Installment 3.3

After walking out of the war council meeting, McDevitt took a cell phone out of his briefcase. Removing the back of the flip phone revealed that it had neither battery nor SIM card. He carefully selected a SIM card from his wallet. McDevitt carried SIM cards the way other businessmen carried business cards. Then he inserted a battery.

He punched in a number from memory.

“Good morning Jose.” The voice announced.

“Good morning Sergi. For the immediate future my name is McDevitt. Please make a note of that.” McDevitt responded.

“What can I do for you today?” Sergi asked.

“What is my account balance?” McDevitt asked.

“About $15.5 million, US currency. Why do you ask?” Sergi said.

“I want to buy some Credit Default Swaps. I think the interest rates for Cali bonds is going to go up.” McDevitt said.

“That shouldn’t be too hard. How many basis points and how many dollars worth do you want to buy?” Sergi asked.

“I am not talking basis points. I want to bet on it doubling. In fact, I also want to buy CDS for it tripling and quadrupling if you can find sellers.” McDevitt said.

“OK, I will see what I can do. How many dollars worth and over what time duration?” Sergi said.

“Six million dollars worth for the interest rate doubling, four million for it tripling and two million dollars for it quadrupling within the next six months. These will automatically transact if they hit those targets, right?” McDevitt asked.

Sergi’s time was worth a lot of money so he was rarely silent. But he was this time, for a couple of seconds. “You realize that you will lose $12 million dollars, US, if those contracts don’t activate, right?” Sergi said.

McDevitt replied, “That may be so but I will still be a multi-millionaire for whatever that is worth. And if they do transact then it will be a lot of money.”

McDevitt then said, “Time is more urgent than getting the absolute best deal. Please transact these buys in the next twenty-four hours. I don’t have time for details, you have my carte blanch permission to just make it happen.”

“Understood. Sergi out.” Sergi said.

After hanging up Sergi typed out a buy order but automatically doubled the amount. $12 million US was chump-change for the Cartel and it sounded like “McDevitt” knew something. Sergi also took the liberty of specifying that the payout be in a market-basket of hard currencies. A doubling in the interest rate meant that the Callor was broken. A quadrupling meant that the Callor was roadkill.

The buy order went out to a “string” of highly reliable brokers across the globe who, in turn, started placing CDS requests in Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Melbourne, Mexico City and Rio. In many cases those brokers sensed that something was in the wind and they bought CDSs for themselves and for a few, highly favored clients.

In retrospect it was no surprise that most of the CDS were placed with accounts in San Francisco. The analysist for the many billionaires who lived in the Bay area were always on the look-out for “stupid money” to vacuum up.

The first CDS for the quadrupling of interest rates had a “payout” of 10,000:1. The shear amount of orders rolling in diluted the payout to 5000:1 in twenty-four hours. The doubling of the interest rate started at 2000:1 and ended twenty-four hours later at 500:1. In all cases, McDevitt’s order was transacted first.

By the time all of initial orders were placed, $100,000,000 of funds had been accepted by the San Francisco investment houses that served the wealthy families in the Bay area.

***
A simple Declaration of Independence and a Declaration of War were drafted. It was signed by a few key parties. Copies of both, and an un-retouched copy of the audio file recorded by the light fixture in Denice Delarosa’s the night she died were delivered to the embassies of all the major countries in the United States. Copies were also delivered to the CEOs of the Fortune 500 via certified mail. Copies were Fedexed to Bona-Brown in Sacramento.

The documents were universally ignored for the first twenty-four hours.

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