BETA - Project Avatar, page 12
“Yes, Karen. It will take a few hours to gather all the information. Is that okay?”
Another rickshaw scooted past her, ignoring her signal. “Yes, that’s fine. And can you call me a cab to the train station?”
“Yes, I can call a taxi for you,” Beta offered. “Or there’s an auto-rickshaw stand one block west and one block south. The train station is twelve hundred meters away, or about two minutes by auto-rickshaw.”
She was tempted to walk to the train station. She enjoyed being out in public in her new costume—a young Sonia Gandhi striding elegantly through the Bangalore night. But to play it safe, she rounded the corner in search of the rickshaw stand.
Her auto-rickshaw driver was more than polite, maybe even a little awestruck. He sat up straight in the driver’s seat and spoke to her tentatively in Tamil. But when she used English to say where she was going, he said, “Yes madam, the train station, immediately!”
The station was a long, decrepit Victorian building, built of massive blocks of gray limestone—the kind of building that would no doubt be around for centuries, even after rail had become obsolete. Dee told the driver to take her around to the side entrance. He complied reluctantly, but not without first trying to convince her that a woman in fine clothing should use the well-lit grand archway at the front of the station. But Dee was more inclined to the stick to the shadows.
When she entered the main hall, she half expected to see watchers in the building—spies in wait for her. And perhaps she did see them, for all she knew. Local informants wouldn’t be dressed as obviously as the men who had chased her through the streets today. They would blend in with the questionable characters who sat watching tourists come and go, touting hotels and transport services, or perhaps looking for opportunities to pickpocket the unwary.
She crossed the high-ceilinged ticket hall with its tiled floors and worn old benches, moving in no hurry, keeping her head high, and trying to seem a little bored. Inevitably, she drew a certain amount of attention, but as far as she could tell, everything was going off without a hitch.
Beta had informed her of a train heading north tonight. It would take her to a transfer point where she could make a connection to Chennai, the nearest city outside Bangalore with an international airport. She would arrive as an anonymous traveler by rail, then travel standby from Chennai to Europe on one of the three morning flights that Beta had identified for her.
She checked the train station’s big information board. It gave departure details in Tamil, Hindi, and English on old-fashioned magnetic flip cards. The northbound train appeared to be right on schedule.
Only one ticket window was open, and despite the late hour, the line snaked halfway across the floor. Whole extended families appeared to be traveling together, most of them with lots of baggage and sundry encumbrances. She felt terribly exposed in the middle of the open floor, and the wait seemed to drag on for hours.
When she finally reached the head of the line, the small balding man behind the cage bars did a double-take as she stepped up to the window. The way Dee read it: the look meant he had assumed she was Indian until he had seen her up close. She bought her tickets in cash and moved away from the line with a huge sense of relief.
She wandered off to look for food. The station’s cramped little restaurant was filled with loiterers and families killing time, as well as the occasional diner. Except for a glass of chai, Dee hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and she was famished. She ordered a fragrantly spiced lentil dahl, several naan flatbreads, and a coconut chutney.
She carried her food, wrapped in waxed paper, out to the train platform. To her delight, the train was already boarding. She had taken a second-class ticket so that she would squeeze in with the crowd. In first class, it was always possible that she might run into someone she knew from her sojourn last year in Bangalore. She took her seat in a crowded passenger car and found herself and a family of five sharing a pair of benches on either side of a small table. The children, who all had immense black eyes, stared at her with tireless curiosity.
Once the train was underway, Dee stood up to search for a more private place to enjoy her meal. She found a small wooden shelf built at elbow height into the wall at the rear of the carriage. She carefully unwrapped the food and ate it standing up.
Gazing out the window, she watched the last lights of Bangalore’s suburbs gradually fade, to be replaced with the vast, sweeping darkness of rural India. The moon had set, and she could see almost nothing outside without pressing her face to the window. An occasional electric light coasted slowly by in the distance—a reminder that there really was a world out there. It was a densely populated world at that, though now it was shut down for the night and its electric grid was all but switched off.
The food made her happy. She was just savoring the last mouthful when Beta spoke to her through the insert in her ear. She hadn’t dared remove the little Bluetooth unit since Tipu Palace. If Beta had something to say to her, she didn’t want to miss it.
“You have an incoming call from an unidentified number, Karen.”
“I’ll take it,” she said.
Abe’s voice spoke into her ear. The first thing he said was, “So you’re still alive?”
“The emergency’s over,” she told him. “But I’ll tell you, it was a doozy.”
“Sorry I wasn’t there for you. I’m at Frankfurt Airport, making my transfer. I just got your message.”
“It’s okay, I’m fine now. I’m sorry for calling your forbidden number.”
“You didn’t do a very good job of making it sound innocuous,” he chided her.
“I was scared out of my wits! I was being chased. By those guys I told you about—only, this time they didn’t have the funny red hats.”
“You can speak freely,” he told her. “As long as there’s nobody listening at your end.”
“Okay,” she said. “You know who I mean. The two UMBRA agents who raided my room in Arizona.”
