The Banker's Club Boxed Set

The Banker’s Club

Books I & II

Defaults

Acquisitions & Withdrawals

T. I. WADE

The Banker’s Club

Defaults

Book I

T. I. WADE

The Banker’s Club— Defaults Book 1.

Copyright © 2013 by T I Wade.

All Rights Reserved.

Published in the United States of America.

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Wade, The Banker’s Club / T I Wade.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Preston Stroud, a good friend of mine from Harnett County, North Carolina for helping me understand the current day’s U.S. conspiracies discussed on talk radio and internet websites, and which one day may be very possible.

I couldn’t include everything going on in today’s financial and banking institutions, but hope that this fictional work is close enough to the country’s current feelings and thoughts about our finances and the institutions that control them.

We all have to deal with them. There is no other way, and no way out.

Again, I am not an expert or Master of any Trades mentioned in this story, and if I have offended anyone by my lack of knowledge, I apologize, unless you are my bank manager.

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves,

And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

Matthew 21:12-13

Chapter 1

Act One: Operation Default

On a beautiful clear morning in Manhattan, Stephan Saber, a well-dressed man puffing a large cigar, looked out of his large office windows and watched a silver aircraft fly directly into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. It was exactly 8:46 a.m. The American Airlines aircraft, a 757 or a 767 he thought, penetrated the building thirty or so floors above his place of observation, the 54th story of a building about a mile away on Wall Street.

The sun glistened off the silver aircraft as the hijacker, a man he had never met but had spoken to several times by phone, flew the plane into the North Tower a few stories higher than the plan had suggested. As the vibrations of the mushrooming explosion reverberated inside his sealed building on Wall Street, Stephan knew that more excitement was still to come…if the U.S. Air Force didn’t respond too quickly.

He smiled. Not only was the first aircraft on time, his wife was already in the air on another plane, originally bound for Los Angeles on United Flight 175 but also slated to visit Manhattan that morning. The trip from Boston was a gift from Stephan Saber to his wife: a ten-day vacation in Hawaii.

If he had had a video camera with him, Stephan could have taken great footage of the incoming aircraft. He didn’t see the exact impact as the aircraft came in from the north, but he was the only person in Manhattan who knew what was about to happen. His vantage point would be nearly perfect for the second attack.

Aboard the second aircraft, Stephan was completely sure his beautiful, well-dressed wife sat next to her lover. Their relationship had developed over a number of years. Stephan had booked her on that particular flight because of the plan to use the airplane as a weapon, and also because her lover lived in Boston. She had been chauffeured to Boston from Manhattan the day before to catch the flight, ensuring this ironic symmetry.

Again, Stephan smiled. It would all be over in a few minutes; the U.S. Air Force could never respond to the first terrorist attack quickly enough to stop the second. Calmly, he lit up a second expensive cigar and watched pandemonium subsume lower Manhattan as the cloud of destruction from the first aircraft expanded out from the North Tower. He had all three major television channels and CNN on the screens in his large, richly equipped office, an office befitting the CEO of one of the biggest securities companies in the world.

He looked at his watch; it read exactly 9:00 a.m. All the television stations, on mute, showed the same smoking tower. However, he wasn’t looking north anymore, but south, trying to find the second glinting aircraft in which he hoped his adversary was already dead.

Stephan—and others—had organized this unfathomable destruction not only to divest him of his wife, but to rid him of an opposition executive, cause a smokescreen for a couple of acquisitions of a billion dollars each, start a worldwide domino effect of destruction within his line of work, and stage the perfect murder of a man he hated venomously.

He still loved and admired his wife; she was a tough cookie, but the man was much like him, and Stephan hoped he was already dead. The world was about to change in his favor forever.

At the same time Stephan Saber was enjoying the view, the expensively dressed blonde-haired Mrs. Saber aboard Flight 175 was now alone in First Class. During the initial attack on the flight crew, a dark-haired terrorist had cut the throat of the man next to her, spattering her with his gushing blood. The victim was the CEO of a smaller financial firm familiar to her husband, and his enemy of 20 years.

She was the last person alive in First Class; all others had been forced by the attackers to the rear of the aircraft several minutes earlier. The attackers had left the cockpit door wide open for her sake alone, and she could see the closing Manhattan skyline as another terrorist dove the aircraft in, banking hard to turn northwards. She thought that she could even see her husband’s building and office on Wall Street, and suddenly she wondered if this was his doing.

Impossible! she said aloud to no one, but she wouldn’t put anything past her husband, a man who had often told her that he would rule the world one day.

Chapter 2

Act Two: The First Recession

The country’s financial institutions are not to blame for the financial meltdown hitting the USA, said the same broadcaster Stephan Saber had watched on television several years earlier during the eventful morning of 9/11.

In the same office on Wall Street, Saber smiled as he heard the media garbage meted out to unsuspecting listeners. Several of the largest institutions based on the East Coast have replied to Federal Reserve accusations regarding the meltdown. They respond that this mortgage fiasco was instead caused by long-term government intervention, new laws instituted by Congress, and a complete lack of government responsibility in running the finances of the most powerful country in the world, not by the country’s banking system.

