Whatever that meant, Gannon thought.
He had a feeling it was probably best for the moment to leave it unexplored.
“Who are the gods?” Gannon said.
“The gods?”
“That I pissed off,” Gannon said after another sip. “The Company? The CIA?”
“Obviously,” Devine said, swirling his wine.
“Okay. A quick follow-up question. Who does the Central Intelligence Agency work for?”
Jimmy looked over at him with an amused look.
“How do you mean?”
“Well, technically the CIA is supposed to work for the citizens of the United States, right? They’re supposed to protect and to defend the Constitution and United States citizens from foreign threats. Well, I’m an American citizen, a patriotic law-abiding one. A decorated war veteran. If I committed a crime, by law I should be arrested. Yet, here I am renditioned. Plus, that was all drug cartel people at the prison soccer thing, right? Aren’t we supposed to be, um, stopping the drug cartels? Looks like the Company is sort of running them.”
“Being only a mortal myself, I do not know exactly the who, what, and why of things,” Jimmy said as he cut another slice, “but like many, I have an opinion. Though I guess mine is what you might call an informed opinion. It has helped me to explore and to devise what you might call an alternative history of things. Would you like to hear what I came up with?”
“Very much,” Gannon said, sipping.
“Again, this is just a theory.”
“Theory, got it. Let’s hear it,” Gannon said.
“A smart man once said that the characteristic danger of great nations which have a long history of continuous creation is that they may, at last, fail from comprehending the great institutions which they have created. This seems to be the case with our own, Mike.”
“So,” Gannon said, “you’re saying the US got too big or something? The right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.”
Jimmy nodded.
“Though it’s actually bigger than that. You have to look at things in a different light from the way you are used to. From a higher position and longer time frame. When you think of a country, you think of a place with a bunch of people who do things a certain way, right? For example, take the country of Colombia. There’s a certain style of dress, a certain attitude, a certain music, regional dishes, a citizenry that considers themselves connected in an almost sibling-like fashion.”
He popped another piece of meat in his mouth, chewed, swallowed.
“Colombian climate, Colombian culture, Colombian people. That’s Colombia,” he said.
“Are we in Colombia right now?” Gannon said.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Jimmy said, smiling as he took a sip of wine. “Are you following me?”
“Yes, keep going,” Gannon said.
“Now the tippity-top people who I think that I work for,” he said, cutting another slice, “see a country as something else. They see every country as nothing, just a pile of dirt to place a bank on.”
“Why a bank?”
“Because as soon as a bank is set up, they can start sending the wealth in that area of the world out of that area and into the pockets of the bank’s owners in Europe.”
“The CIA works for the Europeans?”
“Sort of. See the Europe part doesn’t matter, places don’t matter. Or names. Europe, too, is just a pile of dirt. Bear with me. The word bank comes from its nautical connotation. The bank of a river controls the current, right? Well, a human bank controls another kind of current, otherwise known as currency. The currency flows between the banks, and the bankers who control this flow busily siphon it off into their pockets as they suck it out of various parts of the globe.”
“Banks, huh?” Gannon said, puzzled. “Bankers are the gods? I thought they were a business. Like a hardware store. But instead of selling hammers, they helpfully lend out money like mortgages and pay out interest for savers, right?”
Jimmy laughed.
“You really don’t know anything, do you? You’ve never heard of our fractional reserve central banking system. When you deposit money into a local bank, they go to the central bank, who gives them a near zero percent loan of nine times what you put in for them to lend out. If you put in a hundred thousand at one percent interest, they get their hands on another nine hundred thousand from a central bank and immediately loan out a million at three percent per year. At the end of the first year, you’ve made a thousand on the hundred thousand you actually did something to earn. They’ve made thirty K on it for doing nothing at all.”
“That doesn’t sound very fair. Or even legal.”
“It’s not fair,” Jimmy said, laughing. “Though it is extremely legal. The bankers work diligently with their lawyers and bribed politicians to ensure that.”
“Where does the European central bank get its money to loan out?” Gannon said. “No, wait. Let me guess.”
He pointed at the portraits above Jimmy’s head.
“From the Euro royal dudes, right? They get it from the royal jewels?”
Jimmy laughed for quite some time. He dabbed at the corner of an eye with his napkin.
“You’re right!” he said. “You are smarter than you realize. In the beginning, the banks did use royal gold as reserves for the currency. But that was only in the beginning. Now the banks—get this, Mike—this is the best part. Now the banks don’t back the money with anything! They conjure it up from thin air, from nowhere. How’s that for a racket? They just go to a keyboard and type a number and hit Send and voilà! A bank account has that much money in it. The real wealth flows in. The fake bank money flows out. That’s fractional reserve banking.”
“That’s how the world actually works?” Gannon said. “That sounds like a Ponzi scheme.”
“Oh, yes. It is.”
Jimmy laughed again.
“You are totally getting this, Mike. That’s exactly what it is.”