Code 6, p.14
Code 6, page 14
Sean returned, took the seat beside her, and glanced at the single-spaced text with way too many footnotes. “Now, that looks boring.”
Kate could have dropped it there. But her meeting with Noah had left her mind awhirl with questions. Sean probably didn’t have any answers, but it might clear her head just to hear herself talk.
“It’s a Supreme Court decision from 2019. It relates to my play, in a way.”
“What’s it about?”
“The Court said the Commerce Department couldn’t add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.”
“I have a vague recollection of that from the news,” said Sean. “What does that have to do with Nazis using Hollerith machines?”
“Here’s an interesting fact. In the early days, sometimes the U.S. census included the citizenship question and sometimes it didn’t. But starting in 1890 and going all the way to 1950—seven times in a row—the full-count census asked every U.S. resident if he or she was a citizen.”
“So?”
“I said, ‘starting in 1890.’ That’s where my play starts: the first time the U.S. Census Bureau used technology to process census data.”
“Interesting coincidence.”
“It’s not a coincidence. It’s the slippery slope of Big Data meets Big Government. Who’s a citizen? Who has a great-grandparent of African descent? Who has a Jewish grandparent? This is exactly what my play is about.”
“Actually, it’s not. Irving is more firm than ever that it’s about capitalism.”
“Irving can go to hell.”
“Irving will be there soon enough,” said the director himself, coming down the aisle behind them.
Kate shrank in her orchestra seat. “I didn’t know you were there.”
“Obviously. Now, if you’re done cursing me out, come with me. And leave behind whatever that is you’re reading. I need your complete focus. No clutter.”
“I’ll be in Irving’s office,” said Sean, taking Kate’s bag and the papers with him.
Kate stepped into the center aisle and walked with Irving toward the main stage.
“Kate, what you are about to experience will probably make you nauseous,” he said.
“What is it?”
“A table reading for the next play I’m supposed to open. It’s called Trillary.”
“Trilogy?”
“No. Trillary. It’s a dark comedy about the next presidential election. Trump runs against Hillary Clinton all over again. It’s too close to call. Both candidates are up all night, and finally the media makes the announcement: it’s a tie. Two hundred sixty-eight electoral college votes for each.”
“What do they do?” asked Kate, as they climbed the stairs at stage right.
“Trump still has his key to the front door. Bill Clinton still has his. So . . .”
“They race to the White House, literally,” said Kate.
“Exactly. It’s four in the morning, and we have not one, but two presidents-elect barging into the East Wing in their pajamas trying to lay claim to the master bedroom. Trillary.”
“It sounds kind of funny.”
“Think War of the Roses meets Washington.”
“What’s War of the Roses?”
“An old Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner movie. They play a married couple in a bitter divorce, but neither one will leave the house. So they draw a line down the middle of every room—this half’s yours, this half’s mine. Of course, they end up killing each other. Which, in the case of Trillary, I see as a happy ending.”
Bass parted the curtain, and they joined the cast onstage. Two men and a woman were seated around a table, each with a script in hand. Irving set the scene for Kate.
“We’re in the presidential bedroom suite. There’s a bright red line that runs right down the middle of the bed and continues across the room. Hillary slides under the covers on her side. Donald slides under the covers on his. And there’s this tense silence between them.”
Bass waited a beat, then rapped on the table, a door knock: “Enter Bill.”
Donald read his line. “Beat it, doughboy. This bed is for the presidents-elect.”
“Cool,” said Bill. “Does this mean I get to sleep with Melania?”
“No!” shouted Trillary—Hillary and Donald in unison.
“Cut,” said Irving. He excused himself from the actors and led Kate back outside the curtain. “You see, Kate? The script is terrible. And the playwright won’t let me change a word. If I do, he’ll sic the Dramatist Guild on my ass.”
“Well, it is his copyright.”
“That’s what I was afraid you’d say. I can’t work under those rules. Not with him and not with you.”
Kate’s antennae were up. “It sounds like you want total control of my script.”
“I need control. For starters, the play needs a narrator.”
“I don’t want a narrator.”
“Tom Watson, Sr., is the perfect narrator.”
“Why does my play need any narrator?”
“Because there’s so much good material. The only way to keep all of it in the play is by compressing it through a narrator.”
“How much compression?”
“Get it down to one act. No intermission. Ninety minutes.”
“That’s impossible.”
“It’s not only possible; it’s imperative. My plays start at eight p.m., and eighty percent of my audience are boomers who want to be in bed by ten.”
“I’d rather cut scenes.”
“We can’t. Not with the additions I have.”
“What additions?”
“Charles Lindbergh. He received the Nazi Merit Cross a year after Watson did. Watson must have met him at some point.”
“He did. His son wanted to be a pilot, so Watson took him to meet Lindbergh.”
“Perfect! Work that into the narrative. And we need another minute or two of Watson meeting Joseph Kennedy and Father Coughlin.”
“Father who?”
“Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest. He had thirty million listeners. The Roosevelt administration finally forced the cancellation of his show when his message turned anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler.”
“Are you sure Watson actually had a meeting with Father Coughlin and Joseph Kennedy?”
“I’m sure he didn’t. But he could have.”
“Except that he didn’t.”
“I’m asking you to take artistic license. Coughlin was an anti-Semite, no doubt about it. The verdict is out on Joe Kennedy, but he made some pretty questionable remarks when he was FDR’s ambassador to Great Britain.”
“I thought we were in agreement that Watson was not an anti-Semite.”
“It’s up to the audience to decide.”
“It’s up to us not to lie to them. I can’t portray Watson as an anti-Semite based on meetings that never happened with men who may or may not have been anti-Semitic.”
“Fine. Cut Joseph Kennedy.”
“And Father Coughlin.”
“Oh, all right,” he said, grumbling. “But Watson as narrator is non-negotiable.”
Kate hesitated. “I’m not sure I’m the right playwright to pull this off. Watson is a sixty-something-year-old man. I’m a twenty-seven-year-old woman.”
“No. You’re a writer. You have the tits of Aphrodite and a dick so hard you could cut diamonds with it. You have whatever your director wants and everything your director would give himself, if only he had the talent to write. Give me a play, Kate.”
Irving was such a contradiction to Kate. He could be the crudest, biggest ass on the planet and, in the same instant, he could lift her up like no one else, as if there were nothing she couldn’t do.
“I’ll give it a shot,” she said with a sigh.
“Attagirl. Then it’s all set. I’m pulling the plug on Trillary. Your play opens January fifteenth. I’ll need a finished script by Thanksgiving at the latest.”
Kate’s mouth fell open. “But you’re essentially asking me to start over.”
“Do you want the slot, or don’t you?”
It had been Kate’s dream since middle school. Crazy as it was, the answer was obvious: “I want it.”
“I’ll let the actors know. The men can fight it out for the role of Watson. Hillary is perfect to play Watson’s wife. You get with Sean and set up a timetable for the next draft.”
Irving disappeared behind the curtain. Kate stood numb for a moment, then suddenly found herself struggling to contain the urge to leap into the air and scream with delight. She hurried down the stairs and took the side exit toward Irving’s office, where Sean had said he’d be waiting. She knocked eagerly and entered on his invitation.
“Are we on for January?” he asked, seated in Irving’s battle-scarred leather chair.
“Yes!” she said, louder than intended.
He came around the desk, and it seemed as though they might embrace, but it turned into an awkward retreat into professionalism, a combination of a handshake and a high-five.
“I can’t wait to get started,” he said.
“Me, too,” she said.
He returned to Irving’s chair. The Supreme Court’s opinion was on the desktop. Kate noticed that Sean had moved well beyond the last page she’d read.
“By the way, I love the way this guy writes,” said Sean.
“You read Justice Roberts’ opinion?”
“To be honest, I skipped to the end. Spoiler alert: the whole two hundred pages come down to whether the Commerce Department stated a valid reason when it ordered the Census Bureau to include the citizenship question in the census questionnaire.”
“Right. The department said it was for the benefit of minority voters.”
“And here’s what Justice Roberts wrote,” Sean said, picking up the opinion. “Accepting this explanation would require the Supreme Court to have ‘a naïveté from which ordinary citizens are free.’ Isn’t that a great line?” he asked, then saying it again like a chief justice: “‘A naïveté from which ordinary citizens are free.’”
Kate froze. Naïveté. As in Project Naïveté. Noah’s voice was suddenly in her head—his insistence that she “read the whole opinion,” that she “read every word.”
“Yeah,” said Kate. “That is one great line.”
Chapter 25
Kate found her father in his office. He was on the phone or, more precisely, speaking into his hands-free headset while pacing from end to end of a museum-quality Sarouk rug that stretched the length of his enormous corner office. He motioned for Kate to take a seat, and she did.
“Be with you in one sec,” he told her, and then he resumed his conversation on the headset.
Kate could wait “one sec,” or perhaps even a minute. Beyond that, she wasn’t sure. Technically, her visit wasn’t urgent. Noah had given her until 8:00 a.m. to decide whether to meet with him again about Project Naïveté. She wasn’t sure she would go back to see Noah. The only thing for certain was that she needed to talk to her father.
He stopped, looked in Kate’s direction, and said, “Maybe you should come back in five.”
Kate leveled her gaze and slowly shook her head, which seemed to catch her father off guard. He wrapped up the call, removed the headset, and took a seat in the armchair facing her.
“I didn’t realize it was important. What’s up?”
“Project Naïveté. I know it’s real, so don’t lie to me again.”
He paused, absorbing the blow. “I’m sorry I was less than truthful. But—”
“Please don’t say it was for my own good.”
He started again. “I was going to say: but I hope you didn’t figure this out by going beyond your security clearance.”
“Is that really your response? You’re turning it around, as if I was the one who did something wrong.”
