Mariposa Read Online Free PDF Page A

upper left side.
    Fouad reached into his shirt pocket and removed the four-pronged connector in its plastic packet. To an untrained eye, it might have looked like a thumbtack.
    He stripped off the plastic and shoved the tiny prongs under the cap into his forearm. Then he clamped a digital sensor to the plug, raised his arm to eye level, returned his attention to the screen, and keyed in the six-number technician identifier.
    Almost immediately, without knowing whether he was in or not, he ran his true thirty-line search code, memorized months ago under Jane's tutelage.
    The figures began to scamper again. They sped up—and then the records he sought floated into view in ranked folios.
    The folios opened and pages began to flip. He caught a few frames as they flew past—financial records for accounts in Singapore, United Arab Emirates, China; transactions with federal employees in Virginia; payments to anonymous vendors in Idaho, California, Iran, Iraq, the new state of Arabia Deserta.
    Then, lists of Web news organizations and other media, accompanied by figures that seemed to represent the amount of corporate debt owed to offshore institutions.
    Fouad could get only a general impression of all the corporate and international connections: banks, holding companies, big investors—many of whom worked for the oil cartels—and several chairmen and CEOs of the International Financial Protection Organization, organized a few years ago to oversee the distribution of the huge U.S. debt.
    More lists followed: heads of state and government ministers from the Middle East, Singapore, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Beijing; lobbyists, lawyers, and licensed foreign representatives working for China and Russia.
    They comprised just a few of the hundred or more names that had apparently received a direct invitation from Axel Price himself.
    Three retired generals, an admiral, and the new chairman of the Federal Reserve were also invited.
    Joining them would be political agents from nearly every nation that used Talos services or held American debt. Conspicuously absent was Israel—which seemed more than odd, given Talos's many past contracts there.
    A line of question marks was followed by the designation: "HR undecideds." Fouad could not pause the flow; HR might refer to the House of Representatives, members of congress.
    Many of the modern masters of world finance, politicians, world leaders, and even a few prominent military figures were about to come together at Price's call, a gathering of eagles and moles—and weasels.
    But where and when?
    Fouad tried to pick out the location and date, and then realized he already knew.
    Price was sponsoring a big gathering in Lion City in two weeks. Ostensibly he would be showing off the Talos Campus and hawking his wares: reviewing cadres of mercenaries, along with spectacular displays of new security and military equipment in which Price had made substantial investments.
    Something else flick-paged by—a cluster of references to MSARC. Mutual Strategic Asset Recovery and Control. The central MSARC computers were supposedly buried deep inside mountains in Switzerland.
    All part of the new world economic order.
    The acronym seemed to him reminiscent of Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, the working strategy of the decades-long nuclear stalemate during the Cold War.
    Perhaps it was meant to be. Just as the split-second decision whether to launch nuclear weapons was once regarded as too important to hand over to mere humans, the challenges of international finance were now too fast, too big, and far too complicated to entrust to flesh-and-blood managers.
    The tipping point for another, even deeper decline might occur in hundredths of a second.
    More flickering pages, then multiple references to "Jones," either a man or a network possibly linked to MSARC.
    All throughout, like obsessive-compulsive little fruit flies, buzzed sections of text from a rambling treatise by Price himself about "fiat"