Incredibly, despite the millions of rounds that were fired, only two of the fighters at Wounded Knee were killed. One of them was a kid from Nelson County, Virginia, where Burke himself had been raised. People used to talk about it when he was growing up. Frank Clearwater, they said. Died fighting.
Burke got to his feet, stiff from sitting in the same place for so long. He was thinking about the day Jack Wilson had knocked on his door in Dublin. They’d shaken hands, and Wilson had introduced himself as Francisco d’Anconia. Burke thought he was talking to a businessman, but now he saw how wrong he’d been. Jack Wilson wasn’t a man at all. Not in his own eyes, anyway. He was a tidal wave of new land, looming toward his enemies.
CHAPTER 35
“Salzberg.”
There was a TV in the background. Burke could hear it, the unmistakable white noise of Americans cheering.
“Yeah, hi, it’s Mike Burke – I got your number from Jill Apple – you know, Jack Wilson’s lawyer.” Burke affected the chipper voice of a journalist who (1) expected everyone to recognize his name, and (2) was “just doing his job,” cold-calling someone he hoped would be a source.
“I’m doing a story on the Invention Secrecy Act-”
“For…?”
“Harper’s,” Burke replied, panicking for a moment because he always confused the magazine with the Atlantic, and didn’t remember what he’d told Jill Apple.
“Okay, so how can I help you?”
Burke repeated the song and dance he’d given to Apple.
“So he’s out,” Salzberg said.
“He is. And I’d really like to talk to him, but… no one seems to know where he is.”
“Well, I can tell you he has not called this old friend.” He paused. “You talk to Mandy?”
“No,” Burke said. “Who’s Mandy?”
“His foster mother, Mandy Renfro. Although… Jeez, she might be dead by now.” A fatigued sigh.
“Do you know where she lives?”
“Fallon. Where Jack was from – in Nevada. But she was in her sixties, so…”
“I’ll check it out,” Burke promised, “but, look, Mr. Salzberg-”
“Call me Eli.”
“Eli! I know you can’t tell me about the invention-”
“The hell I can’t! I just can’t tell you how to make it – not that I ever could.” He paused. “You mind hanging on for a second? I’ll be right back.” The noise from the television cut out, and for what seemed like a long while, nothing could be heard but the low hum of the transatlantic cable. Then, the rattle of ice in a glass. “I’m back,” Eli announced.
“I hope I haven’t ruined your game,” Burke told him.
He laughed. “No,” Eli said. “I’ve got TiVo.” Then his tone changed, and he was all business. “So what do you want to know?”
“Well,” Burke said, “I know what Jack’s role was, but…”
“Me? I was the money guy,” Eli told him. “Start-ups are expensive, especially manufacturing ones. My job was to find the venture capital, which, trust me, was not going to be hard, not with the product we had.”
“So what happened?”
“Shit happened! The government destroyed a brilliant guy. They made me testify against him. Did you know that?” The economist’s bitterness was almost palpable. “I think Jack was probably my best friend. I still can’t believe it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’d think Jack had invented… I don’t know, some kind of bomb or something. That’s what you thought, right? That’s what everyone thinks.”
“Apple said it was a battery.”
“Right! A battery – a battery that would last ten times longer than anything else out there. With pretty much the same components. You’d think they’d want that on the market. I mean, just from an environmental perspective, it would have been a huge plus for everyone. But no. The national interest is apparently better served by pollution.” The economist paused. “Do I sound bitter?”
“A little,” Burke told him.
“Well, maybe that’s because it cost me about a hundred million bucks! Not to mention the fact that we were going to change the world. At least, Jack was. He wanted to start a foundation. For indigenous peoples.”
“Native Americans.”
“Native everythings. They have the same problems in Brazil that we have here,” Eli insisted. “Australia, Africa – it’s the same story. You should make that a part of your article.”
“I will,” Burke promised. “But I’m still trying to figure out why the government went after your invention.”
Eli snorted. “I think they thought it would give them an advantage on the battlefield. But who knows? This was going to be a very big product. It was going to make waves in the marketplace. I don’t want to get into specifics, but it would have had a negative impact on certain manufacturers and mining interests. Some of those interests are big contributors to people’s campaigns. So maybe that was a factor, but… who knows? They don’t actually give you a reason. They just take what they want.”
“Apple said Jack made an ‘end run’-”
“Around the government, yeah. He did. And got clobbered – they had to carry him off the field.”
“What happened?”
“Well, he filed for the patent. And here’s what happens when you do that. You file your specification, say what your invention does, submit drawings, sometimes models, and you send it off. Then the patent examiner evaluates it. Is it original, or does it significantly improve the state of the art? Well, Jack’s battery relied on certain insights…” Eli paused. “He always said he was standing on the shoulders of giants, and one giant in particular, a Serb-”
“Tesla.”
“Ri-igght! You have done your homework. Anyway, Jack’s battery took advantage of some of the insights Tesla had, and relied on one of Tesla’s lesser-known patents. So it wasn’t original in the technical sense. But did it improve on the state of the art? Oh yes! It did. It really really did.”
“So what did you do?”
“What do you think? We formed a corporation.”
“And you were successful?” Burke asked.
“Yeah. Kleiner Perkins put up half a million in seed money when we didn’t even have a business plan. Not a real plan, anyway. They just listened, looked at the prototype, and wrote a check.”
“Then what?”
“When we got a little further along, I set up a meeting with Morgan Stanley.”
“And what happened?”
“Well,” Eli replied, “what happened was, we got a letter, a certified letter, from the commissioner of patents. I think it was three lines long. Basically, it said there was a national security interest in the application. As a consequence, they were impounding it under the terms of the Invention Secrecy Act. Enclosed, please find a check for a hundred fifty-two thousand dollars. That’s what happened.”
“Christ,” Burke said. “What did you do?”
“What did I do? I talked to a lawyer, and then I took her advice.”
“Which was…?”
“Forget about it. I actually flew to Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and stayed plastered for a week.”
“And Wilson?”
“Jack… reacted differently. That meeting I told you about – the one with Morgan Stanley? He flew to Boston and gave the presentation, as if nothing had happened. The only thing he changed was the manufacturing venue. He was going to set up offshore.”
“And the government found out,” Burke said.
“One of the people at the Morgan Stanley presentation is a director of In-Q-Tel, so-”
“What’s In-Q-Tel?”
“It’s actually a CIA proprietary,” Eli told him. “But it’s not what you’re thinking. It’s not covert or anything. It’s a straight-up venture-capital firm that happens to be owned by the CIA. They have headquarters in the Valley. A sign on the door. The whole nine yards. The idea is, they put up money for start-ups that deal with problems the Agency has an interest in. I don’t know – a data-mining program for Arabic text, a new kind of body armor, whatever.”