COLLEGE FOR SPIES
By Zac Horowitz
50,000 words
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COLLEGE FOR SPIES Copyright © 2008 by zanybooks.com
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Book I—Bishop’s Opening
“Rarely played. White sacrifices his King Pawn for the sake of an advancement in development.”
from Chess Openings: Theory and Practice by I.A. Horowitz.
I The Gate Keeper
The sun burns down upon the desolate crossroads. So hot and still is the air, it’s hard to believe the ocean is only a few short miles away. But in the absence of irrigation, of water transported thousands of miles from the Rocky Mountains, most of the Pacific coast of California would be like this crossroads, parched and dying.
A mini-mall sits on the northeast corner. New wood-frame construction houses the “Country Store,” a realty office, and a third store front, currently painted over, which may or may not have once held a Novelty and Notions Shoppe.
Through the clear plate-glass window of the realty office, Marston inspects his mini-mall with a measure of pride. Some might think the mall an oddity here. Not a Californian, however, for in California, wherever a mini-mall is constructed, tract houses are sure to follow.
Marston has his feet up on the desk, the better to admire his new Dan Posts; a recent affection, his cowboy boots seem to go with the barren hills and scrub brush that surround the building. A telephone sits unringing close by his hand. Another telephone, with its own separate line, is tucked away inside the desk and a third hides in a back room along with the computers.
Marston has been on the telephone since early that morning, beginning at 8 a.m. Eastern time, 5 a.m. his own, coaxing and cajoling reluctant staff. Too many are still unwilling to believe in the College, despite signed contracts. Marston hopes Norland is having less trouble recruiting for the research facility that will be hidden beneath the campus.
For a while, Marston hesitated about his own role in the mall—he has so many titles now: advisor, consultant, gatekeeper, and landlord—before settling on this real estate office. Managing the Country Store which offers groceries, denims and work shirts, made-to-order sandwiches, magazines, and the ubiquitous California lottery ticket would have demanded too much of his time. Likewise with running the now-failed gift shoppe. Here in the realty office, he can spend most of his day hidden in the back room on the computer or talking on the telephone. Occasionally a customer occupies five or ten minutes of his time—no part of California is free from interest in real estate—but mostly, the demands on Marston are demands he has initiated. If he plays realtor, it is as a break from his real duties, a desire to stretch his eyes from a computer screen to the far horizon.
It is Marston’s job to persuade both the professional and the merely curious that all is as exactly as it appears to be.
A shiny rental automobile pulls into the parking lot and rolls to a stop before the General Store. An Asian steps out of the car and looks about him in amazement. Marston guesses by the man’s walk and dress that he is Japanese in origin, but cannot be sure. Marston dons a set of earphones, ostensibly connected to a Walkman, flips a switch, and prepares to listen to the conversation next door. Had Marston really been concerned, he could have walked into the back room and watched the entire scene on video. As it is, he flips a second switch and the cameras in the Country Store begin to make a permanent audio-visual record of the Asian’s visit.
The Japanese gentleman seems no less amazed by the contents of the store, than by its presence miles from human habitation. He fingers each of the articles on display and ends by ordering a sandwich and a bottle of ginger ale. The manager keeps a careful eye on the stocky bespectacled man as he wanders about picking up and putting down items. So does the one other “customer,” a white-bearded elderly man whom legend (made up by Marston) says was once a prospector.
“Doesn’t seem to be much need here for a store,” says the Japanese, conversationally. Mr. Yokata’s English, while grammatically correct, has the overtones of a less harsh, more sing-song language. A later computer analysis suggests Mr. Yokata is not Japanese at all but a Chinese for whom both English and Japanese are “foreign.”
“Business is growing,” replies the proprietor.
“I’ll bet you don’t see two cars all day,” counters the Japanese (Chinese). He fingers the stiff point on his starched white collar.
“You’d be wrong.”
“Is this your place?” asks Mr. Yokata as if determined to find a topic on which the proprietor will be more vocal.
“Nope.”
Yokata, frustrated, turns to the bearded prospector who is sitting wrong way round on a chair at the side of the cashier’s counter. “It’s hot, isn’t it?” Yokata says.
A shrug is the prospector’s only reply.
“Much construction around here?” asks the Japanese. His voice expresses rising irritation.
“Hope so,” says the proprietor and he and the man in the chair both laugh.
“Land for sale?” Yokata persists.
The proprietor looks at him. “You can make a fortune in land,” he replies, evading the question.
“Yes, but is there any land for sale around here?”
The proprietor jerks his thumb toward the front of the store and then inclines his head to the right. “Across the way.”
Outside the store, the Japanese consults the billboard kitty-corner across the highway. The board, partially hidden by a fence post, gives the name of a realtor and a telephone number. Turning to inspect the realty office, Mr. Yokata verifies that the name and phone number painted on the office window are the same as those on the sign.
Though Marston is not surprised to see the Japanese enter his brokerage office, he brings his feet down off the desk with a clatter and stands up quickly as though he were taken off guard. “I’m Tom Barnes,” Marston says, “How can I help you?”
As before, Mr. Yokata begins by questioning the desirability of the location. Marston replies, “Where else are people going to go? People from San Diego or LA who want a place they can afford, they’ve got to come here.”
Mr. Yokata wonders if there might not be businesses going up in the area. Marston says he’s heard a college will be located nearby. He does not attempt to conceal the map that hangs behind him on the wall; the outlines of a sprawling college campus and a nearby “tiger-town” appear only a few miles from the location of the store. Mr. Yokata looks at the map thoughtfully.
