Dean Ing - Silent Thunder

by Silent Thunder(lit)

  Bryan, a Nebraskan himself, was easy to remember because every school-kid in the state found the man on their exams. Early in the Twentieth Century, William Jennings Bryan had gained tremendous popular appeal with his oratory: half with the words, half with his great, emotion-laden voice that trembled and fulminated. If the popular vote had counted as much then as it did now, Bryan would have been President. Even then, he damned near made it, despite an intellect that was tepid at best.

  The charisma of Adolf Hitler was too well documented to doubt, and anyone who cared to could audit old recordings of the man's fiery oratory. Ramsay's natural skepticism asked it for him: could it really be that simple? Was it possible, before 1930, to construct a vacuum tube device capable of taking a man with a strong message and adding overwhelming credibility with enhanced resonance at the right frequencies or filtering of unwanted voice tones?

  Well, certainly it would not work on everyone; Parker's notes acknowledged that. The question was whether it had worked on enough people to elect a Missouri senator-or an American president. All you had to do was patch that device into a loudspeaker system. And Walter Kalvin had been Rand's campaign manager.

  The notes of Richard Parker, building on this possibly mythical Mainz diary, cited suspicions by German moderates in early 1933 about the loudspeaker system of the Reichstag, the German Parliament building where Hitler had risen to power. It became impossible to check on those suspicions after the fire which leveled the Reichstag in February, 1933, and a tunnel had been found from the Reichstag to the personal home of Hermann Goering.

  Mainz-again supposing the man and his diary had been legitimate, Ramsay reminded himself-had claimed that only a few Donnersprache devices had ever existed. And that Rudolf Hess, realizing the tremendous damage his idol Hitler had done through Donnersprache, had stolen one of the sealed units and defected to the British in May, 1941.

  One of Parker's notes cited a quote from the famed Shirer text in which Hitler, discovering the flight of his most trusted accomplice, shouted, I've got to talk to Goering right away! No wonder, Ramsay mused, if Goering and Hess had been the curators of the Donnersprache machines.

  But Hess, in a stolen Messerschmitt 110, had not landed as he'd intended in Scotland. Bedeviled by weather and without a landing field for the skittish Messerschmitt, Hess had parachuted to safety while the aircraft crashed. This much was history. According to the Mainz account, Hess had either been unable to bail out with the Donnersprache unit, or else it had been wrenched from his grasp when the chute opened. In either case, when the device hit the ground its case ruptured, and after the ensuing explosion nothing could have been left but scattered, anonymous debris. By the time Hess was interrogated the man was an emotionally shattered wreck, lapsing into madness, speaking of strange forces by which men could be moved.

  Richard Parker's suspicions were that, during the brief alliance with Stalin, Hitler or one of his staff had told the Soviets something about Donnersprache. Hess himself had loathed everything Russian and had gone from internment with the Brits straight to Nuremberg for his trial, then to Spandau Prison where American, British, French, and

  Russian jailers had watched Hess when they were not watching each other.

  That'll play, Ramsay mused aloud. The Sovs couldn't get anything out of Hess so they made damned sure he'd never leave Spandau. Yeah. Yeah?'' He barked a short laugh at himself and let the page drop onto the surface of his kitchen pass-through, as if by this gesture he could just as easily drop the whole matter. Ignore it as the ravings of a lunatic; several lunatics, in fact, all with the same paranoid fantasy.

  He microwaved a passable Fettucine Alfredo and made himself a salad, dicing the tomato into cubes so small that Kathleen had called them lumpy catsup, snipping green onions over the romaine because he wouldn't be breathing on anyone this night, thinning the Roquefort dressing with yogurt to limit its calories. He chose a Lowenbrau from the refrigerator. From time to time he caught himself glancing toward the pass-through, keeping a wary eye on that single page as though it might burst into flame at any moment.

  He ate at the little kitchen table, too preoccupied to select a recording of what he called wallpaper music, the sort of music made famous by Tangerine Dream which Kathleen had scorned but which helped Ramsay unwind. Time was when he would have talked this out with Kathleen (never Kathy, never Kate, never ever Katie, always insisting that a reporter named Katie or Kathy would never get the respect of a Kathleen, and asking who would ever have unburdened himself to a Babs Walters) because Kathleen was a better investigative reporter than she ever was a wife. Well, he still could debate it with her, as easily as picking up the phone; but he wouldn't. Their only bond now was Laurie, if you discounted occasional letches between ex-spouses who feared AIDS more than they craved variety.

  No, not Kathleen. Who might he bounce this against at NBN? Britt? Ynga? No, this was too unlikely, yet so goddamn big if it had any legitimacy at all! He'd just have to research it himself, source it to hell and gone, as the spooks liked to say, or simply brand it as a curious hallucination and forget about it, a feat of which Ramsay was simply incapable; and Ramsay knew it.

  He reached out for the memocomp notepad at the kitchen phone and began to list items that might be verifiable. If, and only if, everything tallied he might start checking on the likelihood that a human voice could be massaged and enhanced enough to make it, effectively, the voice of charismatic appeal. A George Whitefield voice; a Bryan voice. Perhaps even a Judy Garland voice, begging only for love.

