“No,” I lied.”
The interrogator stared at me, not even bothering to glance at the readings he insisted revealed my deception.
There was a knock at the door.
Amit let himself into the double-wide trailer.
“Sorry I’m late,” he apologized.
The interrogator, my Uncle Rob, stood up and smiled, “You have good timing. I just finished my third grilling of Pete. I think he’s got it down pat, if he’ll remember to be ‘confused’ instead of denying something outright.”
Amit stared intently at the polygraph. Finally, he asked, “How exactly does this lie detector test work?”
“A polygraph exam is not really a test,” Rob explained. “It’s an intense interrogation. The main reason for the polygraph is to frighten and intimidate a subject into making a confession or admission.”
Amit looked skeptical. “I thought it detected some kind of physiological reaction associated with lying.”
“There’s no such thing as a lying reaction,” Rob clarified. “At best, a polygraph detects nervousness. The ‘reaction’ that brands you as a liar only indicates deception about half the time. Anyone can pass any lie detector test simply by duplicating the physiological response to fear on demand at the appropriate time. The polygraph records your blood pressure, your heart rate, and what’s called your galvanic skin response.”
I held up my right hand and examined the black electrodes attached to my first and third fingers. “So, it’s just measuring the electrical resistance.”
“Exactly,” Rob confirmed. “The more you sweat, the lower the resistance between your fingers. The polygraph can literally see you sweat. The pneumograph tubes around your chest and stomach record your breathing.” He unfastened them from me. I stood up, and Amit took my place in the chair.
“Any number of innocent stimuli cause the exact same reaction that would brand you as a liar,” Rob said, fastening the tubes around Amit. “The more well-developed your conscience, the more likely you are to flunk a polygraph examination – the more hardened your conscience, the better your chance of passing it.”
“So, how do you beat the polygraph test?” Amit asked.
“To pass a polygraph examination, you have to know how it works. There are two types of questions: relevant and control. The relevant questions are the ones the interrogator really wants to know. You have to show no reaction whatsoever on the relevant questions. On the control questions, you want to establish a baseline of high stress and nervousness. The examiner compares your reactions. If the relevant questions show a greater reaction than the control questions, that’s considered a sign of deception.”
Rob showed us the traces. “See? These are the traces for the control questions, and these are the traces for the relevant questions.”
I couldn’t make much sense of the squiggles. “Where’s the indication of massive deception you mentioned?”
“I lied,” he said with a smile. “The control traces are somewhat elevated compared to the relevant traces, like it should be for an honest person who comes in nervous and calms down over the course of the examination. At worst the interrogator might call it ambiguous and bring you in for a redo, hoping the added pressure would yield some admissions.”
I thought about the implications. “So it’s all a game of intimidation?”
Rob nodded his head in agreement. “The interrogator uses the lie detector as a tool to intimidate the suspect into a confession. Sheriff Gunn was telling me when lie detectors first came out, they’d connect a suspect to a photocopier by some wires and when the interrogator thought the suspect was lying, they’d push the print button. Out would pop a copy of the paper they’d loaded with the message, ‘He’s lying.’ They got a lot of suspects to confess that way.”
“Where’d you get the polygraph?” Amit asked.
“The FBI let us borrow it,” Rob grinned.
“Really?”
Rob nodded. “Sheriff Gunn has been making friends. The local Feds hate the new regime. The honest ones, the loyal patriots, they’re being eased out everywhere to make room for the new breed, the compliant ones who won’t hesitate to do their masters’ bidding. They ship out the good agents to career-killing dead-end jobs at backwoods offices like Knoxville, so they can fill the important offices with more trustworthy, compromised agents. The good guys are networking, comparing notes, doing favors for each other, like letting Sheriff Gunn borrow this polygraph.”
Rob settled back into his chair. “Ready, Amit?”
