by Ben Bova
* * *
The next morning Jake looked up local electronics shops on his notebook computer while Tami fried eggs and perked coffee. On his way to the office, he detoured to a shop that advertised on the Internet that it specialized in state-of-the-art digital equipment.
“Audio recorder?” asked the clerk at Bits and Bytes Electronics. He was young enough to still have traces of acne marring his otherwise cheerful face.
He showed Jake an assortment of miniaturized recording devices.
“Completely digital,” he said, holding up one that was no bigger than a cuff link. “Not like the old days, when you needed a separate battery pack and you had to run a wire under your shirt. You can carry this baby in your pocket, no sweat.”
Jake picked the one that looked like a ballpoint pen.
“Neat choice,” said the kid. “The DC narco squad uses these. All complete in this one unit. You can even write with it, if you have to.”
“Great,” said Jake.
“You’ve got to be close to the person you want to record, though; no more than five, six feet away.”
“That’ll be fine,” Jake said, reaching into his back pocket for his wallet full of credit cards.
By the time Jake arrived at his office, he had clipped the recorder in his shirt pocket. He tried it on several of the staff secretaries, clicking the tiny device on as he engaged them in conversation. When he listened to the digital recording, behind the closed door of his office, their voices came through quite clearly.
Satisfied, Jake said to himself, Now to get into a one-on-one with Jacobi.
* * *
Once he got to his office Jake put in a phone call to Bert Jacobi, at the headquarters of Jacobi & Sons Coal Co. in Providence, Rhode Island. A woman who sounded middle-aged told him that Mr. Jacobi was out of the office, but she would pass on his message as soon as he showed up.
Jacobi called late in the afternoon. “You wanna talk to me?” He sounded curious, almost suspicious.
“Yes,” said Jake.
“What about?”
“I’m going to be in Boston for a few days,” Jake lied, “and I thought I’d drop in on you. Senator Santino said you were good at plugging leaks. I’d like to talk to you about that.”
“I’m goin’ out to Cleveland tamorra. Be back Thursday.”
“Okay,” said Jake. “Thursday would be good.”
“See ya then, in my office.”
“Fine. Thank you.”
“Eleven a.m.”
“Eleven. I’ll be there.”
Feeling that he was heading into the lion’s den, Jake flew to Boston early Thursday morning, then drove a rented Kia Optima to Providence.
The car’s GPS led him to a seedy part of town filled with warehouses and automobile dealerships. Bars on just about every street corner. The streets looked as though they hadn’t been swept in months; trash blew along on the wind coming in from the nearby sea.
Jake remembered the run-down neighborhood where he’d grown up. It wasn’t as bad as this, he thought. But then his neighborhood was mostly row houses, blue collar residential. Not this industrial slum.
Jacobi & Sons Coal Co. looked better than most of the buildings in the area. Its front appeared to have been recently painted; the big plate-glass windows were clean, the parking lot nearly filled with decent-looking cars. Jake parked in the visitors’ area and pushed through the glass doors into a modern reception lobby.
The receptionist called Jacobi, and within a few seconds a dowdy gray-haired woman came through the door that led deeper into the building.
“Dr. Ross? Follow me, please.” Jake recognized the voice as the woman he had spoken to on the phone a few days earlier. He clicked on the power switch of the recorder he wore clipped into his shirt pocket as he followed the woman down a quiet corridor toward the rear of the building.
Jacobi’s office was on the small side, furnished with old-fashioned bookcases and photos on the walls of big sturdy coal trucks and family elders smiling stiffly into the camera.
Without getting up from his high-backed desk chair, Jacobi said, “Come on in. Siddown.”
Umberto Jacobi
Hoping his digital recorder was working properly, Jake went to one of the wooden chairs in front of Jacobi’s heavy dark desk and sat down.
“What’s this all about, kid?”
Jake felt a tic of anger at being called “kid,” but he replied evenly, “As I told you on the phone, I want to talk to you about plugging the leak in Senator Tomlinson’s office.”
