Shall We Kill the President?

Mr. Harding paced in his plush office on the top floor of Greasy Palms Inc, the investment bank he had worked in for the past twenty five years. He was now the CEO, and had for the past five years, taken home an eight figure salary. The Board was pleased with his efforts to bring Greasy Palms to the standing of the bulge bracket firms, and he had a tidy sum in his retirement account in Cayman Islands. Life was good, but Mr. Harding was not happy.

Harcourt “Hardball” Harding was a hard man. He had started out as a lowly analyst in the firm, and had fought his way up to the top job through sheer tenacity and brute force. By the time he reached the top, he had no friends left in the firm, so he fired the whole lot and brought in his own people. The shareholders grumbled, but five years of record profits had silenced them. Mr. Harding was worried because the outlook for the sixth year did not look too rosy.

It was June 2006, and the American Joe was feeling quite satisfied with himself. The economic outlook was rosy, risk-hungry investors were fooling about with wild abandon, grubbing about in the mortgage cesspool for the extra buck. Investment banks were having fun, gathering up armfuls of muck from the above mentioned cesspool and handing them over to white haired Grannies, telling them it was the safest thing to put their pension money in. Securitization, they called it, and it made them very very rich.

Mr. Harding was worried because he felt that Greasy Palms was not making as much money out of the whole thing as it rightfully should have. Moreover, he shrewdly felt that there were only so many mortgages that banks could securitize, and that business there would dry up soon. Greasy Palms needed to securitize something new, and just that morning, he had had the glimmering of a brilliant idea…

Harcourt Harding picked up the telephone. ‘Get Miss Corners in here,’ he said briefly. Less than a minute later, Miss Corners entered. ‘Sir?’

Ku Ting Corners was perhaps the most brilliant recruit he had hired for the firm. He recognized her keen intelligence right away, as well as her natural ability to tread the borders of the nice and legal with the dark and murky with finesse, and had taken her under his wing. Miss Corners wasn’t much to look at, angular and thin, with a pinched face. He had helped her smuggle her entire family out of North Korea, and she was a die-hard Harding loyalist.

‘Miss Corners,’ he began. In Greasy Palms, people were addressed on a strict last name basis. An associate who’d dared to address him as ‘Hardball, old boy’ had found himself booted out the next day. ‘What do you think about insurance securitization as a new business to get into?’

‘Insurance securitization?’ Miss Corners raised an eyebrow. ‘Issanchou’s been doing it for a while now. There’s hardly any money to be made from the reinsurance business these days. Besides –‘

‘Not reinsurance,’ Mr. Harding waved a hand impatiently. ‘What if we can offer our clients the opportunity to take a view on… say the number of people who’ll die in a car crash in the United States over the next month? Something completely new. We can do this by grouping maybe a thousand insurance policies together and tranching them. People can buy the safe senior tranche to receive the steady stream of insurance premiums, while the mezzanine runs a risk of having to bear the costs of paying out the claims. So a person having a view that car accidents would reduce over the next month would-‘

‘Buy the mezzanine tranche to earn the higher rate,’ breathed Miss Corners. She gazed at Mr. Harding with utmost respect. ‘That’s a brilliant idea Mr. Harding!’

‘I know,’ he replied, without the slightest trace of arrogance. ‘The only issue is that the people might find it rather… morbid to buy into products such as this. There could be bad publicity if we do launch this product.’

‘I’ll take care of it.’ Miss Corners said brusquely.

Miss Corners took care of it. Fervent lobbying in Washington ensured that their insurance securitized products, if launched, would be legal and above-board. A number of strategic press releases raised the issue in the newspapers, where it led to a frenzied debate regarding the ethics of the financial product in question. While the issue was still hot, Greasy Palms talked to a number of major corporations regarding ‘a demographic hedge’ whereby companies could protect themselves against their target consumer class shrinking, by investing in insurance-backed products which would make them money if there were excess deaths in their target consumer base. Greasy Palms talked to insurance companies and convinced them that they could take excess risk off their books by pooling their insurance policies and selling them on to the risk-hungry investors. Greasy Palms talked to everyone who could potentially form a market for the products.

The day before the big launch, Miss Corners went on air on CNN. She briefly spoke about their new product launch, and answered the ethical questions raised (How could you take a bet that people would die? How could making money when families grieved for lost lives not disgust you? Are you even human?) . She spoke passionately about the free market, and how an American had the right to express his view in today’s world. She spoke about her background from North Korea, and how it would be impossible to launch a product there, due to lack of basic human freedom. She spoke about how coming to America changed her life, and how she finally came to know what freedom meant. She exhorted Americans everywhere to exercise their freedom by investing in the Greasy Palms Insurance Securitization Fund.

