Critical Mass

by Steve Martini

  “Put your feet on the rudder controls.” He pointed to two pedals on the floor. “Just keep them even. Keep the nose level with the horizon, and you’ll be fine.”

  Joselyn found herself flying the plane, unable to speak, a cold chill running down her spine. It was like an out-of-body sensation. Pebbles of perspiration broke out on her forehead. Sheer fright.

  “How do you like it?”

  “Great. Take it back.”

  “You’re doing fine.” He started looking through some papers he pulled from a pocket in the door, totally ignoring what she was doing at the controls.

  “Aren’t you afraid I’m going to fly us into a mountain?”

  “Nope.” He didn’t look up. “The only mountain I have to worry about is behind us.”

  “Good to know you have confidence in me.”

  “I might even take a nap.”

  “Don’t you dare.”

  He was smiling again.

  Her eyes were darting from the dials and switches on the panel in front of her to the horizon and back. Terror ebbed toward discomfort as she began to get the feel of the controls.

  “You’re on a perfect heading. Another twenty minutes, and we should be over North Seattle.”

  “This is no way to treat your lawyer,” she told him.

  “Aren’t you having fun?”

  She wouldn’t admit it, but actually she was beginning to.

  “It’s just like riding a bicycle,” he told her.

  “Yes, but if I fall off a bicycle the ground is a lot closer.”

  “The object here is not to fall. You’re diving a little.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “See your airspeed?” He pointed to one of the gauges. “Very easily pull back on the wheel just a little. That’s it. Bring the nose up just a little.”

  She stopped talking and concentrated on the controls. The horizon slowly leveled out across the bottom of the windshield and the airspeed indicator dropped thirty miles an hour.

  “Good. Now let’s talk about what I can expect at the courthouse today.” He had some papers spread out on his lap, like he was going to take notes.

  “You’re not going to be getting my undivided attention unless you take this back.”

  He laughed and took the wheel, putting his feet on the control pedals. “Relax. I’ve got it.”

  Joselyn took a big sigh and stretched back in the chair, feeling knots release from the muscles in her arms and shoulders where she’d stiffened up over the controls. She took a couple of deep breaths and then reached for her briefcase and the pad inside on which she had made notes. She flipped through some pages, and when she looked over his hands were off the wheel.

  “Who’s flying?”

  “Autopilot,” he said. “I’ll keep a look out for other planes. You tell me what I’m supposed to do when we get there.”

  “If you say so.” She picked up her notes. “First thing. We may get an idea of what they’re looking for if there are other witnesses waiting when we get to the courthouse. You may recognize some of them. If so, it may give us a clue as to what they’re fishing for. You have to tell me if you recognize anybody. There’s still time to take the Fifth, to refuse to testify, but only if we have good reason.”

  “I understand.”

  “Once you get inside, the jury foreperson will swear you in. The prosecuting attorney in charge of the investigation, probably a deputy U.S. attorney, will advise you of your rights. The right to counsel, the right to remain silent, so forth. They will probably warn you that because you are under oath, if you do not tell the truth, you can be prosecuted for perjury.”

  “I understand.”

  “At that point the prosecutor will probably tell you something about the nature of the investigation. This is a critical point. If there are any surprises, if in fact they are not investigating this guy Max Sperling, the one you told me about, take a break. Tell them you want to confer with your lawyer. They have to let you do it. Don’t answer any questions until you come outside and we have a chance to talk. Do you understand?”

  “Piece of cake,” said Belden.

  “Let’s hope so.”

  “What happens then?”

  “Once we get the ground rules nailed down, the prosecutor will start asking you questions. Think before you answer. Just answer the questions he asks. Don’t volunteer anything. If you start giving long answers and getting into items he hasn’t raised, it’s just going to make the whole thing go on longer. That only serves to create more jeopardy for you. To open areas of inquiry the prosecutor hasn’t thought about. Keep it short and sweet.”

  “Got it.”

  “Once you start testifying, tell them the truth. Don’t hide anything.”

  “But you just said I wasn’t supposed to volunteer.”

  “What I mean is that you have to answer their specific question directly and completely. But don’t go beyond the specific question. Don’t open the door on other matters. That’s their job. The less you say, the faster you’re going to be out of there. If you can answer a question with a single yes or no, do it.”

  “Got it. Just a second.” He flipped a switch and a dial on something that looked like a radio overhead, then talked into the microphone fixed to his headset

  “I.L.S. control. This is J-N eight-two-four-six. Coming in on vector… ” He looked at his compass and gave them a heading.

  The tower talked and Joselyn could hear static but none of the words.

  “Lake Union.” There was another pause.

  “Thank you,” said Belden, then turned a dial on the radio.

  “Sorry, had to clear for approach.” He flipped another switch and took the controls. She assumed he had turned off the autopilot.

  “OK, so I don’t give them anything they don’t ask for.”

  “Right.”

  “I talk to you if there’s any surprises.”

  “Right.”

  “What else?”

