Brain Storm (28 page)

“What was the message the, uh, Virgin gave at the first sighting?” asked Arthur.

A pro forma request. The entire multimedia gaming industry knew the message by heart. But he repeated it aloud, for his employer’s benefit—anything to forestall the accusation of disloyalty before the throne of Judge Stang. “I think the final consensus was that she said: ‘We love you. My Son is very proud of you. Thank you for trying so hard to be good. Hope to see you soon. Love, Mary.’ ”

“Yes,” said Arthur. “Very close to the reports I remember receiving. Good.”

“Yes,” said Watson.

They drove another block or two, while Watson murmurously hummed Mozart and awaited the flourish of the switch in the woodshed.

Arthur pressed a stylish little console button and skipped a track
ahead on old Wolfgang. “Ben was wondering, speculating really, about what would happen if the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared again, for whatever reason, in Tower of Torture 4.0,” said Arthur. “Spontaneously, of course,” he added, “like the last one. But Ben was wondering out loud about what would happen if the Virgin’s message was more … dramatic?”

“A dramatic Virgin Mary?”

“Yes, livelier. More than a predictable expression of maternal love. What if some gamers claimed to be healed of certain afflictions, for instance? It’s the Catholic matters Ben needs help on. He heard something about blind or specially abled individuals being cured because they bathed in magic cisterns or drank from springs that welled up in the spots where the Blessed Virgin appeared.”

“Lourdes,” said Watson.

“Yes,” said Arthur. “What would be the effect of something like that?”

“On the screen?” Watson asked incredulously.

“Leave that to the programmers,” he said. “I mean, it’s academic, of course. Obviously, no earthly person can predict what she will do if she appears again. But what if her message was somewhat more ominous, on the order of a dark warning issued to the sinful human race. What if she told everyone to shape up quick or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are going to tear through town mowing down children with scythes and reaping hooks and sprinkling fatal virus dust everywhere? Would that stimulate more interest in the product? Ben was wondering what your thoughts would be, given your background and your … product expertise.”

“Uh,” said Watson.

“Maybe you could do a short memo on the other appearances. Lourdes, right?” said Arthur, proud of his memory and his knowledge of off-beat religions like Catholicism. “And Ben mentioned Fatima? Guadalupe? Aren’t there several?”

While his boss volubly mispronounced renowned Catholic shrines, Watson winced and thought better of correcting him.

“You could maybe summarize what happened at each sighting: What the, uh, Virgin said. What was actually seen by the witnesses. Maybe something more dramatic, or confrontational? Shape up, or eternal damnation? The world destroyed by fire in fulfillment of the Scriptures?”

“Sure,” said Watson.

“Tonight,” said Arthur, “or tomorrow morning, if you can manage.”

“DOT trucking industry regulations,” said Watson. “They’re due.” He held his breath. Truth be told, they were due this morning, which Arthur would either remember now or later, when he looked at his calendar back at the office.

“Not a problem,” said Arthur. He gently picked up the phone from the walnut console and pushed a speed-dial sequence. He asked for Geoff Wilke, in-house counsel at Biggs Trucking, and advised Geoff that some of the new administrative guidelines required careful consideration and an amendment to the original summary of DOT regs. Arthur would personally deliver the file on Monday with Nancy Slattery, who had assumed responsibility for the project.

Watson listened so closely, he felt like voice recognition technology analyzing the stress patterns in Arthur’s voice. Still no trace of anger or impatience.

When Arthur hung up, Watson said, “I’m sorry, Arthur. I owed you that memo. I haven’t forgotten about it. I just …”

“You’re overwhelmed,” said Arthur.

Watson searched his boss’s face for signs of irony, finding only genuine concern.

“You had no idea we would be seeing Judge Stang in chambers. Then you had to try to find your client. And the memo? Don’t worry,” said Arthur. “Part of my job is managing associates. I saw it all coming this morning. Nancy will take care of it.”

If Watson wasn’t mistaken, Watson’s attempts to find Whitlow had not come up in Judge Stang’s chambers.

“How did you know I was looking for my client?”

“I talked to Mr. Harper in the U.S. Attorney’s office and to Dr. Palmquist,” said Arthur patiently. “Mr. Whitlow is on his way to the federal medical center at Rochester, Minnesota.”