Jacobi’s oddly mismatched face twisted into a cynical smile.
“Come on,” he said, “we both know you did the leakin’. What’re you really here for?”
Without bothering to deny the accusation Jake said, “I want to understand why Senator Santino is holding up our energy plan.”
“Whyn’tcha ask him?”
“Because he wouldn’t give me a straight answer.”
“And you think I will?”
Leaning forward, doing his best to appear earnest, Jake said, “You’re not a politician, you’re a businessman. I thought we could talk honestly to each other.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Why should I?”
“Because I want to work with Santino, not against him. I don’t know why he’s bottling up our energy plan.”
Jacobi leaned back in his chair, which creaked slightly, and said nothing. His hands gripping the arms of his chair, he stared at Jake, as if trying to size him up.
Breaking the silence, Jake said, “This energy plan could be a big feather in Santino’s cap. He could be seen as a leader of the Senate, of his whole party.”
“Elections comin’ up next November,” Jacobi muttered.
“The energy plan could be a major campaign issue.”
As if he hadn’t heard that, Jacobi went on, “They already put out feelers about Mario bein’ on the ticket.”
“Really?”
“Vice president. I told him to turn ’em down. He’s got more power as a senator.”
“But it’s quite an honor,” Jake said.
With a disgusted sneer, Jacobi said, “Honor ain’t where it’s at, kid. Power. That’s what it’s all about.”
Eagerly, Jake said, “The energy plan could make the senator a powerful figure.”
“Your senator, maybe. Not mine.”
“But if he gets behind the plan, if he moves it through the energy committee and out onto the floor of the Senate, Santino will become a real leader.”
Shaking his head, Jacobi said, “Forget it, kid. It ain’t gonna happen.”
“But why?”
Looking mildly disgusted, Jacobi ticked off on his stubby fingers, “One: Mario’s already a powerful guy in the Senate. He don’t need your plan.”
“But—”
“Two: Nobody wants your goddamn energy plan. We like things the way they are.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
A crooked grin broke across Jacobi’s face. “Me, that’s who. And AEP, out in Ohio. And the whole fuckin’ automobile industry. And the petroleum industry. Ya need any more?”
“They’d be against a rational energy plan for the nation?” Jake prompted.
“We got a rational energy plan,” Jacobi snapped. “It works fine. We don’t need no do-gooders pumping money into solar and wind power and electric cars and all that crap.”
“But the environment, what about that?”
Waving a meaty hand, Jacobi said, “Aah, you greenies give me a pain in the butt. What’s wrong with the environment?”
“All the carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels,” Jake said. “It’s heating up the world’s climate.”
“So you wanna saddle us with building equipment that’ll take our smokestack gases and stick ’em in the ground someplace? Get real!”
“But the government will help pay for that.”
“Yeah, sure. And you expe
ct us to foot the rest of the bill. Bullshit! Bad enough they’re tryin’ to tighten up the rules on carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants.”
Jake sagged back in his chair. Jacobi glared at him, like a bulldog growling, snarling.
At last Jake said, “At least the MHD power generation technology uses coal. You don’t have any objection to that, do you?”
“Who’s gonna foot the bill for building your fancy new electric power plants?”
“There’ll be federal subsidies.”
“Yah. Sure.” Jacobi shook his head impatiently. “You just don’t get it, do you, kid? Your fancy pie-in-the-sky energy plan ain’t goin’ noplace.”
Before Jake could think of anything more to say, Jacobi raised three stubby fingers. “An’ I’ll give you the third reason why it ain’t. Because it’d make your guy Tomlinson a hero, that’s why. Santino don’t want that. Not for a minute. Capisce?”
I understand, Jake replied silently.
“Mario’s worked too hard for too long to let some good-lookin’ young twerp from out west take the spotlight off him. Tomlinson’s goin’ nowhere until he learns to behave himself.”
