Five Twelve

By Christopher T. Rand

This is in early 2001. Intelligence operatives have just acquired powerful evidence that there will be a vicious terrorist attack in the United States around the twelfth of May. If that strikes they cannot afford to be seen tracking and tormenting mere dissidents in America while ignoring violent alien terrorists, so they must eradicate the blac

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781641117616

Christopher T. Rand

Christopher T. Rand has worked as a writer, consultant, and translator. He is the author of Making Democracy Safe for Oil and has worked on litigation with the Federal Trade Commission and the state of California. Rand lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and has two children.

Book preview

1

It was a late winter day back in 2001 when the journey began for Marko the lawyer. As his plane taxied to its gate in Atlanta, Marko, a burly but trim man with short dark hair, heard the lead attendant announce We have special passengers on board. Well, all you passengers are special, but these are especially special: veterans. Now I’d like all of you to give them a round of applause.

As the applause welled up Marko saw a disheveled heavy-set man more or less his age, fiftyish, spring up in wrath and yell They are not fighting an enemy they are serving one.

Shut up! yelled another man, up and across the aisle.

Me shut up? A taxpayer? Paying my every last tax dollar to Al Capone?

We all pay taxes.

To Al Capone? Carlo Gambino? Ralph Nader? And all the other superthug barons?

Several men were yelling. They are protecting our democracy.

And your freedom.

Send him back to Havana.

Can we please the lead attendant stammered—Please can we show—consideration some and respect here please?

Some of us gunned down over Nam know what service we are applauding here said another figure in uniform, maybe the pilot.

Someone else arose. Yeah but I get this man. Special their sufferings may be. Okay. But he’s right. They are not fighting an enemy.

They are serving one the heavyset man charged. We’re talking ancient Rome! Gladiators on down and out. Gladiators serving like and the Mafia’s just the bright and shining tip of the iceberg of it.

One passenger drew down a suitcase, slammed it to the aisle floor cursing, began trying to haul it forward. Others on both sides followed his angry progress. Some people were sweating. Not the heavyset man though. He stood watching the others before him move on.

He better stay on this plane cried out another voice.

Won’t do him no good. They got straitjackets in the bulkhead.

Can’t get out nohow. Too obese.

Several more attendants had appeared up front as the heavyset man followed the others to the exit. I can’t believe anyone could talk with such godawful contempt said one attendant.

I’m not a spiritual counsellor retorted the heavyset man. I don’t mess with other people’s belief systems. But not only that you made me miss my connection.

In fact he did not miss the connection. A trio of surly men saw to that. Happy to get him out, they surrounded him as he worked his way around the concourse to a train. Shoved him up and onto that.

Marko joined him in solidarity, smiled at him.

Let’s pass around a hat for this crowd the fellow snapped at Marko. Get up a stipend for something meaningful to man. He introduced himself as Victor Lynch.

Can I buy you a drink? Marko asked him.

No hell no I’m okay Victor said. I go through this every day.

I’m a trial lawyer Marko told him. Alan Ivan Markowitz by name. Civil rights, antitrust. I learned four things, four worlds. Marko squeezed Victor hard by the shoulder. Zero in on four worlds. Entrapment, theft, surveillance and sabotage. The worlds your superbarons command. Their only worlds. I’m in LA. Let’s touch base sometime. Maybe you can help me on a case.

Marko had a perfectly-squared rectangle moustache that resembled Groucho Marx’s, but Victor started taking him a bit seriously now. While shaking his head. I’m out there too. But no way I can help.

Help us with advocacy skills.

America’s shrunk down to a land of monosyllables. Yo, chill, dude. I’ve never seen a superbaron, I never advocated, my son runs a fork lift truck. And I never even helped him out.

Marko winked and bade him farewell.

The talk reminded Marko yet again of the secret police. The secret state, the CIA, the adversary. Under Reagan it had drifted totally beyond the control of the American people, through an organization he’d set up to spy on Americans in America, in outright violation of the CIA’s charter. The CIA officers working through that all signed to secrecy agreements, so it would be next to impossible to learn what they really were doing.

Marko nodded now. This, he saw, was the final goal in the case he was just starting up. Maybe someday he could hit it. But it was early yet. The story of the blacklist had not yet come his way.

