Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

CHAPTER 32

Back at home, Burke fell into a dark funk, one pointless day collapsing into the next. More than two weeks slid by as Burke did nothing but watch the tube and drink. Most nights, he slept in his clothes.

He felt trapped.

He was furious with Kovalenko, yes, but his anger extended to Jack Wilson, too. The moment Francisco d’Anconia walked into Aherne & Associates’ offices, there was only one way things were ever going to work out, and that was with Mike Burke holding the bag.

But it wasn’t just anger he felt. Beyond that, he was worried. All of a sudden, Kovalenko had more important priorities than Jack Wilson, not the least of which was his gallbladder. How long had that been going on? Burke wondered. Then he remembered the phone conversation he’d had with Kovalenko’s subordinate, or whoever he was: You’re in a lot of trouble, my friend. Were they all like that? Was it in the job description, that you had to be a dick? What was it he’d said about Kovalenko? He’s in the shop.

It hadn’t made sense, but now it did. Kovalenko was in the hospital, or at the doctor’s, or something. And now he was having surgery. Christ, Burke thought, Kovalenko’s not even paying attention.

And if Kovalenko wasn’t worried about Wilson, who would be? Burke might take the story elsewhere, but… where? He didn’t have enough to persuade anyone who could do anything about it that Wilson was dangerous.

On a few occasions, when Burke had managed to tear himself away from the tube, he’d done a little research into particle beam or “directed energy” weapons – enough to know that, even in the midst of the Iraq war, the Pentagon was pouring money into it. A firm in Virginia was developing something called StunStrike, a device that worked off a Tesla coil and delivered a small bolt of lightning to blind and stun combatants. Raytheon was doing its own work in the field, devising weapons that could knock out the electronics of things like Stinger missiles, land mines, drones, and even aircraft.

Another project, based on the same basic technology, involved a beam that could microwave a crowd – or the inhabitants of a building. Essentially, the beam heated the water in the human body to a point where victims felt as if they’d received an instant sunburn. It more or less stopped them in their tracks, and the beauty of it was that afterward, they were fine. So it had civilian applications. Crowd control. Preventing stampedes. And then, if the people in front of you didn’t stop, you could ratchet up the setting until they felt like they were on fire. Jack it up a little more, and you’d boil them until their skin split.

Kovalenko might have known about these Pentagon efforts, but he wouldn’t connect them to Tesla, whose heyday had been more than a hundred years ago. The truth was, Kovalenko didn’t know enough to worry about Jack Wilson.

And… he wasn’t interested in learning. To the FBI agent, Jack Wilson was about as worrisome as a Nigerian con game.

And then one morning, Burke got up early and in a fit of masochism took a cold shower. To his surprise, it made him feel better. Virtuous, even. Then he made a cup of coffee for himself, and carried it to his computer. Sitting down before the monitor, he told himself to Get it together.

He was tired of treading water while the world wound down around him. If he didn’t do something soon, he’d drown. So watcha gonna do, boy? Join the circus, learn the guitar? Look for a guru in old Siam?

How about: Find Wilson.

Now that’s an idea, he thought. I could find Jack Wilson. But what would he do with him? He could FedEx the sonofabitch to Ray Kovalenko, and it wouldn’t do any good. On the other hand, they deserved each other. They might even be good together. And then, at least, this would be over – and I could move on.

So he typed a search string into the Google bar: “jack wilson” stanford indicted.

Somehow, Wilson had gone off the deep end, matriculating from a dormitory at Stanford to a cell block in Allenwood. That was quite a transition – and maybe enough to have made the papers.

The cursor changed to an hourglass and, in an instant, the screen refreshed.

There were dozens of hits.

He clicked on the first one, which was dated November 22, 1995 – a news story from the San Jose Mercury.

STANFORD MAN GUILTY

By Judi Whitestone

San Francisco Bay Area inventor and Stanford graduate Jack Wilson was found guilty in federal court today of soliciting the murder of U.S. Attorney Joseph Sozio.

Sozio’s office indicted Wilson last year for violation of the Invention Secrecy Act.

A summa cum laude graduate of Stanford’s prestigious School of Engineering, Wilson listened impassively as the verdict was read.

The prosecution’s case was based on surreptitious tape recordings made by Wilson’s former cellmate, Robert Maddox, who also testified at the trial.

Sentencing is expected next week.

Jesus, Burke muttered. And I thought I crashed and burned.

He spent an hour trawling for details on the Net. And what he found was enough to make you weep: Horatio Alger hitches a ride with Icarus…

The story had been well covered in the Silicon Valley press, where Wilson came to be seen as a golden boy with feet of clay.

According to the papers, Golden Boy was an orphan. In 1969, he was found in a box outside the emergency room of the county hospital in Tonopah, Nevada. Attached to his blanket was a round sticker with a smiley face. Under the word, HI!, someone had printed the words I’M JACK WILSON.

