Homeland

by Cory Doctorow

  * * *

  They did that cop thing when they put me in the car, pushing my head down with that weird rough/tender gesture so that I wouldn’t brain myself on the door frame. But I was 110 percent certain that these two were not cops, or DHS, or anyone else on a government payroll. It was the gear in the car: none of your scarred, scratched, rubberized cop laptops like you got in the SFPD cruisers I’d been handcuffed in. These guys had computers that screamed “tactical,” that matte black finish and those rugged matte black steel corner reinforcements, screens fitted with polarized privacy filters that made them appear black unless you were sitting right in front of them. They looked like they’d been designed by someone who’d never seen a modern computer, but had had one described to him by someone who spent a lot of time in muscle cars or Hummers.

  They didn’t just have a GPS: they had a crazy militarized one, with a hedgehog bristle of stubby, rubberized antennae and a street map display that showed the familiar streets of the Mission using blocky, eight-bit-style graphics that looked nothing at all like any commercial GPS or Google Maps. They had these crazy armored USB ports set right into the dashboard, each with a pair of LEDs set under hardened glass. There was a strong new-car smell, like they’d ordered some kind of fresh spookmobile that morning to stalk me with, something they could douse in gasoline and roll off a cliff when they were through with it.

  These guys looked like they had money, a lot of it, and weren’t afraid to spend it. They didn’t look like the sort of people who had to fill in a lot of crazy paperwork to get reimbursed, the way my dad had had to do for the books he’d bought for his department at UC Berkeley. The guy who’d been on lookout slid into the backseat with me—I noticed that there were no door handles on the inside of the back doors and wondered how he’d get back out again when he was through with me. This was a distracting thing to wonder about. It took my mind off what “through with me” might mean.

  “Hi there, Marcus,” the man in the back said. He also smelled like Axe body spray, which must be the national scent of Douchesylvania. He had a disarmingly friendly look: his tight, smooth-shaved face had all kinds of smile lines and wrinkles around his eyes. He projected this air of total relaxation and confidence, like the grown-up version of the Most Popular Kid on the Football Team character from a bad teen movie. “You can call me Timmy.” If we were about to play good cop/bad cop, Timmy was most definitely the good cop.

  “I’d like to consult an attorney,” I said.

  He smiled wider. “I like that,” he said. “That’s exactly what she said he’d say, isn’t it? She even got the voice down. Man, she really knows you well.” “She” must be Carrie Johnstone, squirreled away in some lair somewhere, eating popcorn and regaling her underlings with stories of my weakness and patheticness.

  These guys were here to shake me up, get me to say or do something, give them something: the names of the people who had access to the leaks, the passwords or keys, the locations of all the copies. They wanted to scare me. They had scared me. I felt like I could throw up at any second. I felt like I could piss myself.

  No. You know what I felt like? I felt like I was drowning. Like I’d been strapped to a board, tilted backwards with Saran Wrap over my mouth, and had water ladled down my nose, so that it filled my windpipe. My choke reflex had come to life, sucking hard to try to bring air into my lungs. Each time I coughed, the Saran Wrap belled out, pushing out some of the precious sips of air left in my lungs. Each time I breathed in, the Saran Wrap formed a tight seal around my mouth, and the suction drew more water down my windpipe. My lungs began to empty and collapse. My brain began a kind of awful fireworks display, the last lights and noises of a panicked organ about to wither and die and rot.

  That.

  I was sweating now, all over my body, and had the feeling of a terrible weight on my chest. It was the weight of the knowledge that I was in the power of someone who believed that he could do anything he wanted to me and never pay a single consequence.

  “Marcus, buddy, calm down, all right? We’re not here to hurt you.”

  I hated myself for the weakness I was showing. I’d once slept badly, pinching a nerve or a vein or something in my leg, and when I’d stood up in the morning, my leg had given way like it was made of wood, and I’d pitched forward on my face. Now I felt like something else—my inner strength, the place I’d gone to that moment on the playa at the temple—had let me down when I least expected it.

