The Sand Trap (26 page)

“So you think that I’m ready to hit the
links do you!” Gord quipped. “Do I have to wear moccasins and a
helmet or can I be a normal person?”

“You never dressed like a normal person
Gord,” Bruce responded. “But yes, you are ready to see what you can
do on the golf course with the changes we’ve made.” He paused as he
reached under the bench at the range and pulled out a wrapped
parcel that was about the length of a driver. “But you have to use
this from now on – my gift to you for your hard work.” And he
handed Gord the club.

Gord ripped the paper and held it in his
hands. “No fucking way. These things are for old guys with the
yips,” he offered as he looked with disgust at the belly
putter.

“Well Gordo, two things. First. You are an
old guy if you haven’t noticed. Secondly, these things work so well
they should be banned. The young guys on the tour know how they
give you a putting advantage and I predict that by 2020 belly or
maybe chest putters will either be banned or in the majority. It is
only misplaced macho attitudes like the one you just expressed that
stop more guys from using them.”

Gord grimaced.

“But you don’t have a choice. Our agreement
is that you do what I say. So unless you want to break our
contract, you are now a belly putter guy. Your afternoons from now
on will be on the putting green all afternoon.”

“What do you have in mind for my chipping
and pitching? A lacrosse stick?”

“Actually, other than the new grip, club
head position and swing thought, which applies to all shots by the
way, I am not going to do anything with your short game. The same
way I’m not going to teach you how to putt. Short game is all feel
and all yours.”

“So we are done with the lessons?”

“I’ve given you the techniques you need to
get really good Gord. The rest is up to you. You realize that you
will have to hit ten thousand balls before the changes become
internalized?”

“Maybe. But I think that I am hitting it
pretty well now. I’m a little skeptical of the putter thing but
I’ll give it a try. After I win the club championship I’ll continue
with the practicing. Will you come and watch?”

“Just let me know and I’ll meet you at the
range. But it's all up to you now Gord. I can only just tweak
something that I see in your swing.”

With that they shook hands and Bruce went
back to his car to go to the club and his weekly lessons with the
“rules ladies” as he called them. Despite the work they had done;
despite the fact that Gord was a good golfer and had worked harder
than Bruce would have thought, he was still an experiment. As he
explained to Gord, he had not picked these three things at random
and each change or exercise had a purpose. He felt it better not to
clutter up Gord’s head with the theory behind them otherwise he
would spend more time considering what the change was supposed to
do rather than practicing the effect. He had noticed that Gord
sometimes lost the swing at the top and the grip just helped the
club head get back to square. He had picked that one up from an
interview with Bob Panasik in Swing golf magazine. He noticed that
Gord had a tendency to take the club back a little inside prompting
a downswing that sometimes came over the top, from the outside of
the ball direction line rather than the inside. Starting from a
foot away from the ball made that impossible. He’d picked that one
up from a comment Moe Norman said to a writer one time. The rink
thing was his own invention although the idea came from a
'golfomercial' he saw once where a guy was hitting shots in bare
feet while standing on a big block of ice. His balance was
incredible. Gord had a tendency to fall back on his right foot at
impact; a reverse pivot they called it. He could not possibly do
that while standing on ice or he would fall on his head, just like
he did when he first tried it. Gord now had these changes and there
was little Bruce could do except watch him once in a while to keep
him on track. The club championship would tell how far the
instruction had sunk in, and make or break Bruce’s hard work and
maybe his future as a teacher. For now it was off to the ladies to
earn his keep at the Ottawa Valley Golf and Country Club.

Gord on the other hand didn’t have a doubt
in the world. He was feeling more fulfilled than he had been since
his teen years and was thrilled with his success both on the range
and on the rink. He couldn’t believe how much better he was hitting
the ball. After only a month, … a month of very hard work he
admitted ’he was hitting the ball straighter and further than ever
before. He could hardly wait to get at the young guys and their
'Toys R’ Us’ drivers and show them what a fifty-eight-year-old
could do. He had never won the club championship. In his golf prime
he travelled too much to play the tournaments and for the last ten
years he couldn’t keep up to the young guys when the course
distance was moved up to 7100 yards. But he was hitting the new
drivers close to 300 yards now. As long as he remembered the three
things he was taught, he was as straight as he was long. Hitting
the top right corner of the net resulted in a gentle draw and
hitting the top left made a nice fade. “Go figure,” he thought to
himself. The championship was the coming weekend, the last of July,
and he could hardly wait.

(Back to Table of Contents)

Despite what Gord thought, Richard Fairfield
actually had a real job with a real government agency that did real
investigative security work. CIDC was as ‘spy’ connected as any
government agency in Canada could be. In 2012 there was not much
James Bondish about anything any intelligence agency did. The
Internet had changed the intelligence business as much as it had
changed normal commerce. Now intelligence gathering consisted
mainly of sitting behind computer screens – big ones mind you and
connected to big computers, sorting out the millions of gigabytes
of digital data floating around the world. From newspapers to
Facebook to twitters to emails to iPad apps to satellite photos to
everything that moved through the Internet ether; the people at
CIDC absorbed it all.

