Chapter 5

TimK — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 01:00:00 -0700

When Clydene was a girl, 9 years old, she wanted to make orange pie. She didn’t have a recipe, but she really wanted to make orange pie. She figured she could make an orange-flavored pie crust. And if she substituted oranges for some other fruit, she figured she’d be all set.

Her mother, of course, would never allow it. Clyde had never baked anything before. And she was also known for the clutter she left behind her whenever she did anything in the kitchen. She loved to experiment, loved to create, and absolutely hated to clean up after herself. Truthfully, she didn’t even consider whether her mother would allow it or not. All she knew is that she wanted to make orange pie, and she knew how she wanted to do it. So this 9-year-old girl laid out all the ingredients she needed and set about making a pie crust using fresh orange juice instead of water.

Now, making a pie crust from scratch is not trivial. That’s why pre-made pie crusts are so popular. There are too many things that can go wrong and spoil the crust. You start by combining flour with a fat, like butter or shortening. You have to make sure the fat is cold, though, or it won’t combine correctly with the flour. Then you mix in cold water, or a water-type liquid, until the dough is just sticky enough. Then you refrigerate, and after that you can finally roll it out into a pie crust. Naturally, this all comprises only the start of baking a pie.

Clyde never made it past step one. She used her hands to combine the fat and flour, and overworked it until it resembled a roux. She attempted to save her project by covering the glop with wax paper and popping it in the freezer to chill it— the freezer, because she was too anxious to wait for the refrigerator to do the job. Then she went into the next room and watched TV. But she didn’t make it back to the kitchen until her mother walked in to find what she described as “an explosion at the bakery.” Ironically, the cookbook Clyde was using specifically said to combine the fat and flour with butter knives or a pastry blender, not your hands, because the heat from your hands would warm up the dough and ruin it. Also ironically, her mother had a pastry blender in the silverware drawer, but Clyde had always thought it was for mashing potatoes.

She finally did come up with a recipe for orange pie, using many other orange pie recipes as references, and after many trials and unsuccessful variations. But that all happened much later, after she had grown to be an adult. Adulthood brings a certain circumspection to one’s activities. Still, a person’s basic personality, they say, sticks with one from the time one is a child. As we grow older, we add to those simple childish tendencies, we balance them out, but we can never escape them. Who we are is with us always, even unto the grave.

That’s why it would be no surprise to someone watching Clydene, now that she was desperate to clear Mira. She also wanted to sock it to the evil monsters who had hurt her friend. Now an adult, she behaved just as she did as a child, with one important addition: This time, she was paranoid about how others would react and careful not to get caught. It was because of this paranoia that she was not excited at her discovery. Rather, it gave her heartburn like a pepperoni and coffee-bean pizza. It was the kitchen table when she was 9, covered with flour and goo and melting margarine, an incriminating scene just waiting for the wrong person to happen upon it. Her discovery came in the form of a computer file, a simple document she was not supposed to have a copy of. She was not even supposed to be able to access it. And yet it was now staring her in the face.

Clyde had been very careful in testing her Pyx virus and injecting it via the QX system. The security hole she exploited was not something she had added to the system. In fact, it was in an area of the system she had never directly worked on. The network connection she used to exploit the hole was neither monitored nor logged. And now that the virus was installed, it sent data back to her, encrypted, over the public Internet. She never had any direct contact with it. There was no realistic way anyone could trace it back to her. Yes, if someone were to discover it, they could shut down Pyx. And if they suspected Clydene of being the receiver of these encrypted Internet transmissions, a security expert could prove it, because only her computer could decode the information. Therefore, they could prove she was the culprit by proving that only she could receive Pyx’s transmissions. But at least for now, no one was even looking. And she didn’t plan on keeping the jig going long enough to be discovered.

