Chapter 23 Appeals to Higher Authority

We reached the two-room cabin south of Yosemite the following morning. The "cabin" was a glorified camp shelter, a small log building used by hunters in past times as cover during bad weather. Nestled on the slope of a hill, it was well-isolated from its nearest neighbor. Water was hand-pumped, and cooking was carried out with dexterity over a two-burner propane stove. No hint of electricity or phone marred the pristine quiet. Its simplicity and inaccessibility made the retreat affordable, if sparse.

The next weeks took on a pattern of regularity. Smith arose first, fixing coffee for me and tea for himself. He retreated to the porch and rocked, watching the sun rise through the granite peaks. I took over the small broad-board table, spreading out my papers and books. I used my laptop computer sparingly, saving the battery.

At three o'clock in the afternoon we'd stop for a drive into the surrounding hillsides, where I'd take a hike with Rex while Smith snoozed on a grassy knoll. After dinner we'd light the lantern and it was more dissertation work for me while Smith read. Around ten o'clock we'd conclude the day with a stroll up the hillside overlooking the valley. I'd sip Drambuie and Smith would puff an unlit cigarette. On these walks, he regaled me with subtle insights or delightful turns of phrase that could only be pure and genuine Adam Smith. Thinking back, I regretted all the time I'd wasted, putting Smith through that stupid "test" of ten questions, all because I refused to accept him. That proposition was second nature to me now, yet I sensed our time together was drawing to a close. Smith himself became more wistful and melancholic with each passing day.

Twice a week we stopped in town to pick up groceries and ice, recharge my laptop battery, and do a load of laundry. While our socks were spinning, I'd call Julia from a pay phone. That would cheer up Smith as much as it did me. Ever-mindful of POP, we worked out a system. I would dial the home of Julia's neighbor at a predetermined time, and Julia would just "happen" to be at the Thompson's borrowing some sugar or dropping off a pie. We'd spoken three times since Monterey, and Julia almost forgave me for deserting her in Utah. I was feeling busy and happy, and the combination seemed to work magic on my dissertation.

A good theoretical model didn't require volumes of text, just the one essential kernel of truth that everyone else had overlooked—overlooked because sometimes it was too obvious to bother mentioning. What was unnoticed or ignored could have a huge impact, particularly in a fluid, developing market. Chaos theory, for example, showed how even the delicate flap of a butterfly's wings could unleash forces a thousand miles away. It was for such a nugget of insight that I searched.

The mark of a master craftsman, be it a carpenter who measures twice but cuts only once, or a painter, like Julia, who newly presents the fundamental nature of a bumblebee through subtle distillation, is the ability to identify what is important. Not an easy task, to be so clear and so knowledgeable as to find confidence in reducing down to essential, resonate elements. I could see my floundering in early drafts as I struggled to sharpen the essence of my dissertation down to the razor's edge.

There's only so much inspiration one can glean from staring at a pad of notepaper, so my occasional day-long hikes turned into unconscious extensions of work. By the end of the second week I had gasped to the top of the usual tourist destinations—Half-Dome, Yosemite Falls, and Vernal Falls. Each posed a different set of problems in getting to the top, and it was in overcoming these obstacles that I hoped to shake loose the essence of my dissertation. These were exhausting and exhilarating climbs, cresting summits to breathtaking panoramas of mile-high glacial carvings. The exertion mirrored a river of thoughts, a cascade of water rushing against a dam.

Surprisingly, it was on an afternoon of modest hiking and barely breaking a sweat that the levee burst. We had driven over the Tioga Pass Road to Tuolumne Meadows. Snow peaks fed the Tuolumne River which meandered through the valley. The surrounding mountains were ringed at their base by crescents of pine forests. The mountainsides showed slivers of white where north-facing ravines still cradled snow banks.

