Let Me Tell You About Finding a Slush Fund in South America
In the end, the Director and Bureau Chief of the SIA were not put before a firing squad.
Thanks to my vigorous intervention, the matter was settled in a perfectly lawful fashion: they would go to the coal mines and work until they had paid back every last dollar they'd embezzled.
Really, this was the right call.
However shamelessly those two had lined their pockets, a firing squad? In 2025? They deserved a chance to work it off. That way we recovered the money and looked after human rights in the same stroke.
This isn't North Korea.
Granted, according to Isabella, even after seizing every remaining asset and offsetting it against what they'd stolen, each of them would still need about two hundred and seventy-five years of hard labor to pay it all back. But that hardly seemed like the important part, so I figured we could let it slide.
"Sure is."
"What is, sir?"
"Just that things seem to be falling into place lately. We went through something that big, and the government is still running without any major problems, isn't it?"
"It is all thanks to Your Excellency."
"Oh, please. I didn't do anything. Isabella's the one who really put in the work. Anyway, is the SIA manageable? No one's giving you a hard time over turf?"
"No, sir. They were all people I already knew, and once they heard it would become an agency under the Office of the President, the mood was quite welcoming."
"That's good to hear, but... I hope this doesn't mean Isabella's workload has gotten too heavy."
It was genuine concern. Isabella's expression hardened all the same.
"...I shall do my utmost to ensure there is no disruption to my duties as Chief of Staff."
"No, that's not what I meant. I'm saying I'm worried you'll wear yourself out. People aren't machines. If you bury yourself in work like that, you're going to collapse one of these days, aren't you?"
"Ah."
She nodded.
"Thank you for your consideration."
"Anyway, let's keep at it a little longer. Let's get this country back on its feet as soon as we can."
"Yes, sir."
"So, what's on the schedule today?"
"There is an emergency cabinet meeting at nine this morning, a Port Libertad inspection at one, a visit to the naval base at four, and at seven we move to the broadcasting station for a special address to the nation..."
......
At this rate I was going to drop dead before I got around to looking after anyone else.
The day's itinerary was every bit as murderous as Isabella had made it sound. The schedule itself was packed to bursting, and the difficulty of each item was just as lethal.
The cabinet meeting alone, which started at nine and ran for an hour and twenty minutes, was enough to turn my stomach. The vice ministers in attendance were incompetence distilled to its purest form. I would raise a current issue, and the answer I got back was, more often than not, that they would look into it and report tomorrow.
I was disappointed in their wretched performance all over again, but I didn't chew them out.
Wouldn't change anything anyway.
This wasn't their fault. The problem was a system that only hired military veterans as civil servants.
What does being a soldier have to do with being a civil servant?
From deputy-director level up, only field-grade officers and above were even eligible for promotion. I wanted to tear the whole thing down on the spot, but—
"...Thank you for your work, everyone. That's all for today."
I was going home soon enough as it was, and overhauling it would eat a fortune in time and money. I let it go.
I'll just have to live with the frustration.
The cabinet meeting, however, was not the worst of it.
After lunch I headed out on schedule for the Port Libertad inspection.
"Current cargo throughput is a little over forty-seven thousand TEU..."
A shriek of tearing metal ripped from the port's only crane.
Then it came down with a thunderous crash.
......
The dust billowed up and slowly settled, and what emerged was a rusted crane shattered into pieces. If we had walked another fifty meters, every one of us — myself included — could have been hit by the debris. I stood there staring at the wreckage of what had nearly been a catastrophe.
"I'm sorry."
The silence broke, and I asked the question.
"When was that crane purchased?"
"Th-th-th-that's..."
"...I understand this was an unavoidable accident. I won't hold anyone responsible, so just answer me properly."
"E-e-e-eighty... three, I believe. Purchased in 1983."
"That's quite a long time. Why hasn't it been replaced?"
The director of Port Libertad squeezed his eyes shut.
"Cargo volume was low, and the budget was tight, so we never replaced it. I-it was still technically operational, so..."
"Hah."
I had known this was the reality. Having it become my problem dragged the sigh out of me all on its own.
If that thing's broken, how do we import food?
Coffee-bean exports would take a hit too, that much was obvious. We could grind through the unloading with raw manpower, but the efficiency would crater.
"Find a crane company immediately and get one installed as fast as possible, whatever they charge."
"But the budget..."
"Do you not understand the situation we're in? The people are about to starve, and you're quibbling over budget?!"
"I-I'm sorry! I'll see to it at once!"
And that same reality was waiting for me at the next stop.
I arrived at the naval base to find that two of San Marcos's only four patrol ships would not start. A low rumble, then a sputtering, rattling cough.
"W-why isn't this working...?"
After a long struggle the engines finally caught, but Isabella warned me it was too dangerous, and I finished the inspection without setting foot on board.
That was how the day went, all the way through the address to the nation. On the ride back, the car slammed through a pothole. The asphalt felt even more rutted than usual, and as we bounced along I found myself thinking:
This country has no future.
Back when I was a minister I had only handled the Ministry of Resources and Tourism, so I had known the rough picture and nothing more. Becoming acting president and looking at the books up close had made it unmistakable.
San Marcos was a sinking island.
The people had no will. The civil servants were incompetent and corrupt. And the biggest problem of all: even if you wanted to change something, the country had no money.
You need at least a scrap of firewood to start a fire, don't you?
