Dark Rivers of the Heart

floor.
        On the other side of the room, Johnson was ripping up the alarm wire from the baseboard to which it was stapled, and winding it around one gloved fist. The other three men were watching him and edging backward, out of the way.
        Roy followed the gray cable along the floor. It disappeared behind a tall bookcase.
        Following the alarm wire, Johnson reached the other side of the same bookcase.
        Roy jerked on the gray cable, and Johnson jerked on the alarm wire.
        Books wobbled noisily on the next to the highest shelf.
        Roy looked up from the cable on which his attention had been fixed.
        Almost directly in front of him, slightly higher than eye level, a one-inch lens peered darkly at him from between the spines of thick volumes of history. He pulled books off the shelf, revealing a compact videocamera.
        "What the hell's this?" Johnson asked.
        On the display screen, the count had just reached forty-eight at the top of the column.
        "When you broke the magnetic contact at the door, you started the videocamera," Roy explained.
        He dropped the cable and snatched another book from the shelf.
        Johnson said, "So we just destroy the videotape, and no one knows we were here."
        Opening the book and tearing off one corner of a page, Roy said, "It's not so easy as that. When you turned on the camera, you also activated the computer, the whole system, and it placed an outgoing phone call."
        "What system?"
        "The videocamera feeds to that oblong green box on the desk."
        "Yeah? What's it do?"
        After working up a thick gob of saliva, Roy spat on the page fragment that he had torn from the book, and he pasted the paper to the lens.
        "I'm not sure exactly what it does, but somehow the box processes the video image, translates it from visuals to another form of information, and feeds it to the computer."
        He stepped to the display screen. He was less tense than he had been before finding the camera, for now he knew what was happening. He wasn't ha about it-but at least he understood.
        The second number changed to fifty-one. Then the third.
        Whirrrrr "Every four or five seconds, the computer freezes a frame's worth of data from the videotape and sends it back to the green box.
        That's when the first number changes."
        They waited. Not long.
        "The green box," Roy continued, "passes that frame of data to the modern, and that's when the second number changes."
        "The modern translates the data into tonal code, sends it to the telephone, then the third number changes and-" -at the far end of the phone line, the process is reversed, translating the encoded data back into a picture again."
        "Picture?" Johnson said. "Pictures of us?"
        "He's just received his fifty-second picture since you entered the cabin."
        "Damn."
        "Fifty of them were nice and clear-before I blocked the camera lens."
        "Where? Where's he receiving them?"
        "We'll have to trace the phone call the computer made when you broke down the door," Roy said, pointing to the red indicator light on line one of the six-line phone. "Grant didn't want to meet us face to face, but he wanted to know what we look like."
        "So he,s looking at printouts of us right now?"
        "Probably not. The other end could be just as automated as this.
        But he'll stop by there eventually to see if anything's been transmitted. By then, with a little luck, we'll find the phone to which the call was placed, and we'll be waiting there for him."
        The three other men had backed farther away from the computers.
        They regarded the equipment with superstition.
        One of them said, "Who is this guy?"
        Roy said, "He's nothing special. Just a sick and hateful man."
        "Why didn't you pull the plug the minute you realized he was filming us?" Johnson demanded.
        "He already had us by then, so it didn't matter. And maybe he set up the system so the hard disk will erase if the plug is pulled. Then we wouldn't know what programs and information had been in the machine.
        As long as the system's intact, we might get a pretty good idea of what this guy's been up to here. Maybe we can reconstruct his activities for the past few days, weeks, even months. We should be able to turn up a few clues about where he's gone-and