Hatched (19 page)

The decision to place a time limit for the cashing of older bills was a real shift in policy, and it meant that no matter how sophisticated the counterfeiting operation, it would only work if it could reproduce the newest, plastic version, and that, at least at this juncture, was virtually impossible. Up until that point, the Central Bank had counted on the fact that counterfeiters aimed to reproduce recently printed bills so as to avoid the added scrutiny that was applied to bills that “looked old,” but for the TSP, this was not an issue, in part because they were more interested in making a “splash” than in finding a sustainable way of producing counterfeit currency. And so the reason for Tom’s excitement on that day in Fabergé Restaurant was that all of the excuses for delaying this project were now extinguished; they had to move, they had to move now, and even Steve, the most reluctant of the group, stood to lose if they didn’t, on account of his massive investment in paper.

The idea of producing an older bill had been originally proposed by Ted, subsequent to a Central Bank’s earlier decision to modify the $100 bill. It’s true that this update could have been overlooked, and they could have chosen to limit their counterfeiting operation to the production of fifties and twenties. But in order to meet their objective of creating a “blip” on the
Federal Reserve Board assessment of cash in circulation, they had to impose a huge new burden on the financial markets, and moving from hundreds to fifties doubled the costs, moving from hundreds to twenties multiplied them by a factor of five. It’s true that they could have gotten around some of the high-tech fixes offered up by the previous upgrade of the $100 bill, which had included relatively minor high-tech fixes. The Declaration of Independence had been added to the right side of the bill, a quill and inkwell were printed behind the text of the bill, and a blue ribbon was added to the center of the bill. These were but details. The more difficult changes were that the color of the ink in the well changed, from copper to green, when the bill was turned in the light. This was a new invention from Crane Currency Inc., and it offered new challenges for reproducing this bill. Furthermore, a new watermark of Benjamin Franklin was added to the bill, also designed for easy detection.

When they had met previously to elaborate TSP, an occurrence that would take place at least every couple of years, Steve, Ted, and Tom had decided that the renovated bills, if they became the standard, could be reproduced, albeit at a somewhat higher cost. The government itself estimated a four percent increase to their costs to purchase their own design, an amount that in the grand scheme of things at issue here for the TSP was substantial, but not really problematic. Nonetheless, when they realized that it would be possible to circumvent this renovation by simply aiming to reproduce the earlier version of the $100 bill, then they had relaxed, since there was no reason to even keep up with the new technology being employed. All they needed was to find a way to produce a truly authentic copy of the previous version of the hundred, the fifty, and the twenty. And thanks to a miraculous, little, golden contraption, they knew that they could. But now that the transition was onto plastic, they would have to act immediately if their little contraption was to work.

I could feel the quivering of mechanisms far below the surface of each shell that encases us, from that which mediates between the world and inner depths, to those that encase each movement all the way to a distant core. Shells within shells, like a Russian doll encased inside of a Russian doll, from her form downwards, to a primordial creation.

Chapter 15

A lot of money, energy, and willpower was seated at that bar in Fabergé Restaurant that night, represented in the persons of Tom and Steve. But the real key to the entire operation’s success had in fact been secured years earlier, in the most unlikely circumstances, when Steve was but nineteen years old. Steve was born in Mumbai, to a father who was half Indian and half Chinese, and a Native American mother. India was a place that he didn’t remember at all, because he had been transported to the US by his family when he was but three years old. His ties to the US ran rather deep, though, since his grandfather had come to Texas to work in the technological development of oil fields for Rockefeller in the 1920s, and, due to the exploratory nature of his work, he was paid in stock and in parcels of land. When his firm secured some major US contracts for work abroad, he decided to bring his son on board in the company.