Saber and his international securities firm had composed most of the responses for media distribution since Christmas 2007, hitting the government far below the belt. Much of the propaganda against the federal government originated from his company and the three largest U.S. banks. Their goal was to blind media watchers across the country and, hopefully, the world. The plan, nearly eight years in the making, began with the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Seven years earlier the triple catastrophes of three aircraft crashing into lower Manhattan, the Pentagon, and the supposed flight aimed at Capitol Hill had succeeded brilliantly in their intent. He had watched the second aircraft all the way in, and knew exactly the moment his unfaithful, beautiful wife had perished. He also knew that the reason for the other man’s death, the formation of the small terrorist gang responsible, and the deaths of thousands of innocent people was only to draw the world’s focus away from three large billion-dollar dealings that had taken place just that month. The plan worked perfectly thanks to the efforts of several men.

It is hard to spend billions of other people’s invested money in large ventures without being scrutinized by world governments, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and others on Wall Street, especially if the purchases were large enough to catch the attention of the government and the media.

For two full weeks after the attacks, the world television audience and media were transfixed by the fall of the twin towers being replayed time and time again. During that time, the three large acquisitions by a secret club of CEOs of the world’s largest banks and securities institutions went unnoticed.

The first acquisition was a one-point-one-billion-dollar buyout of most of the old Charleston Naval Base in South Carolina, which the Navy closed in 1996. Originally titled a Navy Yard, it had provided defense for South Carolina since 1901 and became a naval base employing hundreds of thousands of people, producing conventional and nuclear submarines.

Since its closure in 1996, the club Stephan Saber belonged to had leased several production areas of the base through shell companies, and secretly brought them back online to continue to build one type of vessel: custom-designed submarines. These submarines would carry no weapons and would be powered by small nuclear reactors built in the Middle East. The first three of these reactors were already being shipped by cargo vessels directly to the American port city.

Taking advantage of the fourteen days of the Manhattan panic in 2001, the club purchased the base where three of the incoming ships unloaded their secret cargoes and then headed back out to sea with absolutely no surveillance. They were just part of the ever-growing shipping that visited Charleston daily. Who would notice them? All eyes were fixed on more possible terrorist attacks on Manhattan or Washington.

The putative new owner of the shipbuilding operation was a small, unknown Panamanian cruise line. In the purchase agreement, the company said that they wanted to build new cruise ships, which in turn would create new jobs for the workforce of the City of Charleston.

Now, seven years later, as a second diversion was taking place—the entire breakdown of the U.S. subprime mortgage system—the first civilian submarine of its kind was lowered into the waters of the Cooper River; with a crew of six, it headed out into the Atlantic for its maiden voyage.

During the week both towers fell, the club’s second acquisition, insignificant in the United States, was the purchase by one of the leading Scottish banks of an island called Ailsa Craig, a 220-acre volcanic cap ten miles off the Scottish coast. But even in Britain, all eyes were tuned to the destruction in Manhattan.

The third acquisition had been made in Manhattan itself only a few days before the attack, and was about to be scrutinized by the SEC. This purchase, 130 Liberty Street, was another building owned by a financial institution, and, as expected, was damaged by the falling Towers. However, the sudden takeover of the building was passed over at the Securities and Exchange Commission due to the pandemonium.

None of the private club members were concerned about whether the building would or would not be damaged in the attack. They all knew what was going to happen on September 11th. All they wanted was for the purchase to be ignored by the authorities for as long as possible.

The purchase went through. The massive transfer went forward during the preceding weeks and months even though the building was heavily damaged in the two attacks, and many even felt sorry for the purchasers.

Now, seven years after the attacks, several floors remained standing, and it would require an additional two years to dismantle the building down to ground level. Anybody watching the demolition might have questioned the hundreds of trucks heading in and out of the building site daily, and why it had taken so long for the building to be demolished. Fortunately, Manhattan was a busy place.

Over the rest of the country, the subprime mortgage debacle was doing what the perpetrators had predicted a decade earlier. Americans, strapped for cash on a good day, were now feeling the pinch of the new recession, a declining housing market, the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs and, within months, property foreclosures that increased rapidly in every state in the nation.

In 2008 the average homeowner had a grace period of about 90 days of missing his monthly mortgage payment before the system kicked in. A few months thereafter, police in all 50 states would begin to throw thousands of people out of their foreclosed properties. In 2009 over two million homes were emptied of occupants. That number was closer to three million in 2010.

For the smaller banks this was a major catastrophe, while institutions ready and prepared for this found easy pickings. They used the money invested by the same homeowners for retirement purposes to purchase the foreclosed properties for as little as ten cents on the dollar. The stock market nearly crashed as trillions of dollars were secretly taken out of retirement portfolios, actually causing the price drops, while the investors often did not learn that their investments had become worthless until after the value had fallen. These same people now had to find places to rent, or live in motels or even in their cars. Their years of retirement planning had gone up in smoke.

By the end of 2010, the four largest U.S. financial institutions owned over 200 million acres in the United States, and land in every major country in the world.

The man on the 54th floor smiled at the latest figures showing that his club of CEOs now owned nearly ten percent of the United States of America, and were already the largest landowners in the world. He also knew that those numbers were going to treble within another 12 months, and they hadn’t spent a dime of their own money.

The takeover of a large swath of American real estate had been paid by the investors themselves, all through thousands of subsidiary companies. These were the same people who had lost their homes and most of their savings, and it was all completely legal. To the most powerful bankers, the United States of America was a great place to do business.

