Sixty Days and Counting (2 page)

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, 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, wherein 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 preemptive 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 who do your friends work for?”

“Well. They’re scattered around. It’s a kind of internal check group.”

“And you trust them on this kind of stuff?”

“Oh yes.” There was a reptilian look in Edgardo’s eye that gave Frank a shiver.

I
N THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED,
Frank passed his hours feeling baffled, and, under everything else, afraid. Or maybe, he thought, the feeling would be better characterized as extreme anxiety. He would wake in the mornings, take stock, remember where he was: in the Khembali embassy house’s garden shed, with Rudra snoring up on the bed and Frank on his foam mattress on the floor.

The daylight slanting through their one window would usually have roused him. He would listen to Rudra’s distressed breathing, sit up and tap on his laptop, look at the headlines and the weather forecast, and Emersonforthe day.com:

We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man’s power is hooped in by a necessity which, by many experiments, he touches on every side until he learns its arc.

Maybe Emerson too had been hit on the head. Frank wanted to look into that. And he needed to look into Thoreau, too. Recently the keepers of the site had been posting lots of Henry David Thoreau, Emerson’s young friend and occasional handyman. Amazing that two such minds had lived at the same time, in the same town—even for a while the same house. Thoreau, Frank was finding in these morning reads, was the great philosopher of the forest at the edge of town, and as such extremely useful to Frank—often more so, dare he say it, than the old man himself.

Today’s Thoreau was from his journal:

I never feel that I am inspired unless my body is also. It too spurns a tame and commonplace life. They are fatally mistaken who think, while they strive with their minds, that they may suffer their bodies to stagnate in luxury or sloth. A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as his brain. We exaggerate the importance and exclusiveness of the headquarters. Do you suppose they were a race of consumptives and dyspeptics who invented Grecian mythology and poetry? The poet’s words are, “You would almost say the body thought!” I quite say it. I trust we have a good body then.

Except Thoreau
had
been a consumptive, active though he was in his daily life as a surveyor and wandering botanist. This passage had been written only two years before he died of tuberculosis, so he must have known by then that his lungs were compromised, and his trust in having a good body misplaced. For lack of a simple antibiotic, Thoreau had lost thirty years. Still he had lived the day, and paid ferocious attention to it, as a very respectable early scientist.

And so up and off! And up Frank would leap, thinking about what the New England pair had said, and would dress and slip out the door in a frame of mind to see the world and act in it. No matter how early he went out, he always found some of the old Khembalis already out in the vegetable garden they had planted in the backyard, mumbling to themselves as they weeded. Frank might stop to say hi to Qang if she were out there, or dip his head in the door to tell her whether he thought he would be home for dinner that night; that was hardly ever, but she liked it when he let her know.

Then off to Optimodal on foot, blinking dreamily in the morning light, Wilson Avenue all rumbly and stinky with cars on the way to work. The walk was a little long, as all walks in D.C. tended to be; it was a city built for cars, like every other city. But the walk forced him to wake up, and to look closely at the great number of trees he passed. Even here on Wilson, it was impossible to forget they lived in a forest.

Then into the gym for a quick workout to get his brain fully awake—or as fully awake as it got these days. There was something wrong there. A fog in certain areas. He found it was easiest to do the same thing every day, reducing the number of decisions he had to make. Habitual action was a ritual that could be regarded as a kind of worship of the day. And it was so much easier.

Sometimes Diane was there, a creature of habit also, and uneasily he would say hi, and uneasily she would say hi back. They were still supposed to be rescheduling a dinner to celebrate the salting of the North Atlantic, but she had said she would get back to him about a good time for it, and he was therefore waiting for her to bring it up, and she wasn’t. This was adding daily to his anxiety. Who knew what anything meant, really.

Then at work, Diane ran them through their paces as they produced the action plan that she thought was their responsibility to the new president. They were to lay out the current moment of the abrupt climate change they were experiencing, and discuss in full whether there was any way back out of it—and if there was, what kind of policies and activities might achieve it.

