Admit The Horse
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-one
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Book Club Discussion Questions
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ADMIT
the HORSE
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P.G. Abeles
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, business establishments or locales is entirely coincidental. Actual historical events depicted reflect the author’s research and opinion.The publisher does not have control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites or their content.
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Admit The Horse
Copyright © 2012 Paula G. Abeles. All rights reserved.
Cover Design by Tony Greco & Associates
Cover Illustration: “The Procession of The Trojan Horse In Troy” by Giovanni
Domenico Tiepolo, 1773
eBook Design: Pequod Book Design
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced or transmitted in any manner whatsoever, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
ISBN (eBook): 978-0-9840314-9-8
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2011942011
Cataloging-in Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress
Political Thriller/Mystery
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada
“This novel is fiction.
Except for the parts that aren’t.”
Michael Crichton
For my parents…
Comment pourriez-vous etre perdu
quand vous etes toujour trouve dans mon coeur?
‘O wretched countrymen! What fury reigns?
What more than madness has possess’d your brains?
Think you the Grecians from your coasts are gone?
And are Ulysses’ arts no better known?
This hollow fabric either must inclose,
Within its blind recess, our secret foes;
Or ‘t is an engine rais’d above the town,
T’ o’erlook the walls, and then to batter down.
Somewhat is sure design’ d, by fraud or force:
Trust not their presents, nor admit the horse.’
The Aeneid, Virgil, Book 2 (translated by John Dryden)
Chapter One
July 2007
New York, New York
SINCE ITS FOUNDING IN 1923, Tolero Star Securities had weathered economic and international crises with aplomb. The Stock Market crash in 1929, World War II, even the September 11th terrorist attacks, had only tested its financial stability and solvency. Other firms were dragged under by the weight of those events. Tolero Star had survived; some might even argue, it had prevailed—listed as one of the “most admired companies in America” by a popular business journal. But Tolero Securities had a problem—more specifically it had two problems. Tolero’s High Quality Investment Fund and High Quality Leverage Fund had promised their investors low-risk, high-grade investments with a negligible 6% invested in mortgage-backed securities. The funds had enjoyed a record-shattering forty-month 50% return; but the truth will out. The hedge funds’ investment in the pooled mortgages of credit-risky borrowers was not 6%—but 60%. And, as the Wall Street broker dealers were reevaluating the pricing of those securities, returns were collapsing. Investors wanted their money back. With few other options to forestall a major panic and massive sell-off, Tolero Star Securities announced it was suspending redemptions. Nobody was getting out.
Chapter Two
August 2007
Hilo, Hawaii
IT WAS RAINING OUTSIDE. She slid off her high heels and pushed them under the desk cubicle with her toes—savoring the moment of freedom. From her bag she pulled out a pair of impressively logo-d flats: a sidewalk knock-off that cost approximately one-hundredth the price of the original. No sense ruining her good shoes in the rain.
In a workplace characterized by Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops, she dressed like she worked in a New York law firm. She didn’t invite confidences from her co-workers and she didn’t share any. With her perfect tawny skin, expensive-looking suits, and exquisitely manicured hair and nails, it was no wonder she was a source of interest and envy within the island bureaucracy.
The effort was worth it. She was determined no one should guess what she considered her embarrassing origins—a mother so swollen and fat on Spam she had to turn sideways to fit through the door of her battered mobile home—popping blood pressure pills like candy. So much for the royal blood of Kamehameha, she thought.
Taking a covered
elastic from her desk drawer, she pulled her glossy hair into a high ponytail. There was no one left in the office to see her; she might as well be comfortable. More than once, she’d looked for an excuse to stay a few minutes after the others had left so she could savor the day-end freedom. But today she wanted to get home—to pack. She turned off her computer. This was a dead-end job on a dead-end island. She hadn’t bothered to make any friends in the office; there was really nobody here worth keeping.
