Sigma One

by Hutchison, William

  He served the last of his obligatory five year tour in the Navy Annex as a public affairs officer, and even with the boredom associated with a desk job, he was able to make the best of a bad situation. This last job in the military enabled him to make numerous contacts with high roller government contractors in the Washington D.C. area and these contacts, in turn, had enabled him to meet Senator Radcliff.

  Through Radcliff, Pat landed a particularly well-paying, post-service government job serving as the senator's personal liaison with the pentagon. This was due in part to his knowledge, but more to the truth, because he had rescued the senator from a major political embarrassment when he covered for him to his wife in one of the many torrid affairs the senator had had with a junior secretary they both had met at a post-election win celebration. Had it not been for that affair and Radcliff's wanting to pay him back, even with Pat's previous credentials as a Naval Academy graduate, he more than likely would have ended up moving back to Longview, Texas and taken a job in the same brewery his father had worked in till he died. His chances for a post military flying career had ended because of his accident, but his career at the NSF had begun as a result.

  Pat Huxley worked for Senator Radcliff for four more years after he left the military. One year into his tenure, at the age of twenty-eight, Pat hired Sarah Johnson to replace the Senator's personal secretary who had left under other-than-normal circumstances.

  Sarah, a raven-haired beauty with charcoal, piercing eyes and alabaster complexion looked more like she should be on the cover of Vogue magazine than taking the typing test he had given her. At least that's what Pat remembered thinking the first day he interviewed her for the post.

  Sarah, then twenty-five, had just moved to Washington from Boynton Beach, Florida as a result of breaking up with her childhood sweetheart. She had dated the guy for seven years after graduating high school, but finally realized her romantic energies were being wasted on a boy whose only ambition in life was to lie out in the hot Florida sun and work on the perfect tan. Sarah was tenacious though and thought she could change Tad's outlook. Maybe that's why she hung on for as long as she did. But once she did come to the conclusion that they were going nowhere, three days later, she was on a United Airlines flight from Palm Beach International Airport (before it was remodeled) to Dulles.

  With only seven hundred dollars in her purse, but a pocketful of determination, Sarah arrived in Washington. She knew she would have to work fast to land a job, but she was confident she could make it on her own. Buying a paper in the airport, she circled five or six potentials and then headed out to take our nation’s capital by storm. That confidence was visible in her poise as she played the keyboard of the IBM selectric in front of Pat's watchful eye, turning in a perfect 92 words per minute on her first try. That confidence, too, along with her beauty and poise is what immediately attracted Pat to her.

  Unbeknownst to her, she had the job the moment she walked into Pat's office.

  Pat was dumbstruck by her, and during her typing test was already picturing what the two of their kids would look like; whether they would have his sandy brown hair, or her jet black locks.

  Their courtship was a short one; she, on the rebound he, wanting to end his single days and settle down. Six months after they met they were married in Baltimore in a small private ceremony. One year and two months later, Alice was born, a carbon copy of her mother.

  Sarah became Pat's reservoir of strength during the next three years as he struggled in his job working for the senator. She was also the one who finally prompted him to leave when he felt he was going nowhere and tired of covering for Radcliff. It was her strength, too, he relied on as he worked his way up in PCA, the beltway bandit he joined after leaving the Senator's employ. And when his career stalled in this job as project manager on some innocuous urban development planning study for some underdeveloped third world country, she was there to prod him into action again in spite of himself.

  Pat oftentimes when overworked would drown himself in self-pity partly because of his physical disability, partly because he had never had to deal with failure. Sarah knew the signs, and these signs began to show themselves after only one year with PCA: little conversation; lack of his ability to get to sleep; sharp words addressed to herself and to Alice; sulking.

  During their three years of marriage, though, she had learned how to cope with her husband's mood swings. She had also created an undeniably simple method of breaking his self-destructive cycle when things got too bad. Her method was this: she would compare Pat to her ex-lover, Tad. Tad was the antithesis of Pat, lazy, going nowhere, and not very intelligent. That's why her method worked. Pat knew these things about Tad and being compared to him was intolerable.

  On one cold November day after three weeks of the silent treatment, she thought it time to put her defenses in motion.

  Pat stood at the mirror watching the smile lines deepen on his face. He was and had been disgusted with his job at PCA. Things just were not working out as he had expected them to when he hired on a year earlier. He knew he should be happy. He got to be a program manager in three months, didn't he?

  "But that doesn't matter," he muttered to himself.

  "Damn it, Sarah!" Pat said sharply, turning around and raising his voice slightly to be overheard from the running water.

  "Damn it! I'm not going anywhere at PCA and I'm sick and tired of watching the founders of the company gettin' rich selling the same old crap to new customers." (Pat was referring to a particularly knotty proposal he had had to work on over the past three weeks. The proposal involved repackaging an old analysis done three years prior for a different client. This time the work would, however, be done at twice the price.)

