The Fool's Run

late, saw me working, and tiptoed away. Much later, I went to bed and lay staring at the ceiling. By four in the morning, I’d decided there were no options. We had to get into the programming level of the computer. We had to crack another house.
     
    AT BREAKFAST, LUELLEN rambled on, sore, about the play they’d seen the night before. It concerned a street gang. The single scene was set in a basement, where the gang was waiting for a shipment of pistols.
    “It was like one of those World War Two movies, where there’s a Jew and a black guy and an Italian and the coward and this cool, white guy who’s the hero. You know, one of everything,” LuEllen said. “That’s what this gang was like. But I know gang punks. I went to school with them. You don’t find any Jews and blacks and whites together. You hang out with a white gang and it’s nigger-this and nigger-that. If a Jew comes along it’s fuckin’ kike. In real life, these guys are assholes.”
    “It was supposed to be allegorical,” Dace said dryly.
    “Right. What really happened was, the guy who wrote it had his head up his ass.” LuEllen trailed off and peered at me. “Why so glum? Something we should know about?”
    “We have to hit the systems programmer’s place,” I said. “The head man’s. There’s no way around it.”
    “You knew we might.” She was leaning on the refrigerator, munching a bowl of dry Honey-Nut Cheerios. The play was forgotten. “When do you want to do it?”
    “We can cruise by this afternoon, see how it looks.”
    “Is this the last one?” Dace asked.
    “Yeah. If he’s got the codes. And he should.”
    “We’re pushing our luck.”
    “I know. I sweat blood every time,” I said.
    While LuEllen and I had been scouting the homes of Whitemark employees, and hit the first two, Dace had worked out the tactics of the propaganda attack. After breakfast he produced a yellow legal pad with a list of notes, and outlined the plan.
    “When you get the computer operation going, we’ll start leaking stories about their production and design troubles. We’ll get that out to the technical press. It’ll scare the brass over at the Pentagon. They’ve been burned too often—they’re gun-shy about design problems.
    “But most newspaper and TV reporters don’t care about that stuff. Whitemark might be able to sweep the whole thing under the rug. If we really want to nail them, we need raw meat. Corruption. If you tell a Post reporter that there’s a ten-million-dollar cost overrun on a control circuit for a fighter plane, and anyway, the circuit doesn’t even work, he’ll say, ‘So what’s new?’ But if you tell him the company president spent ten thousand on broads and booze for a couple of generals and you’ve got the pictures to prove it, he’ll camp out on your doorstep.”
    “So where do we get the pictures?” LuEllen asked.
    “We could make them up,” Dace said mildly.
    “Frame them?”
    He nodded. “Yeah. Frame them.” He looked sanguine about the prospect, sipping tea and watching us.
    “Sounds risky,” I said.
    “There are advantages, too. If we frame them we can make the corruption as spectacular as we want, and we don’t have to waste time looking for it. We can go in and out fast. Plant the documents, create the backup and supporting material, and call the papers. The biggest problem we’ll have is getting somebody to listen to us.”
    Washington is overrun with crazies. The city desk receptionists at the major newspapers and television stations dealt with a dozen screwballs a day, by telephone and in person. There were letters from a dozen more. Some threatened to wipe out the Zionists, some the Arabs. Some reported the deleterious effects of fluoride on the nation’s testicles. Others could prove that AIDS was a deliberate plot by the Russians, the Chinese, the gays, the blacks, the CIA, or the League of Women Voters, take your pick. Several hundred people knew of the island where a brain-damaged JFK was still living, sometimes with Elvis.
    “If we can find or create something good enough, I can handle it. I can get us in, but it has to be good,” he said. “Once we get in, the media will stay with it, especially if they get the credit. A big defense contractor paying off the generals, and caught in the act by a vigilant press? That’s good stuff.”
    “What about the poor assholes who supposedly took the bribes? I mean, we could be killing these people,” LuEllen said.