Fifty Degrees Below

  Through the lowest leaves of his tree appeared the aluminum-runged nylon rope ladder. One of his climbing friends had called this kind of ice-climbing ladder a “Miss Piggy,” perhaps because the rungs resembled pig iron, perhaps because Miss Piggy had stood on just such a ladder for one of her arias in The Muppets’ Treasure Island. Frank grabbed one of the rungs, tugged to make sure all was secure above, and started to climb, still pursuing his train of thought. The parcellated life. Fully optimodal. No reason not to enjoy it; and suddenly he realized that he was enjoying it. It was like being a versatile actor in a repertory theater, shifting constantly from role to role, and all together they made up his life, and part of the life of his time.

  Cheered by the thought, he ascended the upper portion of his Miss Piggy, swaying as little as possible among the branches. Then through the gap, up and onto his plywood floor.

  He hand-turned the crank on the ladder’s spindle to bring the ladder up after him without wasting battery power. Once it was secured, and the lubber’s hole filled with a fitted piece of plywood, he could relax. He was home.

  Against the trunk was his big duffel bag under the tarp, all held in place by bungee cords. From the duffel he pulled the rolled-up foam mattress, as thick and long as a bed. Then pillows, mosquito net, sleeping bag, sheet. On these warm nights he slept under the sheet and mosquito net, and only used his down bag as a blanket near dawn.

  Lie down, stretch out, feel the weariness of the day bathe him. Slight sway of the tree: yes, he was up in a tree house.

  The idea made him happy. His childhood fantasy had been the result of visits to the big concrete treehouse at Disneyland. He had been eight years old when he first saw it, and it had bowled him over: the elaborate waterwheel-powered bamboo plumbing system, the bannistered stairs spiraling up the trunk, the big living room with its salvaged harmonium, catwalks to the separate bedrooms on their branches, open windows on all four sides. . . .

  His current aerie was a very modest version of that fantasy, of course. Just the basics: a ledge bivouac rather than the Swiss family mansion, and indeed his old camping gear was well-represented around him, augmented by some nifty car-camping extras, like the lantern and the foam mattress and the pillows from the apartment. Stuff scavenged from the wreckage of his life, as in any other Robinsonade.

  The tree swayed and whooshed in the wind. He sat on his thick foam pad, his back holding it up against the trunk. Luxurious reading in bed. Around him laptop, cell phone, a little cooler; his backpack held a bathroom bag and a selection of clothing; a Coleman battery-powered lantern. In short, everything he needed. The lamp cast a pool of light onto the plywood. No one would see it. He was in his own space, and yet at the same time right in the middle of Washington, D.C. One of the ferals in the ever-encroaching forest. “Oooop, oop oop ooooop!” His tree swayed back and forth in the wind. He switched off his lamp and slept like a babe.

  Except his cell phone rang, and he rolled over and answered it without fully waking. “Hello?”

  “Frank Vanderwal?”

  “Yes? What time is it?” And where am I?

  “It’s the middle of the night. Sorry, but this is when I can call.” As he was recognizing her voice, she went on: “We met in that elevator that stuck.”

  Already he was sitting up. “Ah yeah of course! I’m glad you called.”

  “I said I would.”

  “I know.”

  “Can you meet?”

  “Sure I can. When?”

  “Now.”

  “Okay.”

  Frank checked his watch. It was three in the morning.

  “That’s when I can do it,” she explained.

  “That’s fine. Where?”

  “There’s a little park, near where we first met. Two blocks south of there, a block east of Wisconsin. There’s a statue in the middle of the park, with a bench under it. Would that be okay?”

  “Sure. It’ll take me, I don’t know, half an hour to get there. Less, actually.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there.”

  The connection went dead.

  Again he had failed to get her name, he realized as he dressed and rolled his sleeping gear under the tarp. He brushed his teeth while putting on his shoes, wondering what it meant that she had called now. Then the ladder finished lowering and down he went, swaying hard and holding on as he banged into a branch. Not a good time to fall, oh no indeed.

  On the ground, the ladder sent back up. Leaving the park the streetlights blazed in his eyes, caged in blue polygons or orange globes; it was like crossing an empty stage set. He drove over to Wisconsin and up it, then turned right onto Elm Street. Lots of parking here. And there was the little park she had mentioned. He had not known it existed. It was dark except for one orange streetlight at its north end, near a row of tennis courts. He parked and got out.

  Midpark a small black statue of a female figure held up a black hoop. The streetlight and the city’s noctilucent cloud illuminated everything faintly but distinctly. It reminded Frank of the light in the NSF building on the night of his abortive b-and-e, and he shook his head, not wanting to recall that folly; then he recalled that that was the night they had met, that he had broken into the NSF building specifically because he had decided to stay in D.C. and search for this woman.

  And there she was, sitting on the park bench. It was 3:34 A.M. and there she sat, on a park bench in the dark. Something in the sight made him shiver, and then he hurried to her.

  She saw him coming and stood up, stepped around the bench. They stopped face to face. She was almost as tall as he was. Tentatively she reached out a hand, and he touched it with his. Their fingers intertwined. Slender long fingers. She freed her hand and gestured at the park bench, and they sat down on it.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said.

