Thank You for Smoking

Jeannette came on. 'Nick, you give great talking head.'

Polly called, laughing. 'What was that all about?'

'It's not up to me,' Nick said. 'I just hope it turns out to be Virginia they took me to and not Maryland.'

'Why?'

'Because,' Nick said, 'Virginia has the death penalty.'

13

On Nick's first day back at work, BR gave him a welcome-back speech in front of the whole staff. He made it sound as though Nick had outwitted his captors and escaped. In fact, Nick still had no idea how he had ended up on the Mall, but he doubted that he had outwitted them as it's difficult to outwit while having a heart attack and projectile vomiting. The staff treated him like a returning war hero. All the attention was starting to make him a little squirmy, and now here was BR suddenly sounding like Henry V at the battle of Agincourt, exhorting his happy band of brothers. Then he quoted Churchill during Britain's darkest hour: 'Never give in,' he said. 'Never. Never. Never!'

The staff stood up and applauded. Some had tears in their eyes. Well, he'd never seen anything like this at the Academy of Tobacco Studies. His kidnapping had had an amazing, morale- boosting effect. It was as if the long, uneasy truce between tobacco and the hostile world out there had finally broken down into open warfare, and by God, if this was war, then let it start here. They were ready. People who had never been inside a military base, much less on the business end of a gun, were walking around using phrases like lock and load and incoming. It was galvanizing, truly. Talk about esprit de corps. Nick was moved.

'Nick,' said Gomez O'Neal, 'a question.' Gomez, tall, dark, pockmarked, with arms like bridge cable, was head of Issues Intelligence, the division in charge of coming up with personal information about the private lives of prominent gaspers and tobacco litigants. He'd been in some unspecified branch of the government, and did not invite questions about his past. For vacations, he went on one-man survival treks in places like Baffin Island and the Gobi Desert. BR seemed not to like Gomez, but then Gomez did not seem to care; he was not the sort of person one casually fired, any more than presidents had been able to get rid ofj. Edgar Hoover.

'Shoot,' Nick said, a figure of speech one used carefully around Gomez.

'You gonna quit smoking?'

There was nervous laughter. The truth of it was that Nick had not had a cigarette in over a week; the thought of putting any more nicotine into his system held little appeal. It occurred to him that this might even qualify him for workmen's comp.

They were all looking at him expectantly. He couldn't let them down. He was more than their spokesman now; he was their hero.

'Anyone got a smoke?' he said. Twenty people produced packs. He accepted a Camel, lit up, took just a little down into his lungs, and exhaled. It felt quite good, so he took another puff and let it out. People smiled approvingly.

Then spots appeared. Soon the whole Milky Way galaxy was pulsing through his optic nerve and he was in a cold sweat and the room and — oh no, not again, not in front of the whole staff.

'Nick?' BR said.

'I'm fine,' he said wobbily, putting the Camel down in an ashtray. The taste in his mouth. Uch.

'Take it slow at first,' BR said.

'Maybe you should start with filters,' someone said helpfully.

There was this awkward silence as Nick stood there in front of them, blinking, quietly reeling.

'Hey Nick,' Jeff Tobias said. 'Did you see the figures on female eighteen to twenty-ones?'

'Uh-uh.' My kingdom for a wintergreen Life Saver.

'Up twenty percent.'

'Wonderful,' Nick murmured.

BR added, 'Wait until after Nick's anti-smoking campaign.' Quite a few chuckles. 'By the way, when do we get to see boards?'

'I'm videoconferencing with Sven this afternoon,' Nick said, noticing that his fingers had gone cold again. Should he call Dr. Williams? You smoked a cigarette?

'I'm sure we're all eager to see what he's come up with. Okay,' BR said, 'now I'd like to turn the meeting over to Carlton, who is going to brief us on some new security procedures.'

Carlton warmed up his audience with a joke about two guys who go camping and a grizzly bear attacks them in the middle of the night and one guy puts on his sneakers and starts lacing them up. The other guys says, 'Why are you putting on sneakers, you can't outrun a grizzly bear.' And his friend tells him, 'I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you.' The point, Carlton said, was that in anti-terrorism, a phrase that put everyone into buttlock, you win by making the terrorists pick on the other guy. People glanced uneasily at each other. We few, we happy band of brothers.

Warming to his message — and was Carlton ever in his element— he emphasized the importance of not setting patterns. Everyone should leave for work at a different time every day, take a different route every day, be alert to strangers, especially ones wearing uniforms. He passed out photocopied sheets entitled what to do if you find yourself locked in a car trunk. People stared at it, hemorrhaging macho. Locked… in a trunk?

'Now let's talk about explosives.' This part of his presentation went on for a full quarter-hour, during which he enumerated some three dozen types of bombs, including one that was attached to your windshield wiper blades. 'Turn on the wipers and boom, eye-level, in the kisser.' Betty O'Malley went pale.

BR interjected, 'Now give us the good news.' Carlton opened a case and passed out little black things that looked like beepers. They were electronic locator devices, like the ones in life rafts that send out emergency signals. If anyone was snatched, they should push the two little buttons together and the whole U.S. government would be alerted. Then he opened another case and gave everyone little canisters of pepper gas. These were to be spritzed into the faces of any suspicious individuals. But only after they'd made the first move. And only if it looked like they were about to kill you. Otherwise, do exactly what they said, even if they wanted you to get into that lockedtrunk.

Any questions? By now you could have heard a pin drop, and the floor was carpeted.

'I'm not sure I understand,' said Charley Noble, from Legislative Affairs, 'are we all targets?'

'I don't know the answer to that,' BR said, 'but I'm not prepared to take any chances. Carlton has arranged for everyone here, and I mean everyone, no exceptions — except of course for you, Nick — to spend next weekend at a facility in West Virginia where they train government people in anti-terrorist driving tactics.'

There was intense murmuring. 'You'll all receive instruction in— what is the drill, Carlton?'

'Examining a vehicle for bombs, evasive maneuvers, J-turns and bootleg turns, proper ramming technique, and surveillance detection.'

'Bombs?' said Syd Berkowitz of the Coalition for Health. 'Are there bomb threats?'

'Just a precaution. I assure you that the FBI is going to have these people in custody very, very soon. In the meantime, we've made arrangements with 1800 K Street to use their basement parking. For the time being, there'll be no parking in our own underground garage.'

By now the murmuring was quite loud. BR had to raise his own voice to be heard. 'People, people. This is just precautionary. There have been no bomb threats. Anyway, we're on a high floor here. And I'm certain everyone here could handle a little smoke inhalation.'

Jeannette laughed. No one else did.