Walter Williams - The Rift

It had been useless to explain that it had been the Spirit talking, not Frankland. Who was the program manager to question the words of the Spirit? But Frankland’s Video Half-Hour of Prophecy was canceled anyway.

“The seals produce the trumpets and the trumpets produce the bowls!” he proclaimed. “What could be clearer? What do you have to say to that,” he demanded, “Mr. Roman go-to-confession-once-a-week-and-every thing-will-be-fine Catholic?”

People needed to wake up, that was for sure. The signs were all around. The world was going to come to an end, practically any second, and the people were going to need instruction as to what to do, how to behave.

He didn’t know how long he would be permitted to continue. Once the Tribulation started, the servants of Satan were bound to try to silence him.

“And who is this prince?” he asked. “The prince is the little horn of Daniel! It’s all so clear !”

Frankland was ready for the servants of Satan when they came. He had a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun clipped under the desk in the front office. There was a pistol in a drawer here in the studio, and another in his truck.

And, in the concrete bunkers he’d poured for the members of the Tribulation Club on the back of his property, there were a lot more surprises for Satan.

Cases and cases of them.

He brought his hand down on the control panel in front of him, thumping it with his fist as if he were banging a pulpit. Needles leaped on the displays.

“What more do you people need to know?” he demanded.

*

Charlie sipped at his Cohiba, letting the smoke of the Cuban cigar roll over his tongue. He let the taste soak into his palate for a moment, then tilted his head back and exhaled.

“And the hell of it is,” he said, “we’re going to make a fortune while the economy of the entire world goes straight down the tubes. Firms will go bankrupt. Careers will be wrecked. Millions of people will lose their jobs. We may even see a war or two when economies crash in the Third World.”

“You mean like in Arkansas?” Megan said.

Charlie grinned and sipped his Remy Martin. Under the water of his spa, he slid the bottom of his foot along her smooth bare thigh. She smiled back, then took a taste of her own cigar.

They were sitting opposite one another in the spa on Charlie’s second-floor deck, overlooking his yard and pool. Pulsing jets of water massaged their backs, feet, and legs. Wind chimes rang distantly over the throb of the spa’s pumps.

Charlie tilted his head back against the plastic headrest, looked at the few stars visible through high banks of cloud. “There’s a market in everything nowadays,” he said. “Currency, commodities, metals, bonds. There’s a market in markets .” He tilted his head down and looked at her. “With all our short positions, we’ve just placed our bets on the market in catastrophe.”

Megan gave a low laugh. She leaned forward, held out her crystal glass. “Here’s to catastrophe,” she said.

He bent toward her, touched his glass to hers. A crystal chime sang out, hung for several seconds in the air.

Charlie leaned further, pressed his lips to hers. Her lips were moist, tasted of smoke and desire.

A throb of pure lust pulsed through his nerves. For a half-second he considered flinging his drink and cigar off the edge of his patio and throwing himself on Megan, but on reflection he decided to wait.

Timing, he found, was everything.

He leaned back, let the water jets pulse against his back, sipped again at his drink. Megan rescued a strand of her pinned-up auburn hair that had trailed into the water, then looked back at him with dark eyes.

Charlie adored Megan, and it was because he could look into her and see a reflection of himself. Someone who had come from nowhere- from worse than nowhere- and turned herself into someone else by talent, by energy, and by pure force of will. And the process wasn’t over. Megan was improving her vision of herself all the time.

Charlie loved Megan not for herself, but for her potential.

Megan was born in the Ozarks- Charlie didn’t know just where. Her father was a trapper, for God’s sake, someone who spent most of his life in the woods and mountains looking for animals to skin. Her mother was an alcoholic, abusive when she wasn’t drinking herself unconscious. Megan had clawed her way out of that environment through pure courage and determination, got her college degree, worked her way up in the TPS back room to the point where she was in charge of the whole settlements office. Changed her hick accent to the smooth tones of a Southern beauty queen- now he could only hear the Ozarks in her voice when she got excited. Megan had remade herself.

And so had Charlie. The son of an East London machinist, the product of the local Mixed Junior School, he had ridden a talent for maths to London University, to a first-class degree in mathematics, to jobs at Morgan Stanley in London and Citi in New York- both American firms where his lowly origins and Cockney accent were not a liability- and now to head of the front room at Tennessee Planters Securities. Along the way he’d had his teeth capped, his jaw-line reshaped, and his straight, mousy brown hair had gone blond and wavy.

He hadn’t managed to lose his Cockney accent the way Megan had lost the tones of the Ozarks, but he’d worked out ways of turning the accent to his advantage.

In Megan he had found a kindred soul, someone who understood that sometimes a person just needed to be someone else, could decide who that person was to be, and then become that person.

The way Charlie figured it, there was a kind of empty space, a virtual space in the world where a successful person was destined to be. He planned to occupy that space.

So far, it was working very well.

Charlie adjusted his body to the massaging jets that throbbed behind his back. He tasted his cigar again and looked at Megan over the smoke that curled from his mouth. “Life is good, innit?” he said.

Megan blew a kiss at him over the rim of her brandy snifter, and gave voice to the two words that were her motto. “No guilt,” she said.

“Why be guilty?” Charlie sipped his cognac. “We’re not going to cause the recession.”

“For every winner in the market,” Megan said reasonably, “there is a loser. For every fortune we make, a fortune is lost somewhere else. People who aren’t as smart, or as quick, or are just unlucky.”

Charlie smiled. This was the settlements officer talking. In the end, for Megan everything had to balance.

It was her job to catch his mistakes. Trading was fast and manic, and sometimes in the heat of action traders placed the wrong orders or entered the wrong figures. It was not unknown for traders to attempt fraud and deception. It was the task of the settlements office to catch those mistakes on the fly, to make sure that all the accounts were balanced at the end of the day. The job required skill, intelligence, instinct, and tact.

All skills that Megan possessed in abundance. But her instinct to bring columns of figures into balance did not necessarily encompass all financial reality.

“That’s not exactly true, is it?” Charlie said. He leaned back and waved his cigar at the sky. “The market isn’t a zero-sum game,” he said. “Because wealth isn’t limited. The market can be used to make more wealth. And then everyone benefits. As that great statesman John Fitzgerald Kennedy used to say, a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Megan examined her cigar. “That’s not what’s going to happen in this case, Charlie. We’re fast and smart, and we’re going to take money from the people who are slow and stupid.”