  “I would like,” I said, voice a gasp, “to consult—”

  He slapped me. Not hard. In fact, he was almost gentle. But he was fast, so fast I didn’t even see his hand move, and had to reconstruct what had just happened from the way that his body shifted, leaning forward a little, then relaxing back, his arm a blur in between. My face stung, but didn’t hurt.

  “Marcus,” he said, and now his voice was stern and paternal. “Enough of that. We’re not here to hurt you.” But you slapped me, didn’t you? Of course, he hadn’t slapped me hard. And I had no doubt that he could have, had he chosen to. He was a good six inches taller than me, broad-shouldered, and the muscles on his forearms and wrists stood out in cords and masses like a superhero drawing. “We just want to talk to you. If you want to get this over with, you should listen to what we have to say.”

  I stared fixedly ahead of me.

  “There’s something you have, Marcus. Something important. Something that you’ve been gossiping about to certain urinalists in the big old world.

  “The thing you have, it’s not yours. It’s our job to get it back. Once we’re confident that we have secured it, there will be no further need for us to communicate with you and no further need for you to communicate with us.”

  I thought about asking for a lawyer again, but couldn’t see the point. I kept up my fixed staring.

  “I understand that a certain party has asked you to publish this material.” What? Oh, right, Masha. “That party has changed her mind.”

  I was trying to keep my poker face on, but I suck at poker faces. He saw something change in my expression.

  “You think that we beat her up or something? Forced her to change her mind?” He laughed (a full-throated laugh, like someone hearing a funny joke) and his friend in the front seat laughed, too (a mean little bark of a laugh, like someone enjoying the sight of a stranger tripping and falling painfully). “Marcus, buddy. That little girl was plain worn out from all her rough travel. She was tired of living on tortillas and beans, tired of hiding out in the badlands. She wanted what she’d had before, three hots and a cot, a big-screen TV and a minifridge full of Twinkies, all the luxury stuff. Living large. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life as a refugee, sleeping under a newspaper and eating out of the trash. And hey, we need people like her. Our group, we know her, some of us have worked with her before. We like what she does. She’s good at it. We didn’t beat her up, we didn’t pull out her fingernails or drip candle wax on her skin. We just offered her a job and she took it.”

  This was so obvious a lie I nearly laughed myself. Whatever else Masha was, there was no way she’d sell out to these sick assholes.

  But, well, how well did I know Masha, really? I’d only met her three times, after all. Only knew her by reputation, mostly, and it wasn’t like her reputation was particularly spotless.

  Zeb, though. No way Zeb would have gone for it. And I’d seen Masha and Zeb together. They were a unit. Or they seemed like it, at least.

  “That little old man of hers,” said Timmy, reading my mind—or my crappy poker face—again. “He doesn’t really have much we need. We told her we’d keep him around though, if she wanted him. It’s not like he takes up a lot of room or eats a lot of chow. Everyone’s entitled to a pet. But she was through with him, not that I was privy to the, you know, intimate details. But they had words, is what I’m saying, and he went his way.

  “I bet you think we’re the bad guys. We’re not, though. We’re no monsters. We’re good guys, Marcus.” />
  Yeah, because good guys do a lot of kidnapping. Good guys blow up art cars in the middle of the desert and put a whole load of people in the hospital. You’re a pack of angels. Thinking it, but not saying it.

  “What if we take you to see her? We could do that, you know. It’s a bit of traveling, though. Could take a while.”

  “You got all your shots?” said the guy in the front seat with a voice full of morbid cheer. “You don’t wanna go there without all your shots, Marcus.”

  “That’s very true. But if that’s what it’ll take to convince you, we’d be happy to. Who knows, maybe there’d be something you could do for us, too. Kid like you, you’re at least half smart, which is smarter than most of the sheep out here. But I don’t think you wanna go on a long trip right now, do you?”

  The guy in front started the car and eased out onto Mission, and the guy in back put a gentle hand on my chest before I’d had a chance to move. A pane of opaque glass slid up between the front and back seats, and something happened to the rear windows, rendering them black. The only light came from the little dome light on the car’s ceiling.

