A decent mike, he thought, would pick up sounds from the hallway, from his workroom across the hallway, maybe from the living room. What the hell had he just said in the hallway? The pattern of calls; he'd told Nell what he found in the call records. His heart pounded. All right, all right, what else? The personal talk, between him and Nell. Was Interrupt listening to that? Some kind of goddamned voyeur.
Was he listening now?
"Disconnect it," Nell said, reaching for the box.
Andy grabbed her hand. "I'll do it." He let go of Nell and twisted the phone cord once around his hand.
Wayne had come into his bedroom a couple of nights earlier, awakened by a nightmare. Throwing on the lights, signing furiously, he had told Andy that he dreamed he heard a noise, terrifying, like a funnel of color, blood-red and orange-rust, that swirled over him and filled his nose and mouth and ears and gagged him. He saw the colors and dreamed they were noise. And he woke up screaming, he said, but Andy hadn't heard him scream, and he thought he had really heard the noise. Then, as he came fully awake, lying there in darkness and silence, he realized it had been a nightmare. He had finished signing, his hands dropping limp, and a sob broke out of him, in itself a terrible barking noise. Finally, embarrassed, he told Andy he was glad he was deaf, he never wanted to hear a noise like that for real.
Had Interrupt been listening to that? He would have heard that barking sob and Andy's efforts to comfort his son, some of it signed and some of it spoken aloud. Andy didn't remember what he had put into spoken words.
Was he listening now?
"Get out of my life." Out loud; spoken words; spat out; Andy's voice now like Wayne's terrible noise. "Keep away from us."
Nell flinched. "Andy, he's...."
"He's a coward and a thug." He jerked his hand, ripping the plug out of the wall jack.
"Andy. Was that wise?"
"No."
"I know how mad you are."
"No, you don't." He unwrapped the phone cord from his hand.
"You warned me not to take risks."
"Nell." His voice was hoarse, his breathing ragged. "It wasn't wise, but it's done. Drop it."
"If he was listening and he heard you say...."
He picked up the box, looped the cord around it, and placed it on the birch table. "He's not listening now."
"I just don't want you to get hurt."
He shifted his gaze from the transmitter to her, crouched on his bed, fetching, as if there had been no business conducted in this room, as if she had settled there solely to entice him, and he felt a sudden weakness, almost giddiness, shoot through him. Precarious.
"Andy, you shouldn't...."
He put his hand to her lips and pressed hard. "I'm not wise." He touched her shoulder with his other hand, then slipped it around to her bare neck, beneath the waves of hair.
She leaned back, to look at him fully. Surprised, he thought.
"I really like you, Nell, I'm very attracted to you, and I want to make love with you," he said. "What about you?"
She swallowed, a rippling down her bare throat. "Yes."
As he helped her out of the yellow dress he saw dots, thousands of dots. Then he closed his eyes and she was the image of life again.
CHAPTER 15
At Stanford, we design elegance.
Looking in through the wall-size window, as if for the first time, Interrupt took stock of the telecommunications lab. State-of-the-art. Sun workstations, IBM 3090 mainframe, experimental switch components, load simulator, peripherals from half a dozen vendors.
And the students. Diligent, industrious, rigorous as only Stanford EEs could be rigorous, hunched over keyboards, crouched before switching components as if praying.
Smug.
Interrupt remembered, only too well.
As a teenager, at the kitchen table, heatedly filling in the application to Stanford, not bothering to apply to any other school. Then the letter in the mail, regrets, a stunning letter. With the embossed Stanford letterhead. In shock, sick at heart, Interrupt had gone on to another school, worked like a dog. Excelled. Then, finally, one more application, as much a prayer as a petition, for grad school, for admission to Stanford's Department of Electrical Engineering, to the innovative Center for Telecommunications.
This refusal was like an execution.
