The Traveler

8

Maya retrieved the video camera and tripod from the Hotel Kampa but left her suitcase and clothes in the room. On the train to Germany, she carefully searched the video equipment but couldn’t find any tracer beads. It was clear that her citizen life was over. After the Tabula found the dead taxi driver, they would hunt her down and kill her on sight. She knew that it would be difficult to hide. The Tabula had probably taken her photograph numerous times during her years in London. They might also have her fingerprints, a voice scan, and a DNA sample from the tissues she tossed into the rubbish bin at the office.

When she reached Munich, she approached a Pakistani woman in the train station and got the address of an Islamic clothing store. Maya was tempted to cover herself completely with the blue burqa worn by Afghani women, but the bulky clothing made it difficult to handle weapons. She ended up buying a black chador to cover her Western clothes and some dark sunglasses. Back at the train station, she destroyed her British identification and used a backup passport to become Gretchen Voss, a medical student with a German father and an Iranian mother.

Air travel was dangerous so she took a train to Paris, went to the Gallieni Métro station, and got on the daily charter bus that traveled to England. The bus was filled with Senegalese immigrant workers and North African families carrying bags of old clothes. When the bus reached the English Channel everyone got out and wandered around the enormous ferryboat. Maya watched British tourists buy duty-free liquor, pump coins into slot machines, and stare at a comedy on a television screen. Life was normal-almost boring-when you were a citizen. They didn’t seem to realize, or care, that they were being monitored by the Vast Machine.

There were four million closed-circuit television cameras in Britain, about one camera for every fifteen people. Thorn once told her that an average person working in London would be photographed by three hundred different surveillance cameras during the day. When the cameras first appeared, the government put up posters telling everyone that they were SECURE BENEATH THE WATCHFUL EYES. Under the shield of new antiterrorism laws, every industrial country was following the British example.

Maya wondered if citizens made a deliberate choice to ignore the intrusion. Most of them truly believed that the cameras protected them from criminals and terrorists. They assumed that they were still anonymous whenever they walked down the street. Only a few people understood the power of the new facial-scanning programs. The moment your face was photographed by a surveillance camera, it could be transformed into a head shot with a consistent size, contrast, and brightness that could be matched against a driver’s license or passport photograph.

The scanner programs identified individual faces, but the government could also use the cameras to detect unusual behavior. These so-called Shadow programs were already being used in London, Las Vegas, and Chicago. The computer analyzed one-second images taken by the cameras and alerted the police if someone left a package in front of a public building or parked a car on the shoulder of a highway. Shadow noticed anyone who strolled through the city observing the world instead of trudging to work. The French had a name for these curious people-flâneurs-but as far as the Vast Machine was concerned, any pedestrian who lingered on street corners or paused at construction sites was instantly suspicious. Within a few seconds, images of these people would be highlighted in color and sent to the police.

Unlike the British government, the Tabula weren’t encumbered by regulations or civil servants. Their organization was relatively small and well financed. Their computer center in London could hack into any surveillance camera system and sort through the images with a powerful scanning program. Fortunately, there were so many surveillance cameras in North America and Europe that the Tabula were overwhelmed with data. Even if they got an exact match to one of their stored images, they couldn’t respond fast enough to arrive at a particular train station or hotel lobby. Never stop, Thorn had told her. They can’t catch you if you keep moving.

The danger came from any habitual action that showed a Harlequin taking a daily, predictable route to some location. The facial scanner would eventually discover the pattern and then the Tabula could set up their ambush. Thorn had always been wary of situations he called “channels” or “box canyons.” A channel was when you had to travel one particular way and the authorities were watching. Box canyons were channels that led to a place with no way out-such as an airplane or an immigration interrogation room. The Tabula had the advantage of money and technology. The Harlequins had survived because of courage and their ability to cultivate randomness.

