Wag the Dog (6 page)

M
ELVIN
T
AYLOR WAS
a vice president of Universal Security. He was moving up slowly but steadily. He was not the type to surge ahead with some stroke of brilliance, nor did he have the knack for selling that would have made him a major rainmaker. But he saw to it that nothing went wrong on his watch. As with many large corporations, the road upward is a long and winding one, from smaller offices to larger ones. Taylor had worked for the company in Columbia, South Carolina; Nashua, New Hampshire; Austin, Texas; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Phoenix, Arizona. There were two offices that were considered the final testing grounds before promotion to headquarters in Chicago: Los Angeles and Dallas. Three years back Taylor had been posted to L.A. When an important operation was running, he kept an eye on it.

The minute he heard she'd been there, Taylor asked for the tapes of Magdalena Lazlo's visit to U. Sec. He watched her walk down the hall—odd, jerky black and white moves—shot skip-frame to save tape; this was a document, not art. Stop tape. Roll back. Start over. He was holding off seeing her destination.

It was the way he waited after dinner for his cigar. Teasing it. Finding this reason or that—positioning the ashtray; picking exactly the right one, not too dry; deciding whether to use a match or a lighter; pouring out the cup of decaf; watching his wife's lips tighten in silent reproof—to delay the moment just a little longer.

He frequented a Vietnamese mother-daughter massage team. Or so they claimed to be. He'd never asked for IDs and never ran a background check. That was what they said and they never spoke or acted as if they were anything else. He visited them once a week. Tuesdays, 5:30 to 7:00. They gave him a massage and hand job. Once they began, after he was out of his clothes and on the table and had a sip of brandy, about 5:38, it was their job to erect him and keep him that way—more or less—until his ejaculation one hour later. The ultimate exercise, he was proud to tell himself, in delayed gratification.

Let her get closer. Stop. Rewind. Start over.

Delayed gratification, Taylor felt, was the essential precept of civilization in the group or in the individual. It was—obviously—what had made the European races superior. The current decline of America and the rise of Japan was due, obviously, to forgetting that simple and essential lesson. Don't eat your dessert until you deserve it. Don't spend your money until you've earned it. Don't take your pleasure until you're stronger than pleasure and can prove it.

Even closer. Stop. Rewind. Start over.

Closer. Stop. No. Not in time. He'd gone one frame too far. She was turning into the cubicle of Joe Broz. Just like Taylor knew she would. He'd been holding his breath. Now he released it, feeling a bone-deep pleasure.

The visual time code appeared on the lower left-hand corner of each frame. The reference was to the time of recording, not to lapsed tape time. Taylor went to the audiotape. Audio recording of U. Sec. employees was intermittent, not constant. Studies demonstrate that the threat that employees might be taped at any given moment controls behavior virtually as well as constant monitoring, yet is significantly more cost-effective.

Except that in circumstances like this, you just might get caught with your pants down.

Audio recording was monaural. The second track was used for a time code that, like the video, referenced the time of recording. It made search and identification infinitely quicker. Taylor entered the time displayed on the video image into the audiotape machine.

Then he took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He counted slowly backward. This was a technique he employed in his weekly sexual practice. He'd found it had great effect in quieting excitement. Sometimes he could get so deeply into it that the mother-daughter team had to use their every resource to keep him up.

He opened his eyes. The time code said “14:28.16”—the system utilized a twenty-four-hour clock. The flashing red light said “ready.” He pushed the
PLAY
button on the audio machine with one hand. With the other hand he hit the
PAUSE
button on the video machine to release the videotape and create some semblance of synchronicity.

He watched Magdalena Lazlo perch on the corner of Joe Broz's desk. Like she was playing a scene from some old Marlene Dietrich film—or was that the impression he got because the video was a grainy black and white? Broz's mouth was practically hanging open, and he looked, in Taylor's opinion, about as bright as a backwoods Croatian bovine.

“Hey, Joe,” Magdalena said. “You got two bits?”

“Yeah.” Broz said. What repartee, Taylor thought.

“Then why don't you take me out and buy me a cup of Java?”

“Maggie, there isn't much that you could ask me that I wouldn't do.”

That was it? That was it? And they went off—where? And did what? And said what? Was there surveillance on her? A round-the-clock watch? He reached for the file with that feeling in the pit of his stomach that he hated. He opened the file. Of course, there wasn't. Of course, he knew it. He had made himself the security officer on this case.

Oh, they had discussed it in conference and the consensus was that this wasn't the time for full surveillance, that it would be counterproductive because Lazlo was known to be egocentric and very reactive. But if they had missed something important and the operation went wrong, he could certainly forget about a promotion to Chicago. He might very well find himself back in Newark in charge of supermarket security personnel.

Still, all was not doom and gloom.

If it turned out that Magdalena Lazlo was still making waves over this John Lincoln Beagle thing and she had just involved Joe Broz in it, it meant that this time Joe was in it really deep. And Mel Taylor had been waiting for that far longer than for some little wait to take a hit of nicotine or to ejaculate. Mel Taylor had been waiting for Joe Broz to step in shit again for twenty years.