Smith and Rex took off to explore the river while I hiked the meadow. Wildflowers carpeted the fields with a dazzling array of colors and shapes. A mile passed as my boots swooshed through the soft undergrowth of red, orange, and purple blossoms. My breathing merged in-sync with my steps. A calm descended, heightening my senses yet simultaneously taking me beyond them. My mind was free.

Imagination—seeing with perspective, changing focus—that was the key! Anew I surveyed the mat of wild flowers, the flowing river along its worn path, the snowy peaks, and the natural way in which they harmonized to produce the spectacular outcome in this meadow. Random events, such as a dry winter or a flash flood, might alter the specifics of the landscape, but there was a synchronicity with which the living things and the elements combined anew to create a natural balance: the river carving a new bank, older trees dying, and new ones sprouting where conditions improved.

I saw the problem of stock valuation under uncertainty as an extension of the swiftly passing stream and the implications for a valley where wildflower investors sought the water of international capital. In a revelation, the insight for which I searched appeared. It was hardly luck or accident, for I worked hard to prepare the intellectual ground for this moment. It took imagination to break it loose.

"Yee-haa!" I skipped and yelled. "Yee-haa!"

I quickly took out the pencil and paper I always carried and began to write the equations that expressed those insights.

* * *

I stopped in town, humming and singing, anxious to share my epiphany with Julia. I was back in the car within a minute.

"No answer," I said to Smith.

"Same as yesterday," Smith replied.

Why would Julia fail to keep our rendezvous? My euphoria began to ferment into worry. By the time we got back to the cabin, worry had grown into alarm. For Smith's sake, I didn't show it. What could I do? Whatever it was, it would have to wait until morning.

I spent an hour on my computer inputting the equations I'd developed, then turned off the machine and set it aside. Smith and I had navigated so much philosophical territory over the last weeks that to distil its practical meaning took precedence that night. I recalled the first time we'd spoken in Julia's living room, how Smith said the wick and wax of a candle needed oxygen to burn, just as the economy needed the interplay of human beings to make it a society, the "fellow-feeling" that creates a foundation for moral conduct. At that time I couldn't fathom how that could be of any possible relevance to me, to economics, or to business. Now it provided the lifeline to a better, richer way of living.

Economics was a commanding discipline, capable of illuminating potent lessons for the world about scarcity, and our choices for dealing with it. The "economic way of thinking" broke through the sometimes illogical, and often muddled, preconceptions of students and politicians alike on a range of subjects. I had little doubt that our world was richer, and our choices clearer, because of the compelling insights offered by my chosen field. Yet Smith challenged me to wonder if the discipline was fulfilling all it could be. While modern economic theories exhibited logical elegance, did they address the inter-connectedness of one to another, in social and moral ways? Could there be true understanding without that? Moreover, mainstream economics seemed to require nothing of the individual by way of personal change and transformation, nor did it acknowledge, encourage, or inspire anyone to care a whit for anyone else's well-being.

By contrast, Smith's classical view provided the insights for achieving greater material comforts, yet he had little faith that these would bring happiness. For the vast majority of mankind, happiness would unfold from inner growth and transformation, from relating better to others, using the moral imagination provided each of us. This was the road to peace of mind and happiness. Being, not having, was the answer. The transforming power of this message was extraordinary, yet it was hardly an easy path to follow. It would require a new way of thinking, acting, and living.

I put it to Smith that night on our evening stroll. Rex led the way, his nose following the ground as he maneuvered up the overgrown deer track a quarter-mile from the cabin. The moon cast shadows ahead of us.

"I've been struggling to understand all that you mean by a human conscience," I said to Smith.

He answered in a flash, as if it were the uppermost thing in the mind. "A conscience is man's internal capacity to judge his own conduct, and to align it with a sense of duty to a moral standard."

"But we never finished our conversation from Big Sur," I said. "How does a conscience differ from popular opinion, which could be racist or ignorant, or could simply reflect mob hysteria—like what happened in Durango?"

"Your moral standard is partly the product of socialization," Smith said. "But your imagination allows you to go beyond narrow, local concerns."

