Watchlist (9 page)

“Greg, are you coming?”

He looked at the dogs and shook his head. “I've got some pesos left over,” he said. “You take them. Be careful, okay?”

Maya looked like she was going to slug him. Softening, she gave him a ferocious hug.

“Be careful, yourself,” she whispered in his ear.

*

T
HEY CAME FOR
him a week later. At home, in the middle of the night, just as he'd imagined they would.

Two men arrived on his doorstep shortly after 2:00 a.m. One stood silently by the door. The other was a smiler, short and rumpled, in a sport coat with a stain on one lapel and an American flag on the other. “Greg Lupinski, we have reason to believe you're in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,” he said, by way of introduction. “Specifically, exceeding authorized access, and by means of such conduct having obtained information. Ten years for a first offense. Turns out that what you and your friend did to your Google records qualifies as a felony. And oh, what will come out in the trial . . . all the stuff you whitewashed out of your profile, for starters.”

Greg had played this scene in his head for a week. He'd planned all kinds of brave things to say. It had given him something to do while he waited to hear from Maya. She never called.

“I'd like to get in touch with a lawyer,” was all he mustered.

“You can do that,” the small man said. “But maybe we can come to a better arrangement.”

Greg found his voice. “I'd like to see your badge,” he stammered. The man's basset-hound face lit up as he let out a bemused chuckle.

“Buddy, I'm not a cop,” he replied. “I'm a consultant. Google hired me; my firm represents their interests in Washington to build relationships. Of course, we wouldn't get the police involved without talking to you first. You're part of the family. Actually, there's an offer I'd like to make.”

Greg turned to the coffeemaker, dumped the old filter. “I'll go to the press,” he said.

The man nodded as if thinking it over. “Well, sure. You could walk into the
Chronicle
's
office in the morning and spill everything. They'd look for a confirming source. They won't find one. And when they try searching for it, we'll find them. So, buddy, why don't you hear me out, okay? I'm in the win-win business. I'm very good at it.” He paused. “By the way, those are excellent beans, but you want to give them a little rinse first? Takes some of the bitterness out and brings up the oils. Here, pass me a colander?”

Greg watched as the man silently took off his jacket and hung it over a kitchen chair, then undid his cuffs and carefully rolled them up, slipping a cheap digital watch into his pocket. He poured the beans out of the grinder and into Greg's colander, and rinsed them in the sink.

He was a little pudgy and very pale, with the social grace of an electrical engineer. He seemed like a real Googler, actually, obsessed with the minutiae. He knew his way around a coffee grinder, too.

“We're drafting a team for Building 49 . . .”

“There is no Building 49,” Greg said automatically.

“Of course,” the guy said, flashing a tight smile. “There's no Building 49. But we're putting together a team to revamp the Googlecleaner. Maya's code wasn't very efficient, you know. It's full of bugs. We need an upgrade. You'd be the right guy, and it wouldn't matter what you knew if you were back inside.”

“Unbelievable,” Greg said, laughing. “If you think I'm going to help you smear political candidates in exchange for favors, you're crazier than I thought.”

“Greg,” the man said, “we're not smearing anyone. We're just going to clean things up a bit. For some select people. You know what I mean? Everyone's Google profile is a little scary under close inspection. Close inspection is the order of the day in politics. Standing for office is like a public colonoscopy.” He loaded the cafetière and depressed the plunger, his face screwed up in solemn concentration.

Greg retrieved two coffee cups, Google mugs, of course, and passed them over.

“We're going to do for our friends what Maya did for you. Just a little cleanup. All we want to do is preserve their privacy. That's all.”

Greg sipped his coffee. “What happens to the candidates you don't clean?”

“Yeah,” the guy said, flashing Greg a weak grin. “Yeah, you're right. It'll be kind of tough for them.” He searched the inside pocket of his jacket and produced several folded sheets of paper. He smoothed out the pages and put them on the table. “Here's one of the good guys who needs our help.” It was a printout of a search history belonging to a candidate whose campaign Greg had contributed to in the past three elections.