“Oh,” Amit suddenly remembered, “Rick was waiting by the gate when I arrived, so I let him in. He’s dropping off your truck, Pete.” I’d left it in Chattanooga when Sheriff Gunn insisted I ride home with him. Amit handed me a data CD. “Here’s the latest public news and the overnight intercepts. The Civic Circle can’t decide whether Professor Graf ditched them in the Smoky Mountains to join Professor Chen in Charleston, or whether Charleston is a false trail to distract them while they both hide away in some Smoky Mountain cabin. The Civic Circle’s Technology Containment Team seems convinced their Russian contractors managed to poison Professor Graf, though.”
“So far, so good, then,” Rob nodded. “The plan’s working.” I bit my tongue to keep from pointing out that Rob’s plan had been to abandon the professors to the Civic Circle. They were both alive because I’d defied my uncle and insisted on executing a rescue with or without him. He’d acknowledged he was wrong though, so there was no point in my rubbing it in again. Rob handed me some keys. “To the cruiser,” he explained. “Rick’ll drive it back to the Lee County Courthouse.”
“OK.” I headed out the door, wondering what Rick would think of finding himself driving one of Sheriff Gunn’s cruisers, like a real deputy sheriff.
“Is your name Amit Patel?” I heard Rob ask as I shut the door behind me. I walked over to my truck.
Rick stepped out as I approached and tossed me the keys to my truck. I looked him over. “Nice outfit, Deputy Rick.” Apparently, driving the police cruiser wasn’t going to be a novel experience for him after all.
He glanced down at his uniform and looked up with a grin, shifting his hand to rest on the holster at his side. “You don’t want to run afoul of the law hereabouts, son,” he said in a fair imitation of Sheriff Gunn.
“No, sir,” I assured him, reaching out my hand.
Rick relaxed his lawman pose, and suddenly he was my old friend from high school shop class once again. He took my hand in a strong grip. “How you been, Pete? School treat you well?”
“Kept me busy, both inside and outside of class.
“Yeah,” he acknowledged. “I heard something about those protests at Georgia Tech. Figures you were involved.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Stuff’s happening,” he explained. “Your uncle’s in the middle of it. Last summer, Mr. Burdell, he’d take you and Amit on up in the hills most every weekend. ‘Just camping,’ he told the rest of us.”
I remembered it well. We’d meet up with the sheriff, Mr. Garraty, and some of Rob’s other friends to practice escape and evasion, marksmanship, and small unit tactics all over the nearby hills and hollows.
“This past year, he’s been taking me and a few of the other shop rat gang ‘camping,’ too,” Rick explained with a knowing look on his face. “There’s a fight coming, isn’t there?” Rick dared me to deny it. “He’s getting us all ready.”
I hadn’t known Rob was busy recruiting more cells into our organization, but it was no surprise. I wasn’t supposed to be talking about it, though. “What makes you think there’s a fight coming?”
“My eyes are open,” Rick said. “I see what’s happening, parts of it, at least. The Preserving our Planet’s Future Act – that was just the beginning of it. It’s not just the terrorists killing President Gore and President Lieberman’s ‘Gore Tax’ driving the price of gasoline and everything else way up. That’s just an excuse to take more money from our pockets.
They’re trying to take over. Completely.”
“Who’s trying to take over?”
“The elites, of course,” Rick answered. “The big shots, like your uncle, Larry, and the rest of the Tollivers. The Civic Circle. You know?”
I knew exactly what he was talking about. The Tollivers had never forgiven Dad for stealing Mom away from them. Uncle Larry had tried to recruit me into the Civic Circle – a way of getting even with Dad. Dad stole his sister from him, so he aimed to steal me back. In recruiting me, Larry revealed a part of their hidden agenda.
You know how they say conservatives think liberals are stupid? Socialism has been tried time and again. We had the "National Socialism" of the Nazis and the "International Socialism" of the communists. Both sides centralized power in the hands of the state, crushed opposition, and ruthlessly killed their enemies. The Nazis exterminated around 20,000,000 “race enemies.” The Nazis were amateurs, though, compared to their communist rivals, who slaughtered something on the order of 110,000,000 victims. Government power is a necessary condition for mass slaughter, and the historical correlation between absolute power and absolute corruption and devastation is undeniable. If liberals were smart (or so reason some conservatives), they would understand the danger posed by government power. Therefore, liberals must be dumb.
