Stephen Leather - The Long shot

The rest of the guests arrived shortly afterwards: the owner of a local television station and his trophy wife, a white-haired oil man from Texas and a companion young enough to be his granddaughter, and a lawyer from Phoenix who, apart from Howard, was the only one there with a wife close to his own age.

Dinner, as always, was perfect, cooked by Clayton’s personal chef and served in the dining room by Jarvis and two maids in black and white uniforms. On the walls were several of Clayton’s Navajo rugs, some of them more than a hundred years old. The best of Clayton’s collection was on loan to Phoenix’s Heard Museum and the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. Clayton took great delight in telling his dinner guests how both museums had recently asked him to lend them more. With the top quality rugs worth upwards of $75,000, Howard reckoned that the industrialist was as interested in their investment potential as he was in their artistic quality.

Clayton loved Maine lobster and he took obvious pride in telling his guests that the crustaceans had been flown in from the East Coast on his private jet that morning.

Over coffee the conversation turned to a recent court case where a serial killer had used a camcorder to record the gruesome deaths of his victims and had then sent the tapes to local television stations. Several had refused to show the grisly tapes, but others, including the station owned by the man at Clayton’s table, had aired them. When the subject came up, Clayton smiled and nodded at Howard as if to reassure him that he knew the tape of the snipers was to be treated as confidential.

The lawyer suggested that the tapes were evidence of a crime and as such shouldn’t be made public as they could prejudice a later trial, an argument which Howard considered valid.

Clayton screwed up his napkin and dropped it on the table in front of him. He nodded fiercely. “This is the video age, and I’m not talking about the rubbish they show on MTV. There are about twenty million camcorders in this country. We’re getting to the stage now where there’s a camcorder on every street corner. Every time there’s a major disaster the camcorders get there first, we’re seeing them at crime scenes, plane crashes, car crashes, street fights. They’re being admitted in courts as evidence and used in insurance claims, but no-one has really thought through the ramifications of what it means.”

He lifted his wine glass to his lips and sipped. No-one interrupted. Clayton liked to sit and pontificate after a good meal, and his guests knew better than to try to spoil his enjoyment. Clayton slowly put the glass back on the starched cloth and gently ran his finger around the rim. He fixed his eyes on the lawyer.

“Eyewitnesses can be cross-examined and their veracity can be challenged, and as you and Cole know, no two witnesses ever see the same thing. That’s all going to change. Before long everything that happens in public is going to be recorded on tape, and the video recording will take precedence over all other forms of eyewitness evidence. It started during the LA riots in 1992 and the wave of prosecutions which followed. The camcorder is the silent witness. If you can show a jury a video, they’ll believe that over everything else. It’s the old truism: a picture is worth a thousand words. When Kennedy was shot, there was one black and white film of it, lousy quality and taken well away from the event. When Reagan took a bullet there was a videocamera there to record it. The next time they try to hit a President, there’ll be half a dozen camcorders there, and that’s not including the networks’ Death Watch cameras. Imagine what that’ll mean. Imagine what the Warren Report would have looked like if there had been half a dozen camcorders close to the motorcade in Dallas. Cover-ups become impossible. That’s what the video age means. The age of truth.”

He looked at Howard as if to make sure that he was listening. “But tapes can be altered, events can be faked,” he continued. “And the Government is only now beginning to realise the inherent problems in allowing juries to believe what they see. We’re one of several companies working on analysis of video tape, both in terms of improving the quality of recordings and in determining their fidelity.”

Howard began to realise that there were other uses for the technology Theodore Clayton was developing. He knew how keen the CIA and FBI would be to use camcorders to identify trouble makers at civil rights demonstrations, and there were certain to be those in the darker corners of the Pentagon who’d love to be able to use phony videotapes in all sorts of covert operations. Howard knew how easy it would be to blackmail someone who was a threat to Government interests, or how the right sort of tapes could be used to usurp an uncooperative head of state. The hi-tech manipulation of videotape would work both ways: in the hands of the unscrupulous it could become the greatest propaganda weapon of all time. It was already happening to a small extent in advertising, with Coca-Cola using images of long-dead Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and Louis Armstrong to sell their products. It wasn’t too much of a leap to manipulate news broadcasts. Howard remembered the black and white videos he’d seen of ‘smart bombs’ seeking their targets in the Gulf War, released to the television stations to show how well US technology was performing. True or fake? Howard had no way of knowing, and nor did the viewers. But everyone believed what they saw. Clayton was predicting not an era of truth, but a time of deception and lies, when no-one would be able to trust the evidence of their own eyes.

“So what are you saying, Ted?” asked the lawyer. “Are you saying that anything that’s captured on tape should be in the public domain?”

“I think that’s happening already,” said Clayton. “The most popular shows on television are the so-called reality shows, the ones that follow around police and rescue workers doing their jobs, showing them making arrests and pulling victims out of car wrecks. The public can’t get enough of them.”

“Maybe the public needs to be protected from its blood lust,” said Howard quietly.

“And who’ll be the judges of what they should see?” asked Clayton. “Who’ll be the censors? The FBI? You want to go back to the Hoover days?” He raised his hand to silence Howard before he could reply. Theodore Clayton preferred to answer his own questions. “No, the floodgates have been opened, I’m afraid. There’s no going back.”

“And what lies ahead?” asked the television producer.

Clayton grinned. “Ah, Ross, if I only knew. If only I knew.” The two maids began clearing the table and Jarvis carried a large gold-inlaid mahogany box over to Clayton. It was his deluxe Trivial Pursuit set, a game he loved with a passion and which he insisted his guests play after wining and dining them. “Everyone ready for a game?” Clayton asked cheerfully.

“Terrific,” said Howard as Clayton lifted the lid of the box and took out the board. Lisa kicked him under the table, but not too hard. She knew how much he loathed game-playing.

Kelly Armstrong sashayed into Howard’s office unable to control her excitement. Howard was sipping a cup of hot coffee and he put it down on his desk and looked at her with an amused smile on his face. He was still feeling pleased with himself after his and Lisa’s victory at Trivial Pursuit the previous evening. It was the first time Clayton and his wife had ever lost, and Howard had been unable to stop grinning all the way home. He was still smiling when he woke up that morning. It would take a lot to spoil his day. “Yes, Kelly, what is it?” he asked.

“I’ve found the firms that hired the cars!” she gushed. “Two firms, one leased a blue Chrysler Imperial three days before the plane was shot down, another leased a white Imperial two days before. Both cars have been returned.”