Chapter 90: Into the Future

“Excuse me sir,” Tamara said coldly, “we are now just one step away from terminating the interview. I said at the outset of this session that I would not entertain any questions that didn’t pertain to my physics research. I tried to explain in a civil manner why I wouldn’t take that question. The question is out of line. Are we clear?”

He shrugged as the others glared at him, and the next few questions by others were asked tentatively, making sure they wouldn’t upset her.

Question: “Can you answer questions about your manufacturing facility in Anne Arundel County? Yes? Thank you. It adds to the area’s reputation as a high-tech region, especially considering many of the government’s research facilities are in the area too. What products are you planning to produce there, if that’s not confidential?”

Tamara: “Sure. That’s an important question. I went into science to help people in the world and, of course as the proverbs say, the best help comes from people helping themselves. Give them better education and freedom from tyrants—the human kind and the economic kind. The major product we’re producing will be used for creating cheap energy and we hope to be able to develop manufacturing processes here that can be used in third-world countries to allow them to establish their own manufacturing and industrial base. So that’s one product: electrical generators. Another is related to robotics. Robotic intelligence for control and handling systems for manufacturing. Another is prosthetics, which uses our robotics developments and adapts them for designing human limb replacements. I’ve mentioned frictionless bearings. And we recently added the coil assemblies for particle accelerators. Those will be by custom order and we’ve had a lot of interest for such a product. Others are either under development or are currently confidential.”

Question: “You were the inventor of the energy storage systems now being set up in parts of England and in the new electric vehicle battery. Are you still involved with those projects?”

Tamara: “I am. Some of my engineers are in Cambridge right now and we have a few engineers from there working on my projects here. Most of our inventions are cross-licensed.”

Question: “I hope this one isn’t out of line but there’s a widespread feeling in the public that you’re this century’s Einstein. You had dismissed that idea at several prior press conferences at Hopkins but how do you feel about it now?”

Tamara: “Yes, that is a personal question but I suppose I need to address it. I can’t change how the public perceives me or my work. If they could be in my shoes, um, they’d need to have small feet... Laughter ... they’d realize how greatly I’ve benefitted from my predecessors in physics and engineering. All of my accomplishments have come from my simply taking their work one step further; that’s how science works, after all. Einstein, like Newton, made absolutely giant steps in advancing scientific knowledge at the time and there’s no way I should be compared to them. I still strongly feel that way.”

Question: “When are you going to tackle gravitation? Isn’t that physics’ holy grail, the unification of relativity theory and quantum physics?”

Tamara: “Wow. Ask me another simple question. Laughter. Seriously, I was actually working on a closely related problem when I got the idea that resulted in the accelerator design. Check back with me on that in, um, maybe ten years? Laughter. No, I mean it. I think that the new accelerator design has the potential for making discoveries in that realm of particle physics, but from the time that an accelerator is conceived to when its detector has captured enough events to be statistically meaningful, a ten-year time frame is very optimistic.”

Question: “There’s an Alexandre Foundation operating in Haiti, according to our international desk. Is that one of your projects?”

Tamara: “No, that’s my mother’s project. She’s an anthropologist at Westphalia and the Columbia Institute of Economics. That foundation is assisting in funding micro-finance research in third-world countries, one of the Columbia Institute’s target priorities.”

Question: “Now that your manufacturing operation is running, will you leave Hopkins and the APL to do commercial research?”

Tamara: “Not at all. I have a highly competent management team at the facility now and they can run things without my meddling. I’m not the type to micro-manage. I prefer to work with people who don’t need me to tell them how to do their jobs.”

There were a lot more questions asked that covered many parts of Tamara’s research and commercial operations, but no one strayed very deeply into her personal beliefs; she stopped several questioners before they had completed the question, when she saw where the person was going with it. After ninety minutes, Tamara closed the session.

“So you know my ground rules now and you can tell them to the organizations you’re representing here. I won’t appear for a video interview. I’ll be happy to answer any followup questions you or your organizations may have; they must be written questions and can be sent to my company’s PR department or to the Hopkins University Relations department. Thanks for coming and especially thanks for your thoughtful and knowledgeable questions too. Have a great rest of the week.”

She got up and walked out, Lisa Farrell following her. Tompkins followed them both out and she told them to follow her to her office.

“Goodness, Tamara,” Tompkins said as she closed the door. “You completely dominated that crowd—you just took over and shut them right down. Just before you came in at first, from their whispered conversations, I thought that they planned to roll right over you and control the interview...”

