22
“Look at this, Pa.” Joshua was having his turn on the computer. I looked. On the screen was a document about microwaves.
“Are you learning how to cook?” I asked.
“No. We’re doing this peace project at school,” said my son, “and one of the parts is about how to have a war without killing anybody so I’m finding out stuff about that.”
I hadn’t expected summer school mostly about nature studies to include subjects like that, but why shouldn’t it? Maybe naturalists could come up with a better way to have wars.
“I read once about some people up in the Arctic who fought their wars by facing off and yelling insults at each other,” I said. “The best insulters won the war and nobody ever got hurt.”
“I’ll put that in my report, but I’m going to put this in too. Look, it says right there that high-powered microwaves can make somebody unconscious without doing any permanent damage to them. You shoot them with your high-powered microwave gun and they’re knocked out and you capture them and when they wake up they’re your prisoner. Neat!”
Neat indeed. “Do they actually have guns like that?”
“I don’t know if they have any that work yet, but it says here that they’re doing experiments with them and with other kinds of microwave weapons, too.” He scrolled down the page. “See there? They’re making ones that will stop a tank or an airplane or a rocket or a cannon from working. The microwaves stop their motors, and the machines won’t work.” He smiled up at me. “That’s pretty good if you want a war where nobody gets hurt. You just stop their soldiers and their machines with your microwaves.”
I put my hands on his shoulders. “If you ever have to go to war, I hope it’s that kind, but it’s better not to have one at all.”
“Yeah, peace is best, but a microwave war would be better than the other kind. I’m going to say that in my paper.”
“Good.” Plato, who thought that only the dead had seen the end of war, would surely agree one without blood and gore would be an improvement.
“Pa?”
“What?”
“I’m going to say that if you’d been in a microwave war you wouldn’t have all those scars on your legs. Is that okay?”
“A lot of soldiers got hurt worse than I did, Joshua.”
“I know, but I think it will be good if I can show how people right here on Martha’s Vineyard would be safer if they only had microwave wars.”
“Put me in, then. You can say that I got wounded by shrapnel from a shell that killed some of the soldiers I was with, but that if we’d been in a microwave war, maybe no one would have been hurt.”
I suspected that most wars would continue to be fought the bloody, old-fashioned way and doubted that the gunner who had fired that fatal shell at my companions and me had ever heard of microwaves.
Until my talk with Joshua I had known about microwave ovens but had otherwise not been much better educated about electrical energy than that Vietnamese gunner. But Joshua had turned a light on inside my brain and I had that rush of happy certainty that comes when you suddenly see how to win a chess game in five moves or solve a puzzle that up till now totally eluded you. From the mouths of babes.
“Pa?”
“What?”
“How do you spell ‘shrapnel’?”
I told him how to spell it and what it was. I didn’t tell him that even now, decades after I’d been hit, small pieces of metal still occasionally worked their way out through the skin of my calves, causing sores that continued to keep me from a profitable career as a Bermuda shorts model.
When the kids were in bed, Zee played adviser-if-needed as I took my turn at the computer and found my way single-handedly to the Internet, where I brought up pages and pages of information about electronic warfare. Most of it required slow reading, but I had time and Zee showed me how to print out the material I wanted to study most. It was late when we went to bed.
“You’re wearing your thoughtful look,” said Zee, as we lay in bed with our books. “What’s on your mind?”
“Your body.” I took a hand off my book and slid it under the blanket.
“No tickling! What, really?”
“A moral dilemma. What to do if I know who the Silencer is and how he does his work.”
“Give him a medal?”
“That’s one possibility. He’s improving the island as far as I’m concerned.”
“Do you really think you know who it is?”
“I think I know who it could be. I’ll have to ask to be sure.”
She put a hand under the blanket and captured mine. “What if you don’t ask? What if you just let nature take its course?”
“Like what? Letting him keep on destroying thousands of dollars’ worth of sound equipment until he grows old and dies of natural causes sometime in the next hundred years?”
“Why not?”
“It’s tempting. But the Chief asked me how I’d feel if the Silencer started silencing the music I like.”
Zee knew the answer to that one: “Silence Beethoven? Pavarotti? Vince Gill? No problem if that happens. Lock him up for life.”
I dropped my book onto the floor and got my other hand to work beneath the covers. “I love a decisive woman,” I said. “I can’t resist one when I find her in my bed.”
“You probably couldn’t resist a porcupine in heat,” said Zee, dropping her own book and turning toward me. “As for me, I like a man with slow hands.”
“You’re in luck,” I said. “All truly manly men have slow hands and there’s no man more truly manly than me.”
“Show me,” she said. “I have time.”
I did that and forgot about the Silencer.
The next morning I phoned Quinn, up in Boston. He wasn’t at his desk at the Globe, so I left a message. I wondered how many times I’d driven up-island in the last week and decided to spare myself another trip if possible by making another phone call, this one to Cheryl Bradford.
The voice that answered belonged to her mother, Sarah. I gave her my name, reminded her of our brief meeting a few days before, and added that I’d had the pleasure of seeing her hit a homer in the codger game.
