On Deception Watch

by David H Spielberg

  Lal had failed his father’s trust by his unfaithfulness in London. But he had been true to another of his father’s exhortations. “Life,” his father had told him before he left for London, “was not the constant replacement of knowledge and experience, the old by the new. No, Rani, life is an expanding vision. You lose nothing and you gather in more and more as you live. You understand more and you accept more. Wisdom lies in an increasing sense of the possible. Do not limit the possible, my son.”

  True to his father’s teaching, he had tried to live a life free of judgment and open to creative, unconventional alternatives. Even these days, when struggling with an intractable problem, he would think, “How would Poppi handle this?” And yet, he was unable to reconcile those two powerful antithetical components of his father’s nature: his earnest faith in tradition and his modern flexibility and daring. His father, though dead now for three years, was still an enigma to Lal.

  Putting his papers aside, Lal reached across the bed and placed a call to his mother’s house. His brother Hira answered. “Hello. Yes, it is I. Yes, yes, I am fine. I am on my way. I am in Delhi. Are you well? Good. I will get a taxi and be there soon. Is Mommi awake? Yes, very good. I will be there very soon. I will take a taxi now. No problem. Goodbye.”

  Outside the hotel, Ranjit Lal engaged a taxi for the drive to the house that had been acquired after he was grown. His father’s rise up the management hierarchy of Delhi Heavy Industries provided both the opportunity and the need for the purchase. In India, a boss would never have a car inferior to his subordinates. Nor a house. This Lal understood.

  Nevertheless, the house seemed to violate Lal’s sense of tradition. There was no association with family for him with this building, no sense of his mother’s role within it. He recognized his old feelings of resentment against the house, feelings that first developed when his father died, too soon to witness Lal’s rise to world prominence, and leaving his mother the only occupant—an honored elder and ward of her sons.

  The house was stucco, painted a pale rose color that his mother favored. It was a large, two-story building, with wrought-iron-grille-work on the first-floor windows and flower boxes mounted by the second-floor windows. The grounds were well-kept with flower beds, blooming shrubs and broad-leafed plants set in luxuriant landscaped displays. Yet, these and the well-watered lawn all seemed an extravagance to Lal. The gravel path to the front entrance crunched disagreeably as he walked, contrasting surprisingly with the anticipated pleasure of this visit.

  11

  The forests along the side of the road were blanketed with a pure white shroud of snow. Near the road, as he passed by, the scene was clear and precise and cold, becoming gray and ambiguous and deserted as he peered deeper into the woods.

  General Slaider checked his watch. He had time for a walk, he decided. He pulled his car to the side of the road and left it to walk straight into the woods. After penetrating about five hundred feet, Slaider felt himself engulfed in a complete and comfortable isolation. What had seemed lifeless from the road, from inside his car looking out, had become instead tranquil and silent.

  He stopped to listen to the silence. The forest and the snow, with their infinite pockets, had halted all road noise, all intrusions into his momentary sanctuary. All he could hear was the sound of air regularly passing in and out of his own nostrils. He felt the silence envelope him in an otherworldly muffle. He looked around and felt content.

  He checked his watch again and turned reluctantly back to his car.

  12

  Roger Talbot, the most visible director of the Central Intelligence Agency in America’s history, was following his own converging path to Point Dameron, lost in his own thoughts. He ignored the gently rolling hills, the quilted farmland, and stands of pine alternating with snow-blanketed meadow. The redwing blackbirds and starlings were nothing to him. He was untouched by the invigorating winter cold.

  He was a man overflowing with knowledge. To Roger Talbot, knowledge was power. It was a heavy responsibility to be the guardian of America’s grip on the world’s secrets. He felt the burden daily. Hourly. If he could break the smallest unit of time in half, that half would be too long for him to forget his duty to his countrynever to be caught by surprise by foreign intrigues. As he sped southward to Point Dameron, Talbot was trying to decide whether he would let Slaider know about the Brazilian embassy telephone traffic that the boys at the National Security Agency intercepted. The information had not been raised to “probably true” yet. He didn’t like to present information without an action recommendation and he just was not sure enough on this. He would wait for the next meeting with Slaider, after this one. By then he would have it tied up tight.

  Good. He would deal with that later. He continued down his mental checklist. Item after item he reviewed in his mind and revised each priority based on the information of the day. Next, he decided on his list for Slaider. Between the two of them, they represented America’s complete arsenal for defense against foreign enemies. The domestic security forces and agencies of the United States, compared to the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the joint military forces, didn’t amount to—who had said that?—a bucket of warm spit. It was up to the “A” team, as he liked to call the latter group, to protect America from its foreign enemies, where the real action was. They had been given the mission and they would not come up short.

  For all his serious dedication to his office, Roger Talbot also loved his work. He was made for this. He knew that and so did the president and two presidents before him. The days were gone when a director of the CIA could remain a mysterious background figure. These days you went on prime-time telescreen and explained your budget, the approval process, and covert operational procedures, everything, to the whole world. You were a public figure. And his public figure was perfect, he thought. The country no longer trusted the quiet, humorless directors of the past.

