THE OVERTON WINDOW (6 page)

The room was still again, and he let it stay that way for a while.

“Now,” Arthur Gardner said, his voice just above a whisper, “while the tide is in our favor—come with me. You can still save yourselves, and in so doing, you can help us build a whole new world upon the ashes of the old.”

CHAPTER 4
 

Noah stopped in the middle of the main hallway and stood there for a while, his head full of unfinished thoughts and that troubling fogginess you feel only when you’ve forgotten where you’re going, and why.

That meeting was still going on, but without him. His father had called a break and passed him a note with a list of phone numbers and a few bullet points of instructions—one last errand to perform before he could leave for the weekend. These were apparently VIPs to be invited for the after-hours portion of the presentation, provided the first part had gone as hoped. Evidently it had.

This task he’d been given had started out strange, and then one by one the calls had only gotten stranger.

There were no names, only numbers. Each of the calls was answered before the second ring, not by a service but by a personal assistant. Every one of those phones was professionally attended after business hours on a Friday night, and probably twenty-four hours a day by the sound of it. That seemed oddly extravagant, but maybe it wasn’t so unusual considering the circles in which his father was known to travel.

There’d been audible indications of a scrambler during at least four
of the brief conversations, and some sort of voice-alteration gizmo on one of them. Everyone had seemed extremely wary of revealing any information about the identity of the person associated with each number, but the last one hadn’t been quite careful enough.

Noah had caught a last name spoken in the background during this final call. It was a Manhattan number, a 212 area code, and the name he’d heard was an uncommon one. He’d also seen it in the newspaper earlier in the day. That call had been to the private line of the most likely nominee for the next U.S. Treasury secretary, assuming the election went as forecast.

This man was also the current president of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve. He and twenty or so others of comparable status were apparently now dropping everything and coming here, bound for a conference room where Noah’s father was waiting with the previous attendees.

He walked to the southeast corner suite and keyed himself into the private kitchen used to prepare his father’s meals on those days he was in town. The room was all tile and polished granite and stainless steel, larger than most of the executive offices and equipped for Arthur Gardner’s personal chef.

Noah flipped on the blower over the range, lit the cooktop in back, and followed the final instruction on his list of things to do.

Destroy this paper; be certain to watch it burn.

CHAPTER 5
 

His errand complete, Noah resumed his drift through the halls. It was hard to say how much time had passed since he’d been ordered out of the remainder of that meeting. No clocks were allowed on the walls or the wrists at Doyle & Merchant.

It was one of the many quirks meant to remind everyone that this wasn’t just another workplace. Over the decades this office had morphed into a science-fair diorama of the inside of the old man’s brain, furnished with everything he liked and nothing that he didn’t. Sometimes these oddities arose from an impulse or an outburst, other times from long deliberation, but once King Arthur had passed final judgment on a thing he never, ever changed his mind. The clock business happened a few years before Noah was born.

In 1978 an account executive had checked her watch during Arthur Gardner’s heartwarming remarks at the company Christmas party. She’d looked up when the room got quiet and had seen in Noah’s father’s eyes what time it really was: time for her to find another job, in another city, in another industry. By the following Monday the unwritten no-timepiece rule was in full and permanent effect. It was only by His grace
that windows were still tolerated, though access to any view of the outside world was strictly confined to the executive offices.

Noah resumed his stroll and took a meandering right turn, still without a clear destination. There wasn’t a soul in the place, though some would say that in the PR business that phrase always applies.

This particular corridor was the company’s walk-through résumé, a gallery of framed and mounted achievements, past to present. Press clippings, puff pieces, planted news items and advertorials, slick, crafted cover stories dating back to the 1950s, digitized video highlights running silently in their flat-screen displays. It was a hall of fame unparalleled in the industry and the envy of all competitors.

No trophy case, though; you’d never see a flashy award show for outstanding PR campaigns, God no, not for the serious stuff. It’s the first rule, and one of the only: The best work is never even noticed. If the public ever sees your hand in it, you failed.

Near the beginning of the walk were the relatively small potatoes: crazy Pet Rock-style fads that had inexplicably swept the country, the yearly conjuring of must-have Christmas toys (murders had been committed for a spot in line to buy some of these), a series of manufactured boy bands and teen pop music stars, most of whom could neither carry a tune nor play an instrument. On a dare, Noah’s father had once boasted that he could transform some of the century’s most brutal killers into fashion statements among the peace-loving American counterculture. And he’d done it; here were pictures of clueless college students, rock stars, and Hollywood icons proudly wearing T-shirts featuring the romanticized images of Chairman Mao and Che Guevara.