Her voice was not cordial. “Oh? Are you following both me and my daughter around now, Mr. Jackson?”
“No, but I might give it some thought if I wasn’t already a happily married man. I was at the game for another reason.”
“To talk with Kristen Kolle. I saw the two of you together. Do you socialize with any men, or just with women?”
“It wasn’t a social conversation. Is your daughter home?”
“Cheryl isn’t available right now, Mr. Jackson. She’s still recovering from a death in the family.”
“I have a question to ask her. Just one. I won’t take more than a moment of her time.”
“Sorry, Mr. Jackson. Please don’t call again.” The phone clicked in my ear.
So much for saving another trip up-island. I got into the truck and drove to the Bradford place in Chilmark. Both Sarah’s SUV and Cheryl’s Volvo were in the yard. I parked between them and went to the door of the house.
Sarah Bradford, her face filled with anger, opened it. Her voice was as cold as her face was hot.
“I told you not to call. I meant it. Go away and don’t come back, or I’ll call the police and charge you with stalking my daughter!”
“I want to speak with Cheryl,” I said. “She’s a grown woman who doesn’t need any protection from you.”
“She’s a fool who knows nothing about men, including you! Get out!”
“I want to see her.” I was a foot taller than she was, and threw my voice over her head into the house. “Cheryl! It’s J. W. Jackson! I want to ask you a question!”
“I’m calling the police!” Sarah stepped back and tried to slam the door, but I stopped it with my foot. She pushed on the door and I saw her daughter come into the room behind her. Her mother spun to follow my gaze. “Go back to your room!” she s
napped.
“Just one question,” I said to Cheryl, and she took a deep breath and came across the room. Her mother released the door and ran like a deer into the house.
“What is it?” said Cheryl. “What do you want to know?”
In a quiet voice, I said, “Just one thing: Did your mother insist that you break off your relationship with Harold Hobbes when she found out about it?”
She looked bewildered, then gave a quick glance behind her and stepped out onto the porch, closing the door behind her. “No,” she whispered. “Of course she didn’t. She didn’t know about us. And I don’t want her to know! Please don’t tell her! If she knew, she’d be livid. You saw just now how angry she can be. You’d better go. I think she really is calling the police.”
“If they show up, I’d appreciate it if you tell them that I’m not stalking you.”
“I will. But you’d better go.”
I agreed with her and left.
At home I called Quinn again and this time he answered. “You should get yourself an answering machine,” he said. “I called you twice and nobody was home.”
“That’s why I don’t have one,” I said. “I don’t want to get endless messages from you. All I want to know is whether you found out anything about Ethan Bradford and Connell Aerospace.”
“The Fourth Estate has a long reach,” said Quinn. “I talked with a couple of the people I met when I did that earlier story. Seems like a prototype weapon Connell was developing went missing and hasn’t been seen since. Bradford had been working on it. He was the prime suspect but they couldn’t prove he was involved in its disappearance so they couldn’t charge him. But they could fire him and they did.”
“What was the weapon?”
“They were very coy about the details, but apparently it was some sort of portable electronic device. Something small enough for one man to carry around. Shoots microwaves of some kind. The military is big on microwave weapons these days, apparently. I can probably find out more about it if it’s important. What’s going on?”
“Did the theft set the program back enough to cost the company a lot of money?”
“I wondered the same thing. I guess it wasn’t the only model they had, and apparently it was still in an experimental stage and didn’t really work well. What worried Connell was that whoever stole it might sell it to another country or to another company that might bring it out first. If that happened, Connell could lose millions in military contracts. Are you going to tell me what this is all about, or not?”
“Not. At least not now. I’ll pay you in bluefish if you ever stop muckraking long enough to come down and go fishing.”
“I know Zee would like that,” said Quinn. “She could stand some sophisticated company for a change.”
“I think you’ve got sophism and sophistication mixed up,” I said, “but come down anyway.”
I hung up before he could get in a last one-liner.
23
Our normal obligations do not cease simply because crime has intruded upon our lives. No matter what, as the poet noted, we’re gonna come and we’re gonna go and somebody’s got to pay the rent.
So I took a bottle of Sam Adams outside under the warm early-summer sky and worked in the garden while I thought things over. There were enough pea pods to make a meal, so I picked those and then did some weeding and watering. Soon the lawn would need mowing, and I would be pushing around the perfectly good lawn mower I’d salvaged from the dump years before, when it was The Big D, the island’s favorite secondhand store. In those golden days you could find lots of good stuff there and return whatever you didn’t want to keep, no questions asked, and the environmentalists had not yet persuaded the authorities that dumps were bad and should be eliminated.
Maybe I should get some goats to keep the grass trim. How did people keep their lawns trimmed before they had lawn mowers? The owners of those stately mansions in England, for instance; how did they do it?
Or did they do it? Maybe they didn’t have lawns, or maybe they didn’t keep them trimmed. Maybe I could find out by looking up “lawns” on the Internet. Maybe somebody had written a History of Lawns in which were answers to all my questions and more.