  He had personality. And he told dirty stories and he was irreverent and sometimes he swore for effect. In short, he was a man the public could trust. And he carefully cultivated that public image. He enjoyed it. It allowed him to live a double life, the one in his head, the intelligence virtuoso, and the outward personality, the sardonic eccentric. His wife, who knew him best, though he confided nothing of his professional life to her—it just wasn’t done—understood the power behind the facade.

  Roger was a former marine. For most men, that alone would be challenge enough. But as Roger was to prove time and again, he was not like most men. He applied for special ops and counterinsurgency training. Then secret missions that left his wife alone for months with no word. Then section head in the Defense Intelligence Agency. Then operations project coordinator for the National Security Council. Then Deputy Director of the CIA and finally Director. This was not the resume of a man people would readily associate with the public Roger Talbot. And that was just fine with him.

  His wife knew what she believed to be the real Roger and it was a source of frustration for her that other people did not, could not, see him as she saw him, with the strength she knew, with the intellect she knew. She never understood why no one saw the inconsistency between the persona and the record. Does someone live the life Roger Talbot lived, and produce only a caricature? Yet he had progressed steadily upward through the ranks, so ultimately, she wondered, who was he fooling? She did not understand. And perhaps that was the purpose—to confuse. Not to hide or deceive. Just to confuse. It was a maddening world for Roger Talbot’s wife. It was never maddening for Roger Talbot.

  The rough-hewn wood sign ahead, National Park Service-style, indicated the park cutoff was a quarter-mile on the left. Talbot slowed down and made the turn onto the dirt road leading into the park. A mixture of pines and deciduous trees bordered the road closely on both sides. About a half-mile in there was a chain across the road. Talbot got out and opened the lock, drove in, and then carefully relocked the chain. He drove slowly past the park office and went through the main
parking area, to the trail leading to the beach and the view of Chesapeake Bay. Parking his car at the picnic parking area, he walked quickly to the beach along the narrow, snow-covered footpath leading through the trees.

  He knew the spot where he was to wait for Slaider. He knew that he would arrive first. He always arrived first. Automatically, he scanned the beach in both directions and then stood facing the bay, rocking imperceptibly on his heels. Physically, Talbot was the opposite of what one would expect the director of the nation’s principal intelligence gathering service to be. There was nothing inconspicuous about him. He was tall, firm, trim, and handsome. Like a Hollywood version of Charles de Gaulle, he towered over crowds. He was conspicuous in a world that had learned to mistrust the inconspicuous.

  Talbot sat on a log that had been deposited on the beach by the previous night’s storm. The bay was angry today, he thought. Although it was a relatively protected body of water, in the winter it came alive, urged on by winds and tides and thermal gradients the summer was too flighty to display. This was the one concession to nature as a form of beauty that Roger Talbot made—Chesapeake Bay in the winter. There was a complexity about the bay in winter that Talbot admired. It had a subtle power that the open sea did not possess for him. He looked for many minutes at the gray, seamless sky, meeting the horizon in a secret place, a meteorological tribute to him and Slaider, a kind of natural metaphor. He sat and watched the bay until he heard Slaider crunching toward the beach.

  13

  Talbot liked Slaider. As he watched the general stride along the picnic area footpath, he smiled at the feeling of tolerant forbearance that always followed each first new vision of the incongruous Morgan Slaider. Slaider, the warrior, the leader of armies, the metaphor for military superiority throughout the Western world, was surprisingly short and incongruously stocky—one hundred and eighty pounds, he guessed. His round, wire-frame glasses gave an avuncular, scholarly appearance to the man, especially when he was out of uniform, as he was now. He knew men like Slaider. They looked fifty when they were thirty. And they would look fifty when they were seventy. There was this sense of dependability about the man that he liked.

  They greeted each other quickly, professionally. At Slaider’s suggestion, they began to walk down the beach, toward the crescent bay to the north. It was about a half-mile walk. The air was bracing and their frosty breaths led the way like serpents’ tongues, tasting and testing the air.

  “You go first, Morgan, with what’s on your mind,” Talbot said, after walking silently together for a few moments. With a perfunctory look around, General Morgan Slaider began.

  “The president has agreed to provide Cranshaw with the research and development reports on the pumps for our laser-weapons programs. Morrison told ‘H’ and ‘H’ told me. I found out yesterday. Do you know anything about this?”

  “No. This is something the old man is keeping pretty close. Keeping his own counsel, you might say. As far as the security risk with AJC Fusion, naturally, there are tracers now on all communications to or from anyone associated with that company. We’re doing our usual thorough job. There’s plenty of chaff. If there’s any wheat, we’ll find it.”

  “Roger, you’ve got to understand this completely. He’s going to share with this private company—this entity that has prided itself on working outside the controls of the federal government—our most important secrets in the key element of our missile umbrella programour laser-cannon project. In addition, as purely an ancillary benefit, they will get a firsthand look at significant classified technology related to fiber-optic communications networking. It’s unbelievable. And this is a company with informal ties outside of official channels to every potential competitor or enemy of ours in the world. What do you think about that?”

