It Could Happen Here –

J. F. Cronin

Description

Eric King the CEO of International Surveillance, Security and Construction, ISSAC, received a call from Wilbur Barron, the president of the United States, requesting that he attend a meeting at the National Golf Club. Barron was vague but hinted that he needed King’s business expertise in planning an election year strategy. King wasn’t surprised by the call. The president always sought advice from friends outside of his staff. Barron didn’t mention it openly, but those who worked for him knew he had a basic distrust of people who were attached to the system and worked for government paychecks. He wanted input from people whose wealth freed them from having to worry about their next government stipend and leaned on his rich friends for all sorts of tasks and advice. He vested some with cabinet level decision making powers without ever having to run them before congress for confirmation. Cabinet members and the presidential staff knew the president’s friends could overturn their decisions with a phone call and of all the members of the president’s kitchen cabinet, King was the most heavily relied on. He undertook jobs for Barron that were unadvertised, sometimes shady, and he was secretive enough never to let the press know what he was doing.

Sujets

• Political
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 18 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781663242280
• Langue: English

Extrait

IT COULD HAPPEN HERE –
 
A ROADMAP TO DISASTER
 
 
 
J. F. CRONIN
 
 
 
 

 
IT COULD HAPPEN HERE –
A ROADMAP TO DISASTER
 
Copyright © 2022 J. F. Cronin.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
 
 
iUniverse
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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6632-4227-3 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-4228-0 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022912676
 
 
iUniverse rev. date: 08/11/2022
CONTENTS
Chapter One The Setup
Chapter Two Stryker
Chapter Three A Company Man
Chapter Four The Swamp
Chapter Five Voyage of Discovery
Chapter Six Team Stryker
Chapter Seven FOG in a Fog
Chapter Eight Change in Plans
Chapter Nine Inside Outside Man
Chapter Ten Man against the Machine
Chapter Eleven Let’s Get Serious
Chapter Twelve Reversal
Chapter Thirteen The Big Tent
Chapter Fourteen The Power of the Press
Chapter Fifteen Crisis at the Palace
Chapter Sixteen Becoming a Yooper
CHAPTER ONE
THE SETUP

