The Pinocchio Syndrome

10

Gary, Indiana

November 24

In 1984 Colin Goss, already a giant in the pharmaceutical industry, found that leftist terrorists had closed down his newest factory in Costa Rica. They dynamited one of his buildings, killing twenty workers on a night shift. They also threatened the local workers he had hired.

Goss had the manager of the facility complain to the authorities. They promised to safeguard the security of the plant. Their promises were empty. New terrorist attacks followed. The plant manager himself was kidnapped and held for ransom. The leftist guerrillas demanded that Goss pay the ransom and take his business elsewhere.

Goss took matters into his own hands.

Two weeks after the kidnapping of Goss’s plant manager, a group of commandos led by professional soldiers whom Goss had hired at twice their usual fee assassinated the leaders of the local guerrilla movement. All but one, that is. The last was kidnapped from the small rural compound he used as his hideout. His name was Gabriel Cabrera. A legend among local leftists, Cabrera was the driving force of their movement.

The next week Cabrera was exchanged for the manager of Goss’s plant.

From that time on the Goss operation was allowed to function in safety. A small army of security men, all trained commandos, remained in place to assure the plant’s security and the safety of the workers.

One year to the day after the original assault on Goss’s plant, Gabriel Cabrera was run over by a laundry van in San Isidro. The driver of the van disappeared before police arrived at the scene.

No leader of similar force was found to lead the guerrilla movement, which was set back a generation by Cabrera’s death.

The Costa Rica episode had come to be known as ‘Colin Goss’s Godfather story.’ He never mentioned it in public, and denied it when reporters asked if he had killed the terrorists intentionally. But it had assured his public image once and for all. Goss could accuse anyone he wanted of being soft on terrorism and know that the charge could never be leveled at him. He had paid his dues on that score.

Rumors still circulated to the effect that after the World Trade Center attack, Goss had offered to send a group of his own commandos to Afghanistan to locate and capture Osama bin Laden. His offer was refused, because the White House did not trust Goss to keep quiet about his role in the mission if it was successful, and because the political consequences would be terrible if Goss became a hero to the public. Not even the life of bin Laden was worth the risk of positioning Colin Goss to become president himself one day.

Tonight Goss arrived at a noisy rally being given for him in Gary, Indiana. The unruly crowd was made up largely of steelworkers, many of them out of work due to the deepening recession.

Goss’s advance men had made no effort to quiet the crowd. On the contrary, the Goss people had projected images of chaos, violence, and hunger on huge video screens, so that by the time Goss was announced the mob was almost out of control.

This was a different Colin Goss from the mild, fatherly figure appearing in broadcast ads this fall. The only common link was the dark suit Goss wore as he strode quickly to the microphones.

‘Goss! Goss! Goss!’ the crowd roared. The rhythmic shout sounded like the pumping of a huge engine, pistons forcing out a hiss as steam escaped.

It took Goss several minutes to quiet the crowd sufficiently to make himself heard.

‘We all know why we’re here tonight,’ he said. ‘This is a new millennium, but the values we cherish haven’t changed. We’re here to remind ourselves about who we really are, and what kind of life we want for ourselves and our children. It’s hard sometimes, isn’t it? Hard to remember.’

The crowd was silent now, listening intently.

‘Hard to remember a time when neighbors lived in peace and helped each other when help was needed,’ Goss said. ‘A time when we could walk our streets in safety and enjoy the bounties of the greatest nation on earth. A time when love for one’s fellow man was rewarded by peace and prosperity. That seems a long time ago, doesn’t it?’

The crowd murmured its agreement.

‘That was a wonderful world,’ Goss said. ‘It was built by people who loved freedom and wanted happiness and fulfillment, both for themselves and for their children. These people were builders. They still exist, all over this great country. But today they are besieged by another kind of human being. The kind that has no interest in building, but only in destroying. Do you know who I am talking about?’

‘Yes!’ The crowd answered in one voice.

