Page 40 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Cabalocracy and the Hall of Mirrors

conspiratorialist. At the same time I had to display trustworthiness
and a level of ignorance just a bit below his. So a few minor slips, on
the level of almost blurting out a dangerous word or phrase over an
unsecured line, could help my cause by assuring Capra that I was not
a mortal enemy out to silence him or a savvy competitor determined
to pick his brains.
Like others who had paddled productively in the shallow end of
the pool for many years, Mr. Capra had been emboldened by success
to venture farther, unaware the new direction in which he was headed
might be a flat-Earth worldview dragging him irresistibly off the deep
end. He had spent a couple of decades in the Kruger Corporation, a
think tank engaged primarily in devising advanced strategic scenarios
for the Department of Defense. This was speculation of a high order,
extrapolating global trends to anticipate where and how the United
States would find its power challenged in the future; evidently some
wiser heads in the military understood history sufficiently to desire
not to fight the next war as if it were the prior, and commissioned
such studies from outfits like Kruger. Capra was a skilled analyst, able
to pull together data from multiple sources, much of it previously
considered unrelated, to produce hypotheses about nascent hotspots,
impending political crises in our allies’ governments and cyclical
economic meltdowns likely to have dire implications for American
international and domestic policy. To do this he was granted access
to information not available to most civilian academic researchers.
A person in such a position lives or dies professionally by their
security clearance. Curtis Capra lost his. The clipping-cutters and
detectives Magnus hired to discover and document commendable
crackpots found this out in the course of snooping into Capra’s past:
they managed to get a copy of an employment application Capra had
filed five years ago following his termination by Kruger. It was with a
company dependent on government contracts; its employees had to
be squeaky-clean, with top-secret clearance. He was forced to admit
he no longer had even the lowest level. It could only be inferred that
he had done something at Kruger to get him blackballed from the
fraternity of genteel intellectual spies and war-planners. What that
was had already been surmised by Al Magnus: a theory deemed either
too close to the truth or so far from it that Capra had been branded
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