Program for a Puppet

by Roland Perry

  “Oh, my God! No, I have not!”

  “Everett. There’s no need for you to get excited. The most important thing is that you don’t get worried.”

  “You’re right, darling.”

  “Remember, even if it were true,” she added huskily, “I wouldn’t run out on you.”

  Rickard was glad he was sitting alone in a campaign office. His stomach suddenly had butterflies and his throat had gone dry. Rushing into his mind came the memory of his only “affair,” if it could have been called that, when he was Ohio’s state attorney general ten years ago. For some reason he was never really able to explain even to himself, he had got entangled with his private secretary, a prim and ordinary-looking woman. It lasted only half a year. Then, as now, he thought, the incredible woman at the other end of the line had supported him.

  “Darling,” he said softly, “can I tell you for the one billionth time how much I love you.… I told you after the last time I wouldn’t play around ever again. And I haven’t.”

  “I believe you, honey.”

  “I love you so much I want to cry. Really …”

  “Everett, darling, please don’t let it upset you. Just get on with running this country.…”

  Brogan Senior cupped one hand to his forehead and watched the tiny white ball as it glided off and veered left of the green at the fifth hold of Lasercomp’s private Black Flats Country Club. The Wednesday afternoon nine-hole game was a must for the sprightly octogenarian, who on this sunny October 8 was accompanied by Strasburg.

  “How’s our old friend Judge Shaw?” the Old Man asked, marching off down a slope to a buggy as Strasburg swung hard.

  The lawyer followed Brogan Senior as his ball lobbed into trees right of the fairway. “He’s fine,” he said, as he hopped into the driver’s side and drove on. “I saw him last night at the theater. We couldn’t say much. Too many people around.”

  “What about the case?”

  A decision in the Lasercomp versus U.S. Government legal battle was due shortly. The Old Man was beginning to get anxious about its outcome.

  “We’re doing all we can,” Strasburg said, as he guided the buggy over a rough patch. “We’ve hit him from every angle with our version of which way his decision should go. It must be embedded in his skull by now.”

  Over the six years the case had been running, Lasercomp had used their knowledge of Shaw’s reading habits as one way of trying to influence his decision. Every magazine and paper he read had favorable comment about the corporation and the consequence for the nation if he dared decide that Lasercomp should be broken up into smaller independent units. Every circular from banks, and even his own stockbroker, told him the same story. Occasionally they carried articles, written by supposedly “independent” people, which spelled out what Lasercomp would like the content of his decision to be.

  As they approached the spot where Brogan’s ball had landed, the Old Man said, “What about the carrot of a Supreme Court appointment?”

  Strasburg stopped the buggy and pulled on the handbrake. “We have to convince Shaw that if Mineva is elected, he would appoint him once Judge Rathbone dies.” He jumped out and opened the passenger side door for Brogan. “Incidentally, I hear Rathbone’s cancer is so bad that he may resign soon anyway. Shaw’s life ambition is to make the big bench. That empty seat will be looming larger every dream he has.”

  The Old Man strode to his ball just left of center of the fairway and lined up his shot to the green. “How are you going to let Shaw know Mineva would appoint him?”

  “Before the decision, he’ll just happen to meet the future President of the United States.”

  “I had MacGregor assassinated,” Everett Rickard’s voice on the tape said as an electronics expert in a basement apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, switched it off in annoyance.

  He sat on a stool at a bench surrounded by innumerable pieces of electronic equipment and looked up, deep in concentration, at the track lighting that crisscrossed the ceiling and lit the sealed room brilliantly. Then he reached for the recorder again.

  “Why don’t you admit you had MacGregor assassinated …” the voice of Haussermann said.

  “I had MacGregor assassinated,” Rickard’s voice said again.

  The expert stopped it and rewound it a fraction.

  On. “… assass …” Off. Rewind.

  On. “… assassin.” Off. Rewind.

  On. “… assassina.” Off. Rewind.

