“The Ayn Rand thing,” Burke said.
“You know about that!”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it wasn’t helpful,” Apple told him.
“I’m surprised you let him talk about that-”
“I didn’t! I cut him off as soon as he got started. But the prosecutor picked up on it, and jump-started the whole thing all over again on cross. And he just hung himself. He actually told the jury that it didn’t have a right to judge him because they weren’t his peers.” She paused. “This did not go over well.”
Burke laughed. “Meanwhile-”
“Meanwhile, I’m trying to keep the jury focused on the throwaway Indian boy who was left on a doorstep in a cardboard box. You know, he didn’t even know who he was named for until he was ten years old. I mean, he looked Indian, but he had no idea what tribe he was or anything like that. That’s when he got a foster mother who finally did some mothering. She helped him find out who he was, and where he’d come from.”
“When you say he was named for someone,” Burke asked, “who are we talking about? Who’s ‘Jack Wilson’?”
“The Paiute. You never heard of him? He was famous! Invented the Ghost Dance. You should put that in your story. He lived in Nevada way back when.”
“‘Jack Wilson’ doesn’t sound like an Indian name,” Burke said.
“That was his white name – the name of the family he grew up with. His native name was ‘Wovoka.’”
“Like the company,” Burke said. “Wilson’s company.”
“That’s right! I’d forgotten that.”
The connection had been there all along. Burke had seen it in a list of Google cites, but he hadn’t paid attention. It seemed irrelevant. Jack Wilson… the Ghost Dance… He thought it was a coincidence, if he thought about it at all. But there was that woman, the one in Belgrade – Tooti! She’d said something about Wilson dancing. And Ceplak, talking about Wilson’s last day with him: Time to dance.
“Let me ask you a question,” Burke said.
Apple chuckled ruefully. “I think we’ve probably talked enough. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“What was the invention? The invention that started it all?”
The lawyer laughed. “Well, that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it? Or does that date me?”
“It’s pretty important for the story,” Burke told her. “I mean, it’s at the heart of everything.”
“I suppose it is,” she replied, “but that’s why they call it the Invention Secrecy Act.”
“I’m not trying to find out how it works, or anything. I’m just curious – the readers are going to be curious – about what it is.”
“Well…”
“I’m guessing it’s some kind of weapon. I mean, for the government to seize it like that, it would have to be.”
The lawyer sighed. Finally, she said, “Can we go off the record here?”
CHAPTER 33
A road trip.
In a few weeks, such a thing would no longer be possible, so Wilson resolved to take his time as he drove east. He wanted to savor every last moment: the subtle changes in the land, the search for decent road food, even the chance to gripe about the weather and the price of fuel with waitresses and other strangers. It would have been fun to drive cross-country with Irina, he thought, show her the diverse beauty of the country, just meander west and take it all in.
Not possible, of course. After June 22, the pleasures of this kind of driving – of any kind of driving, really – would come to an end. The intricate web of highways and roads and streets that knitted the country together would, in an instant, be useless. Virtually every vehicle on the road would come to a stop. Their engines would sputter and die. And they would never start again.
Vintage cars and a few diesels, like the ones back at the B-Lazy-B would still be capable of travel, but their range would be limited by the dead cars littering the roads.
Even if the occasional old car could get around, most of the fuel would be trapped underground in tanks, inaccessible without the electricity needed to work the pumps.
Bicycles would become quite valuable.
Although he’d modified the suspension, and created a sort of gimballed cocoon for the weapon, he winced as the Escalade shuddered over the rough road from the ranch to Juniper. He felt better when he hit Route 225.
Now that the road was smoother, he tapped the dashboard controls to select the Russian language CD. When it came on, he spoke out loud at the prompts, mimicking the recorded voice.
Thank you: Spashiba
You’re welcome: Pajalsta
Sorry: Izvinche (to strangers); Izvinit (to friends)
As well as making this effort to learn Irina’s language, he’d purchased more than a hundred books in the Russian – everything from dictionaries to poetry to classics, contemporary fiction, and children’s books. He’d bought an array of DVDs, as well, along with several icons, a samovar, and sets of matryoshka dolls for their children. He didn’t want Irina to feel cut off from her culture.
After an hour or so, he switched off the language CD. Time for some music. He used to sing aloud in Florence all the time because music was one of the things he missed the most. It was amazing how many tunes he knew just as fragments. And locked up in solitary, that could drive you crazy if you let it, the way the rest of a tune stayed out of reach, closed off in some neuronal backwater. In the beginning, it maddened him that there was no way to fill in the blanks. It wasn’t as if he could go online and download the song or go out and buy the CD to satisfy his curiosity.
So he went crazy buying CDs after he got back from Africa. He filled in all those blanks and more. The B-Lazy-B had a catalog of more than three thousand CDs – and a state-of-the-art sound system. It was an eclectic selection – he couldn’t be sure how his tastes might change as time went on.
The Escalade had a pretty good sound system, too. By the time he reached the Utah border, he was rapping along with Eminem.
“Oops, there goes gravity.”
CHAPTER 34
“It wasn’t a weapon, at all,” Jill Apple told Burke. “It was a battery.”
Burke thought he’d misheard. “Sorry…?”
“He found a way to make a better battery. A lightweight, long-lived battery.”
“You’re kidding,” Burke said.
“I’m not. These things made the Energizer Bunny look like a fruit fly.”
Burke laughed.
“You can imagine how excited Jack and his partner were,” Jill said.
“What partner?” Burke asked.
“He had a partner. Eli something… Salzberg! They went to grad school together. I think Eli was getting an MBA. Very smooth. He was putting together the venture-capital meetings, when Jack got the letter.”
“From?”
“The patent office. DOD decided the application should be secret. So that was that. No patent. They offered compensation – I think they came up with $150,000.”
“And how much was it worth… actually?”
“Eli thought he could get twenty-five million for a ten percent equity interest. That’s what they were asking.”
“Jesus! So what did they do?”
“They came to me,” Jill told him. “And we took it to court,” Jill replied. “But no ever wins these kinds of appeals. The hearings are closed, and the government doesn’t have to justify itself. They just say it’s in the national interest and that’s that.”
“No wonder he’s pissed,” Burke said.
“It’s eminent domain applied to intellectual property. If the government wants to put a highway through your living room, all it has to do is assert the public interest. And it’s the same with patents. The Invention Secrecy Act (it’s 35 U.S.C. 17, if you want to look it up) goes back to the cold war.”