In the graduate program at the second-choice school the recurring nightmare had begun. Interrupt was working at Stanford, brilliant work, when the police burst into the telecom lab with a warrant for the imposter's arrest. Humiliated, Interrupt was led away in handcuffs. The other students and faculty in the lab did not even bother to look up from their work; the imposter's removal was of no consequence.
Interrupt could still feel the disgrace.
Now, in the far corner of the lab, a kid was bent over an array of circuit boards. Could be Andy Faulkner as a student. Running a hand through the brown hair, tangling it, worrying it, the neck tendons standing out, tautened, the fingers flicking as though they carried a charge, the kid wiring his soul into the boards.
So like Faulkner.
From the start, Interrupt had known that there would have to be an "Andy," indeed, had defined the parameters and steadfastly waited to find the man who fit them. The target had to be a Stanford man, he had to be both intelligent and technically fluent, and he had to possess what was conventionally considered moral fiber. He had to personify Stanford. He had to be a star. Faulkner fit the parameters. The TDD and the boy had been bonuses.
The kid in the corner, young Faulkner, as Interrupt now thought of him, suddenly straightened and looked directly at the window. Obviously, he was not seeing it, or Interrupt outside; he was facing outward but looking inward. Then his mouth curved into a scowl; he shook his head, pushed away from the bench, and walked over to the soft-drink machine.
No, not like Faulkner. Andy Faulkner would not have abandoned the challenge as easily as that. Interrupt rubbed at the headache, digging in knuckles in a futile effort to erase it.
The man did not give up.
Faulkner had done what he was supposed to do. Find the Stanford lab number, find the channel into the switch, make it look as if Stanford's innovative engineering stars were out of control. Give the telco tiger team a shove in the wrong direction.
But he wouldn't give it up. He would worry it to death, like a dog on a bone, until he had figured out the missing pieces.
Like hell, Interrupt thought.
The kid, lounging against the soft-drink machine, said something to someone, brusque.
Coward and a thug. Faulkner's words.
Coward and a thug.
The headache flared, as familiar, insistent, as hunger pangs. How dare you, Interrupt thought.
Interrupt spun away from the window, from the telecom lab, from the young students in their scowling glory, and cut across campus. At the computer center one could anonymously open a guest account and log onto a terminal to send an E-mail message.
Something bound at Interrupt's left wrist. It was just a wristwatch, strapped too tight, but it bound like a handcuff.
CHAPTER 16
Once, this place had been a second home to him. Sandra, alone days and many nights in their married student apartment, would have deleted the second.
Andy glanced around the telecom lab. Some new equipment, new paint on the walls, old posters. Benches and tabletops littered with twisted wire ends, hardened drops of solder, IC chips, boards. Styrofoam cups, donut boxes, balled-up plastic potato chip bags. Odors mixed: sugar, salt, and the analogous acrid smells of heated solder and cold coffee.
It was as it always had been, except that every student in the room looked too young to belong there.
Every one of them looked too young to be Zot,
The E-mail message on Andy's screen had said simply, "Meet me at the telecom lab in one hour." Andy turned so that he could watch the door.
The lab phone rang, and the student closest, no more than a chubby kid, picked up the
handset without shifting attention from her computer screen. "Telecom."
Zot could be a woman, Andy suddenly thought. He recalled what Candace had said about their phreak—only men play games like that. Maybe not.
"A recording," the student said, holding the handset aloft, eyes still on her screen. "Says, please activate your TDD. Who wants it?"
Wayne. Andy reached for the handset. "I'll take it."
By the time he put the receiver to his ear, all he got was dial tone.
He knew this game.
Phase change, he thought. It was a phenomenon of nature, in which a solid, liquid, or a gas changed from one form of matter to another. Andy had heard once about a small isolated body of still water that underwent a sudden, dramatic phase change: ice crystals spontaneously formed, branched, connected, and covered the surface of the lake with a sheet of ice. To the onlooker it was as if the water froze before his eyes.