“Fella gets back to his hotel room after a brutal day of campaigning door to door, fires up his laptop, and types ‘hot asses' into his search bar. Big deal, right? The way we see it, for that to disqualify a good man from continuing to serve his country is just un-American.”

Greg nodded slowly.

“So you'll help the guy out?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. There's one more thing. We need you to help us find Maya. She didn't understand our goals at all, and now she seems to have flown the coop. Once she hears us out, I have no doubt she'll come around.”

Greg glanced at the candidate's search history. “I guess she might,” he replied.

*

T
HE NEW CONGRESS
took eleven working days to pass the Securing and Enumerating America's Communications and Hypertext Act, which authorized the DHS and NSA to outsource up to 80 percent of intelligence and analysis work to private contractors. Theoretically, the contracts were open to competitive bidding, but within the secure confines of Google's Building 49, there was no question of who would win. If Google had spent $15 billion on a program to catch bad guys at the border, you can bet they would have caught them. Governments just aren't equipped to Do Search Right.

The next morning Greg scrutinized himself carefully as he shaved (the security minders didn't like hacker stubble and weren't shy about telling him so), realizing that today was his first day as a de facto intelligence agent for the US government. How bad would it be? Wasn't it better to have Google doing this stuff than some ham-fisted DHS desk jockey?

By the time he parked at the Googleplex, among the hybrid cars and bulging bike racks, he had convinced himself. He was mulling over which organic smoothie to order at the canteen when his key card failed to open the door to Building 49. The red LED flashed dumbly every time he swiped his card. Any other building, and there'd be someone to tailgate on, people trickling in and out all day. But the Googlers in 49 emerged only for meals, and sometimes not even that.

Swipe, swipe, swipe. Suddenly he heard a voice at his side.

“Greg, can I see you, please?”

The rumpled man put an arm around his shoulders, and Greg smelled his citrusy aftershave. It smelled like what his divemaster in Baja had worn when they went out to the bars in the evening. Greg couldn't remember his name. Juan Carlos? Juan Luis?

The man's arm around his shoulders was firm, steering him away from the door, out onto the immaculate lawn, past the herb garden outside the kitchen. “We're giving you a couple of days off,” he said.

Greg felt a sudden stab of anxiety. “Why?” Had he done something wrong? Was he going to jail?

“It's Maya.” The man turned him around, met his eyes with his bottomless gaze. “She killed herself. In Guatemala. I'm sorry, Greg.”

Greg seemed to hurtle away, to a place miles above, a Google Earth view of the Googleplex, where he looked down on himself and the rumpled man as a pair of dots, two pixels, tiny and insignificant. He willed himself to tear at his hair, to drop to his knees and weep.

From a long way away, he heard himself say, “I don't need any time off. I'm okay.”

From a long way away, he heard the rumpled man insist.

The argument persisted for a long time, and then the two pixels moved into Building 49, and the door swung shut behind them.

Summer evenings we gather in newly restored Craftsmans, extended ranch houses, post-and-lintels built in the sixties, these are our homes, we have money and mortgages now, children who swim in carefully fenced backyard pools, we grill chicken and fish, corn on the cob. We sip wine and eat cheese and grapes and speak of life and weather, sometimes we bring out the guitar, strum a few chords and laugh, waiting for the air to cool, the sun to set, the kids to bed down.

Then we look at each other, wondering if it's time, if we're ready. Always, we are.

We go with slick refilled glasses of wine into the living room, we sit on sofas and chairs, on the floor like children. The lights dim. A screen is pulled. Tape flaps, a fan whirs, a soundtrack clears its throat, and we watch film from an old projector. The projector reminds us of moments we've seen in movies, a nostalgia for a time we never knew.

None of the clips we watch have made the Internet. At work, when we vaguely mention their existence to colleagues, we draw blank stares. No one else knows of them. The clips pull us here—partially—because they are so rare, they are private, only ours. And it's also that our lives are so ordinary, we're not disappointed in this exactly, just cheerfully resigned.

