On Deception Watch

by David H Spielberg

  “Goddam it Morgan, don’t treat me like some kind of junior-grade candy-assed kid. I know when our nation is in danger and when it isn’t. And I’m just not as sure about this as you are. And he’s the fucking boss. We’re covering it from every side to Sunday the best we can, and that best is pretty damn good. What in the hell do you want me to do and it better be legal? Right now I’m not about to get my ass in a wringer because you’re unhappy that the boss is giving another kid some of your toys to play with. If you ask me, Emerson’s got a point. It’s pretty fucking embarrassing that our boys at Sandia didn’t come up with this pellet ignition first. And do you know why they didn’t do it first? Because they were havin’ too much fun pulling their peckers doing things big and fancy and expensive instead of smart. They never figured anybody would do it, so they were just jacking off on the taxpayer’s money. So get off my ass. I’m doing my job. If our fucking lab boys had done theirs we wouldn’t be having this little discussion. Got my drift?”

  Talbot repeatedly jabbed Slaider in the chest with his finger, driving him back a few steps. Not a man prone to violent outbursts, Talbot was not able or eager to maintain his anger. As soon as he finished, his anger began to abate.

  Slaider stood facing Talbot, studying him, considering what he had said. He put both his hands in the pockets of his ski jacket, and with a slight shrug, began again to walk down the beach. Talbot turned and followed. After a few moments, they came to a portion of the beach with large rocks and boulders leading from the shore to perhaps fifty feet into the Bay, and which were prominent due to the low tide.

  Slaider approached Talbot. Lowering his voice so that Talbot had to strain to hear him, Slaider said, “I just want to continue meeting, Roger. We need to stay on top of this. We may need to take quick action and I don’t want us not knowing what the other is doing. I have a very strong presentiment that the biggest problems we will face before the dust settles over this brave new world of Emerson’s will be political. And political factors can destroy the country as surely as the enemy’s charging legions. If we are going to consider political factors, I don’t want a paper trail behind us. I want to have just quiet, friendly talks—somewhere new each time—between you and me, so that if we need to counter political threats, we will know why we are acting. Roger, we will not be acting illegally. We will simply be talking shop.”

  “Well, little buddy, I’d love to talk shop with you anywhere, anytime,” Talbot said grinning and putting his arm around Slaider. He knew that kind of physical gesture was uncomfortable for Slaider and perversely, that was why he was doing it—to annoy Slaider and toy with him. Talbot was rewarded with an immediate stiffening of Slaider’s body.

  Gratified, he released Slaider and asked, “By the way, did you know about their missing Director of Operations? A Philip Layland. He disappeared after a quarrel with Cranshaw. Hasn’t been seen for about two weeks now. Amanda Brock’s boys are looking for him. He can’t have gone over to the competition, because we’re the competition—I mean Uncle Sam is. So Amanda figures it’s got to be either big oil or some politician or both buying him off. Emerson wants us to find him and find out who he’s sucking up to. He’s the biggest damn political unknown factor right now.”

  “I think you’re correct Roger. But let’s not forget the temporary excitement that our friend James Marshall is creating with his series in the Washington Courier. We need to discover what his involvement is with Cranshaw. Why the big exclusive for him? Who is behind him? Are you covering him?”

  “Of course. We’re using the fellows at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research to cover him. We thought it would be better to keep the FBI and the rest of the community out of it, him being a journalist. That’s all Emerson would need is some newspaper guy crying government harassment. He’s done a lot of reporting on foreign technology. Not just technology, but the politics of science. The State Department boys can claim they are going to offer him an assignment and wanted to check him out first if he smells them out. I think it’ll fly if they’re challenged. By the way, Morgan, he seems to be getting snugly with Cranshaw’s administrative assistant. Damn good-looking black woman, so I’m told.”

  “This is very interesting. And dangerous. We must never underestimate the power of the press to manipulate. You have read his articles. So far, what do you think?”

