[with Cory Doctorow]
The cops caught
Roscoe as he was tightening the butterfly bolts on the dish antenna
he’d pitoned into the rock face opposite the Canadian side of
Niagara Falls. They were state troopers, not Fed radio cops, and
they pulled their cruiser onto the soft shoulder of the freeway,
braking a few feet short of the soles of his boots. It took Roscoe
a moment to tighten the bolts down properly before he could let go
of the dish and roll over to face the cops, but he knew from the
crunch of their boots on the road salt and the creak of their cold
holsters that they were the law.
“Be right with you,
Officers,” he hollered into the gale-force winds that whipped along
the rock face. The antenna was made from a surplus pizza-dish
satellite rig, a polished tomato-soup can, and a length of coax
that descended to a pigtail with the right fitting for a wireless
card. All perfectly legal, mostly.
He tightened the last
of the bolts, squirted them with Loctite, and slid back on his
belly, off the insulated Therm-a-Rest he’d laid between his chest
and the frozen ground. The cops’ heads were wreathed in the steam
of their exhalations, and one of them was nervously flicking
his—no, her—handcuffs around on her
belt.
“Everything all
right, sir?” the other one said, in a flat upstate New York accent.
A townie. He stretched his gloved hand out and pulled Roscoe to his
feet.
“Yeah, just fine,” he
said. “I like to watch winter birds on the river. Forgot my binox
today, but I still got some good sightings.”
“Winter birds, huh?”
The cop was giving him a bemused look.
“Winter
birds.”
The cop leaned over
the railing and took a long look down. “Huh. Better you shouldn’t
do it by the roadside, sir,” he said. “Never know when someone’s
going to skid out and drive off onto the shoulder—you could be
crushed.” He waved at his partner, who gave them a hard look and
retreated into the steamy warmth of the cruiser. “All right, then,”
he said. “When does your node go up?”
Roscoe smiled and
dared a wink. “I’ll be finished aligning the dish in about an hour.
I’ve got line of sight from here to a repeater on a support on the
Rainbow Bridge, and from there down the Rainbow Street corridor.
Some good tall buildings there, line of sight to most of downtown,
at least when the trees are bare. Leaves and wireless don’t
mix.”
“My place is Fourth
and Walnut. Think you’ll get there?” Roscoe relaxed imperceptibly,
certain now that this wasn’t a bust.
“Hope so. Sooner
rather than later.”
“That’d be great. My
kids are e-mailing me out of house and home.” The cop looked
uncomfortable and cleared his throat. “Still, you might want to
finish this one then go home and stay there for a while. DA’s
Office, they’ve got some kind of hotshot from the FCC in town
preaching the gospel and, uh, getting heavy on bird-watchers. That
sort of thing.”
Roscoe sucked in his
lower lip. “I may do just that,” he conceded. “And thank you for
the warning.”
The cop waved as he
turned away. “My pleasure, sir.”
Roscoe drove home
slowly, and not just because of the snow and compacted slush on the
roads. A hotshot from the FCC sounded
like the inquisition come to town. Roscoe’s lifelong mistrust of
radio cops had metastasized into surging hatred three years ago,
when they busted him behind a Federal telecoms rap.
He’d lost his job and
spent the best part of six months inside, though he’d originally
been looking at a five-year contributory-infringement
stretch—compounded to twenty by the crypto running on the access
point under the “use a cypher, go to jail” statute—to second-degree
tariff evasion. His public defender had been worse than useless,
but the ACLU had filed an amicus on his behalf, which led the judge
to knock the beef down to criminal trespass and unlawful emission,
six months and two years’ probation, two years in which he wasn’t
allowed to program a goddamn microwave oven, let alone admin the
networks that had been his trade. Prison hadn’t been as bad for him
as it could have been—unwirers got respect—but, while he was
inside, Janice filed for divorce, and by the time he got out, he’d
lost everything he’d spent the last decade building—his marriage,
his house, his savings, his career. Everything except for the
unwiring.
It was this
experience that had turned him from a freewheeling geek into what
FCC Chairman Valenti called “one of the copyright crooks whose
illegal pirate networks provide safe havens to terrorists within
the homeland and abroad.” And so it was with a shudder and a glance
over his shoulder that he climbed the front steps and put his key
in the lock of the house he and Marcel rented.
Marcel looked up from
his laptop as Roscoe stamped through the living room.
“Slushy boots! For
chrissakes, Roscoe, I just cleaned.”
Roscoe turned to look
at the salty brown slush he’d tracked over the painted floor and
shook his head.
“Sorry,” he said,
lamely, and sat down on the floor to shuck his heavy steel-shank
Kodiaks. He carried them back to the doormat, then grabbed a roll
of paper towels from the kitchen and started wiping up the mess.
The landlord used cheap enamel paint on the floor, and the road
salt could eat through to the scuffed wood in half an
hour.
“And paper towels,
God, it’s like you’ve got a personal vendetta against the forests.
There’s a rag bag under the sink, as you’d know if you ever did any
cleaning around this place.”
“Ease the fuck off,
kid, you sound like my goddamned ex-wife,” Roscoe said, giving the
floor a vicious swipe. “Just ease back and let me do my thing, all
right? It didn’t go so good.”
Marcel set his
machine down reverently on the small hearthrug beside his Goodwill
recliner. “What happened?”
Roscoe quickly
related his run-in with the law. Marcel shook his head
slowly.
“I bet it’s bullshit.
Ever since Tijuana, everyone’s seeing spooks.” The ISPs on the
Tijuana side of the San Ysidro border crossing had been making good
coin off of unwirer sympathizers who’d pointed their antennae
across the chain-link fence. La Migra tried tightening the fence
gauge up to act as a Faraday cage, but they just went over it with
point-to-point links that were also resistant to the noise from the
2.4GHz light standards that the INS erected at its tollbooths.
Finally, the radio cops got tired of ferreting out the high-gain
antennae on the San Diego side, and they’d Ruby-Ridged the whole
operation, killing ten “terrorists” in a simultaneous strike with
Mexican narcs who’d raided the ISPs under the rubric of shutting
down narcotraficante activity. TELMEX
had screamed blue murder when their fiber had been cut by the
simple expedient of driving a backhoe through the main conduit, and
had pulled lineage all along the Rio Grande.
Roscoe shook his
head. “Bullshit or not, you going to take any chances?” He
straightened up slowly. “Believe me, there’s one place you don’t
want to go.”