“Bernie, you don’t know about the rep that Tamara has as a professor, I guess,” Farrell interrupted. “I’ve heard some stories.”

“Yeah, and that I eat cheaters for dinner,” Tamara joked. “I don’t like people who take advantage.”

“Seriously, that stare you have gave me chills and I wasn’t the target,” Tompkins told her. “Every move, gesture, and glance you did asserted your authority in there. Can you teach that? It would be an awesome skill to have when cross-examining a witness.”

“I guess I’ve been told that I can be scary at times,” Tamara admitted. “I have a visceral reaction to people who attempt to bully others and I sensed that feeling in the group when I entered the room. And I was annoyed when my security person told me that some of them defied my instructions about audio and video. So I took the hard-ball approach. Teach it? I think that it’s just self-confidence. If you believe fully in yourself, other people will sense that. But that’s easily said and hard to do, ‘cause even a tiny amount of self-doubt can interfere. But you can’t come off as cocky either. That makes you look like you’re arrogant and people push back at that. It’s a tricky balance.”

“Hmm. Good advice,” Tompkins said. “So you’ll note that I didn’t need to interrupt you at all about saying anything about your personal life, Tamara, except when you were asked that Einstein question. Your answer was just fine; it was humble without being dismissive. You got excellent advice from Mr Richardson about your public versus private persona. The guy who asked the nudist question, we had vetted him, and he’s from Clearsound Radio—they operate over a thousand religious radio stations nationally—and in his being here, he represented a large number of conservative religious blogs too. It appeared that he was trying to get you to say something that could be used against you, but you stopped that question firmly.”

Tamara nodded, “Thanks. Mason ... um, Mr Richardson did alert me to a possible attack on my reputation, I told you that. But how do you think that guy knew about my personal life?”

“I’m sure that was a loaded question tactic,” Tompkins replied. “Your foundation bought the school site; it’s to be a nudist school and next to a nudist resort; therefore you’re a nudist, the rationale would go. He was hoping to provoke a denial or some kind of prevarication. Instead of giving any answer, you shut down the topic completely, showing no reaction, even by body language, that the question affected you in any way. Masking your reactions like that is a good skill.

“Well, that’s all I have on this topic. I did want to update you on your Haitian factory project. I’m very impressed by your Haitian law firm on how well they’ve been handling both the contractors and some bad government actors. They just stopped a kickback scheme and got one of the subcontractors fired for trying it. And last month, you’ll recall that they reported some attempted extortion by a lower-level official in the National Land Registry Office who claimed that he’d reverse some permits unless he got paid off.”

“Yep. I actually got a phone call on that one. From Pelex Leblanc, the law firm partner who’s managing my affairs locally. Damn, politics there sure are ugly—one of the options he offered about that code-office guy was to ‘eliminate’ the problem. I suggested that the person would be a better fit in a different job where he’d have no contact with the public. Leblanc told me that he would make that happen.

“I also have several private info channels there,” Tamara went on. “My dad’s distant cousin, Henri Benoit, is a kind of factotum for me on arranging for the right materials and people as the project goes on. I appointed him as the troubleshooter for the general contractor because Henri has great contacts all over the country. Also, a number of manbos, who my mom’s organized into a little intelligence group to keep her up to date on social matters, also provide info on how well my project is going—from how the locals perceive it. It’s a great perspective to have, ‘cause the locals are very sensitive to knowing when something’s going off the rails.”

“That’s quite true,” Tompkins agreed. “You’ve got a good intelligence network; that should help protect your investments.”

They spent the next few minutes on the new manufacturing facility and then Tamara left with Farrell. On the way back to the AlWin facility, Tamara told Farrell how to respond to further media contacts.

Four weeks later

Tamara heard about the start of a campaign to discredit her at the beginning of May. Several weeks prior, some attempted picketing had been tried near the school construction site but because of its remote location, narrow access roads, and private property, the picketing that could be done was completely ineffective. Even the local media ignored the demonstration. So her opponents changed their tactics to mount an attack to discredit her. Tamara heard about the start of the smear attempt from one of her physics students during her office hours.

“Hi Dr Alexandre,” the student said as she entered the office. “This isn’t about classes. Last night my folks called me and asked if you were a professor for one of my classes. I had mentioned your name to them once, I guess. Anyway, they said that their church pastor did a sermon denouncing child sex trafficking and said that it was happening right here in Baltimore and that you yourself were keeping a child as a slave. The pastor puts his sermons on line; it’s a big church with maybe six thousand members. I looked for the sermon and found it ... it’s awful. I thought you should know. Here’s the web address.”

