The Eldridge Conspiracy

by Stephen Ames Berry

  “Bad for the Navy’s image,” said Jim. He had revised his opinion of Jameson downward. “Any sign of Erik?”

  “He’s being encouraged to resign his commission. I got a heads-up from a friend that Erik will be discharged from Bethesda today. Which means I’m taking you up on your kind invitation to stay with you for a while. In the spare room,” she added pointedly.

  “Got the rest of your stuff?”

  “In the back of my car. Oh, before I left, I had Erik’s locks changed. And I donated all his uniforms to the Salvation Army shop over in South Arlington.”

  “I’ll try not go get on your bad side.”

  “I left him the receipt—it’s tax deductible. So, you log into SLIF yet, Jimbo?” she asked, all business.

  "Doin’ it now.” Phone held against his shoulder, he tapped the keys. The big orange SLIF banner came up. Entering George’s user ID and password, Jim was admitted to the main menu. “In,” he said, selecting the query module. He took the slip of paper from his wallet and at the ? prompt, typed MBR NBR=12759616; Provide core member data. End. Not quite believing it would work, he hit the enter key.

  “12759616 is... Alan Woodruff,” he said, elated and relieved as Woodruff’s information filled the screen. Jim scrolled down. “It’s all here—home address, next of kin, date of birth, assignment history, qualifications, schools.”

  “Miracle. Got the list of numbers I gave you?” Just to be safe, Angie’d suggested Jim carry only a list of the crewmen’s service numbers into the Bureau, pointing out, quite correctly, that the bad guys were looking for a diskette, not for a piece of paper jammed into the back of Jim’s wallet with his old ATM receipts.

  “Yes. I’ll run them as a group, download the data to a diskette, then I’ll leave. Shouldn’t take long.”

  “And eat the paper with the names on it. Gotta go—doorbell. Don’t forget the groceries.”

  In an office in Crystal City, the petty officer Jim had banished from his cubicle sat before a mirror image of Jim’s PC screen. As the first of the data appeared, he reached for the phone. The lights went out.

  Jim arrived home to find Angie passing out candy to hobgoblins, the small ones who show up around four-thirty or five. “It’s Halloween already?”

  “Groceries?” she asked as he trundled up the walk empty-handed. Barefoot, she was wearing blue jeans and an old green flannel shirt over a red t-shirt. A cup of coffee sat next to her on the porch railing.

  “Oh. I forgot.”

  Angie looked at Jim quizzically as Frankenstein, the Devil and their mother passed him on the way out the white picket gate. “Not like you, Jimbo.”

  “Okay, I was worried,” he confessed, sinking into the porch’s glide rocker. Next door, a troop of witches and ghosts were descending on a two-family house.

  “Why? ‘cause I hung up when the doorbell rang?” she asked, sitting down beside him, large glass mixing bowl in her lap, filled with petite candy bars. “You think I’m going to hide in the house just because some thugs may come calling?”

  “Angie,” he said, touching her knee, “less macho, more street smarts. Things could get very nasty, very fast.”

  “And what if our hypothetical bad guys want to make sure no one else knows what’s on that diskette, Jim?”

  “Then we’ll be squashed like little bugs.”

  “This bug bites,” she said.

  “Trick or treat!” Two boys—one about eight, the other no more than six—ran up the front walk, half-full orange bags held wide.

  “Ah!” screamed Angie, hands thrown high in mock horror. “It’s Vlad the Impaler! And his buddy, Squish Face!” She threw double helpings of white chocolate bars into their bags.

  “You like kids,” said Jim as they watched them go.

  “Is that a virtue or a pathology?”

  “Virtue.”

  “Good. Jimbo, I can be gentle, loving and nurturing,” she said, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek, “but not on an empty tummy. Go!”

  He pulled into the driveway at twilight. A sudden breeze spun leaves down a street now filled with trick-or-treaters. The crisp evening air was sweet with the mingled scent of dry leaves and wood smoke from a dozen fireplaces. It smelled of home and New England past.