The launch was a huge success. The publicity was tremendous. The public was divided in its sense of outrage and admiration. It seemed that the very morbidity of the product attracted clients. Mr. Harding speculated that speculating on the lives of fellow human beings gave the said human beings a sense of power. Greasy Palms won a number of awards for its innovative new product.

A month later, a rival bank tried to launch a similar fund. When he saw their press release, Mr. Harding’s eyes became very hard. A number of calls made out to the largest investors ensured that the new fund had little business. ‘Hard luck boys!’ he crowed. ‘Rather late on the scene, aren’t we?’

Mr. Harding took home a nine figure salary that year.

Soon, problems began to crop up for Greasy Palms. The large volume of business transacted through the single firm put a lot of risk on their books. Soon, the situation arose when the predominant market view was that more people would die in car crashes than ever, while Greasy Palms had a massive position in the opposite view.

Mr. Harding called an emergency meeting of his traders. They were of the opinion that the position could not be reduced at short notice without suffering massive losses. Mr. Harding developed an ingenious new plan. He hired a number of activists to flood the streets carrying slogans like ‘Drive Carefully’, ‘Speed Thrills, but Kills’ and even ‘Your family is waiting at home for you. Better late than never!’

The unconventional plan worked. There were very few accidents that month on the streets of New York. Mr. Harding had found a way to manage the huge risks on Greasy Palms’ books. They did the same thing the week after, and the week after. On the following week however, while the activists were busy handing out pamphlets extolling the virtues of slow driving, the head trader made an urgent call to his boss, ‘Mr. Harding, we have a position on the other side this time!’

Mr. Harding made a few quick phone calls. The pamphlets were burned. The activists began to hand out free beers at traffic stops instead.

Soon, a number of sub-classes of the product were launched. There were Terrorist Insurance Funds, which would pay out huge amounts of money if a ‘substantial’ number of people died from terrorist attacks. There was the Schoolbus Failed-Brake Fund, which took a view on accidents involving school children. But it was the launch of the High-Premium Insurance Fund which led to the eventual shut-down of the very profitable Insurance Securitization business.

The High-Premium Insurance Fund let investors take a view on the deaths of high-premium insured. These included senators, lawyers, Hollywood stars, as well as the bankers themselves. The problem arose when a retail investor named Lee Harvey Oswald took large sizes in a position which predicted record number of deaths in the high-premium category. He became uneasy when the drug addled Hollywood actresses resolutely clung on to life, when the drunk bankers negotiated their way safely home on Friday nights and when no angry clients murdered their lawyers. He therefore decided to take things into his own hands, and through a combination of luck and skill, managed to assassinate the President of the United States. His trade position made him a lot of money, but he spent the rest of his life in jail. He considered it to be worth it.

The incident re-awakened the dormant public conscience, and insurance securitization was banned. Mr. Harding received a tongue lashing in the Senate for introducing a financial product which was against public interest. At the next shareholder meeting, there were a lot of sympathetic murmurs, what the Senators did was not considered to be good form. Did he consider Greasy Palms to be hard done by? ‘Hardly,’ Mr. Harding replied, ‘I do have this other great idea though…’

The Prologue

The cat walked down the moonlit path, stepping carefully over the uneven stones that led to the sanctuary. It was following the cloaked figure of course, as it had for the past several nights over several miles. Although one would never have suspected it to be capable of such a feat, its snow white coat and the rather large belly which sagged down its middle suggested that it was a favoured pet of a rich old lady living in the Forum.

The man knew of its existence of course, he could smell its odd smell and see his white shadow trailing behind him clearly. Was it merely an escort, sent by his too-polite hosts to ensure that he crossed the boundary safely, or something more? It was the smell that bade him to treat the cat with caution, it had the distinctive acrid smell of an enchanted creature. Still, he was certain that it would not harm him or get in his way. His hosts were too set in the old ways to harm a guest within their territory, much as they would have liked to, so he knew that he and his bundle were safe for the time being.

His bundle made a small noise, but he ignored it in favour of quickening his steps to the giant wooden doors. Dawn was almost here, there wasn’t too much time left now. A touch of his fingertips on the cold brass knob, and there was a loud clicking and whirring noise from within, and the door swung open. He left it open as he strode in, knowing that the cat would follow. It was better to have a witness for what was going to happen tonight.

