THE POLITICS OF PLEASURE (49 page)

The general believed that Goldman, in the aftermath of the massacre, would keep a low profile. The chemist wouldn't want to be connected to the well-publicized killings; much like Turner himself. Accordingly the general hadn't used the legal means of his office to probe into the explosive affair, but had found out much through a long-standing FBI source.

Turner had recently bought a state-of-the-art desktop workstation. Trusted staff at the Defense Communications Agency had moved his AUDNET 501 directory onto the hard drive of the new workstation. The compact system was hidden in a built-in section at the back of Turner's home garage, allowing the general to make a cassette-tape copy of any file he chose.

Of course he would still hunt down Goldman. The maverick chemist was a damaging loose end capable of tainting Turner's forthcoming promotions to the NSC and the Joint Chiefs. No, he wouldn't rest until Goldman was caught. With the aid of Interpol computers and NSA technologies, the Occident had become an increasingly observable arena. The chemist's capture was only a matter of time.

Turner rested his cigar on a Fortunoff crystal ashtray and drained his scotch. He grabbed a telephone book from underneath an outdated report listing Soviet-backed guerrilla camps in Central America. He looked up the number for Bambra Studio and made a 12:30 appointment after learning raven-haired Marcella still worked there and was available for him at that time.

Turner knew a late-night romp with the little Brazilian would fire up his cylinders more than any new medical prescription or human potential seminar. He needed to celebrate his newly won position on the political landscape, and couldn't think of a better way to do it. With an irrepressible grin, he re-lit his cigar and grabbed his 4WD's keys.

San Francisco. Tuesday, 9th December, 1980.

A pale apricot sun slipped behind the cluttered skyline. Deepening shadows edged along bustling sidewalks, contrasting the hurried pace of peak-hour pedestrians. A bracing bay wind swept through canyons of tall buildings, scuttling ribbons of dried leaves and lifting flapping pages of newsprint high in the air. Pigeons and gulls navigated the invading draughts with impunity, while down on the congested streets horns blared and tempers flared and brake lights flashed as daring drivers jockeyed their vehicles into better-placed positions. Exhaust fumes from a thousand tailpipes melded with the incoming winds and churned past a lone man seated at a Muni bus stop.

Goldman toyed despondently with the Sony Walkman on his lap. He removed its earphones as the compact cassette player clicked off. People pooled at the bus stop. He couldn't help but overhear a conversation between a tall dark youth and two blond girls who looked like twins.

'What? He's dead?'

'That's right, sweetheart,' said the lanky dark youth with budding dread locks.

'I can't believe it,' the other girl said.

'Well you better, sugar lips, because he was gunned down outside his apartment last night ... right in front of Yoko.'

'Did she get shot, too?'

'Nah, babe, she didn't.'

'My God, it must be awful to see your loved one gunned down like that ...'

Goldman wrapped the Walkman's cord tightly about his finger. A fresh surge of tension tugged at his nerves.

... to see your loved one gunned down like that ...

The unexpected news about John Lennon's murder made him uneasy, made his fugitive world that more out of kilter. Again his mind drifted back to that fateful night in Westwood. After the explosive confrontation with the Cuban gunmen, he'd stole back to Thirteen's house, only to blend in with a group of onlookers across the street. The flashing lights of Fire Department Paramedic trucks and LAPD patrol cars lit up the front yard and driveway. Paramedics carried weighted body bags from out of the house. Goldman had to know if Michelle was still alive. Before he knew it he ran into the grounds, only to be stopped by two LAPD officers guarding the integrity of the yellow tape cordoning off the crime scene. TV news vans screeched to a halt outside. Animated network crews bearing all kinds of cameras jumped to the ground. Goldman panicked at the thought of being captured on film and stole back into the night.

He moonlighted a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt from someone's clothes line. Attired in the loose-fitting clothes, he paid for a room in a backstreet motel. Once inside the room he began to address the boulder of agony threatening to crush him.