Eric King, the CEO of International Surveillance, Security, and Construction—ISSAC—received a call from Wilbur Barron, the president of the United States, requesting that he attend a meeting at the National Golf Club. Barron was vague but hinted that he needed King’s business expertise in planning an election-year strategy. King wasn’t surprised by the call. The president always sought advice from friends outside his staff. Barron didn’t mention it openly, but those who worked for him knew he had a basic distrust of people who were attached to the system and worked for government paychecks. He wanted input from people whose wealth freed them from having to worry about their next government stipend and leaned on his rich friends for all sorts of tasks and advice. He vested some of these with cabinet-level decision-making powers without ever having to run them before Congress for confirmation.
Cabinet members and the presidential staff knew the president’s friends could overturn their decisions with a phone call and that of all the members of the president’s kitchen cabinet, King was the most heavily relied on. He undertook jobs for Barron that were unadvertised, sometimes shady, and he was secretive enough never to let the press know what he was doing.
King was the CEO of ISSAC, but he was the company; there were no shareholders to rein him in. He started the company by investing part of the vast fortune he had inherited. Like many who had inherited their positions in life, he resented paying taxes and was a fierce libertarian, willing to shrink the government to nothingness. The shrinkage, of course, was not intended to affect those parts of the government that did business with ISSAC, which posed an intellectual and moral dilemma for him. The parts of government that didn’t need shrinking were those that provided his company with billions of dollars in contracts. So, while he talked about smaller government, he was careful to talk around shutting down anything that would affect his bottom line.
King gladly accepted the president’s invitation, thinking that politics weren’t his long suit. He couldn’t be bothered with making compromises as politicians sometimes had to do and preferred to buy bureaucrats by promising them lucrative jobs within his company after they left government service. His business model was a revolving door that placed ISSAC personnel in the military-industrial and security complex and rotated them between ISSAC and the government. He understood that by placing people in key federal and state jobs, he could influence decisions. And with Barron pressuring his staff to throw money at friendly companies, it was smart to stay in his good graces.
“Sure, Wil.” King was one of the few men in the world who could get away with shortening the president’s first name. That privilege came because their backgrounds were mirror images. They were both sons of great wealth and complained about its burdens, while suppressing feelings that they might not have gotten as far ahead in life without the boost. That insecurity was buried in the subconscious of each man and was the reason each had designed his businesses, and Barron his presidency, as one-man shows where they weren’t questioned.
Barron was vocal in his insecurity, going so far as to praise dictators who had inherited their positions, intimating that people didn’t know how hard it was to run a country. King was more protective of his past and personal life and was an unknown commodity in the financial world and the power circles that ran through Washington. He had inherited substantially more than Barron and was more successful in using family money to grow his fortune, and for this the president envied him. It was the reason that when the White House sent King a nondisclosure agreement, he refused to sign it.
The presidential staff didn’t think it was funny when he sent his own NDA to the president and several of his top staff.
Barron shrugged it off, and King was the only person in the president’s inner circle without one. The president let him get away with it because King had business interests worldwide and no one knew what they were. King was obsessed with secrecy, and Barron knew that whatever happened between them, King would keep his mouth shut. While the president relied on him and considered him a friend, King kept his distance. Before the president had been elected, he had tried to get King and ISSAC involved with big projects he was building, but King knew too many people whom Barron had stiffed for millions and wanted no part of him. Somehow, Barron, a man who didn’t forget snubs, liked King and had seemingly forgotten.
“Isn’t it kind of early to start worrying about the election?” King queried.
“It’s never too early. This is a twenty-four/seven/three-hundred-sixty-five business, and I intend to stay ahead of things.” Barron paused. King could hear his sigh over the phone. “Several of our pollsters have me way ahead in the early polls, but I’m not too crazy about the way the people running my campaign are responding to the data. They’re more interested in spending the money I’m raking in on fancy media campaigns instead of putting in the legwork that I know works.”
“I’m not the best guy to consult on politics.” King could see no way to make money out of the meeting and didn’t want to get involved.
“Rich said he wanted you there. He’s got some ideas he wants to run by you. I want you to listen to them to give them a sanity check.”
King said nothing. The mention of Richard Slate made his jaw tighten. Slate was a man who hadn’t outgrown his college days where he worked to get his fraternity brothers elected to positions in student government by any means possible. The training had served him well, depending on how one looked at it. He had become an unethical political leech who made his money by fawning over those in power and selling himself as an expert in political warfare.
“Come to the meeting as a favor to me.”
“Sure, Mister President.” King became a bit more formal when mentioning that he would grant the president a favor because there were always favors in return.
“Rich is meeting with Sam tomorrow at the Doral.”
The Sam the president was referring to was his lawyer Samuel DeGata, another of the president’s associates whom King disliked. He had reason to dislike DeGata, a politician who had stumbled into fame after a terrorist attack and of whom no one had asked the question why his city hadn’t been prepared. They only looked at his actions among the smoldering ruins.
Stretching his fifteen minutes of fame, DeGata monetized it and set himself up as a security expert, competing for security contracts in the government and around the world, cutting into ISSAC’s business. The difference was that DeGata had no company. He sold his name and the idea that he had access to the highest levels of government. When he was awarded contracts, he understaffed them with the cheapest labor, often unqualified third world mercenaries, and couldn’t fulfill what he advertised he could do. He never got fired because he let it be known he was politically connected.
He gave US companies trying to sell security internationally a bad name, so foreign governments shied away from them, preferring European security firms. With a string of failures, DeGata brought attention to the privatization of security. And there were calls for Congress to investigate legitimate companies and subject them to oversight. With his star fading, he had been resurrected when Barron was elected. The election enabled him to grow his business with nothing more than the promise of his access to the president.
King had