Page 9 - Just Deserts

Prologue

“And here we are, complaining about how tricky it is to do
anything decent with the money, and how the greedy, arrogant
idiotic establishment types can easily undo the forces of good by
underhanded methods. But how do they do it? With money.
Now we have money, too. And we also have all the skills
necessary to undo those bastards: researching, from our earlier
lives; and well-financed skullduggery, from our present situation. We
could throw thousands of dollars at some charity and never
accomplish a thing—but the same investment could mean the
downfall of a villain, the elimination of whose influence would
immediately clear the way for better people and programs.”
Carlos: “You mean assassinate people? Like a death squad? I could
dig it—but I think we’d get caught.”
Lester: “No, you missed the point. For every civil rights
leader that’s been bumped off, dozens have been bought off—and
nobody is looking for bag men when the public is satisfied with
one hit man brought to trial every decade or so.”
Doreen: “And killing people is not our forte. We are
potentially more like the part of the CIA that stays home in
Langley, Virginia, does its homework and undermines governments
with disinformation and frame-ups; not the part that acts out
cowboy soldier-of-fortune atrocities against unarmed civilians.”
I finally caught the drift and contributed something profound like,
“Hey, remember ‘“Mission Impossible’? The Impossible Mission
Force went to all these made-up Eastern European countries and
staged elaborate sting operations to bring down some obscenely evil
military dictator. You never saw who was financing them, right? Well,
we could finance ourselves!”
Gerald was still picking bits of strudel from his beard.
“The beauty of this sort of revenge is that it looks like the
obnoxious individual’s self-undoing. The disaster is both
untraceable to those who set it in motion and perfectly
reasonable in the context of the target’s behavior. These people have
all gone too far, committing the sin of possessing too much power or
money with too little intelligence, virtue or social control. Their
corruption ultimately is of ego, of responsibility—no doubt the result
of this country’s wealth being concentrated unjustly. Our
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