Marcel opened his mouth.
“Not a word,” Roscoe said. “If you say one god-damned word, you’re out. Fence. Sylvie, you stay here and cover the camper bed with snow. Kick it over. As much as you can. Marcel. Drag the gear.”
They entered the dark toilet single file, and once the door had closed behind them, Roscoe pulled out his flashlight and clicked it on.
“We’re not going home ever again. Whatever you had in your pockets, that’s all you’ve got. Do you understand?”
Marcel opened his mouth and Roscoe lunged for him.
“Don’t speak. Just nod. I don’t want to hear your voice. You’ve destroyed my life, climbing that tower, pulling that gun. I’m over, you understand? Just nod.”
Marcel nodded. His eyes were very wide.
“Climb up on the toilet tank and pop out that ceiling tile and bring down the bag.”
Marcel brought down the bag and Roscoe felt some of the tension leak out of him. At least he had a new license plate and a change of clothes.
Sylvie had covered the bottom third of the camper bed and her gloves and boots were caked with snow.
“I don’t know that it’ll fool anyone who walks over here, but it should keep it hidden from the road, at least,” Roscoe said. His heart had finally begun to slow down.
“Here’s the plan,” he said. “I’m going to swap the license plates and drive into town. Sylvie lies down on the back seat. Marcel, you’re walking. Don’t let anyone see you. Find somewhere to hide until tomorrow, we’ll meet at the Donut House near the Rainbow Bridge, eight AM, okay?”
Marcel nodded mutely. The snow was falling harder now, clouds dimming the moonlight.
Roscoe dug out a pack of hot pads from the trash bag and thrust them at Marcel. “Go,” he said. “Now.”
After Marcel slunk away into the night, Roscoe helped Sylvie over the fence, then hunkered down, using a small wrench to remove the plates from the truck. Sylvie crouched beside him, holding the flashlight.
“Did you know he had a gun?” Sylvie said, as he tightened down the bolts.
“No,” Roscoe said. “No guns. We don’t use guns. We’re fucking network engineers, not pistoleros.”
“Thought so,” she said, but made no further comment as he fastened the new plates in place.
Finally he stood up. “Okay, let’s go,” he said.
“What’s the plan?” She paused, hand on door handle.
“The plan is to get away from here. Then figure out what to do next.” He glanced at her sidelong, calculating. “I think you’ll be all right, whatever happens. But that little idiot—” He realized his hands were shaking.
He drove slowly, starting every time he saw moving shadows. One time he passed a parked police car on the shoulder. He nearly jumped out of his skin, but managed not to put his foot down or even turn his head.
Sylvie sighed as the police car vanished in the rearview. “You’re going to go the rendezvous, like you told him?” she asked.
“Got to. We’re in it together.”
“No.”
Roscoe stared at her in the rearview.
“I don’t trust him.”
“What?” Roscoe shook his head then looked back at the road. “He’s young, is all. Too young.” They were not far from Main Street, and he began looking around for somewhere to park the truck. “We’re going to have to walk a ways. You up to an hour on foot?”
“Listen, you’ve got to pay attention! If you go to the Donut House, they’ll arrest you. You’ll go down as a terrorist.”
Roscoe didn’t dignify her paranoia with a response. Instead he pulled over.
“There have been arrests you haven’t heard about.”
Roscoe opened his door and climbed out. He picked up the trash bag from the back and left the door open, keys dangling enticingly in the ignition.
Sylvie hurried to catch up. “There’s a guy called Dennis Morgan, on the Texas border,” she said quietly. “Don’t know where he is, the feds won’t say—they pulled him in on firearms charges, but all the warrants, search and seizure, went through a special FEMA courthouse. We tried FOIA notices and got denied. Dennis had no record of violent offenses. He was just an unwirer, but they charged him with attempted murder of a federal agent and stuck him in a hole so deep we can’t find him.”