“Okay, okay, I hear
what you’re saying.”
“I hope you do.”
Roscoe dumped the wad of towels in the kitchen trash and stomped
back into the living room, then dropped himself on the sofa.
“Listen, when I was your age I thought it couldn’t happen to me,
either. Now look at me.” He started thumbing his way through the
stack of old magazines on the coffee table.
“I’m looking at you.”
Marcel grinned. “Listen, there was a call while you were
out.”
“A call?” Roscoe
paused with his hand on a collector’s copy of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly.
“Some woman, said she
wanted to talk to you. I took her number.”
“Uh-huh.” Roscoe put
the magazine back down. Heads it’s Janice,
tails it’s her lawyer, he thought. It was shaping up to be
that kind of day; a tire-slashing and an hour of alimonial
recriminations would complete it neatly. Marcel pointed at the
yellow pad next to the elderly dial phone. “Ah, shit. I suppose I
should find out what it’s about.”
The number, when he
looked at it, wasn’t familiar. That didn’t mean much—Janice was
capable of moving, and her frothingly aggro lawyer seemed to carry
a new cellular every time he saw her—but it was hopeful. Roscoe
dialed. “Hello? Roscoe. Who am I talking to?”
A stranger’s voice:
“Hi there! I was talking to your roommate about an hour ago? I’m
Sylvie Smith. I was given your name by a guy called Buzz who told
me you put him on the backbone.”
Roscoe tensed. Odds
were that this Sylvie Smith was just another innocent kiddee
looking to leech a first-mile feed, but after this morning’s run-in
with the law, he was taking nothing for granted.
“Are you a
law-enforcement officer federal employee police officer lawyer FCC
or FBI agent?” he asked, running the words together, knowing that
if she was any of the above she’d probably lie—but it might help
sway a jury toward letting him off if he was targeted by a
sting.
“No.” She sounded
almost amused. “I’m a journalist.”
“Then you should be
familiar with CALEA,” he said, bridling at the condescension in her
voice. CALEA was the wiretap law, it required switch-vendors to put
snoopware into every hop in the phone network. It was bad enough in
and of itself, but it made the noncompliant routing code that was
built into the BeOS access points he had hidden in a bus locker
doubly illegal and hence even harder to lay hands on.
“Paranoid, much?” she
said.
“I have nothing to be
paranoid about,” he said, spelling it out like he was talking to a
child. “I am a law-abiding citizen, complying with the terms of my
parole. If you are a journalist, I’d be
happy to chat. In person.”
“I’m staying at the
Days Inn on Main Street,” she said. “It’s a dump, but it’s got a
view of the Falls,” she said in a hokey
secret-agent voice, making it plain that she meant, “It’s line of
sight to a repeater for a Canadian wireless router.”
“I can be there in
twenty,” he said.
“Room 208,” she said.
“Knock twice, then once, then three times.” Then she giggled. “Or
just send me an SMS.”
“See you then,” he
said.
Marcel looked up from
his machine, an IBM box manufactured for the US market. It was the
size of a family Bible, and styled for the corporate market. They
both lusted furiously after the brushed-aluminum slivers that Be
was cranking out in France, but those laptops were way too conspicuous here.
Roscoe pointed at the
wireless card protruding from the slot on the side nearest him.
“You’re violating security,” he said. “I could get sent up again
just for being in the same room as that.” He was past being angry,
though. In the joint, he’d met real crooks who could maintain real
project secrecy. The cowboy kids he worked with on the outside
thought that secrecy meant talking out of the side of your mouth in
conspiratorial whispers while winking Touretically.
Marcel blushed. “It
was a mistake, okay?” He popped the card. “I’ll stash
it.”
The Days Inn was
indeed a dump, and doubt nagged at Roscoe as he reached for the
front door. If she was a Fed, there might be more ways she could
nail him than just by arresting him in the same room as an illegal
wireless card. So Roscoe turned around and drove to a diner along
the block from the motel, then went inside to look for a wired
phone.
“Room 208, please . .
. Hi there. If you’d care to come outside, there’s a diner about
fifty yards down the road. Just turn left out of the lobby. I’m
already there.” He hung up before she could ask any awkward
questions, then headed for a booth by the window. Almost as an
afterthought, he pulled the copy of 2600 out of his pocket. The hacker magazine (shut
down by a court injunction last year) was a good recognition
signal—plus, having it didn’t violate the letter of his
parole.
Roscoe was halfway
down his first mug of coffee when someone leaned over him. “Hi,”
she said.
“You must be Sylvie.”
He registered a confused impression of bleached blond hair, brown
eyes, freckles. Must be straight out of
J-school. “Have a seat. Coffee?”
“Yes please.” She put
something like a key ring down, then waved a hand, trying to catch
the waitress’s eye. Roscoe looked at the key ring. Very black, very
small, very Nokia. Rumor said they were giving them away in cereal
boxes in France.
“Suppose you tell me
why you wanted to meet up,” Roscoe said quietly. “Up front. I can
tell you right now that I’m out on parole, and I’ve got no
intention of doing anything that puts me back inside.”
The waitress ambled
over, pad in hand. Sylvie ordered a coffee. “What were you charged
with?” she said. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
Roscoe snorted.
Score one for the cool lady—some folks
he’d met ran a mile the instant he mentioned being a con. “I was
accused of infringement with a side
order of black crypto, but plea-bargained it down to unlawful
emissions.” Score two—she smiled. It
was a weak joke, but it took some of the sting out of it. “Strictly
no-collar crime.” He took another mouthful of coffee. “So what is
it you’re doing up here?”
“I’m working on a
story about some aspects of unwiring that don’t usually make the
national press,” she said, as the waitress came over, empty mug in
one hand and jug in the other. Roscoe held his up for a
refill.
“Credentials?”
“I could give you a
phone number, but would you trust it?”
“Point.” Roscoe
leaned back against the elderly vinyl seat. Young, but cynical.
“Well,” she added, “I
can do better.” She pulled out a notepad and began scribbling.
“This is my editor’s name and address.
You can look up his number. If you
place a call and ask for him, you’ll get put through—you’re on the
list of interview subjects I left him. Next, here’s my—no,
an—e-mail address.” Roscoe blinked—it was a handle on a famous
Finnish anonymous remixer. “Get a friend to ping it and ask me
something.” It was worth five to twenty for black crypto—anonymity
was the FCC’s worst nightmare about the uncontrolled net. “Finally,
here’s my press pass.”