“I told you they were coming to India. But wow! That was fast. They must have used the NSA central computer at Fort Meade to track your flight from Phoenix to Bangalore. Then, let’s see, to find your hotel . . . that would have required local contacts with the police.”
She had come to the same conclusion earlier, but still, it was demoralizing to hear the whole thing spelled out. “I suppose that means I’m officially wanted by the U.S. government.”
“Not necessarily.” Abe was quiet for a minute, thinking. In the background on his end of the line, she could hear a distant intercom speaker making an announcement in German, inside some big, echoing space. “If UMBRA is operating outside their mandate, they don’t have to answer up for it, at least not immediately. There’s this weird double standard inside the intelligence community. A lot of the time, the people who are supposed to be supervising or regulating groups like that actually prefer to stay uninformed.”
“Uh huh,” she replied noncommittally. She had never seen an official operation within the government intelligence community that involved illegal, military-style operations without official approval. But she had heard stories. The old Oliver North scandal came to mind.
“Well, one way or another,” she said, “I guess my troubles aren’t the kind of thing I can just walk into an embassy and complain about.”
He scoffed. “No. I don’t think I would do that if I were you. Besides, we’re not even sure what Grimmer and his team have to do with it. So what are you going to do now?”
“Well, from what Nandan tells me, I should speak with Brice Petronille.”
“So why do you have to speak with Meestair Weekee?” Abe asked her.
“I did some work for him a few years back.”
“What!” he exclaimed. “You never told me that. No wonder they’re after you! That guy’s hotter than a firecracker lit at both ends. Hell, he’s probably on some kind of government hit list or something. I keep waiting to read in the papers that someone’s put a sniper bullet in him.”
“I know, I know,” she said. “I didn’t realize how bad his troubles were. Do you think you could find a phone number where I can contact him? I’m guessing he’s in Geneva.”
“I suppose so,” Abe said offhandedly. “Yeah, sure, I’ll bet I can find out where to reach him. If I can, I’ll leave the number in the dead drop. Now, remember, you can check the drop from your phone, though you should try to use public internet points whenever you can.”
“I will. Thanks a million.” She started packing up the remains of her meal.
“Wait a minute, don’t hang up yet! What’s the rest of the story? Have you been leaking documents to WikiBlab?”
“No! All I did was help Brice set up his security. Even if UMBRA was hoping to interrogate me—maybe extract information about WikiBlab’s encryption system—why would they fly me all the way to Arizona, in front of all those witnesses, and then let me wander the grounds? Why not just take me into custody?”
“You’re right,” he agreed. “Something doesn’t fit. So did you get out of Bangalore? It sounds like you’re on a train.”
“I am. I’m going to fly out of Chennai as Karen Collins in a few hours. If you can get back to me with Brice’s contact details as soon as possible, I’d appreciate it.”
“Listen, they’re calling my flight. I’ve got to go.”
“Before you go, there is one other thing.” She told him about Beta’s remarkable performance this afternoon.
When she had finished, Abe’s end of the line was so silent, she thought she had lost the connection.
“Abe?”
“I’m . . . I’m here. That’s the strangest thing I’ve heard all day, and this has been a strange day. This application program of yours—it asked you to confirm that you were ‘under pursuit?’”
“Yes. Twice.”
“And it told you it was ‘assessing line-of-sight vulnerability?’”
“Yup.”
“Then it’s not an Endyne product.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s not. And just to make sure: you really got it from Ed Haas?”
“Yes, and Ed works for Endyne.”
“Then you know what this means, don’t you?”
“No, what does it mean?”
“It means Ed is some kind of a secret agent.”
Dee rolled her eyes, turned her attention to the darkened window, and began adjusting the draping of her sari in its reflection. This was the kind of moment when she wished she had friends who weren’t clinically paranoid. “Abe, Ed Haas is not a secret agent. There are only three or four things in life that I know with absolute certainty. And that’s one of them.”
“Yes, he is.”
“No, he’s not. Do you know who you’re talking about? You’re talking about Ed Haas. Ed Haas, Abe. Some people can grow up to be secret agents, and some people can’t. A real secret agent would eat Ed Haas for lunch.”
“I’m just saying he didn’t obtain that program from Endyne. Either that, or Endyne is a front for something really big and really ugly.”
She squeezed her lips to one side and blew a lock of black hair off her face. “If this is going to turn into some long conspiracy harangue, I’m going to hang up.”
“So hang up,” he said irritably. “My plane’s about to leave anyway. I’m just trying to be helpful.”
Dee began inspecting her nails and waited patiently.
“Well, what do you think it is?” Abe asked, sputtering a bit.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, looking through the window into the first-class carriage for inspiration. She spotted some children playing with a little electronic game. “Maybe Endyne pilfered some of the code from a computer game. Or from some kind of simulator.”
“Simulator!” he chortled. Then he paused for a moment and said grudgingly, “All right. I suppose that’s one possibility.”
“As opposed to Ed being a secret agent, which is not a possibility.”