“I’m very sorry I misled you. But as CEO of Buck, I need to know if you breached.”
“I didn’t breach anything. I heard it from the United States of America.”
He didn’t immediately take her meaning. “You mean Noah? He told you about Project Naïveté?”
“He told me it’s real. I know nothing about the details, other than what I can infer from the Supreme Court opinion he told me to read,” she said.
“‘A naïveté from which ordinary citizens are free,’” he said, quoting the chief justice—and confirming that Noah wasn’t wrong. “I can see why it would be part of his cybersecurity audit,” he added.
“You can?”
“Absolutely. Under Buck’s security protocols, project names must be random. It’s against every rule in the book to choose a name that could give an outsider any clue as to what the project is about,” he replied.
“Who came up with the name Naïveté?”
“I didn’t know at the time. I’ve since been told it was Patrick.”
“You mean since he’s gone missing?”
The point of reference seemed to make him uncomfortable. “Yes. Since then.”
“So Patrick was being truthful when he said my play was like the project. Or I should say my play before Irving Bass told me to change a few things, like the beginning, the middle, and the end. They both dealt with the U.S. census.”
“You said your play was about player pianos, so I can’t speak to that. But Project Naïveté isn’t about the census, per se.”
“I get it that I don’t have clearance. But there must be something more you can tell me.”
“I can give you the thirty-thousand-foot view. I won’t pass judgment as to why the Commerce Department wanted to include the citizenship question in the last census or why the Supreme Court shot it down. But the whole exercise revealed two important things. One, the census isn’t the best way to find out who is and who isn’t a U.S. citizen.”
“People lie,” said Kate.
“Or they just don’t respond. Number two, the U.S. government already has massive amounts of administrative data on citizenship, like Social Security records.”
“Which are probably more reliable than census responses.”
“But here’s the thing. Even all that data is only eighty percent accurate.”
Kate could see where this was leading. “So they came to Buck.”
“Yes. And there’s nothing illegal or immoral about the federal government trying to get a more accurate assessment of how many people living within its borders are citizens and how many aren’t.”
“What does the federal government plan to do with Buck’s ‘more accurate assessment’?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Because I don’t have clearance?”
“Because the next time you see Noah, I want you to be free to tell him everything I’ve ever told you about Project Naïveté.”
The mention of a “next time” seemed presumptive on his part.
“What makes you think I’ll talk to Noah again?”
“Because I need you to keep the dialogue going.”
“I wish you wouldn’t put me in this position.”
“I’m not. Noah is. And I’m fine with it. This conversation has been very helpful to me and to the company.”
“But my stomach has been in knots all day.”
“Stop worrying, Kate. I swear, sometimes you’re so much like your mother.”
He rarely drew the comparison, and this was the first time since her passing, which made for an awkward moment. As always, it rang false to Kate. It was something he would say once or twice a year, usually when Kate’s self-doubt edged toward self-destruction, or when he could tell she was tipsy, and he felt the need to remind her that children of alcoholics were twice as likely to develop a use disorder. Funny thing was, Kate didn’t see herself as being “like” either parent, and if she went back far enough in time, she remembered only wanting to be like her father, not her mother. Just being in his office triggered memories of her father bringing in Kate to sit at Daddy’s desk and play CEO, overseeing a “staff” of American Girl dolls. Samantha, the most responsible, was her star employee and had a chair right beside her. So long ago, so much mischief. The fish in the saltwater aquarium she used to chase with the little net. The screensavers on Daddy’s computer she used to tinker with. Her father favored words over images, and he liked to post something philosophical or inspirational, a line from a book he was reading or a takeaway from a TED talk he’d attended. When he wasn’t looking, Kate would replace it with the latest words of wisdom from Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.
Her gaze landed on the present message, which scrolled across the screen, but she was too far away to read it.
“I’m drained, and I have a ton of reading to do in my Securities Reg class,” she said. “I’m going to head home.”
“You go right ahead,” he said.
She rose, and as she headed for the door, she passed close enough to the computer to read the scrolling message on the screen. This one was from Sophocles: nothing vast ever entered the life of man without a curse.
She stopped at the door and looked back at her father. “Do you think Sophocles was right?” she asked, pointing at the message with a jerk of her head.
Her father shrugged it off, offering a weak smile. “I don’t know. But I do believe we all need to keep our sense of humor in this business.”
Kate left, feeling nothing in her funny bone.
Chapter 26
Patrick was sure he was alive, but only because he could feel himself sweating.
It was so hot inside the trunk of the car that he’d faded in and out of consciousness over the course of a journey that seemed to have no end. A noisy gravel road had long since given way to the monotonous hum of tires on paved highway. Minutes seemed like hours, and there was no doubt they’d been on the road all day. The rusted-out hole in the quarter panel through which he’d watched Javier negotiate with his new captors had gone black with night. The heat had actually gotten more unbearable since sunset, which told Patrick that they were at a lower elevation, no longer in Colombia’s mountains.
