Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  To his amazement he still felt energised, even after the scramble up the hill, and when after a hundred yards or so he came to a small spring-fed creek he jumped right over it, not even contemplating stopping to rest, though the sight of the creek made him realise how thirsty he was, how badly he wanted a drink. To his right there would be the old fire road, but he didn’t want to go near it, since it would be the obvious route for strangers trying to follow him through the woods and, anyway, between the fire road and the boy there was a swamp marsh which Maris had warned him about – it was deceptively deep, she’d said, and parts of it were quicksand.

  He swerved around a thicket of Himalayan blackberry, flush with fruit, and sprinted on, chanting to himself, keep running, keep running, keep running, but as he sensed he was nearing the road he tried to collect his thoughts. He reckoned he would come out about a quarter mile up from the turn-off to Truebridge’s shack and his uncle’s track, but he was doubtful anyone would drive by – there was no traffic to speak of at all on the road, since all the locals preferred the lower and better road that went around the base of this mountain.

  And then as he stopped and listened to the light breeze tickling the poplar leaves, he as much felt as heard a low hum. Plane? No, it didn’t have the vibrating shudder of the occasional jet which flew over this part of northern California – flights, according to his uncle, from San Francisco or Los Angeles heading north to Seattle or Vancouver. No, this was a vehicle on the road, and he felt hope followed by apprehension – could it not be the Camaro which had blocked his uncle’s pickup truck the day before? It seemed more than a day, so much more – a world away in time, before what had happened. From the noise he could tell it was a pickup truck, not a car, and in his relief he ran helter skelter through the last bushes and high grass, and jumped the small ditch in front of the road. It was only as he landed that he saw the shadow moving in on him, only as his feet hit the gravel edge of the road that out of one eye he saw to his left an arm move in on him like a heavy falling branch. It grabbed him with incontestable force, seizing him around his right shoulder and upper arm like a cherry shaker latching onto a tree trunk. He was lifted suddenly into the air, and breathless and scared he wet his pants for the second time in twenty-four hours, and his last thought right then was to wonder if the man in the yellow shirt was going to kill him right away.

  Meeting Kate

  SHE CAME IN almost an hour late and he was already annoyed since he had bust up his morning by having to drive out to Cupertino to give this woman the standard visitors’ tour which Eckerly, the head personnel honcho, would have conducted had he not been on his annual golf holiday. He planned to redeem the wasted time by having lunch at Nicky’s over on the Bay waterfront, which was a small pleasure to be sure, but then his life seemed to consist of small pleasures, hard won and the more fiercely protected for that. But Ricky’s would now be crowded by the time he arrived and he would also be starving it was so late, and his mounting irritation was not really allayed when a tall woman with short chestnut-coloured hair sailed in without even so much as a knock.

  Sharply dressed, with white linen trousers covering legs that seemed to run up to her shoulders, she wore smart mocha-coloured leather shoes, and a blouse of deepest blue. Only a simple gold necklace for jewellery and a ring, also gold, that was not on the wedding finger. She carried a slim leather file case, so the effect was of smartness and energy and a confidence that only served to annoy him further since he was certain that she wouldn’t care two hoots that she had kept him waiting.

  ‘Renoir?’ she asked with a fresh voice, slightly highly pitched. There was an accent there.

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘They said you’re the tour guide.’

  He realised she was English. ‘That’s not very flattering.’

  ‘I’m not usually paid to flatter,’ she said crisply.

  ‘What is it you are paid to do?’ he asked with a sharpness matching hers. ‘I mean, other than keep me waiting?’ he added, surprising himself – normally he might have thought this but would never have said it.