“Whatever. In any case, I’ll take a close look at your smartphone comms over the Substructure line and see if I can figure out what it’s doing. The avatar must be accessing some sophisticated new database. Look, I have to go now. Good luck with Petronille. If you really need to look him up, then at least be careful.”
“I will,” she promised him. “And, Abe, thanks again—for everything.”
Chapter 13
Dee went back to her seat and slept restlessly for a few hours as the train made its way up into the highlands. She might have slept right through her transfer, but the mother of the family across from her gave her a friendly shake.
She shuffled down the aisle and out of the train, into the cool midnight air of the Karnataka Hills. As far as she could tell, she was in the precise geographic middle of nowhere. The station featured a long, weather-beaten wooden platform beside the tracks, and an awning with a single, small incandescent bulb that cast a faint glow, partly clouded by flying insects. When the train pulled out, she was left on the platform among dozens of other passengers waiting for the Chennai Express. Most were peasants from local villages, though a few were transfer passengers like herself.
The platform was almost completely covered with a patchwork of printed cotton sheets, thrown out like picnic cloths to define the territories of family groups. People of all castes and ages lounged there, eating meals packed in baskets or banana leaves, surrounded by little piles of fruit, board games, and, here and there, a wicker basket that made clucking sounds or an occasional outburst of quacking. A pair of little boys stood staring at Dee, each of them holding a baby goat. The whole scene had a sobering look of permanence about it, as if some of these people had been here for days and days. All of them seemed to expect to be here a good deal longer.
Dee found an unoccupied square yard of planking and staked her claim.
The train was scheduled to arrive in thirty minutes, but no one seemed surprised when it did not. Two hours later, she was still sitting cold and cross-legged on the bare planking, hugging her knees and barely able to stay awake. The long day and the lengthening night had left her wrung out, and all she wanted from life was a hot bath and a bed.
To distract herself, she pulled out her smartphone and switched on the screen. It was unwise to run down the battery, but without a little stimulation, she wasn’t going to be awake much longer. Beta’s face, a mirror image of her own, appeared on the screen.
Some children from the family behind her saw the glow and wandered over to stare over her shoulder, acting as familiar as if they had known her all their lives. She gave them a tired smile of indulgence, then thought to turn on the speaker for them.
She wasn’t surprised to find that Beta spoke passable Tamil, so she used the little perfect image of herself to translate a few minutes of friendly conversation with the kids. By then, she had a cluster of nine or ten of them hovering around her, laughing and chatting in Tamil through the amazing little figure on the screen. What must they have thought? The little image looked just like this foreign woman in sari, and it spoke in her voice, but it knew their language and she didn’t. It also looked them in the eyes, turning to speak to each of them individually, as if it were a tiny living person. “Beta,” Dee said, “can you sing them a children’s song in Tamil?”
Beta promptly complied, with a rather tuneless rendition of “Moon, Moon, Come Running to Me.”
The children first looked amazed, and then delighted. Soon they all joined in, the youngest first and then the rest of them, singing and dancing. Dee laughed and clapped her hands, thoroughly enchanted.
One of the children asked a question in Tamil, and Beta translated: “Why does it look like you?”
“It can imitate people,” she replied.
Beta passed this on, and the children absorbed the information with sober curiosity.
“Beta,” she said. “See if you can imitate somebody.”
“I don’t understand the command. Would you like to see a menu?”
“Yes, let’s see a menu.”
She found a menu entry entitled APPEARANCE TEMPLATE. It led her to a set of commands that restored Beta’s original digital image as an anonymous cartoon character, and then initiated the process of visual personalization.
She aimed the little electronic camera at a middle-aged man in a Nehru jacket seated nearby. He was in a world of his own, sneaking sips from a flask in his pocket. She gestured for the children to stay silent, and they tried to suppress their giggles. She held the camera pointed at the man for a few minutes.
When she turned the screen back for them to see, Beta’s cartoon image had grown gray hair and a pot belly. It was slouched in a ridiculous parody of the man’s ungainly position, half propped on one elbow, bearded head nodding and then jerking up at irregular intervals. The children shrieked with laughter. The little cartoon took a discreet look to the left, then to the right, and then lifted a tiny bottle over its face. Its bristly Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as it glugged down the booze. Some of the kids were almost rolling on the platform with glee.
It was another hour until the train arrived, but it was a very pleasant hour. The audience couldn’t get enough of Beta. Even the crankiest of the children soon forgot how long past bedtime it was, and several adults came over to ask in Tamil where you could buy such a toy. Dee told them that it would be available in India soon. And for all she knew, that might be true.
By the time the train pulled up, the unit’s low-battery light was blinking. She switched her smartphone back to standby mode and put it away in her bag. It was only when she took her seat that she remembered how exhausted she was.
She slept in a state of pure oblivion throughout the lurching train ride down from the hills and across the coastal plain to Chennai.
The clatter of the wheels on battered old tracks finally roused her from her sleep. They were passing over cracked concrete train beds and rickety overpasses, as the train rolled through the slums of Chennai. Sitting up with a small groan, she looked blearily through the windows at mile after mile of tiny impoverished homes, with far-off glimpses of a gray sea.
