Steven Gore - Absolute Risk

“Make a sound,” the voice said, “and I’ll shoot.”

Handcuffs snapped around his wrists. Tape slapped against his mouth. Hands clamped onto his elbows and turned him ninety degrees and forced him forward. He stumbled two steps, then his feet caught up with him. A car motor started. A door opened, but the inside light stayed dark.

From fifteen feet away, he recognized that it was a PLA Brave Warrior combat vehicle. He’d seen them on the roads around Chengdu and often wondered who was the enemy.

Now he knew. And it was him.

Soldiers bracketed him in the rear seat as the SUV crept across the parking lot and toward the road leading out of the special economic zone. As they drove toward the gate, Old Cat glanced back at the lamp-lit tents, imagining the comforting sounds he’d heard just minutes earlier, and the nostalgic moments that followed, and became aware that while he regretted dying, he wasn’t afraid.

The headlights came on and illuminated the near highway, but faded into a distant darkness And that was it. That was the source of his regret: a future he couldn’t imagine.

Perhaps if he’d gone to college, maybe even as far as high school, he might’ve been able to devise a destination for himself and for the rebellion.

Instead, all he knew, all any of them knew, was what they were fleeing from:

Confucianism had been death.

Nationalism had been death.

Communism had been death.

And now capitalism had become death.

They had all believed that a rebellion would come someday-all the starving farmers and the sick children and the slaves and the wage-slave workers and the landless laborers.

No, that wasn’t it.

They had all merely hoped. And since it had been mere hope, they hadn’t prepared, and not just with arms, but with ideas.

Old Cat watched the lights of the Chengdu Military Air Base rise up in the distance, a razor-edged jewel stark-lit in the surrounding dark countryside.

And he wondered how they would kill him.

Preparation. How does one prepare? Maybe that had been the Chinese problem all along, the legacy of Buddhism. One endures. One suffers. One burns incense for ancestors who suffered before. If life is suffering, then death is no more than a flame gone out and memory is no more than dissipating smoke, and the future can be no different than the past.

An image of the innocent face of the Christian kid came to him. What was his name? Jian-jun? Yes. Jian-jun. He had a good story to tell, but his religion had no answer either.

The man on the cross, would he build a car or dam a river or spray pesticides? If not, what work would he do?

Old Cat then remembered a cartoon he’d seen years earlier: a textile worker looking up from where he was sewing a “What Would Jesus Do?” baseball cap and saying, “I’m not sure what Jesus would do, but I’m sure he wouldn’t be doing this.”

Old Cat thought of the anthropologist sleeping in the storage room. She must have answers to these questions. She’d spent her life watching, listening, thinking. Maybe she had seen a society where people didn’t poison each other, where all was not suffering and exploitation.

The Brave Warrior came to a stop.

A gate slid open.

Soldiers saluted. Their arms sleeved in sharp-creased jackets. Their heads encased in matte-black helmets. Their machine gun barrels glinting in the headlights.

If only there’d been time to ask.

The hearing will come to order.”

Senator Geoff Prescott struck his gavel a second time and the news reporters and photographers spread into streams moving from the front of the room and circling toward their seats. He then looked at Milton Abrams.

“I apologize for the delay due to the archaic nature of the Senate’s roll call procedures, Mr. Chairman.” Prescott smiled, a smile that Abrams assumed he was not alone in recognizing communicated the opposite of the sincerity that Prescott intended. Abrams suspected that Prescott enjoyed as much as the others hearing his name called in the Senate chamber. “It’s not just the economy that needs modernizing.”

Prescott looked over the notes lying before him. “Where were we?” An aide stepped forward and then pointed down. “Ah, yes. I see. We’d just gotten to the issue of inflation and the theory under which your predecessor operated, in effect, claiming that price stability requires less than a hundred percent employment.”

Abrams nodded.

“But let’s clarify our terms,” Abrams said. “Until I was confirmed as Federal Reserve chairman, the phrase ‘full employment’ meant up to seven percent unemployment, and price stability meant inflation at a rate that didn’t threaten what was called full employment. What I did was to simply-“

“You made your ideas clear at your confirmation hearing and we all know you executed it.” Prescott glanced at his watch. “Can’t you advance the ball here a little bit?”

Abrams thought of Viz McBride sitting in the back row of the hearing room and remembered the size of his hand when he’d picked up a water glass in the kitchen. It was so large that his fingers met the base of his palm-and Abrams imagined it wrapped around Prescott’s throat.

“The point I intended to make, Senator, was that the figures that we’ve relied on for the last four administrations have underestimated inflation by at least fifty percent, perhaps more, and the same is true of unemployment.”

Abrams pointed his finger over his shoulder at the business press.

“The markets need not panic,” Abrams said. “Indeed, anyone who trades in the next few hours based on those comments is a fool. The world is what it is. The economy is what it is. None of that has changed in the last thirty seconds.”

Abrams noticed that three of the twelve senators smiled, seven frowned, and two were looking at their BlackBerrys and had missed the exchange altogether.

Prescott’s face flushed.

“You’re saying that the last four presidents have been lying to the American people about the true rates of inflation and unemployment?”

Abrams ground his right knuckles into his left palm under the table. He wanted to answer by saying that they couldn’t have been lying because none of them understood enough about the economy to know what the truth really was. They lied no more than his brother-in-law’s myna bird did when it proclaimed to anyone entering the living room that the sky was falling.

“No, Senator. I think that they were misled by certain conceptual issues of measurement and definition.”

“And the point is?”

“That we need to be realistic about inflation, about real inflation. The world is watching. The fact that we lie to ourselves doesn’t mean that foreign governments on whom we rely to buy our debt aren’t telling themselves the truth.” Abrams raised his finger. “The only reason-the only reason-that the U.S. bond market hasn’t collapsed in recent years is that foreign purchasers of our debt-based on their own, independent calculations and based on readily available data-still believe that despite the true rates of inflation and unemployment we’re still a good risk.”

Abrams let them absorb that thought, then said, “In addition to inflation as normally defined, there is also what I call functional inflation. Eighteen percent interest on credit card debt and the decline in real wages during the last thirty-five years, both have the same effect as inflation, but it has not been recognized as such.”

“Say our real inflation rate is seven percent,” Prescott said, “say our real unemployment rate is fourteen percent-I’m not conceding that it is-but just say. What does that mean for our bond markets?”

“It means that if there’s a spike in worldwide commodity prices, for example, for tin, copper, and platinum, inflation will skyrocket. We won’t be able to pay our debts and the usual buyers of our treasury bonds will back away.”