Chapter 51
Jack paced back and forth mind racing for what felt like hours, and was less than the twenty minutes Bob promised. The buzzing of the star phone in the middle of the conference room table startled him.
“Jack, you have two…people here to see you.”
“I’ll be right down.”
He trotted down the flight of stairs to the lobby. The widest human being he had ever seen stood in the lobby. He wasn’t the tallest and his date would have made it tough for any man to remember what Mr. Wide looked like anyway.
She was over six feet tall without the spiked heels and black spandex miniskirt over legs that seemed to go on forever. She must have weighed one hundred and sixty pounds, but didn’t look like there was much fat on her anywhere. She could have made a good living parading in a Las Vegas revue. She moved like the athlete she was and when she smiled, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of caps gleamed out of her tanned face.
The man would have gathered looks anywhere. Five-ten at most, he might outweigh Jack by eighty pounds. Jack guessed a fifty-five inch chest to go with the twenty-two inch neck. Mr. Wide was wearing a bomber jacket that must have cost a flock of sheep their lives and a ridiculous black beret, perched right on top of his head. His cigar had gone out and was clamped in the left side of another set of blindingly white teeth. He found out later that Mr. Wide was nearing fifty and managed to look thirty-five at most with no nips and tucks.
Mr. Wide held out a hand that was half again as big as Jack’s and said, “I’m Jerome and this tall girl is my bride, Zelda.”
He shook hands with them both, wishing he could borrow Zelda for a few days. It would be a great way to go. He asked them to follow him into the small meeting room off the lobby.
“That Bob is something,” Zelda said, slipping the Sig Sauer out of the huge black leather purse that moments before had been clamped under her left arm, releasing the slide and engaging the safety. “He calls us at the gym and says to get our tail-ends over here to take care of you, and to do it now.”
Jerome looked at his watch and said, “We have a team at the hotel right now. They should be inserting a bug in the room you identified within a few minutes. We have cruising cabs on racetracks around the block. One will stop around the side of the building in exactly six minutes.”
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THE WAR COUNCIL was in full voice when Dvora entered the room. She sat opposite Jack at the long, blonde conference table. Bob quickly reviewed what they’d learned. “Dvora, you’ll see two files in front of you. The first file is a summary of the results of an Internet survey we conducted. The second file is a transcript of the translated telephone calls we taped in the “Ishigawas” hotel room.
“There are over three thousand blogs relating to stocks and stock sectors. We suspected various blogs were being used as a mechanism to push down share prices on the stocks in question. Olga designed a script and we sent a questionnaire to everyone who placed a comment on the blogs in question. The questionnaire, if answered, includes a $25 donation to the charity of their choice. Of the 491 people who posted to all the bulletin boards, 353 of them had posted negative rumors and comments on the stocks. Of the 270 that responded on the negative side, 252 wanted their donation to go to the Church of the Seven Sisters. None of the people who posted positive comments chose this charity.”
This was the final confirmation that the Church of the Seven Sisters was behind the stock manipulation. He was convinced they were also behind the attacks on his sister, himself, and Lee.
“We face a nimble organization with huge resources. And somehow, they maintain low profile.”
Bob grinned and winked at Alice. He and Alice grew more connected with each passing hour. Bob normally wore a plain red tie with a white shirt, black shoes and gray suit. Today he wore a rep tie, blue shirt, and blue suit with oxblood shoes. What a wild man, and all Alice’s doing.
Uncle Chin and Sir Ian attended, along with Lee, by secured conference call. He hated Lee being so far away. She was scheduled back on a flight in five days. It felt like a few months.
The current argument was on the order to proceed. Sir Ian, with his English public school education, wanted to rat out the conspirators to the authorities and then move in for the kill. He was in the minority.
Uncle Chin hawked, and then, in his best imitation of the plumy old school voice Sir Ian used at his most pompous, asked, “Which authorities do you suggest we call and what do you suggest we say? Excuse me Mr. Prime Minister. There is an international conspiracy to control the stock price of a number of different genetic engineering stocks. What is that Mr. Prime Minister? Is it organized crime that is doing this? Why, no, Sir. It is a church headquartered in Japan. Are they English stocks, Mr. Prime Minister? Why, no, Sir. Call the SEC? There is no need to be sarcastic, Mr. Prime Minister. Hello, Hello, Mr. Prime Minister? Are you still there?”
“Excuse me boys and girls, what I don’t understand, and what we need to understand, is why. We are reacting and not acting until we know why they are doing what they are doing. This is over-the-top complicated as a money making scheme,” Jack said.
“Aiah, Jack!” It was Uncle Chin again. “You cannot be my long lost son. You have the white man’s disease. Do you need to know why the sun shines to put on a hat? Do you need to know why the monsoon rains come to make sure your roof is tight and dry? It is enough to know the rains will come. It is time for us to make sure our roofs are tight and dry. I agree it would be good if we knew why; we could be further ahead of them. But there are still many things we can do.”
The discussion went on for another half hour. Dvora sat patiently absorbing information and then gave the clearest guidance.
“I know you guys are all the experts on this. I’d like to make a suggestion. We watch them for a little longer, making sure there is no doubt about what they are doing. Then we counter each rumor and trade as we already agreed to. After that we inform on them, anonymously of course. We could send video, audio, pictures and charts to the FBI, SEC, and FINRA, and hell, the CIA for all I care. And, then we ask some of our favorite reporters, the ones that owe us favors, to show up at their headquarters here and ask them to explain themselves.”
Dvora looked up to see puzzled faces. “Am I the only one here who watches CNN? There was a series on the Church of the Seven Sisters not even a month ago. They moved their headquarters in the US to an enclave near Yosemite last June. Something about Yosemite being the center of the evil of the ecological religious movement.”
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