Chapter One: The Man on the Train

 
The Man on the Train

    I left London that afternoon in something of a blue funk. My mood was not helped by the raucous noise in the next carriage created by a group of young men. No doubt they were Tottenham supporters who were heading up early for the match against Leeds. Nor could I find much cheer in The Evening Standard which was, in fact, in the hands of the passenger sitting opposite me. “Spring Trouble in Balkans” was the headline, followed with the leading sentence ‘The Balkanisation of Bulgaria and various parts of Macedonia look like a tinder-box which may burst alight in the spring.’ The article caught my attention, because I had heard of trouble brewing in the Balkan states earlier that very day. As the train left King’s Cross, the clouds were darkening and the winter sun was low behind the north-London skyline. My mind turned to the issue of the Balkans and recalled the events of the morning.
    Where had I heard something about it?

     My flight from Buenos Aires had been uneventful and the plane had touched down early into Heathrow. Working for the bank, I didn't have to bother with Customs and was outside in the cold, crisp air only briefly, before being taken by car - complete with driver - into the centre of town. I had visions of catching an early train up to Westmorland, to surprise my wife and the children whom I knew were as eager for my return as I was to see them.  I had been in Argentina for just five days, observing first-hand the economic devastation that the vast majority of the population were suffering with high inflation and severe food shortages. As a junior economist for the bank I had drawn the short straw to go out there, to meet contacts, and to represent the bank’s interests. Of course it helped that I spoke Spanish pretty fluently, having taught English as a second language in Cordoba before returning to England in the early part of the 21st century.
    But my dreams of an early return home were shattered at exactly 8:00. For before I had even unfolded the newspaper in the car, my phone was ringing. It wasn’t good news.

    “Good morning Mr. Harris, it’s Kelly Sunderland, Sir David Buchanan’s personal assistant” said the female voice at the other end of the phone. “I’m sorry to bother you so early in the morning, but it’s about Sir David. He had his regular check-up yesterday at Guy’s - they had called him in for his booster shot. They gave him a clean bill of health. But his wife called this morning at 5.45, he’s had a stroke, or something serious connected with blood clotting.” The distress in her voice was evident, for Sir David, the Assistant General-Director of Routemans’ Bank, had been her boss for nearly 20 years.
    “Where is Sir David now?” I asked.
    “They’ve rushed him to Saint Guys, but the thing is, he was supposed to be meeting the others at Threadneedle this morning, at 9:30. It’s been in the diary for ages, and we put all the finishing touches on the paperwork yesterday. I know you’ve only just got back from Argentina, and you’re probably exhausted, but I think Lord Huntley’s going to call and ask if you can go in Sir David’s place. You’re the obvious choice, because although you’re someway down the list in seniority, everybody else is in Switzerland, at Davos at the moment. I wanted to let you know what had happened, because it is serious about Sir David, and I know you’re a praying man and frankly, well frankly, it doesn’t sound good…”
    
    Kelly’s voice trailed off. “Look, thanks for letting me know” I said, “of course I will pray for David, but surely Lord Huntley will find someone else to attend the meeting. I’m far too junior a member of staff to go to a Bank of England meeting. Do you know if Sir David can take visitors?”
    “Oh no, it’s far too soon for that. I’ll let you know when I hear anything.” Kelly hung up. That was bad news, I thought. Poor David. I hadn’t had a lot to do with him since joining Routemans, but I knew he was fairly young, mid-forties, with two young children. He had been tipped as a high-flier, and had worked for the bank on the Advanced Executive Digital Currency programme since leaving Oxford. He was the director of my division, which was dedicated to predicting economic conditions in Eastern Europe and South America, with a view to advising Routemans investment policy. He had got his knighthood doing some charity work attached with his previous bank, but I couldn’t remember exactly what it was.