She was actually surprised at how quickly Pyx spread and started sending data. Within several hours it had spread to the police department’s computers. And within a day, it had pulled up a gem from Baedes’s own hard drive. Clyde found it by searching for “MJ.” She had set up a number of other searches, too, that her computer automatically executed, looking for anything about Mira. But this one struck pay dirt, the chief’s own notes detailing his plans to arrest Mira, charge her with assault, and keep her in jail. As he had executed each stage of the plan, he had kept track. Baedes appeared to be a compulsive note-taker.

As Clyde pieced together what she learned from the files with what Mira had told her, the whole story began to take shape, like a picture coming into focus. Beady-eyes had been keeping tabs on Mira for a while. He knew her patterns, that she always took the same route home at about the same time each day. He also knew how much work she and her volunteers had been putting into their cause. At first, they came across as just a bunch of crackpots. But all that work was beginning to bear fruit, and this made her a plausible threat, as he saw it. So he figured he’d kill two birds with one stone. He’d shut down the protest and demoralize her troops, all at the same time.

He timed her arrest carefully, close enough to the protest that it would send her organization into panic, but early enough that most people wouldn’t connect it with the protest. He could have arrested her on any charge. He could have made up one if he needed to. The expired registration was just a happy coincidence. He planned to charge her with assault and resisting arrest. He didn’t originally intend to grab Ike, whose arrest was also fortunate happenstance. The chief was the one who started the scuffle with Ike, in order to provoke Mira. And it worked. Then he extorted testimony from Ike, basically by threatening him with prison. Since Ike was a parolee, that was the easy part, because there was no hard evidence against Baedes, just the word of a criminal and the word of a jailbird. And they weren’t even likely to corroborate each other’s testimony. Then he asked a sympathetic judge to put Mira away for a while— not in those words, of course. He and the D.A. dressed it up in legal hocus-pocus, but it all amounted to the same thing.

Baedes himself had probably originated the story that Ike told the court. Or maybe he dragged it out of Ike, while making sure Ike told it right. Clydene certainly knew enough about that sort of persuasion. She set her teeth.

Baedes had also shared parts of this plan with “PB.” A little research via the other files revealed that PB was Officer Pamela Burns, whom was apparently one of Baedes’s protégés, one of his crew that Baedes had taken a personal interest in. In this case, he relied on her to perform research, and he shared with her aspects of his plan, but he made sure she was not a witness to anything that occurred.

Clyde felt like a voyeur, as though she were looking into someone’s window, invading his private room, staring at his nakedness, a sight which was holding her, hypnotically. She woke for a moment from her trance, swept her eyes through her office, afraid someone might be looking over her shoulder. But there was no need. She was the only one in the house. All she heard was the hum of the computer’s fan and of the refrigerator down the hallway. She was there alone, and only she knew how to access the information she had unearthed. Good thing, too. She shivered to think what Ted might say if he knew what she had been up to.

She also felt like it was too simple to be realistic. If she were in a spy novel, everything would be hopelessly convoluted or involve mysterious technology that couldn’t actually exist in real life. But that felt realistic. This truth was stranger than fiction. Baedes had simply written down all of his misdeeds, kept a record, almost as if he were confessing to his priest. And then he left them in an unlocked room with a door big enough for Godzilla to walk through.

All of these thoughts and feelings hit her at once in an eerie blast of mental twilight. But thinking about Ted brought her back to Earth. Indeed, Ted would freak out like only Ted could, angry, upset, betrayed, if he knew what she had done. He would be afraid for her and for himself. He would feel an ethical obligation to turn over all the evidence of her misdeeds, yet a moral obligation to keep her confidence. He would be afraid of losing her and of losing control of the situation, and he hated to lose control. Yet Ted was the man who needed to know what was in the file.

“So how,” Clydene said, “do I clue him in, without getting either of us in trouble?”

Yes, she could send him an anonymous email. But she couldn’t give specifics, because she didn’t know how much this Pamela Burns actually knew. Clyde didn’t even want anyone to know that Baedes’s files had been compromised, because that would provoke them to seek out the person who had compromised the files. And an anonymous email could still be traced back to her, if a court ordered it. And if Ted thought the sender were someone inside the government, he might just seek such an order.