“Okay, I’ll check
these out.” He met her eyes. “Now, why don’t you tell me why the
Wall Street Journal is interested in a
burned-out ex-con and ex-unwirer, and we can take it from
there?”
She closed her eyes
for a moment. Then she dangled her key ring again, just a flash of
matte black plastic. “These are everywhere in Europe these days,
along with these.” She opened her purse, and he caught a glimpse of
a sliver of curved metal, like a boomerang, in the shape of the
Motorola batwing logo mark. “They’re meshing wireless repeaters.
Once you’ve got a critical mass, you can relay data from anywhere
to anywhere. Teenagers are whacking them up on the sides of
buildings, tangling them in tree branches, sticking them to their
windows. The telcos there are screaming blue murder, of course.
Business is down forty percent in Finland, sixty in France. Euros
are using the net for telephone calls, instant messaging,
file-sharing—the wireline infrastructure is looking more and more
obsolete every day. Even the ISPs are getting
nervous.”
Roscoe tried to hide
his grin. To be an unwirer in the streets of Paris, operating with
impunity, putting the telcos, the Hollywood studios, and the ISPs
on notice that there was no longer any such thing as a
“consumer”—that yesterday’s couch potatoes are today’s participants!
“We’ve got ten years’
worth of editorials in our morgue about the destruction of the
European entertainment and telco market and the wisdom of our
National Information Infrastructure here in the US, but it’s
starting to ring hollow. The European governments are ignoring the telcos! The device and services market
being built on top of the freenets is accounting for nearly half
the GDP in France. To hear my paper
describe it, though, you’d think they were starving in the streets:
it’s like the received wisdom about Canadian socialized health
care. Everyone knows it doesn’t
work—except for the Canadians, who think we’re goddamned
barbarians for not adopting
it.
“I just got back from
a month in the field in the EU. I’ve got interviews in the can with
CEOs, with street thugs, with grand-mothers, and with regulators,
all saying the same thing: unmetered communications are the secret
engine of the economy, of liberty. The highest-quality ‘content’
isn’t hundred-million-dollar movies; it’s conversations with other
people. Crypto is a tool of ‘privacy’ ”—she pronounced it in the
British way, “prihv-icy,” making the word seem even more alien to
his ears—“not piracy.”
“The unwirers are
heroes in Europe. You hear them talk, it’s like listening to a
course in US constitutional freedoms.
But here, you people are crooks, cable thieves, pirates, abettors
of terrorists. I want to change that.”
That evening, Marcel
picked a fight with Roscoe over supper. It started low key, as
Roscoe sliced up the pizza. “What are you planning this
week?”
Roscoe shifted two
slices onto his plate before he answered. “More dishes. Got a
couple of folks to splice in downtown if I want to hook up East
Aurora—there’re some black spots there, but I figure with some
QOS-based routing and a few more repeaters, we can clear them up.
Why?”
Marcel toyed with a
strand of cooling cheese. “It’s, like, boring. When are you going
to run a new fat pipe in?”
“When the current
one’s full.” Roscoe rolled a slice into a tube and bit into an end,
deftly turning the roll to keep the cheese and sauce on the other
end from oozing over his hand. “You know damn well the Feds would
like nothing better than to drive a ditch-witch through a fiber
drop from the border. ’Sides, got the journalist to think
about.”
“I could take over
part of the fiber-pull,” Marcel said.
“I don’t think so.”
Roscoe put his plate down.
“But I could—” Marcel
looked at him. “What’s wrong?”
“Security,” Roscoe
grunted. “Goddamnit, you can’t just waltz up to some guy who’s
looking at twenty-to-life and say, ‘Hi, Roscoe sent me, howzabout
you and me run some dark fiber over the border, huh?’ Some of the
guys in this game are, huh, you wouldn’t want to meet them on a
dark night. And others are just plain paranoid. They wouldn’t want
to meet you. Fastest way to convince
’em the FCC is trying to shut them down.”
“You could introduce
me,” Marcel said after a brief pause.
Roscoe laughed, a
short bark. “In your dreams, son.”
Marcel dropped his
fork, clattering. “You’re going to take your pet blonde on a
repeater splice and show her everything, and you’re afraid to let
me help you run a new fat pipe in? What’s the matter, I don’t smell
good enough?”
“Listen.” Roscoe
stood up, and Marcel tensed—but rather than move toward him, Roscoe
turned to the pizza box. “Get the Wall Street
Journal on our side, and we have some credibility. A crack
in the wall. Legitimacy. Do you know what that means, kid? You
can’t buy it. But run another fat pipe into town, and we have a
idle capacity, upstream dealers who want to know what the hell
we’re pissing around with, another fiber or laser link to lose to
cop-induced backhoe fade, and about fifty percent higher
probability of the whole network getting kicked over because the
mundanes will rat us out to the FCC over their TV reception. Do you
want that?” He picked another cooling pizza slice out of the box.
“Do you really want that?”
“What I want isn’t
important, is it, Ross? Not as important as you getting a chance to
fuck that reporter, right?”
“Up yours.” Roscoe
returned to his seat, shoulders set defensively. “Fuck you very
much.” They finished the meal in silence, then Roscoe headed out to
his evening class in conversational French. Marcel, he figured, was
just jealous because he wasn’t getting to do any of the
secret-agent stuff. Being an unwirer was a lot less romantic than
it sounded, and the first rule of unwiring was nobody talks about unwiring. Maybe Marcel would get
there one day, assuming his big mouth didn’t get everyone around
him arrested first.
Sylvie’s hotel room
had a cigarette-burns-and-must squalor that reminded Roscoe of
jail. “Bonjour, m’sieu,” she said as
she admitted him.
“Bon soir, madame,” he said. “Commentava?”
“Oy,” she said. “My
grandmother woulda said, ‘You’ve got a no-accent on you like a
Litvak.’ Lookee here, the treasures of the Left Bank.” She handed
him the Motorola batarang he’d glimpsed earlier. The underside had
a waxed-paper peel-off strip, and when he lifted a corner, his
thumb stuck so hard to the tackiness beneath that he lost the top
layer of skin when he pulled it loose. He turned it over in his
hands.
“How’s it
powered?”