‘These people are not smart,’ Goss said. ‘They are not brave. They are not good. They don’t know how to build or to create. But they do know how to hate. Do you know who I’m talking about?’

‘Yes!’ The crowd’s response was louder.

‘You know their faces,’ he said. ‘And you’ve heard their voices. They brag about the thousands of innocent men, women, and children they’ve murdered with their terrorist bombs. Even today, on your television screen, you can see them dancing in the streets carrying signs to celebrate the slaughter of eight hundred innocent children on an educational cruise.’

As though on cue the screen behind Goss displayed the infamous mushroom cloud rising above the sparkling Mediterranean after the destruction of the Crescent Queen. The image was quickly followed by a now-familiar picture of pretty Gaye Symington, the most famous of the victims, standing on a diving board at a junior high school swimming meet. Water dripped from the curves of her blossoming adolescent body, making her look strangely vulnerable.

Goss paused to let the crowd remember the Crescent Queen.

‘Why, these people have never built a thing in their lives. They’ve never created a thing or had an individual thought. Yet they take pride in murdering free people. The blood of innocent children is on their hands, but they’re not ashamed of it. They’re proud of it. They think their God is going to reward them for it. Do you know who they are?’

‘YES!’

‘They are cruel and brutal and heartless when they kill women and children,’ he said. ‘But they are cowards. What happens when you put them on a field of battle, with men to fight, instead of women and children? Watch them cringe, watch them hold up their hands, watch them run!’

A roar of anger surged through the crowd. The memory of surrendering Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait was fresh enough in American minds to join the image of Arab fanatics calling for the terrorist murder of civilians.

‘And what happens when we capture them and drag them into our courts?’ Goss asked. ‘They demand justice and mercy, in the name of our constitution and our laws. The same justice and mercy they denied their helpless victims.’

He paused, surveying the crowd with his sharp eyes.

‘And in this they remind us of our own terrorists,’ he said. ‘The ones you’ve seen in dark alleys, demanding your hard-earned money at the point of a gun or knife. The ones you’ve seen on street corners, too lazy to work for a living, waiting to corrupt your children. The ones you’ve seen cruising through poor neighborhoods in their gaudy cars, spraying bullets at imaginary enemies and killing the innocent. What do these people say when they are arrested and called to account for their crimes? They demand justice, they demand mercy.’

A twisted smile curled Goss’s lips.

‘I wonder if the word people is really justified as a description of these creatures,’ he said. ‘For one thing, they are far too cruel to be called people. For another, they are far too cowardly to be called people. And they are certainly too dirty to be called people. Are they really human at all?’

‘NO!’ The crowd roared the word in one voice.

‘Don’t you find it funny, in a tragic sort of way, that we have allowed these animals to terrorize us, simply because we are civilized? That we have turned into lambs waiting for the slaughter, simply because we are too civilized to strike back at an enemy who wants to destroy us? Our own compassion has blinded us to the truth about these cowards. They take their courage and their swagger from our own weakness. At the first sign of strength from us, they run squealing for cover. For too long we’ve been too civilized to take a stand against them.’

An invisible electricity held the crowd in silence.

‘But that’s all over now, isn’t it?’ Goss concluded. ‘The age of fear, the era of trembling, is over. No longer will we go about the business of freedom like victims. No longer will we wait like sheep in a pen for the wolf’s next attack. This time it will be us attacking. And when the butcher runs for cover, we will run faster. We will catch him and destroy him. And when he falls to his knees and prays for mercy at the eleventh hour, what will we do to him?’

‘KILL! KILL! KILL!’

‘GOSS! GOSS! GOSS!’

The crowd surged this way and that, held in check with difficulty by the local police who were working alongside Goss’s security staff. They shook their fists at the cameramen and reporters on the periphery of the crowd. Decades of downsizing in American business, along with the recent recession, fueled their rage. So did countless headlines about terrorist attacks, gang warfare, street crime, welfare fraud, school shootings, illegal drugs, and sexual permissiveness. Not to mention six months of nuclear terror on a scale not seen since the worst days of the Cold War.