  "Did you say something, Tad?" Sarah emphasized the last word as she turned over in bed.

  Pat didn't hear her and continued angrily. "Yeh, I said something!"

  "Well?"

  "Well what?"

  "What's bothering you, TAD?"

  This time he heard, but ignored her. "You heard me!"

  "Not all of it I didn't." By this time, Sarah had gotten up and put her hand on his shoulder.

  Pat hesitated then began again trying to hide the smile that had crept onto his face. He didn't want her to know that she had gotten to him.

  "I'll tell you what's bothering me. I'm sick and tired of working at PCA and getting nowhere. I'm just not cut out to continuously deal in paper studies. I want to do something that matters, something that will have meaning three years from now. Something we can be proud of. I'm not doing any of that at PCA. I'm selling transportation studies to underdeveloped, third world countries. As if they have a need for mass transit. Hell, they can't even feed themselves. And to make matters worse, they want me to lead up the newest project in Zaire. That means I'm gonna be gone from you and Alice for at least three months, maybe longer. And that burns me up!"

  Sarah didn't know about Zaire. She could understand Pat's concern. It bothered her to think about them being apart for that long. They hadn't slept separately since they married and she wanted it to stay that way. Still, Pat was finally letting a little steam off, and she needed to turn the heat up on the kettle just a bit to ensure he exorcised himself from the demons that were troubling him.

  "So what are you going to do about it, Tad?" she badgered him teasingly.

  Pat had had enough.

  "You called me Tad!"

  Smiling. "Yes I did! Because you're acting like him. It sounds like something he would say. He'd complain. But he wouldn't do anything about it. Just like you're doing now." She waited for a reply.

  Pat became sullen, gritted his teeth and stared back at his wife. He was angry.But not at her. She was right. He was acting like a jerk and should know better. He had to do something to change his situation.

  "Well. What are you going to do…..TAD?!" Sarah said playfully.

  As soon as the word registered, Pat broke into a grin, picked his wife up and threw her onto the bed and
hugged her.

  She responded by hugging him back. This had been the first sign of emotion she had seen from him in weeks and she loved it.She kissed him deeply.

  After their brief interlude in bed, they both got up and got ready for the day. Pat dressed, kissed Sarah and Alice goodbye and went out into the cold November Virginia air.

  On his way to PCA, his car paralleled the Potomac. The trees had lost their rich green leaves weeks before. The gray overcast skies and their bleak naked branches combined to add to Pat's sullenness. As he stared out at the murky, brown, slow moving waters he began to formulate a plan for breaking with PCA. His numerous years of government service and his years of serving the senator as well as his observations over that last year at PCA had taught him one thing. There were alternatives. And there were ample supplies of money to be had, if one had the right idea.

  Tuning into the news he heard Tom Brockaw editorializing about the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. During that broadcast, Pat had come to the decision that the only way he could contribute to society would be to somehow help lessen the threat of nuclear destruction to mankind. That desire generated the idea for the National Security Foundation, an organization of his own that would do something significant.

  As he drove towards the PCA office he became obsessed with this idea and instead of turning into the parking structure, he headed for Senator Radcliff's.

  The senator was in and over breakfast Pat convinced his old colleague of his idea for a company....a foundation he called it....to address this serious problem. A little arm twisting and reminding the senator that he owed Pat was all it took to ensure that his first year of initial funding would be forthcoming three months hence.

  That morning, Pat finished his meeting with the senator, drove to his office for the last time, packed his belongings and began his search for a suitable location for his new company.Over the next three months, he located his office in rural Virginia, secured facility clearances and began preparing for his first proposal-developing a long term strategy for riskless nuclear disarmament.

  CHAPTER 4

  Cherisa Hunt stood in front of a mirror--a darkened mirror--in a cheap hotel fixing her makeup. Miley really should replace this piece of junk,") she thought to herself as she squinted to better focus on the wary eyebrow she was trying to pluck from her twenty-five year old face.

  The eyebrow didn't need to be plucked, and would have gone unnoticed by anyone else--but not Cherisa. She was a fanatic about her looks. "A real genuine priss!" as one gentleman lawyer she had met in the Dulles Airport while she was waiting for Senator Radcliff had described it. So she took the tweezers and yanked the errant foliage from her face, emitting a loud "youch!" as she did.

  Stepping back from the mirror, she took a better look to see what, if any damage, she had done. "After all," she remarked to herself as she turned her head left then right, "This is the perfect face. And we can't be damaging the merchandise, now, can we?" (She always liked to refer to herself in the second person possessive; this to bolster up an inner sense of inferiority that her ner-do-well mother had instilled in her since she was a child, not wanting to compete with such a "pretty little girl.") Noting that now not a hair was out of place, she turned around and looked at the young twenty-three year old tire salesman lying in bed, half covered, totally smashed, that she had befriended just eight hours earlier in a fit of passion and thought to herself that her suitor looked a lot better in the dim light of the bar. She hadn't noticed it then, but she did now, that the guy still had acne. Yuck!