Boldly I abandoned my garden and went to the computer, where, all alone, I reached the Web and looked up “lawns” and found out that, indeed, books had been written on the subject. In practically no time I learned that the word “lawn,” meaning maintained turf, had appeared in the 1500s, that grass lawns had become important in the 1700s and had been cut by scythes (three men could cut an acre a day), and that mechanized lawn mowers had been developed in the 1800s.
Amazing. Maybe having the computer was as good a thing as the rest of my family and the world thought it was! I now knew more about lawns than I’d ever known before.
Too bad the computer couldn’t tell me if all my brooding and guessing were actually pointing me toward the killer who had coshed Ollie Mattes and Harold Hobbes.
Garbage in, garbage out. Wasn’t that what the techie people said? If you put wrong information into your computer, you’ll get wrong information out.
My problem was that I wasn’t sure what was garbage and what wasn’t, so even if I could feed my computer everything I knew or thought I knew, which I couldn’t, it still wouldn’t give me the answer I sought.
We live in an imperfect world.
Or maybe in a perfect one we just don’t understand.
Such profundity. It was my specialty du jour.
I had another beer with lunch while listening to the noon news on our radio. Nothing had changed. If I went to Mars for ten years and came back and turned on the noon news, would anything have changed? Not a lot, probably. Was that heartening or disheartening?
I put on my tape of La Traviata, featuring fellow islander Beverly Sills as Violetta. Then, as I sipped a third Sam Adams and prepared chicken and snow peas for supper, I listened, eyes full of tears, as Violetta, doomed but worthy of immortal love, poured out her songs to me alone. Oh, Beverly, oh, Violetta, we could have had such a damned good time together!
When the preparations for the evening meal were complete and poor Violetta had, alas, expired once again, I studied the printouts I had taken from the Internet the evening before.
The only ones I could begin to understand were the papers written by experts for know-nothings like me. There were many such papers, evidence that there were a lot more know-nothings than experts in the world, but that the know-nothings, military ones in this case, had the money the experts needed to practice their expertise.
The microwave experts presenting these papers were explaining to the know-nothings what they were working on in the way of electronic weapons, and why. In order to do this, they used the jargon of their science, and I and the other know-nothings had to understand it. If I read slowly I could keep track of at least some of the explanations and the initials that referred to key terms.
Radio frequency (RF) weapons technology was the subject, and apparently a lot of countries, the Soviet Union especially, were or had been involved in developing such weapons. Many were experimenting with directed energy weapon systems, pulsed power technologies, high power microwave (HPM) technologies, particle beams, and related subjects I could not pretend to understand technically.
The significant point seemed to be that RF weapons might be used against all sorts of targets, including land mines, missiles, and communication systems, to say nothing of the plain human beings to whom Joshua had drawn my attention.
A paradox, duly noted by the experts, was that the USA, by dint of being a highly technically developed nation, was thus more vulnerable to RF attack than were less-developed nations. As always with science, yang was balanced by yin. I should probably hang on to my straight-blade knives, just in case.
One of the problems with RF weapons was their size and their need for a potent power source, but as research continued, the prospect of a portable HPM weapon was becoming more feasible. Experimen
ts with solid-state pulsers and high-current electronic accelerators (What were they? Never mind) suggested that briefcase-sized devices weighing only a few pounds were feasible. All your RF shootist would need to blast his target would be a directional antenna to project his HPM.
Manny Fonseca, the Vineyard’s foremost pistoleer and Zee’s shooting instructor, would be fascinated.
The general point of the papers was that there was more and more RF equipment capable of disrupting electronic systems, and that the United States needed to develop such weapons and simultaneously develop defenses against them. I suspected that the military would find the money to do just that. More of my tax dollars at work.
I put my papers away and drove to the police station in Edgartown. There was a state police cruiser in the parking lot. Inside the station, Kit Goulart was again at the front desk, and the Chief’s office door was closed.
“J.W., you should join the force,” she said. “That way you’d get paid for spending all your time here.”
“No thanks. I was a cop once and once was enough.” I jabbed a thumb toward the closed door. “I presume that the Chief and Dom Agganis are conferring. Any chance of breaking in on the cabal?”
“I can but inquire,” said Kit. “Do you have a good reason why the high priests should allow you to enter the inner sanctum?”
“The weed of crime and its bitter fruit.”
“Oh. I don’t know if that will do it, but I’ll pass your metaphor along.”
“It’s all I have to offer, I’m afraid.”
She picked up a phone and spoke into it, listened, and hung up. “Have a seat. The Chief will be free in just a few minutes. How’s the family?”
“The family has entered the computer age,” I said, and told her of our purchase. “Zee and the kids are all better at using it than I am, but I’m improving.”
“Well, someone had to be the last person in America to own one,” said Kit, “and it’s no surprise that it was you.”
“I’m still getting used to internal combustion engines,” I said. “It’s tough for me to deal with new-fangled stuff like electricity.”
Murder at a Vineyard Mansion Page 16