2

Victor Lynch had to admit he hadn’t wholly leveled with Marko; he indeed once had a nudging acquaintance with superbarons, or more correctly some of their retinue. Through the Westwood Engineering and Construction conglomerate. He was married then, and after his wife Gloria left him she moved on to one of Westwood’s founder’s sons, a fellow younger than her, Larry Wringell. She took their son Greg with her before she disappeared somewhere up the Mississippi.

Now Gloria Wringell spread out relaxed on soft leather in a Cadillac as a tall athletic friend, Nick Spofford, drove her about the Los Angeles Basin, showing off the Alameda Street warehouse-megasprawl, a grotesque 1930s art-deco bridge, then a medium-small refinery. She was still attractive for her years, just short of fifty, with broad dark eyes and hair, and she managed to slip her son Greg into the conversation. At the sight of a sign she surged forward in her seat. Westwood! she exclaimed.

That’s way the other side of town. The elite side.

"No, I mean the corporation."

Westwood E and C? They laid sewers out there. When all of west LA was a beanfield.

Take me down to this Westwood.

Nick, a superattendant of sorts too, however tall and blonde, shook his head. I have no part of anything down there he said. Not today. They’d shoot me.

Gus wouldn’t. Gus Wringell, Larry’s father, the force behind the extraordinary upsurge in the conglomerate’s fortunes. You know all about Gus.

Forgotten more than I need to know. I don’t have to deal with Gus anyway. I’m too far down. Slumming with the peasants.

Well I’ve got to talk to Gus she said, worried about her son. They’ve taken terrible advantage of Greg. Now here he is, languishing.

Tell me about it. He even hijacked their plane once.

Oh that’s not fair. That was just an afternoon spin.

None of them think he’s ever going to achieve a thing in life. Beyond getting stoned. I mean look. All due respect. But they all complain.

Greg never was the problem. It was… well, the father. Victor. The least they can do is give Greg a job. Give him his old one back. Greg in fact was no longer even driving a forklift truck.

Gus’s time is worth over seven hundred a minute.

His whole crowd owes me a hell of a lot more than that for Greg. Owes Greg, through me.

I can’t afford five a minute Nick said.

So take me down there now?

Nick winced.

Please?

He will never have any part of me again.

I beg your pardon! You are the client. He has to kiss your ass. Assuming he’s learned how to reach that high.

They’ll spot this Cad in the lot. Far too low class for those bananas.

Then I’ll go by myself. Pull over and let me out.

Just dump you? Now come on. Be reasonable.

A cab’ll take me. Thank you very very much.

Nick felt he had no choice but to obey her and keep on driving. Gloria sat with her arms folded and jaw strictly clenched. When Nick stopped at a red light she clutched her door handle. She didn’t quite start to open the door though and Nick shrugged and whipped his low-class American vehicle through the next left.

In fact Nick could go to Westwood anytime. A one-time member of the Harvard polo team, with high marks in Law School and an Ames Competition trophy, he was in fact a vice president of Antelope, a west Kern County oil developer that depended heavily on Westwood in its infrastructure projects—and leads to possible Middle Eastern ventures. Now his laminated card got him waved through Westwood’s security gate and into the empire’s regal parking area sweeping far away and beyond hundreds of yards right, left and center around a sprawl of structures, some windowless, others seemingly low slung but tall when one got near them.

It still wasn’t easy to keep moving once in there, even for Gloria. She saw another Wringell, Ivan, talking to someone up on the sweep of the Old Building steps. Larry’s oldest brother, lean and sharp-faced. She donned her sunglasses and sat motionless, refusing to catch that scion’s eye. She knew Nick dealt with him. Just keep your shades on and your eyes off him she ordered Nick.

Which was fine with Nick; he didn’t feel like going through the complications of running into that scion now either. He had gotten to know him well enough at Harvard reunions, since their years shared final digits. Now he watched Ivan go over to his low-slung red convertible, Ferrari or Mercedes or whatever it was Gloria said, and once he’d torn off she stepped out.

Nick watched her charge on and up the sweep of stairs past the Assyrian wall reliefs. It was a view he loved, her marvelous massive figure, even though she was wearing a slip now.

She surged on into the enormous early thirties Old Building, which some people claimed had once been an aircraft plant, while others thought it a transplanted Loew’s Orpheum—transplanted and lowered by a squadron of helicopters however into a horizonless expanse of bean, also tomato, fields. She swept through the heavy blue-green cloisonne-floored lobby over to the back channel then up the fire stairs to the top floor and, imperiously she hoped, past an executive secretary.