Chapter 3

The Cube

Chris Uben, AKA The Cube in hacker society, was only nine in 2001 when he watched the Twin Towers fall on television. Although he wasn’t anywhere near the death and destruction, like many, he had felt sick watching the devastation. Charlotte, North Carolina was a long way from New York.

Chris was old enough to understand what he and his family were watching. Like millions, also transfixed by the most powerful live television anybody could ever witness, he was glued to the television screen for days. He never forgot the live scenes, but his memory slowly buried them.

Three years later his sixth grade Social Studies teacher asked the class to write a short essay on what each of them remembered about 9/11. Chris Uben’s mind rushed every television moment back to him, and for the first time he questioned the motives of the perpetrators. For what reason could such a grisly attack happen? Who could be so savage that they wanted to rain death and destruction down on the streets of such a populated city?

It took him three hours to write the first sentence of his essay, and in that period his future formed. He became inquisitive, totally focused on wanting to know why such things happen.

The teacher read his one-page essay a few evenings later and smiled. In this boy, I have certainly lit the spark of curiosity, she thought.

For weeks after writing that short essay—for which he received an A—its theme didn’t leave his mind.

Chris’ father worked as a computer security expert for a bank in Charlotte. He had majored in Computer Science, and had become one of the best through advanced studies at MIT. His mother was also a very analytical person, a math professor at the College of Computing and Informatics at UNC Charlotte. Chris had a little of both parents in his makeup.

Dad, could you teach me about the software you work on? Chris, an only child, asked his father one weekend after writing the essay.

His father smiled. What father wouldn’t want his son to walk in his own footsteps? Why the interest in computers all of a sudden, Chris? the older man asked. You haven’t had much interest in my work up to now.

Remember over dinner the other night, how you were talking numbers to Mom, and you said that one day computers could foretell the future?

A future to do with weather predictions, earthquakes, and tsunamis, son. Telling us the whole future is a bit of a stretch from what we were discussing, his father replied.

Well, I liked the part where Mom talked about computers finding criminals through fingerprint analysis and through possible DNA matches. You know, computers helping to find the bad guys.

Okay…, replied his father, a little puzzled. What has that got to do with future predictions?"

Chris thought hard for a few seconds before replying. You work in the computer department at USA Bank, right?

His father nodded.

I was thinking about future predictions on the stock market, or the international money markets; people getting foreknowledge on buying shares, or making money. You know what I mean?

This time his father smiled. Maybe there was a bright future for his thin, bespectacled son. That has been happening for a few decades now, responded his father, smiling. Ever since computers became practical, they were turned toward the stock market and used to make accurate, profitable predictions. My job in the bank’s IT department is security. I also head the work on directional statistics, where money might go, normally up or down, and make sure nobody else finds out what our computers are saying to each other – or shall I say, to other programmers. Computer information hacking, son, is the fastest growing illegal market in the world, and with more and more powerful computers, the work I accomplished for the bank last week will be obsolete this week. And guess what? I still can’t predict the future next week. Funny you should bring up the subject today. I just spoke to an FBI agent last week about outsiders trying to hack into our bank files. He was very interesting, and he and I will chat again.

What is hacking, Dad? Chris asked.

In a nutshell, it is unauthorized finding out of what other computers are being fed, or saying to each other, or what is saved in their memory. It might be information, new software files, or even protection files, scenario data, and people’s social security or bank account numbers. It is any information that can be of financial or informative use to somebody else. We call it ‘white-collar theft.’

For an hour or two, Chris learned how hackers could break into bank records, why they would want to, and how the bank could resist the hackers. He often looked back at this lesson his father was excited to give. It was so simple and easy compared to what would be available in the not distant future. He learned that even the latest IBM computer his father bought for him was, a week or so later, already becoming obsolete.

In 2009, he designed, built and hid his first self-made computer in the foreclosed home next door. The house had been empty since their friends had been thrown out by the same bank his father still worked for.

Steven J. Uben, Chris’s father, had tried to help the friendly family of six, but the bank had bluntly refused, tossing them out with no remorse, even though they were catching up on their mortgage; at the time of eviction, they were just a month behind. The same had happened up and down the street, and around the community they lived in. Nearly fifty percent of the homes out of 120 in the high-quality housing development were empty by Christmas 2009.

The Uben family still lived well on two higher-than-average salaries. Still, their home value had plunged during the recession from $600,000 to less than half that.

The year 2011 was important to the Uben family. In that year, USA Bank moved out of Charlotte, North Carolina and into South Carolina, establishing headquarters in a new fifty-floor office tower in downtown Charleston. It was important to Steve Uben, because forty percent of the staff were laid off; not the lower rank and file, but mostly upper department heads. And, as Chris’ father explained to his family, without really understanding the reasons, those who knew the internal security operations of the bank and its policies were let go. So suddenly, the less knowledgeable staff moved south and Chris’s father was unemployed for the first time in his life.

With the house and most of his street empty and now very overgrown, young Chris still worked with his family’s ever-growing system of computers in the housing development. They changed houses every few months. His system was composed of three of the nine parts of one family-built semi-supercomputer he, his mother and father had built themselves as a hobby over the last two years.

