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How many of THESE meetings really take place?

2007-01-06

Good morning Boys and Girls!

(Our setting is a forgotten supply closet in the bowels of the White House, pretty close to the entrance of that secret tunnel JFK used to sneak out to see women all the time. The closet isn't tiny, and over the years, these three men had met here many times and have therefore taken it upon themselves to make the place as comfortable as possible amid the boxes of junk memorabilia, cleaning supplies from as far back as the early twentieth century plus lots of other once important things. Boxes lining one wall contain thousands of spools of unused, and now, perhaps never to be used, recording tape for some of the old reel-to-reel recorders used by more than one of the upstairs occupants over the years to capture conversations in which they were involved.

For over six years now they've used this room for their no-less-frequently-than-m onthly meetings. Early on, they managed to find and drag in here three fairly comfortable chairs. They looked to be from the era of the Eisenhower administration, but one of the three men, who'd worked for Eisenhower's re-election campaign in '56 - his introductory foray into presidential politics - had said he didn't remember them as having been used in the White House then. No matter, they were just chairs.

An old steam trunk Teddy Roosevelt had used to move some of his personal belongings in, but had for some reason left behind, became their coffee table.

One of the men, we'll call him "Man #1," is pouring coffee from a old fashioned thermos into three little styrofoam cups as we join them...)

Man #2: "For Chris'sake, can't you get us some better cups? I hate drinkin' outta them little things. It's like drinkin' punch at a five-year-old's birthday party.

Man #1: "Yeah, yeah... (he's finished pouring now and hands each of them a cup, then picks up his own and sits back down on his chair and relaxes, placing his feet on the top of the steam trunk.) How about you bring the coffee from now on."

Man #3 - the oldest by far: "The coffee's fine. Gentleman, what do you propose we do about this speech? Somehow we need this to fly."

Man #1: "Right," he says sarcastically. "This isn't going to fly no matter what we have him say. I think we're just going to have to ride out the shit-storm, and let him take whatever they throw at him."

Man #2: "I'm not sure he'll be able to." (Brow furrowed, he shook his head slowly. "That fucking Woodward. Why did he have to release the tape of Jerry Ford trashing this war? That was cold."

Man #3: "Oh simmer down. That didn't matter one little bit and you know it. No one with any brains has supported the war except us, and our reasons are, you have to admit, a little self-serving."

Man #1: "This is old news. What do we do now?" He picks up a white waxed bag. "Doughnut?" After taking one himself, he passes the treats around. They each take a cruller. It's silent for a minute or so as they sit thinking except for the sound of chewing...

Man #2: - talking through a final mouthful of crispy glazed fried dough, sits up suddenly "I just had an idea!" he grabs a napkin out of the bag and dabs at his chin and cleans his fingers. He swallows, clears his throat. "How much is in the pool account right this minute?"

Man #3 opens a briefcase and takes out a plain folder. He extracts a few sheets of paper and looks at the bottom most figure on the last page: "Six hundred million. Forty percent in Hallibuton with the rest divided up between the fourteen other contractors."

Man #2: "Okay." He sits for a minute longer. "Here's what we do... First we sell Halliburton short about two months out. Then we start feeding George with some of the stuff we've been keeping from him... and we do it NOW. We tell him that if he wants to make the speech play, he's got to give the left a bone. During the speech he announces that he's become privy to some really bad stuff; that he's gonna' start a serious probe into Halliburton. Then WE make sure it really happens. We make him suspend all payments to them... Put 'em in the shit-house."

Man #1: "Hey wait a min..."

Man #2: Interrupts, waving him off and continuing "Meanwhile, WE decide who he should move the contracts to and we start buying up their stock pronto. Maybe even leverage the cash! Buy on margin."

Man #1: "Suspend their payments? Holy shit! Could he do it?"

Man #2: "If we give him some of the stuff we have? Yes-in-deedee. He'd do it in a heartbeat. Hell, he'd have to!"

Man #1: "Cheney will go ape-shit!" They all laugh heartily... "The asshole."

Man #2: "So we make GW look like he's doing the right thing - hell, he WOULD be doing the right thing - we make a boatload on the devaluation of their stock, and we manipulate who he turns to for... for "assistance.""

Man #3: "Let's see..." He's mentally calculating. "If Halliburton dropped, say... 25% in two months and we'd sold short, reinvested in whoever we steer GW to, and buy on margin as you suggested, and their stock RISES the same 25% Halliburton drops... We could make..." He too sits up straight as the figure takes shape in his head. "The timing will be critical, but assuming things go right at all? -three billion. Easy. EASY! Maybe four or five... and in just sixty days."

Man #1: "And in the process George is throwing a bone to the whiners? That's too perfect. I love it."

Man #2: "That's not bad. What did we start with in this fund? Twenty grand each?" He leans forward to shake the hands of the the other two men. "We said we could make this eight years work for us. Here's to war!"

Men #'s 1 and 3: "To War!"

Meanwhile, in another abandoned closet down and around a couple of halls from where these men talk, a man sits checking the sound levels on an ancient RCA mono reel-to-reel tape recorder he'd found sitting atop a long line of boxes full of blank tapes that seemed to work just fine in the old machine.

Just a janitor, he'd been looking for some floor cleaner he knew he'd seen in one closet or another down here at some point, and he'd stumbled into a cozy little room with three chairs and a steam-trunk set up for use as a coffee table. Interestingly, the room smelled like coffee! People had used the room recently. This was definately odd, he decided.

Curious, he'd gone to radio shack and purchsed some wire and a little voice activated microphone. He'd had to buy an old fashioned jack too as the new sort wouldn't work in the old recorder. He simply spliced the wire between the mike cord and the jack.

Over the course of the next week or so, during breaks, he'd taken the time to run fifty feet of wire through some old and now unused heating ducts, just like like he'd seen done in a couple of movies. The room he was in with his old recorder was only about thirty feet away from the one the three men were in, but to walk between the two, you had to go over two hundred and fifty feet around old hallways.

With that accomplished, he'd simply placed the little mike on top of the boxes of blank tapes. He opened only one of the boxes and taken a few tapes. On the slowest speed each tape could record almost three hours of conversation. If the machine shut off after ten seconds of silence as it was supposed to, he didn't think he'd have to change the tapes very often.


Today he'd come down to see if the machine had been activated recently. To his surprise; why look! -it was running now!. It sure wasn't the latest in high-teck wizardry, but the thing was working. Oh Lordy, was it ever working.

He smiled thinking of his exceptionally secure, if modest, government pension. Now, he correctly suspected, no matter what he decided to do with the information he was listening to, it was bound to be augmented most handsomely.



Be good to everyone.

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