When Maya reached London, she took the Underground to the Highbury and Islington station, but didn’t return to her flat. Instead she went up the road to a takeout restaurant called Hurry Curry. She gave the delivery boy an exterior door key and asked him to wait two hours, then place a chicken dinner inside her entryway. As it began to get dark, she climbed onto the roof of the Highbury Barn, a pub across the street from her building. Concealed behind an air vent, she watched people stopping to buy wine at the off-license shop on the ground floor of her building. Citizens hurried home carrying briefcases and shopping bags. A white delivery van was parked near the entrance to her flat, but no one was in the front seat.

The Indian boy from Hurry Curry appeared at exactly seven thirty. The moment he unlocked the door that led upstairs to her flat, two men jumped out of the white van and shoved him into the entryway. Perhaps they’d kill the boy or maybe they’d just ask questions and let him live. Maya didn’t really care. She was sliding back into Harlequin mentality: no compassion, no attachments, no mercy.

She spent the night at a flat in East London that her father had purchased many years ago. Her mother had lived there, concealed within the East Asian community, until she died from a heart attack when Maya was fourteen. The three-room flat was on the top floor of a shabby building just off Brick Lane. A Bengali travel agency was on the ground floor and some of the men who worked there would arrange work permits and identity cards for a price.

East London had always been outside the walls of the city, a convenient place to do or buy something illegal. For hundreds of years it had been one of the worst slums in the world, the hunting ground for Jack the Ripper. Now crowds of American tourists were led around on nightly Ripper walks, the Old Truman Brewery had become an outdoor pub, and the glass towers of the Bishop’s Gate office complex thrust itself into the heart of the old neighborhood.

What used to be a warren of dark passageways was now dotted with art galleries and trendy restaurants, but if you knew where to look you could still find a wide range of products that helped you avoid the scrutiny of the Vast Machine. Every weekend peddlers appeared on upper Brick Lane near Cheshire Street. The peddlers sold stiletto knives and brass knuckles for street fighting, pirated videos, and SIM chips for cell phones. For a few extra pounds, they would activate the chip with a credit card attached to a shell corporation. Although the authorities had the technology to listen to phone calls, they couldn’t trace them back to cell phone owners. The Vast Machine could easily monitor citizens with permanent addresses and bank accounts. Harlequins living off the Grid used an endless supply of disposable phones and identity cards. Almost everything except their swords could be used a few times and tossed away like a candy wrapper.

Maya called her employer at the design studio and explained that her father had cancer and she was going to have to quit work to take care of him. Ned Clark, one of the photographers who worked for the studio, gave her the name of a homeopathic doctor, and then asked if she had tax problems.

“No. Why do you ask?”

“A man from Inland Revenue was in the office asking about you. He talked to the people in accounting and requested information about your tax payments, phone numbers, and addresses.”

“And they told him?”

“Well, of course. He’s from the government.” Clark lowered his voice. “If you’ve got a place in Switzerland, I’d go there right now. To hell with the bastards. Who wants to pay taxes anyway?”

Maya didn’t know if the man from Inland Revenue was a real government employee or just a Tabula mercenary with a fake ID. Either way, they were searching for her. Back at the flat, Maya found the key to a storage locker in a Brixton warehouse. She had gone to the locker with her father when she was a little girl, but hadn’t visited it for many years. After watching the warehouse for a few hours, she entered the building, showed her key to the clerk, and was allowed to take an elevator up to the third floor. The locker was a windowless room about the size of a walk-in closet. People stored wine in the warehouse and it was kept fairly cold with air-conditioning units. Maya switched on the overhead lightbulb, locked the door, and began to search through the boxes.

When she was growing up, her father helped her obtain fourteen passports from several different countries. Harlequins acquired the birth certificates of people who had died in car accidents, then used the certificates to apply for legal identification. Unfortunately, most of these fake documents had become obsolete now that the government was gathering biometric information-face scans, iris patterns, and fingerprints-then placing the information on a digital chip attached to each citizen’s passport or national ID. When the chip was read by a scanner, the data was compared with the information stored on Britain’s National Identity Register. On international flights to America, the passport data had to match the iris and fingerprint scans taken at the airport.

