Seven: In all probability, my life would never be the same. I was no longer safe.
I glanced at my watch, realized I had strolled far too long, and turned back toward the office.
Ten minutes later I was back at the offices of Putnam & Stearns, with a few minutes to spare before my next appointment. For some reason I suddenly found myself recalling the face of the senator I had seen on the CNN newscast. Senator Mark Sutton (D.-Col.), shot to death. I remembered now: Senator Sutton was the chairman of the Senate Select Subcommittee on Intelligence. And—was it fifteen years ago?—he had been Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, before he’d been appointed to fill a Senate vacancy, and then was elected in his own right two years later.
And …
And he was one of Hal Sinclair’s oldest friends. His roommate at Princeton. They had joined the CIA together.
That made three CIA types now dead. Hal Sinclair and two trusted confidants.
Coincidences, I believe, occur everywhere except in the intelligence business.
I buzzed Darlene and asked her to send in my four o’clock.
FOURTEEN
Mel Kornstein entered, in an Armani suit that looked untailored and did little to conceal his girth. His silver tie was stained with a bright yellow half-moon of what appeared to be egg.
“Where’s the asshole?” he asked, giving me a soft, damp handshake and looking around my office.
“Frank O’Leary will be here in about fifteen minutes. I wanted to give us a little time to go over some things.”
Frank O’Leary was the “inventor” of SpaceTime, the computer game that is an exact rip-off of Mel Kornstein’s amazing SpaceTron. He and his attorney, Bruce Kantor, had agreed to a conference to initiate the exploratory stages of some sort of agreement. Ordinarily that would mean they realized they’d better settle, that they’d lose big if it ever went to trial. A lawsuit, as lawyers like to say, is a machine you enter as a pig and come out a sausage. Then again, they could be showing up simply as a courtesy, but lawyers aren’t much into courtesy. It was also entirely possible that the two just wanted to display their gladiatorial confidence, try to rattle us a bit.
I was not at my best that afternoon. In fact—though my headache had by this time mostly disappeared—I could barely think straight, and Mel Kornstein picked up on this. “You with me here, Counselor?” he asked querulously at one point when I lost the thread of argument.
“I’m with you, Mel,” I said, and tried to concentrate. I’d found that if I didn’t want to pick up a person’s thoughts, I generally didn’t. What I mean is that I discovered, sitting there with Kornstein, that I wasn’t bombarded with thoughts on top of conversation, which might have been unbearable. I could listen to him normally, but if I wanted to “read” him, I could do so simply by focusing in a way, homing in.
Obviously I can’t describe this adequately, but it’s like the way a mother can single out the voice of her child playing on the beach from the voices of dozens of other children. It’s a bit like listening to the jumble of voices on a party line, some of them more audible than others. Or maybe it’s more like the way, when you’re speaking on a cordless phone, you can hear the ghosts of other people’s conversations overlapping your own. If you listen with some effort, you can hear everything clearly.
So I found myself listening to Kornstein’s voice, rising in aggrievement and falling in despair, and realizing that I could hear only his spoken voice if I so desired.
Fortunately, I regained some footing by the time O’Leary and Kantor showed up, effusing cordiality. O’Leary—tall, red-haired, bespectacled, thirtyish—and Kantor—small, compact, balding, late forties—made themselves right at home in my office and sank into their chairs as if we were all old chums.
“Ben,” Kantor said by way of greeting.
“Good to see you, Bruce.” Good old casual chummy banter.
Only the attorneys are supposed to talk at these conferences. The clients, if they appear at all, are there only for their attorneys’ ready reference; they’re supposed to keep silent. But Mel Kornstein sat there, fuming, refusing to shake hands with anyone, and couldn’t restrain himself from blurting out, “Six months from now you’re going to be washing dishes at McDonald’s, O’Leary. Hope you like the smell of french-fry grease.”