Andy could see it, could see himself undergoing a phase change, a chill down his spine, an icy knob in his gut, a cold tingling in his arms and legs, and the crystallization icing his whole body until he stood frozen in place in the middle of the telecom lab.
The E-mail message had not been from Zot. The message had been from someone who used a TDD as a weapon. Interrupt. In the frozen depths of his being, Andy was certain of it;
He thought first, I'm on to him. And second, he has killed. Then, with fingers gone cold and stiff, he punched in his home number on the phone. He got Helen; no, she said, Wayne hadn't called the number he had left, the lab number, and neither had she. He hung up.
There were five people in the room, excluding himself. Too young to be Zot, he had thought. Too young to be Interrupt? The five students worked intently, ignoring the man rooted, stock-still, staring at them. Assuming, perhaps, that he was one of those grad students who never graduated.
The phone rang again, and the chubby student answered. "Telecom." She swiveled her chair to face him. "You Andy Faulkner?"
When he nodded, she handed him the phone.
This time, it was the cheerful voice of the TDD relay operator. Call from Mr. Wayne Faulkner. "Meet me at the admissions office, urgent," the operator relayed. "Reply?" When Andy stumbled, she said, never mind, Mr. Wayne Faulkner has rung off.
Andy stopped himself from calling home again; there was no chance in hell that Wayne had placed that call. If he called home, his call would be switched through Stanford's PBX system, and Stanford, he knew, used a 5ESS for its system. His first call home had gone through, had not crashed Stanford's system. If he called now, would this call be so benign? The telecom lab without telephone service; good joke, Interrupt.
But he wasn't going to bite. He moved away from the telephone.
Why the admissions office?
Go home. Or go to Feferman.
He left the telecom lab and started toward the parking lot, to lay it all in Feferman's lap.
Meet me at the admissions office, urgent, from Mr. Wayne Faulkner. But it couldn't be from Wayne.
Urgent.
Where was a phone?
He turned back toward the center of campus and broke into a jog. It was afternoon, a sunny day in late spring with finals still a month away, and students clogged the walkways. Students on bikes and students on foot, like electrons and protons accelerating toward each other, then repelling at the last microsecond. He pushed through the crowd, through the tangle of shoulders and elbows and handlebars. The students all seemed to belong to Interrupt, recruited by Interrupt to enmesh him.
He found himself outside Encina Hall, the administration building. There were phones in there.
Pounding up the steps, he passed a man who looked familiar, someone from the past. Stark white hair and a square workingman's face. Someone on the engineering staff, Andy thought. What was he doing all the way across campus at the admin building? The man stopped on the steps and turned to watch him, and Andy realized it was because he himself had stopped to stare.
The man nodded and passed on.
Andy sprinted up into the building.
He found the admissions office before he found a pay phone. He asked a clerk if he could use the phone for an urgent call, and she quickly stood up and backed away from her desk, giving him space, access to the phone. He dialed and caught her wary look on him, and while he counted the ring-backs he wondered if this call was going to go through without taking the system down.
Helen answered. No, again; Wayne hadn't called him, she hadn't called him. Everything was fine. Was he all right?
He hung up. His hand was shaking. He backed away from the clerk's desk.
The admissions office was a bullpen of clerks, crowded desks, crosstalk, ringing telephones.
So he had come here, after all.
For minutes he stood rooted, flinching every time the phone rang, waiting for the call that would be for him. Finally, he approached the same clerk and asked if there had been any calls for Andy Faulkner. She was uncertain, new at the job; a more experienced clerk would have grilled him, screened him, but she didn't ask the questions and for that he was grateful. She inquired around the bullpen and finally came back to him with a sheet of slick paper in her hand. She handed it to him with an expression of relief; clearly, someone had expected him to be there and that made it official.
The paper was a fax: A. Faulkner—Stanford Hospital emergency room.
He bolted out the door.
The hospital was back across campus, well beyond the engineering corner. His car was in a parking lot in the opposite direction. He ran.
