Augustus. No wonder. To have their financial institutions bailed out by the taxpayer, and hang on to their well-paid jobs was significantly preferable to being stripped, tarred, feathered and put in the stocks. Two hundred years before, the story would have had a different ending.

 
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 26
     
      It was after midnight. He had lost his way twice. They would be watching the train station. Probably the airport. The most logical way for him to leave the city. Michael needed to get to a computer with an Internet connection. He was unlikely to find that in Katowice at one o’clock in the morning. It would take another hour to get into the center of the city. He was shattered, hadn’t slept well since leaving Zurich. Didn’t smell too good either. With each step, he walked towards the people he at all costs needed to avoid.
      There was no alternative. He walked, wincing at the irritating ache of blisters chafing against the heels of his shoes. Rows of multi-storied, concrete apartment buildings stretched as far as he could see. The sulphuric yellow of the streetlamps bathed the road in a dingy, nicotine hazed glow. The backpack, although not particularly heavy, straps digging into his shoulders, was wearing him down. A symptom of exhaustion other than anything else.
      Walking always helped him think things through . It had to be Sharp. Sharp wanted him dead. He’d been lucky. Sharp was afraid that Michael was getting close to the truth. Michael wished he had the man’s faith. All he had was a scrap of paper scrawled with unintelligible nonsense.
      The low hum of a car’s engine on the road behind him. Damn. Of course they’d be trawling the streets looking for him. He glanced backwards, as subtly as possible, swiveled his eyes sideways until they hurt. His heart pounded, the exhaustion that had plagued him moments before evaporated in a spurt of fear- fueled adrenalin. His legs, although moving at a casual lope, were ready to spring him forward into a fast run at any moment. He knew the route he would take. He hadn’t been completely ambivalent to the risks of walking along an open road. To the left, one hundred meters ahead of him, was the entrance to the nearest apartment block. Behind it there were others, separated by