‘I would if I could.’
‘Ah!’ Edgardo was nodding. ‘Gone away, has she?’
‘Yes,’ Frank said; and then it was all pouring out of him. He found himself telling Edgardo the whole story, of how they had met and what had followed. This was something he had never managed to do with anyone, not even Rudra or Anna, and now it felt as if some kind of hydrostatic pressure had built up inside him, his silence like a dam that had now failed and let forth a flood.
It took a few miles to tell. The meeting in the stuck elevator, the unsuccessful hunt for her, the sighting of her on the Potomac during the flood, the brief phone call with her – her subsequent call – their meetings, their – affair.
And then, her revealing the surveillance program she was part of, in which Frank and so many others, including Edgardo, were being tracked and evaluated in some kind of virtual futures market, in which investors, some of them computer programs, were making speculative investments, as in any other futures markets, but this time dealing in scientists doing certain kinds of biotech research.
And then how she had had to run away on election night, and how on that night he had helped her to evade her husband and his companions, who were now clearly correlated with the attempted election theft.
Edgardo bobbed along next to him as he told the tale, nodding at each new bit of information, lips pursed tightly, head tilted to the side. It was like confessing to a giant praying mantis.
‘So,’ he said at last. ‘Now you’re out of touch with her?’
‘That’s right. She said she’d call me, but she hasn’t.’
‘But she will have to be very careful, now that her husband knows that you exist.’
‘Yes. But – will he be able to identify who I am, do you think?’
‘I think that’s very possible, if he has access to her work files. Do you know if he does?’
‘She worked for him.’
‘So. And he knows that someone was helping her that night.’
‘More than one person, actually, because of the guys in the park.’
‘Yes. That might help you, by muddying the waters. But still, say he goes through her records to find out who she has been in contact with – will he find you?’
‘I was one of the people she had under surveillance.’
‘But there will be a lot of those. Anything more?’
Frank tried to remember. ‘I don’t know,’ he confessed. ‘I thought we were being careful, but.…’
‘Did she call you on your phone?’
‘Yes, a few times. But only from pay phones.’
‘But she might have been chipped at the time.’
‘She tried to be careful about that.’
‘Yes, but it didn’t always work, isn’t that what you said?’
‘Right. But –’ Remembering back – ‘I don’t think she ever said my name.’
‘Well – if you were ever both chipped at the same time, maybe he would be able to see when you got together. And if he sourced all your cell phone calls, some would come from pay phones, and he might be able to cross-GPS those with her.’
‘Are pay phones GPSed?’
Edgardo glanced at him. ‘They stay in one spot, which you can then GPS.’
‘Oh. Yeah.’
Edgardo cackled and waved an elbow at Frank as they ran. ‘There’s lots of ways to find people! There’s your acquaintances in the park, for instance. If he went out there and asked around, with a photo of you, he might be able to confirm.’
‘I’m just Professor Nosebleed to them.’
‘Yes, but the correlations … So,’ Edgardo said after a silence had stretched out a quarter mile or more. ‘It seems like you probably ought to take some kind of pre-emptive action.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well. You followed him to their apartment, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not your wisest move of that night, by the way.’
Frank didn’t want to explain that his capacity for decision-making had been possibly injured, and perhaps not good to begin with.
‘– but now we can probably use that information to find out his cover identity, for a start.’
‘I don’t know the address.’
‘Well, you need to get it. Also the names on the doorbell plate, if there are any. But the apartment number for sure.’
‘Okay, I’ll go back.’
‘Good. Be discreet. With that information, my friends could help you take it further. Given what’s happened, they might give it a pretty high priority, to find out who he really works for.’
‘And who do your friends work for?’
‘Well. They’re scattered around. It’s a kind of internal check group.’
‘And you trust them on this kind of stuff?’
‘Oh yes.’ There was a reptilian look in Edgardo’s eye that gave Frank a shiver.
In the days that followed, Frank passed his hours feeling baffled, and, under everything else, afraid. Or maybe, he thought, the feeling would be better characterized as extreme anxiety. He would wake in the mornings, take stock, remember where he was: in the Khembali embassy house’s garden shed, with Rudra snoring up on the bed and Frank on his foam mattress on the floor.
The daylight slanting through their one window would usually have roused him. He would listen to Rudra’s distressed breathing, sit up and tap on his laptop, look at the headlines and the weather forecast, and emersonfortheday.net:
‘We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man’s power is hooped in by a necessity which, by many experiments, he touches on every side until he learns its arc.’
Maybe Emerson too had been hit on the head. Frank wanted to look into that. And he needed to look into Thoreau, too. Recently the keepers of the site had been posting lots of Henry David Thoreau, Emerson’s young friend and occasional handyman. Amazing that two such minds had lived at the same time, in the same town – even for a while the same house. Thoreau, Frank was finding in these morning reads, was the great philosopher of the forest at the edge of town, and as such extremely useful to Frank – often more so, dare he say it, than the old man himself.
Today’s Thoreau was from his journal:
‘I never feel that I am inspired unless my body is also. It too spurns a tame and commonplace life. They are fatally mistaken who think, while they strive with their minds, that they may suffer their bodies to stagnate in luxury or sloth. A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as his brain. We exaggerate the importance and exclusiveness of the headquarters. Do you suppose they were a race of consumptives and dyspeptics who invented Grecian mythology and poetry? The poet’s words are, “You would almost say the body thought!” I quite say it. I trust we have a good body then.’
Except Thoreau had been a consumptive, active though he was in his daily life as a surveyor and wandering botanist. This passage had been written only two years before he died of tuberculosis, so he must have known by then that his lungs were compromised, and his trust in having a good body misplaced. For lack of a simple antibiotic, Thoreau had lost thirty years. Still he had lived the day, and paid ferocious attention to