There was no need to lock anything. The building was secure, and, anyway, the cleaning service would be making their rounds within the hour. As she exited the elevator on the ground floor, her shoes padded softly against the intricately veined marble floor. What he’d asked her to do was easy. With the polyglot ethnicities of Hawaii, she’d had no trouble creating a birth certificate for a multiracial child. She’d mailed it to the P.O. box specified in the envelope, but with a brief note of explanation that there had been no way to create a record in the database as they’d directed—either their password information was outdated or someone had blocked the code. She’d been instructed not to contact them, so she hadn’t. She supposed if they checked the system, they’d figure it out for themselves. In the meantime the money they promised her should be waiting.
She unlocked the car door and slid behind the steering wheel—throwing her purse on the passenger seat. The wheel felt a little sticky. She grabbed a handiwipe from her bag and wiped her palms as she eased her car into the traffic on Aupuni Street.
As the first waves of nausea hit her, she tried to remember what she had eaten that day—just a quick candy bar from the machine and a couple of diet sodas. She should have eaten something. Her mother was always after her for not eating. She was too skinny, her mother said. Men did not like women that were all bones and sinew. Well, maybe not men on the islands—but there was a confirmation on a flight in her name to LAX on her computer, all bought and paid for. She had decided long ago—she wasn’t staying on the island.
She suddenly realized she was sweating—pouring sweat. There was a metallic taste in her mouth that was strange and familiar at the same time. There was something in her mouth—something wet and salty like tears. Was she crying?—she wondered absently. She was confused; there was no reason to cry. She had her whole life ahead of her. Finally, after years of waiting, she was escaping, unfettered, unbound.
But she wasn’t crying; it was sweat from her forehead. It felt like she was drowning—in—what?—what was in her mouth?—filling her mouth—almost suffocating her? She opened her mouth and saw it spill to the passenger seat. In the dark it looked black. Now it was pouring out of her mouth, even as the car headlights and traffic lights started to blur and coalesce. Even after she could no longer see, she heard the horns and the sirens and the voices; but it didn’t have anything to do with her anymore. She was free.
Chapter Three
September 2007
Arlington, Virginia
THIS TIME THEY NEEDED TO BE SURE. Two men mounted the brick stairs, checking that they had the right address on Vernon Street, North. Twenty minutes earlier they had been trying to open the door at the similar sounding North Vernon Street when the irate householder almost called the cops. They used the office key to open the black lacquered door. As they entered the nondescript brick townhouse, they could hear the phone ringing. Consulting a page torn from a notebook, they disabled the security system. The office had been trying to reach him for hours after he missed an important committee meeting. The senior staff had been slow to worry. Most of them were still readjusting to work after the long Labor Day weekend.
The house was still; quiet. “Congressman?” one called out. No answer.
“Anyone home?”
They moved into the house by inches.
“Probably, you know, he just went home to Ohio for the long weekend and forgot to tell us.” The other staffer nodded, it made sense. “Did we try the number at the lake house?”
“Kiera did. No answer.”
Both involuntarily looked up at the large brass chandelier in the foyer.
“Well, no panties. I guess that’s a good thing.”
Both staffers were nervous. Neither had wanted this assignment. Discovering your employer involved in any activity that was worth missing a Congressional hearing was not generally considered good for your career. They steeled themselves against unpleasant discovery, armed with the knowledge that Donald Gilchrist was a family man with five children at home in Amlin, Ohio. He was not a man with secrets. But he was also not a congressman who missed important meetings.
Beltway insiders scoffed that he looked more like a plumber than a politician, but, in truth, he looked like what he was: a doughy sixty-five year old man with a big nose, small teeth, and enough hair to say he had it; perfectly at ease with his fellow Masons and Rotary Club members and always ready to hit a few balls on the golf course. He’d now been returned to Congress ten times from his socially conservative, new-money Ohio district, and if other men might have been tempted to consider his 57% share of the vote in his most recent contest as an invitation to seek higher office—Gilchrist was not among them. He liked where he was, liked his job.
And he was not without influence. He was the ranking Republican on the Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit Subcommittee and his staff was working on an investigation of the alleged fraud that was going on in the sub-prime lending market sponsored by a voter advocacy group called SEED. SEED was the acronym for Self Empowerment through Economic Development and was one of the primary movers behind the Community Reinvestment Act or CRA, which encouraged banks to make high-risk loans to customers with poor credit to increase home ownership. It had been done in the worthy name of ending discrimination in the lending industry, but like so many government programs, it had become vulnerable to special-interest pressures.