  Dressing quickly and quietly, she turned and left the room being careful she removed her business card from the night stand to ensure the loser wouldn't try to track her down for one, and two, to avoid any potential future compromise in her security clearance. The NSF wouldn't think too kindly of this sort of behavior, and she had been cautioned already once. One more episode and she might get her clearance yanked entirely.

  Hurriedly, she headed down the grimy stairs of the cheap motel and out onto the streets now bustling with people on their way to work. She dreaded the thought of anyone seeing her come out of this place, so she buried her head in her scarf and hailed the first taxi that happened by, quickly entering into the safety of the its warm surroundings, happy to be out of the biting cold wind which had begun to numb her.

  She didn't notice the blue green station wagon and the two secret service agents, who immediately started to follow her as the cab pulled away from the curb. She was in too big a hurry to get to the NSF and her job.

  The cab ride from downtown to her office took much longer than she had planned. When they finally arrived, Cherisa looked at her watch, threw the cabbie a twenty and left in such a hurry she didn't even get the change. As she entered the building, Cherisa stopped short of the security guard and hurriedly fumbled in her purse to get her identification pass. Normally she would have had it in her hand so she could walk right in, but she didn't recognize the guard at the door this day, and she didn't want to draw attention to herself. She was, after all, forty five minutes late for work.

  Stepping forward, Cherisa showed her badge to the guard who did a double take, flashing his eyes first at the badge and then at Cherisa. Satisfied of her correct identification, he buzzed the door and let her inside. Before letting the security door close completely, Cherisa looked over her shoulder and batted her eyes at the guard and spoke.

  "Please do me little favor, handsome. Okay?"

  The guard responded, "What's that you want Ms. Hunt?"

  "Just remember when you log in my arrival time, could you fudge just a little and put down 8:30 instead of the actual time? Mr. Huxley said if I was late one more time he'd fire me. And we wouldn't want that now. Would we?" She batted her eyes again, hoping her ploy would work. It always used to work on the guard in the Capital Building when she worked for Senator Radcliff.

  The guard scanned her up and down lasciviously and then nodded his head in agreement. Maybe Ms. Hunt would remember this later on. He hoped so anyway.

  Cherisa closed the door and proceeded down the long corridor of vault doors to her office at the end.

  When she was halfway down the hall, one of the vault doors opened. The soft sound of classical music could be heard briefly as the petite brunette, Amanda Yates, stepped out almost running into Cherisa and dropping a pile of loose-leaf papers in the process.

  "Hi, Amanda. What's the hurry?"

  Amanda composed herself, stooped down and picked up the papers. When they were situated in her arms again she replied apologetically, "Oh, hi, Cherisa. I've just got to get these papers into art. We've got a big presentation to the budget committee tomorrow. You know. Same old thing. Tell 'em what we're spending. Tell 'em what we've accomplished. Get more funding to continue the research. That's all. Sorry I almost bowled you over.

  "No problem, Amanda. I wasn't paying attention."

  "Well. Gotta run!”

  "Bye."

  With that last comment, Amanda disappeared down the hall.

  Cherisa watched her as she scurried along and thought to herself maybe she'd put in for a job in the research department. They always look like they're doing such important things. She wasn't really happy being just a secretary. And besides, the researchers had flexible hours. This was perfect for her scatter-brained approach to life. Flexible hours would suit her just fine.

  Before entering the door at the end of the hallway, Cherisa pulled out her compact, straightened her eye makeup and then went inside. She had no sooner sat down at her desk then Pat (Mr. Huxley to her) summoned her into his office for dictation.

  "Hi, Cherisa. Glad you could make it today." Pat said sarcastically. Were it not for the fact that Cherisa used to be Senator Radcliff's secretary and he was forced to hire her at the NSF as a condition of continued funding, he would have fired her years ago. But the senator made it perfectly clear that unless Cherisa had a job at the NSF, no more funding would be forthcoming. More than likely
Radcliff had planted her there as spy anyway.

  "Good morning, Mr. Huxley. I'm sorry I was late. An accident on the beltway was horrible this morning. A big rig jackknifed and it had traffic snarled for miles." She hoped he would buy this lie. She hadn't used the traffic excuse in weeks.

  "That's okay, Cherisa. I've just got a lot of things that have to be out today. I'll be at the Senate hearings for the next three days and won't have time to come into the office, so every minute counts. Are you ready to work?"

  "Yes. I'm ready."

  "Well," Pat said, "then let's begin. First date this letter yesterday- -the forth of October, 1990.

  "Uh, huh. Got it. The forth." Cherisa wondered why the date change.