  She looked at him more closely, then looked at her watch. ‘I see what you mean,’ she said. He thought a smile began to open across her face. ‘Perhaps I’m paid to take you to lunch? Or do I really have to have the tour?’ And she looked up and grinned at him – grinned with white but slightly crooked teeth, but the naturalness of this disarmed him at once. And her face was otherwise immediately, strikingly pretty – by any standard. She had high strong cheekbones and soft, round blue eyes. And her mouth – well, the mouth unnerved him. There was nothing so obvious to it as a pouting Bardot pouch of bee-stung lips, for in fact her lips were thin and wide. But she had a pronounced pucker just above her lips – what was it called? Frenum? Such an ugly word for such a subtly lovely part – that worked to make lips and mouth and nose and jaw one wonderfully handsome whole. You wanted to kiss that mouth passionately, and that he realised was what made him nervous. It was bad enough insulting clients; kissing them would be fatal.

  So he took the woman, whose name was Kate Palmer, to Nicky’s, which was very crowded indeed, but they sat at the bar and each drank a glass of the Napa white and shared a bowl of large shrimp with mustard sauce and then sat down for a late lunch on the outside deck with the Bay view. It was hot for late April, almost touching eighty degrees, and he ate grilled tiny scallops with pilaf rice and thin string beans and she tucked into a monster piece of swordfish, using all her lemon and half of his, and he would remember the food forever because for some reason he didn’t understand at all he found himself unaccountably nervous, to the point indeed where he almost didn’t trust himself to speak. Not that Renoir was ever very talkative, but neither was he ever very nervous.

  He managed to ask her questions, and she seemed happy enough to explain how she came to be there. She was a consultant for the oil industry, she explained, and her small outfit produced a newsletter that focused on exploration – which was where Renoir’s company came in, since it adapted the expert system technology it had originally developed for the Pentagon into versions for private industry, oil and gas foremostly. So, in Santa Barbara to see offshore production units, she’d detoured north on her way home to make a visit. And, yes, she was English and yes she worked there and yes this was her first trip to the Bay Area, and what else did she say? He wasn’t sure, he was too busy thinking what he should say next – or ask really, since he didn’t want to have to put more than one sentence together at a time

  ‘So was your morning okay?’ he asked. ‘Interesting, surprisingly interesting.’ Then she blushed slightly for her rudeness, which he found appealing. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘it’s just that usually if you’ve seen one software company you’ve seen them all. But this time was different, though I’m sorry I missed your tour.’

  ‘Who did you talk to then?’ he asked, his interest piqued.

  ‘The people in the Artificial Intelligence Unit. I wasn’t supposed to be with them for long, but they had to come drag me away eventually. That’s why I was so late.’

  ‘They’re quite a bunch,’ he said in agreement. He liked them – the small cadre, perhaps seven or eight, working on the nonmilitary uses of the company’s expert system technology. ‘Did you meet Ticky?’ The leader of the group, a boyish and frighteningly young woman with a Ph.D. from Caltech.

  She nodded. ‘Is that her real name?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said with a laugh. ‘It’s short for Ticonderoga.’ Kate looked puzzled and he explained. ‘Her father was a Revolutionary War buff – that was one of the bigger battles.’

  Kate nodded. ‘Like calling an English child Waterloo. Anyway, she was very nice. And clever. I’ve got a new client, a small company called Acer Oil, and its unique selling point is the use of expert systems. I’ve never really known how they work – even in my own kind of business. Frankly, I probably still don’t, but for at least five glorious minutes this morning I thought I did. She explains th
ings so clearly.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. Ticky’s group was unusual, with almost as many women as men, a rarity among coders, and nothing similar about them at all, except for their intense intelligence and communally fierce style of debating . . . anything. Why sixty feet six inches was the perfect distance from the pitcher’s rubber to home plate; why prime numbers for all their beauty and recent publicity were not important mathematical phenomena after all; why refried beans were a misnomer; and – this was a running gag and activity – where in the Bay Area you could find the finest German food. The conversations took place at the end of the day, in what for obscure AI reasons he didn’t understand was nicknamed Prolog Alley, an assortment of desks and chairs and table tops and the odd television set in what had once been a meeting room. Here, when work formally ended, Ticky’s group would gather and start to play, drinking beer in open defiance of the company’s alcohol-free policy.

