Niceville

shimmered off. Chu looked at Bock for a time over the top of his glasses, and then leaned back.
    “I think, since you are finding it hard to talk, I should tell you what is going on in my own mind. Is that okay? Do you need a pill or something? No?”
    In his ramble through Bock’s hard drive Chu had come across Bock’s medical records. The guy had a serious cholesterol problem and was probably going to need multiple arterial stents sometime in the future, if he was ever going to see the north side of fifty. The last thing Chu wanted right now was for Tony Bock to pitch a myocardial infarct.
    He waited a bit, anxiously studying Bock’s complexion, which had settled down somewhere between waxy and clammy. Chu figured he wasn’t going to die yet.
    “Okay, well, first, Tony, this shame you are feeling, this is a good sign. If you were really a bad person, I would think you would not be half so ashamed. Like I said, I don’t judge you about the sex thing. I am Chinese, from Macao, one of the most crowded cities on the planet. How do you think it got so crowded?”
    Chu waited for a smile at his joke, got only a bug-eyed stare and a froglike gasping.
    He went on, speaking as if he had given this thing a lot of thought, which he had.
    “Okay … let me say this carefully. We agree that—oh, by the way, I have made a complete copy of everything on your drives, just so we are okay together, in the same place, yes?”
    “How … how did you find …?”
    Chu smiled at him.
    “There are amateurs and there are professionals, Tony. You are an amateur. I have spent six years—postgraduate—at MIT and Caltech—studying only the way computers and the Net encounter each other. You are, I hope I get this correct, an energy auditor for Niceville Utility, yes? A graduate also of East-Central-Mid-State-Poly?”
    Bock was going down again, so Chu kept talking.
    “Anyway, you might want to know that all of these so-called hush-mail sites—even the ones in Iceland, which is an outlaw state with regard to the Internet—they are all watched. Agencies have set up these virtual watchers at the outer gates of all these portals and whenever somebody uses one, a note is made of the IP. It took me less than fifteen minutes to find out your IP location, and less than that to break your firewall and take over your machine. I see this is not pleasant to hear, so I’ll go on … will I? … with why I am here.”
    The meals came, and Chu daintily devoured his. Bock rallied enough to attack the wine but food was out of the question.
    Mostly he was thinking,
Run run run
.
    Change my name
.
    Get out of town
.
    “First, Tony, I am not here to blackmail you.”
    Bock stopped at the bottom of his glass, stared through it at Chu, set it down.
    “No?”
    “No. No offense, Tony, but I know to the penny what you makeevery month, what you have in the bank, and in savings, and what you have to pay to your ex-wife, Miss Dellums, and your daughter, and for your rent to Miss Kinnear. Tony, my friend, I make ten times what you make. Some years twenty. I have made investments. I am very comfortably off for a man only in his thirties.”
    Thirties?
thought Bock.
I thought you were fifteen years old
.
    “So I am not interested in your money. Do you know what an American H-One visa is, Tony?”
    Bock shook his head, his mind still turning over the phrase
Not here to blackmail you
.
    “Okay, H-One visas are usually given to people with extraordinary ability in an area of highly specialized knowledge. Such as information technology and computer science. I am such a person. I am a citizen of the People’s Republic of China, and my residency here is, to be blunt, at the discretion of my employer. Under the H-One rules, my visa has to be supported by something called a Labor Certification. The rules are complex, but the short story is if my employer wishes to, he can withdraw my Labor Certification, and my visa is gone. I can appeal, but, if an employer has influence, one can be forced to go back to his homeland and reapply for another H-One visa. Do you follow this?”
    “Yes, I think I do.”
    “Good. To put it simply, my employer and I are not on good terms, but I do not wish to return to the People’s Republic of China.”
    “Now?”
    “Now or ever. To be honest, were I to be confronted with the certainty of deportation back to Macao, I would put a bullet in my head.”
    “Yow,” said Bock. “You really don’t want to go back, do