They had three large screens for each of the three control systems, thousands of terabytes of memory, tens of thousands of dollars of only the most modern, most powerful chips, motherboards, and memory, and the fastest internet connection that moved when they hid the three separate but connected systems around the housing estate. Chris always remembered what his father had said that night in 2004: What I worked on last week could be obsolete this week.

To him and his unemployed father, working in and around the area, this statement also worked on behalf of their enemy, the financial institutions.

Chapter 4

Charleston, South Carolina

Millions of Americans like the Ubens were learning how to cope living in new surroundings they were not used to.

The job market hadn’t been kind to many careers. From CEOs to the self-employed service industry, from home builders to computer IT specialists, jobs disappeared as fast as a race car at Daytona. The domino effect that several of their own countrymen had anticipated fell in perfect lines. Jobs were lost, mortgages were not paid, the economy ground to a halt and, apart from teachers, police, firefighters, medical personnel, government employees and politicians, many twiddled their thumbs standing in unemployment lines waiting to collect checks. Some waited in even longer lines at the rapidly growing job fairs, learning what their older generation had found out before them: employers did not really worry about the welfare of their workers. Company money stayed in company bank accounts.

In 2008, the stock market trembled on the verge of collapse and the savings of many were used up feeding their families, or just disappeared as their stock portfolios headed south, often down to zero. Unemployment hit double digits and land changed hands by square miles, not acres.

Much like the still-employed, and those who had money to burn, the bankers went about their business, buying up remains of failing financial institutions. Like vultures, they grabbed for any piece of meat that would interest their institution’s Board of Directors or investors.

The year 2008 was an important year for Stephan Saber’s Banker’s Club for many reasons. Operation Default, the first phase of their plan, went into effect: the first mortgage takeover. The atrocities of 9/11 were long forgotten. The terrorist organization blamed for the attack was being hounded from one end of the Earth to the other, and one of the club’s newest friends was appointed to a high-ranking advisory position to the newly elected President of the United States. Unfortunately, not as high a position as their old administration ally. Their former inside man, a very senior member of the outgoing administration, had done his job well and was about to be offered honorable club membership.

The big U.S. banks were making money hand over fist from the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, thanks to their newly retired and about-to-be-accepted club member. The world was going into recession, which made it easier for the club to control the daily transfers of international currency, always skimming their commissions off the top. First, billions would head across the pond and the movement would restructure the money rates. Once the exchange rates changed for the better, the money returned.

In addition, several companies paid the big banks large amounts to move money around the world and keep it outside of the United States, decreasing their federal taxes.

The Naval Yard in Charleston had been rearranged since its purchase in 2001. Security was kept as strict as possible. It was so stringent that even the CIA, FBI or the NSA would have had trouble getting agents in, if they had wanted to. Much of the construction of submarines was performed by robots and controlled by computers, using new emerging 3-D printers of the most expensive types, and a small, extremely well-paid staff of naval architects, designers, metal workers and welders, none of whom would leak what they saw for fear of losing their fat paychecks.

There actually wasn’t much in there to leak about. The shipping company that had initially purchased the Naval Yard declared bankruptcy a year after the purchase. Now, instead of producing small 250-foot cruise ships for the wealthy market, a new boat building company out of Ireland was building special types of submarines.

The first several submarines were designed for oceanographic use. The club’s contact in the U.S. administration had acquired a no-bid government contract for the company to build new submarines. In total nine oceanographic submarines were to be built at prices far above real cost. At the same time, seven larger, longer, 125-foot atomic-powered submarines were being secretly manufactured in a separate building. Only the company’s most highly paid team knew about the secret internal dry dock.

Much like the smaller extremely deep-diving oceanographic subs, these sleeker, silent runners of the deep would be able to travel 2,500 feet below the surface, slightly deeper than the crush depth of many of the world’s best, most modern naval submarines. Also, thanks to technology stolen or acquired from other naval submarine builders, they were as silent as their military counterparts.

These submarines didn’t have weapons. Instead, any spare internal space, apart from the forward luxury living quarters, was filled with supplies, or machinery that would help keep the silent runners even more silent.

The rear half of the submarine was dedicated to engines and a small, minivan-sized nuclear reactor; the forward half held quarters for the crew and lavish accommodations for VIPs. The crew consisted of the captain, mate, sonar specialist and assistant, cook and two to four service personnel.

The bow of the submarine had three levels. The lowest level held the dozens of battery banks, the middle the luxury living accommodations, and the upper level comprised the control room, sonar, kitchens, supply areas and sleeping arrangements for the crew and up to another dozen personnel if necessary.

The conning tower was only half as tall as on a naval submarine. It had the usual exit hatches, viewing bay, periscope, communications and radio antennae, but these submarines were built to run underwater continuously and deep, for months on end if need be, and had no need to surface while traveling. They carried enough food and supplies for at least a year under water.

At more than two billion dollars each they were not cheap, mostly purchased with taxpayer money, and seven were planned.

By 2011 the first three had completed sea trials in the Atlantic, and another three were weeks away from completing their sea trials when the next Banker’s Club meeting was scheduled.

At the new USA Bank headquarters in downtown Charlotte, life was good. Stephan Saber’s best friend, Chuck Martin, was CEO of USA Bank. They had gone to school together at Yale. Both came from Long Island families, and both had been groomed by their parents for the financial industry. They didn’t talk often over the phone, but did meet regularly for drinks using their corporate jets to meet somewhere safe. Today, though, they made an exception.

