Black Tide (32 page)

"Quite," I said, trying to remember the name of the French premier during the Vichy regime. Trent smiled and walked away, looking like he moonlighted as a model for
GQ
. Coming from one of the richest families on Long Island, he had decided to dedicate his work to his nation instead of the family business. A rare bird. I don't know if he realized that his sense of devotion and loyalty to his country were now considered an anachronism by Those in the Know. Then I shrugged and wrote in "Laval."

About ten minutes later George Walker called me into his office and shut the door and said, "Cole, you're one of our best, which is why I'm directed to give you wide latitude, but why do you insist on making my job difficult? Why do you insult the visitors who come here and make the whole section look bad?"

At the time George Walker was going bald toward the front of his head, and when he was upset, the whole front dome of his skull glowed a dull red, like a heated doorknob.

I shrugged. "I don't know, George. I guess I have an attitude problem toward rich yahoos who come in here because they're connected. They make a mess of things for a year or so before getting bored and moving on, leaving the rest of us here to clean up after them."

George shook his head. "That's not an attitude that's going to get you anywhere, Cole. Not at all."

I winked at him, which I think disturbed him almost as much as my Coke and fries crack. "George, let's take a page from our work and look what's before us. You and I and everybody else here didn't quite fit in, and we've been classified as oddballs. That's why we're here, in the Marginal Issues Section."

"That's not its title," he snapped. "We're the Room 112 Subgroup. "

"George, you're not following procedures. You're letting your emotions cloud your analysis. This is the Marginal Issues Section, and that's who we are and what we do. The only career path for me is your office, and I certainly don't want your job."

Well, that comment didn't sit well, and George started moving papers left and right on his desk, and he spoke low to me and said, "Cole, I'm doing everything possible to get out of this section, and if you want to stay here, fine. But I'm not."

I left and looked back through the glass of the door. His head was bowed over his work and the color was quite red. Poor George. He had a plan to move on up, and part of that plan, I later learned, was treatments to restore hair to his bald spot. He had gone through one treatment before he and the rest of the section were killed.

That memory came back to me as I sat on a stone bench in the rear yard of Cameron Briggs's house and watched him at play on his putting green, knocking little golf balls into a series of holes in a lawn that was so perfect and smooth it made the grass out front look like it belonged to a wild Nebraskan prairie. This was the first time I had ever been up close to a putting green, and was true, the balls did make a little rattling echo each time they went into the hole. As I watched Briggs at work, I was reminded of that Assistant SecDef, for Briggs was a lot like him. Not in physique or dress --- Cameron was about my height (six feet) and ten years older, with short salt-and-pepper hair, but as in better shape than me and had a slim muscularity that spoke of determined hours in a health club. No, it wasn't the shape that reminded me of that ex-hamburger maven turned DoD official. It was the attitude of being above it all so much in terms of class and money that nothing mattered. I guessed it was the self-confidence that came to somebody when they had money, enough money to buy anything: handsome looks, an oceanfront home worth millions of dollars or a fancy job in the Pentagon.

I got a taste of that self-confidence not more than fifteen minutes ago, when he had answered the door and, after listening my lying spiel, invited me in for a drink and conversation. While making my drink in a room that had a bar that would not look out of place at the Lafayette House, he had said, "You'll note that there's nobody here tonight. Just a week ago I got sick of them just hanging around, and I gave them all --- the cook, gardener and maid --- two weeks off. Gad. Sometimes you just want be alone, away from people, especially people that you support, that just keep on looking for more money."

By now my jacket was off and I was drinking a weak gin and tonic. I was bowing a bit to the surroundings, for I had decided my usual Molson Golden Ale wouldn't quite fit in with the fine Mr. Cameron Briggs and his summer cottage. My reporter's notebook was in my lap and Briggs kept up a running commentary as he stroked each golf ball into a hole in the putting green.

"Hmm," he said, his voice firm and low, like that of a former radio announcer. "
Shoreline
is doing a story about the residents of the seacoast and their reaction to the
Petro Star
spill. Hmmm."

The ball popped away from his putter and in a second or two made that satisfying clatter into the hole. He nodded and moved. The putting green was next to a stone patio that butted up against the house, which had high, elegant-looking glass doors leading inside. There were other stone benches and a lot of shrubbery, and more indirect lighting from small lampposts set into the ground. There were no insects buzzing around, no flies, sand fleas or mosquitoes. I guess it is true, the rich are different from you and me, and the reason this night was that they could afford superb insect eradication.

Briggs popped another ball in. He looked up at me. "Suppose there is no reaction, Mr. Cole? Does that pose a problem for your story?" I sipped at my drink and said, "No, it doesn't pose a problem for the story, but it does pose a question. Why the lack of reaction?"

"Hmmm," he said, looking down at the ball with a firm look of attention. "That's a fair question, deserving of a fair answer."

Another ball went down under the rapid fire of Cameron Briggs, and he was finished. He made a grasping motion with the club that suggested some taste of triumph, then sat down across from me on another bench and held his putter with both hands, twirling it back and forth, almost like a baton.

He said, "My answer, I guess, is that I didn't speak quite clearly. It wasn't a lack of reaction, but a lack of the expected reaction. I'm sure you came here looking for the standard comment to plug into your standard story, about the standard outrage and how upset we all are about this tragic environmental disaster on these pristine shores. Bah. I may sound cold and heartless. I really don't care about that. The oil on those shores is the price we have to pay."