For years now, any bank that wanted to merge or expand had to demonstrate that it had complied with the CRA—and an application for approval could be sidelined completely if SEED or other community interest groups filed complaints or staged protests. Making the banks more responsive to consumers, and their lending practices more transparent, should have been a good thing. But bank officials increasingly complained to a sympathetic Gilchrist that SEED was using the bankers’ fear of their “rent-a-mobs” as a form of extortion to force them to ignore standard industry risk ratios. Few people realized that banks were now required to accept food stamps as a source of income on mortgage applications.
Few of these loans were in the best interests of the borrowers—most of whom would be hard pressed to keep their homes when the usurious rates charged by the mortgage brokers reset skyward, but there was little question that they devolved to the benefit of SEED. If the mortgage were written directly by Fannie-Mae or Freddie-Mac, SEED received 4% of each and every mortgage underwritten by the quasi-governmental agencies. It wasn’t a small chunk of change. In 1992 Fannie-Mae was making $1 billion in loans to low income families, by 1999 that figure had grown to $80 billion; by 2003—the last year for which figures were provided by Fannie-Mae—the loans had reached a staggering $600 billion dollars. SEED declined to provide hard numbers, but even by the most conservative estimates these loans were generating $50 million dollars a year for the organization; and possibly much more.
The banks complained that with so many questionable loans on their books, they were prevented from transacting business they wanted and needed to do with low-risk investors—a situation which, they claimed, threatened to stall the commercial banking industry. Luckily, the investment banks had a solution. Congress could resolve the issue, they suggested, by instructing Fannie-Mae and Freddie-Mac to package the loans with other less risky mortgages—theoretically reducing the risk—and Wall Street could profitably sell them to investors as “mortgage backed securities.” As far as Gilchrist had been able to ascertain, the U.S. government was now unwittingly operating as a guarantor of a pyramid scheme.
Most disturbing for Gi
lchrist, who was Catholic and pro-life, was the way SEED, and its notorious use of satellite and front organizations, had apparently hoodwinked the Catholic Church. For decades, every Sunday before Thanksgiving, in dioceses across the United States, parishioners had been provided with pre-printed envelopes to donate to the Campaign For Human Development—an initiative, they were informed, of “The Catholic Church working to end poverty and injustice in America.” Unbeknownst to most American Catholics, in the last ten years CHD had given more than $7.3 million dollars to SEED. Money, paradoxically, used by SEED to support pro-choice candidates.
Not only would Gilchrist’s investigation discredit the ranking member from Massachusetts—a pompous, openly gay blowhard despised by the homophobic Gilchrist—but its links to one of the democratic candidates for president would likely prove equally embarrassing to the Democrats—the possibility of which, Gilchrist was honest enough to admit, he savoured. Apparently, one of the Democratic contenders, Congressman Okono, had long-term ties to SEED. Pictures had surfaced of Okono teaching a Power Training seminar for SEED from sometime in the mid-1990s. Based on the idea of “power analysis” formulated by social agitator Saul Alinsky, it was a cynical strategy to identify relationships built on self-interest and find a way to exploit them to the organizer’s advantage. Gilchrist imagined it would come as a surprise to his idealistic, kumbaya-singing backers that the soft-spoken, professorial Okono had been teaching the brass knuckle tactics of intimidation, disruption, and extortion that had proved such powerful tools for SEED’s “community organizers.”
Of course, it was early days yet. Gilchrist was not one to count his chickens before they hatched. Even among his own staff, Gilchrist was notorious for being close-mouthed. Last weekend, he’d been concerned when Josh Stein at the Political Insider had called him, and seemed to have some information that Gilchrist staffers had been sniffing around SEED and the home loans. Gilchrist had had a few drinks by then, and had been afraid he’d revealed more than he meant to. But nothing about the investigation had appeared in Stein’s column, so he had relaxed.
Both young staffers were trying to pretend, for the benefit of the other, that they weren’t nervous.