Problems required solutions, and solutions required decisions. And he couldn’t decide. So the days were proving difficult.
Because above and beyond all the rest of his problems, there was the absolutely immediate one: he had to—had to—warn Caroline that her cover was insufficient to keep even a newcomer on the scene like Edgardo’s friend from locating her. He had to warn her of this! But he did not know where she was. She might be on that island in Maine, but unless he went and looked he couldn’t know. But if he went, he could not do anything that might expose her (and him too) to her husband. His van was chipped with a GPS transponder—Caroline was the one who had told him about it—so its identity and location could be under surveillance, and tracked wherever it went. He could easily imagine a program that would flag any time his van left the metropolitan area. This was a serious disadvantage, because his van was his shelter of last resort, his only mobile bedroom, and all in all, the most versatile room in the disassembled and modular home that he had cast through the fabric of the city.
“Can I dechip my van?” he asked Edgardo next day on their run, after wanding them both again. “For certain? And, you know, as if by accident or malfunction?”
“I should think so,” Edgardo replied. “It might be something you would need some help with. Let me look into it.”
“Okay, but I want to go soon.”
“Up to Maine?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, I’ll do my best. The person I want to talk to is not exactly on call. I have to meet them in a context like this one.”
But that night, as Frank was settling down in the garden shed with Rudra, who was already asleep, Qang came out to tell him there was a man there to see him. This caused Frank’s pulse to elevate to a disturbing degree—
But it was Edgardo, and a short man, who said “hello” and after that spoke only to Edgardo, in Spanish. “Umberto here is another porteño,” Edgardo said. “He helps me with matters such as this.”
Umberto rolled his eyes dramatically. He took Frank’s keys and went at the van as if he owned it, banging around, pulling up carpet from the floor, running various diagnostics through a laptop, complaining to Edgardo all the while. Eventually he opened the hood and after rooting around for a while, unbolted a small box from the crowded left engine wall. When he was done he gave the box to Frank and walked off into the dark, still berating Edgardo over his shoulder.
“Thanks!” Frank called after him. Then to Edgardo: “Did I see how he did that, so I can put it back in?” He peered at the engine wall, then the bolts in his hand there with the box, then the holes the bolts had come out of. It looked like a wrench kit would do it. “Okay, but where do I put it now?”
“You must leave it right here where it would be, so that it seems your van is parked here. Then replace it when you return.”
“Out here on the street?”
“Isn’t there a driveway to this house?”
“Yeah, I can leave it there I guess. Buried in this gravel here.”
“There you go.”
“And other than that, I’m clean?”
“That’s what Umberto said. Speaking only of the van, of course.”
“Yeah. I’ve got the wand for my stuff. But is that enough? The van won’t look weird to toll gates for not having the box, or anything like that?”
“No. Not every vehicle has these things yet. So far, the total information society is not yet fully online. When it is, you won’t be able to do stuff like this. You’ll never be able to get off the grid, and if you did it would look so strange it would be worse than being on the grid. Everything will have to be rethought.”
Frank grimaced. “Well, by then I won’t be involved in this kind of stuff. Listen, I think I’m going to take off now and get a few hours of driving in. It’ll take me all of tomorrow to get there as it is.”
“That’s true. Good luck my friend. Remember—no cell-phone calls, no ATMs, no credit cards. Do you have enough cash with you?”
“I hope so,” feeling the thickness of his wallet.
“You shouldn’t stay away too long anyway.”
“No. I guess I’m okay, then. Thanks for the help.”
“Good luck. Don’t call.”
Grumpily Frank got in his van and drove north on 95. Transponders embedded in every vehicle’s windshields…except would that really happen? Was this total information project not perhaps crazy enough to fail, ultimately? Or—could it be stopped? Could they go to Phil Chase and lay out the whole story, and get him to root out Caroline’s ex and his whole operation, whatever it was? Root it out from the top down? Were the spy agencies so imbricated into the fabric of the government (and the military) that they were beyond presidential control, or even presidential knowledge? Or inquiry?
If it weren’t for his going-off-grid status, he would have called up Edgardo to ask his opinion on this. As it was he could only continue to think, and worry, and drive.
Somewhere in New Jersey it occurred to him that as he was on the road north, he must therefore have decided to go. He had decided something! And without even trying. Maybe decisions now had to occur without one really noticing them happening, or wondering how. It was so hard to say. In this particular case, he really had had no choice; he had to warn her. So it had been more of a life override than a decision. Maybe one went through life doing the things one had to do, hooped by necessity, with decisions reserved for options and therefore not really a major factor in one’s life. A bad thought or a good one? He couldn’t tell.
A bad thought, he decided in the end. A bad thought in a long night of bad thoughts, as it turned out. Long past midnight he kept following the taillights ahead of him, and the traffic slowly thinned and became mostly trucks of various kinds. Over the Susquehanna, over the Hudson, otherwise tunneling on endlessly through the forest.
