encircled by the city, yet Oslett found them sufficiently large and
bucolic to make him edgy. He was in his element only in sheltering
forests of highrises, where sidewalks teemed with people and streets
were jammed with noisy traffic. In his midtown Manhattan apartment, he
slept with no drapes over the windows, so the ambient light of the
metropolis flooded the room. When he woke in the night, he was
comforted by periodic sirens, blaring horns, drunken shouts, car-rattled
manhole covers, and other more exotic noises that rose from the streets
even during the dead hours, though at diminished volume from the
glorious clash and jangle of mornings, afternoons, and evenings. The
continuous cacophony and infinite distractions of the city were the silk
of his cocoon, protecting him, ensuring that he would never find himself
in the quiet circumstances that encouraged contemplation and
introspection.
Darkness and silence offered no distraction and were, therefore, enemies
of contentment. Rural Oklahoma had too damned much of both.
Slightly slumped in the passenger seat of the rented Chevrolet, Drew
Oslett shifted his attention from the unnerving landscape to the
state-of-the-art electronic map that he was holding on his lap.
The device was as big as an attache case, though square instead of
rectangular, and operated off the car battery through a cigarette
lighter plug. The flat top of it resembled the front of a television
set, mostly screen with a narrow frame of brushed steel and a row of
control buttons. Against a softly luminous lime-green background,
interstate highways were indicated in emerald green, state routes in
yellow, and county roads in blue, unpaved dirt and gravel byways were
represented by broken black lines. Population centers–precious few in
this part of the world–were pink.
Their vehicle was a red dot of light near the middle of the screen.
The dot moved steadily along the emerald-green line that was Interstate
40.
“About four miles ahead now,” Oslett said.
Karl Clocker, the driver, did not respond. Even in the best of times,
Clocker was not much of a conversationalist. The average rock was more
talkative.
The square screen of the electronic map was set to a mid-range scale,
displaying a hundred square miles of territory in a ten-mile-by-ten-mile
grid. Oslett touched one of the buttons, and the map blinked off,
replaced almost instantly by a twenty-five-square-mile block, five miles
on a side, that enlarged one quadrant of the first picture to fill the
screen.
The red dot representing their car was now four times larger than
before. It was no longer in the center of the picture but off to the
right side.
Near the left end of the display, less than four miles away, a blinking
white X remained stationary just a fraction of an inch to the right of
Interstate 40. X marked the prize.
Oslett enjoyed working with the map because the screen was so colorful,
like the board of a well-designed video game. He liked video games a
lot. In fact, although he was thirty-two, some of his favorite places
were arcades, where arrays of cool machines tantalized the eye with
strobing light in every color and romanced the ear with incessant beeps,
tweets, buzzes, hoots, whoops, waw-waws, clangs, booms, riffs of music,
and oscillating electronic tones.
Unfortunately, the map had none of the action of a game. And it lacked
sound effects altogether.
Still, it excited him because not just anyone could get his hands on the
device which was called a SATU, for Satellite Assisted Tracking Unit. It
wasn’t sold to the public, partly because the cost was so exorbitant
that potential purchasers were too few to justify marketing it broadly.
Besides, some of the technology was encumbered by strict
national-security prohibitions against dissemination. And because the
map was primarily a tool for serious clandestine tracking and
surveillance, most of the relatively small number of existing units were
currently used by federally controlled law-enforcement and
intelligence-gathering agencies or were in the hands of similar
organizations in co
“Three miles,” he told Clocker.
The hulking driver did not even grunt by way of reply.
Wires trailed from the SATU and terminated in a three-inch-diameter
suction cup that Oslett had fixed to the highest portion of the curved