  “Well, Morgan, I can tell you he was pretty impressed with our report on their dog and pony show. Those sonsabitches seem to have gone and done what they said they did. Our boys came back pretty goddam embarrassed that this little piss-assed company beat everybody to it.

  “How is Emerson going to get this information transfer by Congress? Beats all hell to me. I don’t know. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with. Now don’t you worry about our secrets. We’ll be so far up this company’s ass they won’t be able to tell the difference between us and last night’s meal. They won’t be able to sneeze without someone in our little ol’ intelligence community analyzing their tissue paper. Besides, boy, we’ve got a ton of companies doing sensitive work for Uncle Sam. What’s your beef with these boys?”

  “Roger, they’re not working within the system. They’re an aberration. And their achievements are an aberration and by a company no one ever heard of. It’s all just too big a risk to give so much to so big an unknown quantity.”

  “Morgan, you’re getting your bowels in an uproar. I tell you we’ve got these boys covered. Emerson has put NSA on every officer and principal scientist in the company, and their mothers. They won’t be unknown for long. And they have to cooperate or the ol’ man won’t go along. Also, there are 327 active suppliers of petroleum in this country. We’ve got tracers going on every phone call, every cable, every e-mail. The only thing we haven’t got covered is smoke signals and mind-reading. We’re even putting tracers on the boys at Livermore and Sandia who might have ever had anything to do with AJC Fusion. Amanda Brock and her boys at the FBI are working with the NSA boys to pool the computer data from all agencies, including your boys at DIA, using common keywords for correlation. Emerson may be crazy, but he ain’t stupid. He’s got us pulling out all the stops.”

  “I hope you’re right, Roger. I pray you’re right,” Slaider said. “You know the Chinese are putting a tremendous effort into their umbrella program. The latest Vietnamese troop movements toward the border are making their generals very nervous. And it’s hard enough to keep North Korea—or Iran, for that matter—from selling anything they’ve got to any bidder with the right value on his bid card. My contacts in the Chinese military are very concerned about all those Sunni Islamic republics in the Russian Federation, about some of them going nuclear with rocket capability.”

  Slaider kicked a chunk of ice from a rock half-buried in the sand. “Those joint ventures we made with Japan turned into an intelligence windfall for the whole of Southeast Asia and we were dealing that time with companies we knew and thought we could control. Look, Roger, I don’t want us to be giving away the farm just because Emerson is having a ‘legacy’ wet dream. Did you know that this company has been communicating for years with the Japanese? The Japanese have a very active microfusion project of their own. Did you know the AJC Fusion boys are in almost-daily communications with labs in Japan, Russia, and Israel?”

  “You’re starting to make me feel bad. Like I don’t know my job. Of course, we know all that. These lab boys talk to each other all the time. It’s a tight network all over the world. We know that. Would you like to hear a recording of their conversations? We have them back to when Nova Industriesthe mother ship our boys and girls are calling itopened its doors. We just never had a reason to analyze them before. The foreign stuff is covered. For right now, I’m not so sure about domestic. Our friends at the FBI are on it, though. Trust Amanda. She’ll get that freight train going full speed too. I trust her a lot. I don’t know what they’ve got yet. We’re working out the protocols with them now so we can share info. They’re good ol’ boys and girls. There’s nothing to worry about.” Talbot crossed himself ostentatiously as he made this last assertion.

  Slaider stopped walking. He bent down to pick up a plastic detergent container that had washed ashore, probably last night, he thought. What a blot this was on the wild, barren, innocent shore. Sometimes he wondered whether the world, with its wasteful ways, could ever reform itself, be saved from itself. In moments of despair, he wondered if the world should be saved. But these moments passed quickly.

  “Okay, let’s start over,” Slaider said. “Fact—the president will provide AJC
Fusion with highly sensitive laser weapons data; Fact—the intelligence community is gearing up to ensure the security of this information; Fact—AJC Fusion has convinced the president and his technical advisors that they have achieved impressive technical advances in controlled microfusion technology and is successfully trading on that to obtain inappropriate—okay, my word—access to our most secret weapons-development technology; Fact—AJC Fusion has had numerous confirmed communications with foreign scientists fully capable of understanding not only the essential elements of this microfusion work but of our laser developments as well; Fact—the road the president is going down with this company will lead to very significant disruptive political consequences both in the United States and overseas. These political consequences will not show up in your telephone tracers, or your mail surveillance. They will show up on the seven o’clock news and in a street demonstration in Tartarstan or in Paris. The Iranians finally let the atomic genie out of the bottle, and now, any country with a steady source of yuan, dollars, or euros that can pay the price, can have atomic weapons. We can no longer hope to protect America by nuclear-weapons containment. We have to rely on being able to intercept weapons aimed at us before they get here. That’s our strategic defense program. And the president is handing that away and getting nothing in return to ensure the safety of America.

  “Roger, I need to know where the hell you stand. Are you going to continue playing this good-ole-boy bullshit or are you going to tell me you are concerned about the unilateral and dangerous course of action taken yesterday by the president of the United States?”