“Dirt-cheap
photovoltaics charging a polymer cell—they’re printed in layers,
the entire case is a slab of battery plus solar cell. It doesn’t
draw too many amps, only sucks juice when it’s transmitting. Put
one in a subway car, and you’ve got an instant ad hoc network that
everyone in the car can use. Put one in the next car, and they’ll
mesh. Put one on the platform, and you’ll get connectivity with the
train when it pulls in. Sure, it won’t run for more than a few
hours in total darkness—but how often do folks network in the
blackout?”
“Shitfire,” he said,
stroking the matte finish in a way that bordered on the
erotic.
She grinned. She was
slightly snaggletoothed, and he noticed a scar on her upper lip
from a cleft-palate operation that must have been covered up with
concealer earlier. It made her seem more human, more vulnerable.
“Total cost of goods is about three euros, and Moto’s margin is
five hundred percent. But some Taiwanese knockoffs have already
appeared that slice that in half. Moto’ll have to invent something
new next year if it wants to keep that profit.”
“They will,” Roscoe
said, still stroking the batarang. He transferred it to his armpit
and unslung his luggable laptop. “Innovation is still legal there.”
The laptop sank into the orange bedspread and the soft mattress
beneath it.
“You could do some
real damage with one of these, I bet,” she said.
“With a thousand of
them, maybe,” he said. “If they were a little less
conspicuous.”
Her chest began to
buzz. She slipped a wee phone from her breast pocket and answered
it. “Yes?” She handed the phone to Roscoe. “It’s for you.” She made
a curious face at him.
He clamped it to his
ear. “Who is this?”
“Eet eez eye, zee
masked avenger, doer of naughty deeds and wooer of reporters’
hearts.”
“Marcel?”
“Yes,
boss.”
“You shouldn’t be
calling me on this number.” He remembered the yellow pad, sitting
on his bedside table. Marcel did all the dusting.
“Sorry, boss,” he
said. He giggled.
“Have you been
drinking?” Marcel and he had bonded over many, many beers since
they’d met in a bar in Utica, but Roscoe didn’t drink these days.
Drinking made you sloppy.
“No, no,” he said.
“Just in a good mood is all. I’m sorry we fought, darlin’, can we
kiss and make up?”
“What do you want,
Marcel?”
“I want to be in the
story, dude. Hook me up! I want to be famous!”
He grinned despite
himself. Marcel was good at fonzing dishes into place with one
well-placed whack, could crack him up when the winter slush was
turning his mood to pitch. He was a good kid, basically. Hothead.
Like Roscoe, once.
“C’mon c’mon c’mon,”
Marcel said, and he could picture the kid pogoing up and down in a
phone booth, heard his boots crunching on rock salt.
He covered the
receiver and turned to Sylvie, who had a bemused smirk that wasn’t
half-cute on her. “You wanna hit the road, right?” She nodded. “You
wanna write about how unwirers get made? I could bring along the
kid I’m ’prenticing-up, you like.” Through the cell phone, he heard
Marcel shouting, “Yes! Yes! YES!” and imagined the kid punching the
air and pounding the booth’s walls triumphantly.
“It’s a good angle,”
she said. “You want him along,
right?”
He held the receiver
in the air so that they could both hear the hollers coming down the
line. “I don’t think I could live with him if I didn’t take him,”
he said. “So yeah.”
She nodded and bit
her upper lip, just where the scar was, an oddly canine gesture
that thrust her chin forward and made her look slightly
belligerent. “Let’s do it.”
He clamped the phone
back to his head. “Marcel! Calm down, twerp! Breathe. Okay. You
gonna be good if I take you along?”
“So good, man, so
very very very very good, you won’t believe—”
“You gonna be
safe, I bring you along?”
“Safe as houses.
Won’t breathe without your permission. Man, you are the
best—”
“Yeah, I am. Four
o’clock. Bring the stuff.”
They hit the road
closer to five than four. It was chilly, and the gathering clouds
and intermittent breeze promised more snow after dark when Roscoe
parked outside the apartment. Marcel was ready and waiting,
positively jumping up and down as soon as Roscoe opened the door.
“Let’s go, man!”
Back in the cab,
Sylvie was making notes on a palmtop. “Hi,” she said guardedly,
making eye contact with Marcel.
“Hi yourself.” Marcel
smiled. “Where we going tonight, man? I brought the stuff.” He
dumped Roscoe’s toolbox and a bag containing a bunch of passive
repeaters on the bench seat next to him.
“We’re heading for
East Aurora.” Roscoe looked over his shoulder as he backed the
truck into the street, barely noticing Sylvie watching him.
“There’s a low hill there that’s blocking signal to the mesh near
Chestnut Hill, and we’re going to do something about
that.”
“Great!” Marcel
shuffled about to get comfortable as Roscoe cautiously drove along
the icy road. “Hey, isn’t there a microwave mast up
there?”
“Yeah.” Roscoe saw
Sylvie was making notes. “By the way, if you could keep from saying
exactly where we’re placing the repeaters? In your article?
Otherwise, FCC’ll just take ’em down.”
“Okay.” Sylvie put
her pocket computer down. It was one of those weird Brit designs
with the folding keyboards and built-in wireless that had trashed
Palm all over Europe. “So you’re going to, what? String a bunch of
repeaters along a road around the hillside?”
“Pretty much that,
exactly. Should only need two or three at the most, and it’s wooded
around there. I figure an hour for each, and we can be home by
nine, grab some Chinese on the way.”
“Why don’t we use the
microwave mast?” Marcel said.
“Huh?”
“The microwave mast,”
he repeated. “We go up there, we put one repeater on it, and we
bounce signal over the hill, no need to
go round the bushes.”
“I don’t think so,”
Roscoe said absently. “Criminal trespass.”
“But it’d save time!
And they’d never look up there, it’ll look just like any other
phone-company dish—”
Roscoe sighed. “I am
so not hearing this.” He paused for a few seconds, merging with
another lane of traffic. “Listen, if we get caught climbing a tree
by the roadside, I can drop the cans and say I was bird-spotting.
They’ll never find them. But if I get caught climbing a
phone-company microwave tower, that is criminal trespass,
and they’ll probably nail me for felony
theft of service, and felony possession of unlicensed
devices—they’ll find the cans for sure, it’s like a parking lot
around the base of those things—and parole breach. I’ll be back in
prison while you’re still figuring out how to hitchhike home. So
enough about saving time, okay? Doing twenty to life is not saving
time.”
