with my lists. I eliminated psychiatrists and psychologists. I eliminated pediatricians and obstetrician-gynecologists. I did not, after some reflection, eliminate dentists and orthodontists. Who could say? I did not know what I was looking for. I was just looking.
And meanwhile I had my map application open and was keeping one eye on it, watching a blue blip move block by block through the city. That was Mr. Maris, still carrying my butterfly knife in his pocket. Embedded in the handle of the knife was a tidy little GPS tracking unit, throwing up location signals to some satellite, which was then throwing them back down to me.
I watched Mr. Maris drive south on Meridian Street away from Abraham the Martyr, then cut right on West South Street, then left on Capitol.
Planting the bug on Maris was an old trick. An easy one. I had done four months of training after they picked me up, in a desert in Arizona, before they sent me out on my first file. I had learned picks and rakes, footprints and fingerprints, fighting and following, database infiltration, encryption and de-encryption.
And then after all that, a doctor with no name and a cold room, two unconscious hours. The hook, the anchor, the leash.
It was funny to think about. Not that funny. Me tracking Maris, Gaithersburg tracking me.
MJ was doing “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool,” and I took that as a good sign. I just listened to that a second, just that, shoo-bop, shoo-bop, swelling strings in the chorus. After that there was a James Brown song, which made me smile—they didn’t play a lot of James on the radio. He’d been the leader of one of those god-awful “family bands” that toured the North in the fifties and sixties, talented slaves brought north to sing to sold-out northern audiences, living proof of how happy everybody was down there. But James defected—snuck out of his Buffalo hotel room and turned up in Quebec City, making beautiful music and touring the world, except for America.
“Just look at me!” he used to crow from European concert stages, palming his pompadour, braggadocious in his spangled cape and boots. “Look at what they robbin’ themselves of!”
Sort of thing used to happen all the time. There was an Olympic gold medalist from Alabama, boy named Jesse Owens, who took a mess of world records in Berlin in 1936 and then defected to the Soviet Union. For the next half century he was one of the evil empire’s prize possessions, turning up in Pravda every once in a while to denounce degenerate slave-state capitalism.
When I felt ready, I got back into it, making notes on Maris’s route, jotting it all down, toggling back and forth between his journey and my slow search-driven encircling of the mysterious Dr. V.
After I was satisfied with my initial list of doctors, I closed out the pages full of hospitals and clinics and started opening the donor rolls of every abolitionist organization active in the city and state. There were local organizations called Total Freedom Now! (pure abolitionist) and Indy FreedomWorks (gradualist); there was a central Indiana chapter of the Fire Bell Society, and there was the Indianapolis chapter of the Black Panthers. The membership rolls and the donor lists were all public information, except for those of the Panthers, which was officially classified as a terrorist organization, but I got their names by hacking the IMPD.
Maris, meanwhile, had gotten on the highway. He moved south by southeast on 465, tracing the city’s outskirts. While I watched him I rehearsed his distinctive African cadences in my mind, replayed what he had said to Cook about the “old business.” No, it is not yet…it is not yet put to bed.
Seized by an impulse, I said the words out loud, drew myself up to stand at full height, as Maris did, making my face solemn, as he had. “No, it is not yet…” I said to myself, to the computer, to the cracks in the wall. “No, it is not yet put to bed.”
Then I eased back
And meanwhile I had my map application open and was keeping one eye on it, watching a blue blip move block by block through the city. That was Mr. Maris, still carrying my butterfly knife in his pocket. Embedded in the handle of the knife was a tidy little GPS tracking unit, throwing up location signals to some satellite, which was then throwing them back down to me.
I watched Mr. Maris drive south on Meridian Street away from Abraham the Martyr, then cut right on West South Street, then left on Capitol.
Planting the bug on Maris was an old trick. An easy one. I had done four months of training after they picked me up, in a desert in Arizona, before they sent me out on my first file. I had learned picks and rakes, footprints and fingerprints, fighting and following, database infiltration, encryption and de-encryption.
And then after all that, a doctor with no name and a cold room, two unconscious hours. The hook, the anchor, the leash.
It was funny to think about. Not that funny. Me tracking Maris, Gaithersburg tracking me.
MJ was doing “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool,” and I took that as a good sign. I just listened to that a second, just that, shoo-bop, shoo-bop, swelling strings in the chorus. After that there was a James Brown song, which made me smile—they didn’t play a lot of James on the radio. He’d been the leader of one of those god-awful “family bands” that toured the North in the fifties and sixties, talented slaves brought north to sing to sold-out northern audiences, living proof of how happy everybody was down there. But James defected—snuck out of his Buffalo hotel room and turned up in Quebec City, making beautiful music and touring the world, except for America.
“Just look at me!” he used to crow from European concert stages, palming his pompadour, braggadocious in his spangled cape and boots. “Look at what they robbin’ themselves of!”
Sort of thing used to happen all the time. There was an Olympic gold medalist from Alabama, boy named Jesse Owens, who took a mess of world records in Berlin in 1936 and then defected to the Soviet Union. For the next half century he was one of the evil empire’s prize possessions, turning up in Pravda every once in a while to denounce degenerate slave-state capitalism.
When I felt ready, I got back into it, making notes on Maris’s route, jotting it all down, toggling back and forth between his journey and my slow search-driven encircling of the mysterious Dr. V.
After I was satisfied with my initial list of doctors, I closed out the pages full of hospitals and clinics and started opening the donor rolls of every abolitionist organization active in the city and state. There were local organizations called Total Freedom Now! (pure abolitionist) and Indy FreedomWorks (gradualist); there was a central Indiana chapter of the Fire Bell Society, and there was the Indianapolis chapter of the Black Panthers. The membership rolls and the donor lists were all public information, except for those of the Panthers, which was officially classified as a terrorist organization, but I got their names by hacking the IMPD.
Maris, meanwhile, had gotten on the highway. He moved south by southeast on 465, tracing the city’s outskirts. While I watched him I rehearsed his distinctive African cadences in my mind, replayed what he had said to Cook about the “old business.” No, it is not yet…it is not yet put to bed.
Seized by an impulse, I said the words out loud, drew myself up to stand at full height, as Maris did, making my face solemn, as he had. “No, it is not yet…” I said to myself, to the computer, to the cracks in the wall. “No, it is not yet put to bed.”
Then I eased back
Similar Books