Roscoe slowed, hearing her breath rasping. “Secret trials, Roscoe, special terrorism courts. Records sealed—no defense attorneys. A woman, Caitlin Delaney in Washington State, they found a meth lab in her garage after they shot her resisting arrest, you know? They made her out to be some kind of gangster. She was fifty, Roscoe, and she had multiple sclerosis, and her backyard had line of sight to the Surrey side of the Canadian border.”
Roscoe slowed even more, until he felt Sylvie walking beside him. “FCC, Roscoe, they’ve been making sure we know all about these dangerous terrorists. But I did some digging with my stringers. Unwirers are disappearing. Their turf gets too visibly unwired and then they vanish, leaving behind guns and drugs and kiddie porn. That’s the real story I’m here to cover. Roscoe, if you go to that donut joint and Marcel is what I think he is, you’ll . . . vanish.”
She took his hand and stopped. His jacket felt icy-slick with freezing sweat. “What do you want?”
“I don’t want you to get yourself killed,” she said. Up close he could see the scar on her lip, the smudged foundation on her cheek. “Shit.” She leaned against him and put her chin on his shoulder, nosing in like a small animal in search of warmth. “Come up to my room. We can discuss it there.”
They ended up naked in bed together. And before anything much could happen, Roscoe was asleep, snoring quietly, dead to the world. He didn’t notice: what he noticed was waking up to Sylvie’s face on the next pillow, the dim red glow of the alarm clock’s digits flickering toward seven o’clock.
“Hey. Wake up.”
“Mm-hum.” Sylvie rolled toward him for a warm moment, then her eyes opened. “We didn’t?”
“Not yet.” He ran one hand along her back, cupping her buttocks with a sense of gratified astonishment. How did this happen to us?
Her gaze traveled past him, settling on the clock. “Oh shit.” She hugged him, then pulled back. “There’s never enough time. Later?”
He nodded miserably.
She leaned over and kissed him hard, almost angrily. “This is so unprofessional—look, if I’m wrong about Marcel, I apologize, all right? But I think it’s a sting. If I had a repeater, I could stake it out with a webcam, but—”
“A repeater?” Roscoe sat up. “There’s one in my bag.”
“Right.” She rolled out of bed and stretched. He couldn’t take his eyes away from her. “Listen, let’s freshen up and get outta here.” She grinned at him, friendly but far from the intimacy of a minute ago, and he had a tangible sense of lost possibilities. “Let’s get the donut joint wired for video. Then we can go grab some coffee and figure out what to do next.”
Roscoe glommed his last repeater onto a streetlamp above eye level. “They’ll probably take it down later today,” he said. “Hope it’s worth it.”
“It will be,” she reassured him, before striding away to plant a webcam on the back of a road sign opposite the donut joint. He stared after her, a slim figure bundled in improbable layers of cold-weather gear.
Sylvie was smiling as she caught up with him and grabbed his arm. “Come on, there’s a Starbucks on the next block,” she said.
They shed gloves and caps as they went in past the Micronet booths and the pastry counter. Sylvie ordered a couple of large lattes. “Mezzanine open?” she asked.
“Sure.” The gum-chewing barrista didn’t even look up.
Upstairs, in a dark corner well back from the shop front, Sylvie produced her phone and began fiddling with it. “Let’s see.” She turned it so he could see the tiny color display. The front of the donut shop was recognizable.
“Seven-thirty,” he said, checking his watch again. A gray miniv
an pulled up in front of the shop and disgorged a bunch of guys in trench coats and one very recognizable figure. His stomach lurched. “Who are those guys? That’s Marcel—” He stopped.
“Party time,” Sylvie said dryly.
Marcel entered the donut store. Two of the men in trench coats followed him. Most of the others moved out of frame, but one of them was just visible, hiding down the alley at the side of the store.
It was five minutes to eight. Roscoe went downstairs for another coffee, his feet dragging and his spirits sinking.
“Roscoe!”
“Coming.” He hurried upstairs. “What is it?”
“Look.” She pointed the phone display so he could see it. A pickup truck roughly the same color and age as Roscoe’s drew up in front of the donut store.
“Hey, that’s not—”
“I told you we employ stringers.”
A man wearing a jacket and cap climbed out of the cab. He looked a little like Roscoe.