Gus the midget-baron had made it through Fresno High School, barely, just before the war. Talk about trash? By the time Japan had hit Pearl Harbor Gus had moved out of the West LA bean fields and up into the Sierra, grading and paving tricky mountain roads with his late father, and fast, grabbing up early completion bonuses on his way to the Mafia of Six, the little fraternity which in decades to come could execute instant emergency freeway bridge-replacements.

Now Gloria saw him as little more than a silhouette before his blazing window, his Venetian blinds only half-closed to the fierce sun. He ground out a cigarette with a screwing motion, clawed another one from a pack with a short stubby finger, drew out a wooden kitchen match, struck that with a thumbnail and inhaled the flame into his cigarette. Of course he could see Gloria brilliantly with the light on his side and she was glad she had put on her slip. He squinted at her as he recited digits and letters into his phone-receiver. She took a seat facing him as a voice issued plaintively from a stainless-steel parabola off to a side, repeating the words abuse mistreatment and suffering in petulant foreign tones.

Who’s that poor son of a bitch she demanded.

Gus put his hand over the receiver. Shut up Norma Jean he snapped. Then further into the receiver: The doctor’s car goes into this front space right here, Mohi. The nurse has to settle for that slot back there. You forgotten that?

Some prime minister demanding his rakeoff?

Again the hand on the receiver. "Ex-prime minister. Go back to your riverboat.—Since the last we talked Mohi I got our auditor’s report. I got it right here. Hey you owe us a fortune, Mohi. One point three million alone just in spare parts you owe us. That gets paid first."

Some more protesting. "I never ever see these certified."

Gus the chain-smoker held his breath at length. That’s because nobody came to look at the papers he said finally.

The man on the parabola moaned again. It is two in the AM my time he said, with a further distant muttering of digits.

Gus leered at Gloria and let the man ramble on.

No rakeoffs for me Gloria charged. It’s Greg I’m talking about here. You owe Greg a job. A nice job.

Gus pressed his lips tight at that, raised his eyes but then lowered his head.

After all that slop about abuse and suffering.

Gus took a very deep draught from his cigarette then ground that out in turn. You go take that up with Larry. And let Larry tell you about that plane trip.

Oh for the love of Jesus she stated, incredulously she hoped.

Flying over the sawmills? We are in a zone of real tradeoffs. Isn’t he getting a little old for this anyway? And who are you to talk? The actress, moving on with her act? No one could find you not here or anywhere else, not at that time you say is so important. Not in this country.

Gus meant the time several years before, the time Nick had just mentioned when Westwood had fired Greg for taking the corporate jet, over some sawmills he’d claimed, and told him never to come back on the premises. There are people who have to fight to feed themselves she told Gus now.

No forwarding address no nothing. I mean I don’t believe this. A woman who is crying Niagara Fallses over her son and she goes years without seeing him? Doesn’t even write him?

I know you had to struggle to get through high school but try and speak English for once.

This swamp is jammed with man-eating armadillos. Seething with them.

Just one more half-breed you mean?

You even know where he is right now?

Gloria didn’t answer; she didn’t know, to be honest.

Gus screwed his face up. Apparently the ex-prime minister had hung up. Gus’ phone buzzed again. He picked up the receiver then winced. And stood up. And this just drives the point on. They keep snapping away. Twenty-four seven. He swung around his desk. I don’t know where this will end. Aurelia will be happy to bring you tea or coffee in the conference room.

She’s done her job. Fool me twice and I’m stupid. Gloria got up too. Just remember where you came from. And who kept you up here. She strode out and back to the fire stairs and spat before Aurelia could offer to get her anything.

Back down by the Cadillac she admitted to Nick she’d struck out big time. Well. So did he. Proved yet again what a coward he is. Had to get his secretary to rescue him, can you believe that?

Nick just waved her off. They all live and work in ratholes.

Mohi?

Must be a famous victim.

Nick winked. A famous gatekeeper. He can afford the seven hundred. He once sold France a province.

At least there’d been no whispering, Gloria thought. Or talk about their Labrador, focus of their newest avocation. "Where did the Harvard polo boy come up with that? Or the variant, Pumping raw blood into his desiccated veins." Nick was the client after all, the boss.