Finally he felt in danger of falling asleep at the wheel, got off and found a side road and a little parking lot, empty and dark and anonymous, where he felt comfortable parking under a tree and locking the doors and crawling into the back of the van to catch a few hours’ sleep.
Dawn’s light woke him and he drove on, north through New England, fueled by the worst 7-Eleven coffee he had ever tasted—coffee so bad it was good, in terms of waking him up. The idea that it might be poisoned gave him an extra jolt. Surely someone had poured in their battery acid as a prank. There was too much time to think. If Caroline was the boss, and her ex worked for her, then….
95 kept on coming, an endless slot through endless forest, a grass sward and two concrete strips rolling on for mile after mile. Finally he came to Bangor, Maine, and turned right, driving over hills and across small rivers, then through the standard array of franchises in Ellsworth, including an immense Wal-Mart. During the night he had driven north into full winter; a thin blanket of dirty snow covered everything. He passed a completely shut-down tourist zone, the motels, lobster shacks, antique stores, and miniature golf courses all looking miserable under their load of ice and snow, all except the Christmas knickknack barn, which had a full parking lot and was bustling with festive shoppers.
Soon after that he crossed the bridge that spanned the tidal race to Mount Desert Island. By then the round gray tops of the island’s little range of peaks had appeared several times over the water of Frenchman’s Bay. They were lower than Frank had expected them to be, but still, they were bare rock mountain tops, shaved into graceful curves by the immense force of the Ice Age’s ice cap. Frank had googled the island on a cybercafe’s rented computer, and had read quite a bit; and the information had surprised him in more ways than one. It turned out that this little island was in many ways the place where the American wilderness movement had begun, in the form of the landscape painter Frederick Church, who had come here in the 1840s to paint. In getting around the island, Church had invented what he called “rusticating,” by which he meant wandering on mountainsides just for the fun of it. He also took offense at the clear-cut logging on
the island, and worked to get the legislature of Maine to forbid it, in some of the nation’s first environmental legislation. All this was happening at the same time Emerson and Thoreau were writing. Something had been in the air.
Eventually all that led to the national park system, and Mount Desert Island had been the third one, the first east of the Mississippi, and the only one anywhere created by citizens donating their own land. Acadia National Park now took up about two-thirds of the island, in a patchwork pattern; when Frank drove over the bridge he was on private land, but most of the seaward part of the island belonged to the park.
He slowed down, deep in forest still, following instructions printed out from a map website. The Maine coast here faced almost south. The island was roughly square, and split nearly in half, east and west, by a fjord called Somes Sound. Caroline’s friend’s house was on the western half of the island.
Nervously Frank drove through Somesville, at the head of the sound. This turned out to be no more than a scattering of white houses, on snowy lawns on either side of the road. He looked for something like a village commercial center but did not find one.
Now he was getting quite nervous. Just the idea of seeing her. He didn’t know how to approach her. In his uncertainty he drove past the right turn that headed to her friend’s place, and continued on to a town called Southwest Harbor. He wanted to eat something, also to think things over.
In the only cafe still open he ordered a sandwich and espresso. He didn’t want to catch her unawares; that could be a bad shock. On the other hand there didn’t seem any other way to do it. Sitting in the cafe drinking espresso (heavenly after the battery acid), he ate his sandwich and tried to think. They were the same thoughts he had been thinking the whole drive. He would have to surprise her; hopefully he could immediately explain why he was there—the possible danger she was in—so that she did not jump to the conclusion that he was somehow stalking her. They could talk; he could see what she wanted to do, perhaps even help her move somewhere else, if that’s what she wanted. Although in that case…
Well, but he had run through all these thoughts a thousand times during the drive. All the scenarios led to a break point beyond which it was hard to imagine. He had to go to work on Monday. Or he should. And so…
He finished his lunch and walked around a little. Southwest Harbor’s harbor was a small bay surrounded by forested hills, and filled with working boats and working docks, also a small Coast Guard station out on the point to the left. It was quiet, icy, empty of people: picturesque, but in a good way. A working harbor.
He would have to risk dropping in on her. The wand said he was clean. Edgardo’s friend had said his van was clean. He had driven all night, he was five miles away from her. Surely the decision had already been made!
So he got back in his van, and drove back up the road, then took a left and followed a winding road through bare trees. Past an iced-over pond on the right, then another one on the left, this one a lake that was narrow and long, extending south for miles, a white flatness at the bottom of a classic U-shaped glacial slot. Soon after that, a left turn onto a gravel road.
He drove slower than ever, under a dense network of overarching branches. Houses to the left were fronting the long frozen lake. Caroline’s friend’s place was on the right, where it would overlook a second arm of the lake. The map showed a Y-shaped lake, with the long arm straight, and the other shorter arm curving into it about halfway down.
Her friend’s house had no number in its driveway, but by the numbers before and after it, he deduced that it had to be the one. He turned around in a driveway, idled back up the road.
The place had a short gravel curve of driveway, with no cars in it. At the end of the driveway to the left stood a house, while to the right was a detached garage. Both were dark green with white trim. A car could have been hidden in the garage. Ah; the house number was there on the side of the garage.
