American Subversive (16 page)

“It was good of you to call,” Mrs. Roderick said. “I'm sure Paige would love to hear from you, but we . . . that is, Lawton and I . . . to tell you the truth we're not sure where she is at the moment. She told us she was going to visit friends for a few weeks, and, well, it's been several months. Of course, I'm sure she's fine, you know her.”

There was a commotion in the background, a male voice, low but insistent, then Mrs. Roderick again: “Brendan, could you hold on a moment?”

“Sure.” More muffled conversation. She was talking to someone with her hand over the mouthpiece. Touché looked at me impatiently.

Then the line crackled back to life. “Brendan, this is Lawton Roderick here.”

“Hello, sir.”

“My wife's putting a happy face on all this, but the fact is we're real worried about Paige. She's a big girl, and Lord knows she's always had a mind of her own, but she's never disappeared like this. I'm assuming you have no idea where she is?”

“No, I haven't talked to her in ages.”

“Well, if you hear anything . . .”

“Of course,” I said.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. I waited.

“Brendan?” Mr. Roderick said, finally.

“Yes?”

“There is one thing.” His voice was tentative now, unsure of itself. “We got a call here at the house two weeks back from a number with a Vermont area code. I picked up the phone and . . . nothing. I mean, someone was there, but they didn't speak. When the line went dead, I called the number back but no one answered. I wouldn't have thought much of it, especially since we don't know anyone in Vermont, but”—he sighed heavily—“it was our son Bobby's birthday that day, and Ellery, she feels strongly that . . .”

“It could have been Paige?”

“Call it a woman's intuition.” He tried to chuckle, then gave up.

“Do you still have the number?”

“Sure, but I doubt it'll do much good. I've called it a dozen times, but no one answers. I even tried to trace it through the phone company, but they said they couldn't do anything because it wasn't a residential or business number, whatever that means.”

“Would you mind giving it to me? Maybe I can . . . I don't know”—I didn't know—“look into it and see if anything comes up.”

“Can't see as it'd hurt. It's . . . are you ready?”

“Oh, yes.”

I wrote it down carefully, repeated it back, and thanked him.

“Maybe I'll be thanking you,” he said, and then hung up.

Touché looked at the digits and frowned. “Should we try it?” he asked.

“Of course!” I took a deep breath and dialed the number. It rang. And rang. For more than a minute. There was no answering machine. Finally, I gave up.

“Probably a pay phone,” Touché said. “And that means we're . . . what's the word?”

“Screwed?”

We put our plates in the sink and relocated to the porch. Fresh air and all that. For half an hour we talked through ideas, loose theories that led nowhere. Why wouldn't Paige just call her brother directly? Why wouldn't she at least say hello to her father? Or, if she was in real trouble, why call anyone at all? We had no answers. After a period of silence, Touché sighed heavily, then announced that we were stuck. At a dead end. Unless another e-mail message surfaced, there was nothing to do now but move on with our lives.

“Just think,” he continued. “On Monday you can write about the whole saga. Post the photo, the e-mails, tell the entire story. Maybe it'll lead to something. Probably, it'll turn out to be a joke. Either way, it'll get you some attention.” With that, he picked up a magazine and started working on a crossword.

He was right. We'd been lucky and luck runs out. I stared out over the water and thought of my crumbling apartment on my broken street; I thought of my girlfriend and her tales of love gone wrong; and
as a light breeze cooled the porch and fluttered distant sails, I thought of the thousands of blog posts that lay before me, years of momentary significance adding up to nothing in particular.

“I need to check in with Derrick,” I said. “See how the rest of yesterday went.”

“Feel free to use the house phone,” Touché said, without looking up.

But I didn't know my boss's number by heart. I lived in short bursts of communication—blogging, texting, speed dial. Derrick was #4. I went upstairs and found my cell phone charging on the bedside table next to
Franny and Zooey
. I put the book back on the shelf where I'd found it, between
Peyton Place
and
Butterfield 8
.

Butterfield 8!

As a teenager in New York, I'd come across John O'Hara's Depression-era classic on our living room bookshelf and asked my father what the title meant. My parents had just started fighting, and happy for conversation that didn't involve his increasingly unclear whereabouts, my father explained that
BUtterfield
had once been the phone exchange for the Upper East Side. When he was a kid, he said, each two-letter exchange had had its own mnemonic name—288 became BU8, which became BUtterfield 8, etc.—that was supposed to make phone numbers easier to memorize. The names often grew from neighborhood characteristics—anything from surrounding streets (
ORchard
for the Lower East Side,
WHitehall
for the Financial District) to prominent families (
WAtkins
in Chelsea,
ENdicott
on the Upper West Side) to area reputation (
ALgonquin
for Greenwich Village,
BEowulf
near Columbia). The exchange system was phased out beginning in the 1960s (they'd run out of phone numbers), but in many places the numerical prefixes had stayed the same, especially in rural areas where populations hadn't grown. In other words . . .

I bounded down the stairs and almost ran into the screen door.

“What's a four-letter word for ‘an imitator'?” Touché asked, pen in mouth.

“I think I know how to find Paige.” I pointed at the phone number I'd scribbled down. “The prefix . . . it might still correspond to a specific town.” Touché had no idea what I was talking about, so I quickly explained the old exchange system.

“But it doesn't work like that anymore,” my friend said skeptically. “People move and keep their numbers.”

“Not always. I mean, we should at least try.”

“Go ahead,” he said, looking back down at the puzzle.

I grabbed the phone in the kitchen and dialed Vermont directory assistance. I asked the recorded voice for a live one, and a moment later a woman came on the line.