“Thanks,” said Watson uneasily, “I appreciate that.”

He tried to feel relieved. Maybe Arthur was remembering his days as an overworked associate. Wrong again—Arthur had gone directly from prosecutor to Stern, Pale partner and had never labored in associate limbo. How to test the sore spot of the morning’s events in Judge Stang’s chambers?

“And as for our little to-do this morning with the right honorable Judge Stang,” said Arthur, “don’t worry. You did the correct thing by
patronizing him. After all, he is the ultimate boss. I hope you live long enough to see a demented colleague appointed to the federal bench because he happens to drink with the right senator, and then spend the rest of your career suffering his overweening abuses. Do you know what separates him from the people he sends to prison every day?” he asked.

“What?” asked Watson.

“Medication,” said Arthur, with a scowl and a sigh. “Ah, well,” he said with a reassuring smile. “That’s that. You know,” he added warmly, “it’s almost impossible to find time to talk about all the matters we need to go over. Are you in tomorrow?”

“Saturday?” said Watson. “I was going to come in and go through the mail and prepare some of my motions in the Whitlow case.”

“Great,” said Arthur. “We’ll chat then.”

Back in his office, Watson programmed and dispatched a couple more spiders to find information about appearances by the Blessed Virgin Mary. He sent another one out to find media hits on Judge Whittaker J. Stang. Then a separate Westlaw search summarizing every criminal case originating in Stang’s court from which an appeal had been taken. He did a separate search to find any opinion written by Stang mentioning the First Amendment, federal sentencing enhancements, or hate crimes. Then he retrieved hits collected by the spiders named Hate and Rachel and scanned them in the filter index.

Journal of Forensic Psychology
, August 1998: “Congress approved funding for a variety of research initiatives to determine the biological and genetic causes of violence under the umbrella term Psychon Project. Instead of studying the usual social or demographic roots of criminal behavior, Psychon task force researchers were charged with finding reliable methods of diagnosing and treating various criminal pathologies using a medical model.”

Forensic Neurosciences Digest
, June 1999: “Neuroscience can now identify, with a reasonable degree of medical certainty, the psychobiology of the violent offender. The database and recurrent network search technologies developed by the Psychon Project in the decade of the brain allow parole boards and sentencing judges to predict with reasonable accuracy the likelihood that an individual defendant will prove to be a repeat offender.”

British Journal of Experimental Neuroscience
, January 2001: “Dr. Rachel Palmquist, a Gage Institute neuroscientist, participated in a press conference here after the fourth annual meeting of the umbrella research group called the Psychon Project.… ‘It is now possible to breed violent species of mice, for instance, or administer hormones or neurochemicals that mimic the neurobiology of violence in an otherwise healthy animal. It is possible to raise an animal in a threatening, hostile environment where the organism is continually and violently attacked. The brain of that animal is different, chemically, structurally, neurologically from the brains of rats used as controls. That’s established. We’re now investigating the very real possibility that we can repair or ablate those circuits which predispose an animal to violence, or other impulsive, pathological social behaviors.’ ”

St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, “Palmquist, Gage Neuroscience Group to Head Biology, Genetics Task Force on Violent Crime,” March 3, 2001: “ ‘People get squeamish about mind control only because they don’t realize their mind is being controlled every second—it’s just a matter of who’s in charge. You’re free to be in charge of your own neural circuits as long as they don’t malfunction and issue instructions to the rest of you to visit the shopping center with an automatic weapon. When that happens, it’s time for medicine to intervene to repair or alleviate the pathology.’ ”

For being a recluse, Judge Stang still managed to show up in plenty of media hits commemorating banquets and bar association conferences honoring him for eons of service in the federal courts. He was usually pictured with a scowl on his face, standing between two beaming luminaries of the bar. A slew of clippings and photos were from the days when he presided over the Lebanese Mafia trials in the eighties. Judge Stang with Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, another with Warren Burger, and later, William Rehnquist. The keyword
Spence
caught Watson’s eye, and when he opened the hit he felt a tingle: Judge Stang shaking hands with one of Watson’s heroes from his law school days, Gerry Spence, at Gerry Spence’s summer clinic in Wyoming—the only photo Watson could find where the judge looked to be on the verge of actually smiling.