T
HE
“
DON
'
T LOOK
”
story is one of the primal stories. God let Lot leave Sodom. God said, “Don't look back.” Lot's wife looked back and was turned to a pillar of salt. Orpheus went to hell to bring his wife back from the dead. Hades, god of the underworld said, “Don't look back until you're out.” Orpheus looked and he lost her. Pandora, the first woman on earth, had a box. She was warned to keep it closed, but she opened it and all the troubles of mankind came out. When a story is that pervasive and that basic, there is a reason. Every culture, in its collective wisdom, has a knowing that there are things that are not meant to be looked at. They appear, in the stories, as magic things or mythological things. But we all know that these stories are parables, teachings by example, which we hear in childhood, or at least in a childlike state of mind—learn at our mother's knee, so that we can take them as general rules to carry with us, to guide us through our lives, so that we may survive.

James Addison Baker III, secretary of state, was Texas-born and Princeton-educated. He knew his Bible and he was familiar with the classic pagan myths. A part of him responded to the atavistic warnings.

But Baker was a Rational Man in a rational mode. To the extent that he acknowledged the supernatural, the paranormal, the mythological, in public or in private—exclusive of Christianity, of course—it was derisively. As in “Poor Lee, the drugs took him over the edge,” or “Hey, a brain tumor—you understand. He gives me this envelope like it's Pandora's box and says, ‘Don't look!' ”

So of course he opened it upon stepping out of the sickroom door. This, at least, was efficient use of time. He still didn't have his cellular phone, a state paper to read, an aide by his side to consult with or give orders to. The walk to the elevators and the ride down was the perfect 420 seconds in which to fit in Lee Atwater's last memo, a dying man's attempt to influence events from beyond the grave.

He read, at first, in silence.

James Baker was, and had been for a long, long time, a public man and automatically maintained a severe censorship over the most casual public utterances. It has been said that “Baker is incapable of expressing passion.” That “when you sit across from Baker, it is like looking at a length of black silk . . . stillness . . . occasionally . . . a rather wintry smile. He controls the conversation with perfect sentences, perfect paragraphs, perfect pages.”
⁶

He pushed the elevator button while still reading. When the elevator arrived and the doors hissed open, he stepped inside without looking up. He was aware that he was not alone. A green-gowned orderly and a patient on a rolling bed were there, as well as whatever surveillance and security systems were operating. And still he said, “Jesus
fucking
Christ.” It was sotto voce, but definitely audible. “Atwater's fucking in-fucking-sane,” he said.

Then he said, but not aloud, This is one piece of paper that must never, ever see the light of day. This must be destroyed. He was right. All the walls that separated reasonable conduct from freedom to think, meaningful conduct from irrelevant actions, dangerous speaking versus necessary speculation, private versus public, had been breached. The military, for example, spent a lot of time producing “what if” scenarios. What do we do if “there is a Russian counter-counterrevolution and they launch missiles at Moldova, Ukraine, and Berlin”? If “there is violent civil unrest in the United States”? If “China goes to war with Japan”? Anyone with a grain of sense would consider that to be sensible speculation so that when the unthinkable does happen there is some sort of plan. But no! When one of those papers was leaked by some asshole
liberal do-goodie, the media reacted as if the president was personally planning to open concentration camps to detain everyone who hadn't voted for Richard Nixon back in 1968. When a man in power told a dirty joke or stuck his dick in the box of some foxy Pandora or expressed his exasperation with some person or group in ethnic terms, that was material that could destroy a career, even an entire regime. Especially if the other side had a Lee Atwater who knew how to use it. This memo, or whatever it should be called, was pure madness. To admit that anyone in this administration had ever even had the thoughts that Atwater had written down would destroy them all.

Nevertheless, James Baker did not burn it, or tear it into tiny pieces and eat them, or head for the nearest shredder. He put the memo in his pocket. And kept it.

 

 

 

⁶
Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman,
The Fabulous Bush & Baker Boys, New York Times Magazine,
5/6/90.

M
AGGIE LIVES ON
the beach. In Trancas, just up from Malibu. I live in Sherman Oaks. They're both in America. That's a joke.

I got a visual for you. Me in my three rooms—bedroom, bathroom, and the room that's everything else—packing. Two large suitcases. Because I'm moving to Maggie's. I don't know what exactly I'm in for, so I overpack. I hesitate over the guns. But for the same reason I pack my good suit and my swimming trunks, I take the Glock 17 with a shoulder holster, a Star 9-mm with an ankle holster and the little Beretta 92 that I can fit into a holster at the small of my back. All of them take 9-mm ammunition.

I take my fiber-case kits. The company recommends that we bring them on assignment whenever possible. There are three standard kits. The DS—defense system—includes: the CMS-3, which detects RF bugs, carrier current, transmitters; the DL-1000, that's a hand-held, take-anywhere bug detector, a hand-held weapons detector, telephone-line tracing set; and a telephone scrambler. Kit 2 contains more active systems, “for those times when it's time to do it to them before they do it to you.” An EAR-200—you can listen through walls; a long-distance parabolic microphone; a vehicle-tracking device. Computer software to block access to your PC. A remote car starter—for the truly security-conscious; hey, there are people who need them, believe me. A Minox infrared camera with infrared flash; miniature microphones,
transmitters, and recorders. The third kit has a stun gun, a stun baton, body armor briefcase inserts, and various mace systems.