  Or an Adolf Hitler voice, commanding hate.

  Dieter Mainz, Innsbruck; daughter? he wrote.

  German electronics advances 1930, he added.

  And Goering-Reichstag tunnel, and Hess flight, and Shirer quote, and finally Kalvin bio. This last item would be in NBN files and was as simple a matter as patching the modem in his study into NBN's computer.

  But if, by some tremendous long shot, this tale had any substance, then the government's own electronic ears might be alert for anyone who became curious about Walter Kalvin. It was known that the National Security Agency's electronic monitors could flag a key word from a hundred thousand simultaneous telephone calls, maybe more. It followed that the monitors might also flag a request by a private modem. How much power could a White House administrator assemble in six months; enough to set requirements for NSA and CIA? Not unless he had the obedient help of the President of the United States.

  Ramsay had attended many a White House news conference, and had seen the new President off the record, in unguarded moments. It was Ramsay's feeling that Harrison Rand's mental wattage would not run a nightlight, though he was certainly a likeable cuss. As likeable as Harding, or Reagan. A vagrant tagline tugged at his mind: The paranoids are out to get me.. ,.

  Christ, it's catching, he muttered aloud, and reached for the phone.

  He did not call NBN, but punched the number on Matthew Alden's elegant buff stationery. He reached a message recorder and had just given his name, halfway through a recitation of his own unpublished number, when he was interrupted by a brisk New England baritone. Mr. Ramsay? Matt Alden here. I recognize your voice. Alden did not bother to apologize. Ramsay often did the same thing, listening to a caller before choosing to go on-line. One of the prices of celebrity....

  I just got your envelope, Mr. Alden. If you prefer, I could call another-

  Alden: No, no, perfectly all right. Then the silence of a man who knew how to wait.

  I think we should speak in generalities, Mr. Alden.

  Matt, please. Just a moment; there. I'm no longer recording and we can consider this a privileged conversation, Mr. Ramsay.

  Alan will do. What I need is some way to contact your friend, the one who doesn't strain at trifles. Do you have any idea, any at all, what his letter was about specifically?

  Specifically? Not the foggiest, but I presumed it had something to do with one of your-

  Okay, good. I'm serious about generalit
ies, Matt.

  Uh-understood. My acquaintance did imply that if I chose to answer any questions-and I suppose that would apply to you as well-I could regret it.

  Ramsay, with a chuckle: If I were amateur enough to tell more than I asked, yes. Not a problem, Matt.

  I suppose not. And I don't want to wander into a can of worms.

  Not if I can help it. But I'd like to contact your acquaintance directly. It would take you out of the loop, Ramsay added the inducement.

  Alden: Uh-huh. I can give you something along that line, if he concurs. Actually, he'd be more likely to contact you than the other way around. It's just as well because, frankly, I'm beginning to want out of this loop. Ah-if acting as an innocent conduit somehow puts me at risk, you will be good enough to warn me?

  The chances are one in a million, but it's the least I can do, Ramsay replied.

  Alden: I didn't quite hear you say yes.

  Ramsay, laughing: Yes, and yes again. My sources are privileged too; I never made this call. Anything more?

  Alden: Just keep up the good work. Good to meet you, Alan.

  Ramsay: And you, Matt. Good night.

  Ten minutes later, Ramsay realized he was still standing by the phone, and by then it was too late to call Laurie. It wasn't too late to do some research from an anonymous computer terminal in the National Press Building, though. These days the historic old structure at Fourteenth and F was open around the clock. Like as not, a gaggle of domestic and foreign press people would be arguing, working, and boozing until the early hours.

  He cursed the lock and the balky door of the garage he rented a block from his apartment, promising himself for the hundredth time that he'd install an automatic opener, knowing he never would. The shovel-nosed little Genie coupe, his one adult toy, squatted inside with the gleam of a yellow opal in a tarnished setting. Five minutes later it was fully warmed, squirting southwest on U.S. 1 while Ramsay inhaled cool night air. Soon he could smell the reek of the Potomac tidal basin, and minutes later he found press parking.

  His ID was enough union card to get him past all the reconditioned bric-a-brac to the National Press Club's lair on the building's top floor. Few of his colleagues in electronic media spent much time here, but a reporter could call up any number of data services at any hour-including the Library of Congress-on an unused terminal without using his personal ID. He spied a terminal carrel in a corner, exchanged nods with a pair of newsmen who scarcely interrupted their discussion in fluent French, fed coins into an espresso machine, then took the bitter, steaming brew to the carrel and unfolded the small rectangle on which he had made his list.

  The Shirer citation was the simplest to verify. Using a fast-search program through the full text, three-quarters of a million words, Ramsay soon verified a quotation and, moments later on page 192, learned that Nazi thugs had traversed a tunnel from Goering's residence to torch the mighty Reichstag. Nor was Shirer the only source to describe this event as Nazi arson. A pretty drastic way to remove evidence of wiretaps in a building, Ramsay thought. But Goering was known for his drastic measures. The motive offered for the fire was a manufactured provocation to round up German leftists. Ramsay reminded himself that an act may have more than one motive, and kept checking.