There are many discrepancies between this map and the one Yokata has left crumpled on the front seat of his car. For one thing, on Marston’s map, the Interstate that now runs in occasional sight of the ocean has moved several miles inland. For another, the U.S. Marine base that occupies the entire ocean frontage in the immediate area has shifted to the south.
Mr. Yokata asks Marston if he’s heard anything about the sale of land that belongs to the Marine base. Marston says, no he hasn’t. The Japanese says he, or rather his employers, would be happy to pay for advance information about such a sale. Marston takes the man’s business card with seeming eagerness, pocketing the $100 bill attached to the card. The Asian appears greatly satisfied with Marston’s response and, after mutual exchanges of goodwill, leaves. Whereupon, Marston pulls a slim aqua-covered textbook, his own, out of his middle desk drawer and begins to read.
II. Construction
One day to everyone’s surprise—Marston himself has only a single day’s warning—off-duty construction workers mob the Country Store. The store soon runs out of sandwich materials, a situation that is corrected the next morning. By week’s end, business at the store has increased ten fold, and a “daughter” soon appears at the noon hour whose job it is to make sandwiches.
In the following weeks, the workers complete three widely separated projects, first leveling the land, and then throwing up half a dozen buildings seemingly overnight.
The first project is a set of condominiums just up the road from the mini-mall, labeled the Cornerstones. Marston remembers seeing it on the plans as a sort of multi-level structure with a portion of the roof of one apartment being the floor of the outdoor patio of the next. The reality is quite different and the resultant monolith has all the grim charm of a Russian prison save for a Rivera-like mural in the front foyer resurrected from the original design.
“Somebody in Washington’s trying to save money,” says Norland, “It won’t happen again.” Marston wonders how he’s supposed to “sell” the new College if all its buildings present similar compromises.
The second project is a dormitory. Although Marston has carefully labeled the dormitories in the order they are to be constructed, the first one assembled is on the farthest edge of the campus in an area earmarked “for expansion only.”
“My fault, this time,” says Norland, “We needed an excuse to put in a lot of extra roads.”
The third project, a trailer park on the southernmost end of the property, is located outside of the property’s original boundaries. Designed as a temporary facility to house the construction workers, Marston forecasts correctly it will become a permanent part of the town.
Six weeks after they arrive, the workers leave and all is quiet again.
Marston finds he is spending more time on the telephone. The chairpersons he contracted with originally are now recruiting for their own departments and constantly defer to him for advice. The College works openly out of two apartments in the Cornerstones and a set of bookkeepers and accountants has been installed by the State of California to oversee construction.
“You work for the State, understand,” Norland says, “I work for the Feds. It’s better this way.”
The mini-mall begins to attract still more attention from passing motorists. The Country Store expands into the original location of the realty office, and the third storefront is now a restaurant, mostly sandwiches and hamburgers. Marston extends the mall an additional 200 feet and hires a number of authentic real estate agents for his front office, reserving the title of “broker” and the new, sealed rear office for himself. His two independent sets of responsibilities, Academic Coordinator and Gatekeeper, are wearing him down.
Vons Markets purchases a site in the new town near the College, as do several other prospective retailers. A total of eight liquor licenses are applied for.
After the Marines officially transfer a strip of land to the project, Marston notifies the Japanese gentleman as well as other individuals both foreign and domestic who expressed prior interest and a willingness to pay for information. He fattens his bank account, although, to no one’s surprise, the land is deeded in its entirety to the State and the College.
Then, the second wave of construction begins. The need to conceal the research facility from satellite flybys turns the entire process into a game of three-card Monte or which shell hides the pea:
First, a herd of earthmovers dig out a huge hole in the ground near where the administration building is intended to be, stacking the dirt in an equally huge mound on the edge of the campus. Next, an ambitious young reporter on the staff of the San Diego Union gets a call from a certain “Deep Throat;” two days later the Union reveals the hole was unwanted and unnecessary; an accompanying editorial refers six separate times to the “waste of taxpayer’s money.” To compensate for the delay, a small number of workers begin to labor on campus late at night. The result of their efforts is not immediately discernible. For each day, a second herd of earthmovers transports the dirt from these circumspect nocturnal activities into the “unwanted” hole.
(Marston is bored now. He finds excuses to arrive late and leave early. Promptly at noon each Friday, he heads north to LA in pursuit of feminine company.)
The second construction crew leaves and a new crew are flown in. The members of this latter group of workers have all received security clearances on other projects and have been assembled from various locations by Brown and Roote, the principal contractor for the College. In the State capital, the Sacramento Bee asks why contracts aren’t being put out for competitive bids, but the newspapers in the counties adjacent to the College are strangely silent.
The new work crew throws a temporary roof over the site of the think tank, but keeps on digging beneath the giant tarpaulin. The think tank will extend seven levels beneath the ground when complete; by no chance coincidence, space for the dirt it displaces in available in the original “unwanted” hole.
When the new crew of workers is through, the think tank has a three-story science lecture hall on top of it. Even Marston can’t tell how deep the excavation beneath the hall has gone. Neither can the fourth and final set of construction workers brought in the following month to erect the other office and classroom buildings.