  Slowly now at lunch, what with the wine and the food, he felt himself lose the anxious-making nervousness and so when the woman said, easy as pie, ‘Enough of me talking about me, tell me what you think about me,’ he could laugh with her and not get flustered when she added, ‘So what did I miss by skipping the tour?’

  He shrugged. ‘I think you did best by sticking with Ticky’s group. I don’t usually give the tour – another reason to count your blessings for missing it today.’

  ‘So I would have been getting a tour from The Great Man Himself,’ she said, smiling but with the slightest zing to her tone, like the jab of a proficient fighter sparring lightly – not aggressive, but certainly letting you know it was there. ‘I feel honoured, even if I didn’t make it.’

  ‘Don’t. The Great Man Himself isn’t me. It’s Eckerly. And I work for him, not the other way round.’

  ‘Doing the same sort of stuff?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, I’m not really a Human Resources person – I don’t hire and fire, or motivate the troops, or deduct payroll taxes, or administer drug tests.’

  ‘Your name came up with Ticky – it was probably on the copy of my schedule she had.’

  ‘Probably,’ he said, not that eager to know what had been said, since HR people were rarely popular among other parts of the company, and he liked Ticky and her bunch sufficiently not to have his own sense of their friendship (well, professional friendliness anyway) disabused.

  ‘Ticky called you Renoir.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Don’t you have a Christian name?’

  ‘That’s no mystery – it’s Jack. I don’t know why, but Ticky just calls me Renoir.’

  ‘She said you don’t read thrillers.’

  ‘What?’

  She looked a little sheepish. ‘We didn’t talk business the whole time. She likes thrillers. You know, detective stories. So do I.’

  ‘I never knew that about Ticky.’

  ‘Why should you?’ she said. ‘Since you don’t like them. She said the irony was that you were the only person in the company who could be out of the pages of one.’

  ‘No,’ he said firmly, though he felt uneasy. ‘I like a quiet life.’ She shrugged to show it didn’t matter to her one way or another, then said, ‘She wasn’t being critical. She called you a straight shooter. It sounded pretty complimentary to me.’

  Embarrassed, he said, ‘I thought you weren’t paid to flatter.’

  The waiter came and took their plates away. ‘That was delicious,’ Kate exclaimed, and Renoir liked the way she could say this without inhibition. He rarely ate dessert, but because he didn’t want the lunch to end he ordered mango sorbet, then smiled when Kate ordered apple pie with vanilla ice-cream on top. ‘When I travel,’ she said with a little laugh, ‘I eat and eat and eat. Anyway, what do you do for the company when you’re not not giving tours?’

  ‘I’m in charge of Security.’ Her face was a beautiful blank he couldn’t read. Did she think he was in charge of locking the doors? ‘They should probably call it Insecurity.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘My job makes everyone uneasy. I vet all the new hires, or at least the ones who need security clearance. That’s pretty much everyone, since most of our business is with the Defense Department. They want level two clearance minimum on anyone working on their projects, and even the janitors get level one. I’m the guy who does the clearance.’

  ‘Really?’ she said, and he couldn’t tell if she was merely being polite. But she added, ‘Tell me, what exactly does that entail?’ And she said this so crisply, her prompting seemed so sincere, that he found himself describing what he did in detail: the interviews with the recruits and the follow-up ones with people from their past; the occasional polygraph when it was needed to reconcile the differences between the two; in extreme cases, the technology or ‘toys’ for everything from wiretaps to satellite surveillance to hacking into private PCs.

  Not of course that they didn’t find things, it was just that it was never evidence of espionage. Secrets were unearthed by the dozen; of course they were – there wasn’t a CV he’d seen in the last five years that didn’t hide something. Not always illegal, not necessarily grounds for disqualification from employment, but just something the person in question wanted to hide.