“You mean that Santino wants to stifle the energy plan because he sees it as a threat to his position in the Senate.”
“Somethin’ like that, yeah.”
Trying to make himself sound properly humbled, Jake asked, “So what should I tell Tomlinson when I get back to Washington?”
“You tell him to follow his leader. Tell him that Santino is the chairman of the energy committee, and he ain’t gonna let any wet-behind-the-ears newcomer steal the power from him.”
Jake said nothing.
Jacobi added, “And he better cancel that thing he’s supposed to be doin’ on Sixty Minutes.”
“He can’t cancel that! They’re due to start filming it next week.”
“Scrub it.”
“But that would make the CBS people suspicious, they’d think he’s trying to hide something from them.”
Jacobi frowned with thought for a moment, then said, “Yeah, maybe. Okay, tell him to go easy about his fuckin’ energy plan. Tell him to tell them it still needs a lotta work and the energy committee’s gonna be workin’ on it real hard.”
Jake sat in silence for several moments, thinking, I didn’t get what I came for, but maybe this is better. Hope the recorder got it all.
Slowly, he got up from his chair.
“I guess I’ve taken up enough of your time,” he said.
As he turned to leave, Jacobi said, “Oh yeah, one more thing. You tell Tomlinson to fire whoever leaked your energy plan to the news media.”
“Fire him?” Jake gulped.
“Yeah. As a peace offering to Santino.”
“Fire him,” Jake repeated.
“That’s right. Good luck findin’ another job, kid.”
Jacobi broke into peals of laughter as Jake made his way out of the office.
Strategy
Tomlinson and Kevin O’Donnell sat in rapt silence in the senator’s office as Jake played back Jacobi’s blustering voice.
The audio volume from the pen recorder was weak, but they heard Jacobi’s voice easily enough. At last his hearty laughter abruptly cut off and Jake picked up the recorder from the senator’s desktop and slipped it back into his shirt pocket.
“Jake, this is dynamite,” Tomlinson said.
O’Donnell was less enthusiastic. “It’s dynamite, all right. But it could blow up in your face, Franklin.”
“I don’t see how. I mean, Jacobi actually came out and said that Santino’s deliberately scuttling my energy plan.”
Jake suppressed a smile. Now it’s your energy plan, he said mentally to Senator Tomlinson.
“We’ve got to be very careful about this,” O’Donnell warned, his lean face dead serious. “A junior senator can’t afford to get into a public squabble with his committee chairman.”
“Even when the chairman’s deliberately sitting on legislation that would benefit the nation?” Tomlinson challenged.
“Franklin, don’t get emotional. This isn’t about your energy plan. It’s about your relationship with one of the most powerful men in the Senate.”
Jake asked, “What do you think Frank should do?”
O’Donnell pressed his hands together and bowed his head, thinking. He looked almost as if he were praying. Seeking divine guidance, Jake thought.
Finally, O’Donnell lifted his head and asked, “The crew from Sixty Minutes will be here Monday, right?”
“Right,” said Jake and Tomlinson, in unison.
“You’ve got to soft-pedal the energy plan.”
“But that’s what they’re coming to hear about,” Tomlinson objected.
“I know. But you speak to them in generalities. Tell them the nation needs a comprehensive energy policy, and what you’ve handed to the energy committee is just the beginning of a long process. The committee has to study it, polish it, refine it…”
“Bury it,” Jake quipped.
O’Donnell shot him an angry glance. Turning back to the senator, he said, “Listen to me, Franklin. You don’t want to make an enemy of Santino.”
“But he’s already an enemy of ours,” Tomlinson said.
“That’s right. But you can’t fight him in public. You have to go along with him, make him understand that you’re not trying to upset anybody’s apple cart.”
“Buckle under,” Jake groused.
“For now,” said O’Donnell. “You have to use your appearance on Sixty Minutes as a clear signal to Santino that you’re willing to go along with him.”
Tomlinson frowned, but asked, “And then what?”
