The Enemy Inside

FORTY-NINE

Three days later, early morning, they pick me up outside my house, a military staff car from Miramar, the Marine Air Station in San Diego. Harry is there to see me off.

“You know what to do if for some reason I don’t come back?”

Harry nods. We have made contingency plans. I have called Sarah, my daughter, and Joselyn, my lover, who is still in Europe on a project, and told them both in general terms what is happening. I take my bag from Harry and step into the backseat of the blue sedan, and we’re off.

The trip is comfortable and swift. The sleek blue and white military jet streaks northeast over the California desert, nips the northern edge of Arizona, and flies almost directly over Four Corners, where the borders of Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado meet. On a straight shot it heads over the shoulder of the southern Rockies and down their eastern flank. In just under two hours we land at the small airfield just outside Florence.

As I had requested, a gentleman from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, one of their executives from Washington, is waiting for me at the airport with a government car. He is personable, highly professional, and best of all, somebody I already know. I met Daniel Wells on a case years earlier when he was working for the Bureau of Prisons in San Diego.

From time to time we’ve kept in touch. We had children the same age and Dan was like me, single. He was divorced. I was widowed. But we haven’t seen each other in almost fifteen years, so that when I step off the plane he has to look twice to be sure it’s me.

“Dan, how are you?”

“Long time,” he says. “But you’re looking good.”

“More wrinkles and gray than I would like.”

“Yeah, but at least you still have some.”

Dan has gone completely bald. I suspect he shaves what little he has left.

“It’s good of you to meet me here. I appreciate it.”

“Not at all. I’m happy to get out of Washington. I’ve got the car over here. Want me to take the bag?”

“No, I’ve got it. Traveling light.” We head for the car.

On the way to Supermax we talk about the kids. He asks me if I’ve ever been out here before. I tell him no. If Dan has done any background on Betz, and I suspect he has, he doesn’t say so. I fill him in on the reason for my request that he accompany me, the fact that I am carrying a single electronic device that I want to take with me inside the prison.

He listens politely and then says, “I don’t know. They don’t generally allow it.”

“It’s not a camera. It’s not a recorder or a communication device. And,” I tell him, “unless I can take it inside and use it, we can’t go forward. We may as well not even go inside.”

He turns his eyes from the road for a second and looks at me. “You’re sure about this? You mean that?”

“I do. Betz does not know me. Unless I can give him absolute assurance that what he’s telling me is confidential, that it can’t be overheard or recorded by anyone else, I cannot in good conscience even talk to the man. I can’t share the details, but I can tell you that his life hangs in the balance. And he may not be the only one.”

“Sounds serious.”

“It is.”

“Well, we’ll see what we can do.”

More than twenty years ago when I was a young man, married with a daughter about eighteen months of age, I had my first experience with white noise. Sarah was going through one of those brief periods when babies seem to cry incessantly. She was miserable and slowly driving us crazy. One day as I was getting ready to clean my study, she was screaming in the other room with her mother. I turned on the vacuum and suddenly she stopped. When I turned it off she started crying again. I turned it on and she quit.

Her mother, with Sarah in her arms, came into the room. We looked at each other and suddenly realized that we had discovered magic. There was something about the sound of the vacuum. We made a tape recording, played it in the car on trips, and sang its praises. It was white noise.

It is a range of audible wavelengths, constant in their tone, the most effective being low frequency, which tend to swallow up and mask other sounds, in our case the disturbing and uneven sounds that tend to make a baby irritable.

Today the same technique is used in manufactured devices called “white noise generators” as a sleep aid. Better than a pill, they work like the wheels of a train to send you to sand land.

They also have other purposes. One of them is as a countermeasure, to defeat listening devices such as parabolic and laser microphones that can tune in on a conversation some distance away. In the case of parabolic mics, this can include distances of up to fifty yards, depending on the size of the dish used to capture the sound waves. Laser mics, which are far more expensive but are known to be used by government agencies, have a range of about half a mile and are exceedingly sensitive.

It is what I’m carrying in my pocket, a small noise generator about the size of a cell phone. It is part of the reason I want Dan with me when I get to the prison. Without him, everything would come to a halt. Security would stop me at the door, take all of the electronics including the noise generator, and I would be playing on their turf.

They would, of course, give me the privacy of a clinical cement visiting cubical, Betz on one side of the glass, me on the other. They would no doubt promise to honor the attorney-client privilege. And then they would listen to everything we had to say. The stakes are too high in this case not to.

At reception, at Supermax, everything happens as expected. The guards just in front of the gated magnetometer ask for all of our electronics. Dan and I empty our pockets, take off our watches, and surrender our cell phones. He shows them his Bureau credentials and I show them the small white noise generator. They tell me it has to go in the basket and be held at the front desk to be reclaimed when I leave. It cannot go inside.

Dan explains to them and a few moments later one of the supervisors comes out. It seems he already has my name on a list. He shakes my hand. He and Dan exchange pleasantries. He looks at the device and asks me if I mind their examining it. I tell him no, as long as they do it in my presence. My concern is that if they take it in another room to look at it, when it comes back it may not work anymore. Harry and I tested it thoroughly with one of the technicians at the shop where we purchased it. It worked perfectly.

They do it at the counter while I watch. They turn it on, turn it off, take out the batteries. One of them unscrews the back of the case with a mini screwdriver, looks inside and then seals it back up. When I turn it on, the red light comes up. It’s still working.

The supervisor tells me there is no need for it. They have a private conference area already set up. I tell him that we’ll have to talk about that when I get inside.

He looks at the two guards, nods, and Dan and I go through the metal detector. The guard isn’t happy about it, but he hands me the noise generator on the other side and we head to the sealed door beyond.