Rick Sorenson and most of his colleagues were dead. And Michelle ... His tortured mind couldn't entertain the notion she had died along with the others in the house. He tossed and turned on the bed. From behind closed eyes, he saw the recurring imagery of a room filled with bodies. Blood, unbelievable amounts of it, pooling across a hardwood floor, staining a crumpled living room carpet. Of course it was his fault. General Turner's cryptic signature lay at the heart of what had taken place. A suffocating guilt threatened to relinquish the chemist of further breaths. His head throbbed and his body ached and there seemed no way forward. And so he suffered in the timeless confines of the narrow room.

After fitful snatches of sleep, he ventured outside and bought a copy of the
Los Angeles Times
from an all-night convenience store. Standing beside a cluttered aisle of goods, the sun winking brightly on the horizon, he'd read and reread a second-page article to assure himself Michelle had survived the killings. Apparently she'd been identified from the belongings in her bag. She would likely pull through from her wounds. Incredibly she was the only one so fortunate. All others in the house had succumbed to their injuries.

Goldman returned to his room, elated Michelle was alive. Even so, guilt bore down on him like the smothering weight of a Sumo wrestler. He lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling, besieged by anguished thoughts and memories, a post-traumatic state from which there seemed little or no reprieve.

So many people killed. Goldman having killed several of them ...

Time, a parade of days and nights, passed unchecked. Food and drink were of little concern, even as his aching body protested the ongoing neglect. His internal pain looked set to consume him, to keep him in a near comatose state on the bed.

And then it happened.

Surfing channels one night, he happened upon Michelle's prime-time interview. She looked pale and drawn, but it was her all the same. He broke down and cried, realizing how badly he missed her. How badly it had all turned out. Toward the end of the interview she'd looked face-on at the camera and smiled. A sunny portrait underpinned with a resolve to pull through the trauma of her ordeal.

Seeing her as such lifted Goldman's spirits. His world turned again. Purpose surged through his limbs like the revitalizing waters of a deistic fount. He wrote a heartfelt letter, including it in a florist's bouquet of roses delivered to Michelle's bedside.

It was hard to resist the impulse to visit her in hospital, but after much deliberation he decided against it. God knew he'd already brought ruin upon the girl. She'd been almost killed. No, he respected and loved her too much to want to endanger her again. In any case he wasn't sure how Michelle would respond seeing him again. It could prove an unpleasant episode. He didn't want to tarnish the cherished memories of their time together. Though in a chamber of his heart he hadn't given up hope he and Michelle might one day meet, and not impossibly resume their relationship once this unpleasantness was behind them. Of course it was a big ask. Nevertheless he allowed himself to be buoyed with hope.

Days passed. He had to pick up the pieces of his life or else throw in the towel and subsist as a ghostlike entity in the concrete bowels of the city. Early one morning, he packed his meagre belongings and grabbed the cash he'd left in a locker at Union Station shortly after his arrival in LA. He caught a bus to San Francisco and contacted Richard Farber, using the telephone number and password reference Thirteen had given him.

Farber took Goldman to his heavily locked 'office' near Fisherman's Wharf, a windowless loft in a warehouse used by a co-op of artists and sculptors. Using a DEC Vax computer and a DARPA-designed modem, Farber accessed the Social Security Administration computer. He then explained how he accessed most government computers on the Tymnet line. Tymnet was a cutting-edge communications company that interconnected US computers, allowing its subscribers to connect to its ever-growing network by a local telephone call.

'Many government computers,' Farber said, 'use the Unix operating system and a powerful editing program called Gnu-Emacs. A flaw in Gnu-Emacs allows Unix users to forward mail files into the protected systems space, a space normally reserved for the system manager alone. Luckily for persons like myself, very few users know this.'

Two years earlier, Farber had sent a 'privilege-grabbing' program disguised as a mail file into a number of federal government computers' protected system space. The disguised program rewrote each computer's powerful
atrun
program, which in turn granted Farber 'super user' status in each targeted computer.

'At present, it's a dream run for hackers of my calibre.' He chuckled wryly. 'But in a few years most government computers will be a closed shop. You're a lucky boy.' He inserted Goldman's false name and particulars into several Social Security Administration files, then created a valid taxation account in the federal database of the Internal Revenue Service. Registered as a new immigrant, Goldman now had a verifiable social security number with which he could legally work and pay tax.

