Bety handed the passport to me-it looked perfect. But then I thought of something.
“What if the real Sandy Schrandt happens to come through customs in the same place on the same day I do? Won’t the officials get suspicious when they check the same number twice?”
“If that happens you’re a dead cow,” said Vanna. “I mean dead duck.” She began giggling so wildly that she had to put both hands over her mouth.
“You just have to hope for the best,” said Bety. She was laughing too.
Was this forged passport part of the ongoing international get-Jerzy burn? Or were the girls just being silly? I started to say something-but what could I say? I fell back on the standard California nonreaction:
“Whatever.”
I got out of there and split off from Vinh Vo as rapidly as I could. I swung in a circle through the San Jose State campus to make sure I’d lost him. Then I got my car from near Wells Fargo and drove out to Carol’s.
Tom and Ida had gone off with friends and Sorrel was waiting for me. We hugged each other and then we sat down and talked for awhile. I loved her lively, confiding little voice and her vehement opinions. She often used a fragmented, creative grammar that Carol and I called “Sorrelese.” She and I talked about my trial and about her life at college. Sorrel had a new boyfriend, and she was doing cartoons for her school paper.
“So, Da,” said Sorrel after awhile, “Don’t you want to make us scarce before Ma and Hiroshi get home?”
“Yes. Why don’t we go for a drive? We could go over to where I rent and take a walk in the woods.”
“Okay.”
I left my Animata at Carol’s and got Sorrel to let me drive her rented car. Sorrel looked at me and I looked at her in the shitty tiny rental car with wheels so small you worried they would get stuck in the grooved highway’s grooves.
“Your eye looks just like Mom’s,” said Sorrel, using our family name for my mother, now dead one year. “The way your skin is all wrinkled at the corner. Mom used to have such a nice cute old eye. And your eye’s just the same.”
“Poor old Mom,” I sighed. “At least she’s not here to see me in so much trouble.”
“You’re going to run away, aren’t you, Da?” said Sorrel. “Tom and Ida suspect. Is it true?”
“Yes. In fact I’m planning to do it today.”
“In fact that’s what we’re doing right now?” said Sorrel. “We’re going back to the stupid airport I just came from last night? So that’s why you wanted me to get a rental car. Mmm- hmmm.” Sorrel made her Big Sis “knowing face,” an expression in which she pressed her lips tight together and nodded her head up and down with her chin sticking out. “Are we still going to Queue’s?”
“I have a brand-new forged passport,” I confessed. “I think the smartest thing I can do is get out of the country as fast as possible. Somebody-the cops or the cryps or the phreaks or West West or GoMotion-somebody probably has a miniature TV camera watching Queue’s place anyway. And Carol’s place, too. The less I give them to go on, the better. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to drive straight to the airport.”
“Let me see your passport!” Sorrel looked through it with interest. “This hologram of you is neat. What country are you going to?”
“Switzerland. My lawyer-that Stu Koblenz who did such a lame job in court today-he said Ecuador and Switzerland are good havens from U.S. law. And there’s a guy in Switzerland I reeeeally want to see.” I was thinking of Roger Coolidge, rich Roger, who’d started all this by releasing the ants and firing me from GoMotion. I aimed to find him and to beat the truth out of him if need be. But there was no need to burden Sorrel with this information.
At the San Francisco Airport, I pulled up in front of the American Airlines terminal. “Run in there, Sorrel, and see if they have a direct flight from San Francisco to Zurich or Geneva tonight. And if they don’t have a flight, then ask who does. Don’t give your name!”
“Right,” said Sorrel, her mouth a short determined line. She darted into the terminal and emerged five minutes later.
“Swissair,” said Sorrel. “They’re flying direct to Geneva tonight at seven-thirty. It’s a twelve-hour flight.”
“Beautiful.” I got out of the car and moved over into the passenger seat. “You can drive me up to the Swissair part of the international terminal. Just drop me off there and go back to Carol’s. How much is this trip costing you, anyway? For the ticket and the car?”
“About six hundred dollars.”
I drew out the smaller envelope of hundred-dollar bills and took out six of them for Sorrel.
“This is for you, and you give the rest of the money in this envelope to Ma. And here,” I handed her my keys as well. “Tell Ma she can have the Animata, too.”
Sorrel messily stuffed the money and keys into the glove compartment.
“Oh, one other thing,” I said. “There’s a cyberspace deck with glove and headset in the trunk of the Animata. You tap three-one-four-one on the right side of the headset to turn it on or off. But it’s a phreak deck, it’s not registered, so you probably shouldn’t use it.”
“Tom and Ida are sure to grub and fiddle with it,” said Sorrel loftily. She drew back her chin for “geek face,” and spittily lisped, “Thyberthpayth!”
“Cyberspace is important, Sorrel! Tell Tom not to let the police find the deck. It might be better to throw the deck away. Ida, Tom, and Carol will have to decide.”
Sorrel drove me the short distance to Swissair. I hugged her and kissed each of her nice soft cheeks. That had been one of the first things I noticed about her when she was a baby: her cheeks.
“Good luck, Da,” said Sorrel. “Take care.”
“Thanks, Sorrel. I love you.”
Before buying a ticket, I cruised the souvenir shop for travel gear. I got a small black leatherette satchel, a toothbrush, and-some business sweats.
These days a lot of businessmen were wearing sweat suits all the time. In principle, you could jog or work out in these cotton and polyester outfits, but business sweats were not normally used for exercise. Business sweats were for display purposes; they were meant to say, “I’m fit and I’m rich.”
I snagged a pompous gray XL outfit for $300. It had shiny gold stripes down the pant legs, and a sewn-in burgundy sash angling diagonally across the chest. The sash had a gold medal embossed on it.
In the men’s room I changed into the sweats and stuffed my shorts and sport shirt into the satchel. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I looked like the Swedish ambassador, man-except for my sandals.
Out in the lobby I sat down for a minute to arrange my junk. I positioned my passport and my money in the satchel’s outside zipper pocket, and then I folded my shirt and shorts. The plastic packet of chips was still in my shorts pocket. Was it worth trying to take the chips through customs?
I took out the packet and opened it. Inside were four square chips snugged into plastic pin protectors. The backs of the chips read National Semiconductor Y9707-EX. I hadn’t seen the “- EX ” suffix before, but I assumed it meant that these chips had been made a little faster and smarter than the last batch. Chip makers were always upgrading to longer product names.
I closed the chip packet and put it in my satchel under my shirt and shorts. Nobody was going to care about four standard production chips. If anyone asked me, the chips were my own property, to be used solely for demonstration purposes. I, Sandy Schrandt, was thinking about designing some custom applications for the Y9707-EX chip in the Swiss industrial market, yes.
So that was that, except for one thing: I hadn’t said good-bye to Gretchen. I’d been so excited about seeing Sorrel, and about my escape, that I hadn’t thought of Gretchen since leaving her apartment this morning. But I couldn’t very well phone Gretchen now because-it had finally occurred to me-Gretchen might be a spy paid to watch me. So, yeah, that was that.
I walked up to the Swissair counter and bought a ticket with no trouble, though all they had left was business-class. To look less suspicious, I made it a round-trip ticket. At the baggage X-ray station, I handed the guard my chips; he sleepily glanced at them and passed the package around the X-ray machine. Fifteen minutes later, I was sitting in the plane. Business-class was luxurious, with widely spaced seats, instant free cocktails, and lobster.