Freedom TM

were here to parse reality into benchmarks and deliverables. He glanced over at his staff agronomist, who was listening with rapt attention to their bullet points, taking notes. That was his purpose.
    But not the purpose of the meeting. The Major stood along the rear wall, ostensibly a back-office troll. However, these young MBAs had no idea that they were really taking this meeting with
him
. They were bringing a problem that needed solving, even if they didn’t realize it. They were the messengers.
    His firm would get the contract. It would be for an infrastructure security assessment or a market risk analysis, or something similar. Korr Business Intelligence Services did not advertise, and they did not submit proposals. They were the junior partners of a security consultant to the engineering department of a construction division of a real estate subsidiary of a financial group. They had no signage out front and no listing for their firm in the lobby directory. Most of their employees were economists,researchers, and mathematicians. And very few of them had any idea what they were really doing here: preserving the global economy.
    The two MBAs were still droning on about methodologies. These junior executives were always so earnest in their Savile Row suits. One was a pasty-white Brit, the other a Pakistani, also with an English accent. Probably graduates of the best schools. A wife and two young children at home—and no idea that there was video on file somewhere of them having sex with young women (or men) while they were on business in Panama, or Mali, or Brazil, or anywhere really. Get the footage while they’re up-and-coming—before they suspect anyone would care. Before they become powerful. These rich dynasties had been using offshore photo mills for decades to enforce loyalty with one another, their business partners, and their kids. Get them married, set them up as respectable people in the community. Pay them tons of money—but always get photos of them with underage hookers. The more perverse the better. It could pay huge dividends when they chaired a government committee or tried to go public with damaging information. Political ideology didn’t matter. They hosted junkets for left-wingers, right-wingers. The Major had cut his teeth on a Panama operation like that back in the late eighties, using cocaine and sex workers to generate potentially career-ending imagery that made the business world go round. Photoshop had pretty much ended the still picture side of the business by making photographs meaningless. High-def video was the only way to go now, and sooner or later computer graphics would do that in, too. Someone really had to come up with a solution, or the entire blackmail industry was doomed. Thankfully, The Major had long ago moved on to more serious operations.
    The MBAs were now evaluating world commodity markets, highlighting key items with laser pointers.
    The Major contemplated his present line of work—and what led him here. It was over twenty years ago that he’d taken his first life. God did not, in fact, strike him down. Instead, a problem disappeared.
    He still remembered the musty smell of the La Paz hotel room. The bray of a two-stroke engine whining past outside while he stood with a bloody knife in his hand. The young trade unionist on the floor, her wide eyes staring at him as she clutched her throat, gurgling. Nothing stopped. The universe didn’t care. He might as well have been slicing bread.
    And that began his awakening—his realization that the Western world was a bedtime story of comforting humanistic bullshit. Slavery existed everywhere—even in the United States. We were all slaves in one way or another. Slavery was just control, and control kept things running in an orderly fashion. It was what made progress possible.
    But now the
problem
he’d been waiting on suddenly appeared on screen. A bar graph labeled “Decline in U.S. Agricultural Subsidy Applications.” He turned away from the window and tuned in to the Pakistani MBA’s presentation.
    “… in certain counties, we’re looking at a ninety percent drop—unprecedented in the history of modern American agriculture. Farmers in these counties have basically decided
en masse
to stop growing subsidized crops—even though there is no distribution system available for anything else. Something is causing this, and causing it all at once on a local basis in defiance of market conditions.”
    The Major