Norland has a broad smile on his face: “You can’t see anything in the satellite pictures, even if you play them back in slow motion.” But Marston is on the point of hysteria. The work he put off earlier must be added to the piles of letters and forms that cross his desk each day. Too much work remains to be done and he has too few people to help him. Tom Leonard, his intended second in command, is still playing hard to get back in Missouri, bargaining over titles and responsibilities. In the end, Marston cuts down Leonard’s area of authority, delegating his abandoned duties to two other, yet-to-be-named administrators. This unfortunate decision leaves Marston with a multitude of other department heads to appoint and oversee while only strengthening Leonard’s hand.
An ex-Colonel from the Army Corp of Engineers agrees to serve as the College’s Facilities Coordinator. Marston is assured by Norland that, despite the Colonel’s military background, he has no connection with military intelligence per se. The Colonel proves well able to cope with the numerous contractors and subcontractors who come and go on the project, particularly after he is given a high-level briefing on the five hundred or so “contractors” in the subbasements of the Physics Building who never appear on his tally sheets.
A second Colonel appears on the scene, Colonel John Bartholomew, an ex-Marine, although Marston cannot be sure if he actually has been detached from duty. This Colonel’s title, Chief of Security, has been defined to encompass the town and campus as well as the think tank. Marston quickly endorses all of Colonel Bartholomew’s plans and receives a nod from Norland for his cooperative attitude.
Marston has a hidden agenda: The College, his college, becomes a nationwide model for campus security. Entrance onto the San Marcos campus is funneled through a single gate. All parking lots, and there are many of them, are well lit. Passages between buildings are monitored by video cameras; a female student can walk between her dormitory and the college library without ever being out of sight of security personnel.
A determined young man and woman still can find plenty of places where they have the illusion of being alone. But even in the most out-of-the-way location, a high-frequency whistle supplied to each student will activate all the concealed microphones and hidden cameras and bring a response in minutes.
“We can be proud of this campus,” says the Governor of California, smiling into the banks of TV cameras and flashbulbs at a major press conference, “a model facility which guarantees the security and safety of our children.”
“We can be proud of this research institute,” says the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a top-secret briefing to the President of the United States, “a model facility which guarantees the security and safety of our children.”
Lecture halls for the arts and the social sciences go up on either side of the science lecture hall with connecting passageways. A married-students dorm and several units of off-campus housing are completed.
Marston hires a “Coordinator of Publicity,” though he has still not found a Vice-President of Public Relations to supervise the “coordinator.” The word goes out in a dozen mass mailings: San Marcos will welcome its first students in the fall. Applications for admission come pouring into the newly opened post office. And Leonard, intransigent as ever, insists that as Dean of the Faculty, these applications have nothing to do with him.
An argument ensues. Marston says that on this campus, his campus, the students will not be selected by some could-care-less administrator, but will be handpicked by the faculty and, later, by selected senior students. Leonard says Marston is crazy; student recruiting is never done this way. Marston says, “You’re fired,” and hangs up. He drafts a letter dismissing Leonard for insubordination and is planning the reorganization of the faculty, when Leonard calls him back with a counterproposal. He will do the job providing he is given an executive assistant to help him. Marston, who has yet to hire an executive assistant of his own, says OK, but balks at allowing the assistant to be located back in Missouri.
Marston no longer reads textbooks in his spare time. Two whirlwind romances in Los Angeles, only a weekend or so apart, founder when, preoccupied, Marston fails to stay in touch with the women to whom he has sworn eternal love. One of the women writes it off to experience, the other, a Ms. Donna Thompson—divorced, no children, is restive and continues to make phone calls Marston does not return.
Too much of the activity is not under his control. Off-campus housing begins to spring up in areas not covered on the master plan. Those houses located in direct sight of the ocean all seem to belong to people of whom Marston has never heard.
The arrival of the Vice-President for Long-Range Planning, a black woman with whom Marston worked when he taught at Georgia Tech, completely lifts Marston’s spirits. Nearly sixty, she is a human dynamo whose warmth and charm seem to make everyone’s day just a little bit easier. The overworked administrative staff, still housed uncomfortably in the Cornerstones, responds to the new Dean with redoubled energy. She takes over the fight with Norland’s facilities director as to when, oh when, the projected administration building will be completed.
Marston has only one more job to do:
For over two years, he has lived in a trailer surrounded by sagebrush, just a few hundred yards from the eastern edge of the campus. The last of the construction crews is assigned to come out and build him a house on the same location.
When Leonard writes to say he will be departing Kansas City late the following month and could use some help in finding a place to live, Marston determines Leonard can damn well look for a place on his own.
III. Pawn
The idea of the hidden research facility had been launched at what Marston still thought of as the low point of his life.
He’d been fired—fired from his last two jobs if one counts not renewing a contract as firing someone. His insurance agent, a delightful woman with henna-red hair, had called him around one in the afternoon with a foretaste of further disasters. “Remember the guy you rear-ended last May? Well, he’s decided to sue.”
Then Marston’s boss called him in. Only his boss’ boss was also in the office. Along with some guy from Personnel. Marston had known what they were going to say before they said it. But it didn’t help. As soon as he heard the words, he felt faint.
“You, O.K. Dave?” his boss asked him. His boss seemed the only one in the room who was concerned.
“Just let me sit here for a minute.”
“We want you out of here,” his boss’ boss said. Marston could hear them whispering behind him.
“You’ll be O.K. by yourself, Dave?” his boss asked when they were alone; “They told me to stay with you while you were packing, company policy, but what the hell. Call me when you’re ready. O.K. David?”
Marston had begun to laugh; he remembered that. He wanted to cry but the tears wouldn’t come to his eyes. His oldest child had just started college. He’d paid the school fees, but he’d had to hold back on the mortgage. Now, he’d be missing two payments. Credit cards due, his oldest child would need books and, month after month, child support on the two kids that had stayed with their mom.
