Sixty Days and Counting. Kim Stanley Robinson

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СКАЧАТЬ – like I said. About the election results, and that program I gave you. From my friend. What happened?’

      Edgardo grinned under his moustache. ‘We foxed that program. We forestalled it. You could say that we un-stole the vote in Oregon, right in the middle of the theft.’

      ‘We did?’

      ‘Apparently so. The program was a stochastic tilt engine, that had been installed in some of Oregon and Washington’s voting machines. My friends figured that out and managed to write a disabler, and to get it introduced at the very last minute, so there wasn’t any time for the people who had installed the tilter to react to the change. From the sounds of it, a very neat operation.’

      Frank ran along feeling a glow spread through him as he tried to comprehend it. Not only the election, de-rigged and made honest – not only Phil Chase elected by a cleaned-up popular and electoral vote – but his Caroline had proved true. She had risked herself and come through for the country; for the world, really. And so –

      Maybe she would come through for him too.

      This train of thought led him through the glow to a new little flood of fear for her.

      Edgardo saw at least some of this on his face, apparently, for he said, ‘So your friend is the real thing, eh?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘It could get tricky for her now,’ Edgardo suggested. ‘If the tweakers try to find the leakers. As we used to say at DARPA.’

      ‘Yeah,’ Frank said, his pulse rate rising at the thought.

      ‘You’ve sent a warning?’

      ‘I would if I could.’

      ‘Ah!’ Edgardo was nodding. ‘Gone away, has she?’

      ‘Yes,’ Frank said; and then it was all pouring out of him. He found himself telling Edgardo the whole story, of how they had met and what had followed. This was something he had never managed to do with anyone, not even Rudra or Anna, and now it felt as if some kind of hydrostatic pressure had built up inside him, his silence like a dam that had now failed and let forth a flood.

      It took a few miles to tell. The meeting in the stuck elevator, the unsuccessful hunt for her, the sighting of her on the Potomac during the flood, the brief phone call with her – her subsequent call – their meetings, their – affair.

      And then, her revealing the surveillance program she was part of, in which Frank and so many others, including Edgardo, were being tracked and evaluated in some kind of virtual futures market, in which investors, some of them computer programs, were making speculative investments, as in any other futures markets, but this time dealing in scientists doing certain kinds of biotech research.

      And then how she had had to run away on election night, and how on that night he had helped her to evade her husband and his companions, who were now clearly correlated with the attempted election theft.

      Edgardo bobbed along next to him as he told the tale, nodding at each new bit of information, lips pursed tightly, head tilted to the side. It was like confessing to a giant praying mantis.

      ‘So,’ he said at last. ‘Now you’re out of touch with her?’

      ‘That’s right. She said she’d call me, but she hasn’t.’

      ‘But she will have to be very careful, now that her husband knows that you exist.’

      ‘Yes. But – will he be able to identify who I am, do you think?’

      ‘I think that’s very possible, if he has access to her work files. Do you know if he does?’

      ‘She worked for him.’

      ‘So. And he knows that someone was helping her that night.’

      ‘More than one person, actually, because of the guys in the park.’

      ‘Yes. That might help you, by muddying the waters. But still, say he goes through her records to find out who she has been in contact with – will he find you?’

      ‘I was one of the people she had under surveillance.’

      ‘But there will be a lot of those. Anything more?’

      Frank tried to remember. ‘I don’t know,’ he confessed. ‘I thought we were being careful, but.…’

      ‘Did she call you on your phone?’

      ‘Yes, a few times. But only from pay phones.’

      ‘But she might have been chipped at the time.’

      ‘She tried to be careful about that.’

      ‘Yes, but it didn’t always work, isn’t that what you said?’

      ‘Right. But –’ Remembering back – ‘I don’t think she ever said my name.’

      ‘Well – if you were ever both chipped at the same time, maybe he would be able to see when you got together. And if he sourced all your cell phone calls, some would come from pay phones, and he might be able to cross-GPS those with her.’

      ‘Are pay phones GPSed?’

      Edgardo glanced at him. ‘They stay in one spot, which you can then GPS.’

      ‘Oh. Yeah.’

      Edgardo cackled and waved an elbow at Frank as they ran. ‘There’s lots of ways to find people! There’s your acquaintances in the park, for instance. If he went out there and asked around, with a photo of you, he might be able to confirm.’

      ‘I’m just Professor Nosebleed to them.’

      ‘Yes, but the correlations … So,’ Edgardo said after a silence had stretched out a quarter mile or more. ‘It seems like you probably ought to take some kind of pre-emptive action.’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘Well. You followed him to their apartment, right?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Not your wisest move of that night, by the way.’

      Frank didn’t want to explain that his capacity for decision-making had been possibly injured, and perhaps not good to begin with.

      ‘– but now we can probably use that information to find out his cover identity, for a start.’

      ‘I don’t know the address.’

      ‘Well, you need to get it. Also the names on the doorbell plate, if there are any. But the apartment number for sure.’

      ‘Okay, I’ll go back.’

      ‘Good. Be discreet. With that information, my friends could help you take it further. Given what’s happened, they might give it a pretty high priority, to find out who he really works for.’

      ‘And СКАЧАТЬ