  “Where are we going?” I said, and I sounded like a scared little kid, which is exactly what I felt like.

  “Just somewhere more private, Marcus. Glad to hear you’re up for a little chat, though. So, let’s talk.”

  * * *

  If I were a superspy, I’d have spent the ride counting hills and listening for the telltale cues of San Francisco traffic and figured out exactly where we were headed. But San Francisco is full of hills, and if you can tell one from the other while you’re scared to death in a blacked-out box, you’re a truer San Franciscan than I am.

  Timmy hummed softly to himself while we drove. He had taken my jacket and bag and he methodically went through the pockets of both, taking out every bit of electronics—laptop, phone, ereader, a little circuit tester I had stuck in my pocket so I could check on the Ethernet wiring in the office—and removed the battery from each device, then put the device and its battery in a heavy-duty freezer bag and set it to one side. Everything else got a fast but thorough examination and then went back into the bag, except for my multitool, a cool little Leatherman Skeletool that I’d coated in candy apple–red enamel using the gear at Noisebridge. He turned that over a few times, brought out the blade and tested it on his thumb—I kept it razor-sharp—and smiled and nodded approvingly. “Nice,” he said, and I felt stupid pride that this badass ninja goon approved of my knife. Maybe that’s the feeling that Masha had felt when she went to work for the DHS the first time around, or when she joined up with Carrie Johnstone and tossed out Zeb—if that’s what she’d actually done.

  The knife went into a baggie on the seat beside him, with the electronics. He felt carefully around the seams and edges of my bags, and I realized that he was doing the kind of bag search that you would get at the airport if the people at the airport actually gave a crap about finding stuff, instead of putting on a little puppet show about security.

  The car came to a stop. We’d been driving for a few minutes, or a hundred years, take your pick. The divider between the front and the back of the car slid down with that kind of purring near-silence of a really well-engineered mechanism. The guy in the front, whose ultrashort hair revealed a gnarly knob of scar tissue that ran from the crown of his head to the tendons standing out in the back of his neck, turned around to look at us. I looked past him, trying to figure out where we’d come. There was water, some dark shapes that might be boats, some industrial-looking buildings. I thought it must be China Basin, a landfill neighborhood that was a mix of abandoned warehouses and factories and trendy condos and offices built into former abandoned warehouses and factories. Judging from the boarded-up windows and the plastic bags and other ancient trash caught in the trees, this was the actual abandoned part.

  “Well, here we are,” Timmy said, and rubbed his hands together. He and the other man exchanged a long look. “Marcus,” Timmy said, turning back to me. “You know what the deal is now. We need what you’ve got back. We’ll take whatever steps you make us take to convince you that that’s the right thing to do. If you need us to take you to where your little friend is so she can explain the facts of life to you, that’s what we’ll do.

  “I don’t think you want that, do you? I think you’d like to have this unpleasantness behind you quickly and with a minimum of mess.”

  The other man twisted his face into an ugly smile. “You don’t want a mess, buddy. You really don’t want a mess.”

  I knew he was saying it to intimidate me.

  But it worked.

  “On the other hand,” Timmy said, accepting a little bottle of mineral water from his friend and sucking back half of it in one go, “you could just give us what we want and we’ll give you a ride to anywhere you’d like to go. You’d be out of this business, we’d get to knock off early and hit the strip bars, and you’d even get a free taxi ride out of it. It’s up to you. Are you a smart guy, Marcus, or are you a stupid guy?”

  I tried to find peace and calm, but it wouldn’t come. So I looked for anger, which is an easy place to get to from scared, and yeah, there it was. “You guys are so full of it,” I said. “You must think I’m a complete tard. I open up my laptop and nuke the file, and then what, you believe that’s my only copy and you let me go? Please. If that file is so important to you, you’re never going to trust me.”