    A movement out of my right eye caught my attention on the train. An older chap, dressed in a Tweed jacket and Yorkshire flat cap, had moved out of the noisy carriage ahead and sat down diagonally opposite me. A farmer, by the look of him, “Can’t think” he said, “too much noise up there. I am hoping to win some prizes this year in the Dufton show, and need to write a limerick. What do you think of this?” he said:
    “There was a man who visited Argentina,
    and found his life getting obscener…”
    “But I don’t know what comes next” the chap said. He looked vaguely familiar to me, yet although I had lived in Westmorland for over ten years, I didn’t think I knew him from there. It struck me as odd that he would be constructing a limerick about Argentina, since I had just returned from there that very morning.
    “I’m sorry sir” I replied. “I don’t know any limericks about Argentina, but I do know one about Peru. Perhaps you’ve heard it already?”
    “Go on” the farmer said.
    “There was a man from Peru,
    whose limericks stopped at line two.”
    The farmer (if that is what he was) looked at me blankly.
    “Well,” he said, “how does it finish?”
    “That’s it” I replied. “It only has two lines.”
    “That’s not going to work for me” the farmer said, in an accent which didn’t seem particularly from North-west England. “They’re strict judges at Dufton. They will want the full five lines.”
    Now as it happened I knew something about the Dufton show, because Jane had won second prize there in 2022 for her home-made marmalade, and a third prize for her fruit tea-cake. Her mother had been particularly outraged at the relatively poor placing of the tea-cake, which was delicious. But I didn’t really want to continue the conversation, as the bank meeting still bothered me, and I couldn’t put my finger exactly on why that was so. Consequently, I nodded to the farmer (if that’s what he was), and buried my head in the book I was reading, written by some unknown clergyman, entitled “Miscellaneous Thoughts As I Pass By.”
    The book was actually rather good, with explanations on why God blessed us with friends, why life had disappointments, and Biblical injunctions on money and economics. As an economist I was rather taken by the author’s illustrations explaining why and how inflation took place. He correctly identified inflation as being the loss of value of a currency, thus creating the need for more currency to buy what had previously cost less. This was a crucial understanding which eluded most people, who thought inflation was simply the increase of prices in particular goods. This chap explained that inflation caused the price increases, and was always created by an agent, just as inflating a balloon did not happen by itself. Furthermore, the rationale for the section on economics intrigued me, for it is not usually a subject that Christian writers touch. It seemed Jesus’ teaching ‘And when you lend, expect nothing back’ had been the catalyst for the entire book.
    But as interesting as it was, my mind kept reverting back to the events of the morning. I was very unsettled by what had happened, and through years of experience had learnt that if I meditated on a thing long enough, usually the problem - and a solution - would present itself. So ignoring the farmer, and the book, although keeping my nose in it, my memory went back to the car-ride into the city.

    Immediately after Kelly had hung up, my mobile phone rang again. As predicted, it was Lord Huntley, who would brook no argument, and absolutely insisted I went to the meeting at Threadneedle Street. I was to commit as much as possible to memory, as the meeting was to be conducted according to Chatham House rules. Now I had never before attended a meeting that operated with Chatham House rules, and I asked Huntley to briefly describe what those rules meant. He said that all participants could talk freely, but that there would be no minutes, that no record of participants would be kept, and that all comments made at the meeting could only be discussed with others who attended the meeting. This was done, Huntley said, to improve communication and allow people to speak without any hesitation. But the rule sounded positively suspicious to me, as surely it would mean any activity or policy discussed, which might be borderline illegal, or simply not cricket, could not be referred to the appropriate authorities, without the whistle-blower possibly losing his position. However, I was a man used to following orders, having subordinates to whom I would say, ‘go there’ and he would go, so when Huntley said, ‘go to the meeting’ I went. He and I had never really spoken before, and the call was brief, but left me with no alternative.

