His vision wasn’t blurred. The sun no longer stung his eyes.
Out at the edge of the shade that was provided by the tarp, Valerie sat on the ground, her back to him. She was bent to a task that he couldn’t see.
Rocky was sitting at Valerie’s side, his back also to Spencer.
An engine was idling. Spencer had the strength to lift his head and turn toward the sound. The Range Rover. Behind him, deeper in the tarp-covered niche. An orange utility cord led from the open driver’s door of the Rover to Valerie.
Spencer felt dreadful, but he was grateful for the improvement in his condition since his most recent bout of consciousness. His skull no longer seemed about to explode; his headache was down to a dull thump over his right eye. Dry mouth. Chapped lips. But his throat wasn’t hot and achy anymore.
The morning was genuinely warm. The heat wasn’t from a fever, because his forehead felt cool. He threw back the blanket.
He yawned, stretched — and groaned. His muscles ached, but after the battering he had taken, that was to be expected.
Alerted by Spencer’s groan, Rocky hurried to him. The mutt was grinning, trembling, whipping his tail from side to side, in a frenzy of delight to see his master awake.
Spencer endured an enthusiastic face licking before he managed to get a grip on the dog’s collar and hold him at tongue’s length.
Looking over her shoulder, Valerie said, “Good morning.”
She was as lovely in the early sun as she had been in lamplight.
He almost repeated that sentiment aloud but was disconcerted by a dim memory of having said too much already, when he had been out of his head. He suspected himself not merely of having revealed secrets that he would rather have kept but of having been artlessly candid about his feelings for her, as ingenuous as an infatuated puppy.
As he sat up, denying the dog another lick at his face, Spencer said, “No offense, pal, but you stink something fierce.”
He got to his knees, rose to his feet, and swayed for a moment.
“Dizzy?” Valerie asked.
“No. That’s gone.”
“Good. I think you had a bad concussion. I’m no doctor — as you made clear. But I’ve got some reference books with me.”
“Just a little weak now. Hungry. Starving, in fact.”
“That’s a good sign, I think.”
Now that Rocky was no longer in his face, Spencer realized that the dog didn’t stink. He himself was the offending party: the wet-mud fragrance of the river, the sourness of several fever sweats.
Valerie returned to her work.
Being careful to stay upwind of her, and trying not to let the playful mutt trip him, Spencer shuffled to the edge of the shaded enclosure to see what the woman was doing.
A computer sat on a black plastic mat on the ground. It wasn’t a laptop but a full PC with a MasterPiece surge protector between the logic unit and the color monitor. The keyboard was on her lap.
It was remarkable to see such an elaborate high-tech workstation plunked down in the middle of a primitive landscape that had remained largely unchanged for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years.
“How many megabytes?” he asked.
“Not mega. Giga. Ten gigabytes.”
“You need all that?”
“Some of the programs I use are pretty damn complex. They fill up a lot of hard disk.”
The orange electrical cord from the Rover was plugged into the logic unit. Another orange cord led from the back of the logic unit to a peculiar device sitting in the sunlight ten feet beyond the shade line of their tarp-covered hideaway: It looked like an inverted Frisbee with a flared rather than inward-curling rim; underneath, at its center, it was fixed to a ball joint, which was in turn fixed to a four-inch flexible black metal arm, which disappeared into a gray box approximately a foot square and four inches deep.
Busy at the keyboard, Valerie answered his question before he could ask it. “Satellite up-link.”
“You talking to aliens?” he asked, only half joking.
“Right now, to the dee-oh-dee computer,” she said, pausing to study the data that scrolled up the screen.
“Dee-oh-dee?” he wondered.
“Department of Defense.”
DOD.
He squatted on his haunches. “Are you a government agent?”
“I didn’t say I was talking to the DOD computer with the DOD’s permission. Or knowledge, for that matter. I up-linked to a phone-company satellite, accessed one of their lines reserved for systems testing, called in to the DOD deep computer in Arlington, Virginia.”
“Deep,” he mused.
“Heavily secured.”
“I bet that’s not a number you got from directory assistance.”
“Phone number’s not the hardest part. It’s more difficult to get the operating codes that let you use their system once you’re into it. Without them, being able to make the connection wouldn’t matter.”
“And you have those codes?”
“I’ve had full access to DOD for fourteen months.” Her fingers flew over the keyboard again. “Hardest to get is the access code to the program with which they periodically change all the
“So fourteen months ago, you just happened to find all these numbers and whatnot scrawled on a rest room wall?”
“Three people I loved gave their lives for those codes.”
That response, though delivered in no graver a tone of voice than anything else Valerie had said, carried an emotional weight that left Spencer silent and pondering for a while.
A foot-long lizard — mostly brown, flecked with black and gold — slithered from under a nearby rock into the sunshine and scampered across the warm sand. When it saw Valerie, it froze and watched her. Its silver-and-green eyes were protuberant, with pebbly lids.
Rocky saw the lizard too. He retreated behind his master.
Spencer found himself smiling at the reptile, although he was not sure why he should be so pleased by its sudden appearance. Then he realized that he was unconsciously fingering the carved soapstone medallion that hung against his chest, and he understood. Louis Lee. Pheasants and dragons. Prosperity and long life.
Spencer’s smile faded. To Valerie, he said, “What are you?”
Without looking up from the display screen, she said, “You mean, am I an international terrorist or a good patriotic American?”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it like that.”
Instead of answering him, she said, “Over the past five days, I tried to learn what I could about you. Not very damn much. You’ve just about erased yourself from official existence. So I think I’ve got a right to ask the same question: What are
He shrugged. “Just someone who values his privacy.”
“Sure. And what I am is a concerned and interested citizen — not a whole lot different from you.”
“Except I don’t know how to get into DOD.”
“You fiddled with your military records.”
“That’s an easy-access database compared with the big muddy you’re wading in right now. What the hell are you looking for?”
“The DOD tracks every satellite in orbit: civilian, government, military — both domestic and foreign. I’m