We came to the bluff where we usually rested to survey the valley. The gorge was quiet in the chilly air. Sitting on a log, Smith turned to face me.

"Here's an unhappy illustration from my own time," he said. "Before the revolt of our North American colonies, Britain had a monopoly of the Maryland and Virginia tobacco trade. Tobacco was global big business, every bit as prosperous as your pharmaceutical industries today. Glasgow, where I was teaching, was a booming port through which that colonial tobacco flowed, and my neighbors made fortunes from plying it. If I parroted the prevailing opinion of my friends in commerce, I would have rejoiced at that wealth."

Smith sighed deeply. "But it was the fruit of African slave labor. And slavery is one of the vilest systems, selling man, woman, and child like so many herds of cattle to the highest bidder! Although never enslaved myself, I could imagine its grim and profoundly unjust effects. Despite the enormous wealth it produced for some, I denounced the system on moral and economic grounds. So, while public opinion may be ignorant, biased, and distorted, the impartial spectator is set free from such limitations."

Smith elaborated. "Even so, in the heat of the moment and overcome with passion, one's spectator could lack the desired detachment and cool judgment. That's why experience gives rise to general rules of morality, so one does not have to rely on the impartial spectator on each and every occasion."

"Rules are based on tradition," I countered, "and human tradition could perpetuate horrible wrongs."

"True, the all-wise Author of Nature has made man the immediate judge of mankind," Smith said, "but remember this—there is a higher tribunal than tradition, the tribunal of one to come." He stood, and wandered to the edge of the forest, hands clasped behind his back, looking every bit the learned professor.

"Meaning?" I asked.

"You've met the great Voltaire, so you'll appreciate his quip, 'If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.'" Smith smiled. "So our happiness in this life is thus, upon many occasions, dependent upon the humble hope and expectation of a life to come, where exact justice will be done to every man. This hope and expectation is deeply rooted in human nature.

"But even here on earth," Smith continued, "by acting according to the dictates of our moral faculties, we necessarily pursue the most effectual means for promoting the happiness of mankind, and may therefore, in some sense, co-operate with the Deity to advance the plan of Providence."

"I haven't heard you mention your faith before," I said.

"You won't find me wearing religion on my sleeve," he rejoined with a quick smile. "I expect that others call me a Deist—like your heroes Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin—a believer that God created the universe and its laws, and we must use our minds to discover them. We use reason to discern the remote consequences of our actions, to foresee the advantage, or detriment, which is likely to result. Reason helps us use self-control to abstain from present pleasures or endure present pain, in order to obtain a greater pleasure or avoid a greater pain in the future. In the union of these two qualities—reason and self control—consists the virtue of prudence."

I started to interrupt but he shushed me.

"Hear me now. Prudence, when it is directed to the care of one's own fortune or reputation is never considered an endearing or ennobling virtue. Such narrow prudence can perhaps make you rich, but it is not in being rich that truth and justice would rejoice." Smith picked up some pebbles from the ground and shook them absentmindedly, by now a familiar exercise whenever he searched for the right words.

A hundred feet away in the forest we heard the crackling noise of a deer, or perhaps a wolf, shuffling along its hillside trail. Rex's ears shot up and he let out a low growl. We kept still and in a moment the night was again ours but for a whisper in the treetops. A brilliant moon dazzled overhead in this place of solitude and pure enchantment.

Smith continued with his thesis: "No, I say, there is a superior prudence, one which involves wise and judicious conduct directed to greater and nobler purposes than to the needs of ourselves. Superior prudence is the former narrow prudence combined with greater and more splendid virtues: with valor, with extensive benevolence, with a sacred regard for rules of justice, and with a proper degree of self-command."

"You're describing yourself, aren't you?"

He didn't hear me. "It requires the utmost perfection of intellectual and moral virtues. I say to you, superior prudence is the best head joined to the best heart!"

