Double Tap

by Steve Martini

  “You know, somebody told me that a year or so ago. But I didn’t believe them. I couldn’t believe you’d ever leave Capital City. But then I saw something in the paper on the plane on the way down. You’re involved in the case: what’s her name …” He lowers his voice, suddenly realizing. “Here …”

  “Madelyn Chapman.”

  “That’s the one—” he begins.

  “Yeah, I am,” I say, cutting him off before he can get further into it, given the fact that we are both standing in her former headquarters where all the walls have ears.

  “What brings you down here?” I change the subject.

  Nathan is a lawyer I once practiced with in the DA’s office in Capital City. That was more than twenty years ago. I have not seen or heard from him for more than a decade, though from the familiarity in his voice you would think that I had just stepped out for coffee. I once considered him an intimate, but that was before his rise to office, when all things political consumed him. Nathan is a member of the state legislature: after four terms in the assembly, he now sits in the senate, representing the old neighborhood where I once lived in Capital City.

  “Actually I get down here quite a bit, at least the last six months or so. Legislative business.

  “I’m surprised they actually let you in here. You are defending the guy—”

  “They may not be letting me in again,” I tell him. “Right now they’re probably reading our lips off one of the security cameras. And if my parking pass expired, they probably towed my car.”

  He laughs.

  “What does the legislature have going on that brings you here?”

  “Nothing as exciting as you do—at least, I hope not. Some redistricting stuff. Nothing major. What do you know about the company?” he says. “Maybe you could give me insights.”

  “Just what I hear. The computer gurus to government. What I read in the papers. Defense Department contracts.”

  “That’s what I heard. I came down last month for my first meeting with them and I’m still trying to catch up. Seems they’re the only game in town these days. You put out RFPs, bids for software, and nobody else shows up.” Nathan chairs one of the legislative committees doing business. “They used to come to us. Now Muhammad has to go to the mountain. Actually I don’t mind. Gets me out of the capitol. Place is the dregs these days. Not like you remember it, I’m sure.”

  “To tell you the truth, I never spent much time there.”

  “The turnover is awful. Friends are mostly gone,” he says. Most of Nathan’s friends—liberals from the old school, people who acted with a modest amount of reason before the partisans took over and started rolling live ordnance across the aisles in the capitol—are now gone, tapped out by term limits, unable to run for reelection. Some have migrated into lobbying jobs so that they can stay in Capital City, where they have put down roots. Others have drifted back to their old stomping grounds in the districts they once represented in hopes of cashing in political chits for jobs. Two I know have taken seats as L.A. County supervisors and now preside over domains that dwarf their old legislative districts. Nathan himself is getting close, probably in his final term. I have seen press reports that he is nibbling around the edges, sniffing for a seat in Congress whose previous occupant passed away a few months ago. The only problem being that Nathan doesn’t live in the district.

  “Like I say, it’s good to get away. The weather down here this time of year has the Valley all beat to hell. I usually stay over. Got a place with a suite on the cove in the Village. What are you doing tonight? Maybe we can get together for dinner.”

  “I’d love to but I can’t. A school program tonight with my daughter.”

  We drift toward the door. Nathan seems to be headed in my direction.

  “As I remember it you never cared much for the fog up north. Always hot for the sunshine. And your tan is looking better than I remember it.”

  “That’s not San Diego. That’s the Caribbean,” he says.

  “Don’t tell me you guys still go to Jamaica in the interim! I heard the Rules Committee made you folks clean up that act.” I am talking about the midterm follies when lobbyists take their legislative friends outside the country to violate all the reporting laws, and where bribery can be served straight up without the diluting fizz of campaign contributions.

  “Well, at least you haven’t lost total contact with the real world.” What Nathan means is Capital City, the center of the western political universe. “There was really nothing going on. I don’t know where the public gets all this misinformation,” he says.

  “Probably from the federal grand jury indictments,” I tell him.

  “Yeah, well, that was bad,” he says, referring to the shrimp scam, an FBI sting operation that went undercover a few years ago and didn’t come up for air until they’d snagged four legislators and a small army of lobbyists. “I could never understand it,” he remarks, shaking his head.

  “What, that bribery was alive and well in the capitol?”

  “That they would sell themselves for so little. I like to think I’m worth more than a thousand bucks.” Nathan laughs. “Not that I condone what they did, you understand.”

  “Of course not. You would have asked for more.”

  “Absolutely not.” Nathan gives me one of his most imperious looks. “I would have had my legislative assistant ask for more. And I would have hired nothing but ex-felons. That way if they tried to roll over on me, they would have had no credibility. I may not have your legal skills, but I did learn a few things as a prosecutor.” He smiles.

  “You’re right. You’re smarter than your friends.”