And it wasn't as if we could borrow it from somewhere. In the late 1980s San Marcos had taken a three-hundred-million-dollar loan from the Soviet Union, and on the pretext that the USSR had collapsed, it had never paid a cent back. An international deadbeat. A default C-grade credit nation.
Which meant the only way to run the country was on what we earned selling coffee beans...
You can't run a country on pocket change.
Honestly, I was starting to wonder if we ought to just stage a communist revolution and start from zero.
Juan Marcos... just what kind of war have you been fighting?
At least it was better than North Korea. I supposed I should take what comfort I could from that.
"You seem quite frustrated."
"Well... yeah."
"The SIA has traced the former Director and Bureau Chief's accounts and assets and recovered thirteen million dollars. Perhaps we might put that to use for the time being?"
"Come on, that's SIA money. I heard the agents have been paying for their own travel and meals out of pocket all this time."
"They will all understand. Without a country, there is no SIA."
"Hmm... Let me take a close look at the fiscal situation first. If there's really no other way, we'll do that."
"Yes, sir. Understood."
The next day, Isabella and I put together a task force to go through the national finances with a fine-toothed comb, having her dispatch SIA agents who were good with numbers.
Ordinarily I should have used my secretaries. But the only personnel I could comfortably put to work right now was the SIA. They had all been blown apart in the last terrorist attack, and even if we hired new people there was no time to verify anyone's competence, so I brought the SIA in.
That, at least, was a relief. The SIA was staffed with something resembling an elite, and now that they were a direct presidential agency their loyalty was extremely high — which meant they worked like people possessed.
"Of the budget disbursed to the Interior Ministry, approximately $1.7 million remains unspent."
"We've confirmed the Ministry of Construction and Housing overpaid a contractor by $4.3 million. We'll initiate recovery procedures immediately."
"We found $2.2 million in undisbursed funds from the Ministry of Agriculture's subsidy budget."
And then there was this.
"$3.4 million of the Defense Ministry's already-disbursed weapons procurement funds was diverted into the former Defense Minister's personal account, and $4.4 million of the transport helicopter purchase appears to have been inflated. If you look here, the previous acquisition cost a little over $8.7 million, but this year's..."
Finance Team Leader Lucio Carvalho's abilities were in a class of their own. Isabella had filled me in on his background: a Military Academy graduate who had served in the army's finance management corps, then worked as a tax officer at the National Tax Service after leaving the service, and had eventually washed up at the SIA. Given a résumé like that, it was no surprise that when it came to picking apart a ledger, he had no equal.
Seventeen days later, the SIA had scraped San Marcos's coffers down to the last coin.
In the process, a number of public officials admitted their own misconduct and voluntarily entered the mines to work off the money they had embezzled.
On paper, it was a considerable sum. But—
"In the end, we still couldn't escape the deficit."
The money that still had to go out came to a little over $810 million, which left us looking at a shortfall of roughly $30 million.
"Do I have to renegotiate with Chevron?"
I turned it over for a moment, then shook my head. Sit on those oil fields and I could develop them on far better terms. Running to the table first because I was desperate was a sucker's play, nothing more.
Which left only one answer.
"We'll have to sell the coffee beans we procured the moment they're harvested."
All we could do was pray the international coffee price would go through the roof.
That said—
"How on earth did President Juan cover a deficit like this?"
The more I thought about it, the less it made sense. Tax revenue this year hadn't come in any lower than in other years. And this — a $30 million hole — was the result of scraping the nation's soul and drawing the budget as tight as it would go.
Which meant that in a normal year the deficit would have run well north of $30 million, and the only way to plug a gap like that would have been to issue bonds...
"Except they didn't."
As I had already established, San Marcos's sovereign credit was not in any condition to issue bonds.
Even if we borrowed, we'd be paying the kind of interest you'd get from a loan shark.
Then what? What was I missing?
Is there a shadow oil field operating in secret somewhere?
I wanted to ask someone. Unfortunately, everyone who would have known was in the ground.
There's definitely something here...
I turned it over and over, and then—
Wait.
An assumption surfaced.
Juan Marcos had ruled San Marcos for nearly fifty years, right up to the day he died. He had even named his own son as successor. An iron hold on power, for a stretch of time unmatched anywhere except North Korea.
Is that even possible just by controlling the military?
Not a chance. History books are quite clear on the point: no matter how completely you hold the army, you cannot prevent betrayal.
Caesar didn't die on Brutus's dagger for nothing.
The dead ministers, for that matter, had been men who threw their weight around in the military. They could easily have gathered among themselves and staged a coup — and yet it had never happened, not once.
And it wasn't as if President Juan had run a brainwashing curriculum like the Kim family in North Korea, or governed the country through terror.
But what if... there had been a reason they had no choice?
What if he had offered the ministers something more valuable than seizing power?
What if everyone had known the country would not function without him?
What if he had been the one covering the national deficit?
Then it made sense. And if that was true, the reason was almost certainly—
Money President Juan had hidden away. That was the overwhelming likelihood.
A fairly plausible conclusion clicked into place — and at the same time, an object floated up in my mind.
"Don't tell me...?"
The USB I had found in a secret storeroom of the Presidential Palace. If the slush-fund hypothesis was right, that was the most suspicious item in the building.
On the off chance, I picked up the USB and slotted it into my laptop. A handful of documents and a single notepad file sat there, and there was hardly anything in it.
Nothing but a brokerage platform address, an ID, a password, and an authentication key.
I accessed the site as if possessed.
"What the fuck is this."
I found myself staring at a screen that stopped me cold.