Greg made sure to get on the road ahead of his father, counting on his speed to keep them from overlapping on the drive down.
Scaffolding now surrounded the sunrise blasted Pleiades and Bay Bridge, though the Pyramid remained gutted, untouched. A few clouds waited in the west. He woke fully in that cold wind, enjoying the salted bay air. The visiting room in the SF Federal Correctional Complex was a long, narrow room with chairs in cubicles on either side of a plastic wall. Each cubicle faced off a prisoner and a visitor, the plastic wall between perforated at mouth level to allow their voices to pass through. The room was large enough, crowded enough and noisy enough that if two people talked normally, they could not be overheard.
“Et tu Brute?” Eugene said, cynically, as he sat opposite Greg.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Greg said.
“Nothing,” the prisoner said, “I suppose you’re here as another representative of the Alabaster lynch mob.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Greg said, truly puzzled.
“Eric, Lori and David. They came to visit me yesterday,” Eugene smiled sardonically, “It seems Eric and Lori have been talking to the District Attorney. They’re gonna try and hang me. David isn’t gonna help the State put me away, but he says he’s compiled a ‘thorough’ file on me and my activities, just in case I manage to beat this rap and go somewhere else. He’s pushing to ostracize me from the entire Left nationwide.”
“That hardly surprises me,” Greg said, “A lot of people feel betrayed by you.”
“Yah, I know” Eugene suddenly looked very old. “Just by living we betray each other. And ourselves.”
There was a long silence between them.
“I hadn’t realized feelings had gotten so worked up that people are willing to help the government put you away,” Greg said.
“I’ve tapped into a deep emotional archetype,” Eugene rubbed his eyes. “Where would Jesus be without his Judas Iscariot. The Old Testament’s second sin, when Cain slew Abel, was not actually murder. It was Cain’s betrayal of his brother, as mirrored in Abel’s eyes seconds before his death. And what was the first thing done when God caught Adam and Eve after they ate of the tree of good and evil? Adam said: ‘It was not me but the woman made me eat.’ And Eve said: ‘It was not me but the serpent made me eat.’ That’s the human condition, loyalties ever betrayed. Even some of the Angels in heaven betrayed God’s plan and were cast out for their rebellion.”
“Only, we can end it,” Greg said, but Eugene did not hear.
“Strange thing is, whether they see me as Jesus or Judas, Archangel Michael or fallen angel Lucifer, Lenin or Trotsky; I still have power in their lives. They still devote a lot of their time and energy thinking about me, even if only to curse me and work for my destruction. They give me this power. They gave me power when they deferred to me as a ‘heavy rad.’ And now they give me power when I’ve become the revolution’s Satanic scourge in their Leftist eschatologies. So. Why aren’t you feeling so badly betrayed by what I’ve done?”
“I told you before. Oakland changed my outlook on a lot of things.”
“Yah, New Afrika is still causing ripples,” Eugene mused, then got sly, “You know that cargo we brought into Oakland. Word has it they used only half of the grenades in the Nimitz attack. The other half s never been found.”
“That’s not how I meant it.”
“Relax,” Eugene smiled, “I’m not telling the Feds about you and Oakland. Nor am I gonna tell ‘em about you and the riemanium. And not just out of principle. It’d be just my word, and that’s worthless now.”
“You knew I had the riemanium,” Greg stated, suddenly tired of his own pretense.
“No other way I could figure it,” Eugene said, “When Larry told me the two of you’d been contacted by Peregrine, well... Besides, I went over Larry’s place with a fine toothed comb and never found it.”
“So, it was you I almost caught in my basement,” Greg grinned, ruefully.
“To be entirely honest.” Eugene gave a dramatic pause. “Yes. My take from the Piccoli heist was to have been a million. With the riemanium, I could have negotiated for that from the government. Easily. Tell you plain, if I had that riemanium now, I wouldn’t be sitting in this jail.”
“So, you’re Peregrine, and you’re Smoke.” Greg enumerated, “You helped steal the Piccoli jewels, and you supplied plasma and arms to Oakland. Did you steal from the Coops? Honestly now. It’s not me who wants to hang you.”