What if conservatives are wrong? What if liberals aren’t actually stupid – at least not all of them? Many in the elite are there because of social connections and inheritance. Once there, though, how do they stay there? At any time, some eager young interloper with cleverer ideas and a better work ethic might undercut their position and usurp their power. How then can the elite increase social stasis, decrease social volatility and mobility, and enhance their chances of remaining on top without requiring an honest victory over the competition?
The answer is simple: socialism.
The devastation that inevitably follows when absolute power leads to absolute corruption? An acceptable risk if it allows them to be the ones with absolute power.
Their redistributive welfare schemes that never seem to cure poverty? They buy votes and build a bureaucracy vested in perpetuating the status quo.
Feminist policies that never manage to eliminate the “wage gap?” They get women out of the home and into the workplace, weakening the threat of families as a rival to government power, lowering the birthrate, and ensuring that what children are born get sculpted by the public school system to be proper citizens with the “right” values and attitudes. They get women looking to the government as a surrogate husband.
Educational loans to help everyone get a college education? They encourage students to incur vast amounts of debt they will never be able to repay, putting them in fiscal bondage for life, while funding the elites’ cheerleaders and propagandists in academia.
Environmental policies to “save the planet”? They’re specifically designed to throttle industry, slow down progress and enforce a social stasis in which the elites’ positions will be secure.
For every “benevolent” policy of the enlightened liberal elite, there’s a sinister hidden agenda to tighten the elite’s grip on power.
“Yeah,” I replied to Rick, “I know.”
“They’re trying to take over,” he insisted. “They fly off on their fancy jets to their exotic foreign resorts to hobnob with Hollywood stars and lecture us all about how we need to learn to live with less. For the planet, they say. Then they leave us with less, and they skim off the rest to fund their next scheme to change the world and buy ‘em more votes.”
I nodded. Rick got it. I could see why Rob was bringing him into the Reactance.
“They’re fencing us in with regulations, and harvestin’ the sweat off our brows and the shirts off our backs in taxes,” Rick continued. “Don’t matter if you vote Democrat because you think they’ll help the little guy, or Republican because you think they’ll get the government off your back. The end result is always the same. We keep losing our country bit by bloody bit.”
I hadn’t realized Rick was so passionate and so clued in to what was going on. “What do you think we should do about it?” I asked him.
“I don’t know, exactly,” he acknowledged, “but if you think they’re going to give us back our country without a fight, you’re sadly mistaken.”
I nodded.
“Mr. Burdell, he’s got a plan,” Rick continued. “I don’t know the details. He keeps all that pretty tight. No ‘need to know.’ He gets us to help him though, when he needs it. Like with that missing scientist lady.”
“You think he had something to do with that?” I asked.
Rick rolled his eyes at me. “The sheriff and your uncle, Mr. Burdell, round up me and most of the other reserve deputies to run off to Chattanooga just as this scientist lady you were workin’ for at Georgia Tech goes missin’? And somehow I gotta drive your truck back here for you a few days later? I may not be in the loop on the whole story, but I can put two and two together and get four.”
I couldn’t lie to my friend. I remained silent.
“Don’t worry,” he assured me with a grin. “I won’t say nothin’. I gotta go get ready for tonight.”
“Tonight?”
He looked at me. “I thought you were involved.” He looked at me more intently, uncertain whether I was really ignorant or merely refusing to say what I knew. “Never mind. Need to know and all.”
I resisted the temptation to ask him what was going on, and I handed him the keys to the cruiser. “See you around, Rick.”
“Later!”
