Donna had arrived, with heaps of luggage and a set of suit bags. She had brought two winter-clad Boston high-maintenance girls in a second taxi. The three women were having an animated chat with a young Anglo man. Oscar recognized the man — he didn’t know his name, but he knew the face, the cane, and the support shoes. This stranger was a local guy, a neighborhood regular.
Oscar unsealed his door. “How good of you to come. Welcome. You can take your equipment up to the prep room. We’ll be sending your client in presently.”
Donna ushered her charges upstairs, chatting briskly in Spanglish. Oscar found himself confronting the man with the cane. “May I help you, sir?”
“Yeah. My name’s Kevin Hamilton. I manage the apartment block up the street.”
“Yes, Mr. Hamilton?”
“I wonder if we could have a word together, about all these guys who’ve been showing up trying to kill you.”
“I see. Do come in.” Oscar shut the door carefully behind his new guest. “Let’s talk this over in my office.” He paused, noting Hamilton’s cane and the clumsy orthopedic shoes. “Never mind, we can talk downstairs.”
He led the limping Hamilton into the dayroom. Greta appeared suddenly, barefoot and in her bathrobe.
“All right, where do you want me?” she said resignedly.
Oscar pointed. “Upstairs, first door on your left.” Hamilton offered a gallant little salute with his cane. “Hello,” Greta told him, and trudged up the stairs.
Oscar led Hamilton into the media room and unstacked an aluminum chair for him. Hamilton sat down with obvious relief “Good-looking babe,” he remarked.
Oscar ignored him and sat in a second chair.
“I wouldn’t have disturbed you this morning,” Hamilton said, “but we don’t see a lot of assassinations in this neighborhood, generally.”
“No. ”
“Yesterday, I myself got some mail urging me to kill you.”
“Really! You don’t say.”
Hamilton scratched at his sandy hair, which had a jutting cowlick and a part like a lightning bolt. “You know, you and I have never met before, but I used to see you around here pretty often, in and out at all hours, with various girlfriends. So when this junkbot email told me you were a child pornographer, I had to figure that was totally de-tached from reality.”
“I think I can follow your reasoning,” Oscar said. “Please go on.”
“Well, I ran some backroute tracing, found the relay server in Finland, cracked that, traced it back to Turkey… I was download-ing the Turkish activity logs when I heard some gunfire in the street. Naturally, I checked out the local street monitors, analyzed all the movement tags on the neighborhood CCTV… That was pretty late last night. But by then, I was really ticked off. So I pulled an all-nighter at the keyboard.” Hamilton sighed. “And, well, I took care of it for you.”
Oscar stared in astonishment. “You ‘took care of it’?”
“Well, I couldn’t locate the program itself, but I found its pushfeeds. It gets all its news off a service in Louisiana. So, I spoofed it. I informed the thing that I’d killed you. Then I forged a separate news release announcing your death, and I faked the headers and fed it in. It sent me a nice thank-you note. That should take care of your problem. That thing is as dumb as a brick.”
Oscar mulled this over, thoughtfully. “Could I get you a little something, Kevin? Juice? An espresso, maybe?”
“Actually, I’m kind of bushed. I’m thinking I’ll turn in now. I just thought I’d walk down the street and give you the news first.”
“Well, that’s very good news you’ve glven me. It’s excellent news. You’ve done me quite a favor here.”
“Aw, think nothing of it,” Kevin demurred. “Any good neigh-bor would have done the same thing. If he had any serious program-ming skills, that is. Which nobody much does, nowadays.”
“Forgive me for asking, but how did you come by these pro-gramming skills?”
Hamilton nudged his chin with the handle of his cane. “Learned them from my dad, to tell the truth. Dad was a big-time coder on Route 128 before the Chinese smashed the info economy.”
“Are you a professional programmer, Kevin?”
“Are you kidding? There aren’t any professional programmers. These losers who call themselves sysadmins nowadays, they’re not pro-grammers at all! They just download point-and-click canned stuff off some pirate site, and shove it into the box.”
Oscar nodded encouragement.
Hamilton waved his cane. “The art of computing hasn’t ad-vanced in ten years! It can’t move anymore, ’cause there’s no commer-cial potential left to push it. The Euros have settled all the net protocols nice and neat, and the Chinese always pirate anything you publish… So the only guys who write serious code nowadays are ditzy computer scientists. And nomads — they’ve always got time on their hands. And, you know, various white-guy hacker crooks.” Hamilton yawned. “But I have a lot of trouble with my feet, see. So coding helps me pass the time. Once you understand how to code, it’s really kind of interesting work.”
“Are you sure there’s nothing I can do for you? I feel very much in your debt.”
“Well, yeah, there is one thing. I’m chairman of the local neigh-borhood watch, so they’re probably gonna bother me a lot about this shooting incident. It would be good if you could come over later and help me reassure my tenants.”
“I’d be delighted to help you.”
“Good deal, then.” Hamilton stood up with a stoical wince.
“Let me see you out, sir.”
After Hamilton’s shuffling departure, Oscar swiftly transferred the contents of his laptop into the house system and set to immediate work. He sent notes to Audrey Avizienis and Bob Argow in Texas, urging them to run immediate oppo scans on his neighbor. It was not that he distrusted Kevin Hamilton — Oscar prided himself on his open-minded attitude toward Anglos — but news so wonderful seemed very hard put to be true.
At 11:15, Oscar and Greta took a cab to Bambakias’s office in Cam-bridge. “You know something?” she told him. “This suit isn’t as stiff as it looks. It’s really very cozy.”
“Donna’s a true professional.”
“And it fits me perfectly. How could it fit so well?”
“Oh, any smart surveillance scanner can derive body measure-ments. That was a military-intelligence app at first — it just took a while to work its way up to haute couture.”
They sped across the Longfellow Bridge, over the Charles River basin. Yesterday’s snow was already half gone to slush on the slopes of the Greenhouse dikes. Greta gazed out the taxi window at the distant pilings of the Science Park. Donna’s hired girls had done the eye-brows. Sleek, arched eyebrows gave Greta’s narrow face a cast of terri-fying intellectual potency. The hair had real shape to it now, and some not-to-be-trifled-with gloss. Greta radiated expertise. She really looked like she counted.
“Things are so different here in Boston,” she said. “Why?”
“Politics,” he said. “The ultra-rich run Boston. And Boston’s rich people mean well — that’s the difference. They have civic pride. They’re patricians.”
“Do you want the whole country to be like this? Clean streets and total surveillance?”
“I just want my country to function. I want a system that works. That’s all.”
“Even if it’s very elitist and shrink-wrapped?”
“You’re not the one to criticize there. You live in the ultimate gated community. It’s even airtight.”
The office of Alcott Bambakias was in a five-story building near Inman Square. The place had once been a candy factory, then a Por-tuguese social club; nowadays it belonged to Bambakias’s international design and construction firm.
They left the cab and entered the building. Oscar hung his hat and overcoat on a Duchampian bottle-rack tree. They waited for clearance in the first-floor reception area, which boasted six scale models of elegant Chinese skyscrapers. The Chinese were the last na-tion still fully alive to the rampant possibilities of skyscrapers, and Bambakias was one of the very few American architects who could design skyscrapers in a Chinese idiom. Bambakias had done extremely well for himself in the Chinese market. His reputation in Europe was similarly stellar, long preceding his rather grudging fame at home in America. He’d done swooping Italian sports arenas, stolid German dike complexes, a paranoid Swiss eco-survivalist compound… He had even done a few Dutch commissions, before the Cold War had made that impossible.