Page 52

51.

Two months of gloom had culminated in a glorious day of sunshine, and it felt like the universe was sending me a postcard from a future I would not be around to enjoy. See this? See what you are going to miss? When I tilted my head back to gaze up at the sky that was visible between the towers of downtown, I was slapped in the eye by a brilliant cerulean slice.

The climate inside Starbucks, however, remained the same as the day before. The bright spring light had been dulled flat by the brown glaze on the windows. The room was still a temperature-controlled 68 degrees, the same inoffensive jazz standards played on the stereo system. The store was emptier this afternoon, but a smattering of bored-looking customers sat hunched over their drinks, flipping through abandoned sections of the Chronicle .

My father was perched at the same table in the corner, as far as possible from the bored barista who was rearranging the display of chocolate-covered coffee beans. He hadn’t changed clothes—it was possible this was the only outfit he currently owned—and he looked even more rumpled, his coat limp and his hair flat on one side. I wondered where he’d spent the night; if he had been the one to sleep rough in Golden Gate Park. I wouldn’t put it past him.

I could feel his eyes on me as I stopped at the counter and bought myself a Frappuccino. It had occurred to me that this might be my last chance to taste one. Whatever was about to happen from this point on, it wouldn’t involve a lot of three-dollar blended coffee drinks.

Straw wedged between my teeth, sugar coating my tongue, I walked slowly over to my father, and took the chair across from him.

“You came,” he said. He knuckled the side of his nose, where a raw patch of skin was erupting.

“You thought I wouldn’t?”

He shook his head, a sideways cant to his smile. “No, I knew you would. You’re my girl, like it or not. That’s never going to change.”

A knot inside my chest was making it difficult to breathe. I tried to find words that wouldn’t come.

My father pointed at the backpack that I’d dropped at my feet. “That’s it? Everything’s in there?”

“Everything important.”

“The money?”

“No,” I conceded. “That’s in a safe place.”

“We’ll need that money. I’ve been living off the generosity of some of my readers but that won’t last forever. Things in North Dakota were getting dicey when I left, Malcolm isn’t as rational as I hoped he’d be; turns out he’s part of the militia movement, which is a hornet’s nest I really don’t want to poke. So I think it might be time to head to Texas, Ben’s offered shelter, but we’ll need supplies.” He prodded the backpack with the toe of his sneaker. “The hard drive, it can’t possibly be in there, either. Where is it?”

“The hard drive doesn’t matter, Dad.”

“Of course it matters. We need to destroy it so it doesn’t get into the wrong hands. I was thinking—we’ll make a movie of it. With one of those little camcorders I’ve been seeing around. Blow it up, a very symbolic act, and then you can put the video online. You can put video on the World Wide Web, right?”

The knot had risen from my chest to my throat. I was finding it hard to swallow. “But, Dad, Peter Carroll surely backed it up.”

A distant expression came into my father’s eyes, as if he was trying to dig up something that was lodged in the rear of his brain. “Backed what up?”

“Backed up his hard drive—as in, made a copy? You know what a backup is, right? They back up my computer every week at Signal. I’m sure they did the same at Microsoft.” His brow crumpled as the portent of my words dawned on him. He picked up a napkin that was sitting on the table between us and began to twist it into a knot. I couldn’t decide if the frustration darkening his face was directed at himself, for forgetting something so fundamental, or at me, for surpassing his understanding of technology.

“Point is, I realized that destroying that hard drive achieves nothing. I’m sure Peter Carroll’s bosses at Microsoft have already passed all his research on to someone else.” My father opened his mouth to object, but I cut him off. “Dad, Oppenheimer didn’t build the atomic bomb himself; it was a team effort. Even without him, the bomb would have happened eventually. Maybe not as fast, but he wasn’t the only one working on the concept.”

He was silent for a moment, twisting and untwisting the napkin. “All right. I concede your point about the hard drive.”

“Don’t you think it’s the point of everything, though? How many people do you think you need to kill to halt the march of progress? For every person you take out of the equation, a hundred more are coming up behind them. It would be a Sisyphean task to try to stop it.”

“ Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backward. That was Aldous Huxley, writing in Ends and Means . His point being—”

“Dad. Stop. No more lectures.”

He opened his mouth, about to persist, but something about the tone of my voice stopped him. Instead, he unfolded the twisted napkin and carefully spread it out on the table between us, running a palm over the wrinkles in a futile effort to restore it to its previous condition. “You know. I thought about it and let’s leave your mother out of all this,” he said, his tone going unexpectedly tender. “I shouldn’t have asked that of you. It wasn’t fair. I’m still angry at her, and I let that color my judgment. But I can see now that it was a mistake to ask you to choose between us. Jane, why are you crying? Don’t cry.”

On the other side of the windows, a cluster of shadows moved past, temporarily blocking out the light. I’d lost my appetite for the Frappuccino, too sweet, that was melting into slush in the cup in front of me. I pushed it away and used the back of my hand to wipe away the tears that were falling, unwelcome, down my face. My father was silent, for once, watching me; and I could tell that it was dawning on him that his plan for us had gone awry.

And then there was a clatter at the door of the café, stiff-heeled shoes scuffing against the floor tiles, a squeak of rubber. The jazz music suddenly seemed painfully loud, but that was only because the rest of the café had gone so quiet. I was afraid to turn around, and so it was only through the changing weather of my father’s face that I could read what was transpiring behind me. First, a sudden wariness, his eyes shifting down and to the side, perhaps an attempt to render himself invisible; and then a stiffening of his spine, hands braced against the tabletop, jaw set; and finally, just as I felt the presence of the bodies behind my chair, a sudden slackness in his cheeks, followed by a long exhale.

“Squirrel,” he said softly, a warning, and it broke my heart.

I turned slowly in my seat and there they were, a half-dozen uniformed officers, two more in suits with FBI tags clipped to their lapels. The bogeymen of my childhood, blocking our path to the door, hands hovering over the guns at their waists. This time, there was no escape hatch, no secret tunnel to saveus.

My head buzzed so loudly that the words being shouted over my head registered only as an indiscernible roar. The room seemed to spin in desultory circles around us; the Frappuccino, somehow, was on its side and oozing brown sludge across the table. My only anchor amid the chaos was my father’s face, his eyes still latched tightly on mine. And so, gazing back into this abyss, I could mark the exact moment when it dawned on him that I was not surprised, and I was not scared; that, in fact, I had known who would be standing behind me before I even turned around. That the feds had not tracked us here of their own accord—but that I had led them here, on purpose.

I watched my colossus of a father break apart when he finally understood that I had turned him in, and it tore me in pieces, too.

But what I didn’t expect was the strange light in his eyes, something like wonder, as he stared at me with his jaw slightly agape. As if, instead of betraying him, I had managed to impress him. As if only now—now that it was too late—did he see that his worthy adversary had been sitting there, right in front of him, all along.