The sanctuary was built the old way, entirely of gigantic stone blocks with intricate rune carvings to bind them together. The hall was long and comparatively narrow, and the ceiling was far above, supported by tenuously thin tendrils of stone. Windows were long thin slits in the side walls, stone pillars were cunningly erected in front of them to prevent their letting in the sun at dawn. A huge circular podium lay at the far end of the hall, and the entire building was designed such that the first ray of sun would strike the exact centre of the circle, while the rest of the sanctuary lay shrouded in darkness. It was speculated that a system of highly polished mirrors placed in the ceiling was used to achieve this, but no one really knew. Even at this time, when he knew his death was but a few minutes away, he couldn’t help but admire the architectural skills of those who had lived so long ago.

He wondered idly if any of the daily patrons knew why the temple was built the way it was. Probably not, he decided, as he himself had grasped the reason only a few weeks ago. He remembered his previous visit, when he had made that terrible oath, that he would never rest until he had righted the ancient wrongs, until he had unified the world.

He had failed. People had called him foolhardy and arrogant, when he set out full of purpose. He had proved them right. Far from being the savior of the world, he had succeeded in making things far worse and a terrible war seemed inevitable. Years of hate and misunderstanding would finally find an outlet, and a secret cowardly part of him was glad he would not live to see it. This brought him back to the present, he had come back to the sanctuary, back full circle, to make his last sacrifice for the cause.

The cat slipped in, almost unnoticed, and crept under one of the stone pews.

He looked down at the tiny bundle under his arm, which wriggled slightly under the scrutiny. He slowly unwrapped many layers of fine quilt to reveal a baby, a pale scrawny thing not too many days old. Large eyes blacker than night stared out from a thin, bony face. It seemed malnourished, an unhealthy, sickly looking thing. Good, he thought to himself, perhaps it would make it less of a sin to kill this creature, the creature which took its mother’s life when it was born.

The cat’s eyes narrowed as it watched the man place the baby gently on the scorched spot which marked the centre of the podium, where the sun’s burning rays would strike unforgivingly, focused by the mirrors in the ceiling. A piece of parchment placed there would ignite instantly. And the man placed the baby lovingly on the spot.

The baby seemed to know something momentous was happening, it stayed completely still, and stared at the man through its wonderfully expressive dark eyes. A sudden lump found its way into the man’s throat for some reason, and he murmured as he rose, ‘Forgive me.’

Dawn was scant moments away. He looked up at the ceiling he could not see, and spoke, his voice husky. ‘This is my last offering. I have nothing else to offer you.’ His voice echoed around the temple. ‘Please,’ he bowed his head, ‘Accept my sacrifice. Save my people.’

The tiniest prick of light appeared above. The sun shone down on the new-born. The man waited. For the cries of the infant as it was burnt to death. For the smell of burning flesh. For his heart to break.

And waited.

And under his astonished gaze, the baby began to giggle. He could feel the hair on his fore-arm rise, the strange musical hum which accompanied a strong burst of the Power filled his ears. His eyes met his son’s and a flash of understanding brought him to his knees. The baby’s eyes were now a light grey, its face seemed fuller, more human.

His sacrifice had been accepted, not the way he thought it would have been, but accepted nonetheless.

They came soon after dawn, as he knew they would. Grim faced mercenaries, seven of them marched slowly down the entrance towards the podium. He was still on his knees, to all appearances, he appeared to be praying. But they took no chances, although it was day now, and the sun’s gentle diffused light lit up the sanctuary. Their swords were unsheathed, and they arrayed themselves in close ranks behind him. Was it the first time blood would be shed in this sanctuary?

And the bravest of them crept closer, and with a sudden thrust of his sword, stabbed him in the back. The man toppled forward, onto the strongly sunlit dais. His flesh began to burn almost instantaneously, far too quickly for a normal human. The baby watched him gravely as he died, light grey eyes meeting black, and the man smiled, a thin smile on a too pale face.

‘My son, the savior of the world…’

The priestesses came soon after, when nothing remained of the man but ashes, with cries of disbelief as they noticed the baby, unscarred, unburnt, wrapped in fine silks. They assumed, of course, that a woman who could not care for her baby left it here, as was the custom amongst the poor. But rarely did a baby come with fine silk quilts. And never was it placed in the centre of the dais, where the sun shone strongest, the mother must have been very careless indeed.

The cat crept out unnoticed. The act of power it had witnessed had shaken it deeply. It would have to report back that day of course, but it would not mention the baby. The vampire was cornered in the old sanctuary, and met his end in the hands of the mercenaries, those were the events that happened that night. The sacrifice would remain a secret.