Wilson’s defense attorney played the orphan card and the Horatio Alger card as if they were a pair of aces. Brought up in a series of foster homes, young Jack Wilson was both prom king and valedictorian of his class at Churchill County High School in Fallon, Nevada. A national finalist in the Westinghouse science competition, he won a full ride to Stanford. Graduating at the top of his class, he was awarded the Ratner-Salzberg Prize (an inscribed pewter bowl and a check) and carried the Engineering School’s banner at commencement.

Other awards followed as he went on to earn a doctorate in electrical engineering. In 1993, he formed Wovoka Enterprises, applied for his first patent, and began to approach venture capitalists.

Patent? What kind of patent? Burke wondered. He searched a dozen different ways, but there was nothing about it.

It was at this point that Wilson’s seemingly unstoppable ascent to fame and fortune came to an end. In July of 1994, the Stanford man was indicted for violating the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951.

According to a trade publication called Silicon ASAP, Wilson’s invention had been seized by the U.S. government through the process of eminent domain. That is to say, it had been taken in the same way that the government seizes real estate in order to build a highway or railroad. Washington declared Wilson’s patent government property, remitted a check for what it considered appropriate compensation, and classified the invention “Secret.”

Relying upon the U.S. attorney’s complaint, Silicon ASAP reported that Wilson attempted an end run around the Invention Secrecy Act. Ignoring the seizure of his patent, Wilson attempted to raise mezzanine financing with a presentation at the offices of a venture capital firm in San Francisco’s financial district. According to an executive who witnessed the presentation, Wilson intended to produce the invention at a manufacturing facility offshore. Anguilla was mentioned.

FBI agents arrested Wilson as he left the meeting. The next day, he was indicted for violating the Invention Secrecy Act.

Burke found out what that was through the Federation of American Scientists’ website. The act was passed in 1951, and established protocols for the government’s seizure of inventions deemed vital to national security. Within the Patent and Trademark Office, special examiners look over all patent applications to determine if there is a national interest. Qualifying applications are referred to boards in the affected precincts – most often, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. Their recommendations are usually final.

In most cases, the seizure of a patent is not a hardship for the inventor, because the patent was developed with government funding. But for some inventors it is a hardship. In 2003, for instance, nearly half of the one hundred fifty patent secrecy orders related to private, or so-called John Doe, inventions.

The inventors’ appeals almost always failed, as did their complaints of insufficient compensation. How do you establish the commercial value of something that has never come to market – and never will? How do you make your case when you’re forbidden by law from discussing the invention itself?

Burke rocked back in his chair. Now he understood Wilson’s affection for Atlas Shrugged and Francisco d’Anconia. But what did Wilson invent? Given his interest in Tesla, and the government’s assertion of eminent domain, it was probably a weapon.

Burke went back to the well.

Following his arrest, Wilson was transported to San Francisco County Jail #1, where he shared a cell and small talk with a motorcycle thug named Robbie Maddox. Before the despairing Wilson was able to arrange bail, Maddox met secretly with sheriff’s deputies, insisting that his cellmate was planning to kill the U.S. attorney.

Two days later, Maddox initiated another discussion with Wilson. This time he was wearing a wire.

At Wilson’s trial on charges of solicitation of murder, the following exchange was played for the jury:

Sozio? Yeah, I would definitely… like to see that sonofabitch go down.

How much would that be worth to you?

You gotta be kidding!

No, really! How much?

Christ, I don’t know… Why?… You know someone who could do it?

I could do it…

Get outta here… is that a deal?

…yeah, sure… deal.

Wilson’s defense attorney, Jill Apple, agreed that her client was angry at the government for seizing his invention. And yes, he had undoubtedly vented that anger to Maddox. But, she argued, the government’s assertion that Wilson’s remarks constituted a threat, much less a contract, was ridiculous. If Wilson was conspiring to murder anyone, where was the overt act to further the conspiracy? It didn’t exist. He didn’t do anything. All her client had actually done, Apple insisted, was shoot off his mouth – because his world was crumbling around him. That was a mistake, she said, but it was not a felony.

She argued that her client was a victim of entrapment, and insisted that Wilson’s remarks had been taken out of context. Apple called Maddox a “provocateur,” and pointed out that after Wilson was charged with solicitation of murder, the U.S. Attorney’s Office moved to dismiss Maddox’s indictment in a drug case.

The jury didn’t buy it. Wilson was convicted. And because his target was the U.S. attorney, he was sentenced to “the Alcatraz of the Rockies” in Florence, Colorado.

There he spent his first year locked down in a six-by-ten concrete cage, doing time beside the likes of the Unabomber, the Shoebomber, Terry Nichols, and Ramsay Yousef. Condemned by Amnesty International for violating the United Nations’ minimal rules for prisoners, the Supermax prison in Florence was brightly lighted twenty-four hours a day. But not by the sun. The only daylight the prisoners could see was a segment of sky, high up on the wall. Like everything else, this was a security feature. In the absence of a landscape, escape became psychologically impossible. All that was left to the prisoners was a toilet, a sink, and a slab of concrete to sleep on. That, and a TV screen embedded in the wall, tuned to insipid programming.

Burke rocked back in his chair. Supermax, he thought. Jesus!

