Camouflage

with a short note to Naomi. Then he went back to the bike and checked the cyclometer. Only four miles; one more to go.
    He pedaled off in the direction Sharon had gone, but didn’t see her. Went home to shower before work, perhaps, or maybe to check the oil in her other flying saucer.
    R ussell was lost in reverie, staring at the monitor without seeing it, and was startled when Naomi set the bag down next to him, with a clink of Coke can.
    “Your Sharon has plenty of DNA, I’m afraid. Next move is up to you.”
    “What? Oh, lunch.”
    “Hope she tastes good,” Naomi said with a lecherous wink. Russell balled up a piece of paper and threw it at her.
    Back to the secret message. He was putting together a one-page website that only Rae would completely understand. It was called “A Rae in the Darkness” and was headed with three photos—Russell and Rae flanking a snap of Stevenson’s gravestone verse he’d taken the hour before she’d led him down the hill to the hotel.
    He’d skimmed through a book of Stevenson’s poetry, and didn’t like much of it, but this one quatrain was not far off, and he typed it in:

    LOVE, WHAT IS LOVE?
    LOVE—what is love? A great and aching heart;
Wrung hands; and silence; and a long despair.
Life—what is life? Upon a moorland bare
To see love coming and see love depart.
    —Robert Louis Stevenson

    Then he pasted in thirty characters of the artifact’s message:

    110100101101001011101001001011

    And then his own message:

    Rae, when I did see you depart, literally, I didn’t know it was you, and it deepened the mystery.
    If you have to disappear, that’s your decision. But you know that if there’s anyone on this world you can trust, it’s me.
    I know I don’t know you, but I love you. Come back in whatever guise.
    —Russ

    There was a box for “affinities,” words that would draw a searcher, or surfer, to the site. He typed in “Poseidon,” “Apia,” “artifact,” “alien,” and so forth, ending with “Rae Archer” and “Russell Sutton.” He knew that the first people drawn to the site would probably be the CIA and their ilk, but there was no way to get around that. He assumed that Rae would be canny enough to anticipate them, too.
    T he Rainforest Café was nostalgic nineties funk in a jungle setting. Bamboo and palms and elephant ears under blue lights and mist nozzles, quaintly angry rap whispering in the background.
    Russell felt a little underdressed in cutoffs and an island shirt. It was the weekend, but Sharon had come from work, wearing suit and tie. She loosened the tie and patted her brow with a tissue, prettily.
    “I should have suggested an air-conditioned place.”
    “Glad you didn’t. I was freezing in the office.” She shrugged out of her jacket.
    “You’ve always lived in the tropics?”
    “In the heat, anyhow. You?”
    “As soon as I could choose.” Russell told her about growing up in the Dakotas. He’d gone to college in Florida, and never had to live through another winter. “Most of myexperience with being cold now is underwater, working in a wetsuit.”
    “Been there.” She covered her mouth, laughing. “When you don’t have enough pee to warm it up.”
    He poured her some iced tea. “You dive a lot?”
    “When I was in school, a little. Now I mostly snorkel. A guy at work took me out to the reef at Palolo last week—all those giant clams, I couldn’t believe my eyes!”
    “They’re something.” He served himself. “Was it your major, marine science?”
    “No, I did business administration. Minor in oceanography—that was my real cold-water experience. A summer course diving in the Peru current.” She’d actually been there as professor, not student, but the university records would confirm she’d taken the course and made an A.
    “We used to be out there,” he said. “My company, Poseidon. We did marine engineering out of Baja California.”
    “Until you found the alien thingie.”
    “Well, we didn’t know what it was, at the time.” He broke open a roll and buttered one half carefully with healthy spread. “We pinged it with sonar and registered it for later salvage. It was a while before we actually went down and took a look.” He gestured down the road with the roll. “Then this happened.”
    “It must be exciting.”
    “Exciting and frustrating in about equal measures. We’re not getting anywhere.” He drew a shape on the tablecloth with his fingernail. “What do you do for