Oh, wow, how was he going to pay child support? He dialed his ex and his youngest daughter Diana answered the phone. “Hi, it’s your dad.”
“I don’t have a dad,” she said and hung up.
His boss’ boss didn’t ask to hear Marston’s side of it. He just asked for Marston’s badge and his card-key. Marston was given fifteen minutes to gather his belongings from his desk. Then they walked him to the parking lot.
Where had it all started to go wrong?
He had left the aerospace industry six years before to go into college teaching. Those six years had been enough to convince him the average aerospace executive was a model of probity compared with the typical college dean.
First, you talked your wife and daughters into giving up their home and their friends to move to a new job, “so you’d have more time to spend at home.” Then, the College put you to work on meetings and committees, told you to publish research, told you to spend more time on teaching, stood back and waited for you to make a blunder, so they could renege on some other part of the deal.
Colleges weren’t being built to educate anymore. They were simply a way to funnel federal monies into state and private hands. Marston wrote a couple of articles—one for the Nation and one for the Atlantic Monthly—describing the way things would be if he were in charge of a university.
The Dean and the other college administrators had intended some other, less-obtrusive kind of publication, apparently. Marston had a three-year contract at his first job, only a two-year contract at his second. By his sixth year in academia, he was teaching part time at three different colleges and making less than he’d earned teaching full-time at the first.
In Marston’s sixth, make-good year in a university, his whole life started to unravel:
His wife said she was sorry, she’d expected more; she moved out and got an apartment. The kids were teenagers so they were given their choice: who do you want to live with, your mom or your dad? The two youngest said they were sorry, they expected more; they moved out with their mom. His oldest stayed, but they both knew it was only for a few months until she went on to college and a life of her own.
Desperate for money, he took this dreadful summer job with IBM, a job so undemanding that time after time he would tell himself that he expected more. And then they fired him!
For the next two weeks, the phone didn’t ring.
He mailed out resumes and called old friends. The two weeks became two months and a friend’s “I’ll see what I can do,” became a secretary’s “He’s not in right now; I’ll let him know you called.”
He’d been meaning to write a book about compulsory miseducation and he almost did. Six publishers rejected “What’s Wrong With our Colleges,” while it was still in outline form.
He tried to sell his house, but the market for homes was depressed in his area. He took his house off the market and his real estate agent sued him for the commission. He hired a lawyer: answers and cross-complaints and interrogatories filled his mailbox, and then he couldn’t afford to pay a lawyer anymore. The good news? He was able to stay in his house rent-free for almost six months while it went through foreclosure.
Marston was lying in bed, fighting for a reason to get up, when the phone call finally came.
It wasn’t his ex or his kids or the auto mechanic or even the plumber he’d been forced to telephone the previous evening. The call was from a man he’d not seen face to face in over a decade, from a man who’d fired him over fifteen years before.
Bill Norland and Jim Edwards had five people working for them when Marston joined their firm with his newly minted Ph.D. They were impressed with his degrees, they said, but the jobs he had done for them while he was still in graduate school had impressed them even more.
Bill and Jim had put in their time in aerospace, working in bullpens with a hundred other engineers. “Now we’re going to make ours,” they said. They were willing for Dave to make his, too. He would get a portion of every contract he sold and, meanwhile, they paid him every penny the government would let them get away with on their existing cost-plus contracts.
It was heaven. A title on his door and his own secretary just outside it. He put his math books aside—oh, he looked at them every once in a while, but mainly he wrote and talked cost-plus proposals.
Bill and Jim did even less, though both had masters’ degrees. Bill was Mr. Outside. He did all the real selling. When he wasn’t selling, he spent all his time in the gym so that he had shoulders as wide across as any wrestler’s. Jim told Marston that Bill had been a wrestler in college. Bill also had been a weight lifter and even tried out for the Olympic team. He still lifted weights.
Jim was Mr. Inside. He negotiated contracts with the same poker face he used when playing practical jokes on Marston and the other senior employees. “And what’s your thing?” Marston asked Jim once. “I’m into women,” Jim replied, shocking Marston, who was then newly married.
“I guess he was trying to warn me,” Marston said to Norland later, after it was all over.
The firm had two interesting contracts: the first, which paid most of Marston’s salary, was to translate the Russian literature on computers. The “literature” arrived on Marston’s desk in the form of near-unreadable photocopies and was accompanied by a Navy petty officer who sat quietly in the corner while Marston worked on the translations. If someone came into the office, Jim or one of the secretaries, the officer would snap to attention. At the end of the day, she would take both the photos and Marston’s translations away with her.
The second contract would have involved twenty to twenty-five different people and turned the tiny firm into a budding TRW. He could hear Bill and Jim talking about the possibilities behind closed doors. Occasionally, the door would open and one or the other of them would come out of their office and clap Marston around the shoulders. “Our hero,” they’d say. And as Marston told his wife (his first), they’d given him reason to believe he’d soon be a manager with a dozen people reporting to him, more than had been working in the company when he first joined them.
Less than a week later—they’d had him in Sacramento trying to sell a study contract to the State of California—he found Regis, one of the new employees, parked in his slot.
“I thought somebody told you,” Regis said when Marston confronted him.
Marston looked for Jim to complain, and then somebody, was it one of the secretaries, led him down to Bill Norland’s office.
“Sit down,” said Bill gruffly; he was always gruff. “You’re fired. No, you’re not fired, fired; we’re just going to have to let you go.”