There were only two Supermax facilities in the federal system, he read, though six others were planned. Of the two, the one in Florence was newer. And therefore crueler. More state of the art. The inmates were effectively buried alive.

Burke had been brought up on movies of convicts pumping iron, playing football, or running on a guarded track. But there was none of that for most of the prisoners in Florence. Their first year, and sometimes two, was spent in their cells with virtually no opportunity to exercise or interact with others, including the guards. If their behavior changed – if they embraced the hopelessness of their situation and surrendered to apathy – they might someday be released into the larger population of less dangerous inmates. Until then, they might just as well be frozen in amber.

It was all about isolation.

Guards slid the prisoners’ meals into revolving “food wickets,” so that the trays appeared in the cells with no apparent human intervention. Drains and drainpipes, which inmates used to communicate in other prisons, were damped. You could bang on the toilet all day long, and no one would hear you. Cells were soundproofed, and sealed off by two doors, one barred, the other solid.

Even as the inmates were denied a view of the surrounding landscape, visitors were equally clueless of the terrain. The only approach to the prison was through a long, winding tunnel. As with the meals in the cells, visitors arrived out of nowhere to find themselves in a hermetically sealed, antiseptic hell, surrounded by walls gleaming with razor wire, monitored by pressure pads, motion detectors, and dogs.

It was, Burke thought, a long way for Wilson to fall, and a hard place to land. He glanced at the notes he’d made, then worked the Internet to find telephone numbers for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco; Wilson’s lawyer, Jill Apple; and Robbie Maddox.

He gave up on Maddox right away. Anywho.com didn’t have a listing for him in San Francisco, which meant that he could be anywhere. Sozio was easier to locate. He was a judge now, working out of the same federal building in San Francisco where he’d previously worked as a U.S. attorney, but there were so many layers of insulation between him and the public that getting an interview would be virtually impossible. That left Apple.

He found her number the old-fashioned way, through information. Half an hour later, he was lying to her. He told her he was a journalist who wrote for Harper’s, Counterpunch, and Salon. He mentioned some of the stories he’d covered (as a photographer), and said he was thinking of doing a piece about the Invention Secrecy Act. He was calling her because he’d become interested in one of the cases she’d handled.

“Jack Wilson,” she guessed.

“Right!”

She was a friendly woman with a warm southern voice. “Are you in touch with Jack?” she asked. And then, in a rush of realization: “He ought to be out by now!”

“Yes, he’s been released but, no, I don’t know where he is,” Burke told her. “I was hoping-”

“Well, I can’t help there,” she said. “We didn’t stay in touch.”

“No?”

“No. We appealed, but… I imagine he’s a different person, now.”

“Yeah, well, he would be.”

She sighed. “It was heartbreaking, really.”

“How’s that?” Burke asked.

“I don’t know how much you know about Jack’s life, but – he achieved so much, and then… it was just so sad. And unfair, too.”

“Unfair?”

“Bad luck.”

“How so?”

Apple sighed. “About a month before Jack went to trial, some lunatic walked into a courtroom in San Jose, and just opened fire. Shot the judge, a bailiff, and a popular young attorney on the prosecution team. Then he turned the gun on himself.”

“How’d he get into court with a gun?”

“The papers said it was a Glock. Lots of plastic parts, though I guess it’s mostly metal by weight. Anyway, you have to be trained to recognize it on a scanner if it’s disassembled. I guess he put it together in the men’s room. But the point is, if it wasn’t for San Jose, I don’t think Jack would have been prosecuted. They didn’t have a case, but they really wanted to send a message.”

“I read what Wilson said on the tape,” Burke told her. “It sounded like-”

“-bullshit. Which is what it was. He was angry. Who wouldn’t be? But murder? No way. If you’d seen that sleazeball on the stand… what’s-his-name? I’ve blocked it out.”

“Maddox?”

She made a disgusted sound. “This is the man they’re talking about when they talk about someone with ‘a record as long as your arm.’ So, of course, he was a professional snitch, and Jack, well, Jack had never been inside a jail before. So he was easy pickin’s.”

“Why was he in jail, anyway?” Burke asked. “Couldn’t he make bail?”

“He was arrested on the weekend, and I don’t think they arraigned him until Monday afternoon. He had a public defender at that point, and I think he was trying to arrange a loan, using his condo as collateral. But it took a few days and… Maddox happened. It was bad luck. Like I said.”

“You also said he was easy pickings,” Burke reminded her.

“Right. Maddox set him up. I can imagine how it went down. If you listen to the tape, there’s no context for anything. All of a sudden, Jack says, ‘Sozio,’ like it’s a revelation. And the conversation isn’t continuous. There are all these gaps. I had an expert witness examine the tape, and he suggested Maddox was manipulating the microphone. But we couldn’t prove it. And in the end, the jury didn’t buy it.”

“Did you call Wilson to the stand?”

She hesitated. “I did, and it was a mistake. Jack was… he’s very charismatic, one on one. Handsome as hell. But on the witness stand? I wanted a victim up there, but what I got instead was John Galt!”

“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?”