“What did his recording say?”
“It said ‘You have reached Louie’s place. Please leave a message, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.’“
“You’re kidding.”
“No, anyone who knows Louie knows that he’d never leave such a message. It’s just not his style.”
“I see. And what made you think they were tracing your call. Surely you didn’t use the hotel’s phone.”
“Correct. I used my cellular.”
“Then–”
“How did I know they were tracing the call?”
“You did it again.”
“Did what?”
“Finished my sentence.”
“Oh.”
“Well, how did you?” Caitlin resisted a sudden urge to pinch his arm. She didn’t remember him being this exasperating.
“If they’re tapping his line, then it’s no leap of imagination that they’re tracing any calls to his number.”
“But you can’t track a cellular phone’s location that easily.”
“Who says?”
“Well ... all right it’s possible, but you’d have to have receivers to triangulate the transmission. That would mean you’d have to expect the signal to come from a particular area and set your receiver’s up beforehand.”
“You’re partially right, but even under those circumstances, they could have gotten our location. They would just have to assume that we were still in the Bay Area and be ready to triangulate all calls out of this region.”
“But that would take time.”
“Right, but that’s not how they do it.”
“Okay, obviously you know something I don’t. Give. What else can they do?”
“For several years now all of the cellular phone chips have been encoded to allow their tracking using the GPS network. Like a GPS receiver, the cellular gets the signal from the GPS satellites. When queried by the proper signal your cellular phone will broadcast that data and bingo, you’re located.”
“You’ve got to be joking.”
“I wish I were.”
“But, how can that be legal?”
“Who knows from legal? How was it legal to install V-chips in all the televisions?”
“But that’s different. It just lets the user lock out all the signals that exceed a preset level of violence or sexuality.”
“Sure that’s what the proponents claimed it would be used for. The V-chip’s construction allows it to be reprogrammed remotely. Even people who don’t use it can have programs blocked out.”
“I don’t understand. What would that accomplish?”
“Don’t you see? It gives them the power to control what you watch.”
“Yes, but it would just control sex and violence. There can’t be anything sinister about that. So what if someone doesn’t get to watch Playboy After Dark or some such trite?”
John’s head shook slowly.
“What?” she asked.
He slowed the car for a traffic light, then turned east again onto the access road for the Mid-Bay Bridge. In a minute, they were driving a few yards above the choppy water.
“Who do you think puts the rating encoding onto the program’s signal?”
“I don’t know. I guess the networks,” she said.
“The V-chip signal can be added remotely; just like the V-chip itself can be encoded remotely.”
“You mean someone, the government, can modify the coding on any program they want?”
“That’s right. There was a brief mention a couple of years ago about the city of Boise, Idaho missing the CNN news for ten minutes. It was later reported to be a problem with a satellite downlink, but it turned out that all of the older televisions, the ones without the V-chips, received CNN.”
“Someone blocked the news?”
“That’s right. The stories being covered were about a pregnant panda, a minor oil spill off the coast of Chile, and a follow-up story on an ex- figure skater’s saving some woman’s life by performing CPR.”
“It was a test. My God. Someone was testing their system. That’s ... that’s un-American.”
“Exactly.”
“But how can that be? How can anyone get funding to create such a program? How can they hide it? How can....”
Caitlin let her voice trail off. Just now, it didn’t matter how it had been done. What mattered was how they were going to get around it?
“What can we do?” she asked.
“What can anyone do? It’s the government. It’s what happens when we allow more and more of our liberties to be confiscated in the name of public well-being.”
“No. I mean, what can we do right now? We need to hide, but yet we have to find out what’s behind all this.”
“Oh. Well, I have the solution for the telephone problem. That’s no problem at all. But we do need to hold up for awhile. In fact, we need to get completely out of town, and that message Scott left you has intrigued me.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“The remark about the first of May. If that’s the day your parents are returning to Colorado, then it seems to me that Scott wanted to indicate their home in Black Forest. How about we visit your parents’ house?”
“Are you serious? They’d obviously be looking for me to contact them. You said so yourself.”
“What I said was that they’d have the capability to monitor all the calls over your parents’ lines. I don’t think they’ll actually put a watch on their house unless they lose track of you.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“That’s all right. It’s not an obvious ploy. That’s why it should work.”
“Why what’ll work?”
“All in good time.”
They were approaching the eastern shore of the Mid-Bay Bridge. They kept moving east for awhile, then turned north toward Oakland.
“Well? What are you waiting for?” Caitlin finally asked.
“Nothing in particular, but I need to pull off and get something out of the trunk.”
“What is it?”
“Patience, patience Caitlin. You’ll be more impressed if I show you rather than just blurting it out. Didn’t you ever hear the expression of showing rather than