  Kate looked at him thoughtfully during this explanation, putting down her fork and propping her chin with one hand as he talked. When he paused she said coolly, ‘I imagine the actual searching through people’s lives gets pretty uninteresting after a while. It may give a little frisson when you catch your happily married programmer spending his down time in bed with a Chihuahua or whatever, but you’ve probably sat watching from a parked car for twelve hours in order to find that out. Aren’t most secrets pretty dismal anyway? I mean, are you ever surprised by what you find out about people?’

  She understands, he thought, this woman understands. For it was boring, almost mindless much of the time: the interviews were overwhelmingly routine; the technology, for all its whizbang innovation, was usually irrelevant and didn’t get used; the secrets unearthed were the squalid ones of private lives with not the remotest relation to national security. Yet he had dated more than one woman whose initial attraction was founded on an unsettling fascination with his work; they’d act as if Renoir were some latter-day Philip Marlowe, instead of a middle management buffer between the bureaucratic requirements of Federal contract dispensers and the money-making ambitions of a modern corporation.

  ‘Not very often,’ he said, at last remembering to answer her question. ‘It’s reached a point where I sometimes make a bet with myself when a new recruit shows up about what their secret is going to turn out to be. After all, how many secret vices are there? Booze? There are fewer and fewer educated alcoholics these days, at least among high-tech people. Drugs? More common, but usually people have cleaned up before they try and work in the industry – we test for drugs and so do almost all employers in the Valley. Sex? Well, yes, it’s the time-honoured favourite, and not about to go out of fashion. But this is California after all, where pretty much anything goes. Other than paedophilia I can’t think of anything out of bounds these days – I mean, that would disqualify you from employment. Adultery, homosexuality, S&M, group sex—’ he stopped, a little embarrassed by the litany. ‘Though once there was a FORTRAN programmer who turned out to have two wives.’

  She laughed, and, like her eating, her laugh was full of appetite, natural. ‘Surely that wasn’t grounds for disqualification,’ she said, and he found her voice so beautiful – it was straight out of a PBS import from the BBC – that he was tempted to ask her to say it again.

  She picked up her fork and examined it. ‘So you’ve seen it all? What’s the part you like best?’ she asked.

  He shrugged, disconcerted by the implication that he was somehow now above such things. ‘There’s always a surprise. I don’t get jaded, because the real thrill isn’t finding out what’s being hidden – after a while, that always comes out. The real thrill is matching it to what yo
u predict it will be. When that correlation gets to one to one, then I’ll be really jaded. It will be time to move on then.’

  ‘You mean, when you don’t even have to look any more? Because your predictions will always be correct.’ She said this with great amusement.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, impressed, and they both laughed at the absurdity of this.

  ‘So what’s the worst part?’

  He looked at her, feeling slightly abashed. ‘Telling people what I’ve found out about them.’ Her eyes stayed on him as he continued. ‘That’s the worst part; when they find out I know they’ve lied, and what they’ve lied about.’ Sometimes they’d get angry, that he found comparatively easy to take. Usually, however, they broke down; men and women, young and old, collapsing as their fabrications were exposed. Realising they wouldn’t be hired, the really desperate ones would even start to beg. He winced involuntarily at the memories.

  ‘I’d say you’re close to having done this job too long.’ She dropped her eyes towards her plate as she said this, which he was glad for since he didn’t know how to respond. What she said seemed at once disheartening and correct, but he didn’t want to be cast as some kind of oddball – a ‘character’ to sit in this English woman’s portfolio of unusual encounters. He realised how much he was drawn to her, though he couldn’t put his finger on what in her exactly made him feel so attracted. Yes, she was refreshingly intelligent, but God knows he worked with plenty of smart people. Unlike most of Silicon Valley, however, she wasn’t trying to act like Einstein. Her face was striking rather than beautiful, yet she was graceful in a lithe, unselfconscious way he found intensely sexy. There was something about her which suggested she was a class act and, he concluded, way out of his league.