But what if… Suddenly, the answer was clear.

She had built a feature into Pyx to allow it to upgrade and expand itself, if she told it to do so. She could issue Pyx commands via the same anonymous, secure channels it sent back data. She quickly wrote a script that sent an email. The email claimed to be from an anonymous, inside informant; it was specific enough to identify Burns as a source of information in Mira’s case—and so that Ted would know it’s not a piece of random spam; and it was vague enough not to give away where the information came from. The email appeared to come from Baedes’s email address, but if anyone looked closely, it would clearly have been sent from a public computer terminal in a separate government office, a computer that she noticed was also infected with the Pyx virus, a terminal almost any government employee could have had access to. The email would be almost impossible to trace, if anyone even tried.

Clyde tested the script using a simulator, without actually sending the email. Then she packaged it in a command to Pyx. She opened up a terminal window and typed pyx_send in the green letters on black background she was used to, followed by the name of the command file, pb_email.pyc. The computer responded:

Logging to pyx.log Command pb_email.pyc encoded Posted to alt.test Transaction id 200709201120A

There. It was off. She expected confirmation from the target machine within 12 hours.

Baedes took a swig from his water bottle. He had been running for almost a half hour, and he was dripping with sweat.

“It’s been 30 minutes, and there are people waiting,” he said to the younger, short-haired man on the treadmill next to him. He disliked cutting down his run time, but those were the rules. If someone was waiting, use the treadmill for only 30 minutes at a stretch; then give someone else a turn.

“Right.” The other man pushed a button to begin the cool-down cycle. Then he checked his pulse and distance. A Friends rerun was just starting on the TV. “I don’t get this show.” He pointed at the television. “I mean, I know it’s supposed to be one of the funniest ever made, but it does nothing for me.”

“Television is pretty much useless,” Baedes said. He wouldn’t even have one if it weren’t for the sports channels.

“I think you may be right. Though the History Channel has some pretty interesting war documentaries.”

“You know I don’t have time for that.”

“Right. That’s why you’ve watched every single pre-season NFL game so far this year.”

“That’s different.”

“Sure it is,” the man said in a sarcastic tone.

“Yes, it is.” Baedes was serious. “Football is a contest of skill and strategy. Twenty-two men go at it, all at once, on the same field. But each with his own unique skills, all for his team. And that team under the direction of a single man, who orchestrates the battle. But only the strongest and smartest team wins. There’s no second place.” His face, covered with drops of sweat, showed a disturbing excitement. “Why watch a documentary, son, when you can see the war?”

Indeed, to Baedes a football game was a genuine battle, with tactics and strategy and skill. And with a few sacrifices. It was order out of chaos. While most fans just rooted for their team, Baedes usually didn’t care who won. But he took pride in being able to understand the intricacies of the game, on multiple levels, from multiple perspectives.

The younger man didn’t respond. Either he had nothing to say, or he was searching for words. Regardless of which, before the conversation could continue, a cell phone began to ring. Baedes picked it up, flipped it open, and spoke into the receiver.

“Baedes here,” he said.

“This is Officer Burns, Sir. Ted Jackson wants to talk to me about the Mira Jayson case.”

“Okay,” Baedes said.

“I don’t know why he wants to talk to me or what he wants to ask me. But I thought you should know.”

“Thank you. I appreciate being informed.”

He knew Burns would not betray him, but he wondered what prompted Jackson to talk to her. Still, it wasn’t her responsibility to put her neck on the chopping block for him, because he was the boss. It was his job to stand up for and protect his people, and he would do so. Besides, the more she hedged, the more Jackson would keep digging.

Baedes added, “Cooperate fully with him.”

“I see. Do you have any guidance on what I should tell him?” she asked.

“I think you should tell him the truth.”

Silence.

“Just tell what you saw, but don’t interpret the facts, don’t repeat hearsay, and don’t offer information,” Baedes said.

“Yes. I understand,” Burns said.

