Interrupt

by Tony Dwiggins

  "Get out."

  Feferman picked up the answering machine, pried it open, and removed the tape. He slipped it into his jacket pocket. "Now, Mr. Faulkner, I'm going to leave. If I want you in my office, I'll tell you when to come. If I want to visit you again, you're going to welcome me." He wagged a finger at Andy, then turned and trudged into the living room.

  Andy didn't follow. He heard the front door open, then Feferman's voice. "You're going to call me when you figure out the importance of Mr. Strowger." The door slammed shut.

  Andy dropped into the chair, still warm from Feferman's body.

  If he could have had any wish granted right now, he would wish to be sitting in Colson's office with the team, kicking around some minor alarm that was provocative, not lethal, hearing Candace's high, clear, sarcastic voice assessing the damage.

  Suddenly, he lunged for the phone. He got dial tone and jabbed in the number that was jotted on his desk blotter. Then he slammed down the handset; there was no transmitter in the phone. There was the bug, still in his hand, but he was damned if he was going to reinstall that.

  He sprinted into the living room and used the phone on the coffee table. The thought came that they hadn't checked this set for bugs, but he didn't care, he just counted the ring-backs and waited for her to pick it up. He was shot through with adrenaline.

  Finally, she answered, voice cottony from sleep.

  "Did you get the call records?" he said, hoarse.

  When she realized who he was and what he wanted, she answered. "Not yet."

  "Don't try." For God's sake, Nell, don't end up like Can-dace.

  CHAPTER 10

  Andy opened his hand and spilled the sand down onto Candace's coffin. Then he walked away, fast, his palm gritty where sand grains clung to sweat.

  He moved uphill, above the long line of mourners waiting to file past the hole in the ground and release their sand.

  A small grove of eucalyptus offered shade, and Andy stopped there. The smell of eucalyptus made him think of Stanford; the trees were all over campus, and on a warm sunny day like this the leaves would release their oils and saturate the air with the astringent odor.

  Below, a slight figure in a well-fitted suit paused beside the hole, looked down, and with one elegant movement scattered sand onto the earth. Amin. He turned from the grave and followed Andy's path uphill.

  "I am sorry," Amin said, stopping beside Andy.

  "Me too." Andy picked out Speedy and Lloyd in the line, and farther back, Colson.

  "I didn't really know her. Just that once at the cutover, you understand."

  "Nice of you to come."

  "Respect for the dead," Amin said softly.

  Andy looked downhill.

  "Andy, my chick, a quick word. Sometime soon I would like to talk with you about these switch failures."

  "Anything to do with switch failures is the business of telco Security."

  Amin pressed his fingertips together, steepling his hands. This was a gesture he had used in class for effect, inviting the student to rethink his position. "I am concerned about you, about your difficult situation."

  "I'm alive."

  Amin broke the steeple and patted Andy's arm. "I hear that you are suspended, and under a cloud of suspicion."

  Andy didn't ask where Amin got his information. Amin always had access to information. He remembered Amin as his students saw him, native of Jordan, schooled in Europe and Boston, alighting at Stanford for no one knew how long, consulting and conferencing in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Milan, London, wherever the principal people were meeting. A player in the real world. Amin was the processor in his own communications network.

  "Andy, I had a thought that may be of use to you. Perhaps, though, this is not the time or the place."

  The mourner standing over Candace's grave, bulky and huge even from here, was Feferman. Feferman dropped his sand, wiped his hands, and stepped aside to watch the others in line.

  "Now is all right," Andy said.

  "Well. If you are certain." Amin waited a moment, discreet, then resumed. "As you may or may not know, I've made a little study, a hobby, of the technical phenomenon of phreaking."

  "Phreaking? You think it was a phone phreak who sabotaged the switches?"

  "Most probably not. But the phreaking network is buzzing about these switch failures. Possibly, they have learned something useful."

  "Then they should report it."

  "Phreaks, as a rule, are not drawn to report things to officialdom."

