All These Shiny Worlds

by Jefferson Smith

  A straight-out search turned up nothing, but that didn’t surprise me. The target probably wasn’t using that name yet.

  I touched down in L.A. early afternoon on the Friday, and booked into a rat hole. (Time-Life wasn’t doing so well anymore. The internet probably had something to do with that too.) By 1600 hours I was dragging the froth off my first latte at the Bourgeois Pig, and staring across Hollywood’s Franklin Avenue at Château Élysée, also known as Celebrity Centre, Church of Scientology.

  I was casing the joint, as much as you can case something the size of Madison Square Gardens. The building is a monolith, desecrated and re-sanctified to the great L. Ron Hubbard, and reminds one of a Norman-revival castle, complete with turrets and hundreds of delicious nooks and crannies. It also looks like a theme park, and at any moment I expected to see Tinkerbell splash its roof with scintillating colour. This was going to be easy.

  Stealth, contrary to popular thought, is not so much about hugging shadows as being invisible in plain sight. I’d had to learn that on the job, being an NO, and I guess that’s why I’d been given missions on a gentle curve.

  You see, visibility is relative. A CEO can’t see the bum begging for money; the bum might as well be a lamp post. Unless the bum is the CEO’s brother. Or his business. The only reason Mayor Giuliani could see the bums messing up Manhattan was because it was his Manhattan—right before he pest-awayed them to the boroughs.

  The trick to stealth is to find a niche, a fold in space, where, for the folks you want to elude, the photons just flow on around you and go their merry way. That’s real magic, and I used that afternoon to collect the ingredients to invoke it. Simple reagents, easily collected.

  When I crashed the party the following evening I made sure the first guy I bumped into was a security guard. My stint at the Bourgeois Pig had told me two things: first, the location of the service entry, which was opposite the cafe; and second, the dress standard of the delivery men for the hotel restaurant, The Renaissance. The restaurant was a snooty affair, and as I’d suspected, its staff were neat bordering on chic. In contrast, I was wearing a kitchen hand’s whites, none too clean. I held a milk crate pilfered from the alley behind a lunch bar—most smoker’s haunts have one—laden with fifteen of the most expensive TV dinners I could find, with their outer packaging removed.

  Then came the magic.

  When the guard pinned me with his flashlight as I angled out of the garden’s gloom and onto the service road, he didn’t see a failed academic running a job for the CIA. He saw a dinner with his name on it.

  He knew, I reasoned, there was no way he, along with the dozen other extra security guards contracted for the night’s event, were getting rations from the five-star hotel restaurant. Rent-a-guards are used to rent-a-dinner. And I was the supply wagon.

  But to make sure he didn’t baulk at the lack of a company insignia on my whites, I added a final touch. I mentioned the reason I was coming from the gardens was that I’d just puked all over a potted ficus. Last night had been my cousin’s wedding, a big Catholic affair with an open bar. I was feeling seedy—not smelling of drink, mind you—and had been playing catch-up all day. I’m not much of an actor, but if there was an Oscar for best portrayal of embarrassment, I’d be on the short list.

  This generated the quantum of sympathy I needed. The guy had been there too. He shone the torch into the milk crate, perhaps checking I hadn’t also puked on the dinners, and then gestured for me to follow him.

  When that transaction was complete, I knew I was in. He walked me to within sight of the kitchen entry, in view of the two guards lolling at the door, and then returned to his patrol. But he’d already given me what I needed: association with someone within the invisible envelope that shrouded the Château. The two guards had seen us, breaking conversation for a second only, and in that moment had pinned me with a mental green flag. The fold in space opened and I stepped in, vanishing from sight, and walked through the door into the kitchens.

  I dumped the crate of dinners out of sight, beneath a bench that had the look of not clearly being anyone’s responsibility, and walked to the staff toilet I knew to be off a connecting corridor. The floor plan of the Château is available on the internet, if you know where to look, courtesy of a disgruntled ex-Scientologist—no kidding.