“Call me afterwards, please.”

“I’ll keep you informed,” she said.

After they hung up, Baedes thought about this turn of events. He was in no personal danger from anything she could say. It could mean a short end to Miss Jayson’s incarceration, but not until next week at the earliest. Jackson could have gotten Burns’s name from the duty schedule or police blotter. Still, it disturbed him that the enemy thought her valuable.

“Officer Burns,” Ted said. He extended his hand and introduced himself.

Ted honestly didn’t know what he was doing speaking to this young officer, didn’t know what he expected to get from her. A tip from an anonymous inside source, completely unverifiable, yet somehow it felt right. Ted had checked the police blotter and peeked at the duty schedule—Ted had his own inside sources. Indeed, Baedes had taken a car and gone out and had arrested Mira. That’s it. The only thing he did was to arrest Mira. He issued no citations, responded to no dispatch calls. It was indeed as if he had planned it. And now that Ted was out of leads, he was desperate.

One of Ted’s only hobbies was the study of magic. He loved the intricacies and mysteries of illusion, sleight of hand, mind-reading, psychokinesis, deception and trickery, hypnotic regression, psychic surgery, mind games of vanishing, levitation, prediction, and the all other products of the magician’s skill and cunning. Ted knew that magic is not real. Magic happens in the mind, as a result of how the magician presents it and in how his audience accepts it, a result of what the audience does and does not know. And psychics, they are a special class of magician. They use surprisingly simple mind tricks to make their mark believe they have some supernatural source of information, all the while pulling that information from the mark himself. Now seated in a private room with young Officer Burns, Ted started playing psychic.

“Do you know Sam Baedes?” he began.

“Yes, we all do.”

“Does he ask you for special favors?” Ted was hoping his phrasing would rattle her.

She looked askance at the lawyer across the conference-room table from her.

“No. Well, nothing unusual or inappropriate,” she said.

“So when he told you about the Mira Jayson case, that must have made you feel uncomfortable.”

“No,” she said, shifting in her seat.

“Really?” Ted raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. “It would make me uncomfortable to hear one of the other partners at my firm admit to the sort of tactics he admitted to you.”

“He did nothing wrong,” Pam insisted, staring off to the side.

“What he did was akin to falsifying evidence.”

“Look,” Pam stared at him and spoke adamantly. “The report says that Miss Jayson charged at him, and that’s completely true.”

“But what about the non-existent weapon she supposedly had?” Ted challenged her.

“Sometimes in the middle of a situation, you have to make split-second decisions, for your safety and for everyone else’s, and you don’t have time to gather evidence first. I’m sorry your client got hurt, but she shouldn’t have been trying to help.”

“But Baedes attacked Ike Morgan, and he did it expressly to create a situation. That’s entrapment.”

“You have no proof of that,” she said. She shifted her weight again in her seat.

“On Monday, September 10,” Ted said, “did Sam Baedes take a car and go out to make traffic stops?”

“Yes, you know he did.”

“Do you know why he did so?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to get out of the office that day.”

“Are those the words he used?”

“Yes—“ She cut herself short.

“He said he wanted to get out of the office,” he said.

No response.

“Did he say why he wanted to get out of the office?”

“No.”

“Hmm.” He looked into her eyes. “Are you sure?”

Her eyes narrowed. “I’m sure.”

“Why do you think he wanted to get out?”

“You’d have to ask him,” Pamela said.

“But I want to know what you think,” Ted said.

“Well, I don’t know the answer.”

“You don’t know what you think?”

“I don’t know what he wanted, or that he wanted anything, and I’m unwilling to speculate.” She was trying to backpedal.

“Take me through the conversation. From the start.”

“What conversation?” she looked confused.

“The conversation where he told you about arresting Mira Jayson.”

“Why don’t you just ask him what he did instead of pursuing hearsay?” She grinned slightly.

“Does the chief usually do the job of a duty officer?”

“No.”

“So that was atypical.”

“Yes, but not unheard of.”