  Hauling groceries in from the jeep, he at last identified as happiness the half-forgotten emotion that had been his all day. Still surprised, he went into the house.

  While Angie busied herself with the food (“Don’t give me that inverse chauvinist bullshit, Jimbo—I know how to cook. You think microwaving is cooking.”), Jim trotted back and forth to the front door, liberally dishing out candy to ever-larger and more boisterous groups of older kids. After his tenth or twelfth trip, he was turning from the fridge, beer in hand, when a voice commanded “Taste!”

  The heavenly flavors exploded across his taste buds: chicken, garlic, wine, onion a hint of orange and basil, all sautéed in olive oil. “Umm!” he responded, chewing. “To die for! How did you do the orange bit?”

  Angie laughed, pleased and happy, all else forgotten. “Had an orange with lunch and saved the rind, sautéed it with the chicken.” She thrust a plate of chicken and linguine topped with Mariana sauce at him. “Mangia!”

  He stared at her blankly.

  “Eat! You never had an Italian girl friend?” she asked as he stuffed his face.

  “Ummph,” he grunted diplomatically.

  They ate at the old round claw-footed table in the middle of the big country kitchen, seated in the comfortable old captains’ chairs he’d picked up at an auction on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Chicken came with a salad, wine and crusty onion baguettes that they tore apart with their hands, spread with garlic butter and washed down with a Chianti classico so dry it squeaked.

  Uninterrupted—porch light off, doorbell disconnected—they devoured five boneless chicken breasts, all the bread and salad, most of the pasta, and topped off with espresso and a chocolate angel food cake smothered in crushed strawberries.

  “God, that was good,” said Jim. “Compliments to the chef,” he applauded.

  Angie nodded. “Thank you, Jimbo. Shall we waddle off to work?”

  Armed with hazelnut coffee and the printout of the personnel data Jim had pulled, they moved to the dining room table, a great slab of walnut that had been an 1840’s library table at Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library.

  Angie set her chair next to Jim’s as he took the thick, letter-sized printout from his briefcase and laid it on the table.

  “All the names are there?” she asked, flipping through it, then looking up. Jim thought she looked relieved.

  “Yup,” said Jim. “All the names you gave me. First page is just an alphabetical list of the names and service numbers. I put each service member’s complete personal history and assignment records on a separate page. By the way, this is the only copy of the data that can come from SLIF. After I ran the names and logged off, SLIF advised that all source data had been deleted.” He’d sat staring in amazement at that message for a long moment.

  “Everything? All the 1943 personnel records?”

  “I went back in and checked—the source data’s all gone. If you were in the Navy in 1943, you’ve been deleted. Assignment records, master personnel records, the whole nine yards.”

  “George,” she said.

  Jim nodded. “He must have programmed SLIF to delete all the 1943 records after that one query—the one I ran under his user ID.

  “Diabolical,” she said. “Who was he really?”

  “Maybe he was just George Campbell. Angie, we’re the only ones on the planet with this information.”

  “This looks very complete,” she said, ignoring him as she flipped through the first twenty or so pages. “With this it may be possible to track down all of these guys, given time. Some of them could still be alive.”

  “Angie, the folks who want this information don’t have it and they know we do. Apparently the Eldridge’s duty roster for that day was lost
in a great mountain of paper somewhere—misfiled, tossed, whatever. Or maybe whoever hid it originally hid it so well that it could never be found again.”

  “Until the Navy had SLIF built and scanned in all those old records,” Angie said. “After which George, knowing just what he was looking for, reconstructed the Eldridge roster.”

  “Know anything about SLIF’ architecture?” asked Jim.

  “All I ever saw was GDR’s original high-level briefing paper. It was up there in the stratosphere.”

  “The usual bullshit for the brass?”

  “Right,” she said. “It talked about proprietary algorithms and heuristics, specialized microprocessors, artificial intelligence modules, massively parallel processing and, of course, seamless integration. Nothing you could get your fingernails under, but lots of five-color concept diagrams.”