  In a toilet stall, I shed my white cocoon, doing my best to bust a hole in the laminated chipboard walls with my elbows, and emerged in my academic garb, a mauve shirt, mismatched with a red tie, and thin grey slacks that had fit under the baggy kitchen-hand pants. Like I said, I’m not much of an actor, and all my reflexes fire in the pattern of an itinerant lecturer.

  I needed to drop my first disguise because a kitchen hand would have no business wandering around the guest floors, which was where I was headed. The target, Herr Thait, was billeted up there and, with luck, he’d left some tasty crumbs incriminating himself in a Middle Eastern intelligence racket for me to find while he put in an appearance at the Chamber of Commerce mixer.

  That was Plan A. It had been impossible to secure a ticket to the event, so I was sketchy on its timing.

  I found the elevator with no problem. My hand shook as I pressed the call button, and I knew it came from more than the adrenaline fizzing in my veins. This mission, if I managed a scoop, would have a rare payoff, because attached to the German were some high-profile names, some Hollywood names. And if I could nail some celebrities, it would make the news.

  Maybe that sounds arrogant, but I’m not one to blow my own trumpet. I’m not. I had no problem when Nathan told me up-front that NOs toil in the shadows and only rarely see the fruits of their labor, let alone get to touch it and taste it. But I’ve since learned that although I can do without recognition, a sense of contribution and completion turns out to be vital. Like air in your lungs, or blood in your veins.

  This shouldn’t have been surprising. I’ve lectured on the human animal’s need to work.

  While researching my Movers and Shakers lecture on Hitler—he moved and shook, for the Devil—I came across the account of a cohort of concentration camp POWs who were subjected to a peculiar kind of torture. Already starved of food and warmth, they were made to dig a vast hole. The twist came when the following day they were ordered to fill it in and dig another. They had survived work on roads and train lines, and even knitted socks for Nazi toes, I guess. But this final deprivation was of meaningful labor: The dirt they were told to shift served absolutely no purpose in all the universe, not even to ease the way of an enemy battalion. So they began dropping like flies.

  Purpose is a basic human need. I would put it before food and shelter.

  So when the doors slid open on the elevator, I was relishing the hope of one day seeing on my TV screen, back home in Berkeley, a scandal I had helped unearth. I could hear myself in that future, wagging a finger at the TV:

  “Yes, Mr. Cruise, freaking Oprah out is cute, but putting guns in the hands of jihadists is not.”

  I exited the lift on the sixth floor, an admin level, and made for my first soft target. I had no idea which room was Thait’s, but finding out would be a piece of cake. You don’t lock your door in Fort Knox, so I was betting that Celebrity Centre admins didn’t either. The admin, a Ms. Graver, didn’t let me down. Her door was not only unlocked but open. I entered, eased the door shut and sat in front of her computer.

  Two minutes later I had her PC out of standby and was scrolling through the Château’s occupant listing thanks to the password her browser had helpfully saved for her. Laziness greases the wheels of espionage the world over. (No need for my skeleton key, a thumb-drive filled with the PC-equivalent of the Ebola virus. One minute with Mr. Key and PCs spit their organs all over the screen. It’s quite therapeutic.)

  Then I encountered my first major hiccup, followed three seconds later by my second: the register had no Erhard Thait; and a guard picked that minute to do his job by investigating the door that had been open and was now shut.

&nbs
p; The handle turned and I had a split second to take evasive action. I could make the blind side of the door, but I’d leave the chair spinning. I could fall back on the lost, preoccupied academic, but what on earth was he doing shut in an office? My mind juggled this hot coal in time lapse while I sat motionless and gaping…

  Until inspiration burst over me like a summer shower. I swivelled to face the screen as the door opened, laid my hands on the keyboard, and began to punch up something—anything—in the browser.

  The scuff of the guard’s feet fell silent as he entered the room.

  “Yep?” I said, my attention absorbed by the screen.

  I would have laughed if I wasn’t so damn scared. I fancied his thoughts were spilling out over the floor: “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”—or maybe—“How much of the briefing did I doze for?”