This move, which had brought Steve’s family to Texas, was initially traumatic, augmented by the fact that Steve’s father only felt at home in India. But his stock grew into a veritable treasure trove, and the land that he’d been given as further enticement became invaluable, since it was said to sit on some of the most important oil reserves in Texas. And Steve, also the only grandson, inherited the entire lot when his father died of a heart attack at the age of forty-seven. When Steve sold the land to move to NY, he received three hundred million dollars. This unexpected windfall led him to hold onto the oil stocks, which had multiplied in value so many times as to render him a billionaire four times over, probably five.

That was but a brick in the wall. The real story, as for the TSP, was that Steve’s father, in order to make up for the vast number of business trips he had overseas to America and to Europe, began in his later years to bring his son with him, to both apprentice him in the business, and to make up for days and weeks and months of parenting that had been sacrificed to making a living. An offhand conversation with a family friend, who was introduced to him by his father on one of the trips they’d gone on together in Italy, had in fact generated the particulars of the idea and had unexpectedly yielded the possibility of carrying it out.

In one of those awkward moments that occur between adults, when a child is projected into a conversational mix in which he or she doesn’t naturally fit, Steve had volunteered his intense obsession with bicycles. His father’s friend, Luigi Carmichael, the son of a notable British father and a glamorous Italian mother, clung to this little piece of information to make conversation, and this interaction intensified when Steve’s father unexpectedly left the room for a few minutes, to pee, and left Luigi and Steve alone together. Luigi, as it turned out, was himself not so much a rider of bicycles, as a connoisseur of them. His profession was to print, and this was why his father worked with him, and a large printing order was the subject that led to the business trip in the first place. But Luigi’s real obsession was machined perfection.

“There are few consumer goods as carefully machined as Italian bicycles,” Luigi had told Steve. “It’s a technology so precise as to produce track times for racing bicycles that every year exceed existing mathematical formulas predicting possible outcomes.”

“Because of weight.” Young Steve uttered this with the seriousness that characterized everything that he did, and with the knowledge of his devotion to the sport of riding.

“Weight, yes.” Luigi smiled with great admiration. He would have loved to have a son, particularly one who seemed so mechanically inclined as this boy—Steve.

“Weight,” insisted Luigi with a smile, “until bicycles are made of air. Until then, they can always be made lighter.”

“And faster!” Steve was gaining confidence with this man who shared his love for the sleek, clean, metallic, precise world of technology and engineering. “E-MC squared.”

“Faster, Steve, yes. Faster. Less M, a whole lot less E!”

Luigi winked at Steve, and Steve did his best to wink back, producing a kind of squint and a few blinks. They were part of the secret society of those who actually understand something about how things work, a welcome change in a society of people who consume without knowledge of the provenance or the workings of the products they possess.

On the basis of this conversation, Steve got himself invited to Luigi’s factory, in Monza, near Milano. The purpose was, for him, to see Luigi’s incredible collection of vintage Italian bicycles. But in addition, Luigi also showed him his printing facilities, in which he produced the molds that were used to create stamped numbers, used in a range of precision instruments and, moreover, in the production of currency. As it turned out, in the past years Luigi had been awarded, for the first time ever for a non-American, the contract to create the stamps used to imprint dollar bills with sequence numbers. This had become a special and very lucrative area of work, one that paid for his bicycle collection, his magnificent home in Milano, and a substantial portion of his country residence, near Urbino.

The precision required for the stamps that make the ten numbers on each bill was famously intense, and only two factories in the world produced stamps suitable for the task, one in Germany, that handled most European currencies in the period leading up to the production of the euro, and Luigi’s, in Italy, that provided the number stamps for the dollar, and for a number of Asian currencies. Steve was enthralled, and, normally shy and withdrawn, he consumed this environment of lathes and presses and delicate stamping devices with the lust of a technology devotee.

