CHAPTER 20
Before I could answer, Dee strode toward the exit. I tucked the badge in my pocket and hurried after. We were outside and heading down the sidewalk before I totally caught up.
“Um, so what's with the badge?” I asked.
“Oh come on, Barry, you don't really think the prof is just going to spill her guts to any random schmoes that walk in off the street, do you?”
“She might. Heck, she might welcome the chance to vent about it.”
“Or she might be very reluctant to talk considering everything she's already gone through and what it cost her,” Dee countered.
“Still... impersonating a federal agent? Isn't that a felony?”
Dee grinned as she looked sidelong at me. “Only if we get caught, and I've got contingencies planned if that happens. Everything is going to be fine.”
“I wish I had your confidence.”
Dee stopped walking and faced me. “Barry, don't worry. This is what I do. You can keep your badge hidden away. Hell, don't even speak if you don't want to, let me do all the talking. Just nod and look stern. Glower. You can glower right?”
I didn't answer, but my face must have shown my discomfort with the situation.
“Yes, exactly,” Dee exclaimed, “THAT is a glower.”
“Dee, if I don't need to talk, why did you even bring me?”
“It's more important that you listen. When the professor answers our questions, I need you to really listen to her. But if you do talk, don't call me Dee. I'm Agent Jillian Marston. She pulled out and flipped open her own badge and ID.
“This just seems... risky,” I stated.
“Risk can't be avoided,” she countered, “not in the hero business. We can reduce it, plan for it, but never completely eliminate it.” She continued walking as if this completely addressed my concerns and the matter was settled.
I walked with her, and we soon reached the campus. We entered the Applied Sciences and Technology building, climbed the stairs up to the third floor, and approached Professor Simonson's office. The door was open.
“Just follow my lead,” Dee whispered to me as she walked up and rapped on door jamb.
A middle aged woman sat at a desk that occupied most of the small office. She appeared to be grading papers. She didn't stop when Dee knocked but just said, “With you in a minute,” and continued marking up the page she was on. Dee and I waited silently until she finally looked up.
“Professor Simonson? I'm agent Marston,” Dee introduced herself, “We spoke on the phone last Thursday. This is my partner, Agent Gardner.” I nodded my head in greeting but said nothing. “I was hoping we could continue our conversation in person.”
A tired look settled over her, but the professor waved us into her office and motioned toward two threadbare chairs on the opposite side of her desk. As we settled down, she reached over and shoved her office door, letting it slam shut with surprising force. Then she sat silently for a moment, staring at the stack of papers on her desk. A muscle in her jaw twitched slightly. The silence stretched awkwardly, and I sensed that Dee was about to speak, but then the professor beat her to it.
“I would really rather just put all this behind me,” she said.
“I can certainly understand that,” Dee replied, “but as I mentioned on the phone, I think maybe you can help us with a related case.”
“On the phone you mentioned something about money laundering?”
“Yes. Of course I can't provide any details regarding an ongoing investigation, but let's just say new evidence has come up that lends credibility to some, um, allegations you made last year.”
“You mean about Siegleshust.” The professor's expression darkened as she said the name.
“I can't confirm that,” Dee said, though the corner of her mouth twitched up in a subtle smile that said otherwise. “I can tell you we are investigating a number of parties. Wealthy individuals involved in banking, international finance, and... the energy industry.”
Simonson nodded her head as if this confirmed her suspicions. “What do you need from me?”
“Background mostly. I've read the case file, but if you could walk me through the events of last year, tell us about your work at CalTech and the controversy surrounding it, that would be a big help.”
“I'm not so sure I can be much help. I mean, I was very vocal about this stuff at the time. I don't really have anything new to add.”
“You never know. Sometimes details are lost when things get boiled down into a written report. Sometimes innocuous details have new meaning when seen in the light of new context. Just tell the tail. Tell it like it's the first time. Like I don't know anything about it.”
“Well, how much do you know about the work I did at CalTech?” the professor asked.
“Climatology... something about ocean currents, right?”
“Yes. Specifically, I was studying thermohaline circulation. I wasn't directly studying anthropogenic climate change... global warming... but my research was often incorporated into larger models. I was cited on a fair number of papers that got more attention than my own. I laid the groundwork for some of the carbon feedback loop discoveries now making news.” There was a note of pride in her voice as she said this.
“Feedback loops... like from melting methane hydrates?” Dee prompted.
“Well, that's a potential one, yes, though it wasn't my initial focus. I was mainly examining how changing ocean currents might effect the larger climate... polar ice loss, albedo reduction, loss of permafrost. That sort of thing. It was an email from a colleague that got me onto the methane hydrate thing. He had been approached by this energy consortium to do a private study on the feasibility of hydrate mining but turned it down because of the NDA requirement... the Non-Disclosure Agreement. He offered it to me, but I rejected it for the same reason. I mean, its not really science if your have to keep the results secret, right?”
“Does that happen often,” Dee asked, “privately funded climate research?”