The pain, the sense of betrayal Marston felt then, would always remain near the surface just waiting for the by-now-all-too-familiar words. He remembered asking Bill, “Where’s Jim?”
“Jim’s not around,” Bill said. “Look, I’m going to try to get you a job someplace else, but you just can’t hang around, O.K.?”
Bill or someone found him a job someplace else, but it wasn’t the same. Marston lasted less than a year at the new job, and then he went to work for one of the big aerospace firms working in the bullpen that Bill and Jim had told him about, where sixteen engineers facing sixteen engineers in lines across an enormous room and banks of secretaries and filing cabinets lay against the walls.
Fifteen years, three kids, eight jobs he didn’t care for and he was speaking to Norland once again. “How can I help you?” Marston asked Norland politely, though he really wanted to shout, “Help me, Bill, help me,” into the telephone.
“You can come to a meeting,” Norland said as if continuing a conversation he had started the day, not the decade, before, “we really need your particular brand of expertise.”
Marston gulped. “Glad to help,” he managed to say.
“You will be working with us as a consultant for one or two days,” Norland continued, “say three at most. Just charge us what you usually charge per day.Usual cost-plus stuff.”
“You still with the old firm?” Marston asked, wondering idly who Norland’s “us” had referred to. Marston’s mind was elsewhere, already occupied with the half dozen ways he would be spending his newfound fortune. With the income from three days of consulting, he could pay his oldest girl’s college fees or, at least, he could make a contribution.
“Have you got an active security clearance?” Norland asked and without waiting for an answer said, “You don’t, do you? Well, we can solve that.”
There goes the money, Marston thought, panicking. “I’m sure I can get a clearance,” he said.
“Forget it; I said I’d take care of it. I’ll see you Wednesday.”
“Wednesday,” Marston stammered.
“Wednesday. Take down this address, it’s near the airport.”
IV. Consulting Session
“The problem, simply put, is one of conducting secret research in a society, indeed in a world, where there are no longer any secrets.”
Norland paused in his peroration and looked carefully about the conference room. The panel of distinguished guests, all male and more than half in military uniform, looked back at him unblinking.
“A preliminary issue is whether the Russians still pose a serious threat.” Norland paused again and cleared his throat. “I think that all of us here agree that they do.”
A chorus of assent filled the room. Marston heard one distinguished looking man say, “As do the Chinese.” “And the Arabs,” said a second. “Who practically run the State Department,” added a third, moon-faced man in an Air Force-uniform devoid of all insignia but for the set of monogrammed initials on its broad lapels.
“And we agree,” Norland continued as if merely summarizing a previous discussion, “that there is a need for continued research in the defense area.”
“We’re doing research,” persisted the tall man who Marston now recognized as having been introduced earlier as a professor of aeronautical engineering.
“Sure we are, Bernie,” interrupted a man in crisp Navy whites with the wings of a naval aviator on his shoulders, “On obsolescent models of far-too-slow airplanes.”
“Under international supervision,” hissed the man in the Air Force uniform.
“And,” here Norland raised his voice slightly, “we agree that America needs unrestricted, unmonitored research on real weapons if we are to survive.”
No voice was raised in dissent. A tall black man who had not spoken to this point said, “What we need is one of those towns in the boonies like the Russians used to have. No admittance in or out. Everybody in the town is committed to the project.”
The black man had a deep and commanding voice and you could almost sense that each man in the room was considering this idea and turning it over in his mind.
“Ain’t no boonies no more,” said the Air Force general, “Not with hourly satellite flybys.”
“And Soviet military personnel in and out all over the place, even Disneyland.”
“Chinese in every research lab,” added a third man.
“Arabs,” grumbled the Air Force general.
“Gentlemen,” said Norland, “I think we may have a solution. . . .”
The meeting place was in the airport, not near the airport as Norland had implied on the telephone. Marston parked in front of a converted hangar near the far edge of the airfield. At first, he thought he must have got the address wrong. A long counter separated him from some kind of shipping office. They had him sign in and he had been escorted through two layers of secretaries before he found himself confronted suddenly by a military policeman at the end of a long hallway. “It’s all right Sergeant,” the woman with him said, “Dr. Marston is expected.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” said the MP.
Where am I, Marston wondered? The lieutenant, whom Marston had mistaken for an administrative assistant, had not been wearing a uniform. If she was a lieutenant, who were the other people in the shipping office?
The MP was just the first in a long series of hoops Norland had laid out for Marston to jump through. In the next room, a reception office not much different from the one Marston had encountered when he first entered the building, two men in shirtsleeves poured through his identification, his credit cards as well as his driver’s license, asked him for a social security card which he didn’t have with him and a passport for which his answer was also a no. Then they photographed and fingerprinted him and told him to sit in a chair.
Marston sat in the chair for over an hour before someone brought him a lengthy set of forms to complete. “But I don’t know my addresses for the last ten years,” Marston complained, “I’d have to go back home to look up that sort of information and even then I’m not sure I’d find it. I mean, usually my wife helps me with things like that.” He stopped. I must sound awfully suspicious, he thought. “Of course, I’m not married now,” he added aloud.
A clerk told Marston to write down what he did remember and he spent an hour trying. Then they took the forms away from him and again he waited. “Do you want a sandwich?” he was asked. “No thanks, I don’t eat lunch. Could I have a coke or a 7-up or something?” They brought him a 7-up.