  Andy glanced at the mourners. The chief special agent, head tipped back, white face shining in the sunlight, was looking uphill at them. Too far away to overhear, too far away to read lips if he had the skill, but close enough to be curious. The bear sniffing the wind. All he would catch would be the odor of eucalyptus.

  "We've had a phreak over at R-TAC," Andy said. "The guy is into everything." Candace, he recalled, had left the phreak a rude message on the bulletin board.

  "Andy, I must repeat that I don't think a phreak is actually responsible...."

  "Why not?'

  "Well, it's possible, in that phreaks are technically clever. As are a good number of non-phreaks."

  "But this takes more than technical know-how. It takes a certain mind-set."

  "Do you mean criminal?"

  "Maladjusted, at the least."

  Amin stepped out into the sunlight, to a worn granite gravestone. He regarded it a moment, then sank gracefully to the ground, legs crossed, perching on the stone. He looked up at Andy, sweeping his arm in a half-circle. "Please?"

  Andy sat on the grass beside him. Amin had held seminars on the grass outside the engineering building. Never before, though, on a gravestone.

  "Let's consider maladjustment. I have had students who were quite bright, in the ninety-ninth percentile. And some of them, in my opinion, were capable of activities that someone might call maladjusted. Perhaps, more accurately, we'll call them skewed. They are concerned with the technical distillation of the problem without regarding the nontechnical parameters, the human dimensions." Amin gazed at Andy. "But then all of us in the ninety-ninth percentile share that weakness to some extent. You, Andy, have certainly been ...carried away ...by the thrill of the hunt."

  "Carried away? That's not the same as crippling two switches." Andy folded a blade of grass. "Not the same as murder."

  "It was murder, then?" Amin did not show surprise.

  Remember at the cutover, the story about Strowger. His strongest memory of Candace, Andy thought, was going to be of a voice on an answering machine. Someone we both know. Strowger, the cutover, Amin. There was a crosspoint, the kind that Feferman would savor.

  Andy stared at Amin. No.

  Amin was consulting his watch. It was a crafted gold watch, thin, European, not an engineer's watch. Andy remembered it, or one like it, how Amin would always remove it and slip it into his pocket before touching any equipment in the lab.

  Amin did not get carried away.

  Someone, in the line of mourners down below, was crying.

  The eucalyptus oils, like a medicinal inhalant, filled Andy's head and made his eyes water. Now, he thought, he would associate the smell of eucalyptus with a funeral, rather than with student days on campus.

  "Andy," Amin said, "would you like to talk to your phreak from R-TAC?"

  "You know him?"

  "No. But my little hobby has given me a certain reputation in the phreaking world. I am considered to be a nonjudgmental interested observer. Phreaks have tremendous egos, they can't resist someone like me. If I put the word out, he may contact me, and I can perhaps induce him to contact you."

  "Do it, then."

  "For one of my chicks, anything." Amin rose. "I have class in forty-five minutes." He held out his hand.

  Andy scrambled up and took it.

  "Take care of yourself, Andy."

  "Thank you."

  Amin headed down the hill, headed back to his students. No one wou
ld ever mistake him for a student; not because of his graying hair but because of his bearing, fluid and surefooted, that of a man who had only answers.

  A phreak. The thought remained in Andy's mind. He knew no phreaks. Phreaks were like ghosts; they came and went as they pleased, and unless they chose to reveal themselves they remained invisible. It was possible, he suddenly thought, that a phreak knew him.

  Later, when he walked back down the hill, there was still one mourner at the grave site. Ray Colson stood erect, hands folded behind his back, gazing down into the earth like a watchful hawk. Then he knelt, probing the grass. He did not look up as Andy approached, and Andy stopped and waited for him to finish his search. As he waited, he noticed the top of Colson's head, how expertly Colson's hair was cut to disguise the thinning.

  Colson stood, holding the dandelion that he had torn from the grass. "When I was a child," he said, "we used to call these milk fairies."

  Andy had never seen such an expression on Colson's face: open, almost daydreaming. Feeling like an intruder, he fixed his sight on the dandelion.

