“I don’t know, Captain,” the Jew said mock dubiously. “You’re learning too quickly.”
Rolfe laughed and clapped the other man on the shoulder. He enjoyed Sol’s company, in reasonable doses; he played a wickedly challenging game of chess, and he shared some of the Virginian’s taste in books, and he really knew classical music with a passionate zeal, enough to work hard at getting a chamber group started. Andy was more fun for a drink and a night out on the town, Salvo had taken to yachting with surprising enthusiasm, and his own relatives were the men for a horse-and-hounds meeting or a hunting safari.
All in all, the Commonwealth of New Virginia was shaping up to be a very pleasant place to live, as well as to make money.
I’ve just got to see that it develops in the right way, he thought. Having children changes a man’s perspective; I’ve got my sons’ legacies to think about now.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“You were holding out on us,” Sarah Perkins said.
“Yeah,” Tom answered, looking her straight in the eye. “And on our own chain of command as well. After you’ve listened to what we have to tell, so will you. Or,” he went on with a wry smile, “you’ll talk soothingly as you steer us to the rubber room.”
Tom watched the black woman’s thin eyebrows go up a little, then further as she looked about her at the documents and printouts heaped around the apartment. They’d cleaned out the empty Chinese food cartons and pizza boxes, and made a quick-and-dirty attempt to get things into order. It still looked pretty messy.
“This had better be good,” she warned. “I don’t get enough weekends at home with my family as it is.”
Tully snorted. “This is better than good. This is X-Files come true.”
Bad move, Tully. Bad move, Tom thought, watching her face.
“Let’s start with that condor,” he said hurriedly.
Four hours later she sat back; for the first time in the months he’d known her, Special Agent Perkins’s face looked slightly slack.
“You have got to be shitting me,” she said slowly. Then she looked from one man to the other. “No, Tully could do it, but you’re too much of an Eagle Scout. You really believe this, don’t you?”
Tom nodded. “It’s not that I want to believe it,” he said and held up his hand with two fingers upraised and the thumb crossed over the others. “I actually was an Eagle Scout. So… Scout’s honor.”
The FBI agent looked at him for half a minute by the clock, steady and silent, a slight frown bending her thin brows. At last she sighed, a half-angry sound.
“All right,” she said. “I’m not going to call for the rubber-room division just yet. This is the craziest story I’ve heard since I started with the Bureau, and we hear some fine varieties of paranoia. I don’t—didn’t—peg you two for woo-woos, though.”
“I admit it sounds crazy,” Tom said earnestly, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his big hands knotted together. “And a lot of it depends on evidence we’re asking you to take on faith. So what we want you to do is check yourself, in a way only the Bureau can do. Check Adrienne’s… Adrienne Rolfe’s movements. Look for patterns. If we’re right, there’ll be some unmistakable evidence.”
Perkins looked at them. The FBI system could do that: another legacy of the war. It wasn’t supposed to be used for domestic surveillance except in situations where terrorists were involved, or an extremely unambiguous threat to innocent life. Even then, under very careful safeguards. Doing so without authorization would be a career-wrecking move, and could possibly put Perkins in jail, unless they were retroactively blessed by success.
Then she sighed again. “You two boys go for a walk and come back in fifteen minutes—I’ll be in enough trouble without letting anyone outside the Bureau see exactly how I’m going to do this. Congress would shut the whole system down in a minute if there was a hint of outsiders getting their hands on it. The ACLU is raising its head again, you know.”
Tom nodded, carefully not smiling—the last thing he wanted to do was disturb a fragile equilibrium of belief. Outside the door, Tully extended a palm and they gave a silent high five, the smaller man grinning like a shark.
“You nearly queered the pitch with that X-Files remark,” Tom said, turning down a stick of Tully’s gum. “God damn you and your hobby.”
“Sorry,” Tully said. “Couldn’t resist. My sense of humor’s gonna be the death of me, someday.”
“All right, you sons of bitches,” Perkins said in a growl as she opened the door and beckoned them back inside. “You know what you’ve gone and done now?”
They looked a question at her, and she went on: “You’ve put me in the same goddamned position you were in—believing something I can’t prove. What the hell are we supposed to do, convince the world one friend at a time?”
Tully shrugged. “Sort of slow,” he agreed. “Even for those of you who do have friends.”
“You I wouldn’t have believed if you told me shit stinks,” she said. “I’ve got enough to convince me, now, but—”
“What did you get?” Tom asked eagerly.
“I used the identification net,” Perkins said.
She nodded toward her PDA. The FBI had set up the system during the war; computers collating input from retina scanners, fingerprint and voiceprint scanners, and public surveillance cameras running face recognition software and reading things like license plate numbers. It had been extremely useful, but it had also never been popular—there were already calls for dismantling the whole system.
I’ve wished that myself, Tom thought. But it is so damn useful.
“I turned the information into hardcopy and then erased everything I could,” she said. “I’ve got clearance for remote-accessing it, although they’re probably going to restrict that soon. I will catch hell in a month or so, when they review requests and ask for a justification report.”
Her PDA was securely fastened; the printout had been routed through Tom’s machine. And I’m willing to bet several of my favorite organs there’s no data trace back, he thought. Perkins’s name will be recorded at Bureau HQ, but she’s kept us out of it.
“This is recorded movements of your Ms. Rolfe,” the black woman said. “Back as far as we go—some of the early data predates the system; it was collated later.”
“Aha!”
“The early stuff might just be an artifact,” Perkins said, pointing and flipping. “Back then our surveillance net was skimpy—there weren’t nearly so many biometric ID scanners, or face-recognition systems, and they weren’t tied into the national grid the way we set it up in the last part of the war. But the stuff for the later period is good; we’ve had the Bay Area tied up tight as a drum for a while now. Here’s the pattern.”
The dots showed unmistakable clusters. There was a tight grouping around the HQ of the Pacific Open Landscapes League in Berkeley… but only a few near Adrienne Rolfe’s putative address in that city. A massive cluster, dots blurring into black blobs, near the RM&M warehouse complex in south Oakland.
“But now, look at them sorted for time.”
Tom’s breath hissed out between his teeth. Yeah.