CHAPTER SIX

Support Free Trade: SMUGGLE!
-- Bumper Sticker

The preceding year paid off well for Marcus Grant. As a businessman, he understood and utilized the virtue of starting out small with a familiar service and a popular product. He began his enterprise with smuggling, an ancient commerce, and -- profits in hand after cheerful laundering by willfully disinterested bankers -- he immediately dove into less-crowded fields of endeavor. He set up several offshore corporations through which he bought an abandoned factory and warehouse on the shores of the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey, a 200 foot cargo ship of Liberian registry, a vintage Boeing 707 in excellent repair, and three floors of an office building in downtown Long Beach overlooking the Port of Los Angeles.

Using these tools and his talent, Marcus Grant made his subsequent fortune. The service was still the same, only the commodities changed.

The secret of smuggling was secrecy, yet smuggling a product for sale required an end-market. A market required that customers be informed of products and services available. So no matter how secretly Marcus Grant operated, word concerning the nature of his commerce began to spread, for not even a black hole in deepest Space can hide its presence -- the very fact that information about it disappears provides the means to infer its location. The stories about Grant consisted of rumors and inferences, unsubstantiated by anything that passed for evidence in a court of law.

Grant sat in his office on the twentieth floor and gazed at the screen on his computer, reviewing the day's events.

China: government officials complained that pilotless drones, apparently dispatched from an airfield in Seoul, South Korea, were parachuting shipments of contraband to dissidents on the outskirts of Beijing. One of the drones -- accidentally downed over the capital city by collision with a flock of cranes -- carried three separate packages. One contained inflammatory, anti-government literature. One contained Danish pornographic magazines. The third consisted entirely of Bibles. Grant did not regret the loss of the drone; the parts were untraceable, and the banned items would swiftly find their way into the counter-economy via corrupt bureaucrats. He mentally wrote off such losses as the cost of doing business, a kind of advertising that inevitably resulted in market expansion.

Nevada: High speed boats raced across the Colorado River every few minutes, carrying cartons of cigarettes from Laughlin, where the tax per pack was minimal, to California, where citizens violated the recently enacted 200% tobacco tax with impunity. Individual entrepreneurs composed much of that black market, but a plurality of ships belonged to Desert River Jet Mail Boat Sightseeing, a charter division of Grand Cayman Diversified Industries, Inc., on which Grant Enterprises held a private placement bond covering all its corporate debt.

New Jersey: The Hoboken factory lay fallow, awaiting some future use. He made a note to confer with Donahue about it.

Worldwide: Wherever a government ordered a commodity illegal, strictly controlled, or heavily taxed, Marcus Grant fed the market with quality and efficiency. Cheap American rice flowed into the agri-protectionist Japanese market; cheap Vietnamese computer chips sluiced out to electro-protectionist Canada. Video games crept into Cuba; quality cigars snuck out. Birth control devices crossed the border into Guatemala; unwanted babies escaped to clandestine adoption agencies in wealthier parts of the world. Australian beer went to the Czech Republic; refurbished Czechoslovakian AK-47 rifles made their way to African independents, Manchurian insurgents, Los Angeles shopkeepers, and dozens of other embattled groups and classes.

Grant spoke to the vox intercom. "Jo-Don!" The computer instantly connected him to Joscelyn Donahue, his second-in-command.

"Here, Marc," a crisp voice replied over the line.

"What's with the Ruthenia shipment?"

"Extra charges against the delivery division due to additional bribes of Ukrainian ministry of exports. Hasn't been entered into the spreadsheet yet. We're still in the black, but they're opening up to grey markets in electronics, so we're going to have to undercut the competition in some other ways than mere availability."

Grant mused for a moment, his fingers peaked against one another. "All right. Stop sending in the low-end computers and shift to top-of-the-line goods. Those are tariffed at one-hundred-fifty per cent white market, so set the bribe maximum at five per cent of our cost and pass it through to the wholesale markup. Then start building the market for CD-ROM and VR."

"Shifting gears now." There was a pause, then the voice added, "Marc -- predictions for the coming winter are for food shortages. Take a look."

