He led them through the corridors of Wyndham Harks, talking rapidly, obviously trying to impress them. He told them the dollar value of every fancy chair, every piece of artwork, and threw around numbers like they said everything. He didn’t really send any of the art more than a passing glance.

He never mentioned what Wyndham Harks actually did as a company. Tom wasn’t clear on that. The other companies in the Coalition had survived the end of the middle class and the Great Global Collapse that followed because they controlled key resources. That, or they were like Obsidian Corp. and LM Lymer Fleet—companies that protected companies controlling key resources.

Wyndham Harks wasn’t like the others. It didn’t have a lock on anything of real value as far as Tom knew. It had always been powerful, though, and it owned a lot of other companies, and a lot of US assets. Even before the rise of the Coalition of Multinationals, people apparently said that governments didn’t rule the world, Wyndham Harks did. Yet even knowing that, few could say exactly why Wyndham Harks—a company that served as a middleman to transactions—was so very essential to the world economy that taxpayers had to bail it out every few years whenever it made too many bad investments. The company had never created a product, never invented anything, never done anything of substance, yet the political class touted it as the essential foundation of a functional society.

“Why do they keep going broke?” Tom asked Wyatt, hoping she’d know.

Wyatt made a strange noise. She was making an odd face, her lips compressed into a tight pucker, her eyes very wide. She resembled some sort of fish.

Yuri answered in her stead. “They purchased many rugs.” Then he pointed at the floor, as if Tom hadn’t seen them.

“Yeah, I got that.” Tom rolled his eyes. “I don’t get why they weren’t forced to sell them all off. You know, if my dad bought a car he couldn’t pay for, he’d have to give it back. He wouldn’t get to keep the car and get someone else to pay his debt for him.”

“Your dad is not Reuben Lloyd,” Yuri said.

The next corridor resolved the paradox. Reuben Lloyd led them before a vast collection of portraits spread across the wall. “Here are Wyndham Harks’s most valuable assets.”

Tom read the placards beneath the photos of the executives, then gave a start as his neural processor began identifying them as powerful government officials. There was Sheldon Laffner, the head of the Department of Homeland Security; Kristyl Chertowitz, the chief of staff to the president; and Aubrey Bremmer, the chief justice of the Supreme Court. There was Barclay J. P. Goldman, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve; Vice President Julian Richter; and President Donald Milgram himself. All of them were former Wyndham Harks executives or current shareholders.