  The seed of inspiration for this piece of Invisibility In Plain Sight (TM) was a memory of the time a projector had failed during a lecture. The IT contractor on call who had come to fix it had been dressed like me. Academics can wear whatever they like—’cause it’s all about the grey matter, right?—and IT contractors, those modern day troubadours, can be quite colorful too. On top of that, the IT crew work their magic at all hours, and, the icing, I was working on security. Me and the guard were on the same gig.

  He found his voice eventually. “What are you doing?”

  “Plugging a hole in the firewall. These guys are paranoid. Always getting hacked.” I mopped the sweat off my brow with a sleeve. “Failing that, working out where I’ll sleep tonight.”

  “Hacked,” the guard said, and made a chopping gesture with one arm. “Yeah, that’s right.” He laughed at some private joke, and left without shutting the door.

  I was alone again. But this was bad. No German, and the Château felt like it was closing over me like a stabbed bouncy castle. The guard had been too close, and soon I would start sticking to the radar.

  The only solution I could see was to find Erhard and learn what name he was using, which meant venturing into the star-studded mixer on the ground floor.

  I took the elevator down, my nostrils smelling carpet cleaner, and my gaze on a faux-18th century print of a violin. I braced myself to enter the fray, where a thousand barbed or hopeful glances were cast every second, with me wearing a disguise that already felt worn and showing.

  I exited the elevator into a corridor and headed in the direction of The Renaissance. I rounded a corner, and when I pushed open a glass door, noise hit me like an ocean wave—the sounds of ringing glass, and raised voices, and eruptions of laughter.

  And this was just the restaurant lobby.

  Through an enormous set of French doors cast open on the cool night, I could see that clots of guests had swirled out onto the terrace and beyond to the gardens. I snatched a drink from a passing waiter and surveyed the scene.

  At the second mouthful, I found who I was looking for: Messrs. Cruise and Travolta clumped with half a dozen shining-eyed hangers-on at the lip of the terrace. Among them was a tall, fair-haired man with his back to me.

  I felt a thrill of excitement. That man had to be Erhard. I’d found my target.

  I drifted toward him. All I needed was to get within earshot. To hear him called by his name.

  I felt naked crossing the terrace, and glanced about desperately for someone to rope into conversation, for an excuse to skulk near Erhard so I could steal his name. But I fortified myself with the thought that one name was all I needed, and then I’d be back ravishing Ms. Graver’s PC for Erhard’s hotel room. And from there it was connect-the-dots back to my hotel and the drop-off.

  Child’s play, really, I thought.

  Which was the last coherent thought I had for some time.

  It’s funny how your ears can detect a step with purpose in it.

  Just as I got within feet of Erhard’s group, a hand clamped onto my shoulder. A voice spoke to me, and I recognised the owner to be the guard who had found me in the admin office.

  His fingers felt like a vice, and I knew the mission was slewing off the rails. It was about to wreck in flames.

  I was desperate to retrieve something. Anything. This was my first six!

  I plunged one hand into a coat pocket, hunting for my Blackberry, and in the same moment stretched with the other to cuff Erhard on the back. I wanted him to turn, to see his face. If I could just get a photo…

  But that was the last cast of the net on storm-threatened waters when all the smart fishermen had turned for port.

  The storm hit with unexpected ferocity.

  It’s all jumbled in my head. I know Erhard turned and said, “What gives, buddy?” with a flawless American accent. Then the guard kneed me in a kidney and tackled me to the tiles…and somehow Tom Cruise had rammed his shoulder into my guts, too. I retched, and a girl screamed a Hollywood-hopeful scream.

  I guess someone called the cops, because when I was bundled out the front gate, there were red and blue lights strobing the darkness. Camera flashes punctuated the night.

  When my mind stopped reeling, I decided it all seemed a bit overboard. I said as much to the cops on the way to the station. Turns out the Sunday before a man—Meyerski? Majorski?—had been shot dead on the Château’s front steps as he came at the guards with a samurai sword in each hand. Talk about bad timing.