The information appeared on his computer screen, gleaned from the CIA-KGB joint intelligence system. Grant ran a few inquiries of his own, then muttered, "Idiots. They de-collectivized farming but still maintain central control over trucking and fuel. No wonder food's rotting in warehouses while markets stand empty. All right... There must already be a link between off-time truckers and black market diesel. Strengthen it. Establish a network of freelancers and forge the appropriate paperwork so they can learn to look clean while hauling the goods. I want a return of at least twenty per cent of the throughflow."

"I'll get on it." She switched off.

Marcus Aurelius Grant turned to gaze out a window that offered a sweeping view of the harbor. The sun dropped behind Palos Verdes, the fortress hill of wealthy homes that jutted into the Pacific as if wanting to break free of the rest of the Los Angeles megalopolis. Grant lived there, in a home at the top that was as much an ærie as his office. He enjoyed looking down on the world. It gave him what he considered to be a proper perspective on the human race.

He was a tall man, even seated in the oversized executive throne. In just two years his wavy black hair turned from its formerly long sandy-blond to a premature silvery grey trimmed in short, businesslike style. Dressed in an exceptionally well-tailored dark navy pinstripe suit, pale blue shirt that matched his eyes, and navy tie sporting the tiniest and most conservative maroon dots, he now fit the classic alpha-male archetype. He looked the part he played: owner of a vast financial empire.

A few degrees above Palos Verdes hung the sliver of a new crescent Moon. It took a while for Grant to notice it in the twilight. When he did, he glanced quickly away and returned his attention to the computer.

Information was what made him strong, and information cascaded through Grant Enterprises like fish through a gill net: very little escaped his grasp. So it was that an item captured from the Combined Federal Electronic Database System was immediately routed to his attention. It was a simple list of topics for an upcoming meeting of a senate sub-committee headed by Ludlow Woolsey III, the senior senator from Utah. On that list was the name of a company only one dummy corporation away from Grant Enterprises. That was too close.

Grant Enterprises thrived on information flow. It told Grant what was illegal where, and allowed him to determine when and how to make a profit circumventing the laws. The only catch was that information never flows in just one direction. Every time the Grant octopus insinuated a tentacle into the world market, it left a trail that could -- given extreme perseverance -- be traced back to its source. His twin defenses against such diligence were bribery and blackmail. The elder Woolsey possessed peculiar interests in certain congressional pages working on the Hill. One of them worked for Grant, though she did not know it. He kept the photo negatives and videotapes in a vault where he stored many other sensitive items. A large vault.

Woolsey snooped where he should not. That was the trouble with politicians, Grant mused. So few were honest enough to stay bought.

Woolsey, now in his seventies, had reached the end of his term limit, yet was still young enough to risk losing out on private-sector positions by falling into scandal. Grant suspected counter-blackmail by a competitor. Whatever Grant had on Woolsey, someone else had something dirtier. That would require--

"Marc?" Joscelyn Donahue's voice said over the intercom.

"Yes?"

"Senator Woolsey's on line two. He says it's important."

Grant punched up the line. "Good evening, Senator. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

The voice on the other end, sonorous and dignified, spoke with equal courtliness. "Why, Marcus, it's always a joy to hear your voice. I'm just calling as a proud parent to let you know my son Ludlow the fourth has been named head of the House Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Technology."

"Congratulate him for me." Grant now realized the angle. Not counter-blackmail against Woolsey, but against Grant himself.

"Now, you know," Woolsey continued, "even with such a prestigious position, he faces a tough campaign this fall..."

"Say no more. He's got my personal contribution to the legal limit. I'll have a fifty dollar check cut immediately. On a totally unrelated subject, Ludlow..."

"Yes?" The senator knew better than to think any subject unrelated.

"Fidelity Security Full Faith and Credit Trust Savings Bank in Portland has quite a few non-performing loans. I think someone should question the loan officer."

"Consider it done, Marcus." The senator switched lines.

The exchange had grown a bit more blatant than he wanted, but he lacked the time to haggle. One of Senator Woolsey's bag men would soon secure a loan from Fidelity Security intended never to be repaid. The bank would simply write it off as a non-performing loan and add it to the staggering debt structure of the bank, to be repaid, perhaps, by taxes when the bank went under.

"Ah, democracy," Grant muttered, shifting his thoughts back toward turning a profit. Marcus Grant knew the power of government and he knew the power of the market. He preferred the market. White, black, or grey, it never left as sour a taste in his mouth.


Proceed to Chapter 7 Return to the Table of Contents