O’Leary smiled calmly and gave Kantor a look that said, Will you handle this lunatic? Kantor bounced the look over to me, and I said, “Mel, let Bruce and me handle this right now.”
Mel folded his arms and smoldered.
The real point of this meeting was to determine one simple thing: had Frank O’Leary seen a prototype of SpaceTron while he was “developing” SpaceTime? The similarity of the games wasn’t even in question. But if we could prove beyond any doubt that O’Leary had seen SpaceTron at any point before it went on the market, we won. It was as simple as that.
O’Leary maintained, naturally, that the first time he saw SpaceTron was in a software store. Kornstein was convinced that O’Leary had somehow gotten an early prototype of the game from one of his software engineers, but of course he couldn’t prove his suspicion. And here I was, trying to fence with Bruce Kantor, Esq., the feisty little bantam.
After half an hour Kantor was still making noises about restraint of trade and unfair practices. I was finding it hard to concentrate on his line of argument, in that half-dazed state I’d been in since the morning, but I knew enough to realize he was just blustering. Neither he nor his client was going to give an inch.
I asked, for the third time, “Can you say for absolutely certain that neither your client nor any of his employees had any access to any of the research or development work that was going on at Mr. Kornstein’s firm?”
Frank O’Leary continued to sit impassively with folded arms, looking bored, and let his attorney do the heavy lifting. Kantor leaned forward, gave his saucy little smile, and said, “I think you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, Ben. If you’ve got nothing else—”
And then I heard, in that gauzy, soft-focus tone that I’d begun to recognize, Frank O’Leary’s voice mutter something. I could barely make it out, but I tilted my head forward, pretending to be consulting my legal pad, and concentrated to separate it from Kantor’s chatter.
Ira Hovanian, O’Leary was saying.
Jesus, if Hovanian spills—
“Ah, Bruce,” I said. “Perhaps your client can tell us a little about Ira Hovanian.”
Kantor frowned, looked annoyed, and said, “I don’t know what you’re—”
But O’Leary grabbed his arm and whispered something into Kantor’s left ear. Kantor looked at me quizzically for a moment, then swiveled around, and whispered something back.
I consulted my yellow pad and tilted my head and began to listen, but at that instant Kornstein tapped me lightly on the shoulder. “What does Ira Hovanian have to do with anything?” he whispered. “How did you know about Ira Hovanian?”
“Who is he?” I asked.
“You don’t—”
“Just tell me.”
“He’s a guy who quit the company a couple of months before SpaceTron came out. A schlemazel.”
“A what?”
“I felt sorry for the schmuck. He lost a shitload in stock options. I guess he found a better job somewhere else, but if he had stayed, he’d be a rich man by now.”
“Did he sell trade secrets?”
“Ira? Ira was a nothing.”
“Listen to me,” I said. “For some reason, O’Leary knows that name. It means something to him.”
“You didn’t mention—”
“It’s something I picked up recently,” I replied. “All right, let me think for a minute.” I turned away from Kornstein, and feigned deep concentration on the scribblings on my yellow pad. Several feet away, O’Leary and Kantor were deep in whispered colloquy.
—stole a working prototype from the safe. He had a combination. Sold it to me for twenty-five thousand bucks and the promise of another
hundred grand when we started turning a profit.
I took notes as quickly as I could, and continued to listen, but the voice faded out. O’Leary was smiling, visibly relaxed now, and his thoughts were placid, therefore unreadable.
I was about to turn back to Kornstein to ask him about this, when suddenly I picked up another flow.
… burned him. What the hell was he going to do? He’s the guy who committed the illegal act, right? So who’s he going to turn to?
Now Kantor swiveled back toward me and said, “Let’s meet again in a day or two. We’ve gone on long enough today.”
I reflected for a few seconds and said, “If that’s what you and your client would like, that’s fine. If anything, that will give us time for an additional deposition of Mr. Hovanian, who has already given us some interesting information concerning a prototype of SpaceTron and a company safe.”
