Let Them Look West, page 28
Walden chuckled. “No, no it didn’t. He told me that he would never under any circumstances reveal the identity of the writer and said that he sadly was not surprised to see such thuggish tactics already coming from James Alexander. I made it clear to him that I was there entirely on my own initiative. I told him that if I’m doing my job right, then Alexander’s problems go away without him even having to take the trouble. I was laying it on a little thick, but I wanted to put a scare into him.”
“Why? Sadism?” Rob asked with a smirk.
Walden twisted his mouth and made a rough sound in his throat. “Hardly. I wanted to find out how he was communicating with the writer. In order to do that, I needed to get him concerned enough to reach out. If he felt he needed to caution this Nico character, then maybe I could catch him sending some kind of message.”
“By what, tapping his phone?” Rob suggested sardonically.
“No, by bugging his office. That’s why I wanted to walk in there in the first place.”
Rob stopped with his glass half raised to his lips. He stared at Walden. The older man had sunk back into his chair with a look of menacing coolness on his features.
“You’re serious?” Rob asked.
“Of course I’m serious. Why do you think I had you sign a nondisclosure agreement? Do you think I get off on that kind of thing?”
“That is, well, not to mention illegal, that is so unethical. I don’t know where to begin.” The liquor had given Rob the carelessness needed to voice his disturbance. “I mean, you’re a lawyer. You didn’t feel bad stooping to criminal methods just to try to figure out who wrote some editorials?”
“There are three types of people who go into law,” Walden declared with a coolly determined expression. As he continued speaking, his eyes flicked over to Rob’s face at intervals as though by necessity, a slide mechanism rolling back at the end of each thought in order to stamp out new lines of explanation. “The most pernicious of them are the idealists who believe that the law ought to be preserved and guarded by an almost priestly class of scholars. These sorts usually go into law because they’re really interested in politics or social justice, whatever that means. They tend to exalt the law with a traitorous veneration. Because they respect its power, they seek to transform it. The law is like their father. They respect its authority and experience but resent its old-fashioned restraint and inconvenient bigotries. They see the law as a power which contains the world of men and they seek to place the confines securely around themselves and everyone else. Those are the most contemptible people who study and practice the law.
“The second kind of people who get into law are the most common. It’s a lucrative field. They have no strong ideals really about what the law means in a metaphysical sense or how it forms and shapes the world of men. They don’t love the law just as an electrician doesn’t love copper wiring. They understand it and use it. They simply apply it in a way that saves their clients’ money or helps them avoid legal headaches.
“Then there is the third kind of person who studies the law. This sort of lawyer is like the first and second in some ways. He possesses an ideological view of law, but not because he reveres it. Like the second kind of person, he uses it for his profit too at times. His purpose for knowing the law is primarily so that he knows how to move in the world. Unlike the first sort of legal scholar, he does not seek to set boundaries to contain himself and his adversaries. He dwells outside and around the world of law. His kingdom is whatever he wishes it to be. He knows the law as the wilderness traveler knows the nature of a serpent. He learns its behaviors, the effect of its venom, the pattern of its skin. I strive to be this third sort of person. I do not owe the law any allegiance, nor do I stand in awe of its complexity and dimensions. I do, however, like to know the sound it makes when it’s about to bite me.”
Rob scrunched up his eyes and furrowed his brow for a moment after the lawyer finished speaking. “That’s all very eloquent, but you have practiced law as a trade, right? I’m not sure your relationship with the law is as cool and calculated as you make it sound.”
“I’ve worked it as a trade at times, yes,” Walden asserted with a nod. “But all of my most interesting projects have fallen more accurately under the wide umbrella of what could be called ‘consulting.’” He gave a wolfish grin.
“What about Alexander?” Rob asked. “He puts up with it? Your views on the law? I find it hard to believe that he knows you do not respect or revere the law and has no issue.”
Walden raised an eyebrow and tilted his head to one side slightly. “It’s funny. I’m not sure that you understand him at all. It was Alexander who told me one of the profoundest things about the law, something I’m not sure I still yet understand. I had not been working for him for very long, and in a meeting, one of his other people was telling him that a certain political move could result in legal trouble. Alexander responded by asking what the law is.”
The lawyer’s eyes rolled over. “Do you know what the law is, Mr. Journalist?”
Rob shrugged. “Agreed upon principles,” he tossed out half-heartedly.
“‘The law is words.’ That’s what Alexander said. He said the law is words, and, while all laws are made up of words, not all words are laws. He said that in the beginning was the Word and thus also was the law, but the Word is greater than the law. And then later on, the Word became flesh and dwelt in the world, and the law was within the Word, but the word was not only law. He ended by saying again, simply: ‘The Word is greater than the law, because the Word contains the law.’”
Rob took a gulp of his drink. “Sounds like a bunch of semantics to me.” All this talk about law and power and things being greater than the law was reminding him of something he could not quite place.
“Perhaps it is,” Walden replied. “But it spoke to me and the way I had approached the law. It was the closest I ever came to believing in Alexander as more than just a leader.”