The crowd did not have to sort out the manifold sources of its rage. Colin Goss focused it for them. With a sure touch developed over many years, he aimed their anger at a faceless mass of dirty, lazy, selfish, violent, and ultimately inhuman creatures who were responsible for the ills that beset society in the new millennium.

‘GOSS! GOSS! GOSS!’ came the chant, louder than ever now.

At the end the chaos was so great that Goss had to be escorted to his limousine by security men. It took forty-five minutes to disperse the crowd. Scattered incidents of violence would be reported in the nearby inner-city neighborhoods overnight, all of them directed at minorities.

Colin Goss was gone now, en route to his private jet and a speaking engagement in another city. But his message of hate remained behind him, as he knew it would. The legend ‘Time for a Change’ loomed on the enormous video screens.

In a pickup truck on a back road in rural Tennessee, three men were listening to Goss’s speech on the radio.

‘Fuckin’ A,’ the driver said.

‘No shit. Put that fucker in the White House and our problems are over.’ Rafe, riding shotgun, said this.

‘Fucker knows what’s happening,’ said the passenger in the middle, a slender out-of-work auto mechanic named Donny.

They were all unemployed, though Donny had been laid off only last month. Dick, the driver, was a construction worker who had not earned a cent in over a year. Rafe was an air conditioner repairman, out of work since the end of summer.

‘Look,’ said Dick. ‘Look at this.’

A young black boy, perhaps fourteen or fifteen, was walking along the shoulder of the road. He wore overalls and oversized running shoes. As the truck approached he looked over his shoulder without much interest.

Dick brought the truck to a sudden halt on the shoulder, scattering gravel into the weeds.

‘Fucker,’ he said.

‘Fucker!’ his friends echoed.

They were all drunk. They had spent the night pouring down boilermakers at a country tavern. Their search for girls had been fruitless, and they had left in the truck with a bottle of cheap vodka and some Cokes, in time to hear Goss’s speech on the radio as they cruised the farm fields.

They didn’t need to talk over what was to happen. Rafe leaped from the passenger’s seat and seized the black boy by his shoulders. Donny kicked the boy between the legs, whooping excitedly as a cry of pain came from the boy’s lips.

‘What did I do to you?’ the boy cried. ‘Leave me alone.’

Donny’s fist crushed the boy’s nose before he could say another word.

The boy fell to the gravel shoulder. Donny and Rafe crouched over him, fists flying, while Dick aimed kicks at his crotch, one after the other, methodically.

‘Nigger.’

‘Fucker.’

They would not have done it if they had been sober. Even drunk they would not have taken the risk had it not been for Goss’s speech and their frustration at the tavern. But now they were out of control, beating the boy with all their strength. He squirmed and flailed under the blows, his struggles already getting weaker.

‘Kill the fucker,’ said Dick.

The boy’s eyes were beginning to glaze over. Rafe aimed a powerful kick at his undefended temple. Dick was kneeling to undo the boy’s fly.

Then something happened.

Dick’s hands froze in midair. His face, contorted in a grimace of hate, suddenly went blank. Off balance, he teetered and fell to the ground, his arms and legs rigid.

‘Dick? Are you all right?’

Rafe and Donny paused to look at him. Rafe, assuming the black boy had injured Dick in some way, aimed a hard punch and hit his unprotected stomach. The boy screamed.

Donny bent to look at Dick. ‘Fucker passed out on us.’

Rafe pushed Donny aside to get a better look at Dick, whose eyes were wide open. They were not the glazed eyes of a drunken man.

‘Bullshit,’ Rafe said. ‘No way. He’s not passed out.’

The two men stood swaying over their friend, swearing inconsequentially as they wondered what had happened. They did not notice the black boy as he crept away into the thick brush.

‘You don’t think …’ Rafe was scratching his head.