  “I’m not impressed. It’s mostly boilerplate stuff on the technology. I could have read the stuff in his articles anywhere except for the specific claims by Cranshaw. The articles don’t seem to be part of a grand design, so far.

  “I don’t trust news people,” Slaider said, as a light flurry began once again to fall. Silently they walked back to their cars. They agreed to meet again the following week. They would meet at the civil war memorial at Manassas.

  14

  Morgan Slaider loved the military. He loved the military environment, the military language, the sense of community and purpose, the military bearing. He loved the revered history of sacrifice and heroism, of brilliant strategies and creative countermeasures. He was moved equally by the glorious push to victory and the dauntless struggle against certain defeat.

  To his colleagues and to the citizenry, Morgan Slaider was a great general. But this perception of him went beyond his rank and position as chairman of the joint chiefs. He was perceived as not merely powerful and influential, but as a man whose bearing, character, and personal philosophy embodied greatness. He was the soldier-philosopher, acknowledged by the American public to have a broad and penetrating view of the world and the role of the military in it.

  Sitting in his car, new possibilities began to dawn on General Slaiderunexpected possibilities. Perhaps he was resisting when he should have been pulling, he thought. Out of his down jacket pocket he took a small voice recorder, placed it on the empty passenger seat and turned it on. Silently, he studied the recording of his just-concluded meeting with Roger Talbot.

  15

  Ten miles ahead of Slaider, Roger Talbot drove at his usual sixty-five miles per hour. He was not paying close attention to his driving—just enough to keep from losing his way and avoid accidents. His attention instead was on the recorder on the seat next to him, as he listened, emotionless, to a playback of his meeting with General Slaider.

  16

  Sylvia Carlyle hung up the telephone. She sat at her desk, her head resting in her open palms, her long, thin fingers gently massaging her eyes and the bridge of her nose. Leaning back in her chair, she stretched her body while rolling her head from side to side, loosening the tight muscles on either side of her neck.

  Her desk was crowded with reports and memos and studies and proposals. On the floor, behind the desk, newspapers were scattered where she had tossed them after clipping the articles she knew would be of interest to Arthur Cranshaw. She had just finished her daily clipping file when James called. He was not easy to find and she was relieved when he returned her call. It was very important that she meet with him and they agreed on dinner at her place.

  Sylvia was too tired to prepare dinner, but she wanted to share her Brooklyn Heights view of Manhattan with James. She called Sorrentino’s Restaurant and ordered for both of them. As a special treat she would serve the bottle of Chateau Lascombes Margaux, grand cru, that she had been saving. She was looking for an excuse to open that bottle and James would do just fine, she thought.

  She had been thinking a good deal about James. They had seen quite a bit of each other during his preparation and research for his series of articles. She respected James and was puzzled by him. He was intelligent. In fact, he was a knowledgeable scientist, she told herself. It puzzled her why he had become a journalist instead of pursuing his original career in science. He explained it to her, but the explanation didn’t ring true, so she was never able to hold on to it. Each time she would forget his answer. Tonight she would ask him again and this time she would make sure she understood. She wanted to understand him.

  She sensed
that he brought out the mothering instinct in her. He must have suffered some serious loss of confidence, she guessed, or gone through a traumatic experience of some kind that made him change his life direction as he had. Regardless, she liked and admired James Marshall. He also seemed to like her. She felt comfortable with him. Sylvia had become good at sensing the atmosphere of relationships. She could sense when she was being too bold, too vocal, too sociable—compensating for some unconscious need to appear comfortable with a white person when her body, her inner register, knew she was not. There was none of this with James.

  There was no self-consciously unselfconscious kidding about race or color to show how broad-minded he was. Or she was. And she knew when a man was interested in her physically. Every woman can sense this basic connection and knew when it existed, when there was interest. And James was interested. She was used to that. At Columbia, she was very popular with the men. A woman majoring in engineering or physics was still a rare-enough event to heavily weigh the odds in favor of an abundance of male attentiveness. And she knew that being an intelligent, attractive black woman at a rich man’s school gave her an exotic air which her sisters in less high-power environments would not experience. And she liked it.