W
atson came home early—7:00
P
.
M
.—almost a record! But the Memsahib was not happy about the events in Judge Stang’s chamber; even Watson’s selective narrative was too much for her. She quickly grasped the essentials: that the murder case had not gone away, and that Arthur was possibly displeased—never mind Judge Stang’s tributes to her husband’s lawyering skills.

“I’m really worried about you and Arthur,” she said, her eyes watering into the telltale, pink-rimmed look, serving notice that he was failing in his vocation to keep her and the kids happy and secure.

He tried plying her with extra wine, but she wasn’t interested. And later, just before bed, he heard her say his name while she was talking to her mother on the phone in the bedroom. When he tiptoed closer to the door, she paused, then changed the subject to Benjy’s ear infections. He felt a tingle of dread and wondered if she already sensed his budding infidelity. Maybe she didn’t consciously know it yet, and she was displacing her forebodings onto the subject of his alleged disloyalty to Stern, Pale. A system monitor must have tripped somewhere in her subconscious, prompting her to call home for help. He was convinced that she was overdoing things by going outside of their marriage for assistance. She apparently had a different opinion.

Maybe Watson had crossed some kind of line, and had simply lulled himself into believing he could never get in trouble serving the will of the mighty Whittaker J. Stang (a guy who hung out with the likes of Gerry Spence!) and the Code of Professional Responsibility. Arthur couldn’t publicly fire him for doing his duty to an appointed client: The scandal would humiliate Stern, Pale and impugn the firm’s standing as officers of the court, as model citizens, as members of the bar. No, the worst Arthur could do would be a couple of mediocre annual performance reviews on other subjects, like quality of work or billable hours. After about a year, the firm would suggest he start looking elsewhere, at which point he would look elsewhere and perhaps leave. In short, no immediate threat on the career horizon, and the long-term consequences were too insubstantial.

And in the meantime, what if he was able to manage a dismissal of a few of those charges against Whitlow? The possibility was not remote after the recent session before the judge. Big plume for his lawyer cap, whether Stern, Pale liked it or not. Federal judges sit up and notice criminal defense victories, especially if an appointed lawyer or a public defender manages to pull one out of the hat.

Time to hang his Clarence Darrow quote on the wall of his office at Stern, Pale, he decided. He would take it with him when he went in tomorrow. He retrieved it from his quote database on the notebook, where he often foraged for telling points to add to his memos or briefs.

In 1902 the warden of the Cook County jail in Chicago invited Clarence Darrow to speak to the inmates of the jail. Darrow accepted and gave the prisoners one of his many famous speeches. Watson had found the speech in
Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom
, edited by Arthur Weinberg, where the whole thing ran to twelve pages, from which Watson had clipped inspirational excerpts into his computer database, including the following:

Poor Darrow. Fifteen days would barely suffice to argue a motion to suppress on behalf of O.J. or Claus Von Bülow. And trials?

What about the infamous Rutger Lupine sexual harassment case? The trial took twenty-two months, gavel to gavel, beginning in the latter half of 1999 and ending in mid-2001—the case of a wealthy bisexual and transsexual sex criminal, whose mixed race, ancestry, and nationality, as well as his/her promiscuous conversion to twelve of the world’s leading religions, arguably immunized him/her against all charges of committing hate crimes against others because of their race, religion, ancestry, gender, age, sexual orientation, and disability. Lupine’s defense that he/she himself/herself was a member of every protected group he/she was charged with discriminating against ultimately failed, and he/she was convicted of nineteen separate counts of verbal assault with a gender-based assumption, and fourteen separate counts of felonious, hostile-environment harassment intended to subordinate and degrade people of different abilities, religions, ancestries, genders, and sexual orientations. The case swelled up bigger than a day-care kid-sex scandal when a search of Lupine’s sector housing turned up a cybersex machine, complete with a tactile bodysuit, customized female pelvic unit, virtual reality helmet, teledildonic gloves, and fiber-optic cables rigging the whole thing to a network array of central processing units. He was wired for interaction with legally obscene, CDA-prohibited pornographic software or for cybersex with virtual representations of other sex criminals who were bold enough to go on-line looking for felonious teledildonic sex. All of which added up to another forty-nine separate violations of the Communications Decency Act, with a minimum ten-year sentence under the 2001 amendments.