They stared at each other.
Salsbury felt as if he were not in the room with them, as if he were watching them from the eyepiece of a mile-long telescope.
With less of an edge to his voice than there had been a minute ago, Klinger finally said, “Leonard, I suppose you realize that I could be setting you up.”
“Of course.”
“I could agree to hear your man out, listen to everything he has to say-only to get evidence against you and him.”
“String us along.”
“Give you enough rope to hang yourselves,” Klinger said. “I only warn you because you’re a friend. I like you. I don’t want to see you in trouble.”
Dawson settled back in his chair. “Well, I’ve an offer to make you, and I need your cooperation. So I’ll just have to take that risk, won’t I?”
“That’s your choice.”
Smiling, apparently pleased with the general, Dawson raised his brandy glass and silently proposed a toast.
Grinning broadly, Klinger raised his own glass.
What in the hell is going on here? Salsbury wondered.
When he had sniffed and sipped his brandy, Dawson looked at Salsbury for the first time in several minutes and said, “You may proceed, Ogden.”
Suddenly, Salsbury grasped the underlying purpose of the conversation to which he had just listened. In the unlikely event that Dawson actually was setting a trap for an old friend, on the off chance that the meeting was being taped, Klinger had deftly provided himself with at least some protection against successful prosecution. He was now on record as having warned Dawson about the consequences of his actions. In court or before a military review board, the general could argue that he had only been playing along with them in order to collect evidence against them; and even if no one believed him, he more than likely would manage to retain both his freedom and his rank.
Ogden got up, leaving his brandy glass behind him, went to the window and stood with his back to the darkening lake. He was too nervous to sit still while he talked. Indeed, for a few seconds he was too nervous to speak at all.
Like a pair of lizards perched half in warm sunlight and half in chilly shadows, waiting for the light balance to change enough to warrant movement, Dawson and Klinger watched him. They were sitting in identical high-backed black leather easy chairs with burnished silvery buttons and studs. A small round cocktail table with a dark oak top stood between them. The only light in the richly furnished room came from two floor lamps that flanked the fireplace, twenty feet away. The right side of each man’s face was softened and somewhat concealed by shadows, while the left side was starkly detailed by amber light; and their eyes blinked with saurian patience.
Whether or not the scheme was a success, Salsbury thought, both Dawson and Klinger would come through it unscathed. They both wore effective armor: Dawson his wealth; Klinger his ruthlessness, cleverness, and experience.
However, Salsbury didn’t possess any armor of his own. He hadn’t even realized-as Klinger had when he protected himself with that spiel about secrecy pledges and treason-that he might need it. He had assumed that his discovery would generate enough money and power to satisfy all three of them, but he had just begun to understand that greed could not be sated as easily as a hearty appetite or a demanding thirst. If he had any defensive weapon at all, it was his intelligence, his lightning quick mind; but his intellect had been directed for so long into narrow channels of specialized scientific inquiry that it now served him far less well in the common matters of life than it did in the laboratory.
Be cautious, suspicious, and watchful, he reminded himself for the second time that day. With men as aggressive as these, caution was a damned thin armor, but it was the only one he had.
He said, “For ten years the Brockert Institute has been fully devoted to a Pentagon study of subliminal advertising. We haven’t been interested in the technical, theoretical, or sociological aspects of it; that work is being done elsewhere. We’ve been concerned solely with the biological mechanisms of subliminal perception. From the start we have been trying to develop a drug that will ‘prime’ the brain for subception, a drug that will make a man obey without question every subliminal directive that’s given to him.” Scientists at another CDA laboratory in northern California were trying to engineer a viral or bacterial agent for the same purpose. But they were on the wrong track. He knew that for a fact because he was on the right one. “Currently, it’s possible to use subliminals to influence people who have no unshakable opinions about a particular subject or product. But the Pentagon wants to be able to use subliminal messages to alter the fundamental attitudes of people who do have very strong, stubbornly held opinions.”