  "I don't believe I ever told that to Nell."

  Nell had not come, Andy thought. But then, she barely knew Candace.

  As much as Amin knew Candace. From R-TAC and the cutover.

  Someone we both know.

  Christ, Andy thought. No. Someone we both know. Colson was someone he and Candace both knew, as was Lloyd, and Speedy, and twenty other people at R-TAC, and how many others from field calls and conferences.

  Andy turned to Colson. "I thought Nell might have come."

  "No," he said, terse again, Colson again. "But I'm meeting her back at the office for lunch, if you have a message."

  Andy froze. The five-E team, what was left of it, was here, and Nell was alone at the office.

  Colson lifted the dandelion close to his lips and blew hard. The silky filaments exploded into a cloud, then took a long slow fall back to earth.

  Like fairies, Andy thought.

  Colson watched the bits of dandelion float down into Can-dace's grave. "More appropriate than sand, don't you think?" he asked, leveling his oscilloscope look on Andy.

  CHAPTER 11

  Foothill Boulevard sliced across the back lands of Stanford, the foothills for which the road was named angling upward from its western side. It was two-laned and narrow here, jammed with traffic routed around Stanford. Joggers scissored dangerously close and cars crowded them back.

  Andy snapped on the radio, punched the buttons past the all-news station, classical, TalkNet, New Age, heavy metal, reggae, and stopped when he hit old Creedence Clearwater. They used to play this kind of stuff in the lab at Stanford, hard-beat rock, always oldies, loud straight-on music that fed them energy at three in the morning. Andy turned up the volume and rolled down the window and sucked in the tang of California browning—weedy, heavy sage, bone-dry and warm—while Creedence intoned the bayou.

  His heart echoed Creedence: heavy downbeat, insistent.

  He came to the turnoff, a graveled driveway that cut through the trees several hundred yards to a dirt clearing. They had left the car here when they hiked up the hills for the picnic. Today, there were a couple of parked cars and, at the far end of the clearing, the van with the "E.T. Phone Home" bumper sticker. White with red stripes girding its flanks, the red starburst logo, and "Pacific Bell" in humble gray block letters.

  He parked, shutting off the engine and Creedence, got out, and approached the van.

  There was no one in the cab of the van so he walked around to the back and knocked softly on the doors. Her face appeared, screened, at the tinted glass windows. Then the doors flew open and he saw her clearly. She smiled. "Come in."

  He climbed into the back of the van and she slammed the doors shut behind him. The window tint filtered the light inside to amber.

  There were huge spools of wire, racks of parts, test phones, large green metal boxes, a ladder strapped to one wall and a pegboard of tools to the other. Stacked in the corner were the two sets of pole-climbing gear.

  He didn't see a mag tape reel. Disappointment, relief, then disappointment again hit him.

  Nell sat on a metal box and invited him to sit on another. She wore the blue workshirt and jeans, but she had on sandals instead of boots. He wondered if the sandals were supposed to offset the Pac Bell truck; if she had something to give him, she wasn't doing it as a telco employee.

  "You said on the phone...."

  "No, I didn't. All I said on the phone was meet me here."

  "Okay." He watched her. "I like secret meetings."

  "You think this is crazy."

  "No, just cramped." The metal boxes were close; their knees jammed together. He tried to keep his breathing even.

  "Andy, did you ever think that your phone might be wiretapped? Or your house or your car bugged?"

  He was momentarily stunned, as if he had gotten the wrong way across a power supply. He had never thought of such a thing until Feferman suggested it, and now he could not touch a phone without wondering if it was tapped.

  "Think about it," she said.

  He started to tell her about the drop-in bug, but instead said, light, "Who's going to tap the phone of a telecom engineer?"

  "God, you engineers have such egos. You're just like a doctor who won't admit he's sick."

  "All right, I'm sick. What do you know about wiretapping?"

  "We cover it in training."

  After Feferman had left that night, he had examined his other phones and found them clean.

  "There are some nasty little bugs out there," she said mildly.