“Hi,” I said. “If I gave you the prefix to a phone number, could you tell me the town it corresponds to?”

“What is it?”

“Four nine six.”

There was tapping on a keyboard, then: “Waitsfield.”

“You're kidding.”

“That's what it says here. Is there a number you'd like me to conn—”

“No, thank you.” I hung up and hurried back outside.

“Well?” Touché raised his eyebrows.

“Waitsfield, Vermont. It's a ski town in the Green Mountains. We used to drive up there when I was a kid. It's where Sugarbush is, and Mad River Glen.”

“I'm more familiar with Courchevel and Gstaad.”

I waited for something more, but Touché just sat there.

“So what do you say? It's only Saturday. We could crank up the plane and head north. Do you need to file a new flight plan or something?”

“I can't go.”

“Come on, just for one night. We're
close
. We've got her now.”

“Do we?” Touché said, suddenly fixing his gaze on me. “All we've got is the name of a town that some girl we've never seen or spoken to
might
have made a call from. Let's look at the big picture here. You received an anonymous
e-mail
. Nothing more. I'm beginning to think we launched into this without thinking it through.”

“I
have
been think—”

“And what if it
is
her? Have you considered that? What if you somehow do find her, and over a nice glass of chardonnay she admits she builds bombs in her free time? Then you're
involved
. Then you have to turn her in. And even if you don't get in trouble for having failed to alert the police sooner, your life from that point on . . . it will always be that one thing.
You'll never escape it. Even heroism is a kind of infamy.” With that he got up, slapped me on the back, and walked inside.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I called after him. I felt dazed and a bit dizzy. Then, like a summer storm, the feeling passed, and I knew exactly what I was going to do. “When does the ferry to New London leave? I can catch a train from there, right?”

PAIGE
 

THE HEAT CAME THE SECOND WEEK OF JULY, SCORCHING DAYS, ONE AFTER another. Leaves browned and hardened like toast. Streams slowed to faucet trickles. The house, a place for winter pleasures, had no air-conditioning and by midmonth was almost unbearable (Lindsay kept promising to buy a stand-up fan in town, but it hadn't yet appeared). I imagine it was sweltering in the garage, too, but when Keith came in for lunch—shirtless, shoeless, caked in sweat and grime—he never mentioned the temperature. So I pressed on, uncomplaining.

My role was evolving, the concrete replacing the conceptual. No longer roaming the Internet link by random link, I now searched for specific
targets
. Studies, trends, and forecasts. Articles, interviews, and essays. The trick, the crucial necessity, was to navigate cyberspace without leaving a trail. It was something I'd never had to worry about in my real-life research jobs, and once again, Keith showed me the way. He had a background in technology. He had a background in life. The wired world was a dangerous place, he told me, its endless pages filled with deceptively benign-sounding cookies, bugs, and logs. The cookies—ID tags embedded in user hard drives—could be disabled; the real problems were the Web bugs and log files. The bugs monitored page visits; the logs recorded server activity. The only way to bypass these was to blend in by avoiding search engines and local ISPs.
But that was only the beginning. We downloaded nothing and saved nothing (I took handwritten notes). We stayed away from e-mail, from blogs, from YouTube; from well-known tracking sites and anywhere else that might arouse suspicion—government or university sites; extremist sites; anything originating from the Middle East. Instead, I roamed the outskirts of information, picking up scraps, shards here and there.

Who were these targets, these objects of our dangerous affections? They were the people and institutions that pulled America's strings, and played them, too, played them so well we'd been lulled to sleep by their soothing sounds—that soft thrum of capitalism. We wanted to expose the wretched underside of the global energy supersystem. Does it sound grandiose? Perhaps. But we believed it was achievable and became more so with every passing day, every careful click, every filled-up notebook.

Lindsay gave us our first hard lead. Since we had no television, she'd started watching webcasts on the laptop—mostly news shows and sitcoms. Keith didn't love the practice but couldn't say exactly why, so it continued. One sweltering night, while I made dinner and Keith studied ordnance manuals on the couch, Lindsay settled in to watch one of the network news shows. I could hear it in the kitchen, but not until I saw Lindsay furiously scribbling notes did I begin paying attention. The segment was on Texas Consolidated, Inc., one of the world's most profitable oil companies. TCI had just posted the largest single-quarter profit in the history of the New York Stock Exchange, and here, now, was their CEO—on the back deck of his 120-foot yacht—calmly explaining that every penny was justified. He spread his arms as wide as the surrounding water and spoke of millions of happy investors, and of hundreds of millions more that relied on him to keep their cars running, their houses heated. He clearly expected an easy time of it—a few pesky questions about executive compensation or going green, then a smooth glide to the finish. Instead, the correspondent surprised him with a question about TCI's operations in Ecuador. I knew that saga well thanks to my work in Washington, and I hurried over to watch. From the early 1970s, when oil was first discovered in the fragile Amazonian region known as the Northern Oriente, to the early 1990s, when
drilling finally stopped, Texas Consolidated had pumped over $30 billion out of the ground. The bounty was split between TCI and the cabal of Quito politicians and generals who had allowed them in. Not a dime made it back to the poverty-ravished Andean tribes who had previously lived on and farmed that land. Stuck out at sea with his inquisitor, a sudden prisoner of his own wealth, the CEO called TCI's Ecuadorian adventure ancient history, but the correspondent was only getting started. What about the aftermath, she asked: the ruptured pipelines and toxic wastewater; the unlined sludge pits that seeped into aquifers; and the deforestation that stripped bare not just the land but the indigenous people who had inhabited the rain forests for as long as anyone had lived anywhere?