one-stop shopping for all the satellites with the surveillance capabilities to look down into this little corner of the world and find us if we go out and about.”
“I thought that was part of a dream,” he said uneasily, “that talk about eyes in the sky.”
“You’d be surprised what’s up there. ‘Surprised’ is one word. As for surveillance, there are probably two to six satellites with that capability in orbit over the western and southwestern states.”
Rattled, he said, “What happens when you identify them?”
“The DOD will have their access codes. I’ll use those to up-link to each satellite, poke around in its current programs, and see if it’s looking for us.”
“This awesome lady here pokes around in satellites,” he said to Rocky, but the dog seemed less impressed than his master was, as if canines had been up to similar shenanigans for ages. To Valerie, Spencer said, “I don’t think the word ‘hacker’ is adequate for you.”
“So…what did they call people like me when you were on that computer-crime task force?”
“I don’t think we even conceived there
“Well, we’re here.”
“They’d really hunt us with satellites?” he asked doubtfully. “I mean, we’re not that important — are we?”
“They think I am. And you’ve got them totally confused. They can’t figure out how the hell you fit in. Until they get an idea what you’re all about, they’ll figure you’re as dangerous to them as I am — maybe more so. The unknown — that’s you, from their viewpoint — is always more frightening than the known.”
He mulled that over. “Who’re these people you’re talking about?”
“Maybe you’re safer if you don’t know.”
Spencer opened his mouth to respond, then held his silence. He didn’t want to argue. Not yet, anyway. First, he needed to clean up and get something to eat.
Without pausing in her work, Valerie explained that plastic jugs of bottled water, a basin, liquid soap, sponges, and a clean towel were just inside the Rover’s tailgate. “Don’t use a lot of water. It’s our drinking supply if we have to be out here a few more days.”
Rocky followed his master to the truck, glancing back nervously at the lizard in the sun.
Spencer discovered that Valerie had salvaged his belongings from the Explorer. He was able to shave and change into clean clothes, in addition to taking a sponge bath. He felt refreshed, and he could no longer smell his own body odor. He couldn’t get his hair quite as clean as he would have liked, however, because his scalp was tender, not just around the sutured laceration but across the entire crown of his head.
The Rover was a truck-style station wagon, like the Explorer, and it was packed solid with gear and supplies from the tailgate to within two feet of the front seats. The food was just where a well-organized person would stow it: in boxes and coolers immediately behind the two-foot clear space, easily accessible from either the driver’s or passenger’s seat.
Most of the provisions were canned and bottled, except for boxes of crackers. Because Spencer was too hungry to take the time to cook, he selected two small tins of Vienna sausages, two snack-size packets of cheese crackers, and a single-serving lunch-box can of pears.
In one of the Styrofoam coolers, also within easy reach of the front seats, he found weapons. A SIG 9mm pistol. A Micro Uzi that appeared to have been illegally converted for full automatic fire. There were spare magazines of ammunition for both.
Spencer stared at the weapons, then turned to look through the windshield at the woman sitting with her computer, twenty feet away.
That Valerie was skilled at many things, Spencer had no doubt. She seemed so well prepared for every contingency that she could serve as the paradigm not only for all Girl Scouts but for doomsday survivalists. She was clever, intelligent, funny, daring, courageous, and easy to look at in lamplight, in sunlight, in any light at all. Undoubtedly she was also practiced in the use of both the pistol and the submachine gun, because otherwise she was too practical to be in possession of them: She simply wouldn’t waste space on tools that she couldn’t use, and she wouldn’t risk the penalties for possession of a fully automatic Uzi unless she was able — and willing — to fire it.
Spencer wondered if she had ever been forced to shoot at another human being. He hoped not. And he hoped that she would never be driven to such an extreme. Sadly, however, life seemed to be handing her nothing but extremes.
He opened a tin of sausages with the ring tab on top. Resisting an urge to wolf down the contents in a single great mouthful, he ate one of the miniature frankfurters, then another. Nothing had ever tasted half as good. He popped the third in his mouth as he returned to Valerie.
Rocky danced and whimpered at his side, begging for his share.
“Mine,” Spencer said.
Though he hunkered down beside Valerie, he didn’t speak to her. She seemed especially focused on the cryptic data that filled the display screen.
The lizard was in the sun, alert and poised to flee, at the same spot where it had been almost half an hour earlier. Tiny dinosaur.
Spencer opened a second can of sausages, shared two with the dog, and was just finishing the last of the rest when Valerie jerked in surprise.
She gasped.
The lizard vanished under the rock from which it had appeared.
Spencer glimpsed a word flashing on the display screen: LOCKON.
Valerie hit the power switch on the logic unit.
Just before the screen went dead, Spencer saw two more words flash under the first: TRACE BACK.
Valerie exploded to her feet, yanked both utility-cord plugs from the computer, and sprinted into the sun, to the microwave dish. “Load everything into the Rover!”
Getting to his feet, Spencer said, “What’s happening?”
“They’re using an EPA satellite.” She had already retrieved the microwave dish and had turned toward him. “And they’re running some sort of weird damned security program. Locks onto any invasive signal and traces back.” Hurrying past him, she said, “Help me pack. Move, damn it,
He balanced the keyboard on top of the monitor and picked up the entire workstation, including the rubber mat beneath it. Following Valerie to the Rover, his bruised muscles protesting at the demand for haste, he said, “They found us?”
“Bastards!” she fumed.
“Maybe you switched off in time.”
“No.”
“How can they be sure it’s us?”
“They’ll know.”
“It was just a microwave signal, no fingerprints on it.”
“They’re coming,” she insisted.
Sunday night, their third night together, Eve Jammer and Roy Miro had begun their passionate but contact- free lovemaking earlier in the evening than they had done previously. Therefore, although that session was the longest and most ardent to date, they concluded before midnight. Thereafter, they lay chastely side by side on her bed, in the soft blue glow of indirect neon, each of them guarded by the loving eyes of the other’s reflection in the ceiling mirror. Eve was as naked as the day that she’d slipped into the world, and Roy was fully clothed. In time they enjoyed a deep and restful sleep.
Because he had brought an overnight bag, Roy was able to get ready for work in the morning without returning to his hotel suite on the Strip. He showered in the guest bath, rather than in Eve’s, for he had no desire to undress and reveal his many imperfections, from his stubby toes to his knobby knees, to his paunch, to the spray of freckles and the two moles on his chest. Besides, neither of them wanted to follow the other’s session in any shower stall. If he were to stand on tiles wet with her bathwater or vice versa…well, in a subtle but disturbing way, that act would violate the satisfyingly dry relationship, free of fluid exchanges, which they had established and on which they thrived.