After lunch, he was directed into an office with a solitary desk and filing cabinet. An army major sat behind the desk going through the forms Marston had completed that morning.
“None of this makes any sense,” said the major. Marston tried to explain. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to make a tape of this,” the major said. He flipped on a cassette recorder. Later, Marston learned this cassette was a blind; the entire interview had been captured on videotape from the moment Marston walked into the room until long after the cassette recorder had been shut significantly off.
After his interview with the major, Marston was sent back to the waiting room where he had spent most of the morning. The same bored clerks sat at the same desks answering phones, typing, or simply shuffling papers. Around three, he glimpsed Norland behind one of the glass partitions talking with the major. He stood up to call “Bill,” and one of the clerks snapped, “Sit down.” When Marston began to argue, the tall MP from the morning reappeared looking ready to sit Marston down if Marston did not sit down by himself. He sat.
At four, Norland appeared from the corridor where Marston had first entered the waiting room that morning and demanded of no one in particular, “What is this man doing here? We need him in the conference room.”
While the clerks scurried, Norland waved his arms apologetically at Marston. He still has a wrestler’s build, Marston thought; in fact, with his tan and broad shoulders, Bill looked better than ever. Only a slight thinning of the hair on top suggested any change in Norland with age.
“You look better than ever,” Norland said to Marston, before Marston could say anything to him. “You put on some weight finally. Have you been working out?”
“Gardening,” Marston stammered in reply, “and I referee soccer.”
“That will do it,” Norland called out, “you look good.”
“How’s Jim?” Marston asked.
“Dead.”
The major appeared from the back room then and Marston found himself walking at Norland’s side down an inner corridor with no chance to discuss Jim’s death. A second and third MP moved before and behind them. Marston gestured with his hand to the building around them asking for an explanation. “We got you a security clearance,” Norland responded as if this explained everything.
.” . . I’d like you all to meet David Marston,” Norland said addressing the group, “The Marston Doctor we used to call him in the early days.
“No Dave, don’t look startled. We’ve seen you fairly jumping out of your chair with excitement waiting your chance to speak. Now let’s hear your idea.”
Marston rose slowly from his chair. After an initial rapid round of introductions, he’d sat quietly for most of the afternoon, or was it already evening, wondering just what his role at this meeting was supposed to be.
The other people in this room could influence national policy: the professor of law from Harvard, representatives from each of the military services, the National Security Agency, the FBI—that was the tall black man with the coat and tie, and the CIA. One of the men was a deputy secretary of defense. Another wasn’t anybody official but Marston had seen him in photographs just a step behind the President.
Did these men really want to hear Marston’s ideas? He had ideas all right, but the discussion had moved so fast and so furious leaping from topic to topic since Norland had sounded the theme that Marston wasn’t sure which of his ideas, if any, they would want to hear. Maybe, he could just pull the old consultant’s trick and say he’d like a chance to think about all that had been said for a day or so.
But before Marston could get a word out, Norland interrupted as if realizing suddenly that somewhat more of an introduction was required. “Gentlemen, Dr. Marston is an expert in a number of the areas that concern us. But sometimes, I think his real expertise lies in just sitting and listening to those of us that are floundering in the dark and then showing us the way. We had a saying in the office where we worked together some years ago, that if you need a brainstorming session, just put Marston in a room by himself for ten minutes.”
They laughed as Norland concluded, “Give Dr. Marston just a moment of your time and I think you’ll see why, security clearance or no, I’ve asked him to be here.”
Marston’s voice was rusty as if it had not been used for a long, long time. The sudden swiveling of heads in his direction only made it that much more difficult to force his words through the blockage. But at last, one by one, first in short sentences, and then in a regular torrent, he got out his idea for the college:
“Gentlemen, my specialty, one of my specialties, is secure communications. I think the problems we face in defense research are similar. We know, each of us, a dozen different ways to tamper-proof communications. But we also know from hard experience that for every measure, a countermeasure exists, and, yes, in turn, counter-countermeasures to reinstate the original barriers. The only real way to have secure communications is to ensure that no one cares to listen.
“This is what we must do if we plan to conduct secret research in an era when there are no secrets.
“My idea is for a small college, perhaps one with a technical orientation, to be located in a relatively isolated part of the state, perhaps near an existing military base, where we can easily control access in and out. The college will explain the presence of many highly trained “high-tech” individuals in the vicinity. It will also provide a way to ensure the morale of these same highly trained, highly sensitive individuals.
“The research area or think tank can be assembled as subbasements to one of the college’s above-ground research facilities. Its construction can proceed in secret and in parallel with the construction of the college. After it is built, the further movement of men and materials will be screened by the college’s other activities. During the day, our research workers will work underground in the tank. At night and on weekends they will blend in with the college community. A single town surrounding the college will house and support both sets of workers.
“Granted, construction of the college will be readily visible from Sino-Soviet spy satellites, but these will be unable to tell if there are one or ten subbasements beneath each building.
“The college will provide a cover for the flow of individuals in and out of the area each day. It will also explain the presence of these same individuals in the area at night—we all know how dedicated academics are—and, furthermore, it will explain the need for maintaining security twenty-four hours a day.
“Assaults and robberies on campus are a major problem at collegiate institutions. Ours being a new college with a new orientation, the heavy level of security is easily explained by a desire to ensure protection for both faculty and students.
“Finally, and not at all incidentally, is the issue of recruiting for the research facility. We need a way to attract individuals who are both highly skilled and highly in demand to a relatively isolated area. Together, the college and surrounding town will provide a satisfactory, even desirable environment for them. Above ground, a college. Below ground, a world-class research facility.”