“No, not really. I mean, there are some supposed non-profits churning out the occasional privately funded paper, but their stuff usually doesn't stand up to peer review. But this wasn't a climate research study, not really. It was a feasibility study, more a cost benefit analysis that included an environmental impact assessment almost as an after-thought. That sort of thing isn't so unusual. Say you want to sink an oil well into some pristine slice of nature somewhere. Maybe you have to get approval from the EPA or the Department of Interior before you get your oil lease, and they want an environmental impact statement. You just shop that sucker around to a bunch of different 'scientists' under NDA, then just use the one that says what you want. If none of them are favorable, throw them all out and try again. With non-disclosure agreements, it's like those previous studies never happened. The government only ever sees what the company wants them to see.”
“That doesn't seem like it should be legal.”
“You're not alone in thinking that. There's been some effort to improve the laws. Make it a requirement that ALL the relevant research be disclosed. There's precedent in the pharmaceutical industry. Anyway, legal or not, I had to pass. I mean, it was tempting. The private sector pays way more that publicly funded research. But ultimately I couldn't risk the hit to my reputation.”
Dee raised an eyebrow. “Your reputation?”
“Yeah... take on too many of those privately funded 'studies', and your fellow scientists might begin to question your impartiality. For some, the money is too big a lure. They know what their clients want, and they know they'll get even more work, more money, if they play ball. I've seen a few otherwise good scientists go that route. Twist the data to fit the outcome the client wants. Of course peer review is a cold hearted bitch, and it inevitably destroys their reputation. After a while, the only work they can get is corporate scraps. I mean, even if you do the science straight, others might suspect you're on the take.
Better to just avoid it totally.
“So yeah, I passed on it. But they found someone to do it, because a few months later I stumbled across their so called research. I normally might have ignored it, but I just had to read it. I'd had a shot at this thing myself, so I was curious what someone else had done with it. I was barely past the abstract when I realized the thing was a train wreck. I mean, they only used a geologist for goodness sake! There was no interdisciplinary collaboration. They didn't even consider the hydrodynamics. They just assumed they could pump warm water onto the methane hydrate field without any effect on the larger ocean current system. I couldn't just let it lie. In my spare time I started working the numbers. I already had a computer model of deep ocean currents. My thermohaline work is all about temperature gradients and current migration. It was a natural fit. Not long into it, I began to see some alarming results. Large thermal migration. A big feedback loop. It was all very preliminary, but the numbers seemed to indicate rapid warming... like compressing two centuries of climate change into only three decades.” She sighed. “And then I published.”
“That was the paper that...” Dee seemed to be reaching for a diplomatic turn of phrase.
“Got me fired? Destroyed my career? Yes,” said Professor Simonson. “Oh, not right away mind you. At first it was well received. It was doing well under peer review. Even the press was was treating me nicely. Then that think tank got involved.
“The Freedom Birthright Foundation?” Dee asked.
“Yes, that's the one. Though actually, the harassment started before that. At first just angry emails from climate denier nut-jobs. Then a few articles on right wing web sites. Then I got a visit from this scary guy with no neck. Talked all polite but suggested I was letting my left wing tree hugging bias distort the science... said I was... what was the words he used? 'choosing a career limiting path'. Suggested I retract my paper.”
I looked at Dee. She gave me a knowing glance. We were thinking the same thing I think. This sounded a lot like The Mook. The polite intimidation was certainly out of the same play book.
“I laughed it all off,” Simonson continued, “I mean, I had the evidence on my side. The science. There was some weak attempts to attack my methodology in peer review, but it held up. And then those emails came out.”
The professor dropped her heads into her hands. For a moment I thought she might begin to sob, but then she rubbed her eyes and looked back up. She took a breath and let it out slowly.
“They lied.” Anger distorted her words into a near hiss. “The Freedom Birthright Foundation. I had the truth on my side, so they defeated me the only way they could... with lies. They made it seem like I had an agenda, like I was the one with bias. They were smart about it. They dummied up some fake emails, but they mixed it in with a bunch of real ones. They obviously got into the university email system at some point. Most of what they released were unaltered, but they faked just enough. A few false messages here and there. A few words altered. The university investigated, but somehow the email archives were accidentally deleted. Right. The evidence that would have exonerated me just 'accidentally' gets deleted. Of course they made even that work to their advantage. They implied the university deleted the email themselves to avoid a scandal.”
“And you are absolutely sure someone altered the email?” Dee asked.
“Absolutely. I still had some of the original messages on my laptop. I could see that they were different than the leaked ones. I tried to show the authorities, the university... but ultimately it didn't matter. Chain of custody and all that. I was the one under investigation, so they couldn't trust something on my laptop. That was when the university decided they just needed to cut their losses... cut me loose.” She lowered her head again and just stared at the stack of papers on her desk.
“That must have been difficult,” Dee suggested. Her voice was gentle. Sympathetic.
“Sure. But you know what the worst of it is? Now the science isn't getting done. It wasn't just me they discredited, it was the research. The journal pulled my paper. Nobody bothered to give it proper peer review after that. They pretty much just ignored it. I suppose nobody wanted to get too close... get mixed up in the same scandal. I would have welcomed someone shredding my work on its own merits. I would have gladly taken my lumps and gone back to the lab to clean up my mistakes. This is important. It deserves follow-up research. But now... I might never know if I was right.”
Dee sat silently for a moment. “I'm not so sure about that,” she finally replied, “I expect we'll all know... in about thirty years.”
Devious Origins Page 26