  “Oh hey. I’m so glad you called.”

  “I didn’t know, but I thought. . . .”

  “Please. Always call. I wanted to see you again.”

  “Yes.” She smiled a little, as if aware that seeing was not the full verb for what he meant. Again Frank shuddered: who was she, what was she doing?

  “Tell me your name. Please.”

  “. . . Caroline.”

  “Caroline what?”

  “Let’s not talk about that yet.”

  Now the ambient light was too dim; he wanted to see her better. She looked at him with a curious expression, as if puzzling how to proceed.

  “What?” he said.

  She pursed her lips.

  “What?”

  She said, “Tell me this. Why did you follow me into that elevator?”

  Frank had not known she had noticed that. “Well! I . . . I liked the way you looked.”

  She nodded, looked away. “I thought so.” A tiny smile, a sigh: “Look,” she said, and stared down at her hands. She fiddled with the ring on her left ring finger.

  “What?”

  “You’re being watched.” She looked up, met his gaze. “Do you know that?”

  “No! But what do you mean?”

  “You’re under surveillance.”

  Frank sat up straighter, shifted back and away from her. “By whom?”

  She almost shrugged. “It’s part of Homeland Security.”

  “What?”

  “An agency that works with Homeland Security.”

  “And how do you know?”

  “Because you were assigned to me.”

  Frank swallowed involuntarily. “When was this?”

  “About a year ago. When you first came to NSF.”

  Frank sat back even further. She reached a hand toward him. He shivered; the night seemed suddenly chill. He couldn’t quite come to grips with what she was saying. “Why?”

  She reached farther, put her hand lightly on his knee. “Listen, it’s not like what you’re thinking.”

  “I don’t know what I’m thinking!”

  She smiled. The touch of her hand said more than anything words could convey, but right
now it only added to Frank’s confusion.

  She saw this and said, “I monitor a lot of people. You were one of them. It’s not really that big of a deal. You’re part of a crowd, really. People in certain emerging technologies. It’s not direct surveillance. I mean no one is watching you or anything like that. It’s a matter of tracking your records, mostly.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Well—no. E-mail, where you call, expenditures—that sort of thing. A lot of it’s automated. Like with your credit rating. It’s just a kind of monitoring, looking for patterns.”

  “Uh huh,” Frank said, feeling less disturbed, but also reviewing things he might have said on the phone, to Derek Gaspar for instance. “But look, why me?”

  “I don’t get told why. But I looked into it a little after we met, and my guess would be that you’re an associational.”

  “Meaning?”

  “That you have some kind of connection with a Yann Pierzinski.”

  “Ahhhhh?” Frank said, thinking furiously.

  “That’s what I think, anyway. You’re one of a group that’s being monitored together, and they all tend to have some kind of connection with him. He’s the hub.”

  “It must be his algorithm.”

  “Maybe so. Really I don’t know. I don’t make the determinations of interest.”

  “Who does?”

  “People above me. Some of them I know, and then others above those. The agency is pretty firewalled.”

  “It must be his algorithm. That’s the main thing he’s worked on ever since his doctoral work.”

  “Maybe so. The people I work for use an algorithm themselves, to identify people who should be tracked.”

  “Really? Do you know what kind?”

  “No. I do know that they’re running a futures market. You know what those are?”

  Frank shook his head. “Like that Poindexter thing?”

  “Yes, sort of. He had to resign, and really he should have, because that was stupid what he was doing. But the idea of using futures markets itself has gone forward.”

  “So they’re betting on future acts of terrorism?”

  “No no. That was the stupid part, putting it like that. There’s much better ways to use those programs. They’re just futures markets, when you design them right. They’re like any other futures market. It’s a powerful way to collate information. They outperform most of the other predictive methods we use.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “Is it?” She shrugged. “Well, the people I work for believe in them. But the one they’ve set up is a bit different than the standard futures market. It’s not open to anyone, and it isn’t even real money. It’s like a virtual futures market, a simulation. There are these people at MIT who think they have it working really well, and they’ve got some real-world results they can point to. They focus on people rather than events, so really it’s a people futures market, instead of commodities or ideas. So Homeland Security and associated agencies like ours have gotten interested. We’ve got this program going, and now you’re part of it. It’s almost a pilot program, but it’s big, and I bet it’s here to stay.”

  “Is it legal?”

  “It’s hard to say what’s legal these days, don’t you think? At least concerning surveillance. A determination of interest usually comes from the Justice Department, or is approved by it. It’s classified, and we’re a black program that no one on the outside will ever hear about. People who try to publish articles about idea futures markets, or people futures markets, are discouraged from doing so. It can get pretty explicit. I think my bosses hope to keep using the program without it ever causing any fuss.”

  “So there are people betting on who will do innovative work, or defect to China, or like that?”

  “Yes. Like that. There are lots of different criteria.”

  “Jesus,” Frank said, shaking his head in amazement. “But, I mean—who in the hell would bet on me?”

  She laughed. “I would, right?”

  Frank put his hand on top of hers and squeezed it.

  “But actually,” she said, turning her hand and twining her fingers with his, “at this point, I think most of the investors in the market are various kinds of diagnostic programs.”