“Okay,” Marcel said,
“we’ll do it your way.” He crossed his arms and stared out the
window at the passing trees under their winter caul of
snow.
“How many unwirers
are there working in the area?” Sylvie said, breaking the
silence.
Marcel said, “Just
us,” at the same moment as Roscoe said, “Dozens.” Sylvie
laughed.
“We’re solo,” Roscoe
said, “but there are lots of other solos in the area. It’s not a
conspiracy, you know—more like an
emergent form of democracy.”
Sylvie looked up from
her palmtop. “That’s from a manifesto, isn’t it?”
Roscoe pinked.
“Guilty as charged. Got it from Barlow’s Letters from Prison. I read a lot of prison lit.
Before I went into the joint.”
“Amateurs plagiarize,
artists steal,” she said. “Might as well steal from the best.
Barlow talks a mean stick. You know he wrote lyrics for the
Grateful Dead?”
“Yeah,” Roscoe said.
“I got into unwiring through some deadhead tape-traders who were
importing open recorders from Germany to tape to shows. One of them
hooked me up with—someone—who could get French networking gear. It
was just a few steps from there to fun-loving criminal, undermining
the body politic.”
Marcel came out of
his sulk when they got to the site. He loaded up his backpack and a
surveyor’s tripod and was the model of efficiency as he lined up
the bank shot around the hill that would get their signal out and
about.
Sylvie hung back with
Roscoe, who was taking all the gear through a series of tests,
using his unwieldy laptop and two homemade antennae to measure
signal strength. “Got to get it right the first time. Don’t like to
revisit a site after it’s set up. Dog returning to its vomit and
all.”
She took out her key
ring and dangled it in the path of the business end of the repeater
Roscoe was testing. “I’m getting good directional signal,” she
said, turning the key ring so he could see the glowing blue LEDs
arranged to form the distinctive Nokia “N.”
Roscoe reached for
the fob. “These are just wicked,” he
said.
“Keep it,” she said.
“I’ve got a few more in my room. They had a fishbowl full of them
on the reception desk in Helsinki. The more lights, the better the
signal.”
Roscoe felt an
obscure species of embarrassment, like he was a primitive, tacking
up tin cans and string around a provincial backwater of a country.
“Thanks,” he said, gruffly. “Hey, Marcel, you got us all lined
up?”
“Got
it.”
Only he didn’t. They
lined up the first repeater and tested it, but the signal drop-off
was near-total. Bad solder joints, interference from the microwave
tower, gremlins . . . Who knew? Sometimes a shot just didn’t work,
and debugging it in the frigid winter dusk wasn’t anyone’s idea of
a fun time.
“Okay, pass me the
next.” Roscoe breathed deeply as Marcel went back to the truck for
the other repeater. This one worked
fine. But it still left them with a problem. “Didn’t you bring a
third?” Roscoe asked.
“What for?” Marcel
shrugged. “I swear I tested them both back home—maybe it’s the cold
or something?”
“Shit.” Roscoe
stamped his feet and looked back at the road. Sylvie was standing
close to the truck, hands in her pockets, looking interested. He
glanced at the hill and the microwave mast on top of it. A light
blinked regularly, warm and red like an invitation.
“Why’n’t we try the
hill?” Marcel asked. “We could do the shot with only one repeater
from that high up.”
Roscoe stared at the
mast. “Let me think.” He picked up the working repeater and
shambled back to the truck cab absentmindedly, weighing the
options. “Come on.”
“What now?” asked
Sylvie, climbing in the passenger seat.
“I think.” Roscoe
turned the ignition key. “Kid has half a point. We’ve only got the
one unit, if we can stick it on the mast, it’ll do the job.” He
turned half-around in his seat to stare at Marcel. “But we are
not going to get caught, y’hear?” He
glanced at Sylvie. “If you think it’s not safe, I’ll give you a
lift home first. Or bail. It’s your call. Everyone gets a
veto.”
Sylvie stared at him
through slitted eyes. Then she whistled tunelessly. “It’s your ass.
Don’t get into this just because I’m watching.”
“Okay.” Roscoe put
the truck in gear. “You guys keep an eye out behind for any sign of
anything at all, anyone following us.” He pulled away slowly,
driving with excruciating care. “Marcel? Stick that bag under my
seat, will you?”
The side road up to
the crest of the hill was dark, shadowed by snow-laden trees to
either side. Roscoe took it slowly; a couple of times there was a
whine as the all-wheel drive cut in on the uncleared snow. “No fast
getaways,” Sylvie noted quietly.
“We’re not bank
robbers.” Roscoe shifted down a gear and turned into the driveway
leading to the mast. There was an empty parking lot at the end,
surrounded by a chain-link fence with a gate in it. On the other
side, the mast rose from a concrete plinth, towering above them
like a giant intrusion from another world. Roscoe pulled up and
killed the lights. “Anyone see anything?”
“No,” said Marcel
from the backseat.
“Looks okay to—hey,
wait!” Sylvie did a double take. “Stop! Don’t open the
door!”
“Why—” Marcel
began.
“Stop. Just stop.”
Sylvie seemed agitated, and right then Roscoe, his eyes recovering
from headlight glare, noticed the faint shadows. “Marcel,
get down!”
“What’s up?” Marcel
asked.
“Crouch down! Below
window level!” She turned to Roscoe. “Looks like you were
right.”
“I was right?” Roscoe
looked past her. The shadows were getting sharper, and now he could
hear the other vehicle. “Shit. We’ve been—” He reached toward the
ignition key and Sylvie slapped his hand away. “Ouch!”
“Here.” She leaned
forward, sparing a glance for the backseat, where Marcel was
crouching down. “Make it look like you mean it.”
“Mean what—” Roscoe
got it a moment before she kissed him. He responded automatically,
hugging her as the truck cab flooded with light.
“You! Out of the—oh, geez.” The amplified voice, a
woman’s voice, trailed off. Sylvie and Roscoe turned and blinked at
the spotlights mounted on the gray Dodge van as its doors
opened.
Sylvie wound down the
side window and stuck her head out. “I don’t know what you think
you’re doing, but you can fuck right off!” she yelled. “Fucking
voyeurs!”
“This is private
property,” came the voice. “You’ll have to get a room.” Boots
crunched on the road salt. A holster creaked. Roscoe held his
breath.
“Very funny,” Sylvie
said. “All right, we’re going.”