Briggs held the golf club still and moved forward, leaning into the club and almost using it as something to prop him up. “We live in an advanced, technological and extremely complex society, Mr. Cole, and if there's more than a few thousand people out there who realize how complex it really is, I'd be surprised.  You know, I made some very bitter enemies out there, back in the Eighties, when the Cold War seemed to be getting warmer. Some collection of do-gooders came by, wanting to get my name on a resolution for a nuclear freeze or some numb-nut petition, and I told them it was a waste of time. I told them that there would never be a nuclear war. Never. They couldn't believe me when I d that, and they demanded proof. Do you know what my answer was?"

I looked into my drink for a moment. "Nuclear war would never come because it would unnecessarily deplete the customer base?"

He smiled at that one. "No, though that's amusing. No, I said there would never be a nuclear war because it wouldn't make sense. It was too expensive, too bulky and too blunt an instrument. I told them that if and when a war came, it would be simple and direct. In fact, I told them I could shatter this country in a week and all it would take would be less than ten million dollars and a hundred or so well-trained men. You know how I would do that, Mr. Cole?"

I decided he was looking for a more serious answer than my previous one, and I said, "Vulnerabilities. Choke points. Utility switching yards. Computer rooms. Some refineries, maybe a bridge or two."

Briggs nodded vigorously as I responded. "Exactly. My God, people don't realize how easy it would be." He swiveled and made a gesture to the north. "Up about an hour or so from here electrical substation in a remote part of the New Hampshire woodlands. At a party last summer, a Public Service of New Hampshire exec told me all it would take would be one man with a high-powered rifle and in twenty minutes this entire state would be in a blackout. That's just one man with a rifle. One man with an explosive charge in a computer room in New York City could take out the air traffic control system for the whole Northeast. Hell, you read about it all the time, Mr. Cole, how a computer chip burns out somewhere and the entire long-distance network for AT&T collapses. It wouldn't take much."

I doodled something in my notebook. "So do you have your hundred-man army ready, Mr. Briggs?"

He smiled again. "Hardly. But that's the point I make. More than 99 percent of the human populace stumble through their lives, not knowing --- and probably not caring --- about the elaborate juggling act that takes place every day to keep them alive. The gasoline trucks that slide into the neighborhood service station. The tractor-trailers that roll in and out of giant food stores. The pharmaceutical companies that make the necessary drugs and treatments. Such a juggling act the world has never known before, and it wouldn't take much to bring it all to a screeching halt. Can you imagine New York City if all the grocery trucks were to stop going in for a week? A month? Those fools told me that they prayed for no nuclear war, and I told them they should pray for no national truckers' strike. And while you're imagine no trucks moving across this country, imagine the impact of a national computer programmers' union, and what would happen if they sat home and didn't go to work."

Briggs got up and motioned to me to follow him, and since I was working, I did. We walked across the patio and through tall double glass doors and into the kitchen area, where I deposited my now empty glass. The kitchen had two enormous gas-fired stoves, side by side, and there was a walk-in cooler and freezer against a wall. Pots and pans of every possible size and shape hung from wooden beams overhead. If there is such a thing as kitchen envy, maybe I was feeling it about that moment.

From the kitchen we passed a formal dining room --- tall chairs grouped around a polished table that looked like it would cover a bowling alley --- and through other rooms that I soon gave up trying to give names to. There were paintings on the walls --- some nineteenth-century and some modern art --- along with a collection of statuary and several wood-and-glass display cases with cut crystal and china. Somehow we ended up in the white tiled front hall, and I followed Briggs as he pranced up a curving staircase, his leg muscles quite defined as he took the stairs two steps at a time. Through it all, he carried his golf club, and I was beginning to wonder if he slept with it.

On the second floor we went past closed doors that probably led to marble bathrooms or master bedrooms or a gymnasium, for all I knew, and then we were outside again, passing through another set of double glass doors, and we stood on a balcony that overlooked the wide front lawn. Iron grillwork served as railings and there were chairs and a round glass-topped table in one corner. From up here the view to the Atlantic was magnificent. I could see the lights of Porter off to the north and the warm glow of Tyler Beach and its adult and child playgrounds to the south.

"Look here, Mr. Cole." He finally gave the golf club a rest and leaned it against a railing as he stood there, arms folded. "The ocean. Some people see it as a playground, others see it as a fishery. And me? I see it as a highway, a liquid highway that needs no tolls or maintenance. A highway that brings commerce to and from this country, and makes it a world superpower. Look at Russia. Hundreds of years old and the poor bastards are still looking for a warm-water port.”

''And last month there was an accident out there, and you still say that the smell and the mess didn't bother you."

A motioned hand, as though an errant mosquito had dared cross over into these protected grounds. ''A nuisance. Nothing more."

I decided it was time for a hand grenade to be tossed his way. “What do you think should happen to the owners of the
Petro Star
?"

If there was a reaction, I missed it. Briggs pursed his lips a bit and said, “I’m sorry, but I was under the impression that the owners weren’t on the vessel that night, and that it was the crew’s fault the ship ran aground.  If anyone deserves punishment, they do.”

“But the owners were the ones that delayed repairs, hired a crew of inexperienced sailors and sent it up this coast with inadequate instrumentation.”

“Something for the courts to decide, I suppose.  Besides, it’s been months.  I’m sure that the beaches are returning to normal, and rather quickly.”

              “Did the smell hurt the fashions how?”

             
He turned and said, “Off the record, Mr. Cole, when those lovely old ladies are at my home, the only thing they can smell is money, either old or new, doesn’t make much difference.  I could have an open sewer pit in my backyard and they wouldn’t care.”

             
That was a sentence I’d remember for a while, and I said, “Some people would say that spill made a difference, though.  Birds and fish killed.  Tourist industry damaged.  Fishermen losing a month or two of work.”

             
“Insurance companies, Mr. Cole.  That’s why they exist, and they do quite well.”