Marston was interrupted not by one but by several individuals all speaking at once. All the voices were incredulous, and each seemed to have focused on a different aspect of Marston’s solution. “Underground?” “In the tank?” “A college?”
Some of the voices were outraged, “The brain-boys will work where we tell them to: this is war.” In the end, reason and Bill Norland’s stentorian bellow prevailed. “Mark, this is an undeclared war. In theory, we live in peace with our Russian, our Chinese, and our Arab neighbors. In practice, all of them maintain sizable numbers of spies in their embassies, all of them are preparing for war under the cover of their own peacetime research, and all are amply prepared to take advantage of the concessions our out-of-touch politicians keep making.
“Communists,” hollered the Air Force. “I don’t think so,” said Norland, “capitalists is the more likely explanation. Our congressmen seem all too willing to accept cash gratuities, regardless of the source.
“Dr. Marston is right. We must go underground. First, because the United States is not yet willing to admit publicly how essential weapons development continues to be in this post-glasnost era. And second, because no one will care to spy on that which does not exist.
“I’d thought at first of an amusement park or something similar that would explain the large amount of activity in the area. But Dr. Marston is right. The college is a perfect cover. Four physicists go to a conference at the college. Three remain above ground. If one disappears below, who will notice?
“Equipment is purchased for a professor’s lab. More equipment arrives than is shipped. Again, who will notice? And since we cannot, I emphasize, cannot imprison our scientists the way the Russians once felt free to do, the College will give them a place to play.”
One elderly gentleman whose employer Marston did not have a need to know rose and remarked that the idea was not unprecedented, that Cambridge University had provided just such cover during the Second World War
Initially, his comment and Norland’s summary were the only other good news as far as Marston’s idea was concerned. Speaker after speaker got up to comment and then to criticize. Desperate as Marston was for money, he would gladly have forgone his consulting fee if only he could have disappeared from the room. His embarrassment faded gradually and was replaced by anger. But Marston soon realized he had no one he could be angry with. These people really weren’t talking about him—no one even looked his way—but about his idea. Their criticisms were more declarations of territory than assaults on his person.
“And does Dr. Marston feel we need not take the usual security precautions, given the hidden nature of the installation?” This question came from the second of the two FBI men, dapper as the other in suit coat and tie.
“Security is more important than ever,” Marston said. “I think of this installation as an immense maze or dungeon of several rings or levels. The outermost ring or level is the town; then comes the college, and then the think tank. Within the tank, we can have further compartmentalization; insisting on the usual need to know, still more secure institutions can be hidden one within the other like Chinese puzzle boxes.”
“You’ll need lots of security liaison,” said an ex-member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“Exactly, General,” said Marston and this was all he was permitted to say for the rest of the meeting.
V. Pawn Advance
The issue of whether Marston was to be President of the new college or merely its Vice-President for Academic Affairs was left up in the air. For the moment, he would be called Academic Coordinator, Norland insisted at their next face-to-face meeting:
“You’ve come through like a champ.
“You’ve stepped off the bench to bring in the winning play, come in from the wings to take over the role of the stricken star, hollered ‘Dr. Watson come here I want you,’ over a brand new telephonic device. Boy Robin has done it again.”
“And now Boy Robin picks up his check and goes home to wait for the next phone call ... in fifteen or twenty years,” Marston said mournfully.
“Wrong. You go on the payroll immediately.”
Marston slowly turned his head to face Norland.
“As the head of the college, its Academic Coordinator.”
“What!”
“Marston, has anyone ever told you, you have a limited vocabulary? Your official title will be Academic Coordinator; later, President is not out of the question. The committee has decided you are to organize the college side of this project. After all you know a lot about colleges.”
“Well, . . .” Marston stammered simultaneously pleased and uncomfortable.
“As I recall you’ve been fired by five or six of them.”
“But . . .”
“But, you’ve taught in just about that many departments. This means you know a great deal about a lot of different things, which is why I brought you on to the committee in the first place. And a knowledge of a lot of things is a much desired quality in a college president or, equivalently, in an academic coordinator.”
But Marston was no longer listening; he was responding instead to something inside, something that had been there a long time waiting to break free. He began to speak, not to Norland, not to an imaginary audience, but to himself.
“I could organize a college the way I’ve always thought a college should be organized. Only a few departments, interdisciplinary courses like those Hutchins had at Chicago, real businessmen brought in to give lectures about business to the upperclassmen, freshman seminars with one faculty member to every eight students, support groups, challenge circles, a coop arrangement in which every student works on campus to help defray the hidden costs of his or her education.”
“Organize the college any way you like,” said Norland. “Just make sure the people you hire are top drawer and the credits are transferable.”
“Hell, I know the best guys in half a dozen fields.”
“Get them. Only get them cheap. You’ll be working out of a budget.”
“I’ll get you talented people who like to teach. And I’ll make them like the salaries I give them. But we may also need a few high-paid stars that can bring in research money.”
“You’ll have stars.” Norland reassured him. “You’ll get them out of the
research tank. Their research grants with you will be the cover for the defense research they’re doing below. Eventually, it might even go both ways, though that’s a little risky.
“Right now, I want you to focus on the campus. Get some architects and draw up your master plan. We’ll need a core set of buildings that can be expanded quickly. An explanation for all the other construction we’ll be doing.”
“Where’s the college going to be?” Marston asked.