  Tonight she must mix business with pleasure. It was essential that James go on to the next phase of his reporting on AJC Fusion. Dr. Cranshaw would be testifying in Washington in two weeks and the public must be conditioned favorably. She and James would begin tonight developing the strategy for the next two Sunday-feature articles.

  She looked at the wall clock just beside her sliding doors to the balcony. It was eight-thirty. She had a half-hour for a quick shower and a change into some fresh clothes. For a moment, she looked toward the New York skyline. It was a sight that never failed to move her—the vast horizontal bank of lights, mammoth and awesome. From a distance, it resembled a world in miniature, with each light a world within a world. It conveyed an extraordinary sense of life and achievement not just for the city itselfits scope, its achievements, its energybut for her personally, that she should be here, in her own apartment, in possession of this magnificent view, self-sufficient, empowered.

  She wondered if it was just that she was an accomplished black woman that made her feel so self-satisfied, or would any human on the face of earth feel this way with a view like this in an apartment like hers?

  Checking the clock again, she turned and walked quickly to the bathroom, shedding her clothes as she went.

  As she had hoped, James arrived late. She was buttoning the cuff on her rose-colored silk blouse when her doorbell rang. She greeted James warmly at the door.

  “Hi, Sylvia. I brought a bottle. Least I could do,” Marshall said pumping her hand.

  “Thank you, James. Very sweet of you but not tonight. I have other plans.”

  Taking James’s coat, she showed him into the living room, got him settled comfortably in the slightly overstuffed couch with the bright floral pattern on a black background, and went to get two Dewars and water. She quickly returned, ice cubes clinking softly in the glasses

  “How did you know, you smart girl, you?” James said, taking the glass offered to him. For a few moments he was content just to sip his drink and relax. Quietly they sat and sipped their drinks and looked at each other, smiling. At last, feeling he needed to say something, James said, “God, I needed that . . . Well, hello again, Sylvia. How nice to see you.”

  Sylvia smiled broadly and clicked James’s glass. “I guess you’re feeling a little better now.”

  “Mother’s milk,” James said, saluting her with his glass as he began to look around the apartment.

  “Good. Because I’m going to wine you and dine you and then put you to work. But right now, you just relax. May I show you around,” Sylvia asked, “or do you need another dose of mother first?”

  “Well, from what I can see, your apartment is really quite beautiful. Why do I sound surprised? I guess I need another dose. Please, show me around. We can start with the scotch.” James got up and offered his hand to help Sylvia rise from the couch. After refilling their glasses, Sylvia showed James the rest of the apartment, ending with the view of the city through the bedroom doors leading to a small balcony.

  Sylvia was proud of her world, her life, and her apartment, and took obvious joy in showing James around. Her taste with furnishings, as with her clothes, was stylishly contemporary.

  “I love sharing this view with friends and wanted you to see it with me,” Sylvia said as James once more fell under the spell of a view he had seen many times before, but which never lost its magic. They both looked out, lost in their separate thoughts.

  The doorbell rang, announcing to Sylvia that Sorrentino’s delivery service had arrived. “James, that’s dinner. Let me take care of that. You stay here until I need you, which will be in a few minutes to help me set the table and put out the goodies . . . ”

  It was ten-thirty when James put his fork down, completing his last bite of mud pie washed down with a full-bodied cappuccino. He smiled contentedly at Sylvia. “I’m glad you like it. Eating this way is the best of all possible worlds. But, James, now comes the bill,” she said, returning his smile. “I’m afraid we have to get to work tonight. You know about the Congressional hearings. Dr. Cranshaw has been asked to testify in two weeks.”

