NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
I keep thinking of the strange story that emerged in conversation walking back from Hank Dumpty’s barbeque with Lou and Rank Majors. Rank had been an air force pilot. He flew stealth fighters over Iraq, and later retired from a desk job at the Pentagon. When I asked what he was up to at the moment he said he worked for a consulting firm.
“Oh”, said I. “Sounds interesting, what field are you in now?”
“Pretty much whatever they throw at me” said Rank with a grin.
“Do you find your air force background useful?”
“Yea it has been, once in a while.”
We had reached Rank’s place on Bails Lane. He said good night to Lou and me and went in.
“Rank doesn’t allow much does he?” I said to Lou as we walked on through the moon shadows around Bailes Lane toward Oval Street.
“I think he works for Fibonacci” said Lou. “Yes, Diddlie said the same thing.”
“What do they do?”
“Rank was right about one thing, Fibonacci does all kinds of work.”
“Did you read that a big expose years ago, in Rolling Stone Magazine?” asked Lou. I had not and Lou went on. Fibonacci was a silicone valley start-up which turned out to be a front company for either the CIA or the NSA. The front company was unexpectedly successful. It made embarrassing amounts of money. It isn’t clear which agency started it. Maybe it was a partnership, but it looks like they got into a turf war over the money that then led to a leak to the press”.
“So they went ‘legit’ to avoid further embarrassment and to be able to answer questions as openly as a legitimate business would. Well not all that open I guess, but government secrets were no longer at risk. It was taken over by a couple of retired Generals, or maybe one was an Admiral. I don’t know. But anyway, these guys hired a lot of their old buddies as they retired out of the service. Some of them had valuable specialized knowledge and contacts so the company diversified into many different areas as they developed their own divisions of the business. It is all about relationships and money. Once a Congressional appropriation is put into a contract with Fibonacci, the money can be ‘re-papered’ and used for anything.”
“What do you mean ‘re-papered’?
“I mean the accounting and finance people make everything look one way while the money is spent some other way. It sounds illegal, but it often isn’t. It all depends on how clever they are doing it. No one has time to follow up on this stuff anyway. Sometimes it is less than a million, but it is critical to some project.
“Less than a million? Is that some threshold?”
“Yeah, anything less than a million tends to be be overlooked by routine audits when your dealing with multibillion dollar government contracts.”
“So what happened with all money the front company made?”
“That’s one of the things Rolling Stone was interested in, and they got a lot of interesting leads but ended up with nothing but speculation on that one. The big scoop was the front company story, but it never got into the rest of the media. The story ended there.”
“It sounds like the sort of sensational muckraking that would be ideal for the media!”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
“The story may have been killed in any number of ways, but the thing that struck me was that the same day that the Rolling Stone broke the story, the Armond Macadamia story broke all over the evening news and in the morning papers. I am told Armond has a place in Fauxmont but I know little more about him.”
“Yes, that I remember. Armond is our local billionaire. He was supposed to have trucked half a trillion dollars in used green backs down to Honduras. The big networks all had people down there showing much the same thing. The corespondents stood on the road beside a ravine where a truck had tumbled off into the jungle. The lead into the story was pretty funny. They asked if anyone had ever seen money grow on trees? Then the footage from Honduras showed dollar bills all over the canopy below the road side, and in a stream going down beside the wreckage. ABC said Macadamia was planning to buy the whole country and turn it into a ranch. Some one on CBS questioned if there was really enough money there to buy a ranch the size of Honduras.”
“CNN interviewed a man with a head cloth, no shirt and ragged shorts, who gestured with his machete assuring us through a translator that he had seen a whole convoy of trucks. Then we saw a lot of low denominations among torn fragments of bills at the road side.”
“You’ve got it” said Lou. “That’s what was on television. You know, I asked Jake Trip about this a couple of years back when I was talking to him about his plans for the new house. He happened to mention Macadamia, and it turns out he’s close to the old man and he told me Armand had no intention of buying anything in Honduras.”
“So why didn’t he come out and deny it?”
“Good question” said Lou.” He wouldn’t answer that one when Jake asked him. He just said a deal is a deal, and Jake assumed he made out alright somewhere. Macadamia always did in those days.”
“Do you think they paid him off to use his name?”
“ I have no idea.”
“I mean where did all that cash we saw on television come from?”
“Maybe it was dope money”
“Those narcos do have truck loads of used bills.”
“How did the networks know where to go in the jungle to find the wreck?” asked Lou.
“That was never divulged.”
“Those reporters keep their sources confidential. That’s how the system works. Otherwise no one would talk to them.”
“So your thought is that the Macadamia scandal was cooked up to draw attention away from the silicon valley story.”
“Yes, that is one of the tools of perception management” said Lou.
“How do you know so much about it Lou?”
“Reading this and that.”
“Come on.”
“What?”
“Were you privy to this operation”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean do you know some one with inside information?”
“I sold out, remember?” said Lou.
A white rabbit hurried across the road a few yards in front of us, and stopped in the shadow of a hydrant. Some one’s porch light made it visible, and we could see its twitching nose. It was looking at us with its right eye, its nose pointed away.
“That looks like Mr. Liddell.” I said.