  Now it was Frank’s turn to laugh. “So there are computer programs out there, betting I am going to become some kind of a security risk.”

  She nodded, smiling at the absurdity of it. Although Frank realized, with a little jolt of internal surprise, that if the whole project were centered around Pierzinski, then the programs might be getting it right. Frank himself had judged that Pierzinski’s algorithm might allow them to read the proteome directly from the genome, thus giving them any number of new gene therapies, which if they could crack the delivery problem had the potential of curing outright many, many diseases. That would be a good in itself, and would also be worth billions. And Frank had without a doubt been involved with Yann’s career, first on his doctoral committee and then running the panel judging his proposal. He had impacted Yann’s career in ways he hadn’t even intended, by sabotaging his application so that Yann had gone to Torrey Pines Generique and then Small Delivery Systems, where he was now.

  Possibly the futures market had taken notice of that.

  Caroline was now looking more relaxed, perhaps relieved that he was not outraged or otherwise freaked out by her news. He tried to stay cool. What was done was done. He had tried to secure Pierzinski’s work for a company he had ties to, yes; but he had failed. So despite his best (or worst) efforts, there was nothing now he needed to hide.

  “You said MIT,” he said, thinking things over. “Is Francesca Taolini involved with this?”

  A surprised look, then: “Yes. She’s another subject of interest. There’s about a dozen of you. I was assigned to surveil most of the group.”

  “Did you, I don’t know . . . do you record what people say on the phone, or in rooms?”

  “Sometimes, if we want to. The technology has gotten really powerful, you have no idea. But it’s expensive, and it’s only fully applied in some cases. Pierzinski’s group—you guys are still under a much less intrusive kind of thing.”

  “Good.” Frank shook his head, like a dog shaking off water. His thoughts were skittering around in all directions. “So . . . you’ve been watching me for a year. But I haven’t done anything.”

  “I know. But then . . .”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I saw you on that Metro car, and I recognized you. I couldn’t believe it. I had only seen your photo, or maybe some video, but I knew it was you. And you looked upset. Very . . . intent on something.”

  “Yes,” Frank said. “That’s right.”

  “What happened? I mean, I checked it out later, but it seemed like you had just been at NSF that day.”

  “That’s right. But I went to a lecture, like I told you.”

  “That’s right, you did. Well, I didn’t know that when I saw you in the Metro. And there you were, looking upset, and so—I thought you might be trailing me. I thought you had found out somehow, done some kind of back trace—that’s another area I’ve been working on, mirror searching. I figured you had decided to confront me, to find out what was going on. It seemed possible, anyway. Although it was also possible it was just one of those freak things that happen in D.C. I mean, you do run into people here.”

  “But then I followed you.” Frank laughed briefly.

  “Right, you did, and I was standing there waiting for that elevator, thinking: What is this guy going to do to me?” She laughed nervously, remembering it.

  “You didn’t show it.”

  “No? I bet I did. You didn’t know me. Anyway, then the elevator stuck—”

  “You didn’t stop it somehow?”

  “Heck no, how would I do that? I’m not some kind of a . . .”

  “James Bond? James Bondette?”

  She laughed. “It is not like that. It’s just surveillance. A
nyway there we were, and we started talking, and it didn’t take long for me to see that you didn’t know who I was, that you didn’t know about being monitored. It was just a coincidence.”

  “But you said you knew I had followed you.”

  “That’s right. I mean, it seemed like you had. But since you didn’t know what I was doing, then it had to be, I don’t know . . .”

  “Because I liked the way you looked.”

  She nodded.

  “Well, it’s true,” Frank said. “Sue me.”

  She squeezed his hand. “It’s okay. I mean, I liked that. I’m in a kind of a bad . . . Well anyway, I liked it. And I already liked you, see? I wasn’t monitoring you very closely, but closely enough so that I knew some things about you. I—I had to monitor some of your calls. And I thought you were funny.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. You are funny. At least I think so. Anyway, I’m sorry. I’ve never really had to think about what I do, not like this, not in terms of a person I talk to. I mean—how horrible it must sound.”

  “You spy on people.”

  “Yes. It’s true. But I’ve never thought it has done anybody any harm. It’s a way of looking out for people. Anyway, in this particular case, it meant that I knew you already. I liked you already. And there you were, so, you know . . . it meant you liked me too.” She smiled crookedly. “That was okay too. Guys don’t usually follow me around.”

  “Yeah right.”

  “They don’t.”

  “Uh huh. The man who knew too little, watched by the spy who knew even less.”

  She laughed, pulled her hand away, punched him lightly on the arm. He caught her hand in his, pulled her to him. She leaned into his chest and he kissed the top of her head, as if to say, I forgive you your job, I forgive the surveillance. He breathed in the scent of her hair. Then she looked up, and they kissed, very briefly; then she pulled away. The shock of it passed through him, waking him up and making him happy. He remembered how it had been in the elevator; this wasn’t like that, but he could tell she remembered it too.

  “Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “Then we did that. You’re a handsome man. And I had figured out why you had followed me, and I felt—oh, I don’t know. I liked you.”