Both the United States and Australia were issuing passports with radio frequency ID chips embedded in the covers. These new passports were convenient for immigration officials, but they also gave the Tabula a powerful tool for hunting down their enemies. A machine called a “skimmer” could read the information on a passport hidden inside a coat pocket or purse. Skimmers were installed in elevators or bus stops, any location where people lingered for a brief amount of time. While a citizen was thinking about lunch, the skimmer was downloading a wide variety of personal information. The skimmer might search for names that suggested a certain race, religion, or ethnicity. It would find out the citizen’s age, address, and fingerprint data-as well as where he had traveled in recent years.

The new technology forced Maya to rely on three “facer” passports that matched three different versions of her biometric data. It was still possible to fool the Vast Machine, but you had to be clever and resourceful.

The first thing to disguise was your appearance. Recognition systems focused on the nodal points that comprised each unique human face. The computer analyzed a person’s nodal points and transformed them into a string of numbers to create a face print. Tinted contact lenses and different-colored wigs could change your superficial appearance, but only special drugs could defeat the scanners. Maya would have to use steroids to puff up her skin and lips or tranquilizers to relax the skin and make her look older. The drugs had to be injected into her cheeks and forehead before arriving at an airport with scanners. Each of her three facer passports used different doses of drugs and a different sequence of injections.

Maya had seen a Hollywood science-fiction film where the hero got through an iris check showing a dead man’s eyeballs to a scanner. In the real world, this wasn’t an option. Iris scanners shined a beam of red light at the human eye and a dead man’s pupils would fail to contract. Government agencies boasted that iris scanners were a completely reliable means of identification. The unique folds, pits, and pigmentation spots in a person’s iris started to develop in the womb. Although a scanner could be confused by long eyelashes or tears, the iris itself stayed the same throughout a person’s life.

Thorn and the other Harlequins living in the underground had developed a response to the iris scanner several years before it was used by immigration officials. Opticians in Singapore were paid thousands of dollars to manufacture special contact lenses. The pattern of someone else’s iris was etched onto the surface of the flexible plastic. When the pupil was hit by the red light of the scanner, the lens contracted just like human tissue.

The final biometric obstacle was the fingerprint scanner. Although acid or plastic surgery could change someone’s fingerprints, the results were permanent and left scars. During a visit to Japan, Thorn discovered that scientists at the University of Yokohama had copied fingerprints left on the surface of drinking glasses and turned them into gelatin coatings that could cover a person’s fingertips. These finger shields were delicate and hard to put on, but each of Maya’s facer passports had a different set of prints for that false identity.

Searching through the boxes in the storage room, Maya found a leather toiletry bag that contained two hypodermic syringes and a variety of drugs that would change her appearance. Passports. Finger shields. Contact lenses. Yes, it was all there. She worked her way through the other boxes and found knives, guns, and packets of currency from different countries. There was an unregistered satellite phone, a laptop computer, and a random number generator about the size of a café matchbox. The RNG was a true Harlequin artifact, on an equal level with the sword. In earlier times, the knights who defended pilgrims carried dice carved from bone or ivory that could be thrown on the ground before battle. Now all she had to do was press a button and random numbers began to flash on the screen.

A sealed envelope was taped to the sat phone. Maya tore it open and recognized her father’s handwriting.

When on the Internet, watch out for Carnivore. Always pretend to be a citizen and use soft language. Be alert, but not afraid. You always were a strong, resourceful person even when you were a little girl. Now that I’m older, I am proud of only one thing in my life-that you are my daughter.

Maya hadn’t wept for her father when she was in Prague. And during the journey back to London, she had concentrated on her own survival. But now, alone in the storage locker, she sat down on the floor and began to cry. There were still a few surviving Harlequins, but she was basically alone. If she made one mistake, even a small one, the Tabula would destroy her.