Jonathan Raban - Surveillance - A Novel

It didn’t sound like much to Lucy. Even the wretched Lewis Olson had twelve sections at 640 acres to a section, but of course English farmland was exceptionally wet and rich, so perhaps such a negligible acreage might go with Marjorie Tillman’s very upstairs accent.

“He had to be fed on bananas, you know? Bananas were incredibly scarce during the war, but they were one of the few things that child could keep down. They were specially flown in, in RAF transports, for the likes of him.”

“But you have the same photograph as the one on the b-b-b-book jacket?”

“I’m looking at it right now! It’s in a frame, on the Welsh dresser, on the knickknack shelf, where my mother used to keep her mementos. Even though he never wrote, she kept his picture to remind herself of the war years. ‘Our little refugee’ was what Mummy used to call him. I can’t tell you how this ridiculous book would have hurt her. It would’ve cut her to the core.”

“And you’re sure it’s the same one?”

“I’m not blind!” That shout again. “Of course the printers have done things to the one on the book, touched it up and so forth. But it’s him, all right, by the old chicken run.”

Frantic to see Augie publicly exposed as an ingrate and a liar, Marjorie Tillman was Lucy’s eager collaborator. She checked her local phone book for the nearest Federal Express office, which turned out to be in “Norritch,” agreed to have the picture copied later that morning, and wrote down Lucy’s FedEx account number and her address at the Acropolis.

“And you’re going to show him up in your magazine? In America?”

“If it really is the same p-p-picture.”

“There’s no if about it. You’ll see — and I hope your magazine has an extremely large circulation. It’s about time someone put a stop to that man’s dreadful nonsense.”

As Lucy was thanking her for her help and about to say good-bye, Marjorie Tillman said, “Of course he didn’t call himself August Vanags then; he called himself Juris Abeltins.”

“Could you spell that?” Lucy said.

UP LATE after dinner with Gilda Hahn — at which she’d spent the dessert course, followed by two Courvoisiers, in tears — Tad was web surfing the world’s news. He read a long glum article in the Guardian, by an English jurist who was cataloging the erosion of civil liberties in the UK since the London bombings in July 2005. The Brits were playing Simon Says, slavishly following every move dictated by the U.S. administration — imprisoning people without trial, battening down on free speech, giving the police and secret services unprecedented powers to mine private data and tap phones of legislators, to harass and arrest citizens, to deport aliens…the usual story. Apparently in Britain there were even more spy cameras than here, with motorists followed around the country by the hidden eyes of government. According to this guy, the Brits — with no written constitution — were pretty much screwed. Canada was beginning to look like the last place in the English-speaking world where civil liberties were still relatively unscathed. It was always at the back of Tad’s mind that one day the time would come when he, Lucy, and Alida might have to cross the 49th parallel as political refugees — if the Canadians would let them in, which was a big if, for half of Canada’s neighbors to the south must be harboring similar thoughts. And of course Lucy would have to be dragged up there by her hair. Until the undercover agents were actually at her door, she’d go on living in her bubble of delusion that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

The worm of anger was beginning to work in him again. He fought it back and went over to the BBC site.

Police in Wolverhampton raid terror suspects’ home…

Strangely, for there was usually no advertising on the BBC, a pop-up appeared, a very amateur-looking pop-up saying he’d “won £100!!!” Tad clicked on the close-window X button on its top right-hand corner, realizing he’d done the wrong thing when an unfamiliar web page appeared, succeeded by his Outlook Express address book. Then blood-colored letters from some paint program began to slowly write themselves across the screen. F…R…E…FREAKED!!!

He took the cursor to the Start button to close down Windows, but it was immobilized. The hourglass symbol appeared next to the traveling arrow. The computer was frozen solid. He had to turn off the power strip.

His first major virus. He’d never opened a suspicious attachment and was protected by a Norton firewall. The experience of watching the familiar screen turn suddenly, mockingly hostile on him was more unsettling than he could’ve imagined. It was like a spookily successful exercise in black magic — like seeing a domestic cat transformed into a toad. Five minutes later, hoping this was some momentary cyber aberration, he switched the power on again. The computer started up normally, then told him he was truly

FREAKED!!!

ON TUESDAY MORNING, Lucy dropped Alida off at school with just seconds to spare before the eight o’clock bell. When she switched on the NPR news, the lead story was about a Trojan horse named Freak, which had spread overnight through America, Europe, and Asia, burgling people’s address books and forwarding itself to unsuspecting millions. Sites like Amazon and eBay were temporarily down. A spokesman from Microsoft, who promised a patch within two hours, described Freak as “a malicious act of cyber terrorism,” which Lucy thought wildly overblown. Vandalism, certainly. Terrorism? Surely not. The cant word of the last few years was graying from repetition, decaying in a process of inevitable entropy — which, come to think of it, was another cant word from an earlier decade. Entropy itself had fallen victim to entropy.

The Microsoft man explained the virus in breezy technobabble. It was, he said, a “WMF exploit” by a hacker who’d uncovered a “Day Zero vulnerability” in the Internet Explorer system, blah, blah, blah. The important thing was that his geeks had been on the case since midnight, and a solution was imminent.

Senate committee hearings had begun on the appointment of another judge to the Supreme Court — a born-again guy whose views on Roe v. Wade were characterized by liberal Democrats as “beyond Neanderthal.” A threatened subway strike in New York, more bloody news from the Middle East…She switched off the radio to concentrate on her own, more pressing news from Thetford, Norfolk.

She neither believed nor disbelieved Marjorie Tillman, whose story was full of oddities that fit together badly. Lucy found it hard to imagine that Augie Vanags had ever been a “dim” or “moony” child. The boy in his book was instantly recognizable in Augie the man, while the boy of Marjorie’s memory was a total stranger. There was the business of the printers “touching up” the supposedly identical photo, which surely meant the two were not identical. The FedEx package should arrive tomorrow or the day after, by Friday at the latest, and until then any speculation about the pictures would be pointless.

What about the two names? If August Vanags had once been Juris Abeltins, why, reinventing himself in America, had he chosen another Latvian name? Had Lucy been called Juris Abeltins, then emigrated to the States, she would’ve gone for a more American-sounding moniker. Juris could have turned himself into Lowell Cabot, so why choose August Vanags? When the Freak virus was safely patched, she’d try Googling this Mr. Abeltins to see if he was leading a separate existence somewhere; there couldn’t be that many Juris Abeltinses in the world, and if she could locate one in England, the whole fabric of Marjorie’s tale would unravel.