  The man worked fast and methodically, his deft control of the levers on the mixing panel an art in itself. Intermittently, the sound of the two voices would come off the tape.

  The man stretched and yawned. It was time for more coffee. He switched on an electronically controlled and timed percolator which produced a brew to his own satisfaction. Sitting on a comfortable couch opposite the bench, he sipped his coffee, and contemplated his efforts. A minute later he switched on the three-and-a-half-minute tape. The modulation of certain words taken from several pieces of tape was marginally different.

  As he was about to play the tape again, the face of Haussermann filled a television screen which monitored the front entrance of the man’s apartment. He let the former State Department official in and offered him coffee.

  “Would you like to hear it so far?”

  “Haussermann nodded. When it was through, he said, “That sounds excellent to me.”

  “Oh, no, it’s not! Your voice is okay. We can record changes now. But it’s the pitch of certain words from Rickard that is giving me hell.” He pinpointed a section of the tape. “Listen to this again.”

  Haussermann’s voice was heard. “Why don’t you admit you had MacGregor assassinated?”

  Rickard’s voice said, “I had MacGregor assassinated.”

  The expert played it once more. “We have you okay. And Rickard says the actual words “I had MacGregor assassinated.’ But it comes out as a question rather than a statement. The word ‘assassinated’ is the tough one. It has such a strong upward inflection. I think I can modulate it down. But if I can’t, I’ll have to pull the word out of one of Rickard’s speeches.”

  “Can you get it right?”

  “It’ll be difficult. But I think so.”

  “I’ll need it before the end of the week. I’m off to Europe then.”

  “It should be ready by Friday. Who has to hear it from the corporation?”

  “Huntsman. If he likes it, we use it.”

  “That’s the reason I have to get to the States pretty soon … Graham said, as he tossed Françoise some newspaper clippings collected for him by Ryder Publications while he was in the Soviet Union. “See the small Reuters piece dated October sixth?”

  Françoise picked up the clippings and read the six-paragraph article. It quoted Dr. Donald Gordon as saying in a lecture on computer technology and marketing at Georgetown University, Washington, that the unchecked flow of sophisticated computer technology into the Soviet Union was a major military threat to the West.

  “That guy is the one Jane Ryder tried to see just before …” Graham got up from the couch in the Brighton flat and wandered over to a window that gave a view of the beach about one hundred yards up the road. The wind was up and the sea was pounding the deserted beach. “Gordon is a key to my investigation, I’m sure of it. He’s trying to say something. I have to speak to him.”

  There was a short silence.

  “You’ve been back from Russia four days …” Françoise began in an exasperated tone; “you’ve only just begun to look a little healthy again and you want to go charging off to the States. Haven’t you gathered enough material already?”

  Graham shook his head. Françoise moved to him.

  “I don’t understand you,” she said with a confused, slightly hurt expression. “Do you want to go through life with one of them following you everywhere?” She pointed contemptuously at a car in the street five floors below. It was one of Commander Gould’s men.

  “He’s only going to
be with us while I put together all the information for MI-6. I have facts they want. They’ll protect their investment until it pays off in a few days’ time…

  “And then who will it be down there? The KGB? Someone from Lasercomp contracted to kill you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said softly.

  She lit a cigarette and studied him for a moment. He was staring at the sea. It seemed to have him mesmerized.

  “Why are you pushing yourself?” she asked gently. “Is it because of Jane Ryder?”

  “She is a factor. But it’s more. Something … something very deep in my gut is pushing me to finish this damned business … to get the whole truth. I can’t explain it more than that.”

  He looked at her. “No one wants it to end more than me. I’m scared. I’ve had it up to here …”

  “Can’t you leave it to … to them?”