I was going to have to ask Rob how Rick fit into our day’s plans in particular and the Reactance in general. I mean, I knew Rob was busy working out how to take down the Civic Circle, and I knew he was using his business activities as a cover for his plans. I’d figured he was collaborating with Sheriff Gunn and some of their veteran buddies. Rob recruiting his employees, including my high school friends, into some kind of covert militia – the scale of it took me by surprise.
Seemed Amit and Rob were still busy with their interrogation in the trailer, so I headed to the barn to check on the professor. Rob didn’t want Amit knowing about the refuge buried underneath the barn. Until Amit and I went off to our summer jobs, we were maintaining the fiction that Rob and I were occupying the trailer and Professor Graf lived in the apartment in the barn. That fiction was for Amit’s sake. Rick may have put the pieces together to figure out what was going on, but neither he nor anyone else were supposed to know we were hiding the professor. When Rob and I had left her, she was reviewing her calculations in the kitchen. That’s where I found her.
“Hi, Marlena.” I was still getting used to calling Professor Graf by her first name.
“Hi, Pete,” she looked up from her book. “Ready for your polygraph exam?”
“I think so,” I assured her. “The concept is easy. It’s the practice of consciously controlling breathing, heart rate, and nervousness in general that are the challenge.” I looked at Fox News playing on the TV in the background. “Isn’t that distracting?”
“Yes,” she acknowledged, “but I was stuck anyway, and I just can’t help myself. Every hour they recap the top news, and America gets to learn the latest developments in the manhunt for the Chinese spy, Professor Wu Chen, and his missing femme fatale, yours truly. They’re saying the most vicious things about him seducing me or me seducing him – ridiculously salacious speculations woven out of no evidence whatsoever.”
“There’s no reason to subject yourself to that nonsense,” I pointed out. “Amit compiled a digest of the online press and the Civic Circle’s internal reports.” I handed her the CD.
“Thanks,” she took the disk. “I need to see it, though,” she gestured toward the TV. “I need to keep reminding myself that I really am a wanted fugitive, that I really have broken all my ties to my past life. You get used to being able to search for the specific information you want, online, instantly,” she said, a tone of frustration in her voi
ce. “Having to sit back passively while some clueless talking-head gatekeeper feeds you a stream of information, most of which you don’t care about…”
“It wouldn’t be a good idea for us to show too great an interest in your case through online searches,” I pointed out. “They monitor everything, and if they start to focus on who’s paying attention to the news about you…”
“I know,” she interrupted me, “I know. It’s just that I’m used to keeping up to date in astrophysics, looking at who’s citing my work and who’s publishing what in my area. Every morning I’d check the latest. Now, I can’t do that.”
“If you get Amit a list of what you want to keep up with, he can roll that into all the other searches he distributes across all the hotels running his software. We have to hand-carry it up from town, though. With our satellite internet out here, it’s just too easy for them to keep an eye on our data and activity. The hotel Amit’s family runs and the network Amit built up provide much better cover for hiding potentially suspicious data streams like that.”
“That’s just part of it,” Marlena looked off into the distance – the weight of the past few weeks evident in the weariness that showed on her face. “My old life is gone. I can’t go back. It’s finally sinking in. I’m a prisoner here.”
I started to protest, but she cut me off.
“Oh, I know. You and your uncle have been very nice to me. I’m grateful you saved my life. I’m grateful you’ve provided me with a refuge here to hide, but… I can’t leave. It’s a prison. A very nice prison with friendly jailers, but a prison nevertheless. I’m angry at the Civic Circle. They may have failed to kill me, but they did manage to take my life away. I’m frustrated there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that, because it was all true. I thought she knew I loved her, but I wasn’t sure. I wanted to tell her how I felt, but with her in such obvious turmoil, the timing just didn’t seem right.
I finally noticed the book in her hands – the original proof of Angus MacGuffin’s Suan Ming or the Art of Chinese Fortune Telling, quite possibly the most valuable, or at least the most dangerous, book in the world. “We do have copies, you know.”
The Brave and the Bold Page 2