“Yah,” Eugene slumped back into his chair, “I stole from them. I was planning to use my cut of the gem job to retire to the Slovenian coast. Trieste. Definitely I wanted out of Alabaster, and the west coast. So when the deal fell through, I had no money. I started resorting to the line of work my brother taught me. It was a fast way to make money, and the coops were so damn simple to crack. I didn’t want to spend more than a month hanging around. Not with the police and then the FBI looking for me. I got rid of my car in Oakland. But when I got back to Alabaster, I found out that both Sulawesi and the cops had raided my apartment. I had a little deal in the works for some traveling money, but things were closing in. I was gonna hide out and the bookstore score was gonna be my last job, just a little pin money until my travel funds arrived. Funny how that worked out.”
“You were Smoke in the MDRG, and street fighter extraordinaire. Were you also BdN?”
“Yep,” Eugene was weary, drawn, and humbled. “One of its founders. I helped write the Maximum Platform. When I started working on the Piccoli job, over a year and a half ago, I moved to Alabaster and dropped my formal connection with BdN. I helped get together MDRG as a local cover for some of my political activities. Told you my contradictions ran deep. I just didn’t think you, or anybody else, would find out how deep.”
“You were Michael Baumann to Rosanne Casey, and Eugene Wisdom to your brother,” Greg marveled at the complexity to the man before him; commitment within betrayal within commitment within betray-al...a dense web of contradictions indeed. “So, what are you going to do now?”
“Take the consequences, I guess,” Eugene sighed. “I have one long shot in all of this. The riemanium. They don’t know that I don’t have it. I’m hoping you won’t turn it in, not just yet. If I’m real damn lucky, I can parlay something I don’t have into something I want. My freedom. Otherwise, well, my brother Kenny, he’s in jail. I guess I’ll be in good company.”
“So, this is the way it ends,” Greg said.
“Not with a bang, but with a whimper.”
“I wouldn’t call having all your old friends and associates hating you and wishing you strung up as going out with a whimper.”
“Most of those middle class fucks, I don’t care what they think,” Eugene growled. “They wouldn’t know radical or proletarian if it came up and kicked their fucking asses. My family was working class until I was 14. That’s why my brother became a thief. All he had was a high school diploma and he wasn’t keen on flipping burgers for the rest of his life. As a second story man he made good, quick money. Actually, he started in high school, ‘cause even then he knew there was no future. Then, my old man, he got some luck, and our family was in money just when Kenny was teaching me his trade. My parents shipped me off to school to keep me out of trouble, but that didn’t keep me and Kenny from staying tight. He’s the one who turned me on to radical edge politics.”
“You talk like being a thief is just another job,” Greg noted.
“More respectable than most. I’d rather be a thief than a professor, a cop, a CEO, or a politician.”
“Do you feel any guilt at all for ripping off the coops?” Greg pressed.
“Sure I do. I wouldn’t have touched the coops if the Piccoli had gone down as planned. Fuck, I wouldn’t even be here if that had happened. Look, stealing is what I do best. I never developed very many other job skills. The cops were on my ass. And the coops were just too easy. I started with regular businesses in Alabaster. But security
at the campus coops was a joke, and the take was bigger. The temptation was there. I went for it.”
“So, you did wrong.”
“Sure I did wrong,” Eugene nodded. “You bet. But I didn’t do the most horrible thing ever imagined against humanity. That’s how everybody on campus and in ASP is taking it. And that’s a fucking petty bourgeois attitude if there ever was one. To be a fallen angel, you first have to have been an angel. I’m neither. Christ, radical politics and thievery have gone hand in hand for a long time; Spanish and Italian banditry in the 1800’s, Pancho Villa, Gene Genet, Emmett Grogan. Bertolt Brecht once said that the good poet steals...”
“Times up,” the guard said, all of a sudden, at Eugene’s shoulder.
“Thanks for dropping by,” Eugene stood and smiled, suddenly distant, “Thanks for giving me a listen.”
“I might be able to do better than that,” Greg said.