“Not yet, you
aren’t,” the voice said again, this time without the amplification,
much closer. Roscoe looked in the rearview at the silhouette of the
woman cop, flipping her handcuffs on her belt, stepping carefully
on the ice surface. In her bulky parka, she could have been any
state trooper, but the way she flipped her cuffs—
“Go go go,” hissed
Marcel from the backseat. “Vite!”
“Sit tight,” Sylvie
said.
From the backseat, a
click. A gun being cocked. Roscoe kept his eyes on the rearview,
and mumbled, “Marcel, if that is a gun I just heard, I am going to
shove it up your fucking ass and pull the trigger.”
Roscoe rolled down
his window. “Evening, Officer,” he said. Her face was haloed by the
light bouncing off her breath’s fog, but he recognized her. Had
seen her, the day before, while hanging off the edge of the gorge,
aiming an antenna Canadawards.
“Evening, sir,” she
said. “Evening, ma’am. Nice night, huh? Doing some
bird-watching?”
Made. Roscoe’s
testicles shriveled up and tried to climb into his abdomen. His
feet and hands weren’t cold, they were numb. He couldn’t have moved if he tried. He
couldn’t go back—
Another click. A
flashlight. The cop shined it on Sylvie. Roscoe turned. The
concealer was smudged around her scar.
“Officer, really, is
this necessary?” Sylvie’s voice was exasperated, and had a
Manhattan accent she hadn’t had before, one that made her sound
scary-aggro. “It was just the heat of the moment.”
Roscoe touched his
lips and his finger came back with a powdering of concealer and a
smudge of lipstick.
“Yes, ma’am, it is.
Sir, could you step out of the car, please?”
Roscoe reached for
his seat belt, and the flashlight swung toward the backseat. The
cop’s eyes flickered behind him, and then she slapped for her
holster, stepping back quickly. “Everyone hands where I see them.
NOW!”
Fucking Marcel.
Jesus.
She was still
fumbling with her holster, and there was the sound of the car door
behind her opening. “Liz?” a voice called. The other cop, her
partner. Fourth and Walnut. “Everything okay?”
She was staring
wide-eyed now, panting out puffs of steam. Staring at the rear
window. Roscoe looked over his shoulder. Marcel had a small pistol,
pointed at her.
“Drive, Roscoe,” he
said. “Drive fast.”
Moving as in a dream,
he reached for the ignition. The engine coughed to life, and he
slammed it into gear, cranking hard on the wheel, turning away from
the cop, a wide circle through the empty parking lot that he came
out of in an uncontrolled fishtail, swinging back and forth on the
slick pavement.
He regained control
as they crested the ridge and hit the downhill slope back to the
highway. Behind him, he heard the cop car swing into the chain-link
fence, and in his rearview mirror, he saw the car whirling across
the ice on the parking lot, its headlights moving in slow circles.
It was mesmerizing, but Sylvie’s gasp snapped him back to his
driving. They were careening down the hill now, tires whining for
purchase, threatening to fishtail, picking up speed.
He let out an
involuntary eep and touched the brakes,
triggering another skid. The truck hit the main road still
skidding, but now they had road salt under the rubber, and he
brought the truck back under control and floored it, switching off
his headlights, running dark on the dark road.
“This isn’t safe,”
Sylvie said.
“You said, ‘Drive
fast,’ ” Roscoe said, hammering the gearbox. He sounded hysterical,
even to his own ears. He swallowed. “It’s not far.”
“What’s not far?” she
said.
“Shut up,” he said.
“Okay? We’ve got about five minutes before their backup arrives.
Seven minutes until the chopper’s in the sky. Need to get off the
road.”
“The safe house,”
Marcel said.
“SHUT UP,” Roscoe
said, touching the brakes. They passed an oncoming car that blinked
its high beams at them. Yes, driving with my
lights off, thank you, Roscoe thought.
Roscoe hadn’t been to
the safe house in a year. It was an old public park whose jungle
gym had rusted through and killed a kid eighteen months before.
He’d gone there to scout out a good repeater location and found
that the public toilet, behind the chain-link fence, was still
unlocked. He kept an extra access point there, a blanket, a change
of clothes, a first-aid kit, and a fresh license plate,
double-bagged in kitchen garbage bags stashed in the drop
ceiling.
He parked the truck
outside the fence, snugged up between the bushes that grew on one
side and the chain link. They were invisible from the road. He got
out of the truck quickly.
“Marcel, get the
camper bed,” he said, digging a crowbar out from under his seat and
passing it to him.
“What are you going
to do?” Sylvie asked.
“Help me,” he said,
unlatching the camper and grabbing a tarpaulin. “Unfold this on the
ground there, and pile the stuff I pass you on top of
it.”
He unloaded the truck
quickly, handing Sylvie the access points, the repeaters, the
toolboxes and ropes and spray cans of camou colors. “Make a bundle
of it,” he said, once the truck was empty. “Tie the corners
together with the rope. Use the grommets.”
He snatched the
crowbar away from Marcel and went to work on the remaining nuts
holding down the camper bed. When he had the last one undone, he
jammed the pry end of the bar between the lid and the truck and
levered it off the bed. It began to slide off, and he grunted, “Get
it,” to Marcel, but it was Sylvie who caught the end.
“Over the fence,” he
gasped, holding up his end while he scrambled into the back of the
truck. They flipped it over together, and it landed upside
down.
A car rolled past.
They all flinched, but it kept going. Roscoe thought it was a cop
car, but he couldn’t be sure. He stilled his breathing and listened
for the chop-chop of a helicopter, and thought that, yes, he heard
it, off in the distance, but maybe getting closer.
“Marcel, give me that
fucking gun,” he said, with deceptive calmness.
Marcel looked down at
the snow.
“I will cave in your
skull with this rod if you don’t hand me your gun,” he said,
hefting the crowbar. “Unless you shoot me,” he said.
Marcel reached into
the depths of his jacket and produced the pistol. Roscoe had never
handled a pistol, and he was surprised by its weight—heavier than
it looked, lighter than he’d thought it would be.
“Over the fence,” he
said. “All of us.” He put the gun in his pocket. “Marcel
first.”
Marcel opened his
mouth.
“Not a word,” Roscoe
said. “If you say one goddamned word, either of you, you’re out.
We’re quits. Fence.”
Marcel went over the
fence first, landing atop the camper bed. Then Sylvie, picking her
way down with her toes jammed in the chain link. Roscoe set down
the crowbar quietly and followed.