I swallowed hard. This Smith fellow was not just an intellectual icon meriting a few caricatures and clichés, he was the founder of a moral framework for living: Not just the "father" of modern economics, he was its nurturing "mother" as well—a source of clever, pragmatic intelligence, and beyond that, wisdom. How different my classes could be next fall, I mused, using the entire corpus of Smith's views, not just an amputated limb—the invisible hand.

My meditations were interrupted by another rustling, this time from the bushes directly behind Smith. Rex gave a low growl. With the slight movement of a branch, a shadowy form emerged from the woods. For a second, I imagined a bear. Then into the moonlight stepped Max Hess, pointing a gun!

I opened my mouth but no sound emerged. Oblivious to this commotion, Smith kept up his monologue. "To strive for perfect wisdom and perfect virtue—"

Hess struck Smith in the back, sending him crumpling to the ground.

"Wisdom—ha!" Hess said, now pointing the weapon at me.

Rex bounded from six feet back, leaping toward Hess's outstretched hand. The report of the gun threw Rex reeling into the brush. He whimpered and Hess fired another shot his way.

"Bastard," I screamed, rushing toward Smith's fallen form. He was alive, breathing shallowly.

"Move!" Hess barked.

I pulled Smith along gently, using his armpits for handholds, his heels dragging on the ground. Hess followed, keeping the gun pointed at my belly. In his other hand Hess carried my laptop computer, which he must have taken from the cabin before following us here.

We struggled up the steep hillside to a cave on the far side of the rise. Strewn signs of a camp indicated Hess used it as a shelter. In the moonlight I could see a white van pulled up under the camouflage of over-hanging branches on a nearby logging road. He'd switched vehicles, of course. Damn it! I'd become so lax, thinking there was no way Hess could find us once we'd fled Nevada.

"How did you find us?"

"Shut up." Hess hit me in the hollow of my back, catapulting me into the cave. He followed, dragging Smith by the scruff of his jacket. It was cold, damp, and dark where I landed in mud, and I could feel drips of water on my aching back. Beside me I heard Smith's labored breathing. Enough moonlight filtered through for me to make out Hess's form positioned over us, the weapon still at his side. Replaying the scuffle outside the Opera House in Chicago, I knew he could be fast and vicious in a fight. There was little chance of disarming him in my current position. I pushed myself onto my elbows, and was starting to sit up when a boot in my chest laid me out flat.

Having established dominance, Hess squatted across from us, leaning against the cave wall. His eyes gleamed, and he seemed poised to leap. After a moment, he grabbed my laptop computer. He pressed the power button, waiting for it to boot. Since the theft of my dissertation papers, I'd kept my files password protected; that was of no use now with Hess pointing a gun at me. Without difficulty he navigated through my folders, and found the one I'd completed that day with the new equations. He grunted with satisfaction, then exited the program.

He proceeded to reformat my hard drive!

I stared in astonishment. He wasn't going to steal the formula. He was going to erase every trace of it. Hess saw my look. "Yes, your formula will soon be gone, and you, too."

"Others will discover it, just as I did," I said. "You can't stop everyone."

"I don't need to."

The computer finished whirling and Hess tossed it aside.

He spoke in a whisper, his words a ramble growing in intensity and volume. A litany of evils had been done, he alleged, by an unjust society. Western "civilization" prayed to the alter of capitalism, its religious icon the Almighty Dollar. People were puppets, jerked back and forth by the invisible hand of Benjamin Franklin on the one-hundred dollar bill. Given or withheld to stifle speech and thought, dollars made everyone conform to an over-blown commercial world that makes profane what is sacred. As Hess ranted I glanced at Smith: blood oozed from a wound in his back.

"I said 'no' to the whole Spiel and your friend, the 'Great Doctor Lattimer,' attacked me for it," Hess said. "When I told the truth about Che Guevarra and the plight of the people in Bolivia, did the Great Professor listen? Did he learn? Did he try to help those who cannot help themselves? No—instead he sabotaged my scholarship. Before I knew it, I was on the street."