  They let me go the next afternoon. The Celebrity Centre was keen to appear beneficent, especially when it came out I’d been gang-mugged for wanting nothing more than a photo.

  I was gathering my belongings from the station registrar when the email that changed my life pinged my Blackberry.

  I waited until I had found a sidewalk cafe and ordered a tall black before opening it. I was hoping, maybe, to salvage some intel from this debacle.

  The email had been automatically generated. It was an alert from one of my internet sticky searches watching for the search term: Erhard Thait. Google had found the first and only matching page among the web’s billions of pages.

  I clicked the link and loaded it up.

  A photo filled my Blackberry’s screen, and my brain had a little brownout.

  Have you ever looked in a mirror so long you become a stranger to yourself? Kept staring until you don’t know the guy staring back? That’s how it was looking at the photo, only in reverse.

  It captured a typical night-scene police bust. In the foreground was the perpetrator restrained by two burly cops. His eyes were averted, or perhaps hunting for the source of a flash that had fired from somewhere else only a second before. Then with a jolt of recognition, I realized “the perpetrator” was me. The photo was from the L.A. Daily, which had run the previous night’s debacle at the Celebrity Centre as breaking news. The photo had probably earned $10,000 for the dark but unmistakable profile of Mr. Cruise, seen in the background returning to the party, having busted my ass.

  Now that was embarrassing, but embarrassment never stopped the sun in its arc.

  No, that happened when I took a closer look at the web page, wondering how my photo and the name Erhard Thait had surfaced on the same webpage.

  The page was part of a blog—a personal journal.

  And the blog’s title read: Operation Erhard Thait, aka Hit the Radar, outs the Cuckoo.

  The Cuckoo? My secret, known-only-to-the-CIA, codename?

  I’d been set up.

  By a philologist with a penchant for anagrams, apparently. Cute.

  But who was publishing this in a blog, and why? I scrolled down the blog, going back in time, scanning its articles.

  Here’s what I discovered: a complete list of my missions for the last three years. Wire taps and mail surveillance on a Detroit insurance broker the previous winter. Before that, my hound dog work on a Westchester family that daily scattered beneath the fall colors like hide-’n’-seekers when the counting starts. All the way back to the pretend break-and-enters I’d done on my home turf, UC Berkeley, on two professors suspected of running an immigration r
acket.

  This blogger, whoever he was, was in deep doodoo.

  I scrolled back to the top of the blog and looked for a link to the author’s profile, not expecting much. Even a moron would know that spewing the operation history of a CIA NO into the public malls of the internet was illegal, however he’d come by the information.

  The blogger’s alias was Langley. Even cuter than the Erhard anagram.

  The author had neglected to provide a real name, but had included a photo. It framed a young woman, and I knew instantly she had to be the daughter of Nathan Blaylock, the man who’d launched my career with the CIA.

  I returned to the blog articles and scrutinized them carefully—and realized my first interpretation had been wrong. Radically, cataclysmically wrong.

  The blog was not describing the work of a CIA field agent. It was prescribing it. The author, alias Langley, claimed to have conceived each mission, issued it, and monitored its outcome.

  And I knew without a doubt it was true.

  Which is when the whole world seemed to turn upside down in an instant.

  Everything felt suddenly weightless—the folk on the sidewalk, the cup in my hand—without heft.

  But to my surprise, the revelation that I had been playing a game for seven years didn’t leave me feeling anger or sorrow. It left me feeling powerful. Potent with the pointless power of a Greek god, those destroyers and debauchers, unfettered by the fear of consequence. I was brim full of a numbing power.

  After my epiphany, it didn’t take long to assemble the complete picture as I have it today.

  Nathan Blaylock, now deceased, was in fact the multi-millionaire Lionel Meyer, the original creative force behind “Project Sandbox” and its principal player in the early days. His son, Timothy Meyer, now deceased, took the reins from his father, and in turn gave them to Laurel Meyer, also deceased.