The clips are something else entirely, new, unexpected. Nothing about them has been explained. They are mailed to us intermittently. No return address. We recognize people in them we don't know personally. We feel they are moving us somewhere, propelling to a climax we cannot guess. And we sit forward in our seats, hungrily, waiting for the next clip to begin.

T
HE FOOTAGE IS
especially grainy in #4, the sound cluttered, immediately we hear the whine of the diesel VW Westfalia. The public television show host is on the road again, we see, precisely what the voice-over says as the clip begins,
The public television show host is on the road again, ho-hum, always on the road, hum of engine, hum of road, rectilinear agricultural fields, irrigation canals, mountains, deserts, etc., etc., look at him, the host, so solemn, so distracted.

The camera zooms in on his face. His chin and jaw are strong. His white flattop seems gray in the footage. There are wrinkles deep around his eyes, like an old surfer from quieter days.

He stares out a window, chin on fist. The voice says,
The host ruminates over a recurrent nightmare: empty deserts, the vast Central Valley with nothing but oil derricks and bones and him standing alone in denim shorts and boots and a white muslin shirt, sunglasses missing and microphone in hand, but not a soul to speak to. It's a nightmare a mind could get lost in.

On the screen, audibly, the host sighs.

What could it all mean?
asks the voice.
Does emptiness forespeak of great miseries?

The host laughs shortly, “Ha!” and turns from the window. He looks directly at the camera, at us, and it is this moment that always disarms us—that he knows he's being filmed.

He smiles. What does he see? Who is behind the handheld camera?

Why is he smiling?

The camera pulls away as he looks down and taps his hiking-booted feet against the bus's floorboards. The host smiles, the voice exclaims,
Floorboards, he thinks! Such an antiquated word! Were cars truly once fitted with floorboards, actual pieces of wood that somehow did not cause fires? Combustion? Is there an auto museum in this state with an auto museum docent who can say if once cars had floorboards? Do auto museums have docents? Attendants? A pit crew? There is the Internet of course, but we don't use the Internet, we use real people, That Is Who I Am, thinks the host happily, He Who Speaks to Folks, this is how we learn about the world thinks the host how we experience life here in the western Americas, here on the road, and yes! there is indeed one of course the auto museum on Museum Row in downtown Los Angeles, what a fool,

The film flaps, the clip is over.

E
ARLY ON WE
choose favorites, usually the purer ones lacking voice-over. #10 for example is amusing, behind the scenes, the host and his cameraman in a bright studio, sitting at an older PC, editing segments from their television show. They speak in the monosyllables of men who know each other well. “Too long.” “Yep.” “Cut here?” “Cut here.” “Chatty Cathy, isn't he?” “They all are.” #5, too, is enjoyable, the host standing outside an office building (in Studio City, we all agree, though we're only guessing) paying for a delivery of gyros. “Are the fries in there?” he asks in his soft drawl. “I gotta have my fries, delivery man!” He laughs and clearly tips well—the delivery man thanks him twice. The office door shuts, the clip ends, warm, lighthearted.

The majority of us prefer #6. It is long and simply shows the host making coffee. He seems aware of the camera but not distracted. He glances up, nods at us, doesn't speak. He is deliberate: he opens his refrigerator, removes a bottle of water, pours it into an electric kettle, flips a switch. He opens his freezer, removes four bags. He smells each, shutting his eyes tenderly with each sniff. He lingers over one bag, nods. Measures three scoops into a black grinder. Seals and returns the bags to the freezer. He presses a button and grinds the coffee. The kettle begins to steam. He flips a switch. The steam recedes. Onto the counter he sets a coffee mug fitted in what looks like a wet suit; on this, he sets a perfectly fitted filter. Spoons grounds into the filter. Last he pours the steaming water slowly, incrementally, everything precise, just so.

He removes the filter, blows steam from the lip, sips, smiles. And so the clip ends.

W
E LAUGH OVER
the phone, over email, over text—simultaneously we've realized that we've each been reconsidering our coffee habits, how much we tip, our interactions with coworkers.