  "You want to check out my phones?"

  "If you want me to." She grinned at him, pleased, or amused. Then she leaned across him and stuck her hand into the space between the metal box he was sitting on and the wall of the van. She produced a bulging manila envelope, laying it on the box beside him.

  He willed himself not to look at the envelope. He watched her eyes, the almost-gold irises widening as she waited for his reaction.

  "Did anybody see you?"

  "Nobody." She paused. "Almost everybody was at the.... thing ... for Candace."

  "I wish you hadn't taken the risk."

  "There was no risk. I made a lunch date with Ray and asked him for his keys so I could wait in his office."

  So easy, he thought.

  "It's what you wanted, isn't it?"

  "Yes. But after what happened to Candace, what I wanted was for you to stay out of this."

  She shrugged. "Too late."

  He nodded,

  "Do you want me to return the tape?"

  "No. No more risks." He glanced at the envelope. "I don't want you to take it back."

  "Then say thank you and stop worrying."

  He took her hand, held it gently resting on his knee. Her fingertips were work-roughened but the palm was soft and warm. "Thank you, Nell."

  "Any time." With her free hand she pushed loose curls of hair back from her face, tried to tuck them into her braid, and he saw in surprise that she was nervous.

  He was grateful. More than that: he was stirred. He could see the pulse beating in her throat, fast, an alarm gone red.

  "Nell." He let her hand go and reached for her, moving his hands to her shoulders, down her back, feeling the heat of her skin through the workshirt. She slid onto the box next to him, pressing close, and laid her head on his chest. He could feel his own heartbeat vibrating through her.

  He touched her hair, his hand shaking. He pulled off the band that held her braid and dug his fingers deep into the red-gold plaits. Her hair was slippery clean, like a child's.

  Her lips were at his throat, and he breathed in sharply. "Look at me," he whispered.

  She tipped her head back. Her face was flushed, her lips still open.

  He kissed her. Her hands pressed hard on the back of his neck, she was pulling onto his lap, and he slid his arm under her legs.

  As they moved, they knocked the envelope to t
he floor.

  * * *

  They lay in a canyon of equipment, a spool of wire rising above their heads, a latticework of racks and shelves flanking them on either side. Andy stared up at the black coils of wire, tightly ribbed, then at Nell. She was tanned all over, a harvest of sand and water and warm beaches, but here amidst the tools her sweep of flesh was stunning. As he continued to stare, she sat up and pulled her workshirt from the tangle of clothes beneath them and put it on. "You're beautiful here," he said.

  "Here?"

  He waved a hand: the tools, the truck. "Context." He tried again. "Like gold in the gravel." He shoved up beside her, his body stiff from the hard floor. "It's more striking that way." He stopped; shut up, fool.

  She held the edges of her shirt but didn't button it. "You're very nice."

  He leaned closer to her, touched his forefinger to her cheek, and traced a line down under her chin. He realized he had made the sign for "girl."

  She turned to him. "Don't tell Ray about us."

  "Ray?" He pulled back. "You're more likely to see Ray than I am."

  "When you get back to work."

  Andy picked up his pants, held them over his groin. "Why shouldn't Ray know about us?"

  "Well," she said, "the records...."

  He saw. He saw her on the picnic with Colson, the celebration. The strawberries and champagne. She has come all the way up from San Diego, taken a job with Pacific Bell, she won't be an engineer but she joins the telco, just like him, to please him. She wants to impress him, and by God she gets past the calibration, she registers approval on his scope. He toasts her with champagne and feeds her strawberries, he acquired that trick somewhere, maybe that's how he courted her mother. Then, pleased and probably astounded with her success, she shows off and teaches him how to climb.

  Now she looks at the stolen records and she feels guilty.

  "You don't want to lose what you started on that picnic with Ray."

  "Whatever it was." Her mouth compressed, then relaxed. "Well, it was something. When I was climbing with him it was a real father-daughter thing. You know what I mean. The father passes along his skills and there's this bonding.... except"—she laughed—"he didn't actually pass along that skill."