“You’ll need to switch it off completely, Madam,” the crewmember said firmly.
The businesswoman presses a button and showed off the device, “It’s off. See?”
The stewardess moved down the cabin catching Planner’s newspaper. Planner looked up and caught the businesswoman’s eye.
“Why do they have to do that? Would it have hurt so much to have another minute? Christ!” exclaimed the businesswoman to Planner. Then she held her mouth, not meaning to swear at a stranger.
Planner smiled weakly in return.
“I’m so sorry. I’m a bit wound up. I’m not usually like this.” The businesswoman smiled goofily at Planner.
“Well, it’s their job,” Planner replied reluctantly. “The cell phone could disrupt the aircraft… um… systems.”
“So they say. I know I left my phone on a flight the other week and I got a call while we were taking off. Didn’t seem to cause a problem. How can a fifty dollar phone bring down a $100 million airliner?” she joked.
Planner nodded slowly and folded his newspaper, “Indeed. I am sure they don’t cause a problem. It’s just the cost of proving that they don’t cause a problem.”
“I guess that must be it,” she said with a smile. Then her phone rang, she had obviously not turned it off. “Woopsy.” She said to Planner, then whispered into the phone, “Sorry. I can’t talk. I’ll be thrown off the plane!”
* * * *
Soon after take-off, the businesswoman leant towards Planner. The businesswoman held out her hand, “I’m Katherine, by the way.”
Planner said “Robert… Robert er… Smith.”
“Well how about that,” she said with a glow. “I’m a Smith too. Well, I wasn’t born a Smith; I married one. Now divorced. And you?”
Planner averted his eyes, “You really don’t want to know.”
“Separated?”
“My wife died in a car accident… last year.”
“That’s awful. I’m so sorry.”
“Yes, it was dreadful. It’s not a great subject for me, if you don’t mind,” Planner bit his lip when she looked away. In the immediate pause, he realised that he did want to talk; to talk to a real person, he rarely had the chance recently. He had not wanted to talk for a long time. So he said gently, “I don’t mind talking about your problems, though… a legal matter, I think I heard?”
Katherine looked back to Planner and smiled, “Lawyers! And accountants. They’re both driving me nuts. Do you know the difference between an accountant and a lawyer? At least, accountants know they’re boring.”
“So you’re not either?” ventured Planner.
“No, I’m an analyst. Analysts are also probably boring but I’d have to do some more research on that.”
“You’re really funny,” said Planner.
“A sense of humor is the only thing that keeps me going some days. Not that I let it show when I’m at work.”
“Seems intense.”
“It is at the moment. It’s pretty way-out.”
“Go on. I’m intrigued.”
“An extraordinary mess,” grimaced Katherine.
“Well… we have a couple of hours,” said Planner looking around the confining walls of the airliner.
“It would be good to talk about this stuff. It’s good-to-talk, as one of my British colleagues likes to say.”
“So you have a legal problem? With accountants involved too?” said Planner.
“A legal problem? Yeah,” said Katherine with a lopsided smile. “The problem being how do you get them to prosecute unabashed criminal activity?”
“With evidence?” said Planner hopefully.
“We have a ton of evidence. We suspected something was wrong with this company for a while. A single news article appeared asking how they made their numbers. They were just too good. Too smooth. So we looked and we couldn’t figure out how they made their numbers either. That’s the job I do.”
“As an analyst?”
“Right; as an analyst. Then we were given insight what was really going on; exposed by a whistleblower. We now have an avalanche of evidence. So we go to the lawyers and there’s this startled frozen reaction from the prosecutors.”
“Sounds typical to me,” said Planner.
“But it’s their job! Some of the lawyers involved in the case are displaying incompetence beyond comprehension.”
Planner nodded, “Then perhaps they’ve been asked to act incompetent. It’s one of the games.”
“Games?”
“The games people play… to distract from their true intention. Did they let this happen? Or have they made this happen? Both questions are irrelevant. The question to ask is what did they want to happen. Displaying incompetence is often just deflection or a delaying tactic.”
“Wow. That is it exactly. And you don’t even know what I’m talking about. What do you do again?” asked Katherine incredulously.
“I’m a… consultant. Aerospace industry. Radar… that sort of thing. And… er… who do you work for, er, Katherine?” said Planner nervously.
“Marsh McLennan in New York. I’ve been a market analyst there for eight years, doing this and that, portfolio management mostly,” she trotted off of company names and investment procedures and started to see Planner’s eyes glaze over, and so came back on topic firmly. “Anyway,” she said, “I see I don’t need to do any more research on whether market analysts are boring or not.”
Planner laughed.
“So then I stumbled across, what I consider to be, the crime of the century. But… yes, strangely, or perhaps not, now that I’m talking about it with you, without my spreadsheets and powerpoints… I’m struggling with my own conclusions.”
Planner shrugs, “So is this just your opinion?”
“Oh, no. We have a whole team working on this. My whole department has now bought into this.”
“So what’s the crime?”
“A whole, massive, criminal, enterprise,” Katherine said grappling with the words.
Planner did not have to say a word, just the look and smile to indicate that Katherine really ought to have known better.
Katherine wagged her finger, “No, it’s not the Mafia. Or at least, I don’t think it is. It’s hard to believe though. Just suppose… there was this company that produces nothing but just buys and sells stuff, say, for the sake of argument, er…”
“Insurance?” mused Planner.
“No. Electricity, say. And they get a monopoly contract to supply a whole state.”
“So potential for abuse from the start,” noted Planner.
“Yes. They get paid on the mark-up. So what they do is, they close local capacity, to cause power cuts31 and then buy-in expensive electricity from afar.”
“Where no doubt they get a rake off? So they’ll going to lose this contract eventually,” observes Planner.
“No. That’s just it. They don’t!” Katherine blurts. “They’ve won awards for most innovative company for six years because no-one hears the bad stuff. They pay journalists to say how wonderful they are.”
“Hmm, that sounds unethical. But is that illegal?”
“Misrepresentation? Oh yes, that’s illegal!” Katherine said trying to restrain any shrill in her voice. “But the worst part, to keep the share price going up, the company buys its own shares using a loan from a bank.”
“Stupid, sure, but not illegal?”
“It’s illegal the way they do it. The loans are treated as income and not debt. Accountants are no longer creative, they’re fraudsters. With Auditors told to look the other way.”
“Ok. That’s illegal,” said Planner pursing his lips.
“And with the loans, shares and rip-off prices, there’s lots of cash being generated… That is used to buy-off politicians so that more crappy deals are made across the country. And the pile of shit just gets bigger and bigger until…” and then Katherine stops and looks into the distance.
“Until what?”
Katherine shakes her head, “I don’t know!”
“You don’t?”
“No. I keep trying to imagine all the ramifications and I can’t. The size of the hole is billions of dollars. I imagine the four horseman of the apocalypse in my sleep,” she says dramatically.
“Well, I’m sure it won’t come to that,” Planner said reassuringly. “It’ll be a scandal and forgotten about in six months.” Planner then bit his lip and asked the crucial question that every intelligence analyst knows is the keystone to credibility, “How do you know all this?”