Free Graveland: A Novel by Alan Glynn Page B

want to be the bankers, not to kill them, and the Occupiers are too wooly and amorphous for anything as decisive and proactive as an assassination program.
    So she keeps coming back to her first instinct on this.
    They’re amateurs.
    Stray dogs.
    Doing their own thing.
    And where do people like this find inspiration? Where do they get their ideas from? Where do they meet, and hang out, and exchange information, and chat ? Her heart sinks.
    The fucking Internet, of course.
    She stares at the tiled wall in front of her.
    What’s she going to do? Instigate a search ?
    Without the full resources of an Echelon-style intercept station or fusion center, Ellen knows very well how pointless this would be. She pulls the plug and gets out of the bathtub. She dries off and puts on sweats and a T-shirt. She orders up pizza.
    Not having eaten all day.
    She turns on the TV. Even there they’ve sort of given up and are discussing instead the witness currently on the stand in the Connie Carillo murder trial.
    Joey Gifford.
    The celebrity doorman.
    Jesus wept.
    The thing is, for all she’s got, for all she’s pulled out of the hat, she may as well give up too, and sit around like the rest of them, waiting for the next target, the next vic. She flicks through a few channels, but doesn’t want to watch anything. There’s no one she wants to talk to, either. She checks Twitter on her phone and glances at the time. Pizza won’t be here for another fifteen minutes. She looks over at her desk.
    It couldn’t hurt .
    Three hours, the pizza, a bottle of wine, and two bananas later she’s still at her desk, bleary eyed, near to tears, scrolling down through forums, discussion groups, and comment boxes. Each new post she reads, or thread she follows, seems to hold out the promise of something, an insight, an angle, a revelation even. In discussing stuff like fractional reserve banking, the creation of the Fed, the Glass-Steagall Act, Keynes, the Chicago School, subprime, securitization, the bailouts, there’ll be an initial hint of reasonableness, a striving for clarity—for the holy grail of a coherent point —but sooner or later, and without fail, each contribution will descend into ambiguity, internal contradiction, and ultimately gibberish.
    On some sites things can get pretty heated, and shrill, especially when they focus on the bankers themselves, on the voracious, lying, bloodsucking zombie motherfuckers who’ve effectively been RUNNING THE COUNTRY FOR THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS  …
    But it’s at about 3:00 A.M. that she comes across something she thinks is significant. Though she can’t be sure, because by that stage she also suspects she might be hallucinating.
    It’s deep, deep into the comment box of an archived blog post on a site called Smells Like Victory. She doesn’t remember how she got here—through what circuitous route, or when exactly she veered off topic—because the post itself, go figure, is a half-scholarly account of the effects railroad construction had on the economy of pre–Civil War America. The discussion in the comment box leads with a fairly polite disagreement about the relative importance of railroads over canals in the antebellum North, and this soon degenerates into a testy spat about how unsuited the “heavy” imported British locomotives were to the supposedly “lighter” American-engineered track systems. But after close to a hundred comments—and as is so often the case these days, online and off—the subject somehow ends up being about the current crisis. A comment is posted claiming that the likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and John D. Rockefeller shaped modern America, and pretty soon a discussion is in full swing about the relative merits (or demerits) of the nineteenth-century robber barons over today’s one percenters.
    After a few more posts, someone called Trustbot37 says, “People forget that back then these guys were hated every bit as much as the bankers are now. I