Last in this section were a few recently developed pharmaceuticals that had required some imaginative new diseases to match them. Drugs weren’t so very different from other products; it was all just a matter of creating the need. If you hear about restless-leg syndrome often enough, one day soon you might start to believe that you’ve got it. Cha-ching; another job well done.

Farther along, just past Big Tobacco, was a small exhibit devoted to the poster-child client in the world of public relations: the lottery. Fun fact: as a naïve youngster during a rare family chat at the Gardner dinner table, Noah had come up with the tagline displayed in this frame. It had been the first time he’d ever earned a pat on the head from the old man:
You can’t win if you don’t play.
Sure, kid. And you can’t fly if you don’t flap your arms.

No other product could demonstrate the essence of their work as perfectly as the lottery. The ads and jingles might remind all the suckers to play, but it was the PR hocus-pocus that kept them believing in the impossible, year after year. A fifth-grade math student could seemingly blow the lid off the whole scam: to reach even a fifty-fifty chance of winning you’d have to buy a hundred million Powerball tickets. Everybody
knows
that, but still they dream on. Take their money and give them nothing but a scrap of paper and disappointment in return, and then— and this is the key—make them line up every week to do it again. If you can pull that much wool over the eyes of the public and still sleep at night, you’ve got a long and rewarding career ahead of you.

Each of these PR triumphs represented a defeat for someone else, of course. That was simply the nature of the business, of all business really. The whole concept of winning requires that others lose, and sometimes they lose everything. That’s just the way it had to be. A person could waste his whole life trying to work out the right and wrong of it all.

Case in point: Noah had a friend in college, not a close friend, but a self-described bleeding-heart lefty tree-hugging do-gooder friend who’d gone to work for an African aid organization after graduation. She’d kept in touch only casually, but her last sad letter had been one for the scrapbook. It turned out that after all the fund-raising and banquets and concerts and phone banks, all the food and clothing and medical supplies they’d shipped over had been instantly hijacked and sold on the black market, either by the corrupt provisional government, the corrupt rebel militias, or both. Most of the proceeds bought a Viking V58 cruiser
for the yacht-deprived son of a parliament member. The rest of the money went for weapons and ammunition. That arsenal, in turn, fueled a series of sectarian genocidal massacres targeting the very starving men, women, and children whom the aid was meant for.

Back in his younger days, Noah had been quick to snatch a moral from this story: You can’t fix everything, and maybe you can’t fix anything at all. It’s all too big, and too broken. So don’t rock the boat, kid. Just count your blessings, keep your head down, and play the lucky hand that’s been dealt to you. This had come as a welcome vindication for a young man who’d given up early on his own high ideals and drifted into the safe though stormy harbor of his father’s business. It was a comforting answer, so long as you didn’t think too hard about the questions.

And what had that woman said today?
All you PR people do is lie for a living.

That’s right, sweetheart. Well, Miss Holier-than-thou, to paraphrase the artful response of a prominent client of the firm, I guess that all depends on what the definition of
lie
is, now doesn’t it? And while you’re looking that up in the dictionary under L, run your uppity little finger down the column to the last word of your indictment:
living.
We all have to make one, and unless I’m mistaken, you and I both get paid with the same dirty money. The difference is, one of us isn’t kidding himself.

By now he’d arrived at an alcove that showcased the truly world-class events and power players, political and otherwise, that the company had helped to invent.

A number of U.S. presidents were on display here, a nearly unbroken succession from the present and upcoming administrations all the way back to JFK. To hear the old man tell of the only two holdouts, Jimmy Carter had been too high-and-mighty to accept this sort of assistance, and Nixon had been too cheap. Republican or Democrat, it didn’t matter; to the realists of modern politics, ideology was just another interchangeable means to an end.

Noah was nearly to the end of the hall when a small, unassuming case study caught his attention. There was no title or description on this one, just a silent running video, the testimony before Congress of a volunteer nurse named Nayirah al-Sabah. She was the fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl whose tearful story of infants being thrown from their incubators by Iraqi soldiers became a podium-pounding rallying cry in the final run-up to the 1991 Gulf War.

Undeniably moving, highly effective, and entirely fictional.

The client for this one had been a thinly veiled pro-invasion front group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait. The girl wasn’t a nurse at all; she was the photogenic daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The testimony had been written, produced, and directed by Arthur Isaiah Gardner, the distinguished gentleman sitting just behind her in the video.

A dull headache had begun to pound at his temple, and Noah abruptly remembered where he’d been meaning to go: the bulletin board in the break room. He had to grab the address of that meeting of flag-waving wackos, and then finish his conversation with an attractive but naïve young woman who might need to be straightened out on a thing or two.

CHAPTER 6