  “Those people were the exception, not the rule. Most of the members in the capitol are honest people,” he asserts, climbing on the stump. I have heard it before. How you never sell your vote. How money in the form of donations come election time just assures access. It doesn’t buy your vote. This particular line hasn’t changed in thirty years. Nathan heard it from the second generation, the people who called money “the mother’s milk of politics” and suckled at the nipple until their lips turned blue. I often wonder which greasy political scientist from which university came up with it. But when some lobbyist has his hand up your rectum and he’s pulling all the right levers, it’s difficult to tell exactly where this right of entry begins and ends.

  I look at my watch. “Listen, it’s good to see you but I’ve got to run. Stop by the office sometime.” I peel a business card from my wallet and hand it to him.

  “You sure you can’t do dinner tonight?”

  “No. Wish I could.”

  He takes the business card and shifts the leather portfolio to his other arm so he can keep his left hand on my shoulder as we walk, like I’m leading the blind. Nathan is one of those people who can never talk to you unless he has at least one hand on you, invading your private space. I used to watch him do this outside of court with opposing counsel. I came to the conclusion that it was an acquired social tool, like LBJ thumping other pols in the chest with his finger when he talked to them. There is something subconscious and discomforting in its effect. I often wondered how many people were forced to cop pleas by their lawyers and ended up in state prison because Nathan hadn’t used mouthwash that morning.

  He shakes his head as he’s holding me back with his hand on my shoulder. “Jeez, where does all the time go? And I suppose you don’t own a telephone to call a friend, tell him that you’re picking up sticks and leaving town?” To Nathan all telephones work in only one direction: incoming to Kwan.

  “I didn’t know I had to ask permission before leaving.”

  “You don’t have to apologize. Just get your ass back up north.” He laughs. With anyone else you might resent it, but Nathan has a gift, a kind of Asian blarney—Chinese father and Irish mother—that allows him to roll back the clock with impunity.

  “How’s Nikki and your daughter …” He finally drops the hand from my shoulder, snapping his fingers lightly
as we walk, struggling for Sarah’s name. “Don’t tell me, I’ll get it.”

  “Sarah,” I say.

  “That’s right. I remember. A cute little girl,” he says.

  “She’ll be eighteen in three months.”

  “No!”

  “And off to college in the fall.”

  “I don’t believe it. And that gorgeous wife of yours …” We keep walking. “The only woman I knew who took pity on your bachelor friend. I remember,” he says. “She must have had me over for dinner every Tuesday night for a year.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “You weren’t there,” he says.

  We both laugh.

  “I just have to see Nikki. I owe you guys a dinner or two.”

  “I don’t know how to tell you this, but Nikki passed away.”

  He stops in mid-stride, a half-smile on his face like he’s waiting for the punch line to a bad joke. Then he realizes that I’m not kidding. Suddenly a dour expression falls over his face. He is flushed all the way to the ears. “No.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. When did it happen?”

  “Almost nine years ago.”

  This seems to stagger him: that Nikki has been dead this long, that he has without guarding himself stepped on this land mine, knocks him off stride. “I didn’t realize. Nobody told me.”

  “Cancer. She was sick for quite a while.”

  “That explains why I didn’t see you. Jeez, I’m sorry. Must have been hard. Difficult on your daughter. On Sarah.”

  “It was. They were close.”

  “Why didn’t you call and let me know?”

  “What could I say? There was nothing anyone could do.”

  “I could have been there,” he says. “I’m sorry.” It is one of the few times I have seen Nathan at a loss for words. We walk in silence for a couple of seconds as we move toward the door. “We have to get together,” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Talk about old times.”

  “I’d like that.”

  We finally make it to the door.

  “Listen, I’ll give you a call. Next time I’m in town. We’ll do dinner. On me.”

  “You got it.”

  I shake his hand. He gives me a hug, something I hadn’t expected, his portfolio digging in my back. Then I turn and head for my car. Knowing Nathan—and life being what it is—unless he gets arrested on a felony, it is not likely that I will see him again, in this life or the next.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  If the experts are to be believed, Madelyn Chapman and her minions have perfected software that allows the government to monitor its people and their activities in ways that would cause most of us to shudder. The stated purpose, at least publicly, is to do what geologists cannot do when it comes to earthquakes: predict with accuracy the tremors of terrorism.

  This morning Harry and I have made arrangements to be briefed by one of the few people outside of government and Chapman’s own company who have knowledge of the Information for Security program—IFS—and how it works. We are huddled in the conference room of our office in the far bungalow behind Miguel’s Cantina on Coronado Island.

  James Kaprosky is in his sixties, tall, slender, stoop-shouldered, and from all appearances frail. Every few minutes he has to pause to cough up a lung.

  If what I have read in news accounts on Nexis is accurate, a good part of Kaprosky’s current physical state is the result of more than a decade of litigation against the federal government. During this time Kaprosky, his company, and his family have been ground into dust by a bureaucracy with bottomless pockets and legions of government lawyers. He has been at war with Uncle Sam in a series of civil suits that have worn him to the nub and that two years ago sent his company, a once prosperous software manufacturing firm, reeling into federal bankruptcy court. From all appearances he is a walking, breathing warning label that litigation will kill you and that legal tangles with the federal government will most likely follow you into your grave.