Chuck’s phone rang; it was his private assistant telling him Mr. Saber from Joseph Silverstein’s was on the line.

Stephan, good to hear your voice. How is lower Manhattan these days?

A pleasant day, Chuck. The year 2011 seems to be interesting so far. You never know what is going to happen tomorrow, replied Stephan Saber from his 54th floor office. Both men knew that their lines were as secure as possible. More secure than the average line, but they would bet their annual salaries that somebody, especially Feds, were listening in 24/7. I wanted to see how you were doing with launching VISA’s new IPO. Are you still going ahead with it?

For several minutes the two men chatted informally without revealing any classified information. USA Bank was selling off part of its ownership of VISA. The two men needed to meet with the rest of their club to make sure that the sale was completely legal and that the control of all the major credit cards worldwide stayed within the club members’ control. They needed to chat, to make it look like they were talking freely to each other and to the other major institutions. At the same time, private information was hand delivered by their own courier system.

With the growth of the internet and changes in government policy which allowed agencies to monitor private conversations, most people in high places knew that their phones, email lines, even social sites could be tapped heavily by the government. So, they had arranged a completely different system of communications.

Communique, a private company in New York, handled all private messages between the club members and other high-ranking banking officials. Owned by USA Bank, Communique had at its disposal two corporate jets, several armor- plated SUVs and cars, and a dozen motorcycles. They also owned hundreds of the newest laptops hitting the market annually. These portable computers could hold a coded message, could send the message as an email over the airwaves, or actually deliver a message by courier.

The computers were never plugged into any landline or wireless connection and therefore could not be hacked since they were never connected to the world feed. If a computer ever needed to make a connection and send an email, the sending computer was then destroyed.

As the two men chatted over the phone about golf, shares, and government reactions, a courier arrived at the new bank offices in Charleston, South Carolina and hand delivered a small portable computer to Chuck Martin. Once his office was cleared, he switched it on and indirectly told Stephan Saber over the phone that he had received it.

He decoded the message on the portable and related in the phone conversation that all was in order on his side, and that he agreed to work more closely with Joseph Silverstein’s in New York. The message on the laptop had been an offer to purchase ten percent of VISA for more than a billion dollars.

I think we can work out some deals with these as credit-card-backed securities, Chuck responded, giving Stephan his answer verbally over the phone. With the movement of our credit-card-backed securities, I want more success and control than those guys like Countrywide, for example, who set up this whole mortgage-backed securities fiasco.

Sure, I understand, replied Stephan Saber in New York. What Chuck Martin on the other end was talking about, he was sure eavesdroppers wouldn’t understand; it was pure gibberish. But he had gotten his answer; his offer had been accepted. Now Chuck Martin wanted to repay the offer by selling some control of his own institution-owned credit card company. Both men knew this, and a coded message on the same laptop was sent back with the courier, who headed straight for his waiting aircraft at the Charleston Executive Airport terminal.

Chuck Martin said his goodbyes to his friend. The return message was for 30 percent control of Discover card for the same amount of money, and stated that they urgently needed to meet with the rest of the club.

Chapter 5

The Banker’s Club

Less than a month after their last phone call, Chuck Martin grabbed a drink with the same man, his old Yale buddy, at the bar in the Hotel Exclusive in Vaduz, Lichtenstein. The Banker’s Club had taken over the entire hotel for their three-day meeting. Over the next couple of hours, the other club members would arrive one by one.

The annual World Bankers’ Conference was convening at the same time in Zurich; dozens of CEOs and executives were about to arrive in Switzerland from all over the world. Each of The Banker’s Club executives was to leave his corporate jet at Zurich International Airport and travel individually and by different means of transportation to the Lichtenstein hotel.

Chuck Martin and Stephan Saber came in a few days early, and they immediately crossed the border into Lichtenstein for their own private club meeting.

Both men had flown to the hotel grounds by helicopter, an hour apart. The others would come the same way or by road, as it was less than seventy miles from Zurich. The only interested party who could not make it to the meeting was their current inside member in the U.S. government, and that worked out perfectly.

The recently retired U.S. government politician and former inside man, on the verge of admittance to the most elite club in the world, a powerhouse in the world of politics and business, walked into the bar as the second round of drinks arrived.

He had worked in the last administration in Washington, had made the club members hundreds of millions of dollars each from government military contracts, such as new submarines, and military support contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was about to be accepted into The Banker’s Club and thanked by them for a job well done.

Richard, wonderful to see you, greeted Stephan Saber as the man who had given him vast opportunities in Iraq entered the small, expensively appointed bar. Richard Chambers was the only person at the club meeting who wasn’t, strictly speaking, in the financial arena.

Rich, great to see you and right on time. What can I get you to drink? asked Chuck Martin.

Kentucky Bourbon on the rocks, replied Richard Chambers, a man who scowled often and rarely smiled. A person who had dealt with many governments all of his life, he was not a happy guy. As one of the three highest-ranking government officials in the last administration, he had been a real asset to the banking community.

The barman, a club employee, expertly poured the man his drink.

How did you travel in? Stephan Saber asked clinking glasses with the new arrival.

As you guys organized it, replied Chambers. That new Audi SUV is a great ride. I must remember to see if it’s reached the States yet. They chatted about money and the new administration as good friends did, before the newcomer said that his stomach didn’t feel so good.