The pony-tailed cyberpunk took a head-shot photograph of Goldman in front of a cream screen. He then accessed the California Department of Motor Vehicles computer in Sacramento and inserted Goldman's false particulars. Farber explained the counterfeit drivers license would be ready for use in a week's time, and would check out legit should any roadside cop radio it in. Farber had a paid contact in the DMV who would insert Goldman's picture into Goldman's new DMV file. Goldman's drivers license renewal notice would be posted in due course to the address Goldman provided.

A week later Goldman was handed a genuine-looking drivers license and an equally impressive social security card – both IDs linked to his new alias: Scott Anderson. Farber then accessed the relevant government computers to demonstrate Goldman's new particulars were legitimately stored in them. Confident he wasn't the target of a high-tech sting, Goldman paid the agreed price (which was a good part of what he'd received for his gold coins in Washington DC). Disappointingly, Farber hadn't known anyone who handled counterfeit passports.

Now, Goldman fidgeted with the Walkman's earphones. Watching pigeons squabble with a pesky gull, he was impervious to much about him. The gusting pockets of wind, the horn-honking of early evening traffic, the growing number of commuters at the bus stop. He nearly jumped out of his skin when a car screeched to a halt behind a mail delivery van. The chemist cursed under his breath and his heart thumped in his chest like a heavily weighted metronome.

Since killing the gunmen in Los Angeles, Goldman had been on edge. Nervous and tense, ready to strike at a moment's notice. He was accosted in a side street a few nights ago. A knife-wielding teenager in torn jeans and a Greenpeace sweatshirt had demanded money. Goldman had beaten the mugger beyond the dictates of necessity, an unneeded brutality in his fists. Standing over the broken, unconscious youth, he'd felt an irretrievable loss of character. He'd felt fated and damned, and genuinely fearful of drawing others into his darkening gravity.

Particularly women.

He thought of his late wife Rachel and how she'd died in the company of his mother; of Belize and her sister and how they'd suffered at the hands of the gunmen in his Baltimore apartment; and of the heart-wrenching horror when Michelle was gunned down in Thirteen's house. All in all, it was a terrible tally that weighed on him like a debilitating yoke. He was damaged goods. It would take time before he could offer himself intimately to another woman.

He picked up a wayward page of the day's
Examiner
that the street's tunnelling wind had dropped beside him on the seat. He sped-read an article about NASA's first space shuttle launch scheduled for April the following year. The author extolled that
Colombia's
successful return to earth would herald an exciting new era in American commerce.

Wind churned the chemist’s hair as he looked skyward at gliding gulls, and higher still at airborne pages of newsprint colliding against the glass sides of office towers. He remembered social commentators on a late-night show predicting the coming decade would be a time of unprecedented capital. Fast money will be the order of the day, one forecaster had proclaimed. Turn On, Tune In, Take Over, the likely maxim for a sharp new generation. Carrying a slimline briefcase, a young woman in executive attire appraised Goldman as she marched past. He broke eye contact with her, a low profile his only ambition.

With new credentials and limited capital, he'd decided to take up Brad Ryan's offer of work at his expanding health food business in Hawaii. A new start in the fiftieth state across the waters wasn't without appeal; indeed seemed a fitting move for the hunted chemist to make.

'Everything loose in the east rolls west” was an adage he'd heard often enough from Rachel's Bostonian mother. He wouldn't tell Brad Ryan he'd been at the Westwood house the night of Rick Sorenson's murder, nor that he was the reason why Sorenson and the others were killed. He didn't like harbouring secrets from friends but felt he had no choice in the matter. No, his heart would remain a graveyard of secrets. 

An electric trolley bus pulled up and people climbed aboard. Goldman slipped a new cassette into his Walkman. He got up from the seat, pressed in the earphones, and fell in step with the rush hour crowd. Unknown faces streamed past him as he made his way back to his hotel room. Strangers, to the last man and woman. He couldn't have been more alone, more out of place. Nostalgia transported him to a vast, green-rimmed continent far removed from these choking sidewalks. Old friends still lived there. It was where he came from and, he realized with a sagging heart, where he belonged.