"You're good at playing the victim," I said, finding myself in the uncomfortable position of defending Lattimer. "There were other graduate programs; other things you could have done with your life."

"Silence!"

It was clear Hess intended to kill us, but in his madness he seemed intent on first crusading his causes. We spent the remainder of the night listening to Hess's diatribe against globalization, the evils of multinationals, and the treachery of the World Trade Organization. A swarm of bats chirped on the ceiling, and steady drops of water from underground springs completed the chorus of background noise. Hess was finally silent.

"If you're going to murder us, at least tell me how you found out about Smith," I asked.

"Finding you was a lucky coincidence," he said. "You fell from the sky. I was seeking the cell members for POP and was using the lists of other friendly organizations. And although universities have done their best to purge Marxists, there are still some gold mines ... your colleague in International Relations, Doctor Wayne Brown?"

I swore under my breath.

"Yes," he continued, "I went to Hearst College to get him into POP. Can you guess who nearly knocked me down on my way to his office? You!—walking so intently you did not watch where you were going. I recognized you instantly because I had seen you with Lattimer at the Ebbett Grill in Washington. What a wonderful chance, so I followed you to the library. You forgot to erase the computer screen, and I saw the book title by Smith that you were seeking."

It occurred to me that he was the "former student" asking about me at the library.

"My youthful looks are very handy," he said. "After a week, your friend Doctor Brown was calling to tell me about the lunch at the Faculty Club with you and this not-so-amusing fellow Doctor 'Smythe.' As I was saying, you both fell from the sky."

"The bastard," I said.

"Oh, do not be so severe. We never told him our plans for you and Mister Smith. And what about you? You left your dissertation papers in the recycling so that I could find them? That was idiotic."

He was right on that score. I was a brick-head to have imagined myself in an ivory tower in placid Fredericksburg, insulated from the "real" world of power politics and multinational muscle. Our only chance at survival was to keep Hess talking, anything to tire him out and give us a moment to take him.

"How did you find us here?" I said.

Unlike the first time I asked it, this time Hess didn't hit me. He sat back, watching with bright eyes that revealed nothing. Finally he said, "I found your picture with your girlfriend on the front page of the newspaper in Nevada. But that track was old by the time I got there. Still, I knew you would be at the WorldChemm meeting in San Francisco—you wrote that on another sheet I pulled from your recycling bin."

I cringed again.

"And while I did not know the importance of this, I also saved your brochure about cabins in Yosemite you threw away. I went to the West Coast just exactly as you must have done. Our people back in the East were very alert and they watched and they waited. Then ... we had luck." He paused to smile. "When your girlfriend started to make little trips to the house of her neighbor each other night, how so, we asked? Strange, no? She does so much baking and she always lacks flour?"

I cursed. I'd been a fool, risking Harold's and Julia's lives when I could have taken them to the safe house in Boston that Lattimer offered. I refused because of my own selfish need to exert my independence from him.

Julia—was she all right?

Hess seemed to intuit my concern. "Your girlfriend. She is very beautiful."

Anger obliterates judgment. I didn't care if Hess shot me as long as I could make him hurt first. I tensed, ready to spring. Hess stood quickly, extending the gun. "Very soon anyway, you are dead."

My anger dissipated and Hess said, "After one of your telephone meetings with your girlfriend, one of our clever members went into the house of the neighbor and stole just one thing—the portable telephone. Out in the yard he dialed *69 to make the call come back. What a surprise! Somebody at a pay phone in Yosemite Park answered."

Hess enjoyed this. "Then, for the first time I remembered the brochure about the cabins that you threw away. I should have followed that lead sooner; I could have found you in half the time. So I came to Yosemite and waited in town, watching the phone until you showed up, exactly on time like a train."

I lowered my head. Hess said, "Let me give you some advice, which will not do you any good whatsoever, but in this business to be consistent means you die. You have to do something unexpected, you must have a rigid rule not to repeat yourself. That way, you cannot become analyzed or predicted. That is why the CIA, the FBI, and Interpol have never caught me. And this is not because the bastards have not tried."