Within minutes he felt a little ill, and asked his smiling associates to be excused. He put it down to old age, being tired after the long trip, and the barman suggested that he help the man to his room.

Instead of going to his room, he was helped back out to the SUV.

We have to drive you to your bungalow, sir, the barman said. Chambers acknowledged the information. He had never been here before, and was not surprised when his chauffeur and a security guard ran out to meet them to help the barman walk him back to the vehicle.

By the time the Audi drove out through the gates of the hotel, the barman was back behind the bar, the old man in the back was dead, and the two men in front drove to a cabin in the mountains where a large drum of sulfuric acid was ready to destroy his remains.

By the time the Audi left the hotel grounds, a third helicopter had landed, deposited one club member and his luggage, and took off to return to Zurich.

Good afternoon, Stephan, Chuck, the newcomer said to the two men smiling at him. Have we welcomed our newest member yet?

As of about twenty minutes ago, Bruce, replied the two Americans, smiling.

Bruce McDonald, CEO of the largest bank in Great Britain, had held that position for a decade and was as powerful as the two Americans. The Scottish department of his bank had purchased the island off the coast of Scotland for the club in 2001.

He didn’t have to tell the barman what he wanted to drink; a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne was already being opened, and it was well over 30 years old.

Baron Marcus Von Kippenhof arrived next, twenty minutes later. He walked in, leaving his armored Maybach with his chauffeur in the driveway. It had been a long drive from Stuttgart and he was in need of a drink. He was the only continental European member of the banking group of six members.

Actually there were seven members in The Banker’s Club. Six would be meeting, and the seventh member, the chairman of the club, would not attend. He never did, and none of the other six had ever met him face to face. They only knew him as The Banker, and this was his very private club.

Each of the members had been invited into the club, and everything that went on between the members and the chairman went through Communique and the portable computer information system.

The Banker’s Club had been formed in the early 1980s, and there had been over a dozen members since the initial members had passed on. When one of them died, usually from natural causes, he was replaced by someone new. All had been men, and all had been powerful financial CEOs.

There had been dozens of potential members who had heard and wanted membership, important people, who had lobbied to join the club one way or another. Like Richard Chambers, they were never heard from or seen again by the rest of the world.

It is instructive what an acid bath can do to the human body. Making a corpse disappear completely takes two baths, as The Banker had been taught by his peers and friends. Most people who used this system to make someone disappear, such as Mexican drug dealers, used lye, sodium, potassium hydroxide, or pure sulfuric acid. Lye in a pressure cooking system, heated to 300 degrees, will turn the human body into a motor-oil-like substance in several hours. The downside of this method was that the lye usually left minute tooth and bone fragments. What The Banker had been taught was that if the motor oil was then poured into pure sulfuric acid, within 24 hours there would be absolutely no evidence of the body, including any microscopic residue. He didn’t bother with lye much anymore. The strongest sulfuric acid was cleaner and did a far better job.

The used sulfuric acid and other contents were sealed in drums labeled Hazardous and sent to waste storage facilities across Europe or the USA. The drums were never opened. Nobody, including The Banker, actually knew what the final result was, but nobody wanted to open one of the sealed drums and see.

The Banker believed that the early victims who had been fed into these acid storage drums were still in European government hazardous storage facilities somewhere, and had been for decades. Poor Richard Chambers was about to arrive at the closest European hazardous waste site. Twelve gallons of sulfuric acid and 32 gallons of dissolving remains would soon be on its way to a German government Nuclear Hazardous Waste Site within the week. Baron Von Kippenhof’s connections would make sure of that.

Nobody in the club knew who The Banker was, nor did they know the method used to ensure potential members who did not make the cut disappeared. All that the club members knew was that the remains of these people never resurfaced. A Middle Eastern Shah, a Catholic Church leader, a famous pop singer, three beautiful movie actresses, and a British former Prime Minister had all mysteriously disappeared a decade or more earlier, and lengthy, massive manhunts failed to provide any information. That didn’t include several more Members of Parliament from Brussels and London, a couple of members of Congress, a Senator from Maryland, and nearly three dozen high-ranking generals from several different armies.

Baron Marcus, great to see you, said Stephan as the tall thin man dressed in a quality suit walked alone into the bar, removing his hat and coat.

Mein Herr, Guten Tag, the smiling, good-looking man of about 60 replied. A well-dressed doorman, also a club employee, took his hat and cane.

The barman knew exactly what the German wanted. He knew this man well. The barman was Bavarian.

The doorman returned to the room and, in a soft voice, told the four men that Mr. Will Frederickson, President of Western Fort Bank in California, was twenty minutes out in a helicopter taxi, and the sixth man, Mr. John Davenport, President of AmericaCorp, New York, was thirty minutes behind him.

Dinner that evening was composed of food that even a king would have happily enjoyed. One thing all six men knew well was quality living. Among them they earned billions of dollars a year and ran financial institutions with assets of close to a trillion. They all owned houses or properties around the world, as well as the odd secret retreat the others didn’t know about.

All six men flew everywhere in their corporate jets, never paying a dime for transportation. Why pay for a private jet if the company, or its shareholders, customers or investors paid for everything? Not one of the six men had his own private jet. It was a waste of personal income. The transportation and stay at the hotel in Lichtenstein was paid for by The Banker; their rooms, the best in Zurich for the World Conference, were paid by their institutions.