Kantor looked supremely uncomfortable. He unfolded his legs, then folded them again, and pulled nervously at his chin with a thumb and forefinger.
“Look,” he said, his voice a few notes higher than before, “bluff all you like. But let’s not waste each other’s time. If a minimum settlement is what you want, I think it would be in my client’s interest just to get all this stuff behind him, so we’d be prepared to make a—”
“Four point five million,” I said.
“What?” he gasped.
I stood up and extended my hand. “Well, gentlemen, I’ve got some depositions to take. With your knowing cooperation in the concealment of a felony, as the attorney of record I think we should have an interesting trial. Thank you for coming.”
“Hold on a second here,” Kantor blurted out. “We can come to an agreement of—”
“Four point five,” I repeated.
“You’re out of your mind!”
“Gentlemen,” I said.
The two clients, O’Leary and Kornstein, were staring at me, dumbstruck, as if I’d suddenly pulled down my trousers and danced a jig on my desk. “Jesus,” Kornstein said to me.
“Let’s—let’s talk,” Kantor said.
“All right,” I said, and sat down. “Let’s talk.”
The meeting broke up forty-five minutes later. Frank O’Leary had agreed to pay an outright settlement of $4.25 million in one lump sum, payable within ninety days, with a further stipulation that SpaceTime would remove its flagship computer game from the market forthwith.
At half past five, O’Leary and Kantor, considerably more subdued, filed out of my office. Mel Kornstein gave me a humid, bearlike embrace, thanked me profusely, and left, beaming for the first time in months.
And I sat alone in my office, ignoring the ringing phone, and tossed a perfect hook shot into my electronic hoop. It emitted a wild packed-Boston-Garden cheer and shouted tinnily, “Score!” I grinned to myself like an idiot, wondering how long this peculiar good fortune could last. As it happened, it lasted for precisely one day.
FIFTEEN
My mistake, as it turned out, was that classic error of the novice intelligence operative: neglecting to assume that you’re being watched.
The problem was that I had lost my bearings. My world had turned upside down. The normal logic of my staid, ordered, lawyerly life no longer applied.
We go through our lives by rote, I think, doing our jobs and performing our duties as if with blinders on. Now, suddenly, the blinders were off. How could I possibly be as circumspect, as cautious, as I once might have been?
I was able to leave the office early enough to make a stop before home. When the elevator arrived, it was empty—too late, as usual, for the evening rush—and I got in.
I needed desperately to talk to someone, but who, in truth, could I talk to? Molly? She would immediately think I had gone off the deep end. Like all physicians, her world was a very rational one. Of course I would have to tell her at some point—but when? And what about my friend Ike? Possible, I suppose; but at this point I couldn’t risk telling anyone.
Two floors below, the elevator stopped, and a young woman got in. She was tall, auburn-haired, with a little too much eye makeup, but with a nice full figure, and her silk blouse accented her large breasts. We stood there in the normal silence shared by elevator passengers who do not know each other but happen to be standing in a metal box a few feet apart. She seemed distracted. Both of us were busily looking up, watching the numbers change. My headache, that terrible welling-up of pain, was all but gone, thank God.
I happened to be thinking about Molly, in fact, when I “heard” it—what he’s like in bed.
I glanced over at her, instinctually, assuring myself once again that she hadn’t said anything aloud. Her eyes seemed to catch mine for a split second, but turned back toward the flashing red numerals in the panel above the door.
I concentrated now, and I picked up more.
nice ass. Probably a pretty strong guy. Looks like a lawyer, which means he’s probably the real conservative boring type but one night who cares.
I turned again, and this time her eyes met mine for an instant, a second too long.
If ever a woman were available, she was. I at once felt a strange spasm of guilt. I was privy to her most intimate fantasies, her private calculations, her daydreams. It was a terrible violation. It violated all the rules we human beings have developed for flirtation, the dance of cues and hints and suggestions, which works so well because nothing is ever said, nothing is ever certain.