“Forgot where this was going.” Rob ran his fingers through his hair in frustration. He was feeling sullen about the stagnating conversation and that none of it mattered, since he had signed the nondisclosure.
“You were asking how I could, as a lawyer, purposefully breach the law by bugging a journalist’s office. And that was my explanation.”
“Right,” Rob replied with a nod.
Walden cleared his throat and settled back into his chair. “I’m not sure what happened to the microphone I planted on Grant’s desk, but it only transmitted for a few days. Out of those two days, there was only one possible relevant thing I picked up about the editorials. Grant made a phone call to someone to tell them that I was snooping around. He said that he was pretty sure that I didn’t know anything and that all he knew himself was the email contact from the guy at Pneuma who had helped set it up.”
“What is Pneuma?” Rob asked.
“It’s exactly what you would expect,” Walden explained in a tired voice. “It was some extremely nebulous non-profit organization focused on ‘pro-democracy’ and ‘free society’ messaging for big corporations that wanted to give back to the world. It didn’t seem like much, but it was my only lead.”
“Do you have any theories about what happened to your bug in the office?” Rob asked. “Before you get too far ahead?”
“I don’t know,” Walden said with a frown. His voice meandered the words out and he sounded uncharacteristically unsure of himself. “It could have been a faulty microphone, or it was knocked off the underside of the desk by accident. Of course it could have been picked up in a bug sweep.” His light brown tiger’s eye pupils jerked over to stare directly at Rob’s face.
“But why would a small newspaper be sweeping for bugs?”
“Exactly,” the old lawyer agreed with the open-ended question. “But that wasn’t my concern at the time. Things started to click when I began my research on Pneuma. You see, I knew one of the advisors on the board. It was my old ice fishing buddy Charles from years back. That was when I remembered what he told me about project ICON and began to wonder if there was a connection.”
“You checked out Pneuma?” Rob was engrossed at this point.
“There wasn’t much to check out. It was a shell. The address in New York was one tiny office. I never saw it open. It was just a sign on a door as far as I could tell. The whole operation was a ghost. Somewhere in the middle of it all, that writer Andrew Laren fit in. I went back to the Tribune and started working the small fish. After a few weeks of nothing useful, they got suspicious and the editor in chief called Alexander. He pulled me off it. I lost my chance.”
Walden’s brow had slid down low over his eyes and his lips were pulled tight over his front teeth. They would have been bared angrily if the skin was not covering them.
“You think Pneuma was a cover for ICON?” Rob asked.
“I think it was one of the many masks it wore in public.”
“And you think Laren worked for them in some capacity?”
“The only surviving relative at that point was his daughter. She said he had moved out of the state after he retired from the university, and they lost contact. She never heard from him until the call explaining that he was dead. Heart attack in California someplace.”
“Then you weren’t entirely honest when you said that you knew who was writing the editorials,” Rob chided with a grin.
“I know who was involved. I have guesses about the whole process, but I don’t like to talk about my speculations.”
“For legal reasons?”
“That, and I wonder if I’ve gone crazy when I speculate too much. If I step outside myself and look at what I’m thinking, then it looks completely insane.”
“What, that it’s all part of a secret government program?”
“No,” Walden ventured grimly. “About Andrew Laren himself. Sometimes I think that maybe they don’t let you die anymore if they don’t want you to.”
Rob took another drink. “They?”
“Exactly.”
Rob heaved an exhausted sigh and finished his glass of whiskey. Walden seemed to have trailed off and lost himself. Rob checked the time. It was late and he was tired. “I think I’m going to go back to bed.” He paused. “Do you think there is any chance I can talk to Alexander again tomorrow?”
“I doubt it,” Walden stated, rousing slightly from his dark turn. “He’s extremely busy with the Treasury Department business.”
“Well, thank you for the drink.”
“You are very welcome, Coen.”
Rob picked up his sheets of notes, stood a little unsteadily and shuffled through the dim meal hall to the entry of the lodge. He cast one last glance back to Walden, a black boulder of a silhouette which stared into the flames with one elbow propped on the table and his glass held aloft. It was entirely possible Walden was lying about the entire thing; that there was no project ICON, that it was all a ruse to discourage Rob from looking too closely at anything.
He clambered up the steps and went down the hall toward his room, his right shoulder grazing the wall all the way down. He fumbled with the key and dropped it once before getting the door open. Directly inside another note lay on the floor. Rob turned to look each way down the hall before stooping to pick it up and then enter his room. He turned on the lamp and then collapsed into bed. This time it was a sheet of paper that read,
Miscellaneous Four: Thirty-Seven Minutes. Do not forsake the archival materials. They hold the key. If you doubt my intentions, then let me give you a sign that I speak the truth. If you look to the sky a little after seven PM, you will see a light moving from the Southeast to the Northwest. Let this be an assurance that I have the best intentions for you and for the people of this state. To know is to hold and to hold is to care for.
Your friend,
Nico.
Rob stared at the words for a few minutes, too tired and intoxicated to make much sense of them. He set it on the table along with his notes from the conversation with Walden, turned off the light and rolled over to go to sleep.