  “I’m not precisely sure. Procedures vary from district to district. Some prosecutors allow members of the grand jury to question the witness directly once the prosecutor is finished. I don’t know if that will be the procedure here or not. I’ll try to find out before you go in. But if they do allow jurors to question you, be careful.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the jurors are going to look like ordinary folk. That’s what they are. Most of them are going to be friendly and smiling. They’re not going to be talking in legal-speak. They’re going to sound like your neighbors. There is a tendency to let your guard down, to get into a conversation with them. Don’t do it! The prosecutor’s going to be listening to every word, and any door you open he’s going to walk through. These are not your friends. They didn’t invite you down for a social meeting.”

  “I understand. The enemy,” said Belden.

  “Don’t be hostile; just be guarded.”

  “Good. Does that cover it?”

  “Pretty much. If you don’t understand a question, get clarification. Don’t hesitate to ask them to restate the question. And if you feel that you want to talk to me, tell them you want to take a break to confer with counsel.”

  “OK.”

  Joselyn could see houses spread out like a carpet on a field of green beneath them as they started to descend over the northern suburbs. The University District spread out along the western shore of Lake Washington.

  “Tell me a little more about your business?” she asked.

  This came out of the blue and seemed to surprise Belden.

  “What’s to tell?”

  “Exactly what is it you make?”

  “Switches.”

  “I know. But what kind of switches?”

  “The kind that turn things on and off.”

  She looked at him, like “give me a break.”

  “Right now we’re actually into designing computer chips for voice-recognition systems. Used in security,” said Belden. “It’s like a fingerprint, only
in this case what we’re checking is a voiceprint. Somebody speaks into a telephone, or microphone, and the computer compares the voice to the voiceprint on record. If it matches, the door opens or the lights go on or an alarm is set. You can turn on your sprinklers or your lights long-distance. If the voiceprint doesn’t match, the person doesn’t get access.”

  “Fascinating,” said Joselyn. “They can actually do that?”

  “Accurate to more than ninety-nine percent. Almost impossible to fool.”

  “And what if I have a tape-recording of somebody’s voice?”

  “Even with a tape recording of the right voice, the chip will pick up background noise, the slightest grain from the microphone on the tape, and lock you out. The best systems use coded words. With the right words you could control the world.”

  He swung the plane wide to the east and began his approach over the university, cutting power and dropping his wing flaps. He banked steeply to the right and dropped rapidly, so that Joselyn’s stomach felt as if it were going to bounce off the ceiling. They picked up speed, with the engine almost at idle as they dove toward Lake Union, over the I-5 bridge with traffic backed up to a standstill.

  As they approached Lake Union, Belden pulled back slowly on the controls and slid the throttle forward for a little more power. The engine lifted the nose momentarily.

  Touchdown on the water was smooth and barely perceptible, but for the spray shooting up from the pontoons to the side and behind them and some shudder in the plane as they glided across the water.

  “There. I got you here in one piece.” He looked over at her.

  “I never had a doubt.”

  “Right,” he said.

  He taxied the plane toward one of the docks. A large sign on a green building read SEATTLE SEAPLANES. There were flowers, a fusillade of color in wooden planter boxes all along the dock, and several small floatplanes tied up, one of them pulled up on a floating dock that was partially submerged under the load.

  “I made special arrangements to tie up here. Just for a few hours. I don’t come down that often to have a permanent berth. We can call a cab from inside.”

  Joselyn checked her watch. He was right. They had plenty of time.

  Ten minutes later, they were in a cab cutting through the downtown, heading up the hill toward Madison and Sixth, the U.S. courthouse in Seattle.

  NINE

  CULVER CITY, CA

  It was an absolutely wild scam, better than knocking over a bank, or using a pickup truck with a chain around the axle to pull an ATM machine out of a wall and haul it away. Nobody was going to get shot doing this one, and most banks didn’t have this kind of cash on hand.

  Besides, the tight khaki shorts made Buck’s behind look real sexy. The little receptionist was checking him out as he stood at the counter and waited for her to finish her phone call. If she knew that the view was going to cost her employer a thousand dollars or more, she might have looked a little longer.

  Buck Thompson lived in the small town of Sedro-Woolley in the extreme northern part of western Washington State. He was a lumberman by vocation, but he hadn’t worked at it for three years. There were no jobs. He and most of his friends did whatever they could to keep their families together. From time to time, Buck took odd jobs in other states to make a few dollars. It was how he had gotten in on this current thing.

  He’d made a decent living for ten years until the last compromise between environmentalists and the White House on timber harvests for federal land closed all the mills. Since then, Thompson and most of his friends had been out of work. One of his boys had dropped out of school a year ago, at age fourteen, to get a job. His wife held down two, cleaning offices at night and answering phones in a small brake shop during the day.

  What made him mad was the constant drumming on CNN, telling everybody that the economy was just fine. The news media, or whatever they were calling themselves these days, had become nothing but a mouthpiece for the federal government, parroting press releases from the White House. If the president took a crap in public, they’d report that he shit gold bricks.

  If Buck and his friends wanted to know what was going on politically, the only place they could get the truth was on the Internet. At least there they could pick their own bias, rather than having the news moguls spin everything for them.