I knew this woman would go to bed with me. Ordinarily, you can never be certain no matter what the body language. Some women like to flirt, to take things to the brink just to see if they’re sufficiently desirable to lead a man that far. Then they’ll pull back, playing along with social conventions, feigning unwillingness, a need to be wooed. The whole game, which has baffled both men and women since we all began standing upright (and likely before then), relies upon our inability to know what is in the minds of others. It is premised upon uncertainty.
But I knew. I knew with absolute certainty what this woman was thinking. And for some reason I found this deeply upsetting, as if I’d just become an outsider to the normal rules of human behavior.
I’m also quite aware that another man might have taken immediate advantage of the situation. And why not? I knew she was willing; I found her attractive enough. Even if she affected a lack of interest, I could see—or “hear”—through it, knowing just what to say and when to say it. The power was enormous.
Well, I’m no more virtuous than any man. It’s just that I was in love with Molly.
And it was at that point that I realized that my relationship with Molly could never be quite the same.
* * *
The Boston Public Library was not too busy at this time of the early evening, and I was able to get the pile of books I’d ordered within twenty minutes.
The literature on extrasensory perception is actually quite extensive. A number of books had (reasonably) sober-sounding titles like Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain and The Scientific Basis of Telepathy. Some, on the other hand, had such unpromising titles as Develop Your Mind Potential! or Anyone Can Have ESP; those I discarded after the briefest scan. Some of the serious-seeming ones turned out, after a few minutes of reading, to be not so serious after all—they’d dressed up a lot of speculation and the slimmest evidence in pages full of statistics and learned references. Finally I was down to three volumes that seemed to hold out hope: Psi (which turned out to be a jargon abbreviation of “psychic”), Recent Findings in Parapsychological Phenomena, and The Frontier of the Mind.
I felt a little strange looking through these books, speculative as they were. It was a bit like a migraine sufferer poring over volumes that hypothesized that there just might possibly be such a thing as a migraine headache. I wanted to shout out to the library’s hushed, cavernous interior: “It’s not goddamn theoretical! I have it!”
Instead, I plowed through the studies. Apparently, amid all the quacks and the loonies there were a n
umber of credentialed, credible scholars who believed that certain human beings possessed the ability to read minds in one way or another. Among them were a few Nobel laureates and some prominent researchers at Duke, UCLA, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, the University of Freiburg in Germany. They studied such subspecialties as “psychometry” and “psychokinesis.” Mostly these scientists had attained recognition in more traditional fields of research and drew little or no serious attention for their work in parapsychology, despite the occasional article in respected science journals like Britain’s Nature.
What it seemed to come down to was this: perhaps a quarter of all human beings, at one time or another, experience some form of telepathy. Most of us, however, refuse to allow ourselves to accept it. I read a number of accounts that seemed plausible. A woman is dining with friends in New York City and suddenly feels certain that her father has died. She rushes to the phone—and the father, indeed, died of heart failure in a hospital at the moment she felt it. A college student feels a sudden, unexplained urge to call home, and learns that his younger brother has been in a terrible car accident. Most often, I learned, people receive “signals” or “feelings” while asleep and/or dreaming, because it is at those times that we are least hindered by our skepticism.
But none of this really applied to what had happened to me. I wasn’t experiencing “feelings” or “signals” or “urges.” I was “hearing”—there’s no other word for it—the thoughts of others. Yet not at a distance. In fact, more than a few feet away, I could not “hear” a thing. Which meant that I was receiving some sort of transmissible signal from the human brain. Nothing in these books dealt with that.
Until I came across an intriguing chapter in The Frontier of the Mind. The author was discussing the use of psychics by various police forces throughout the United States, and by the Pentagon during a search for MIAs in Vietnam. There was a reference to the Pentagon’s use of a psychic in January 1982, in a hunt for General Dozier, who had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades in Italy.
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