The Banker owned the hotel in Lichtenstein and the country around it, on paper anyway.

Even though the men all had credit cards, and between them owned the majority shares in all the world’s credit card companies, their cards were the least used of all customers.

Each man liked his position, his power, and certainly wasn’t going to change the status quo. There was only one man who knew everything about them; he also knew everything about 95 percent of the world’s politicians, terrorist organizations, and security companies, and he was by far the richest man in the world. At an earlier meeting one club member asked whether The Banker was worth more than Bill Gates. The reply was that twelve or fifteen Bill Gates’ wouldn’t even get close. The Banker was insulted and the member didn’t last long. Stephan Saber noted that he was not around to tell his story.

There were the top ten known richest men in the world, and then the top ten richest men in the world who didn’t want it made public. Among the latter were people like President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, leader of one the smallest and poorest countries in the world. It was poor because he had stolen the entire country’s wealth and deposited it in his private Swiss bank accounts. He was only number nine on the unknown list.

At number seven was the pharmaceutical company investor and part owner, James Tavert, who owned the majority shares in all the big drug companies worldwide.

Number six to number three were also dictators of nations. For years these men had siphoned off oil revenues and their country’s exports. Between them they had personal assets of over $1.5 trillion.

In second place was Paul Messiner, major backer, investor, and large shareholder of the big four oil companies, and the reason that the entire world drove petroleum powered automobiles up to 2005. A score of inventors, several scholars of alternative methods of energy, and dozens of university students who had come across new methods of energy for transportation had not survived to a decent age. Messiner was also very big in nuclear energy and detested electric cars.

The Banker, in control of all the world’s financial institutions, was number one, and had been for decades. He actually controlled everybody else’s money. Whether The Banker had a boss or not was anyone’s guess.

The room was vacated fifteen minutes before 8:00 p.m. and, once cleared of personnel and checked for listening devices, The Banker greeted them. His familiar voice came over the bar’s internal speaker system as he welcomed them to his country of Lichtenstein.

Chapter 6

Mr. and Mrs. Byte

Steve Uben, Chris’ father, was one of the best in computer security, in large part thanks to timing—he was educated at a time when computers were becoming powerful—and forward thinking by his parents in the 80s, and also thanks to his wife. Jenny Uben was as clever as he was, but had gone the teaching route after leaving MIT. They had fallen in love in Boston, and had married shortly after Steve completed his education. When his scholarship ran out, it was time to earn money for the first time in his life.

Steve had good friends, and while Jenny completed her last year of study, he went south to Charlotte, North Carolina, where a friend of his, director of computer security for a large bank, wanted his brains.

His friend Joe Marks had worked with him on computer research for his first two years at MIT before the older man left for paid employment. It took him only two months to be employed in Charlotte, and was given the position of Director of Bank Computer Security by his new employer, one of the biggest banks in the world. Joe wanted his friend to join him immediately, but Steve had completed his studies and gotten married first.

Steve Uben moved down to Charlotte a year earlier than Jenny. His heart was heavy as he would have to live a year without her. The night before leaving, the car packed and ready to go, Jenny told him that she was pregnant.

The couple had been together since the second day after their first meeting at MIT. Like a pair of swans, they were meant to be together, and once united in body and soul, nobody would ever be able to pull them apart.

Their first year of marriage was hell for both of them. It was so bad that Jenny left school three months before completing her final year to take a lower paid teaching job to be with her man. Chris Albert Uben was born a week after her arrival in Charlotte; there would be no going back to finish her postgraduate degree. Instead, she got a job at the local university, UNC at Charlotte, which was grateful to get such a young, pretty and clever person straight out of MIT for their computer faculty. UNC Chapel Hill wanted her more and tried to recruit her to join their faculty further north for a higher salary, but there was no way to separate her from her well-paid, well-entrenched husband who was working at a Charlotte bank.

During their first years of marriage they enjoyed their daily jobs and also their hobby: computer hardware construction and software file dissection. It was pure entertainment to penetrate newly developing mainframes, firewalls, security programs, and anything other companies installed in their security nets. However, the bank Steve worked for and the university system that employed Jenny were off limits.

By the time Chris was eleven, Steve and Jenny had hacked into the company about to start production of The Roadrunner, at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Roadrunner was meant to be the world’s fastest computer and as the designs grew, they analyzed and copied certain parts to make themselves a miniature supercomputer, only 10,000 times smaller. At a cost of $100,000 and their electricity bill going up over 800 dollars a month, they struggled to make their own version pay. They had upgraded the electricity input to their house as much as possible without raising suspicions but, like Roadrunner, their version was just too expensive to run. Then, in 2009, they purchased, via hacked information, a second house in their emptying housing development. It was a foreclosure and once they changed the information within the bank’s files, they upgraded the electricity with a more modern high input system. On the power company’s books, this user of electricity suddenly turned into a restaurant, which justified the higher usage.

This new idea enabled them to string a few houses together. When they rented five more foreclosed houses for pennies on the dollar in fictitious names, their growing $6,000 monthly electricity usage didn’t look bad as it was spread between seven bills.