It was a different intelligence game when
Richard joined the CIDC in the early seventies, fresh from a
Political Science degree from the Royal Military College, Canada’s
university for future military officers. He had intended on a
career in the military like his mother and her father before him.
His mother had a Ph.D. in mathematics, a tremendous feat for a
young girl in the late thirties that spoke to her prodigious
brilliance. She had actually worked on the enigma project during
WWII. After the war she stayed in England working for British
intelligence. She often joked that she actually had sex with Ian
Fleming but Richard’s Dad just laughed and told her Ian was too
smart for that. Richard was born in England right after the war but
when his parents were killed in a house fire when he was 13 he came
back to live with his Mother’s parents in Sault St Marie. After
high school he followed his parents into a military career by going
to RMC in Kingston. The early years in England gave him that
typical cultured British accent that had fooled colonials for
centuries into thinking that the speaker was just a touch smarter
or at least a touch more informed than they were. The years in the
Sault taught him how to fish, hunt and fight anyone who teased him
for the accent.

The Political Science degree was just a
cover for his real passion for information – any information. In
high school he wrote a paper on one of the African campaigns during
WWII and through an exhaustive letter writing campaign to every
Canadian soldier he could find who had been there, an archival
search in Ottawa during the requisite school trip to the parliament
buildings, and his own study of the material in the Sault
Collegiate library, he concluded there must have been a spy in the
Allied ranks feeding daily information to the German high command
during this particular campaign. Once the data was put together, it
was obvious to Richard. Not to the Canadian and British military.
Shortly after the local Sault paper published a very tiny story
describing his paper that his history teacher had told them about,
he and his Grandparents had a visit from some very senior military
officials. They politely took all the research Richard had done.
"Borrowed it" they said at the time. Richard didn’t really care
since the paper was done, but his taste for research and analysis
was whetted. When he was quietly approached during his final year
of high school by one of those same officers who came and took his
research and they asked if he was interested in doing such things
as a career, he was instantly curious. The officers explained that
Richard would first have to go to the Royal Military College to get
a degree. During the four months in the summer, his military
assignment would be with a special division of the Canadian
Military that fought with information, not guns. Richard excelled
at the College in everything they taught including guns. Years
hunting with his grandfather in the bush around the Sault had
taught him to kill with one shot in the right place and he showed
that skill in marksmanship at the College. He also excelled at hand
to hand combat skills, since part of the summer work at the Agency
was intensive training in some types of hand to hand combat skills
he had never heard of before, taught by one person he thought was
from North Korea and another from China. He also excelled at
studies in Political Science although he knew that was just a
diversion from the real skills and knowledge he was being
taught.

Richard Fairfield was being groomed to be a
spy.

He graduated from RMC in 1962 and went right
to work for CDIC, although officially there was no such department
in the Canadian military. While the tools that they used in 1962
were different than the ones they now used in 2012, the job and the
principle was still the same, gather and analyze data. In those
days they relied far more on people observations and reports than
upon satellite photos and computer printouts. Early in his career
he had spent time on the ground in Africa, the soviet Union and
India, gathering data first hand that could be sent back to Ottawa
for analysis and shared with other western countries. The targets
of investigation had shifted over the years, from cold war antics
to African despots, to Eastern European genocides, to the Middle
East, to today’s preoccupation with terrorism in its various
shapes. But the solutions had not changed in a hundred years of
intelligence gathering; if you find a threat you eliminate it.
There was not much purpose in spending billions of dollars
gathering, sifting through and analyzing data if it was only to be
used as fodder by politicians to advance their own brand of
redemption, usually only after the intelligence has long gone
stale. So Richard had a very formal job as the director of the
Agency and the Agency a formal title that reported, through a very
formal and as secret a parliamentary committee as government could
have, the recent intelligence on international terrorists, crooks,
immigrants, or anything else that might pose a threat to global or
Canadian peace and prosperity. Often this information led to quite
legitimate actions that interrupted the flow of drugs into British
Columbia for a week or so, or the expulsion of an Iraqi diplomat
for spying on Alberta’s oil industry, or to uncovering a plot by a
half dozen thirteen-year old Muslim extremists in Toronto to blow
up the Air Canada centre with a ton of fertilizer. This reporting
detail was necessary to ensure the flow of government funds that
were necessary to fund the public, and not so public, activities of
the Agency.

In actual fact, the public budget was
totally spent on the publically accountable and legitimate actions
of the Agency. During the cold war in the sixties, at the same time
that the Canadian Prime Minister was winning a Nobel Peace prize
for his work in establishing the United Nations, his government
secretly allocated a significant sum of money to the Agency and
erased all trace of the allocation. This sum was held secretly in
various accounts throughout the country and other places in the
world. Through wise investment the fund had grown and now does
exactly what the government originally intended. It acts as an
endowment type funding agency for activities that are best left off
the annual parliamentary budget debate. It was from this sum that
Richard paid Gord Salmy’s retainer.

There were only three people in Canada who
knew of the secret side of CIDC operations. One was Richard’s
Executive Assistant who had been with him for the whole ten years
he had been Director and had been the EA to the previous Director.
While he knew the details of her kids, husband, hobbies and so on,
he had no idea where she came from and how she ended up with such a
confidential role, but she was indispensible in helping him keep
his two roles in play. The other person who knew his role was the
CIDC watcher. Her job was just what it meant – to watch. She had a
regular job out in the civilian world but was a highly trained
agent and was paid to simply watch over his “asset” as he called
it, the only Canadian at the current time that was, in Ian
Fleming’s terms, licensed to kill. She watched him in Canada and
watched over him while he carried out assignments anywhere in the
world. She was found a job that would allow her to do this without
arising suspicion in either her civilian employer or the “asset”
himself.