“But all he did was to stake out the road Mira was riding home on. That sounds incredibly boring. Why would he want to do that?”

“He said,” she explained, “that Mira Jayson was a violent person, that he expected her to be driving in an unregistered car, and that he needed to bring her in. And he wanted to personally make sure it went down without a hitch.” She immediately closed her eyes for a moment, as though she didn’t mean to say that.

But Ted tried not to appear to notice. “He said that? Just like that? That Miss Jayson was ’a violent person’?”

“No, those weren’t the exact words he used, but—”

“What exact words did he use?”

“I don’t remember. But that was the sentiment.”

Ted took a breath. “Are you familiar with Miss Jayson’s reputation?”

“Yes.”

“Is her reputation that she is a violent person?”

A pause. “No.”

“So did you believe Chief Baedes when he said that she was?”

She paused again. “No.”

“So, did you seek any clarification of his statement?”

“Yeah, but…”

Ted waited before saying, “Okay. What was it?”

“I told the chief I had heard that Miss Jayson was a pacifist.”

“And what was his explanation?”

“And he said he thought this time she would get in more trouble than she usually does.”

“Sad. Like Ike Morgan, more trouble than he usually gets into.”

“Oh, please,” she scoffed. “He’s got it made. He dodged a bullet, that one. I dug through the files myself. We have so much we could charge him with. He’s in such deep shit, he’s lucky he’s walking the streets.”

“Fine then,” Ted said. “I won’t worry about him.”

Judge Spiller refused to hear any more on the bail issue. Friday afternoon, Ted appeared before a Superior Court justice, with Mira, to argue that Mira’s bail should be lifted. He brought up all the same arguments that had not worked before, with two additions:

“Judge Spiller erred in increasing bail,” he said. “In the typical case, the court would issue a restraining order, for example, to order Miss Jayson to keep at least 100 feet from Chief Baedes. But a law officer’s job is to deal with conflict. What if he needs to arrest her? In fact, that very situation is the one in which Miss Jayson was alleged to have assaulted Chief Baedes. Therefore, a restraining order in this case is silly—ordering Miss Jayson to stay at least 100 feet away from a law officer.

“The very reason it is silly is the same reason the court should discount the argument. In the typical case, if the court had issued a restraining order, and if the defendant were to have violated the restraining order, she would have violated the terms of her bail, and she would need to be taken into custody by a law officer. In this case, however, if Miss Jayson were to commit an arrestable offense, that in itself would violate her bail. Therefore, releasing Miss Jayson in this case has a substantially equivalent effect to issuing a restraining order in the typical case. Therefore, she should be released on her own recognizance without surety.

“Furthermore, Officer Baedes sought to entrap Miss Jayson. Then he used his position to compromise Mr. Ike Morgan, the only witness to that entrapment. The details will need to be hammered out at trial. However, for the purposes of this appeal, this indicates that Mira Jayson was not—and is not—a danger to him. She should therefore be released on her own recognizance without surety.”

A lot of legal mumbo-jumbo that basically amounts to: Let Mira go, because it’s unfair to keep her in jail.

The Superior Court agreed. Mira was finally free.

First thing after she stopped at home and cleaned up, she went to see Ike. She found him at a job site, taking a break, standing in the driveway, chewing on a slice of pizza. A haze of clouds covered the sun, casting a cool, fuzzy light over the scene. A light breeze blew through Mira’s hair, carrying the scent of new shampoo and fragrant perfume out across the field next door.

“I heard they let you off the hook,” she said.

“Yeah, they did,” Ike replied.

“I just wanted to make sure…“ She faded, then tried again. “I don’t know what happened with you after they arrested us.”

“Well—“ Ike began.

“And I don’t want to know.”

“Okay,” he said.

She gathered that he had been put in an impossible position, and she had turned hero in order to save his skin, and she had already rationalized his innocence in her own mind, and she didn’t want to revisit the subject, because she blamed herself for all that had happened. Still, she felt she owed him an explanation, but she had to loosen some words from her brain by shaking her already trembling hands.