  “Let’s go to the living room. If I stay here, I’ll never get my mind off this wonderful meal. And I won’t want to get to work. Sylvia, this boy was brought up a long time ago with the wise knowledge that there are no free lunches—or dinners, for that matter. So let’s get to work.”

  “Exactly,” Sylvia said, getting up and taking James by the hand into the living room.

  “Why don’t we start by you telling me what you know about the hearings,” James said.

  He settled in once again on the couch.

  “Well, before we go there, we anticipated there would be three main reactions to the AJC announcements and to your articles,” Sylvia began. “First, there will be the public interest in the new scientific wonder—a sort of flash response—a lot of light and heat, but it doesn’t last very long. Dr. Cranshaw anticipates this. The second will be the technical community reaction. This will be a longer time coming after the first few skeptical comments by people who don’t matter. Finally, there will be the Congressional reaction once the reality of the achievement truly sinks in. This will be the search for the guilty as to why the government labs were scooped, to be followed quickly by the punishment of the innocent, followed finally by praise and honors for the nonparticipants. Congress is like that. The reaction I didn’t mention is the power industry reaction. And there we don’t know. But we do know it won’t be good.

  “It’s the last group that’s the most threatening to us. Your articles have done a brilliant job of making AJC Fusion known and real and credible to millions of people. That was essential as a minimum and you have done that wonderfully. I’ve never been asked before to appear on Good Morning America. But as we believe, it’s only a flash response. We will be vulnerable again quickly. These Congressional hearings are both a threat and an opportunity for us, James. That’s what we need to talk about tonight. Their search for the guilty will only help us if the Congress finds itself among the guilty.

  “What are you getting at?” James interrupted, surprised by the direction of the conversation.

  “James, I still think that you don’t sense the potential for violence against us to be real. We need the public to see us quickly as an underdog who beat the system—a harassing and hostile system. We need that shift from short-term awe at our technical achievement to long-term affection for our gumption, and we need that shift to occur quickly, before we disappear from the public consciousness. These hearings can help us accomplish this. And you can help condition the hearings with the right kind of articles.”

  “Condition—hmmm. Sounds like propaganda to me. That’s not really my line of business. Why don’t you hire someone to write t
hose kinds of articles for you?”

  “James, I’m not talking about propaganda. I’m talking about facts. I’m talking about unannounced inspections, I’m talking about delayed approvals of even the most benign radiation-related work to five and ten times the normal time for other companies working on similar federal projects. I’m talking about trumped-up safety violations and even arrests of our key personnel on phony misdemeanor charges—all later dropped. Anything that would delay or discourage our work. Other laboratories that communicated with us were suddenly subject to surprise inspections. Even our vendors who also did work with the government were harassed and inspected unjustifiably until they didn’t want to do business with us anymore. They got the message. ‘Stay clear of AJC Fusion.’ James, this is America. Things like this shouldn’t be allowed to happen. The free enterprise system has to apply to nuclear work as well as non-nuclear work. AJC Fusion is living proof that the system works. That’s not propaganda. We want the American people to hear this message, to hear how the bureaucracy fights innovation and freedom. We want to defend the entrepreneurial spirit of the people.”

  It was an argument James had heard before. It made him uncomfortable.

  He got up and slowly paced, thinking. Obsessive people frightened him. Righteousness frightened him. People with a mission in their lives frightened him. He didn’t trust them. He didn’t trust their lack of proportion, of a sense of boundaries or limitations. True, he liked Sylvia and liked being with her, yet he didn’t want an infatuation to lead to his being used or drawn into some open-ended involvement. But he was a journalist, after all. This harassment angle might just be a good story.

  Turning to Sylvia, he asked her, “What was the exact date for Cranshaw’s testimony?”

  17

  “Jesus Christ, Jimmy, didn’t you know this? I mean you’re supposed to be close to these people.” Marshall’s editor, Dick Scully, pounded his desk in frustration. The paper on his desk was the Washington Post. It carried the front page headline “Fusion Company to Get Weapons Secrets.”