  This morning Kaprosky stands in front of us, a pointer in one hand and the remote control to an overhead projector in the other. He is giving Harry and me chapter and verse on the IFS system while his wife looks on.

  Jean Kaprosky has driven her husband to this meeting because he no longer has a license. His doctors have had it revoked because of his failing health. If I am any judge, Mrs. Kaprosky is perhaps ten years younger than her husband. If I had to pick the dominant expression readable in her eyes, it would not be weary but worried, as if she long ago realized that the war with the government was over but still cannot steel herself to tell her husband. So she drives him and comes along for moral support.

  “The heart of the system,” says Kaprosky, “is the Primis software. Primis is what makes it all work. Without it you have nothing. I know because I wrote it.”

  Kaprosky is here today not because we are paying him but because he is now at the point of desperation where he will talk to anyone willing to listen. Like everyone else, he has read about Ruiz’s case in the papers. Unlike everyone else, Kaprosky sees a link between Madelyn Chapman’s murder and the IFS program, the government’s proposal to monitor everything that is now digitized in American life. He is convinced that Chapman’s murder and his own battle against the government are somehow linked.

  While Harry and I have to weigh our suspicions that maybe Kaprosky has gone around the bend and finally snapped under the pressure, what is undeniable are his professional credentials. He has been writing software and designing programs—some of them for Fortune 500 companies, and most of them for large mainframes—for more than forty years. Regardless of his faltering finances, he is an icon in the industry.

  “Jim … You don’t mind if I call you Jim?” I say.

  “Why should I? It’s my name.”

  “Why don’t you have a seat? Let’s just talk.”

  For a second he looks bemused, as if without the pointer and slide show he might be lost. Then he breathes a deep sigh, sets the pointer and the controls on the table, and slumps into one of the swivel chairs at the other end of the table.

  “Tell us a little bit about Primis. We don’t need to know all the technical details.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “For starters, how did it come about?”

  “I created it seventeen years ago. Of course, back then it had a different name. Probably didn’t have all the bells and whistles it does now, though I haven’t seen their final take on it, so I really can’t say. When I owned it, it was called Paradize. The Defense Department wanted to buy it. They wanted to modify it, use it for their own purposes.” He coughs a short jag, then catches his breath.

  “Of course, that was good news for my company, back then. If you could only roll back the calendar …” Kaprosky muses. “I guess I was a little naïve.” He looks at his wife as if to apologize for the rugged ride through life he has given her. “But I was dealing with the federal government. Who would have thought?”

  “Tell us about it.”

  “We thought it was a tremendous opportunity,” he recalls. “We signed a contract, not to sell, but to license the program to the Pentagon. They wanted to use it for random processing of large amounts of data, but they wanted some changes. That was fine …” His voice trails off, and for a moment I think he’s gone to sleep in the chair. But Kaprosky is just catching his breath.

  Jean Kaprosky looks at me with a kind of mournful expression and shakes her head.

  “Everything was fine for a while, about a year,” he resumes. “Then the government claimed that we had somehow violated the contract. They canceled it and refused to return the source codes or stop using them. Except for a small sum that they paid up front, we received nothing. They claimed that we had failed to make required changes they wanted to the software.”

  “Did you?” says Harry.

  “No. The problem was they failed to provide any specifications. How
do you write parameters for a program when you don’t know what they are? No: the people running the program never intended to pay us.”

  “Why?” says Harry. “Why would the government want to take your software without paying for it?”

  “The government? No. The government is just a concept. Figment of our imagination,” says Kaprosky. “It took me a long time to figure that out. It’s the people who run it who do the Devil’s work. Ambitious dogs. We think we’re protected because they come and go. But along the way some of them reach out and grab things, things of value. Things that they want for themselves and their friends. I never thought of the government as a friend or benefactor. But I once believed that while they could draft me, tax me, or put me in jail, there were rules they had to follow. Now I know better. You want to know who took the software? His name was Gerald Satz.”

  Harry gives me a look. The first possible connection with Ruiz’s case.

  “What we found out during the lawsuits,” Kaprosky goes on, “is that the government had already hired another company to come in and make the changes they wanted, using my source codes.”

  “What is this thing?” says Harry. “You’ve mentioned it a couple of times: the source code.”

  “To an operating program, the source code is like DNA. It’s written in programming language, what you would call human-readable instructions, like a long list, using logic. For it to be used by a computer, the source code has to be translated into machine language, something the computer can read. What is important about this,” Kaprosky explains, “is that you can only make changes to the program if you have access to the source code. The changes are written in the original programming language and then converted to machine language.”

  “So if you don’t have the source code, you don’t have anything,” I say.

  He nods. “That’s why most software companies only license the finished product. As long as they hold the source code in secret, it’s protected. Once they release it out into the public, they’ve lost any claim to ownership.”