  Three sources described Rudolf Hess's uniform disguise-as a captain-when stealing the Messerschmitt he piloted to Scotland. Only one mentioned the fact that he carried a smallish piece of luggage, ostensibly in case of an emergency landing. Ramsay thought about that for a long time before he shut down the terminal, wiped the keyboard down with a tissue, and strolled to another terminal some distance away.

  The state of the electronics art in Germany in 1930 was not as easily learned by computer terminal. Parent companies seemed to have sprung like weeds from the polytechnic institute at Karlsruhe after the pioneering electronic work of Hertz; Badenwerke and Telefunken had grown from such work, cross-pollinated by Marconi, force-fed by military research in World War One. By 1928, Germany had fallen behind in commercial applications, but her research in electronics was paving the way for the independent development of radar. And in the psychological responses to audio stimuli, the few research papers before 1930 were virtually all German. No German citations in the field after 1931; no replications, no refinements; almost as if the German interest had abruptly died. Or as if it had been curtained off, Ramsay thought.

  He wiped this terminal down, too, and decided against calling up the biography of cool, self-confident Walter Kalvin. NBN would have such stuff printed out in a file anyway, where Ramsay could read it anonymously. Now that Cody Martin's letter was starting to look like the story of the century, every step in researching it would have to be made on tiptoe.

  If anyone had tried to share the elevator, Ramsay would have refused to enter it. He stepped outside, only two blocks from the White House, into a chill midnight wind bearing too much rain. It was no match for the blizzard howling through the mind of Alan Ramsay.

  FOUR

  Though the hour was late in the cloistered room adjoining his Oval Office, the President remained fresh and clear-eyed. Cabinet and council members often remarked on the stamina of Harrison Rand, unaware that their President's afternoon 'study hour' was really a ninety minute nap. Harry Rand had once joked to good old Walt Kalvin, his closest friend, that from two-thirty to four every day, Walt himself was President. Kalvin had not seemed to enjoy the joke, perhaps because others were present.

  Harry sometimes regretted this lack of risibility on the part of his friend; had even prayed to the Lord to give Walter Kalvin a sense of humor, though it was plain He had more important things to do because, while Walt knew how to laugh in public, he retained the cold intensity of dry ice and all the good humor of a headstone. People said that Harry Rand, in private, was exactly the same as President Harrison Rand in public, and this pleased him because, as he used to tell his Missouri congregation, what you see ought to be what you get.

  Some had forced comparisons between this Harry and another Harry from Missouri who had occupied the White House half a century before. It only bothered Harry Rand when they suggested that the other Harry had been a little swifter of thought, and more his own man.

  Nobody had ever accused Harry Rand of special beauty, with his ruddy, round and open face, free-swinging expansive gestures, somewhat larger than life, given to bright vests that kept his belly in. He envied Walt Kalvin for his waist measurement, which had not changed on that wiry frame in the years since the two had met in Kansas City.

  And Kalvin's friendship had led here, to the Oval Office-and, at the moment, to the small adjoining conference room in the West Wing. Lyndon Johnson had called it the little office; more recently it had been called the think tank. Beatrice Rand, in one of her first acts as First Lady, had refurbished it in euromodern style and now, alone with his chief advisor and half reclining in a pillowy lounge chair, Harry Rand rested the heels of his loafers on the top of a coffee table that floated on permanent magnets above its base.

  Snazzy, weird and wildly expensive, Harry mused. Lord, where would I be today without old Walt? Delivering benedictions back in KayCee, most likely. He gazed with affection across the table at Kalvin, who was talking as he always was; explaining this, urging that. Often, Harry listened, sometimes with rapt attention when Walt called from the Executive Office Building just across the drive. You had to hand it to Walt, on a telephone or radiophone call the man was a demon of persuasiveness. But at other times-now, for example-Harry's mind tended to wander.

  Why the heck didn't Walt accept an office in the West Wing, where we could talk face to face anytime his President wanted him? Well, Walt had a fetish about that; he had always, from the early days of that first bewildering senatorial race in Missouri, depended more on a good intercom system than face-to-face discussion. In fact, most of Walt Kalvin's special ideas seemed to develop best over the intercom. Which one of them was he pushing now? Harry Rand tuned his mind back to the man who sat facing him in a
Barcelona chair, and caught Walt's drift after a moment. The Federal Media Council...

  ... Must have a more responsible press, Kalvin was saying, if we want strong grass-roots support for your programs. There's nothing like bushels of mail from the public to move those hidebound bastards on Capitol Hill.

  Now, Walt, said Harry, with the sad little smile he always used when Kalvin became profane. There's plenty of time to work that out.

  No, there isn't. Other presidential advisors were far more circumspect, would at least precede a flat disagreement by 'with all due respect, Mr. President,' but not old Walt when it was just the two of them. Those codgers on the Hill are experts at wasting time. We've been in office five months now and they haven't brought the media council to a vote. Do you want an end to abortion and pornography and ecology freaks hamstringing good old American industry, or don't you?