‘Come on, don’t bullshit me.’

‘You know … that thing … that sickness.’

Donny looked closely at Dick’s eyes. ‘Jesus.’

‘Let’s get him to a hospital.’

Rafe had jumped back in alarm. He seemed afraid of the inert body of his friend. He shook his hands as though to rid them of a contagion. ‘Fuck that. Let’s get out of here. We’ll call an ambulance.’

They hopped into the truck, suddenly sober. Rafe gunned the engine. Spinning the wheels on the gravel, he got the truck onto the road and hit sixty within a few seconds.

The roar of the engine subsided. The only sound was the wind in the weeds. The black boy was nowhere to be seen. The motionless white man lay on the shoulder, where a passing farmer would notice him before dawn.

Rafe would fall into drunken sleep before dawn. When he failed to awaken by mid-afternoon, his brother would become alarmed and call 911.

By then Donny would already be in the hospital, a victim of the mystery disease like his two friends.

11

Washington

November 25

Karen Embry was waiting for a news conference to be given by the director of the CIA.

The director was a political appointee who had played a crucial fund-raising role in the president’s narrow election victory. His background was in business and advertising. He had not expected to end up on the hot seat in his new job, though he was aware of the embarrassments suffered by the intelligence community over the past decade.

But the Crescent Queen explosion changed all that. The public held the CIA responsible for not anticipating the terrorist threat and taking steps to prevent attacks. The agency’s fecklessness was one of the key issues cited by those who wanted a new administration in Washington.

So the director was on the defensive today as usual.

Karen had arrived at CIA headquarters a half hour early, and she studied her notes as other journalists set up video cameras and joked with each other. She had dressed carefully for the news conference. She knew the director liked women. She wore a fitted blazer with a short skirt. Her legs were her best feature, along with her eyes, and she knew how to show them off.

The director began the news conference with some routine details about the population of terrorists in European jails. His voice was hard to hear, and his syntax was slightly garbled as usual. Evasiveness had become part of his persona, like the character in Proust who became deaf when unwelcome things were being said to him.

He droned on as long as he dared and finally threw the session open to questions. Karen was the first reporter to raise her hand.

‘As you know, sir,’ she began, ‘the intelligence community has not gotten to the bottom of the Crescent Queen disaster.’

This statement was not a surprise. But it was a sore point with the director.

‘All I can tell you about that,’ he replied carefully, ‘is that we’re investigating. We will bring those responsible for the attack to justice.’

‘All the major known terrorist organizations have denied involvement in the attack,’ Karen said. ‘Isn’t that true, sir?’

‘Yes, but we suspect their denials are in bad faith,’ the director replied.

‘The intelligence services haven’t been able to prove that any terrorist group had either nuclear weapons or the missiles to deliver them, isn’t that true?’ Karen asked.

‘That’s true.’

‘Have you considered the possibility that someone else was behind the attack?’

The director raised an eyebrow.

‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

‘If we suppose for the sake of argument that none of the known terrorist groups was behind the incident,’ Karen said, ‘wouldn’t it be possible that someone else built and delivered the bomb, knowing that the existing terrorist groups would fall under suspicion?’

The director did not know how to answer.

‘We have no evidence that such a scenario is the correct one,’ he said.

‘But if it were,’ she pursued, ‘how would you proceed?’

The director was thrown. His professional role was to sift through data and find the most clear and obvious answer. He had no time for unlikely hypotheses, and didn’t really know how to deal with them.

‘All I can tell you is that we’re investigating all possibilities,’ he said. ‘The very fact that an outlaw organization possessed the technology to use a nuclear weapon’ – he pronounced the word nucular – ‘against innocent civilians is a monstrous thing, a totally unacceptable thing. I guarantee you we will find out the truth behind the Crescent Queen disaster, and those responsible will be punished to the full extent of the law.’

Karen waited while he answered a softball question from another reporter. Then she raised her hand again.