“You get Santino to shake loose the one part of the energy plan that you need to bring back to your constituents.”
“MHD power generation.”
“That’s right,” said O’Donnell. “You let Santino have his way with the rest of the plan and he lets you have your MHD program. Quid pro quo.”
Feeling exasperated, Jake protested, “While the fossil fuel industry keeps its stranglehold on the nation’s energy policy.”
O’Donnell turned to Jake. “That’s right. We don’t have the power to change that. Not yet.”
A line from Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech leaped into Jake’s mind: But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year?
Seeing the expression on Jake’s face, Tomlinson said as soothingly as he could, “I’m afraid Kevin is right, Jake. We can’t stand up to Santino in a straight-up fight. Not yet. We have to bide our time.”
Raising a finger, O’Donnell pointed out, “But you get your MHD program. You have to get something out of this. Santino will understand and go along with you.”
Tomlinson nodded.
“And,” the chief of staff added, “you’ll have to get rid of Jake. He’ll be the sacrificial lamb.”
A look of alarm flashed across Tomlinson’s face. Jake had been expecting that, but he’d kept telling himself that Tomlinson would protect him.
Instead, the senator turned to Jake and said softly, “I’m sorry. I didn’t want it to come to this.”
Jake pushed himself up from his chair. “That’s okay. The energy plan is what I came to Washington to do. If you’re throwing it away, I don’t have any reason to stay here.”
Sixty Minutes
It was nearly Easter by the time Sixty Minutes aired the segment in which Senator Tomlinson appeared.
Jake had not returned to Montana. He stayed in Washington and, with Tomlinson’s help, got a job as a researcher at Washington’s Public Broadcasting System station, WETA-TV.
They never leave DC, he heard Steve Brogan’s scornful voice in his mind. Jake told himself that he needed to stay close to Tomlinson, to help him when and if the senator needed him. Besides, what was there back home? Teaching at the university? Watching Rogers and Younger pushing the MHD rig in Lignite toward higher power output, longer running time
s?
No, he stayed in Washington, and even picked up a guest lecturer’s nighttime job at Georgetown University. Moonlighting, Jake told himself. Telling working-class undergrads about the wonders of modern technology. Big thrill.
But Tami was in Washington, and Jake did not want to end their relationship. She was easy to be with, warm and pleasant and bright and happy.
Isaiah Knowles was also still in Washington, and the NASA deputy administrator scowled at Jake whenever their paths crossed. The meeting between Senator Tomlinson and NASA’s top brass never happened, and Knowles was still sore at Jake for dropping space solar power from his energy plan.
Doesn’t make any difference whether SSP is in the plan or out of it, Jake knew. The plan’s not going anyplace.
The Sunday that Tomlinson was to appear on Sixty Minutes, Tami happened to be out of town, visiting her family in California. So Jake sat alone in his basement apartment, stretched out on his futon with a bottle of Gatorade—his one concession to the world of athletics—and drowsily watched a football game between the Washington Redskins and the Arizona Cardinals, waiting for Sixty Minutes to come on.
The NFL game ground to an end at last, and Jake roused himself from his semi-slumber, uncertain of who won the stupid game.
The interview with Tomlinson took place mostly in his walnut-paneled office in the Hart S.O.B. The senator looked handsome and relaxed as he sat in his shirtsleeves on one of his office’s comfortable leather chairs, facing the CBS correspondent Daniel Manley.
Tomlinson was beaming his bright, friendly smile, looking youthful and vigorous, idealistic and energetic. Manley, one of the show’s younger interviewers, wore a navy blue blazer over a lighter blue shirt and carefully knotted tie of red and yellow stripes. He looked professionally calm, intelligent, and just a bit skeptical.
“Why does the nation need a federal energy policy, Senator?”
Tomlinson launched into his standard line: use modern technology to make the best out of America’s natural resources, create tens of thousands of new jobs, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, make the nation—and the world—cleaner and greener.