“Because,” she said, “it would just get me upset all over again.”

Ike just nodded.

“At Sam Baedes.”

Ike looked inquisitive. “I don’t understand,” he said.

Mira continued. “I’m so sorry I got you into this. And whatever they did to you… I’m so sorry. I just hope you can forgive me and maybe we can get back to some… normal.”

Ike had a pained expression. “I’m afraid you don’t realize… what I—”

“Yes, I know all about that. But they forced you to say those things. I don’t know how…” And she didn’t want to know how they forced him. She didn’t want to know what they had on him. She didn’t want to know what kind of deep trouble he was in, because she firmly believed in the basic goodness of this man. “I’m just sorry I got you into this.”

Later that day, the District Attorney’s office mysteriously dropped the charges against Mira. No one knew why, except Clyde, who noticed an update in Chief Beady-eyes’s computer file. Apparently, he was disturbed by “the attack,” as he wrote, “on PB.” And he was afraid that pursuing this case would be worse for him than if Mira Jayson were simply allowed to continue, for now. So he had gone privately to the prosecutor and persuaded him that the case was no longer worth pursuing. His file didn’t indicate what methods he used to persuade a prosecuting attorney that an active case was not worth pursuing. Clyde almost searched through the files for dirt on the D.A., but she changed her mind at the last second. She decided the question was probably better left unresolved.

He had, however, added a final new note to the file. It read: “Information leak. Informant in office? Outside subversive?”

In his hand, Ted held a tall, thin, stemmed glass half-full of sparkling Brut, as did everyone else seated at the dining room table. He looked out over the collected guests. It was only a small dinner party. Mira brought Ike. Michael brought a woman named Annie, a sultry brunette he knew from somewhere or other. And naturally, the hosts were in attendance.

Clyde had orchestrated the entire menu, a mouth-watering spread: garden salad with homemade lemon vinaigrette; Clydene’s garlic-herb chicken and couscous, with a chicken-vegetable gravy; green beans, carrots, and corn; and a couple bottles of Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand, an economical but wonderful wine, a zesty, straw-colored white that burst with citrus and melon. And on deck, cheesecake and coffee, not burnt this time. As it turned out, the coffee pot just needed to run through a cycle in the dishwasher. As she had told Ted exactly what to do to help her prepare each dish, he happily took a back seat and let her drive. This was her province.

Ted said, “Before we begin, I asked Michael to say a few words.”

Michael stood. “Over the past week,” he said, “I’ve had little opportunity to tell Mira how much we appreciate her. It’s ironic; usually I have the opportunity, but I don’t feel the need. This past week has made me acutely realize the debt we all owe her, and how frequently we each ought to take the time to let her know her how much we appreciate her.

“Working with Mira has taught me more about my craft than any of you know. She brings passion and meaning to every life she touches, and I’ve aspired to be more like her in that respect, even though I’ve done a poor job of it.

“Now, she came into our lives when Ted and Clyde were facing a particularly difficult time. And I daresay without her friendship, they wouldn’t have the wonderful marriage they do, the envy of husbands and wives everywhere, one of the happiest and most well-adjusted marriages I’ve ever witnessed. And that includes my own.”

Everyone laughed. Ted recalled Michael’s story of the one time he was engaged, which ended in disaster.

“And she has of course also graced Ike with many undeserved gifts.” Michael paused a moment.

He raised his glass. “Mira, absence is a horrible thing. And it’s pitiable that circumstances must beat that truth into my head with a sledgehammer. I miss you, and I’m glad you’re back.”

“Hear, hear,” Clydene softly said as she raised her glass.

“Hear, hear!” repeated Ted.

And there were other murmurs of “hear, hear” from around the table as they all clinked glasses and drank.

Mira blushed. Ted knew enough to notice that, and he knew enough to smile fondly in her direction.

“Well, let’s eat,” Ted said.

The Conscience of Abe’s Turn - Chapter 5 - Comments

Chapter 5