The idea of what do with the riemanium had jelled with the conversation; a solution that would also take care of the “Eugene Wisdom Problem.” If all went as he envisioned. He was not sure he liked Eugene. But one thing was certain, that man now in prison had power. Magnetism, charisma, charm; whatever to call it did not matter. Simply put, he inspired deep emotion in people. The measure of hatred he now provoked spoke to the love he had fired in people’s hearts; love transmuted to hate by betrayal. Not an unknown experience to Greg.
Eric had been right at the meeting that had decided what to do with Smoke. So long as he remained visible and close at hand, Eugene would be at the eye of a hurricane. And his former friends and associates were already part of that storm. Not only might Greg be able to dissipate the community’s fury by removing Eugene from the scene, all without aiding the government much or destroying Eugene, but he could also settle the mess that the Solidarity Brigade had become. Actually, it was the only feasible solution remaining. One that he alone had the power to implement.
On the drive home, he took the exit to San Rafael for his metal yard where he purchased three large, thin sheets of smart steel. He left the sheets in the trunk as he caught his two Friday classes sandwiched about another secretive lunch. Sure enough, he found messages from David, Beth, George, Lori and Larry on his answering machine when he returned home, burnished smart steel under his arm. He did not bother to listen to any of them after the first few words. Instead, he carried both Lori’s xeroxed roll of papers and the steel into the basement.
The bundle of xeroxes turned out to be several book and encyclopedia extracts, as well as more than one magazine article. Lori had done her homework. It seemed that a Progressive magazine article revealing hydrogen bomb secrets had been the one prevented from publication by a government obtained court order in 1979. On A-bomb construction, she included late 20th century articles from Commonweal through Mechanics Illustrated and Science Digest to Time and Newsweek, including an unlabeled parody on how to convert an antique, bullet-shaped hose vacuum cleaner into a fission weapon. Apparently, it was quite easy to make a crude but effective nuclear device, provided one had the bomb-grade material in hand.
Greg did not even use the computer, but sketched out a hypothetical A-bomb for riemanium’s parameters in fifteen minutes. The rough mathematics for such a device took him twenty-five more. Only then did he don lathe gloves and goggles to confirm his design by creating it to spec and detonating it in the home ‘some’s virtual reality. He reassembled his design in 3D CAD-CAM, then projected it as hologram into the lathe’s focus span.
Dry heat, brilliant light, the smell of ozone and sweat patterned the basement. He used the laser light to teach the steel to crease, fold and curve into place. An hour and a half of intense, concentrated effort later, he had the shiny shell and some impressive internals for a mock nuclear device. He welded all the segments together with a pure bead. It was 4 o’clock.
His bomb design was convincing, if he did think so himself. He had modified a simple A-bomb design, two plutonium pits driven together by an explosion, into a Siamese bomb construct. In his design, one Timpo explosion impelled two quarter pound riemanium pits down two short, parallel tubes, each simultaneously striking against another fixed pit at their run’s end. A double barreled bomb, with enough shielding between each pair of riemanium pits to prevent any premature critical mass. If one side misfired, the bomb still detonated. In theory.
Greg snagged a couple of rolls from the bread box, some cheese and an apple. He finished eating as he tossed his father’s instamatic into the back of his spitfire, on top of the blanket covering the nuke shell, the Timpo grenade shell and the very full riemanium case. He drove at a maniac’s pace, first to a convenience store for some instamatic film, and then to a side road he knew, a shortcut to Nicasio Valley Road. Once well enough along it, he pulled off to the shoulder, parked, and wrestled all of his props a short ways into the woods.
The day was drifting away quickly, dusk already columning among the dark trees. First, he took flashes pictures of the riemanium with the instamatic, then of the fake bomb. He concentrated on details for maximum effect, and finished off with the real enough grenade shell, encoring with a group shot to use up the last picture. While the photos developed, he loaded everything back into the car. The night congealed. Good enough, he thought to himself once more on the road, glancing at his snapshots. He dragged everything into his room, where he gloved and goggled into his pc’s ‘some to compose the Solidarity Brigade’s final communique.