  “No. I couldn’t just walk away from it now and wonder about it for the rest of my life. It would haunt me. I must see it through.” He laughed mirthlessly. “Besides, what you said before is probably right. If it’s not MI-6 down there, it’ll be someone else…. I’m in too far anyway.…”

  Dr. Donald Gordon was desperate. Somehow he was going to have to make the effort to extricate himself from his self-imposed predicament, or go under. When he had left Lasercomp six years earlier, after big disagreements with the Brogans, they had warned him to keep quiet about his knowledge of the Cheetah series, which he had helped develop, and Lasercomp’s secret plans. He knew about the dynastic master plan and the PPP, but had discreetly kept his mouth shut after Lasercomp had paid him off handsomely. But now all the things for which he had privately condemned the Brogans had begun to surface over the last year, and he could stand it no longer. He felt like the scientists who had split the atom. They had helped create something that was both of great benefit to mankind and its potential destroyer, if allowed to fall into the wrong hands. Cheetah, if misused, could be equally destructive. It could more precisely propel the weapons of total annihilation than any previous computer. Coupled with this was the potentially insidious use of the machine by totalitarian regimes.

  Gordon had chosen invitation lectures to universities in Europe and the U.S. as the medium for his indirect protests, which were couched in generalities, and never mentioned the corporation.

  In recent weeks, he had received warnings from Lasercomp that if he continued his lectures he could be in “trouble.” And Gordon knew what that meant. It was the same kind of “trouble” that Jane Ryder had found herself in.

  His dilemma was whether to continue his lectures or keep quiet.

  Gordon had been living alone at his home in Virginia, and since Jane’s death had decided to cover himself by gathering all the data he knew about Lasercomp’s plans, especially information he thought would be damaging to the corporation and the Brogans. First he left a copy with his lawyer, and then, summoning up considerable intestinal fortitude, he decided to confront Brogan Senior.

  Gordon had no trouble arranging an appointment. He was shown to the executive suite area of Lasercomp’s HQ at Black Flats at 8:30 P.M. by one of the score of security guards. Brogan was still working in his office when Gordon entered the suite. He was told the Old Man would only be a minute or two.

  The scientist had become extremely nervous. In an effort to calm himself he wandered around the room looking at pictures and portraits. Yet this only made him more anxious. It sharpened Gordon’s sensitivity to the power of the Brogans and the runaway monster corporation they had created, nurtured and let loose on the world.

  On one wall there was a tribute to Brogan Senior, the creator, and the early selling days starting in the Midwest and spreading across America. There were shots of him on the podium at sales conferences preaching to his devoted corporate followers, and shaking hands with important heads of state and presidents of six generations. These particularly affected the scientist as they accentuated some of his fears. The Brogans, he realized more fully, were not content with strongly influencing these people and their successors. They wanted complete control. And they were prepared to do anything to get it.

  On another wall were colorful photographs of the great laboratories and research centers, theatrically lit to appear like eerie shrines. On a third wall, pictures were dedicated to the focal point of what the years and the billions of dollars had created: the outside and inside of the Cheetah computer. These showed the circuits, the laser technology, the components magnified ten million times. They were artistically displayed in a tribute to everything clinically engineered, aseptic and profitable, and they had created the new unemotional environment to allow Lasercomp to expand into tomorrow and eternity.

  Every picture increased Gordon’s fears. He had been a misfit at Lasercomp, a scientist with a conscience. His kind, he reflected with a shiver, had to be expendable in the eyes of such an organization. Suddenly the total awesome reality of just what he was confronting hit him. He panicked. Gordon turned to leave. Brogan Senior was standing in the doorway to his office. The scientist was shocked. He wondered how long the Old Man had been watching him as he was greeted with all the effusiveness of an old and dear friend. Gordon was stunned but not initially fooled because he had seen the Old Man with “outsiders” a thousand times before in the past and he remembered the orders he would give when their backs had turned. “Finish him,” or “Buy her,” or “I want a dossier on that one …”

  The scientist was given a drink and taken into an adjoining lounge area, usually reserved for heads of state and other VIPs who would sooner or later become Lasercomp customers.