One thing that she had no patience for was the idea that having restarted the Gulf Stream, they were now out of the woods. She shook her head darkly when she saw this implied in communications from other agencies, or in the media. It did not help that they were suddenly experiencing a warm spell unlike anything that had happened the previous year, when the long winter had clamped down in October and never let up until May. This year, after several hard freezes, they were experiencing a balmy and almost rain-free Indian summer. Everyone wanted to explain it by the restoration of the Gulf Stream, and there may even have been some truth to that, but there was no way to be sure. Natural variation had too great an amplitude to allow for any such one-to-one correspondence of climatic cause and effect, although unfortunately this was something the climate skeptics and carbon supporters were also always saying, so that it was tricky for Diane to try to make the distinction.

But she was persistent, even adamant. “We have to put the Gulf Stream action to one side, and take a look at all the rest of it,” she commanded. “Chase is going to need that from us to go forward.”

Back in his office, therefore, Frank would sit at his desk, staring at his list of Things To Do. But all in a vain attempt to take his mind off Caroline.

Ordinarily the list would be enough to distract anyone. Its length and difficulty made it all by itself a kind of blow to the head. It induced an awe so great that it resembled apathy. They had done so much and yet there was so much left to do. And as more disasters blasted into the world, their Things To Do list would lengthen. It would never shorten. They were like the Dutch boy sticking his finger into the failing dike. What had happened to Khembalung was going to happen everywhere.

But there would still be land above water. There would still be things to be done. One had to try.

Caroline had spoken of her Plan B as if she had confidence in it. She must have had a place to go, a bank account, that sort of thing.

Frank checked out the figures from the oceanography group. The oceans covered about seventy percent of the globe. About two hundred million square kilometers, therefore, and in the wake of the first really big chunks of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet floating away, sea level was reported to have risen about twenty centimeters. The oceanographers had been measuring sea level rise a millimeter at a time, mostly from water warming up and expanding, so they were blown away and spoke of this twenty centimeters’ rise as of a Noah’s flood. Kenzo was simply bursting with amazement and pride.

Back-of-the-envelope calculation: .2 meters times the two hundred million square kilometers, was that forty thousand cubic kilometers? A lot of water. Measurements from the last few years had Antarctica losing a hundred and fifty cubic kilometers a year, with thirty to fifty more coming off Greenland. So, now about two hundred years’ worth had come off in one year. No wonder they were freaking out. The difference no doubt lay in the fact that the melt before had been actual melting, whereas now what was happening was a matter of icebergs breaking off their perch and sliding down into the ocean. Obviously it made a big difference in how fast it could happen.

Frank brought the figures in with him to the meeting of Diane’s strategic group scheduled for that afternoon, and listened to the others make their presentations. They were interesting talks, if daunting. They took his mind off Caroline, one had to say that. At least most of the time.

At the end of the talks, Diane described her sense of the situation. For her, there was a lot that was good news. First, Phil Chase was certain to be more supportive of NSF, and of science in general, than his predecessor had been. Second, the salting of the North Atlantic appeared to be having the effect they had hoped for: the Gulf Stream was now running at nearly its previous strength up into the Norwegian and Greenland Seas, following its earlier path in a manner that seemed to indicate the renewed pattern was, for now, fairly robust. They were still collecting data on the deeper part of the thermohaline circulation, which ran southward underneath the northerly flow of the Gulf Stream. If the southward undercurrent was running strong, they might be okay there.

“There’s so much surface pressure northward,” Kenzo said. “Maybe all we’ll have to do from now on is to monitor the salinity and the currents. We might be able to intervene early enough in any stall process that we wouldn’t need as much salt as we applied last fall. Maybe a certain percentage of the retiring oil fleet could be mothballed, in case we needed a salt fleet to go up there again and make another application.”