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 with Lou and Rank Majors last year, walking back from Hank Dumpty’s barbeque. 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.”
“Do you find your air force background useful?”
“Yeah, 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?”
We walked on through the moon shadows around Bails Lane toward Oval Street. Lou’s voice went quiet.
“I think he works for Fibonacci”.
“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, on the Shrink Rap?”
“No, Lou, was that before it became a web site?”
“Not sure, a while back. Fibonacci was a silicone valley start-up which turned out to be a front company for one of the secret agency acronyms that we all know, CIA or something. 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.”
“No, don’t remember reading about that either.”
“So, they went ‘legit’ to avoid further embarrassment. They had a story which I didn’t believe but it enabled them to answer questions openly.”
“Openly?”
“Well, not all that openly 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.”
“Sounds to me as if there is a lot more to be said!”
“Oh, no doubt. 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. 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 overlooked by routine audits when you’re dealing with multibillion dollar government contracts.”
“You mean Fibonacci is in that league?”
“Sure is.”
“What happened to all money the front company made?”
“That’s one of the things Shrink Rap was interested in, and they got a lot of interesting leads but ended up with nothing solid 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?”
“So what happened?”
“The story may have been killed in any number of ways, but the thing that struck me was that the same day that the Shrink Rap broke their story, the Armond Macadamia story broke all over the evening news.
Oh yes, Armond has a place in Fauxmont, but I don’t remember which house.”
“Oh, I can show you some time. He’s never there.”
“I remember reading that one, Lou. Armond is, indeed our local billionaire. He was supposed to have trucked half a trillion dollars in used green backs down to Honduras. The big news networks all had people down there showing much the same thing. The correspondents 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, and in a stream flowing down beside the wreckage. ABC said Macadamia was planning to buy the whole country and turn it into a ranch. Someone on CBS questioned if there was really enough money there to buy a ranch the size of Honduras.”
“Do you remember the CNN interview with that funny looking guy in a head cloth, no shirt and ragged shorts?”
“Yes, and he had no credibility to my mind. He gestured with his machete assuring us through a translator that he had seen a whole convoy of trucks. He seemed like he was acting or put up to it. Then we saw a lot of low denomination bills among torn fragments in a puddle.”
“So Fred, that was the picture on television. You know, I once asked Jake Trip about this, years back when I was talking to him about his plans for his new house. He happened to mention Macadamia, 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.”
Lou stopped. We stood outside Derwent’s house and he seemed to be somewhere else, just staring into the middle distance.
“Excuse me, some of these memories have painful associations. Where was I?”
“I had asked why Macadamia didn’t disassociate himself from the money spill in Honduras.”
“That’s it. He wouldn’t answer that one when Jake asked him. He just said a deal is a deal, and Jake assumed he made out all right 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 truckloads of used bills.”
“Fred, I would like to know how the networks knew where the wreck was in the jungle?”
“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”.
“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 someone with inside information?”
Lou kicked a twig out of his path.
“I sold out, remember?”
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 me with its right eye, its nose pointed away. Lou pointed.
“That looks like Mr. Liddell”.