    Suddenly I started forward. The farmer looked at me carefully, and the chap reading the paper looked up. “Dreadfully sorry” I said, in an apologetic tone. “I just remembered something rather important.”
    I had remembered something which had been lurking outside my memory. The fact is, when I went to the meeting, the people in charge were stating in a forthright manner that in the spring the Russian/Ukrainian conflict would expand into Romania, Poland, Bulgaria and Macedonia. This was bound to cause trouble in the banking system and we were advised to get assets out of the Balkans. That was the connection between the newspaper headline and my darkening mood. The blue funk, which perhaps had only been sky-blue, was now looking positively naval. How had the people at the meeting known about trouble in the Balkans? There had been nothing about that part of the world for months, although the Russian conflict in Ukraine continued to rumble slowly on. Yet here we were, less than six hours after that meeting in Threadneedle Street, and already there seemed to be hints of something rotten in the Balkans.

    My mind returned to the meeting, for it wasn’t the Balkan situation which bothered me primarily. Although the other bankers and economists had clearly known each other, they greeted me in a friendly-enough fashion and were the sort of chaps I thought I would typically like to spend time with. There were no women present, we were all in suits and ties, and the chap up the front spoke with authority. I couldn’t determine his age, for he looked youngish, but spoke with the kind of experience an older man has. I wondered if he had had plastic surgery at some point. The chairman’s tone had a certain harshness to it, and I must admit that I was rather disconcerted by his manner, and what he had to say.
    ‘The correct approach to restoring confidence in the economy and the banking system,’ he said, ‘is to ensure windows are smashed, buildings burnt down, and then for public money to be spent on rebuilding the broken and destroyed buildings.’ Someone, I think from Haxby’s, said that it would have to be a lot of windows and a lot of buildings to get the economy going, as Britain, along with most of the Western world, was in a pretty big economic hole. The chairman just smirked and said that he thought severe events in Birmingham, Nottingham, Glasgow and Edinburgh might get the ball rolling. I could follow the line of thinking, although I didn’t agree with it, because it was classic Keynesian economics, arguing that the state could spend money to employ people to repair damaged property, and thus ‘pump’ the economy.
    But in a twist from the normal funding route, the chairman was indicating that the money was to be obtained from our customers, who were to pay more for their loans in interest, which would start at the next rise in interest rates, due to happen at the end of January. Now I had been a student under Gary North, who was a believer in the Austrian school of economics, and I was convinced that breaking windows was not the way forward, as all it achieved was a loss of money for the landlord, and while it provided employment for glaziers, it increased costs within society due to larger insurance premiums and the need for more policemen, firemen etc. So the whole plan sounded crazy to me - and I said so. The group heard me out, but replied that as I was new there, it was understandable that I did not know the ropes and that the plan was already set. The general advice was that I should return to Routemans and tell them that a rate rise was on the way, and that we should get assets out of the aforementioned cities, plus a number of others, as soon as possible, and make sure the whole lot were well insured.
    “But the kind of economic recovery you’re speaking of,” I said, “would require massive rebuilding - not just a little here and there.” I was not to worry, they said. It was all in hand. The chairman advised all of us to keep an eye on the Balkans, and that when things erupted there, in the spring, that was the sign that the end was near. If we hadn’t moved our assets, or got them insured, it wasn’t his problem. He finished with a smile which, frankly, disturbed me. A bit like a cat eyeing up a goldfish.
    The meeting broke up soon after that. There was to be another, smaller meeting, immediately after, but it was only for bigwigs, and I wasn’t invited. I stopped at the Horse and Foal for a late breakfast - or maybe it was an early dinner, because my body was still on Argentinian time. I pondered what I had heard. None of it made any sense. Perhaps if I could have gone to the second meeting I might have had a clearer light to see by. As it was, all I knew was that there was trouble predicted in the Balkans in the spring, and that the solution to the economic crisis was to be via some sort of building programme, preceded by considerable property damage, and funded by anybody who had a loan, a mortgage, or unpaid credit card bills. Which according to the latest data was about 97 percent of the adult population who were under the age of sixty.
    Nothing else of interest happened while I was at the pub. I saw on my phone that the train to Leeds would leave at 3.31 pm, so I phoned Jane to tell her that I would likely be home around 10.00 pm, as the earlier train up to Carlisle was cancelled (due to industrial action) and that I would need to get the last train out of Leeds, heading towards Appleby, at 8.30 pm. She was pleased to hear me, as we hadn’t spoken since I had left for Argentina, and the children all took turns to tell me what was happening. It was the usual stuff, a chicken had died due to the cold weather and old age; they had had sausages for dinner the night before; had I brought them anything from Argentina - and no, they didn’t want ponchos.
    Before leaving ‘the Horse’ I received a text from Kelly. Sir David’s condition was serious but stable. Nobody could visit him. I paid my bill (in cash), and headed back to Routemans to debrief Lord Huntley on the meeting. From there I planned to walk to King’s Cross in time to catch the train north. Normally Huntley was a sanguine fellow, I had never seen nor heard of him in a flap about anything. But he was mighty peeved at the news that I had not attended the second meeting. He tore a strip off me for contradicting the plan that the others had outlined, and said that if I had kept my mouth shut I probably would have been invited to the second meeting. Now, he said, he was in the dark about what had happened there.
    That was when my blue funk had started. I hadn’t been told by anybody prior to the meeting that there would be a second meeting after the first. I hadn’t had any time to prepare for the first meeting anyway. There had been no pre-meeting notes to read. I was jet-lagged, some distance from home, cold, and feeling like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. I left Routemans with my nose slightly out-of-joint by Huntley’s attitude, but by the time I got to the train station I had mentally forgiven him. To be fair, he had just had Sir David, one of his senior people, suffer a medical emergency, and he had not got all the information he clearly had expected out of the Threadneedle Street meeting.

