A Calculated Risk by Katherine Neville (best time to read books .txt) 📗

“Not quite,” said Nathan. “There is one you haven’t mentioned. If you choose, I’d be willing to convey the gold to Wellington myself—naturally, for a fee. I am prepared to guarantee its safe delivery.”

“Yourself?” said Herries, a smile hovering about his lips. “My dear Rothschild, you’re a brilliant financier, but I scarcely believe you can walk on water—the sort of miracle called for just now. And what would be our guarantee?”

“That any gold I cannot deliver will be replaced from my own pocket,” said Nathan calmly.

“But how do you plan to get it there?”

“Let that be my concern,” he said.

While Mollien congratulated himself in letters to his emperor upon the great success he was having in looting British coffers of their gold, James Rothschild was at the money markets in Paris, trading the steady flow of gold he received from Nathan into bills of exchange drawn on Spanish banks.

His brothers Carl and Solomon moved back and forth in relays across the Pyrenees from Paris into Spain, disappearing into the mountains with their bills of exchange, then returning with receipts from the Duke of Wellington. And the French never realized that the gold they’d permitted the Rothschild brothers to smuggle from England into France was being fed through legitimate channels into Spain and used by Wellington to feed his armies.

With his coffers replenished, Wellington soon achieved victory against the French in the peninsular war—and entered Madrid.

Nathan’s father, Meyer Amschel, remained in Frankfurt with his eldest son, Amschel, carefully monitoring news of the war through the central post office, and feeding that news to the others. Now that he was an old man, he had little else to occupy himself—except for the daily care and feeding of the new dovecote, full of doves, that Nathan had sent him from London as a gift.

In September of 1812, when Napoleon was fighting at Borodino, en route to Moscow, Meyer Amschel passed away into his last dream. Three days later, the Russian general Count Rostopchin put the torch to Moscow, leaving Napoleon’s armies to march back through Russia in winter, in final defeat. It was the end of an era.

THE FED

Under the Constitution, it is the right and duty of Congress to create money. It is left entirely to Congress. Congress has farmed out this power—has let it out to the banking system.

Constitutionally, the Federal Reserve is a pretty queer duck.

—Wright Patman

When the dust had settled after the first of the year, Tavish took a look at the programs we’d installed at midnight Christmas Eve, and polished them up a bit.

We were grabbing a big percent of the money transfers that came in each day, slicing them up like a salami and dropping them into the fake bank accounts we had set up under all those ritzy names on the Bobbsey Twins’ list. We hung on to each money wire like that for only about twenty-four hours so no one would get suspicious. We picked up the interest on it, then gave it back. But since our “borrowing” was now running in the hundreds of millions, the income from it was growing by leaps and bounds even though we rotated our pot each day.

Tor and his team—now including Pearl—had headed off to Europe. It seemed things were running smoothly at both ends. At least, so I thought until Tavish came in one Friday morning just after New Year’s.

“There’s good news and bad news,” he said.

“Let’s hear the good first,” I told him.

“I’ve been tracking Dr. Tor’s bonds from that list you gave me—following them in the newspapers. Nobody’s trying to pay them off or redeem them, at least not yet, so we needn’t be concerned about those loans in Europe you told me they’re securing. Furthermore, I’ve tuned up our systems so we can take bigger slices of the salami. That’s boosted our average pot to around three hundred million we can now invest.”

“Terrific,” I congratulated him. “Now what’s the bad news?”

“I’ve redone those figures you got from Charles Babbage, about how much money you need to steal and invest in order to earn that thirty million by April first—that’s forty-four banking days from now. Your numbers are wrong; you can’t do it. And that’s a really serious problem, not only because of winning your bet. If something did happen to those loans of Dr. Tor’s, and we had to cover for him, I doubt we could wring out enough just from our profits. And you know we can never hold the actual wire transfers themselves for more than forty-eight hours at best.”

How could it be that we wouldn’t be making enough in profits? I’d run those figures a dozen times and they always came up the same. Tavish interrupted my thoughts to explain.

“You took into account all the wire transfers passing through the bank,” he said. “Your plan was to slice off as much as we could from whatever action might pass through the door—without drawing undue attention.”

“Right,” I agreed. “So what’s the problem?”

“One of the biggest volumes of wires is one we can’t get our hands on—Fedwire. It’s used to transfer, adjust, or fiddle with our reserve at the Fed. But the money’s in their pocket—not ours. You shouldn’t have counted the Fed activity in.”

Blast. He was right, of course—but the problem this raised was even worse than the idea of knocking over a bank. Fedwire was a wire transfer network owned by the U.S. government; you could go to federal prison just for getting a parking ticket on U.S. government property—I didn’t like to think what they’d do if they caught you mucking about with their loot.

“But here comes the worst part,” Tavish added. “I saw Lawrence in the elevator a moment ago. He’s sent you a memo. It seems he somehow learned that we’ve successfully broken through security. We couldn’t have hoped to keep it a secret forever, but now even the auditors know—and they’re all expecting some sort of