  There, seated on comfortable chairs, Brogan Senior’s reminiscences began with such apparent respect for an old comrade-in-arms that Gordon was confused and found his initial determination crumbling. The Old Man spoke of the good times, the big breakthrough in computer memory development that Gordon had pioneered, the big government contracts and the winning of new markets. No, he told Gordon ruefully, scientific brains like his were becoming harder and harder to find. His manner, the scientist knew, was an intimidation in itself. Dare Gordon upset it? He got his opportunity when Brogan finally asked, “To what do I owe the honor of your visit?”

  Gordon braced himself. “Some of your people have been threatening me.”

  The Old Man arched his eyebrows. “Threatening?”

  “Yes, because of my lectures.” Gordon silently cursed the Old Man’s thick-lensed glasses which hideously distorted his eyes and made it more difficult to gauge a reaction.

  “Some of my people have interpreted them as breaking our agreement.” The Old Man’s words were cool, measured. A storm would surely follow.

  “I have not named you or made any specific ref—”

  “You alluded to it,” Brogan snapped. “That’s all my enemies in the government, the press, business … that’s all they need.”

  “Look, Clifford,” Gordon said, hearing his own voice quivering, “I don’t want anything to happen to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, Christ! You know what I mean. That English girl investigating Soviet computer smuggling, you can’t tell me her death was an accident!”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” Brogan sneered angrily.

  “No? I think you were worried she may have been on to your little secrets. Secrets that could destroy your empire.”

  “Secrets? Come on, don’t be so melodramatic!”

  Gordon was amazed. His words had held back the storm. He sensed the complex dials in the Old Man’s head turning, feverishly trying to check himself and calculate the impact of what was being said.

  “You forget, Clifford. I was in on the early planning of Cheetah and its markets.”

  “Things have changed since you left.”

  “Look. I can read. I can hear. I see the odd report about the computer build-up in Russia. I hear Lasercomp is going all-out for all major government contracts over the next few years. Not just the milita
ry, but the FBI, the CIA, everything.”

  “And why not? We still live in a free enterprise system.”

  “Yes, but the master plan is the same for Russia and here, isn’t it Clifford? With you sitting astride the two nations manipulating everything.…”

  “That’s enough!” he yelled. “Why are you here?”

  “To tell you I have everything documented. The plans, the ways, the means. Everything, the machine itself.”

  “The machine?”

  “Yes. The inbuilt devices to allow you to tap the data in any Cheetah, anywhere in the world.”

  “That was drawing board stuff. It was abandoned just after you left.”

  “Those devices were the reason I left, and you know it. How many employees do you have? Half a million? Well, some of them break the code, and they talk. You went right through with the original Cheetah design.”

  Brogan stood up, walked over to a mantelpiece and seemed to be examining a steel management toy of eight balls suspended from wires. He pulled two of the balls to the left and let them swing into the others. It started a symmetrical motion. He stood mesmerized by the steady “click, clack” for a few seconds, before he said menacingly, “I don’t know why you are so paranoid.” He turned to face Gordon again. “You have nothing to worry about unless you continue your unfortunate public lectures.…”

  “I have”—the scientist faltered—”taken out my own insurance by collating everything I know … it’s all with a lawyer.…”

  “That sounds like blackmail!”

  “Not at all… but call it what you will. If anything happens to me …” The scientist trailed off. He couldn’t bring himself to sound threatening.

  Brogan turned away and started the toy game again. “If such information was released, nothing could be proved about Lasercomp activities inside the Soviet Union for a start.” He smiled cynically at Gordon. “And we would take our chances that such ridiculous allegations would not damage us, or our business, in this country.”

  The scoffing confidence of the last statement sent a chill through Gordon. Most of the major government contracts Lasercomp was chasing would probably be decided finally by the American President early in the new year. They would at least need his countersignature because of their size and importance, especially in the military field. He knew Rickard would do his best to stop Lasercomp getting the big ones. But what, he wondered, would happen if Rickard lost the election?”