Oh my trash! Nick exclaimed now. He reached over to her, put his arms around her, slid his left hand under the hem of her dress. She kissed him and giggled.

Greg indeed was around. Gloria managed to track him down by the end of the week. He was living almost homeless then, floor-surfing in a single-room occupancy, and there it was that Marko Markowitz’s triangle met its apex.

3

Greg woke up with the phone ringing down his hall in pulsations, little frothy heads of sparks gushing from the phone with each ring, flowing down the table leg to the floor then subsiding, sinking into the rug as the echo faded—then swelling out in a new flow with the next soft glittering ring. Greg, slender, no longer a teenager, youthfully bright-eyed anyway, crawled over to the phone and gripped it.

This is Gloria said the voice at the other end. And I am able to tell you Aurelia that secretary called me. She said there is a job at Westwood, menial as it is. I don’t know what, but at least you had experience with those forklifts. And I called Edgar and saw to it he will give you a sofa to sleep on. For a while.

Edgar, though the son of another Westwood mistress, had found and kept work at the E and C empire. His work was much better than what Greg had had: indoors, accounts something. Payable?

Greg had lived with him in the old days, before committing the blunder of pirating that jet. To fly over and check out a Canadian resort he worked for once, briefly. Now Edgar lived not far from the Westwood conglomerate, in the confused Downey-Lynwood-Norwalk nexus, a small blue-collar tract sprawl close by Imperial Boulevard and indeed the Santa Fe Springs refinery up on Florence, whose tower you could see if you picked the right angle. Greg slung his duffel over his shoulder and found a city bus down to Edgar’s house.

The place could offer him some respite. It’d be okay as long as he stayed there, grounded. Every now and then. Greg had hoped Edgar was out of town, on ever-expanding ever-more-vital business. He was not in his house in any case. He had left a key in his Venus fly trap. Once Greg worked his way in he went to the main bedroom and rummaged through bureau drawers. Nothing there but dirty socks, a Japanese towelette, a phone number on a napkin in lipstick.

In the medicine chest though he found a bottle of large white discs. He picked up a ballpoint pen, ground a pill down, spilled its powder into the pen holder then lit the nib-end and inhaled through the holder. Several good deep breaths. A little harsh, with the plastic, but they worked. Then on top of that he saw that Edgar did keep various tequilas in the kitchen, so he turned to those.

He thumbed through the Calendar for a twenty-four-hour movie house where he could nurse himself without leaving his seat, but the nearest he could find was two bus rides away, back beyond Manhattan Beach, maybe two hours off. Best stay grounded.

He accepted that he had to be cautious and keep to what nature had set before him. There was some argument on what that was. Usually he took his lead from his father Victor, who used to tell stories about a goatherd watching his flock nibble on an alien herb and start to prance and dance on hind legs.

Well, that’s nature, Victor always said. The forces of the universe meant for you to find that and enjoy it. But the stuff they invent in labs at MIT, that’s a different story, sonny boy. Even if they order you to take a hundred doses to qualify for your PhD.

Victor had only been trying to give advice, in his way. Others did too, less amicably. Jesus don’t let him in the pantry someone said once, not quite out of Greg’s hearing.

Pantry hell. What about the time zone.

Greg sat staring out the window. In time with the shifting of the light the sycamore outside began to cast leaf-shadows on an eagle-winged Navajo throw rug. He admired the shadows of the thousand stiff little leaves glittering and glancing yellow and green, the cape of coins draped over the dense sycamore. Deesha! A name that came back from years. Well, a few years. Deesha and the leaves on her floor. Greg remembered their embraces up on the floor among the leaves. His voice had barely changed then. She was a big bosomy black-haired girl always if strictly letting him lie on top of her before the bed, rub on her, get her gasping. Each time she gasped harder than the last. She did not allow him to talk up there though or put a hand under any of her clothes. He once reached under her blouse but she yanked his hand out and slapped it. Giggling. I can’t dare be doing any of this till I’m eighteen she whispered.

She had shown him an old servants’ staircase and finally a man came storming up from the front hall just as she’d said he would someday and she shoved Greg out those back stairs. She couldn’t even kiss him goodbye in his rush to escape. He never saw her again but he didn’t know how he could ever face her anyway, after that cowardly desertion. He heard the man shout at her as he fled. Her uncle, he’d guessed. Her shrill scream followed him under the fence and away. He could hear the man hitting her.