Running on a warm day, not dressed for a run, sweating, he cut in with runners in shorts pounding the footpath that wound between the main campus and the hospital, through groves of eucalyptus. Sun heat baked the long leathery leaves, drawing out the medicinal oils, scenting the path like a hospital ward.
As he had known he would, Andy thought of a funeral when he drew in the eucalyptus-drenched air.
He thought of someone who could kill to prevent the revelation of a conjecture about switch failures and an undertaker named Strowger.
He reached the hospital light-headed and clammy with sweat. He knew precisely where the emergency room was. He had rushed Sandra there when she went into labor with Wayne, a sudden acute labor that had alarmed them both before settling into a thirty-hour medicated wait.
The emergency room waiting area was occupied by a small cluster of men and women speaking a hushed stream of Spanish, dressed up as if for a wedding.
Interrupt? He didn't know any of them.
From a treatment room came yelling, more in protest than pain, it seemed, and a staccato voice commanded, "Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it."
The emergency room had been redone in pastels since his visit eleven years ago.
From behind a partition he heard a new voice, gentle, or weary. "Dr. Kolsrud here. Brief me."
His head still pounded with his runner's heartbeat. He knew what to do; he had learned the rules.
"What kind of explosion?" the gentle, weary voice asked.
Andy approached the check-in desk. "My name is Andy Faulkner...." he began.
"Faulkner?" The receptionist straightened, recognition flashing across his face.
He knows me, Andy thought. This man with spiked blond hair, a sunburn, and three stud earrings in each ear knows who I am. "Yes, Faulkner."
"Got a message for you." The receptionist glanced down at a notepad. "Wayne Faulkner is being transported to the Stanford Hospital emergency room." He looked up and smiled, in sympathy or reassurance, a mouthful of crooked teeth bright white against the sunburn. "You're supposed to wait here."
He could have done nothing else but wait here.
From behind the partition the doctor's voice droned, an edge to it now. "Vitals, BP one-sixty over one hundred, pulse one-twenty, respirations, thirty-two. That's correct?"
Andy found himself counting his own pulse. His blood pressure must be dropping, he was seeing red spots flicking ac
ross his eyes. He focused on the receptionist's earrings and drew in a deep breath. "How did the message come?"
"Some kind of phone operator. T something."
"TDD?"
"Yeah."
"Apply burn packs and start a nasal oxy at six liters per minute," the doctor said slowly, distinctly. "You have the IV established?"
"When?" Andy said.
"When what?"
"When did the call come in?"
The receptionist checked his watch. "Five, ten minutes ago."
About when he'd left the admin building. He, always now like Feferman, didn't buy coincidences. Interrupt had to know where he was and when he was there. Interrupt was on a bike, and with his head down and his shoulders hunched he looked just like any other student racing across campus. Or he was sitting in a car somewhere on the street in front of the admin building, with a cellular phone and a TDD. Or he was the white-haired man from engineering, from the past, forgotten but familiar.
There was no way in hell, he thought, an echo, that the call had been from Wayne.
"What?" All weariness was gone from the doctor's voice.
"You can wait over there." The receptionist motioned toward the cluster of formal men and women.
"Look, I want you to monitor those respirations closely."
Why, Andy thought, does he keep using Wayne's name? This has nothing to do with Wayne.
"Vitals again, please."
My son has nothing to do with this.
The receptionist picked up his empty mug and sauntered over to a counter where a coffeemaker shared space with stacks of hospital forms.
Andy remembered Sandra in the wheelchair, doubled over her inflated belly, her wail of pain, the debate whether they had time to make it from the emergency room to the delivery room. Wayne then was barely real to him, a bulk in Sandra's belly that was propelling them both toward panic. When he was born, when his fuzzed head crowned, Andy was stunned to find himself headlong in love.
Andy grabbed the receptionist's phone and dialed his home number, his pulse and respirations pumping high. Only one ring-back and then Helen was on the line. He thought her voice sounded funny but he didn't have the chance to pursue it because the line went stone dead.
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