“Roscoe,” Sylvie
said. “Can you explain this to me?”
“No,” Roscoe said.
“Sylvie, you stay here and cover the camper bed with snow. Kick it
over. As much as you can. Marcel, with me.”
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.”
He aimed the flashlight to emphasize his point.
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. It was a
start.
Sylvie had covered
the bottom third of the camper bed, and her gloves and boots were
caked with snow. Roscoe set down the trash bag and helped her, and
after a moment, Marcel pitched in. Soon they had the whole thing
covered.
“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, and he was breathing normally.
“Here’s the plan,” he
said. “I’m going to swap the license plates and drive into town.
Sylvie lies down on the backseat. They’re looking for a truck with
three people in it and a camper bed. Marcel, you’re walking. It’s a
long walk. There’re some chemical hot-pads in the first-aid kit.
Stuff them in your boots and mitts. Don’t let anyone see you. Find
somewhere to hide until tomorrow, then we’ll meet at the Donut
House near the Rainbow Bridge, eight a.m., okay?”
Marcel nodded mutely.
The snow was falling harder now, clouds dimming the
moonlight.
Roscoe dug out the
hot pads and tossed them to him. “Go,” he said. “Now.”
Wordlessly, Marcel
climbed the fence and started slogging toward the
highway.
They watched his back
recede, then Roscoe jumped the fence with the trash bag. He dropped
it in the back of the truck and hauled his tarpaulin bundle back to
the playground side, then dragged it into the bathroom. It was too
heavy to get into the drop ceiling, and the drag marks in the fresh
snow were like a blinking arrow anyway. He left it on the
floor.
He 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.
Sylvie climbed into
the truck. Roscoe sat for a minute, concentrating on getting a grip
on himself.
He drove slowly,
starting every time he saw moving shadows, the headlights of other
vehicles. One time the road took a bend, and he passed a police
car, stationary on the shoulder. He nearly jumped out of his skin,
but forced back the urge to put his foot down or even turn his
head. Give no sign, he told
himself.
Sylvie sighed as the
police car vanished in the rearview. “You’re going to go to the
rendezvous, like you told him?” she asked.
“Yeah. More than the
little shit deserves, but I owe him that much. We’ve got to sort
this out together.” He tapped the steering wheel. “I’ll have to
ditch the truck.”
“No.”
Roscoe stared at her.
Sylvie’s face was half in shadow, half a flat orange washout from
the streetlamps. “I don’t trust him. I think he’s a
provo.”
“What?” Roscoe shook
his head then looked back at the road. “He’s young, is all. A bit
young.” They were not far from Main Street, and he began looking
around for somewhere to park the truck. “Listen, we’re going to
have to walk a ways. You up to an hour on foot?”
“A hike in the dark?
Yeah, I guess so.” Sylvie sniffed. “If you go to that 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. “Open the
glove box. There’s a can of foam cleaner and some wipes inside.
Pass ’em over.”
“If you want.” She
sounded resigned. Roscoe focused on polishing the wheel and
gearshift handle. Old prints he didn’t care about, but he didn’t
want to leave fresh ones. “There have been arrests you haven’t
heard about.”
Roscoe opened his
door and climbed out. The air was freezingly cold, trying to suck
the life from his face and lungs. He picked up the trash bag from
the back and paused, about to close the door. Instead he left it
open, forcing himself to leave the keys dangling enticingly in the
ignition. “You coming?” he asked.
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 that
won’t talk to us. We tried FOIA notices and got denied. Dennis had
no record of violent offenses, like you, he was just an unwirer,
but they charged him with attempted murder of a Federal agent, then
stuck him in a hole so deep we can’t find him.”
Roscoe slowed,
hearing her panting for breath.
“Secret trials, Roscoe, special terrorism courts.
They don’t call them that, but all the records are sealed, and I
can’t even find the defense attorneys in the goddamn phone book. ’S
a woman called Caitlin Delaney in Washington State. They found
kiddie porn in her house and 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 just happened to have 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, did you know that? But I made some phone calls from pay
phones to local stringers, had them do some digging. Unwirers are
disappearing. Their turf gets too visibly unwired, 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 just vanish.”
She took his hand and
stopped. Roscoe felt himself halt. His shoulders were tense and the
lining of his jacket felt icy-slick with freezing sweat. “What do
you want?”
Her breath steamed in
the air before him. “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. “Look, come up to my room. We can discuss it
there.”
The Days Inn was a
hell of a lot closer than the Rainbow Bridge, that was for sure.
Being scared half out of his skin and on the run was exhausting,
and Roscoe was perversely grateful to Sylvie for leading him back
to the motel room, even though a nagging paranoid corner of his
head kept shrieking that she, not Marcel, was the agent pro
vocateur, that she’d get him into bed and G-men with signal meters
and search warrants would erupt from the closet—
But it wasn’t like
that, it wasn’t like that at all.
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 it,
actually: what he noticed was waking up to the dim red glow of the
alarm clock’s flickering digits, Sylvie’s face limned against the
pillow next to him with the incipient glow of hellfire, digits
flickering toward seven o’clock and an appointment with an
uncertain future.
“Hey. Wake
up.”
“Mm-hum.” Sylvie
rolled toward him for a warm moment, then her eyes opened. “We
didn’t?” She looked hopeful.
“Not yet.” He ran one
hand along her back, cupping her buttocks with a sense of gratified
astonishment. How did this happen to
us? he wondered, a thought that always hit him between the
eyes when he found himself in bed with a new woman. It’s been a long time.
Her gaze traveled
past him, settling on the clock. “Oh shit.” She hugged him, then
pulled back. “There’s never enough time. Later?”
“After the meet-up,
when I know if it’s safe to go—”
“Shut up.” She leaned
over and kissed him hard, almost angrily. “This is so
unprofessional—look, if I’m wrong I apologize, all right? But if
you go there, I think you’re walking into a sting. I don’t think
you should go near the place. 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 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.”
Signal strength near
the bridge was good. Roscoe just glommed his repeater onto a
streetlamp above eye level, to boost the final hundred yards to the
block. “They’ll spot it immediately, probably take it down later
today,” he said. “Hope this is worth it.”
“It will be,” she
reassured him fiercely, before striding away toward the donut
joint. He stared after her, a slim figure bundled in improbable
layers of cold-weather gear, and resisted the impulse to run after.