    The train was delayed by industrial action by signalmen and I fell asleep just outside Grantham and stayed in the land of Nod until I was shaken awake by the farmer as the train pulled into Leeds.
    “Wake up Harris!” the farmer said.
    I came to rather quickly, embarrassed at having fallen asleep and hoping I hadn’t snored on the train. It was the quiet carriage after all. But then a thought crossed my sleepy mind. The farmer (if that’s what he was), had said “wake up Harris” but I had never told him my name. How had he known my name? I followed him off the train and across the concourse at Leeds station.
    “I say, I say, excuse me, sorry, do we know each other?”
    The ‘farmer’ turned to me and said “Quick, into the Pig and Poke, you’ve got an hour till your train leaves and I have 30 minutes before I return to London.”
    We went into the pub and he turned his phone off.
    “Switch your phone off, Harris, this is for your ears only.”
    I switched my work phone off, but left my old Nokia on, because I didn’t want this chap to know I had an old burner hidden in my jacket pocket. Besides, I was confident it didn’t have listening software like the modern phones do, being barely a 2G phone.
    “You probably don’t recognise me” the farmer began, “but I was in both meetings this morning at Threadneedle Street. I need to tell you about the second meeting - I chose you because my conscience can’t hold this thing on its own, and I know you did some good work for Kingdom Bank four years ago, saving them from ruin. So I’m going to tell you things that will make your toes curl.”
    I recognised him them. He had been sitting two seats to my left, and a row forward, in the meeting at Threadneedle - only he hadn’t been wearing Tweed, or a flat cap. “Didn’t you have a moustache?” I said. “Yes, I normally have one, but I shaved it off after the second meeting. It plays havoc with the facial scanners at the bank, I can tell you.” He gave me a rueful smile.
    “Now listen,” he said. “You won’t believe what I am about to tell you, so I am going to tell you two things that will happen this evening, so that you will know my story is true. Firstly, I am sorry to say, but Sir David will not make it through the night. Secondly, you will get a phone call from Huntley when you’re on the train instructing you to return to London. There will be a car waiting for you at Appleby. Whatever you do, don’t get into that car!”
    I have to admit I thought the old boy was completely crackers, and I looked discreetly for the exit, or at least the bouncer at the door. He must have read my mind, for he went on.
    “Look, you’ll probably think I’m crazy but what I am about to tell you is the absolute truth.”
    “Go on,” I said. For despite the unusualness of the situation, there was something compelling about the way he spoke.
    “That stuff in the first meeting was all vaguely true. The banks are colluding to bring Britain into the war on the side of the Ukraine. The broken windows the chairman referred to will be the result of bomb and missile raids on British cities. This can’t be stopped unless we let the British public know, but because of the Chatham House rules anyone who blows the whistle will be fired. Worse than that, he will likely be permanently silenced. But that’s not the worst of it. The banks have a plan to move everyone onto a digital currency. For that to happen, they need a banking crisis not seen since the Great Depression, and then the air raids to cover their tracks. The crisis is to begin this way. There will be a rumour that Haxby and Wakefields are short on cash…”