He didn’t want to drive into the driveway. On the other hand it must look odd, him idling out on the road, looking in—if there was anyone there to see. He idled down the road farther, back in the direction of the paved road. Then he parked on the side at a wide spot, cursing under his breath. He got out and walked quickly down the road and up the driveway to the house in question.
He stopped between the house and the garage, under a big bare-limbed tree. The snow was crushed down to ice shards on the flagstones between the house and garage, as if someone had walked all over them and then there had been a thaw. No one was visible through the kitchen window. He was afraid to knock on the kitchen door. He stepped around the side of the house, looking in the windows running down that side. Inside was a big room, beyond it a sun porch facing the lake. The lake was down a slope from the house. There was a narrow path down, flanked by stone-walled terraces filled with snow and black weeds. Down on the water at the bottom of the path was a little white dock, anchored by a tiny white boathouse.
The door of the boathouse swung open from inside.
“Caroline?” Frank called down.
Silence. Then: “Frank?”
She peeked around the edge of the little boathouse, looking up for him with just the startled unhappy expression he had feared he would cause—
Then she almost ran up the path. “Frank, what is it?” she exclaimed as she hurried up. “What are you doing here?”
He found he was already halfway down the path. They met between two blueberry bushes, him with a hand up as if in warning, but she crashed through that and embraced him—held him—hugged him. They clung to each other.
Frank had not allowed himself to think of this part (but he had anyway): what it meant to hold her. How much he had wanted to see her.
She pushed back from him, looking past him up to the house. “Why are you here? What’s going on? How did you find me?”
“I needed to warn you about that,” Frank said. “At least I thought I should. My friend at NSF, the one who helped me with the election disk you gave us? He has a friend who was looking into who your ex is, and what he’s doing now, you know, because they wanted to follow up on the election thing. So he wanted to talk to you about that, and my friend told him that you had disappeared, and this guy said that he knew where you probably were.”
“Oh my God.” Her hand flew to her mouth. Another body response common to all. She peered around him again up the driveway.
“So, I wanted to see if he was right,” Frank continued, “and I wanted to warn you if he was. And I wanted to see you, anyway.”
“Yes.” They held hands, then hugged again. Squeezed hard. Frank felt the fear and isolation in her.
“So.” He pulled back and looked at her. “Maybe you should move.”
“Yeah. I guess so. Possibly. But—well, first tell me everything you can. Especially about how this person found me. Here, come on up. Let’s get inside.” She led him by the hand, back up the garden path to the house.
She entered it by way of the sun porch door. The sun porch was separated from the living room by diamond-paned windows above a wainscoting. An old vacation home, Frank saw, handmade, scrupulously clean, with old furniture, and paintings on every wall that appeared to be the work of a single enthusiast. The view of the lake seemed the main attraction to Frank.
Caroline gestured around her. “I first visited my friend Mary here when we were six.”
“Man.”
“But we haven’t been in touch for years, and Ed never knew about her. I never told him. In fact, I can’t quite imagine how your friend’s friend tracked down the association.”
“He said you called a number of an old roommate, and this was her place.”
She frowned. “That’s true.”
“So, that’s how he tracked this place down. And if he could, so could your ex, presumably. And besides,” he added sharply, surprising them both, “why did you tell me that he was your boss?”
Silence as she stared at him. He explained: “My friend’s friend said you were
actually your husband’s boss. So I wanted to know.”
She glanced away, mouth tight for just an instant.
“Come on,” she said, and led him through the living room to the kitchen.
There she opened the refrigerator and got out a pitcher of iced tea. “Have a seat,” she said, indicating the kitchen table.
“Maybe I should move my van into the driveway,” Frank remembered. “I didn’t want to shock you by driving in, and I left it out on the road.”
“That was nice. Yeah, go move it in. At least for now.”
He did so, his mind racing. It was definitely foolish of her to remain exposed like this. Probably they should be leaving immediately.
He reentered the kitchen to find her sitting at the table before two glasses of iced tea, looking down at the lake. His Caroline. He sat down across from her, took a drink.
She looked at him across the table. “I was not Ed’s boss,” she said. “He was reassigned to another program. When I first came to the office, I was part of his team. I was working for him. But when the futures market program was established I was put in charge of it, and I reported to some people outside our office. Ed kept doing his own surveillance, and his group used what we were documenting, when they thought it would help them. That’s the way it was when you and I met. Then he moved again, like I told you, over to Homeland Security.”
She took a sip of her drink, met his eye again. “I never lied to you, Frank. I never have and I never will. I’ve had enough of that kind of thing. More than you’ll ever know. I can’t stand it anymore.”
“Good,” Frank said, feeling awkward. “But tell me—I mean, this is another thing I’ve really wondered about, that I’ve never remembered to ask you—what were you doing on that boat during the big flood, on the Potomac?”
Surprised, she said, “That’s Ed’s boat. I was going up to get him off Roosevelt Island.”