"Mack Reynolds - Day After Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Mack)

"Nothing positive," Larry said. "Are you people accomplishing
anything?"

"We're just getting underway. There's something awfully off-trail about
this deal, Woolford. It doesn't fit into routine."
 Larry said, "I wouldn't think so if the stuff is so good not even a bank
teller can tell the difference."

"That's not what I'm talking about now, although that curls our hair
too. Let me give you a rundown on standard counterfeiting." The Secret
Service man pushed back in his swivel chair, lit a cigarette and propped
his feet onto the edge of a partly open desk drawer. "Briefly, it goes like
this. Some smart lad gets himself a set of plates and a platen press and—"

Larry interrupted. "Where does he get the plates?"

"That doesn't matter for the moment," Steve said. "Various ways.
Maybe he makes them himself, sometimes he buys them from a crooked
engraver. But I'm talking about pushing green goods once it's printed.
Anyway, our boy runs off, say, a million dollars worth of fives, face value.
But he doesn't even try to push them himself. He wholesales them around
getting, say, fifty thousand dollars. In other words, he sells twenty dollars
in counterfeit for one good dollar."

Larry pursed his lips. "Quite a discount."

"Ummm. But that's safest from his angle. The half dozen or so
distributors he sold it to don't try to pass it either. They also are playing it
carefully. They peddle it at, say, ten to one, to the next rung down the
ladder."

"And these are the fellows that pass it, eh?"

"Not even then, usually. These small timers take it and pass it on at five
to one to the suckers in the trade who take the biggest risks. Most of these
are professional pushers of the queer, as the term goes. Some, however,
are comparative amateurs. Sailors, for instance, who buy with the idea of
passing it in some foreign port where seamen's money flows fast."

Larry Woolford shifted in his chair and said, "So what are you building
up to?"

Steve Hackett rubbed the end of his pug nose with a forefinger, in quick
irritation. "Like I say, that's standard counterfeiting procedure. We're all
set up to meet it, and do a pretty good job. Where we have our difficulties
is with amateurs."
 Woolford scowled at him, lacking comprehension.

Hackett said, "Some guy who makes and passes it himself, for instance.
He's unknown to the stool-pigeons, has no criminal record, does up