Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [35]
anyone else gets hurt.
Now you’re threatening me.
The devices are the threat. Go back to.
your hacking and phreaking and leave well enough alone.
No more messages came from Swan.
Two
‘There’s only one thing for it, declared the Doctor. ‘Well wiretap the wiretapper.’
‘You want us to bug Swan’s phone?’ said Bob.
‘Waitaminute. You want me to bug Swan’s phone?’
‘I have every confidence in your ability,’ said the Doctor smoothly.
We were standing around at a rest stop on the I-95, stretching our legs, halfway home from Baltimore. Peri got a grape soda from a vending machine. ‘I love this stuff,’ she confessed. ‘And the places we visit, you usually can’t get it.’
‘My ability to get screwed by Swan when she finds out,’
grumbled Bob. ‘I’m no phone phreak. I could use the test set to listen in through her bridging box, but that’s kind of conspicuous. And she probably visits that box about as often as she visits the bathroom.’
‘Do we even know her phone number?’ said Peri. ‘We’d need that, wouldn’t we?’
‘C’mon,’ said Bob. ‘She’s not gonna be listed, is she?’ He suddenly made a gesture as though turning his own head backwards. ‘On the other hand, maybe she’s that cocky... hang on.’ He got up and went to a payphone nearby.
Bob came back. ‘She’s ex-directory,’ he said. ‘So I did a CN/A on her. Couldn’t believe it. First time lucky.’ He showed us Swan’s phone number, scribbled in ballpoint on his arm.
‘You did what?’ said Peri.
‘I called up a Customer Name and Address operator and told her I was a linesman,’ said Bob. He shook his head.
‘Never done It before. But she was only too happy to give out Swan’s address and phone number.’
Peri shuddered. ‘Is there any way somebody can keep their private information private?’
Bob grimaced. ‘Not when people are really determined.
Question is, what do we do now? I know there are ways of bugging someone from inside the telco, but I don’t know how it’s done.’
‘Peri,’ said the Doctor, ‘why don’t you and Bob go and get some lunch? I want to have a word with Mr Peters.’ The kids wandered off to the kiosk to see if it was open.
‘Peri doesn’t seem too happy about tapping Swan’s phone,’ I ventured.
‘Extreme situations call for extreme measures,’ grumbled the Doctor. ‘I don’t think it’s possible to appeal to Swan’s better nature. The question is, can we appeal to her common sense? Her desire for self-preservation? Or will we have to simply bludgeon her into giving up?’ He scowled. ‘I never like to be reminded that simple rational argument, simple facts, are not enough to convince people.’
‘If you learned something you could use to blackmail Swan, would you?’
‘If it became necessary, yes I would. After all, we all have secrets we’d rather keep to ourselves.’
The little hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I usually only felt that just before I got into a fistfight with someone.
‘Are you threatening me?’ I said.
The Doctor stopped, surprised. ‘Nothing was further from my mind.’
‘Oh, boy.’ I shrugged, trying to get my shoulder to unknot. ‘Well, Swan could make some serious trouble for me.
She thinks I’m investigating you, helping her out. If she realises I’m just a neutral party –’
‘Are you a neutral party Mr Peters?’ said the Doctor. ‘Is it possible always to be a neutral party?’ This was what he’d wanted to talk to me about.
‘Call me Chick. Staying neutral is the journalist’s job. We don’t make the news, we just report it.’
‘And yet, isn’t there sometimes the temptation to interfere?’
I sat on the bonnet of the Pontiac. I thought of a story I’d been doing in Los Angeles about traffic safety. ‘Well, you know. I wouldn’t just stand there and let a kid get run over by a car, or something like that.’ Even if it would make one hell of a story.
The Doctor nodded. ‘But what if the stakes were higher than that?’
‘Higher than a child’s life?’
‘Much higher. The lives of every child, woman, and man on the planet.’
My secret for dealing with people who are either mean or crazy is to imagine them in their underwear. I tried to imagine the Doc in his underdaks, and failed.