“I’ve a site all picked out. Had it in mind before I even spoke to you. All we need is a little cooperation from the Defense Department; part of the land is on what is now a Marine base.”
“Camp Pendleton,” Marston breathed.
“Right. Marines make very good neighbors. Of course, they may take advantage of those college girls.
“Anyway, tomorrow, we’ll start talking numbers. We’ll get some enrollment projections from the State—that’s your job too by the way, staying in contact with the State administration. We’re going to be a State college but we’re not going to be if you know what I mean. The college will be sort of a joint Federal-State effort, enough of each to keep both sets of politicians from trying to cash in on the construction. Let’s face it: we just can’t recruit the construction crews in the ordinary fashion. For parts of the college maybe, but the Tank itself will have too many special details.
“So, we’ll break up the construction. One crew builds a deep hole. No, they dig two deep holes. Then another crew, a special crew, digs the first hole deeper and sticks the dirt in the second hole.
“Crazy eh? Not your problem though, Marston. Your job is getting this college on the road. Hire architects, construction crews, and faculty. You’re going to be very busy for the next couple of years even without a college to preside over. Then, who knows, everybody will think you have the right experience to be President. Retire ten years later; you’ll be the grand old man, the founding father of the new College of San Marcos.
“Thanks Bill,” Marston said.
Inside, Marston cried tears of joy. He had a sudden instant vision of it all coming together. He was walking across a tree-lined campus; nearby, an older student due to graduate in a few months punched a younger student on the arm and whispered, “Look, there goes the College President.”
In less than a week, things did change for Marston. The old friends who had tolerated his phone calls now looked forward to them, waited expectantly for the Academic Coordinator of the new college to say, “Tom, it’s confirmed, you’re our chairperson.”
Norland’s plan called for a small college astride a big think tank. But what was to prevent that college from growing? The more it grew, the better camouflage it would make. The better and bigger the College’s reputation, the better cover it would provide.
Marston’s dreams had returned and, for the moment, were focused and productive. In one way, he felt silly because these were, after all, just dreams, and, in another, he felt proud because, whatever happened, some of his dreams would become reality.
“Thanks Bill,” he said in prayer.
VI. The Town
Odd how quickly the town adjoining the University had been assembled or, rather, had assembled itself. Quite obviously, a town had to be located near the campus, not only to provide the conveniences employees and their spouses—faculty and research workers alike—would expect, but to act as yet another barrier a spy must penetrate.
With the Interstate now completely rerouted to the East, the town had sprung up along what was once a bypass road through the former Marine base. The road to the College branched off at the south end of the town, while a half-mile beyond the northernmost edge was the crossroads that had held Marston’s realty office.
The first housing in the town consisted of the trailer park that had sheltered the construction workers. This trailer park was still located at the south end of the town though outside the official town limits. A 7–11 convenience store was next to the trailer park, but most people did their shopping at the Vons near the center of town or at the Country Store at the far north end. A drugstore with a postal substation inside, a hardware, a video store, and a florist were located adjoining to the parking lot that held the Vons.
The remainder of the “downtown” area contained a military recruiting station, the College information center, a children’s clothing store called Kangaroos and Jellybeans, a used record and book store, a TV and computer repair shop, and a half dozen restaurants and fast-food places. None of the fast-food places corresponded to any of the national chains—a necessary security precaution, but a Dairy Fizz provided near milk shakes and families could head out to Macs for burgers.
Macs also sold beer, Marston discovered one day on a pub crawling tour. Macs slick front, similar to that of a dozen other fast-food places, was deceptive; the back was sawdust and beer, a bandstand and a large dance floor. Their announced policy of rock-and-roll could mean anything depending on the day of the week. Once the College was in session, Friday and Saturday at Macs would be devoted to whatever the kids wanted to dance to, but until then, Friday and Saturday were Golden Oldies Nights and the dj’s played a strange mixture of ‘50’s and ‘60’s music.
If you wanted a quiet place to talk with a person of the sex of your choice, Buffy’s, two blocks north from Macs, served steaks. Buffy’s was also the place where the respectable but serious drinkers went. The rowdies had a country and western bar called the Bar-B just beyond the town limits to the south, though still subject to control by the project. In fact, Marston knew security had at least two people stationed at the Bar-B at all times.
The Bar-B had pool tables, two bars, and three dance floors, though the evening Marston strolled through, none of the latter was in use. This was a place for men to belch and yell and throw up afterwards in the bushes on the edge of the parking lot. And though the entire town, strictly speaking, was off limits to the Marines, Marston could tell from the brush cuts that more than one Marine had made it up the coast and over the fence to the bar.
Finally, for those who didn’t mind paying a few dollars extra, the SeaCliff Condominiums, perched on a bluff overlooking the Pacific near what had once been a Marine staging area, had an excellent restaurant associated with it and both the restaurant and the raised bar had excellent views of the Pacific. The SeaCliff was where Marston took prospective faculty, though in truth, he felt just about as uneasy in its plush surroundings as he did at the Bar-B.
(As for picking up girls, none of the bars in town were appropriate; too many watching eyes. When Marston had a rare free weekend, and could not stand being alone any longer, he’d drive an hour and a half north to where he used to live and hope he’d get lucky.)
Almost all the businesses in town were located on the west or ocean side of the highway. A series of short streets branched off from the eastern side, leading back into a residential area. Here is where Marston would take incoming faculty members who had families, showing them the sort of houses that were or would be available. Two schools, one elementary and one sixth-through-twelfth grades had been erected here also, with a series of athletic fields forming a buffer zone before you came to the College.