Trench coats boiled out from behind trash cans. They swarmed the truck and blocked the doorway and two of them covered the parking lot. There was chaos and motion, then another trench coat barreled out of the door and started yelling at them. The guns vanished. Marcel appeared in the doorway behind him, pointing. Two of the trench coats began to walk toward the camera.
“I think we’ve seen enough,” said Sylvie, and killed the feed. Then she hit one of the speed-dial buttons on her phone. It rang twice. “Bonjour. Ou est le—”
Roscoe shook his head. He felt like a tuna might feel, a wooden deck under one flank and the cruel sun on the other, gills gasping in thin air. Sylvie was speaking to somebody in rapid-fire French while he was drowning on dry land.
She finished her call and closed her phone with a snap. She laid her hand across his: “Okay, you’re all set,” she said, grinning.
“Huh?”
“That was the French consulate in Toronto. I set it up in advance so they’d see the webcam. If you can get to the consulate, you’ve got diplomatic asylum.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small box; it unfolded like brushed-aluminum origami, forming a keyboard for her to plug the phone into. “We’re going to hit the front page of the Journal tomorrow. It’s all documented—your background, Marcel, the gun, the stakeout, all of it. With a witness.” She pointed a thumb at herself. “We’ve been looking for a break like this for months.” She was almost gloating, now: “Valenti isn’t going to know what’s hit him. My editor.” She slurped some coffee. “He got into the game because of Watergate. He’s been burning for a break like this ever since.”
Roscoe sat and stared at her.
“Cheer up! You’re going to be famous—and they won’t be able to touch you! All we have to do is get you to Montreal. There’s a crossing set up at the Mohawk Reservation, and I’ve got a rental car. While I’m at it, can you sign these?” She thrust a bundle of papers at him and winced apologetically: “Exclusive contract with the WSJ. It covers your expenses—flight included—plus fifteen grand for your story. I tried to hold out for more, but you know how things are.” She shrugged.
He stared at her, stunned into bovine silence. She pinched his cheek and shoved the papers into his hands. “Bon voyage, mon ami,” she said. She kissed each cheek, then pulled out a compact and fixed the concealer on her lip.
Paris in springtime was everything it was meant to be and more. Roscoe couldn’t sit down in a café without being smartmobbed by unwirer groupies who wanted him to sign their repeaters and tell them war stories about his days as a guerrilla fighter for technological freedom. They were just kids, Marcel’s age or younger, and they were heartbreaking in their attempts to understand his crummy French. The girls were beautiful, the boys were handsome, and they laughed and smoked and ordered him glasses of wine until he couldn’t walk. Billboard ads for Be, Inc. and Motorola, huge pictures of him scaling a building side with a Moto batarang clenched in his teeth.
Roscoe couldn’t keep up. Hardly a week went by without a new business popping up, a new bit of technological gewgaggery appearing on the tables of the Algerian street vendors by the Eiffel Tower. He couldn’t even make sense of half the ads on the Metro.
But life was good. He had a very nice apartment with a view and a landlady who chased away the paparazzi with a broom. He could get four bars of signal on his complimentary Be laptop from the bathroom, and ten bars from the window, and the hum of the networked city filled his days and nights.
And yet.
He was a foreigner. A curiosity. A fish, transplanted from the sea to Marineland, swimming in a tank where the tourists could come and gawp. He slept fitfully, and in his dreams, he was caged in a cell at Leavenworth.
Roscoe woke to the sound of his phone trilling. The ring was the special one, the one that only one person had the number for. He struggled out of bed and lunged for his jacket, fumbled the phone out.
“Sylvie?”
“Roscoe! God, I know it’s early, but God, I just had to tell you!”
He looked at the window. It was still dark. On his bed stand, the clock glowed 4:21.
“What? What is it?”
“God! Valenti’s been called to testify at a Senate hearing on Unwiring. He’s stepping down as chairman, I just put in a call to his office and into his dad’s office at the MPAA. The lines were jammed. I’m on my way to get the Acela into DC.”
“You’re covering it for the Journal?”