“...We the Action Cells of the Mexican Revolution Solidarity Brigade have constructed a working nuclear device. The explosive trigger to impel the riemanium to form one critical mass derives from the use of material from a Timpo grenade obtained from our New Afrikan comrades. All that is required to arm the weapon is to form the riemanium into the device. As you will be able to tell from the enclosed designs, we have enough riemanium for two such weapons.
“This Communique has NOT been issued to the media. The imperialist US government has 48 hours to release our Brigade’s leader, Eugene Wisdom, provide him with a valid US passport and one million dollars in US currency, and fly him to France where he may apply for political asylum. Twenty-four hours after the international media has broadcast Eugene Wisdom’s safe arrival in France, all two pounds of the expropriated riemanium will be returned. The lying bourgeois scum of the powers-that-be may provide the media with whatever explanation they deem necessary.
“If, after 48 hours, Eugene Wisdom is not released, this communique will be released to the public, and the neo-fascist US government will have 24 more hours to affect the release of our Brigade’s leader. Popular pressure will thus be brought to bear upon the vile, scheming capitalist blood suckers and their political lackeys. If, after this second deadline, Eugene Wisdom has not been released, the nuclear device we possess will be armed and detonated somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area during the following 24 hours. The US government will then have an additional 48 hours to release Eugene Wisdom before our second bomb is detonated somewhere in the continental United States...”
Greg added a few more rhetorical flourishes decrying the suppression and sell-out of New Afrika, supporting southern Mexico’s Liberated Territories, and condemning the murderous FBI’s Operation Anvil. But this was the gist of the communique. He laser printed the communique’s text and compiled it with the photos, the computer printout of Greg’s bomb design, and Lori’s xeroxed article into a discreet manila envelope. He once more donned his leather flight jacket, and supplemented it with leather driving gloves. He kept the roof down during the ride into the city, and enjoyed the blustery wind stirring the clouds and stars above him. There was no problem in finding a 24-hour, do-it-yourself xerox shop in the heart of downtown. He color xeroxed the snapshots, then superimposed the communique’s text over the color xerox. He included this with xeroxes of his xeroxes on bomb-making articles and the bomb design, all in another manila envelope he purchased from the shop itself. He carried out every transaction still wearing his gloves. He also
bought a black marker at the register where he paid for it all. Then it was off to the downtown Civic Center.
Before leaving his car with the correct envelope, he scrawled FBI on the package. The plaza bore no signs of their riot less than a week and a half before. The Federal Building’s drop box accepted his envelope. He called in his drop to the 800 Federal Crime Tip number from a pay phone off the plaza. It was back on the road to Alabaster then, where he hoped to salvage a few hours study.
Saturday morning, bright and early, found him in the campus library, where he stayed, except for a call to Peggy from a public phone to arrange a date for Sunday night. As it turned out, the 5 O’Clock News fairly bubbled over with the story.
“...Learned from sources who wish to remain anonymous that, at 2 p.m. today, Eugene Wisdom was placed, under guard, on an airplane bound for Paris, France. Wisdom, you may recall, is suspected of being the notorious Peregrine, the fifth man in the Piccoli jewel robbery, who remained at large until apprehended last Wednesday by the authorities. Arraigned for involvement in the theft and the murder of a Security Pacific guard, it is rumored that Eugene Wisdom knows of the whereabouts of the two pounds of bomb-grade riemanium, also stolen during the Piccoli robbery. Spokesmen for the Justice Department refuse to discuss whether or not a deal has been made for a return of the riemanium in exchange for Wisdom’s release. Nor will Federal authorities confirm or deny that Eugene Wisdom is no longer in his cell in the downtown San Francisco Correctional Complex...”
He imagined that the shit was hitting the fan as he left the library’s VR lounge. Sure enough, when he got home that evening, his answering machine blinked, the tape full of messages from his former accomplices in the Solidarity Brigade, compounded by several faxes from Larry as well. In fact, the phone still rang. Grinning to himself, he shut off his answering machine and disconnected his phone. He studied for a time, then climbed down to the basement where he used several solvents and radical cleansing agents to scour down the riemanium casing, eliminating any clue of his possession of it, before wrapping it in a plastic garbage bag and stowing it back under his lathe. He set his radio alarm for early and tried to sleep,
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