Authors: Darrell Delamaide
Tags: #Azizex666, #Action & Adventure, #Fiction, #Suspense, #Thrillers, #Espionage
Gold (32 page)
Carol raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You don’t think you’re projecting?”
“No, it’s there, all right. It’s as though everyone had been under a terrible strain and is just happy to be rid of it.”
“We’re not rid of it yet, I’m afraid,” Carol said, extricating files from the tightly packed briefcase.
“How does it look?” Drew asked.
“Halden made a major miscalculation. You see it already in the choice of Rambouillet for the monetary conference. Halden thought the United States, as the dominant economic power, would be able to dictate the terms of a new monetary system, as it did in Bretton Woods at the end of World War Two.
“It’s true, the U.S. still has the biggest national economy, but Europe, with its single market policy, is actually a bigger economic unit, and Japan, with its Asian market, is an equal party too. And this time, given the circumstances of the collapse, it’s as though we lost the war.”
“So the Europeans and Japanese will be dictating the terms?”
“Let’s just say that the initiative is really not ours; Wagner made that very clear in his briefing today.”
“How is he holding up?”
“Holding up? He’s never looked better; he loves every minute of it.” Carol succeeded in emptying the case and set it aside, sorting the files into separate stacks. “I’ve been wondering just how innocent his role was. You remember Halden went up to see him the week of the Crash.”
Drew heard the capital C on Crash and winced in spite of himself. Usually, now, it was referred to as the Gold Crash, although Drew felt it should be called the Fed Crash. To spare each other’s feelings, Drew and Carol simply referred to the Crash.
“He certainly wasted no time in answering his country’s appeal for help.”
“He’s running the New York Fed like he never left it, and he’ll be the head of the U.S. delegation to the monetary conference.”
“Any news of Halden?” Drew asked in a gentler voice.
“He’s still incommunicado on Long Island. But you don’t hear any more talk of charges or grand juries. After all, he got general authorizations ahead of time for crisis action that could justify everything he did.”
Drew was reflective. “He was too clever in the end.”
Carol picked up a folder and opened it.
“Good luck,” Drew said to her, returning to his seat in the living room. He found Channel 13 and listened to Adam Smith explaining to investors the complicated formula for evaluating stocks until the markets reopened.
It had been just over a month since the Crash. The markets remained closed through December and the holiday period. A fairly active gray market had sprung up, with the brokerage houses effecting sizable trades among institutional investors. Private individuals had been generally blocked from liquidating or trading their stocks, but the authorities now promised to begin limited trading by the end of January.
The Fed, effectively directed by Wagner from New York, had kept the domestic economy flush enough to head off a deflationary spiral that would have ushered in a depression like that of the 1930s. The only real hardship, becoming more apparent as inventories ran down, was the unavailability of foreign goods. Even the impact of that was surprisingly mild; it was Japan that was running the greater danger of recession, with the United States no longer able to buy Japanese products. Tokyo was even talking of a Marshall Plan for America until the monetary conference restored convertibility of the dollar.
Drew had been in the States for three weeks and separated from Carol for only one of those days, when she had to cut short their Christmas holiday in Iowa to rush back to the Fed for meetings. She was the third-ranking economist in the U.S. delegation, after the Treasury expert and a Harvard professor who had been drafted into service.
Drew had been commissioned by Commentator magazine to write a story on the upcoming monetary conference, now scheduled for the beginning of February in Rambouillet, outside Paris. The Europeans had insisted on a European site, and the French won out because of their long insistence on a new world monetary system.
Drew’s interviews in Europe and in the United States indicated a lot of uncertainty and worry about the future, but also this undercurrent of relief. The worst had happened and life continued.
Drew’s own feelings were ambivalent. He knew that in the long run the overhaul of the monetary system had to be made, but he regretted the manner of the old system’s passing. He was ashamed still of having been duped by the gold hoax, and remorse for the deaths of Kraml and Van der Merwe haunted him.
He could rationalize that all of them were caught up in events and machinations beyond their control. He knew, too, that his decision to follow through with exposing the hoax had given him a new strength of character. That partly effaced his chagrin at being fooled. But it did not bring the two dead men back to life.
Drew felt a sudden intimation of warmth and then Carol was on his lap, embracing him with a kiss.
“How much do you think the New Dollar should be worth?”
“That’s easy. One ECU, the good old European currency unit.”
“That is the easy part. But how many old dollars does it take in exchange for a New Dollar?”
Drew shrugged. Prices had been frozen in the United States to avoid hyperinflation like that which ravaged Germany twice in two decades after the currency collapsed. But Drew had been astonished by how many dollars he was able to purchase in black market trading with the sterling he had brought with him from London.
“The big question is gold or no gold,” he said finally. “There doesn’t seem to be any way around it. Every other possible anchor that was in use depended on the dollar and the U.S. economy. Neither the Europeans nor the Japanese will accept that; nor do they want their currencies to be the sole reserves either.”
Drew hesitated to be drawn into a discussion of monetary reserves. He had a journalist’s working knowledge of how they functioned, but the economists’ view of central bank reserves was as subtle and impenetrable to him as scholastic theology.
“Doesn’t the situation in South Africa influence what role gold will have?” he asked.
“Yes and no,” Carol answered, smiling at herself for her easy slide into the traditional posture of economists. “The damage from the ALF offensive, the prospect of protracted guerrilla warfare, the operation of some Orange Free State mines by ALF— all that will make the supply of gold uncertain.
“But,” she said with emphasis, “demand is virtually infinite—gold is literally priceless.” The gold fixing still took place in London, but the current price of £5,000 on ounce meant nothing, for practically no gold was for sale. “And the Russians have told the Europeans discreetly that, although they will not attend the monetary conference or participate immediately in the new system, they will manage their gold sales in a way not to disrupt whatever role is established for gold.”
“How very considerate of them.” Drew said it lightly, but he was unable to keep an edge of hardness out of his voice.
“Is Abrassimov going to talk to you for your article?”
“He had better, or I’ll unmask him,” Drew joked. Although the journalist himself had been the subject of many stories and interviews in the aftermath of the Crash, he had not divulged the sources of the information that enabled him to break the hoax story. In the context of the U.S. action and the real sabotage of the ALF offensive, the exposure of the hoax had become a minor event.
But Drew knew that the effect was not minor. More than the impact of the story itself on the horrific day of the Crash, the exposure of the hoax bolstered the credibility of all news reporting. Drew’s story had demonstrated the tenaciousness of the truth.
“By the way, I’m fairly certain Commentator is going to offer me a job,” Drew said to Carol as she rose to return to her files. He had not waited for any reaction from Madison, but telexed his resignation from WCN on the day of the Crash itself. Commentator, a highly regarded British monthly, had called him the following week with his freelance assignment.
“In London?”
“I’d be the ‘roving economics correspondent.’” He paused. “It probably doesn’t matter where I hang my hat when I’m not roving.”
Carol smiled at him. “Maybe we should start looking for a bigger apartment.”
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