“Better. I got a book deal! My agent ran a bidding war between Bertelsmann and Penguin until three AM last night. The whole fucking thing is coming down like a house of shit. I’ve had three Congressional staffers fax me discussion drafts of bills—one to fund $300 million in DARPA grants to study internetworking, one to repeal the terrorism statutes on network activity, and a compulsory license on entertainment on-line. God!”
“That’s—amazing,” Roscoe said. He pictured her in the cab on the way to Grand Central, headset screwed in, fixing her makeup in her compact, dressed in a smart spring suit, off to meet with the Hill Rats.
“It’s incredible. It’s better than I dreamed.”
“Well . . .” he said. He didn’t know what to say. “See if you can get me a pardon, okay?” The joke sounded lame.
“What?” A blare of car horns. “Oh, crap, Roscoe. It’ll work out, you’ll see. Amnesty or something.”
“We can talk about it next month, okay?” She’d booked the tickets the week before, and they had two weeks of touring on the continent planned.
“Oh, Roscoe, I’m sorry. I can’t do it. The book’s due in twelve weeks. Afterward, okay? You understand, don’t you?”
He pulled back the curtains and looked out at the foreign city, looking candlelit in the night. “I understand, sweetie,” he said. “This is great work. I’m proud of you.”
Another blare of horns from 6,000 miles away. “Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you from the Hill, okay?”
“Okay,” Roscoe said. But she’d already hung up.
Six bars on his phone. Paris was lit up around him with invisible radio waves. Coverage and innovation were everywhere. They thought he was a hero, but 6,000 miles away the real unwiring was taking place.
He looked down at his slim silver phone, glowing with blue LEDs, a gift from Nokia. He tossed it from hand to hand, and then he opened the window and chucked it three stories down to the street. It made an unsatisfying clatter as it disintegrated on the pavement.
Revision Point
In 1995, Congress held a series of hearings on the “National Information Infrastructure.” At that time, lobbyists for the entertainment industry petitioned the government to redesign the Internet so that copyright infringement could be detected and stopped.
This bid was wisely ignored by the Congress—after all, these were the same companies that sued to get rid of the piano roll, the radio, and the VCR! In “Unwirer,” Congress had adopted regulations that defund any research into the decentralized Internet, and has created a series of c
riminal offenses for the use of the Internet in the commission of a crime. Consequently, America’s technology boom never arrives, while abroad, Jean Louis Gassee’s Be, Inc., turns France into a technology juggernaut.
C.D. and C.S.
WHEN THE MORNING STARS SANG TOGETHER
by Isaac Szpindel
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you understand! Who decided its measurements, if you know? . . . Where are its bases fastened? Or who laid its corner-stone; when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
—Job 38:4-7
THEY’RE coming for you now. You knew they would.
You knew better. There are no secrets in the Brotherhood and your theory is dangerous, not only to you, but to the world. It threatens 300 years of Holy Science, 300 years of history and stability. But you had to satisfy your curiosity and some misconception of justice and truth.
You knew better. You are a scientist, a Jesuit like all scientists, but your faith couldn’t protect you. It won’t protect you from them now that they come as they should.
Your heart pounds through your chest and your head. So hard to think. Destroy the evidence. Destroy it, before they use it to destroy you. Destroy it before it gets out and poisons minds.
They’ll be here soon with their computers and their technologies. Saint Galileo had no Inquisition like this, those three centuries ago. But this is 1946, Saint Galileo’s 1946, and the Church’s. And now you threaten their world from your little apartment in a converted motel room in the shadow of the Holy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.
You should have kept your ideas to yourself, you should have stayed in Rome. But you live here, too, you trained here, and from here you were called to the Vatican to be curator of the Holy Galileo Letters. How fitting that you and those very Holy Letters be the Inquisition’s next victim. You can still recall the way the coarse textures of their aged pages felt through your gloved hands. You can smell their intoxicating musk even though you were allowed the experience only once, to scan them for the archives and for analysis. They were so fragile, so delicate, like the people and the ideas preserved, trapped forever, within their folds.
ReVISIONS Page 23