  “So, we really don’t know how it works?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, well, I think SLIF was designed just to retrieve the Eldridge roster.”

  “Oh, come on! What makes you think that? We both know they might eventually have gotten that roster with a conventional system. Why build a cannon to shoot a fly?”

  “They don’t want the fly, they want the fly’s children. They want the Eldridge descendants. It’s the only thing that makes sense. From what I saw at the demo the other day, given the names of the sailors who were in that experiment, SLIF can track them and their kids and their grandkids right down to next week’s dental appointment or ballet recital.”

  Angie thought about that for a moment. “Why?”

  "Well, I’d guess that, if the government’s sunk a half billion dollars into finding them, they must think there’s something extraordinary about them.”

  “Or extraordinarily dangerous,” she said.

  “Who’s the prime contractor on SLIF?”

  “GDR Corporation,” she said. “Everyone knows that.”

  “Did you know that they run a lot of black budget experimental physics projects for DOD and the CIA, out in the New Mexico desert? Really heavy stuff, requiring billions of dollars each and every year? And have since after World War II?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “I read the supermarket tabloids.”

  “Jesus, Jim, you’re not going to conspiracy theory on me, are you?”

  “According to their website, GDR is taken from their original name, the Gelderide Corporation. An anagram of which is DE Eldridge. There’s also the murder of George, the importance he attached to the roster, the search and bugging of my home, and may I remind you who told me that the Philadelphia Experiment is cloaked in a conspiracy of silence? And the only way to get at that information was through SLIF—a horribly expensive system for which, as nearly as I can tell, the Navy has no legitimate use. A covert system like that should have been built for an intelligence agency. Now that the original data’s gone and the original documentation destroyed, there’s only one place to go for the Eldridge roster.”

  “Don’t suppose they’ll forget about us, do you?” she asked.

  “I’m surprised we’re not riding in a black chopper. Yet.”

  They sat quietly for a minute, Angie sipping her coffee, Jim reading the personnel data.

  “So, now what, Jimbo?”

  “This is death,” he said, tapping the small pile of paper. “But even if we left it for the leprechauns and it was gone in the morning, I doubt we’d be safe. After all, we could have copies.”

  “And we’ve read it.”

  “We know too much.”

  “So?”

  “So, a variation on the theme—we do leave it for the leprechauns,” he said, “but we tell them that friends of mine know what’s going on, and will pursue the matter if anything untoward befalls us.”

  Angie didn’t like that at all. “We owe George, Jim,” she said.

  He shrugged. “For what, Angie? Getting killed? Being some sort of spook? No,” he raised a finger as she opened her mouth. “Listen to me—I’ve been around this town for a long time. If we don’t get out of this, now, we’re dead. Now, these friends of mine have severe anger issues if aroused. A word from them and these bad guys—and I think these are very bad guys—will take what they want and quietly slip back into the sewers.”

  Angie looked down into her coffee. “No Don Quixote you,” she said.

  He shrugged. “All my windmills stand behind me. Look, I can fix this, Angie,” he continued earnestly. “We forget all about it and next year at this time we’ll still be around to watch the leaves fall.”

  “These friends,” she asked, running a finger gently along the back of his hand, “are they from your former life?”

  “Former life?” he asked, as startled by her touch as by the question.

  “Come on, Jimbo,” she said. “Your resume lists no prior Federal service...” She held up a hand as he started to protest. “And yet, yet Jimbo, you’ve got a big fat government 401K and decades of Federal pension accrual.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I found your mutual fund and Federal retirement statement when I went through your desk,” she said coolly. “I was curious. I mean, for a quasi-computer geek, you disposed of Asshole Erik with, how to say? polished aplomb? I’m grateful, understand, but had you wanted to stay just innocuous ol’ Jimbo, you should’ve taken a fall and let him beat the crap out of me.”