    “They are already short on cash” I interrupted, “we all know that there isn’t enough cash in the system to cover all the money in people’s bank accounts. But it doesn’t matter, what with electronic banking we can just pay people via our phones.”
    “Yes,” the farmer replied. “That has been deliberate policy, to get people used to the idea that money is just a number in your bank account, nothing of value to hold in your hand. Quite unlike a piece of silver or gold. But what happens if you can’t access your phone? What happens if the banking app goes down? How long would you last on cash? Could you go a month without accessing your bank account?”
    I replied that I doubted I could go even a week.
    “Exactly,” the farmer replied. “Most people won’t last two days. Nobody uses cash these days. The rumours will begin on the Friday nearest March 23rd, either this year, or next.” He gave me the probable dates. “Wakefields and Haxby will deny there’s a problem but a few people will start moving money on the Saturday. There will be increased speculation over the weekend. On the following Monday, Wakefields and Haxby will remain ‘temporarily’ closed. Online banking will not work, nor will the telephone apps. On Tuesday other banks will close and the crisis will spread. Russian hackers will be blamed. The banks will end up being closed for 28 working days, ATMs will not be replenished. People will be indebted and hungry. Then the new digital currency will be released, but only a few banks will be allowed to survive, and they will only be acting as fronts for the Bank of England. Almost the entire population will have their accounts frozen and will not get their money back, unless it is digital.”
    “Forgive me, but your story is crackers,” I said. “The government would never allow that. The Members of Parliament will surely stand up for their constituents.” But as I said it I had to admit I had serious doubts of the truth of that last sentence. “Anyway,” I said, “even if this were true, why would you tell me?”
    “You’re my only hope,” the farmer replied. “My thinking is that if you can get this story published, the plot might be foiled. People might get their money out. But I am frightened of them. Their power is enormous. They control the government you know, and not just ours.”
    “Rubbish,” I replied. “Democracy finds its home here in Britain. All Western nations look to Westminster as the Mother of Parliaments. None of this is going to happen.”
    “Listen Harris,” the farmer said. “I am not joking. This is deadly serious. People are going to be enslaved. The powers that be, the invisible powers that control the world, are rolling out the China model world-wide. March 23rd I tell you. We have only about six weeks to let people know. Now I have to catch my train back to London. Remember what I told you. I am sorry but Sir David is going to die. He and I were working together on trying to stop this diabolical plan. And Huntley will call you back to London, with a car waiting at Appleby. Wait and see - it will happen. Whatever you do, don’t go. Now, cheerio.”
    With that the farmer shook my hand and left. I hadn't even got his name. Well, it didn’t matter, Chatham House rules were in operation, and besides nobody would believe his story.
    I didn’t even believe it myself.
    I watched him walk across the concourse, heading towards a London-bound train.
    I re-entered the Pig and, although I am pretty abstemious as a rule, ordered a brandy.
    I made sure it was a large one.


 Editor's note:

If you'd like to read more of John Harris' adventure, you can get a copy of the novel for free by contacting the author here.