Now he took a seat staring at Edgar’s TV, black and white shadows slicing back and forth across the screen before crackling harangues, as he sipped away.

Kicking made him look up. Edgar, towering overhead. Where were you this time? the stepbrother demanded. What did you make off with? They take away your license for good this time?

Greg could only moan.

You ever listen? I keep telling you that if you start drinking now you’ll be torched by dusk.

And unable to enjoy a proper drink in its proper time.

And that other stuff.

What other stuff.

You forgotten how to breathe too? You know what that stuff does?

They all ask that.

And they mean it. Take ten years off your life easy.

All right I’ll stop it then, okay?

One step is—

I will stop it all right? You hear me? You still deaf or what?

Edgar just turned to his bedroom. Edgar with his short trim hair. Every hair on his head the exact same length as every single other hair. But, oddly enough, darker than Greg’s: word had it his mother was part Paiute.

Edgar did agree that Greg could rent an old car in his garage for a hundred dollars, to come from his first paycheck. With that he could drive to Westwood to his job running a forklift truck again, under Skip the supervisor in Warehouse Refugio. From where he would move up to places not yet seen.

4

FIRST OF THOSE PLACES WAS REFUGIO ITSELF, RIGHT where some of the old-time Westwood hands met at the Supper Club after work. A barrel-chested typist who introduced herself as Bernice fell abreast of Greg as he passed out into the stench of industrial yeast and iodine and over to the parking expanse which spread on and on without horizon in a haze of tin, asphalt and barbed wire. Martoonie-time! she exclaimed, and coughed, and tugged a pack of Chesterfields from her smudged-olive canvas purse. She took out a cigarette and pointed it toward a distant outer wall of steelworks tattered as the shredded hem of a witch’s dress, rotting slowly up from the bottom—though if one peered at it closely one could see it was made not of cloth, or even metal, but glass, thousands of panes, most of them, toward the bottom, haphazardly or systematically blown, kicked or punched out over the decades.

Half across the faded asphalt before them, out of sight of the Old Building, a beat-up van. Around it, various people. One Bernice introduced to Greg as Mike Drabilsky the piping estimator, who waved her over to a large stubby cylindrical cooler.

Bernice gestured to one of the other figures about. I won’t stand around listening to that foulmouthed creep she told Mike, scarcely moving her lips.

Dailey? Christ don’t give him another thought Mike replied in a gravelly drawl. Dailey cleans up his act round about the sixth drink. Which should be any minute now.

At the mention of drink Bernice’s eyes started to glisten.

Greg watched a tall angular fellow with jagged pock-marked face in cowboy boots and tight pearl-buttoned maroon shirt pour amber fluid from the cooler into plastic cups. Silver Harley-Davidson belt buckle, gold nugget bracelet. Scowcroft, Bernice called him.

Knew Ivan the swinger, Bernice went on quietly. Ivan of course the older step-uncle to Edgar and Greg; the big dealer. Hear how Ivan got his start? A business development job, when he landed a contract his father Gus’s crew had worked on for years. Pushing hard with blind arrogant vitality. Rather than cable his superiors that he had got it, he came back, burst in on his boss in the silence of a critical meeting, slammed the signed contract onto his desk and walked off without a word of comment.

The first of a long line he did boast.

Yeah but the funny thing is Mike the final brother who kept his mouth shut was the guy who walked into a cocktail party Scowcroft observed. Fifty people in the room, cased it and saw exactly who was sleeping with what. While Ivan had to work the room doggedly and still couldn’t figure anything out on his own.

Mike Drabilsky pressed a cup on Greg. I’ll use a little of that Bernice charged. You use a little let’s all use a little. Splashing all around.

We spill more than any of those other clubs pour declared Mike.

To Greg it seemed Mike’s eyes were light sockets, or corkscrew molds. Greg let out a deep breath and sipped at what Mike had handed him, and Bernice lit her cigarette off the end of Scowcroft’s and they went on drawling back and forth in gravelly tones.

Also in attendance was a very short older guy they called Santos, hair turning gray, a senior coordinator from the New Building somewhere. You know Gaddafi? he asked Mike. That dictator out there? In Libya?

He buy you a drink?