  Timmy laughed and thumped the car door. “Oh, Marcus. Come on, we’re pros. We know how to do this kind of thing. We don’t want to take you along with us if we don’t have to. Where we’re headed, it’s a nice place, it’s a reward and an honor to get assigned there. The people there, they’re elite. You wouldn’t fit in. If we have any choice in the matter, we’ll leave you right where we found you.”

  I tried again for a poker face. Yeah, sure they’d leave me. In a garbage bag at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay.

  “Or maybe you think we want to off you? Now that wouldn’t make any sense. Smart guy like you, you’d have lots of copies where we couldn’t find them, but where they’d be sure to come to light some day if you weren’t around. We want your cooperation, and we can only get that for so long as you’re alive.”

  “And so long as you’ve got something to lose,” the other guy said. Bad cop.

  “Show him,” Timmy said. The guy in the front seat got out and walked around the car, closing the door behind him with another well-engineered thunk. The car rocked a little on its suspension as he opened it and got something out. His shoes crunched softly on the ground as he came back around and opened the passenger-side door and slid in. He was holding a heavy-duty ballistic plastic equipment case, another tactical black number, with big, chunky latches that had worn away a little to show glints of silver metal beneath the matte black paint. He thumbed the latches and opened the case, which made a little gasketty, rubbery sound as it opened. It had been filled with foam rubber with precise cutouts to accommodate a little black box, some wires, assorted discs of plastic and clips.

  “Polygraph,” the man said. It was such a pleasant surprise that I found myself on the verge of laughter.

  “Polygraph” is the fancy, semiscientific name for a “lie detector,” a machine that’s supposed to be able to tell whether you’re fibbing by measuring things like “galvanic skin response” (another science-y word, meaning “sweatiness”) and your heart rate. They were invented in 1921, and, like many science-y things, people decided they were so complicated that they must work. This, of course, is an insane reason to believe something.

  Lie detectors are crap. What they tell you is whether the person they’ve been hooked up to is sweaty, or whether his pulse has gone up, but that doesn’t mean he’s lying. Courts don’t admit lie detector evidence for a reason.

  But they’re still made and they’re still used—for much the same reason that people still wear crystals around their necks to cure their diseases or buy “homeopathic remedies” to get bett
er. It’s a combination of two distinct flavors of stupidity. I call the first one “It’s better than nothing.” I call the second one “It worked for me.”

  These delusions are why many big corporations, the U.S. military, and the FBI subject their people to lie detectors. Imagine that you’re some kind of millionaire big-shot company executive, the founder of a chain of successful convenience stores. You need to hire a regional manager, and if you hire the wrong person, he or she might rob you blind and ruin you. You need to get this right.

  So you pay some expensive “executive recruiting” company to find the right person. They have a big sales pitch: we’re smart, we’ve been doing this for years, and best of all, we’re scientific. We have “scientific personality tests” we’ll administer to make sure you’re getting the right person. And before you hire that person, we’ll wire her up to our lie detector and ask her some important questions, like “Are you planning on robbing the company?” and “Are you a secret drug user?” and so on.

  Science is awesome, right? A scientific recruiting company’s going to be totally badass at finding you the right person, using the science of hiring-ology, and their science lab must have a bunch of Ph.D. hire-ologists. But you’ve heard that the polygraph is, you know, kind of sketchy. Does it really work?

  “Oh, sure,” the consultants tell you. “Not perfectly, of course. But nothing’s perfect. Polygraphs, though, sometimes tell you when someone is lying, and isn’t that better than nothing?”

  (The correct answer is “probably not.” Flipping a coin or sacrificing a goat would “sometimes” tell you if someone was lying, if you had enough lies and enough goats and you did it for long enough.)

  Now, imagine you’re a section chief at the FBI. You got your job by passing a lie detector test. You’d been wired up, you’d been asked if you were a secret communist islamofascist terrorist dope-fiend. You’d said “no,” and the machine agreed. It works! Now, some people out there say that the machine’s a piece of crap, but what do they know? After all, it not only worked on you, it worked on everyone you work with!