The Banker's Club

The Banker’s Club

Defaults

Book 1

By

T I WADE

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 TIWADE Books

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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.

Thanks to the perfectionists:

Editor— David Van Dyke, Virginia.

Proofreader— Kayla West, Weatherby, Missouri.

Cover design— Jack Hillman, Hillman Design Group, Sedona, Arizona.

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