Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [36]
“Please.” She put a hand to his mouth, and he kissed her fingertips. He tried to swallow all his questions.
But some of these questions represented a change of subject, a move to safer ground. “So—tell me what you mean exactly when you say surveillance? What do you do?”
“There are different levels. For you, it’s almost all documentary. Credit cards, phone bills, e-mail, computer files.”
“Whoah.”
“Well, hey. Think about it. Physical location too, sometimes. Although mostly that’s at the cell-phone–records level. That isn’t very precise. I mean, I know you’re staying over off of Connecticut somewhere, but you don’t have an address listed right now. So, maybe staying with someone else. That kind of stuff is obvious. If they wanted to, they could chip you. And your new van has a transponder, it’s GPS-able.”
“Shit.”
“Everyone’s is. Like transponders in airplanes. It’s just a question of getting the code and locking on.”
“My lord.”
Frank thought it over. There was so much information out there. If someone had access to it, they could find out a tremendous amount. “Does NSF know this kind of stuff is going on with their people?”
“No. This is a black-black.”
“And your husband, he does what?”
“He’s at a higher level.”
“Uh oh.”
“Yeah. But look, I don’t want to talk about that now. Some other time.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Some other time.”
“When we meet again?”
She smiled wanly. “Yes. When we meet again. Right now,” lighting up her watch and peering at it, “shit. I have to get back. My friends will be getting up soon. They go to work early.”
“Okay. . . . You’ll be okay?”
“Oh yeah. Sure.”
“And you’ll call me again?”
“Yes. I’ll need to pick my times. I need to have a clear space, and be able to call you from a clean phone. There’s some protocols we can establish. We’ll talk about it. We’ll set things up. But now I’ve gotta go.”
“Okay.”
A peck of a kiss and she was off into the night.
He drove his van back to the edge of Rock Creek Park, sat in the driver’s seat thinking. There was still an hour before dawn. For about half an hour it rained. The sound on the van’s roof was like a steel drum with only two notes, both hit all the time.
Caroline. Married but unhappy. She had called him, she had kissed him. She knew him, in some sense; which was to say, she had him under surveillance. Some kind of security program based on the virtual wagers of some MIT computers, for Christ’s sake. Perhaps that was not as bad as it first sounded. A pro forma exercise. As compared to a bad marriage. Sneaking out at three in the morning. It was hard to know what to feel.
With the first grays of dawn the rain stopped, and he got out and walked into the park. Bird calls of various kinds: cheeps, trills; then a night thrush, its little melodies so outrageous that at first they seemed beyond music, they were to human music as dreams were to art—stranger, bolder, wilder. Birds singing in the forest at dawn, singing, The rain has stopped! The day is here! I am here! I love you! I am singing!
It was still pretty dark, and when he came to the gorge overlook he pulled a little infrared scope he had bought out of his pocket, and had a look downstream to the waterhole. Big red bodies, shimmering in the blackness; they looked like some of the bigger antelopes to Frank, maybe the elands. Those might bring the jaguar out. A South American predator attacking African prey, as if the Atlantic had collapsed back to this narrow ravine and they were all in Gondwanaland together. Far in the distance he could hear the siamangs’ dawn chorus, he assumed; they sounded very far away. Suddenly something inside his chest ballooned like a throat pouch, puffed with happiness, and to himself (to Caroline) he whispered, “ooooooooop! oooooooop!”
He listened to the siamangs, and sang under his breath with them, and fitted his digital camera to the night scope to take some IR photos of