  “I see. Tell you what, Angie,” he said, regretfully banishing the warm glow left by dinner and her company, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The fifty-third service number, the one you so conveniently left off the list you gave me? Whose was it? And while you’re at it, just how long were you and George working together? You knew running that final query would wipe out everything, didn’t you?”

  She drew away from him—recoiled, really, it was so abrupt. They stared at each other across a distance far wider than a table.

  “You already know or you wouldn’t ask me,” she said. “Isn’t that the way you guys work?”

  “You guys?”

  “You spook guys, you spy guys, you CIA guys.”

  By way of an answer, Jim turned and opened his attaché case.

  “Always the fucking briefcase,” said Angie, glaring at him, face filled with hate. “It’s so much a part of your slimy little showmanship, isn’t it?”

  He handed her a second manila folder. “This is for you. When I got to my cubicle, I found I only had fifty-two service numbers from our little diskette. You wrote them out while I was asleep—all but one of them. Deleted it from the diskette, too, I’ll bet.”

  White-faced, Angie just glared at him.

  “Remember I ran one service number when I was talking with you on the phone? Turned out to be some guy named Woodruff. Well, after I hung up, before I ran the main query with all fifty-two names, the one that blew away the database, I played a hunch and did a name search—you know, just a good old name search? Along with the hull number DE173.

  “I’ve got all the personnel data for those fifty-two guys on diskette and on the main printout. The information for the fifty-third sailor, the guy whose number you didn’t give me? It’s in that folder you’re holding. I think George didn’t give me a list with the names because he knew I’d recognize one of them. He figured you’d be the one pulling that data if he was killed. Or, maybe he’d have been wrong, lived to see the new dawn and gone back and run that query himself.”

  Angie stared down at the folder, not opening it

  “Milano, Anthony G., Ensign, USNR,” recited Jim. “Naturalized American citizen. Date of birth: November 16, 1923, Verona, Italy. Married, wife Maria Angelica, née Casali. Date of immigration: May 3, 1928. Date of commission, April 2, 1943. Place of commissioning, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Education: BS, Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania...”

  Eyes blazing, Angie leaped up and slapped him with the back of her hand. Hard. “You fuck
ing bastard!” she spat, her face ugly with hate. “What do you know about anything, you nameless little creep?!”

  Jim rose and walked to window, rubbing his face where she’d hit him. Sobbing quietly, Angie opened the folder and began reading her father’s military record.

  Jim stood watching the last of the old tree’s neatly cut wood being loaded onto a stake bed truck as the street lights flickered on. “The Agency wanted me out of SpecialOps,” he said. “We worked out a deal.” He turned back to Angie, now seemingly lost in the folder. “I was too young to retire, so I was retreaded with a new occupation. I went back to school, got another degree, became a systems and data analyst for the Agency. I took an early retirement when they were handing out golden parachutes a few years back, then became a contractor, most recently at the Bureau. My name’s James Beauchamp,” he said, coming to stand across the table from her. Angie continued reading. “My friends call me Jimbo. I was Department Head for Domestic Liaison—I ran covert operations in the U.S.—very illegal stuff. I’m not married—my wife and our daughter died many years ago.”

  Angie looked up, the anger draining from her face.

  “My parents are long dead. And until I met you, Angelica Milano, I lived out of mere habit and without joy. So, what did they do to your dad?”

  “Before or after they killed him?” she said bitterly.

  He waited. She shut the folder. “They ruined his health, destroyed his mind and finally let him die.” She folded her hands on the table. “In the seventies he went into a special VA hospital ward and never came out. He died officially on a bitterly cold Christmas Eve, but Mom and I knew that he’d died long before, on the deck of the Eldridge.”

  She rose, walked around the table to him and kissed him. As the kiss grew longer and deeper, Jim pulled her to him. After a while, Angie led him by the hand into the living room where they sank down on the soft carpet.

  A half an hour later, across the street, in the front bedroom of a two-story colonial with a “For Sale” sign on the lawn, a phone rang. “Anything?” Philip asked the woman who answered.