* * *

It was near morning.

"Why should you even believe Harold's the real Adam Smith?" I gestured at the prone figure. "He's a delusional old man. Kill me, if you must, but let him go."

Hess looked at me wearily. I thought about lunging for his gun, but he was watching intently. Finally he said, "You are forgetting my training in economics, which makes me able to puncture your deception. If he is not the real Smith, you would not waste your time with him, you would not offer to die in order to let him live. Your own actions reveal what he's worth."

I needed to do something, anything, to keep Smith alive. "But he's misunderstood," I said. "Smith doesn't glorify profits at the expense of the downtrodden. Read him yourself! I've got his books in the cabin."

"I have read Smith," Hess sighed. "It is clear he does not endorse high profits that are undeserved."

My mouth was open. "But if you knew that..."

I looked again at Hess's boyish face, and it suddenly looked twenty years older. My question must have caught him off guard for he shifted in place, looking down. In that instant I saw behind his back to the entrance of the cave: A form crouched there!

"What might have happened," Hess finally asked, "if I could have read Adam Smith so much sooner? Smith is a man who understands the world, and the real people living in it. In him—all of People Over Profit's concerns are addressed."

"You like Adam Smith?" I said, completely confused.

Hess's mouth had a grim twist to it. "Yes, Smith does not propound a capitalism for the sake of corporations, but rather a commerce for the sake of people. I know all this now, but only by accident. When I went to graduate school to find answers, I was made to memorize dry formulas for efficiency that do nothing to help the poor. The discipline today seems ruled by technocrats—mathematicians without a conscience."

"And your response," I said angrily, "is simply to hate, to tear down, to kill? Why not work to build something better?"

Smith, who had been lying unconscious, began to stir. I watched with peripheral vision as the crouched figure in the tunnel began moving forward slowly, covered by background noises in the cave. The figure stopped a yard from Hess's back. It was Julia!

I said to Hess, "If you like Smith, then why in God's name kill him?"

"Because it's too late for me," Hess replied. "I'm not starting over at my age."

A glimmer of hope came to me. "It's never too late. Groups like POP are started by well-motivated people, it's just a question of educating them."

Hess gave a laugh, an aberrant laugh. "My simpleminded, naive American! POP has now become a front, a sham, a hoax. You and this Scotsman will be worth a lot more dead to others." Hess raised the handgun to Smith's head.

I tried to keep my voice calm, but it cracked anyway. "A front for whom? What others?"

"A tool of the Russian mafia," Hess said. "Privatization of Russia's aluminum assets will make a small group of them stink-rich, but only if overseas bidders are excluded. POP was infiltrated to mobilize the public against foreign multinationals, and scare leaders into thinking political upheaval is imminent if bidding is opened from the West. I was perfect to run POP because of my Maoist connections. That helped convince the CIA and others of POP's threat."

"But you're Che Guevarra's man!"

"I was. Even a tiger grows new stripes."

"But why? You do care about the poor!" I said.

"I don't care, anymore," he sighed. "I am sick of poverty. In a few months I will be rich enough to disappear to Bali for the rest of my life. As long as I do my part to keep the Russian aluminum industry free to be exploited. I'm not so different from you, am I? Only difference is, you lick Lattimer's boots."

Smith was awake and spoke slowly, in obvious pain. "Free does not mean 'competitive.'"

"That is it," Hess said. "With an aluminum monopoly there will be no limit to the riches for the kleptocrats running that country. It's the same old story, isn't it?"

He cocked the hammer on the gun. "With friendly faces in government," he said, "and international mergers giving companies back the market power they lost when trade was first liberalized, nobody wants Smith raising his voice against them."

Hess tightened his grip on the gun. I tried to think of something, anything to say or do. But it was too late.

Hess squeezed the trigger.