  Buck searched the Web nightly when he was home, hitting all the familiar sites, Aryan Nations, the Brotherhood, a handful of tax protest sites, all the places where people with militia leanings hung out. They communicated on-line, using code words and aliases. The feds were always listening, watching all the chat rooms.

  Buck knew that jobs were being shipped to other countries in droves. The American trucking industry all along the Mexican border had been decimated. Unemployed truckers were big-time on the Net. Companies that had flourished for generations went bankrupt within months of the U.S. entering into the North American Free Trade Agreement. It was an unholy alliance between the political parties, Democrats and Republicans, and big business to screw over working people. As far as Buck was concerned, all politicians were a pack of pimps, anxious to sell their country to anybody in return for a quick campaign contribution, half the time from foreigners or foreign governments.

  Buck thought the Justice Department was a joke. It did nothing but cover it all up. The FBI was interested only in chasing people like Buck, people who didn’t fit the definition of being politically correct. Anybody who resisted taxes, made a critical comment about the IRS, or criticized the president found that they were suddenly being investigated or audited.

  It had gone full circle. America had destroyed the Soviet Union only to replace it as the world’s biggest totalitarian government, run by crooked politicians and their corporate friends in the media, and administered by corrupt bureaucrats. It was America’s legacy for the millennium.

  It was the reason Buck took so much pleasure in the latest scam, screwing over the phone company, dialing for dollars. It was certain to raise a lot of money in a very short time. Buck guessed that something big was up.

  He wondered who thought it up. He’d been told it was a Russian, a mobster from Moscow who had immigrated to the U.S. The Russians didn’t rob banks or knock over liquor stores. They believed in making money the modern way, by reaching out and touching somebody. Surviving in the shadow of the Kremlin for seventy years, the Russian mob was more than a match for American law enforcement. In five years, the federal government would be wishing the Iron Curtain was back, trying to rebuild the wall in Berlin. America wanted to free the people of Eastern Europe. Be careful what you ask for; you may get it.

  The scheme was brilliant. There were fourteen of them, all militia members, working it this afternoon. Each one wore the uniform of a different delivery company. They all carried a package under one arm and a metal clipboard with phony shipping receipts under the other. Though all of the guys came from the Northwest, today they worked the area around Culver City in Southern California, mostly light industry, a few warehouses, and a couple of large retail outlets. They picked businesses that looked large, the kind of company that might not notice an extra thousand or two on their phone bill at the end of the month.

  The little blond receptionist was kind of cute. She reminded Buck of one of his nieces. She wore a headset like an airplane pilot and punched buttons on the phone’s keypad like a pro. He was glad the money wasn’t coming out of her pocket. She punched one of the buttons on her phone, looked up at Buck, and smiled. “Can I help you?”

  “Got a package for Mr. Zinsky,” he told her.

  The girl looked at him quizzically, like she didn’t recognize the name. There was no reason she should. Zinsky didn’t exist.

  “You sure you have the right address?” she asked.

  Buck read her the name of the company and the address from the shipping label inside its clear plastic holder on the package.

  “Maybe he’s new,” she said. She rifled through the roster of employees on
the counter in front of her. “Hmm.” Nothing. “Why don’t I take it,” she said, “and I’ll call your office if I can’t find him.”

  “I can’t do that,” said Buck. “He has to sign for it.”

  “I can sign,” said the girl.

  “Special handling,” said Buck. “Requires Mr. Zinsky’s signature.”

  “Well.” Now she wasn’t sure what to do. “I could call my boss.” She started paging through the printed roster one more time just in case she missed his name. Still nothing.

  “It’s a priority overnight,” said Buck. “Must be something pretty important.”

  She offered a pained expression. She didn’t want to get in trouble. But she didn’t know what to do.

  “Could you spell the name?”

  “Harold Zinsky. Z-I-N-S-K-Y.”

  She looked some more. There was nobody by that name. By now the phones lines in front of her were all lighting up, bells ringing everywhere.

  “Just a second.” She answered one of the phones. “Can you hold.” She went down the line. “Please hold.” She did it six more times until all of the lines were flashing, but quiet.

  “That’s the right address, and our company,” she said. “But there’s no Mr. Zinsky here.”

  “Emm.” Now it was Buck’s turn to look troubled. “I wonder if I could use your phone. Check with the dispatcher. It’s an eight-hundred number.”

  “Sure. There’s one at the end of the counter there. Just press nine for an outside line.” The girl went back to her phones, relieved that she didn’t have to make a decision, at least for the moment.

  This one was gonna be a cakewalk. Buck sidled down to the end of the counter five feet from where the girl was talking on the line. He picked up the phone, dialed nine, and then the number. Only it wasn’t an eight-hundred number. He dialed nine-hundred and then the phone number. It was what is known as a “pay per call” service, one of those numbers used by some legitimate businesses but known mostly as the telephone equivalent of the red-light district. “Call me. My name is Sherie. I’ll tickle your dingle-dangle long-distance with a feather for three dollars a minute.”