We put him in power. Everyone out there says that and knows it. And we’ve kept him in power ever since.

Better not get into that around here said Scowcroft.

It’s okay this side of Refugio nodded Dailey, the one Bernice couldn’t stand. When Nixon became president that was his very first order of business. Set himself up in Libya.

They wanted to raise the oil price Santos went on. The field hands never could stop railing about that. You know what? That was 1969, the last days of the old king. Idris. He’d gone senile and had no heirs. He kept going to Turkey on vacation. This time he never came back. Our boys handed Gaddafi the keys to the main palace. It was all Nixon I keep saying. But the mechanism was way long in place.

Why the hell did they go through all that folderol? Bernice demanded. Couldn’t those sheiks all just snap their fingers and make it dance?

Santos shook his head almost mournfully. "The big companies wouldn’t let ’em.

I was there, I saw it. There were Americans out there during the price talks. They were strange. I saw them with my own eyes. A lot of Americans acting very strange. ER men they called them, personnel managers. Employee Relations. We got working on it, back in DC. Marko Markowitz and I got working on it.

Dailey winked at Bernice over that. She just wrinkled her nose.

No one else paid any attention, except one woman who looked like a Sicilian from a very early-fifties Vittorio de Sica movie—no makeup, a sack dress, practically no bra and wrinkled opaque beige stockings just like the ones an old maiden great-aunt of Victor’s used to wear, in early 1896 perhaps. Aunt Frances. Now this woman was talking quietly with another woman, so quietly one could not really make out her words. She brought a pair of sunglasses from her purse and trained her eyes on Santos.

"Who on earth is that" Greg asked.

Someone in Cogeneration Dailey remarked.

Nobody can remember her name said Bernice. Anita. Anita Whatever.

Going to take early social security what I hear. Then maybe with some luck she’ll be out of here.

Some of the others went down the road for their country music at Code Seven and the evening broke up. But Greg right then through Santos and his panoramic description started to get inched sideways into Marko Markowitz’s story.

5

SOME YEARS EARLIER. SANTOS SAID, THEY’D PUT MARKO to work in Aerojet Center up near Sacramento. A high California state official, Herman Baxter, had him come to a predominantly Japanese area in that state capital, a gray panorama of muddy-white old Victorians and immense oaks, orchards and backyard gardens, some blotted out by long narrow two-story apartment structures. They drove off for lunch in his official car.

What do you know about the Saudi oil colossus Aramco? Baxter, quite lean for a man in his late fifties, asked Marko right off. The Arabian American Oil Company? The richest oil company in the world?

A lot Marko said. He described exhaustive research he’d done, on a tanker case involving Aristotle Onassis among others, through the Arab press, industry fact-sheets, oilgrams, the makeup of Aramco’s big American owners. And the so-called cartel, the oil nations’ organization OPEC.

OPEC, more overrated than the House of Lords Marko concluded brusquely. "All you do when you say ‘OPEC is a cartel’ is raise a silly question—how is it a cartel? But you tell us nothing."

Baxter nodded. Where we need you, right there. On a confidential deal. It ties right in with big, big, superbucks.

The real target was Chevron, the San Francisco oil company. That giant held a 30 percent share in the Saudi colossus. Baxter’s state board couldn’t rely on its own men to pursue its tax conflicts with big oil. People on such boards always got deeper and deeper in bed with the people they tracked. Their men in the State Board of Equalization, Baxter meant here. Foremost the chairman, or executive director, of its tax arm, the Franchise Tax Board, the FTB (or as its employees called it, Fuck The Board). Unquestionably a bad guy, that chairman, Baxter contended, but it was impossible to fire him. It’d take a measure by the State Board of Equalization and on top of that a two-thirds vote of the state senate, but you hardly ever got that for anything.

So they had to do an end run around him. Whatever we get from the state we steal, Baxter told Marko simply. "We have to steal from the governor’s office. But our monopoly on this investigation is intact. We are still state, not federal. All these other forces—the FTC, Justice, the Senate committees, the big dealers, you name it—they’ve all flopped. Because the closer they’ve got to the bone on this tax superfraud, to the marrow, see, the more obvious it has become to them that their own employers were in on it too. Stu Symington and Jesse Helms and Moynihan and Russell Long and all those other big-wheel senators have blown the whistle on those whistleblowers, hard. Turned them around. Even Carter