She passed over a note and Tamara thanked her.

Tamara checked the URL and indeed, there was the sermon and it was filled with fabrications about her. Somehow the pastor had found out that she had been involved in the takedown of the human trafficking rings and he had painted her as a participant. He had learned about Winnie’s guardianship and had turned that into her slavery. He even claimed that the Nobel Prizes were obtained fraudulently and that other people had actually done the work. Tamara called Sam for advice and left a message; Sam was in court.

Sam called back that evening; she had reviewed the sermon. Tamara had emailed her the link when she had made her original call.

“Hello Sam, it’s Tamara.”

“So I got your message and watched that prig doing the sermon,” Sam told her. “He’s not only a prig, he’s plain evil. That rot he spouted shows definite malice. First thing I did was to call him; he refused to speak to me and referred me to his lawyer. That whole law firm is dodgy; they cater to the less wholesome clients. I spoke to the lawyer twit—don’t know how he ever passed the bar—and he said it was protected religious speech...”

“One sec ... Winnie just came in and she’s upset,” Tamara said.

“Yeah I am,” Winnie growled. “There’s this asshole making false claims about you and he named me too, saying I’m your slave!”

“I’m talking to Sam about that right now, sweetie. Let me turn on the speaker. You heard Winnie, Sam?”

“I did. Yeah, Winnie’s still a minor too, right? That’s what I told the twit. I told him that the sermon was a straight defamation case, that you were not a public figure and certainly Winnie wasn’t. I told him that each day the sermon was on line was a separate infraction. I told him that he’d better get his client to take it down because we would be preparing a major lawsuit. He just laughed and told me to have fun wasting my time. I did file a cease and desist petition with the district court to shut down the site, but that could take a week to be acted on, maybe more.”

“How do we get it shut down faster?” Tamara asked.

“Legal stuff tends to move slowly,” Sam told her. “Things like this don’t get handled very fast.”

“We’ll see about that crap,” Winnie grumbled. “One of the kids in school told me about that shit. She asked if I really was a sex slave. And the garbage he said about you, Tamara! He’s dead meat.”

“What do you mean?” Sam asked.

“One of my teammates has an older brother. He knows how to crack into websites. I’m gonna see if he can crash this one. And I’m thinking of other stuff too.”

“Don’t do anything illegal, now,” Sam cautioned.

“Won’t get caught,” Winnie growled and stalked into her room.

“I need your go-ahead to get a case started,” Sam told Tamara.

“Sure. Go for the kill, too. Try to go for all his assets,” Tamara replied.

They disconnected and Tamara went to talk to Winnie. She didn’t want to discuss the defamation and told Tamara that she’d think some more about what to do.

Two days later, Tamara was in her Hopkins office after a class and saw a message on her phone. It was Winnie’s school reporting that as of the first period, she hadn’t been in classes. She called Winnie and the call went to voice mail so she called the school. It was almost noon now. The office person told Tamara that they’d contact her when Winnie showed up; then Tamara recalled the phone’s location app on Winnie’s phone so she activated her own copy. The app showed Winnie traveling and it appeared that she was approaching her school. Fifteen minutes later, Tamara’s phone rang. It was Winnie.

“Sweetie, you scared me,” Tamara admonished her when she answered. “Why did you skip school this morning?”

“Doing my civic duty; getting rid of the garbage,” Winnie chuckled. “I gotta check in at the office now but I’ll see you after school. There’s no problem and everything will be fine now,” she said cryptically.

Tamara was waiting when Winnie got home.

“Well? Tell me what this is all about.” Tamara demanded.

“I took care of the pastor and the sermon problem,” Winnie told her. “I’ll bet that there’s a story on the local news. The pastor was calling the TV station as I was leaving him.”

“Okay, so that means that he’s not dead or I assume, too badly disabled,” Tamara replied grimly.

“No, I wanted to kill him, but this is better. I got an appointment to see him for this morning. I had told him that I had heard his broadcast and had some additional info about Tamara that he really would like to have, juicy stuff. That hooked him like a big, fat, evil fish. When I got to his office—shit, it was decorated like a palace—and he saw me, I sensed that he thought he could seduce me. Ugh, what an ugly soul he has. I guess he figured that I was no threat to him so he sent this guy who was there with him away; I think it was his personal security. That was perfect.