After a profound bonding session between this unlikely couple, centered on Steve’s surprising knowledge of the intricacies of bicycles, in particular derailleurs, and his concomitantly interesting observations about precision gearing and even possible obstacles to producing clean type, Luigi rewarded Steve with a gift of ten golden, titanium-tipped stamps, the prototype that he had just developed, in multiple copies, for the dollar. He would eventually make hundreds of them, since the tips would wear out and have to be replaced, even in spite of the titanium. And so, just like Einstein might have handed out formulas scribbled on pieces of scrap paper for lovers and friends, formulas that were the tangible product of a remarkable man, Luigi simply gave one of the stamping sets to Steve, an indication of the kinds of work Luigi was most proud, and a sign of the bond they’d created that day.

Steve had coveted this strange gift and spent untold hours focusing his eyes upon the tiny numbers that were promised by the titanium molds that topped the perfectly round, golden wheel that would be mounted on a lathe-like shaft, for the imprinting of those crucial numbers, delicately impressed into the flesh of the cotton-fiber paper. This impression was the first line of defense against counterfeiting, the second being the quality of the number left behind, a quality tied as well to the tips that were the object of Steve’s careful study in the coming years. And it was on account of this little set of golden printing wheels that Steve had suggested forging money during one of the many conversations that Ted, Tom, and he had about how to destroy American capitalism to each of their respective ends. And his ownership of what turned out to be the most difficult to replicate part of the entire process, catalyzed Ted’s stimulus plan. And here they were, all these years later, sitting on the precipice of actualizing it.

“I don’t know how long it’ll take to make a difference,” continued Steve. “We have to plan on just running the fucking presses until the stamps start wearing down, and I don’t even know what that means. We’re going to need a small army of technicians, Tom, because this whole thing only makes sense if we can do it quickly. And we’ll need to start with the set that I have and hope that we can build a replica of it by the time we need to replace the last one on the presses. We lose the moment they put the phase-out into operation. So with hundreds, say, we’ll need ten billion of them. If it’s twenties, we need fifty billion bills.”

Tom leaned back in the chair and observed the perfect egg-like interior of Fabergé Restaurant. “Fifty billion bills? Fifty billion?”

“Yup.”

Tom definitely needed to get laid. “Fifty billion bills to make a trillion!” He enjoyed the sound of his own voice articulating those words. “Fuck that, Steve. Fifty billion bills would make five trillion if we stick to hundreds.”

Steve looked around, feigning concern that someone was listening, even though it was clear that they were on their little island inside of the great Fabergé Restaurant egg. But Tom looked so agitated, that he might have drawn attention to himself, and that was exactly what they didn’t need.

“That’s what I’m talking about, Steve. Five trillion.” He looked around him, in awe of his very thought process. Tom looked around the restaurant, as though for the first time. “This place is shaped like a fucking egg, Steve. A fucking egg.”

“Good place to get hatched.” It was a rare, comical utterance from ever-serious Steve.

As Tom tried to figure out the source of Steve’s newfound sign of life, Elizabeth returned to the table.

“Can I get you two something else? We have ostrich egg soufflé with roe. It’s divine.” She motioned forward somewhat, pressing her chest in the direction of their faces. It worked.

“For dessert?” asked Tom, looking exactly where he was supposed to look.

“The sweetness of the soufflé brings out the warm, sugary flavors of the salmon egg. It’s a remarkable experience,” said Elizabeth, pouting her lips.

“I’m sure it is,” said Tom, looking up to her face. She smiled, showing a perfect row of teeth, perfect in the way that American girls could be perfect in that realm, more perfect than Europeans, thought Tom.

“I assure you,” Elizabeth uttered the words like a commandment.

She was very pretty, in a country-girl kind of way, thought Tom. His scrotum tingled again. Was it the TSP? The fifty billion? Or was it her?

“It
really
is delicious.” She implored the two of them, cautiously. “I just tried it before my shift.” That usually worked, since so many men wanted to share in whatever it was Elizabeth happened to be doing. Preferably in the nude.

Not being privy to her thought process, Steve and Tom just contemplated her words and her offer. “It’s hard to imagine that she’s from the city,” thought Tom himself, “but she sounds the part. Pennsylvania perhaps?”