Part 1 (1/2)

DOCTOR WHO : BLUE BOX.

by KATE ORMAN.

In memory of Jack Warren Orman ('Papa') 1916-2001

Journalist Chick Peters has written for Infodump Infodump, Computers Computers Now! Now! , , Phreakphest Phreakphest and and Newstime Newstime. This is his first book. The narrative that follows is based on interviews, reconstructions and Chick's own witnessing of events.

REM.

Once upon a time there was a young princess who lived by the seash.o.r.e. One day she and some of the court's ladies were gathering flowers in a field, when they were approached by a huge bull. It was pure white, from its glittering horns to its tail.

At first the young women were badly frightened, but the bull moved so slowly and gently, meandering harmlessly through the many-coloured flowers, that they soon lost their fear.

The princess was charmed by the bull. She held out flowers to him, and he slowly chewed and swallowed them, to everyone's amus.e.m.e.nt. She made a garland of flowers and laid it over his neck while her friends giggled. He let all of the young women pat his head and stroke his shoulders, but the princess was his favourite.

Finally the bull lay down in the gra.s.s amongst the flowers.

Laughing, the princess clambered onto his broad back, sitting there as though he was a horse.

In an instant, the bull had leapt up, the princess holding onto him in surprise, trying not to tumble to the ground. The bull began to run, heavy hooves pounding the gra.s.s, and then the damp sand as it rushed onto the beach. The princess's friends ran after it, calling out in alarm, but they couldn't catch up with the bolting animal.

The princess cried out as the bull plunged into the ocean, his skin the colour of the foaming surf that surged around him.

She was terrified he would drag her beneath the waves. But instead the bull swam in powerful strokes, further and further from the sh.o.r.e, deeper and deeper into the ocean. Soon the sh.o.r.e behind was just a shape, then a line, and then it was lost to her.

All she could do was cling to the neck of the bull, and pray that one day it might take her home again.

10.

One.

I want to describe the Bainbridge Hospital for you. But they don't let journalists in. In fact, they don't let anybody in. Just the patients, their carers, and sometimes the men in black suits. CIA? Probably, with the headquarters at Langley so close.

All I can describe is what you can see from the outside.

Take a trip south from DC, then south-east along I-64; one of those antique Virginia farmhouses in the distance is actually the hospital. Whichever way you approach, you're always separated from the tidy white building by a field of waving crops.

In late 1982, I drove around for a couple of hours trying to find a road that would lead to the building itself. I never found one, not even one barricaded and marked KEEP OUT. In my pa.s.senger seat, Sally tried to stay patient as we meandered back and forth, the white building always tantalisingly visible in the distance. At last she said, 'If even a reporter can't find the way in, how do the CIA get there?'

I pulled over into the gravel and shut off the engine. The country silence rang in our ears. 'Maybe they walk in,' I said, exasperated. 'Or maybe they've got underground tunnels.'

'How about helicopters?' said Sally 'You seen any helicopters?'

I shook my head. But for all I knew, she was right.

Bainbridge was supposed to be where the government kept mental patients who knew too much. A loony bin for spies whose cookies had crumbled under the pressure. Rumour had it they weren't the only patients: defectors recovering from brainwas.h.i.+ng, soldiers who'd been dosed with LSD in secret trials, commandos undergoing intensive mental programming to turn them into fearless super-soldiers. And civilians who had, one way or another, been caught up in the hidden machinations that lay under the surface of life in the free world and had been spat back out again.

We got out of the car to stretch our legs. I got my camera bag out of the trunk and pushed a brew into the pocket of my jacket. Sally sat on the bonnet, swinging her legs and reading her romance novel. I screwed the telephoto lens into place and stared through it at the house in the distance.

There were a few people out in the grounds. Without the lens, they were like white dots against the green lawn.

Through the lens, I could see they were mostly in wheelchairs, pushed around by uniformed nurses, or parked under trees. I couldn't make out any faces from this distance. The afternoon suns.h.i.+ne was warm: they'd be out there for a little while.

'I wonder how close I can get?' I said. I slung the camera around my neck, and swung my legs over the low wire fence that bounded the cornfield.

'Aren't you gonna ask me to come with you?' said Sally, jumping down from the hood. Her cowboy boots crunched in the gravel. She put her head on one side, feathered blonde hair falling fetchingly around her oval face, and smiled.

'I'm working,' I told her, from the other side of the fence.

'Sorry, Sally. I can't stop to fool around in the corn.'

'Well, what am I supposed to do if someone comes along?'

'Tell 'em the car won't start and your boyfriend went to find a phone. Get a Bud out of the trunk If you want one.'

The rows of corn ran perpendicular to the road. I moved sideways through a few rows, so anyone who did stop to check on Sally wouldn't have a view straight down the row I was in.

The ground was warm and a little moist from last night's rain.

I wished I was wearing boots; my sneakers were getting covered in mud.

It took about a quarter of an hour to walk to the other side of the cornfield. The cold can kept me company. When I could see I was running out of cover, I ducked down and knelt in the dirt. Now I had a much better view of the patients. A couple of old guys played chess at a little stone table they didn't have wheelchairs, and neither did a few others I saw walking around on gravel paths or sitting on benches in the sun. The wheelchairs were arranged in a horseshoe under a shady cl.u.s.ter of big oaks.

There. I focussed on one of the faces, a familiar one. A woman in her late thirties. Her platinum blonde hair had been trimmed back severely, like a soldier's haircut. Her eyes were a hot blue. She stared at a spot in the distance. Every so often, as I watched, she would raise her hand to bat away an insect buzzing around her face, but she never took her eyes off that spot.

Let's call her Sarah Swan. Her real name is on the government's files, of course: a casualty in the secret war to keep America safe. Not that Swan is an innocent bystander.

But one year ago, she was one of the best-known hackers in the District hacker in both senses of the word. Swan was not only an accomplished programmer and head of development at an innovative defence contractor. She was also a computer criminal, perpetrator of illicit electronic acts both great and small, respected and even feared by her fellow hackers, crackers, and phreaks.

That was last year. Now Swan sat in a wheelchair and stared at nothing.

After a while I got tired of kneeling in the mud, waiting for Sarah Swan to do something. I zoomed out a little and looked around. I didn't like what I saw: the nurses had grouped together, talking about something, and a few shot glances off in my direction. Maybe they could see the glint off the camera lens, or maybe I had tripped some hidden sensor in the field. I stuffed the camera back in its bag.