CHAPTER
14
I
n the morning he was very groggy and rolled out from under the blankets into the light of the room before stumbling to the small bathroom to take a boiling shower. All the strangeness with Walden from the night before lurked in the back of his mind. As the water poured down his head and back and down his limbs and fingers, he suddenly remembered what he had been trying to think of the night before when Walden was talking about the law and the word being greater than the law.
Not long after Alexander won the governorship of Wyoming, a scandal broke out in the world of journalism. Perhaps scandal was too strong a word. It was an uncomfortable series of events that resulted in a significant bit of infighting between the columns within the battalions of commentary. Someone broke ranks and publicly defected from what were the acceptable lines of thinking. The man in question was Ron Franks. He was one of those kept ostensible traditionalists who endured a long humiliation of his own ideology in order to be printed in a paper accepted by the wider journalistic society. Rob never understood how those types could live with themselves. They ate the scraps of the socially liberal, religiously neutral, commercially friendly table, while somehow perceiving to have reactionary bona fides of some kind. It came across to most as ineffectual complaining, the muffled protestations of a man bound and gagged in the cupboard as conversation made its way around the dining room.
Ron Franks was viewed by most as a pathetic character, the cowed pet of the media establishment who preached civic peace at the most fervent peaks of cultural conflict. The left shrugged and gave him patronizing tomcat smiles typically reserved for plump field mice. The reactionary right openly scorned him. Rob wondered what gene of shamelessness was needed for survival in such circumstances: to live at the pleasure of your enemies in spite of your ostensible allies. For Ron Franks to fall from the constellation of opinion journalism luminaries was no great loss. He was after all, little more than a toothless, taxidermied trophy set above the mantle as an amusing conversation piece. The problem was the way that he fell out: biting every hand which had fed him all those years in the urban progressive core. He went very quickly from being a joke to being the most hated man in journalism with one article titled “The Last Laborer in the Vineyard.” The piece opened with an apology:
Despite being a conservative and a Christian, I have been critical and at times even hostile to the goals and methods of James Alexander during his campaign for the Governorship of Wyoming. This was earnest criticism, born from my belief that America is most importantly a neutral space where ideas, ideologies, and political movements can compete for influence without fear of institutional abuse suppressing the spread of competing ideas and ethics. It has taken me a long time to acknowledge that this view is naïve, that things have already gotten to the point where I have no good faith rivals on the other side of the political divide. This leaves me alone in the middle, trying to play referee, criticizing equally my political allies and opponents for not upholding the ideal of institutional neutrality in favor of short-term victories. I believed, mistakenly, that so long as there was a free market and open square for public discourse and debate, the best ideas would win out in the end. I was wrong. We do not have a free market. There is no good faith maintenance of neutral institutions.
Following James Alexander’s victory in Wyoming, a democratic mandate given by the will of the people living in that state, I have heard my colleagues and even friends in the world of politics, business, media, and entertainment openly live out fantasies of political, economic, and, at times revoltingly literal, war upon the state of Wyoming. Massive corporations have suggested that they will no longer do business in the state. Members of congress have suggested methods of sanction. I was wrong to side against Alexander. I beg the forgiveness of those I accused of exaggeration, extremism or doomsday prophecy. The founders enshrined interstate commerce protections to prevent conflict between members of the union, but they did not expect massive corporations to become as large and powerful as small states, to be unaccountable to the national ethic.
Sex sells, vanity sells, sloth sells, pride sells, violence sells, sin sells. An upright people is the enemy of a corporation. Big business and financial powers will make war on the democratic mandate of an upright people who will narrow their consumer base. I was wrong, I was so very wrong.
The nakedly honest candor and the unfettered willingness to admit false conscience proved exceedingly jarring to Ron Frank’s journalist colleagues. This sort of sudden shift made everyone else very nervous. They were even more nervous after reading the following bit:
I have long made the constitutionalist and legalistic arguments that moderate policy precedent, neutrality of culture, and checks and balances matter more than anything. James Alexander’s willingness to shatter norms and civility long held in the public square caused me to balk. But no longer. It has taken time and prayer for me to recognize that Alexander approaches civics and civic morality from a supra-legal, mythic perspective. He is driven by the heroic politics of the Puritan founders of America, not the cautious liberality of the Virginian landholders.
What good are volumes and tomes of constitutional law and checks and balances, when the men and women supposedly executing and protecting these laws are morally bankrupt? When history reaches the end of civilization’s small arc, and the decent men are few, they must slip off the bonds of legalistic thinking in order to preserve their own and their people’s righteousness. I believed too much in the libertarian dream, that diametrically opposed ideologies could exist side by side in friendly competition and that this friendly struggle was the end to history. This is not so. One will always gain the upper hand and seize upon the machinations of justice. Then we are all at their mercy, unless mercy is not a virtue found in their code. What is left for a man such as myself? One who long saw himself as the keeper of civility as the greatest good? There is only one option: Find the truth, which is not the conditional laws of a fickle people, seize upon it, and survive.