If the cops were looking for anyone it’d be him, a known parole
violator, not a single young female on the far side of the road.
Plan was to fasten the cam to the back of a road sign opposite the
doorway, use plastic zipstrips to keep it on target. He glanced at
his watch: seven zero seven hours. Cutting it
fine, if it’s a stakeout . . .
Roscoe took a walk
around the block, stamping his feet against the chill, trying not
to dwell on the unpleasant possibilities. His heart gave a little
lurch as he came back around the alleyway and saw Sylvie walking
back down the street toward him, but she was smiling and as she
caught up with him she grabbed his arm. “Come on, there’s a
Starbucks on the next block,” she said.
“I hate Starbucks,” he complained.
“Yeah, but it’s
indoors and off the street,” she explained. “So you’re going to put
up with it this once, okay?”
“Okay.”
They shed gloves and
caps as they went in past the Micronet booths and the pastry
counter. Sylvie ordered a couple of large lattes. “Is the mezzanine
open?” she asked.
“Sure, go on up.” The
gum-chewing barista didn’t even look up.
At the top of the
stairs, in a dark corner well back from the shop front, Sylvie
produced her phone and began fiddling with it. “Let’s see. Ah . . .
uh-huh. Here it is.” She turned it so he could see the tiny color
display. The front of the donut shop was recognizable. “It does
voice over IP, too; lots of people use these instead of laptops.
What time do you make it?”
“Seven thirty.” A
gray minivan 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? What’s Marcel doing with—” He
stopped. Further comments seemed redundant.
“Let’s see who else
turns up,” Sylvie suggested, sipping her latte.
Marcel went into 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,
hurrying down the alley at the side of the store.
Nothing happened for
a couple of minutes, then a police car pulled up. Two uniforms got
out, but as they headed for the door one of the trench coats came
out. Words were exchanged, and angry gestures. The uniforms went
back to their car and drove away: the trench coat headed back
inside. Sylvie sniffed. “Serve ’em right, stopping for donuts on
your tax dollars.”
Roscoe tensed. “I
think you were right,” he said slowly.
Sylvie beamed at him.
“Oh, you ain’t seen nothing yet!”
It was five minutes
to eight. Roscoe went downstairs for another coffee, his feet
dragging. Everything was closing in, going night marishly wrong.
I’m screwed, he thought. Gotta run—
“Roscoe?”
“Coming.” He turned
back and hurried upstairs. “What is it?”
“Watch.” She pointed
the phone display where 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. Right?”
A man wearing a
jacket and cap climbed out of the cab. He looked a bit like Roscoe,
if you were watching via a covert webcam from across the street. He
turned and looked at the camera, but he was too far from it for
Roscoe to see if he winked or not. Then he turned and went
in.
Trench coats boiled
out from behind trash cans like so many black leather cockroaches.
They swarmed the truck and blocked the doorway and two of them with
guns and warrant cards drawn covered the parking lot. There was
chaos and motion for almost a minute, then another trench coat
barreled out of the door and started yelling instructions at them.
The guns vanished. Marcel appeared in the doorway behind him,
pointing. Two of the trench coats began to cross the road, heading
toward the camera.
“I think that’s
enough,” said Sylvie, and killed the feed. Then she hit one of the
speed-dial buttons on her phone. It rang twice. “Bonjour. Où est le—”
Roscoe shook his
head. He felt approximately the way he imagined a tuna fish might
feel with a wooden deck under one flank and the cruel sun beating
mercilessly down on the other, gills gasping in a medium they’d
never evolved to survive exposure to. Sylvie was speaking in
rapid-fire French, arguing with somebody by the sound of it, while
he was drowning on dry land.
Sylvie finished her
call and closed her phone with a snap. She laid her hand across
his. “You’re okay,” she said, smiling.
“Huh?” Roscoe
started, setting the empty coffee cups aside.
“That was the French
consulate in Toronto. I set it up in advance so they’d see the
webcam. My editor, too. If you can cross over into Canada and get
to the consulate, you’ve got diplomatic asylum, genuine refugee
status.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small box; it
unfolded like intricate 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,
Roscoe. 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. “My editor got into the game
because of Water-gate. He’s been burning for a break like this ever
since.”
Roscoe sat and stared
at her dumbly.
“Cheer up! You’re
going to be famous—and they won’t be able to put you away! 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 in the lot next door
to the Days Inn. While I’m at it, can you sign these?” She thrust a
bundle of papers at him and winced apologetically. “Exclusive
contract with the Wall Street Journal.
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 cafe 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 terribly, awfully young, 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. He’d put on twenty pounds, and when he did the
billboard ads for Be, Inc. and Motorola, they had to strap him into
a girdle. LE CHOIX AMÉRICAIN in bold sans-serif letters underneath
a picture of him scaling a building side with a Moto batarang
clenched in his teeth.
Truth be told, he
couldn’t even keep up with it all. 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 stern French and 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 throng and thrum of the city
and the net 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,
back on the inside, in maximum security, pacing the yard in
solitary stillness.
He 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 bedstand, 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 Simon and Schuster and St. Martin’s until three a.m. last
night. I’m hot shit. 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 dollars in DARPA
grants to study TCP/IP, another to repeal the terrorism statutes on
network activity, and a compulsory license on movies and music
online. God! If only you could see it.”
“That’s—amazing,”
Roscoe said. He pictured her in the cab on the way to Grand
Central, headset screwed in, fixing her makeup, 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 even to him.
“What?” There was a
blare of taxi horns. “Oh, crap, Roscoe, I’m sorry. It’ll work out,
you’ll see. Clemency or 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 six thousand 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.
He had six bars on
his phone, and Paris was lit up with invisible radio waves, lit up
with coverage and innovation and smart, trim boys and girls who
thought he was a hero, and six thousand 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, 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.
Afterword—“Unwirer”“Unwirer” was written as a collaboration between Cory Doctorow and me. It developed in 2003 in response to an anthology editor looking for alternate-history stories about science and technology. In this case, the particular departure we picked on was a legislative one. Back in the 1990s, when the music and film industries were just getting alarmed at this new fangled Internet thing, a number of really bad laws were proposed—ones that would have effectively gutted not only US use of the Internet but all comparable communications technologies. But leaving aside all ideological assertions to the effect that information wants to be free, people like to communicate. So what would things be like if open Internet access were as illegal as, say, cannabis?