Steve Martini - Double Tap

“They fired your ass and you’re facing a murder charge,” Harry points out. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“Yeah. You’re right.”

“So what did you hear?” says Harry.

“About IFS? That’s all they talked about. Information for Security. From what I gather, it was huge. Biggest project they had. Every time something broke in the press, some committee in Congress started cryin’ over privacy rights and people at Isotenics would all start filling sandbags and barricading the doors. They were busy stiffing two congressional investigating committees. I mean, you could hear them talking about it on the phones.”

“So you knew they were writing the software?”

He nods. “Sure. You hear things. Little bits here and there. You’re driving a car and they’re in the back on the cell phone, you can’t help but hear.”

“Do you know what the software is, how it works?”

He shakes his head. “Seen the stuff in the newspaper, that’s all. I’d read the stories ‘cuz I knew there was a connection. But other than that, when it comes to computers, I’m a man from Mars.”

“Did you ever meet any of the people involved in the program from the government side?” I ask.

“It’s possible. They had us pick up people at the airport from time to time. A few times we went out to the base at Miramar and picked up some uniforms coming in on military flights. Drove them out to Software City for meetings. But all you got was a name. They never told us what they were working on. There was one guy, though. I do remember him and his name did pop up on the program you’re talking about.”

“Who was that?”

“Retired general. Name of Gerald Satz. I’d seen his name in the papers. According to the articles, he was in charge of this IFS thing. From what I read he was hired as a civilian consultant. Thought it was sort of a strange selection myself. You know who the guy is?”

I nod. Gerald Satz, aka “Poster Boy for Perjury,” according to liberals in Congress; a stand-up warrior and top-notch soldier, according to his fans.

“I knew the name,” says Ruiz, “‘cuz I remembered hearing about him when I was in the Army and reading about it in the paper. According to what I heard, he had a long history working with spooks, intel agencies, black-bag shit. Satz had contacts buried in the bowels of governments on every continent. A man knows where the bodies are buried because he put half of them there. And he knows how to dig them up whenever it serves his purposes, or maybe the purposes of his prince. Satz is what some people might call a true believer.

“Some years back-I was a kid, so I don’t know the details-Congress got caught screwing with Satz’s constitutional rights,” Ruiz continues. “A committee took his testimony under oath. When they couldn’t get him on perjury, they tried to use his own testimony to indict him. The courts said they couldn’t do it.”

“It’s called use immunity,” I tell him. “You looked this up and read about it?”

He nods. “When one of our people was assigned to go pick him up at the airport. The man was coming to a meeting at Isotenics. I got curious and checked his history online. Sounds like maybe he beat the charges on technical grounds.”

“Suppose you could call that technical,” says Harry. “But from where I’m usually sitting, I’d call it a good result.” My partner has a problem with a political system that gives members of Congress a monopoly on lying.

“Still, it ruined his career. Forced him out of the military and still he’s hanging around. That’s what I call survival. Man sounds like a tough nut to crack. But what I found interesting is the fact that Satz and Chapman went back a long way.”

Harry raises an eyebrow and looks up from his notepad.

“Back twenty years ago, Madelyn came out of nowhere. Graduated from a small school in the Midwest with a degree in computer engineering and software design. She took a job working as a GS-3 for the government in Washington and three years later she was a technical adviser on the White House staff.” Ruiz looks at me and winks.

“Where I come from, they call that upward mobility,” says Harry.

“Where I come from that kind of upward mobility usually requires connections,” I say.

“Bingo,” says Ruiz. “General Gerald Satz. From the little bit I heard and saw, he was the key.”

“Did you ever meet him? Satz, I mean.”

“Heard about him a lot. He was what you might call a legend. Had a reputation for loyalty, not that that’s a vice. But in his case it bordered on fanatical. People convicted of crimes, if they were doing something everybody knew was illegal, but to Satz and others it was necessary, he’d stand up for them. Do it publicly. All the rest of the brass would be ducking for cover. Satz would be right there. It made him popular among the enlisted men, the NCOs. I was impressed when I first heard Madelyn mention his name.”

“How old is this guy?” says Harry.

“Satz? I don’t know. Probably early sixties. Don’t get the wrong idea: I don’t think there was anything physical going on between them. From what I know, it was more in the nature of what you would call paternal guidance. She worked for him. Did whatever he asked, long hours, never complained. In return he introduced her around. Madelyn did the rest.

“If you knew her, which of course you didn’t, you’d come to understand that with Madelyn, all it took was an opening, a crack in the door, and she was in. She had a natural talent for self-promotion. If you had a vital project, lives depending on it, and you were looking for somebody to put in a forty-hour workday to get it done before men died, Madelyn was your cookie. She could be efficient to the point of obsession.”

“Sounds like you knew her pretty well,” says Harry.

“Nobody knew Madelyn. Not really. Not if you mean the heaving, heaping boiler-stoked-with-white-hot-coals, engine-of-ambition Madelyn. And that’s what she was ninety-eight percent of the time.”

“And the other two percent?” I ask.

He looks at me but doesn’t respond.

“Where did you get all this information, the history on her and Satz?” I ask.

“Part of it came from Madelyn. Partly, bits and pieces, what I heard.”

“Go on.”

“The rest,” he explains, “requires a bit of faith. I don’t have any solid information. You sort of have to piece things together. Toward the end Madelyn was scared. Not all the time, mind you, but at times. Something was happening. I don’t know the details. But I do know that she and Satz had some kind of a falling-out. A serious disagreement. I don’t know what it was about, but it’s not a long leap to assume that it had something to do with this IFS thing, Information for Security. She was angry, she was pissed, but most of all she was scared. Madelyn was used to getting her way. But something had gone wrong.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. But from what I saw and heard, she was in a box and was having trouble finding her way out. Satz asked her to do him a personal favor. She told him she couldn’t do it.”

“She told you this?”

“Not in so many words. But I’m fairly certain.”

“What kind of favor?” Harry presses.

“I’m not sure. It had something to do with business. I assumed it had to do with IFS. The newspapers were full of it at the time. The news out of Washington was that Congress was going to kill the program unless they could find some fix for privacy issues. They don’t care if a few hundred soldiers get killed hunting. From what I heard, whatever it was that Satz wanted her to do, there were risks-more than she wanted to take-and their relationship, Chapman and Satz’s, had changed. She wasn’t some young staffer at the Pentagon anymore. Madelyn was big business, with a multibillion-dollar stake, and if I had to guess, given the sweat she was in, whatever Satz was asking her to do was threatening to put all that in jeopardy.”