“Thanks for the tip, Don. Don’t you trust your own people?”
“It’s not that, Michael.” The voice coming out of that sharp cheekboned face seemed genuinely concerned for the little family. “Director Shore will tell you the same — even in the OCRS, only a handful are in the know. We’re up against dangerous people. But I guess I don’t have to tell you that.”
“No. But I don’t mind hearing that you feel that way, too.”
At first, Pat and Anna just ate room service and watched television (Days of Our Lives and Match Game among the favorites) while Michael answered question after question in Room 2730 at the Justice Department. A few days in, however, mother and daughter began working with a female agent, who briefed them about their new identities.
Standard operating procedure was that family members would retain their real first names, with a new last one providing the familiar initial. This helped prevent slip-ups, giving the rechristened Satarianos a chance to catch themselves if they started saying or writing their old names.
Or, as Anna said, “Saves on monograms.”
When Michael returned to the hotel room each evening, he, too, would study the fake backgrounds provided them. Fabrication was kept simple, just the basics, should new friends or employers or teachers or whoever ask the usual innocent questions.
The Smiths needed to know where they were from (St. Paul, Minnesota — a city none of them had ever even visited) including street address and description of home and neighborhood, also some key names (of nonexistent grandparents and real schools, including colleges for Pat and Michael).
And “Michael Smith” had to be familiar with various things about the assorted businesses he’d worked for over the years, and be aware of his undistinguished military service — he’d been stateside during WWII, a company clerk (oddly, the same fake post their son, Mike, had fooled his mother with, when he’d really been in combat).
A blond, bland, friendly OCRS agent named Michael Reddy counseled the family, individually and as a group, on various difficult aspects of the WITSEC program.
“You can’t maintain contact with any relatives or friends,” Agent Reddy said. “You’d put them — and yourself — in danger.”
“But what about when our son comes back from Vietnam?” Pat asked.
“We’ll bring you together, of course. He’ll be over twenty-one, so joining you in your new identity would have to be his own choice.”
“I understand,” Pat said, apparently mollified.
Privately, however, Reddy admitted to Michael that the US Army did not hold out much hope for Lieutenant Satariano’s return — apparently, WITSEC had checked the missing soldier’s status, as a matter of course.
“How frank you want to be with your wife,” the agent said, “I’ll leave up to you... You might not want to put her under any more pressure right now than necessary.”
Reddy also told Michael, privately, that exceptions were often made to the “no contact” policy where parents and grandparents were concerned. Letters could be forwarded on, sans return address, and even phone calls arranged through a Justice Department switchboard; but since both Michael and Pat had lost their parents, this service would only be made available, discreetly, to Pat... should she want to maintain contact with her sister, Betty.
Pat and Betty were not close — the once wild Betty was now a Republican, and married to a born-again pastor — but “Mrs. Smith” did arrange for one call to be made, just to keep Betty from being concerned.
The biggest problem, of course, was Anna, who was going steady with a boy named Gary Grace.
“You’ll have to watch her like a hawk,” Reddy said. “She is a teenager.”
“No kidding,” Michael said. “Can’t she even write the kid a goodbye letter?”
“We advise not. Make it a clean break. Right now.”
“Do you have any kids, Agent Reddy?”
“Why, yes.”
“How old?”
“Grade school — third and sixth.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“Until she’s twenty-one you can control her, of course, and...”
“You really don’t have teenage kids, Agent Reddy.”
“...And if you want to allow her to write the boy, her letters will have to be read by both you and your wife, and by WITSEC personnel. There can be no hints of where your daughter has moved.”
“I understand. Let’s not even give her that option.”
“That’s a good call, Mr. Smith. A very good call.”
Another trauma dropped at their feet was the need to make a legal name change. They wouldn’t just be pretending to be the Smiths; they would legally be the Smiths... Satariano no more.
Shore himself explained this to Michaeclass="underline" “We can’t have you lying when you fill out legal documents, real estate documents, for instance, or loan papers. The Justice Department can’t be party to fraud. You will have to use your real name... which is now Michael Smith.”
Court records would be sealed, protecting the old and new identities alike. Pat and Anna hated this whole legal-name-change thing, though Michael didn’t really care. He’d been through it before.
The intensive combination briefing and debriefing lasted almost two weeks. Toward the end a stream of new official papers flowed: birth certificates, Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, even school and college transcripts. The Smiths had history.
They had documents.
They were real.
Pat and Anna were in a better mood working at memorizing their new backgrounds than they’d been watching TV, a hotel-room existence which had in particular begun to bore Anna, whose every other sentence was a report of what would be going on back home (“Prom committee is meeting now — right now!”). That, and “I can’t believe that The Waltons is the best thing on!”
Michael was not told who he’d first be testifying against, and in what trial, just that it would be at least six months before he had to take the stand, though thereafter he’d likely be involved in at least one trial a year for the foreseeable future. Just having a foreseeable future seemed a good start to Michael.
He would testify as neither Michael Satariano nor Michael Smith, rather as “Mr. X.”
Suddenly I’m starring in a Saturday afternoon serial, he thought.
That the government had been able to make Michael the manager of a restaurant that Uncle Sam owned (due to an IRS takeover) made it particularly easy for their witness to miss work. He had no monthly stipend from WITSEC because the restaurant salary (forty thousand dollars a year) outstripped it.
The meetings with Shore in Phoenix would be occasional, perhaps once a month, never longer than a single afternoon. Shore had to fly in from DC for these, and Michael was only one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, in WITSEC the associate director was dealing with.
“We’re going to let you hang on to that .45 auto of yours,” Shore advised Michael, on the first of these Phoenix confabs.
“It’s sort of a family heirloom,” Michael said, unaware they knew he’d kept it. Did they know about the half-million, too?
“I can understand you wanting some protection at hand,” Shore was saying, “but no other guns, Mike. Don’t make your new home a fortress or an arsenal. If you have a problem, if you have any suspicion that you’ve been made, let us handle it.”
“Harry, all due respect — you don’t even have an office in Tucson.”
“No, but I can send a marshal, straightaway. One thing they have plenty of in Arizona, Mike, is marshals. You’ll have a ‘panic number’ to call.”