All this was exciting to the pair and also to Chris. In 2010 he moved into one of the empty houses two streets away to take a third of the computer and set up his own supercomputer. To his surprise he found that the house was already wired and the electric bill went to a couple he knew well: his parents. This was the start of understanding who his parents were: surprise adversaries in his own new and private world of computer hacking.

By that time computer technology had come far, and he built a brand new computer for twenty thousand dollars. He built this extremely powerful computer by himself; it was about one-tenth the speed and power of the old one his parents sometimes used, and it used far less electricity. His parent’s old behemoth still took up six whole server cabinets, and was still a dozen times faster than what he could put together.

Chris’s parents built new, more modern models in other houses around the city of Charlotte and outlying areas. Their hobby was paying off, they were skimming off bank transactions giving them ample funds to pay for all their purchases, but they were beginning to get noticed, and it was time to move.

Up to the times of their employment terminations, Steve and Jenny had kept to their house rule to never hack into a file in either of the companies where they worked, at least for financial reimbursement.

Once they were both unemployed in 2011, and with Joe Marks, Steve’s only friend at USA Bank, deceased for over a year, the barriers came down. Poor Joe Marks had mysteriously disappeared one day, and was never heard from again by his family.

What really fascinated Steve when he finally went in to USA Bank’s computer memory banks was that all files relating to his college friend had been cleared. It was as if Joe Marks had never existed. On paper, the bank had paid nothing to Joe’s family, but Steve knew that his wife had received a large payout from USA Bank. Any such settlement had disappeared from all bank records, as if Joe Marks and also another insurance payout never existed.

The Marks family didn’t want for cash; they received mid six-digit payouts. But Steve had been asked to leave and received nothing other than a severance package, and that made him unhappy.

After looking for Joe’s history and finding that the employee had never worked for the bank, he checked his own history with the bank computers and was just as shocked when he realized that his own history had changed. It appeared that once any moneys owed to him had been paid, he and all payments were completely wiped clean by the bank.

Within months, Steve had never existed; even his six months’ severance package was not on the bank records. He then looked through the records of other people who had been terminated by accessing the new computers operating in their new location of Charleston. The information told him that there was a lot of erasing going on, and that if he valued his life, he might want to stop hacking into USA Bank.

Steve Uben left his former employer alone for a year, moved to a new house, and paid off the old and new mortgages through bank proceeds hacked from another large bank. He made sure that he and Jenny had no more business with USA Bank.

Jenny had done the same on her newly-built computer located a street away from Steve’s. She found her files on the university records, and began to understand why she lost her job. Her unexpected termination had been engineered by two members of the university’s Board of Trustees, two men who disliked her, and disliked her methods of teaching, and who had wanted her out of the university for some time.

Jenny dug around and found carefully hidden files connecting one of the men to several assaults against women on campus over a ten-year period, crimes that had been reported by the students but had been silenced and buried by the administration.

The other man lived a comfortable life and she found out where he had siphoned funds out of private student loans from the university. The interest rates had been a quarter to half a percent higher than expected on hundreds of internal loans between the system and its students since 1997. With an extra million dollars in cash he lived very well.

Both men suddenly found themselves under investigation. Charlotte police received anonymous tips with enough documentation to easily make a case for each of them. Both men were forced to resign their positions a few weeks after the information was leaked.

It took young Chris Uben a couple of years to catch up to his parents’ quality of computer knowledge. His high school report cards showed that he was a dreamer and in most subjects he wouldn’t amount to anything. This was one of the main reasons nobody paid much attention to him, especially when the police or FBI happened to be in the area looking for a local computer hacker. His teachers didn’t think he had the brains to be anything of the sort, especially in computer science, where he made sure he failed miserably. So miserably that he barely managed to receive his high school diploma, but already had five million dollars stashed away in several retirement fund institutions.

So did his parents. It wasn’t until the Hackers’ Convention, just before Christmas 2011, that he discovered the identities of a couple renowned in the world computer hacking hall of fame. The infamous Mr. & Mrs. Byte were his very own parents!

Up to 2010 hacking was a petty nuisance to government organizations. Once hackers grew more numerous, got better organized, and began hacking into more secure government facilities, mostly from China and Russia, a very real problem raised its ugly head.

After 2010, the government’s computer security departments grew as fast as the hacker’s computers became more powerful. The internet and its snake-like connections and higher speeds spread into every corner of the world. Soon contacts were established between computer users in the United States, Europe and, most important of all, the new ex-Soviet countries and Asia. Chinese hacking seemed to be controlled by the Chinese government, but many found ways to bypass the systems. Slowly, the number of hackers in the world interested in helping each other grew faster than the government’s anti-hacking departments.

By the time the 2011 Hackers’ Convention opened in Las Vegas, it was easy to send cryptic information to hundreds of servers around the world, using Onion Routing, false DNS leads and IP scrambling, masking the origination of where the information had come from.

A share purchase transacted in Manhattan, a block away from Wall Street, could be recorded as coming from an anonymous trust fund in the Hamptons. The purchase might move around the world several times, when it was actually owned by a hacker in Los Angeles, or Singapore. Bogus trades strained growing government systems; they could not dedicate the manpower required to follow leads that often ended up in an offshore banking country which didn’t allow investigators in.

Investigations into monetary transactions that were hacked took second place as hacking of government establishments increased. This development angered the banks to an extent, but several didn’t want the government looking too closely, as they were doing the same thing but on a far greater