Free Watchlist by Bryan Hurt Page A

from around the edges.
    W HEN HE RETURNED home, he discovered that all of his fake pre-Columbian statues had been broken, and his brand-new white cotton Mexican shirt had an ominous boot print in the middle of it. His clothes no longer smelled of Mexico. They smelled like airport.
    He wasn’t going to sleep. No way. He needed to talk about this. There was only one person who would get it. Luckily, she was usually awake around this hour.
    Maya had started working at Google two years after Greg had. It was she who’d convinced him to go to Mexico after he cashed out: anywhere, she’d said, that he could reboot his existence.
    Maya had two giant chocolate labs and a very, very patient girlfriend named Laurie who’d put up with anything except being dragged around Dolores Park at 6:00 a.m. by 350 pounds of drooling canine.
    Maya reached for her Mace as Greg jogged toward her, then did a double take and threw her arms open, dropping the leashes and trapping them under her sneaker. “Where’s the rest of you? Dude, you look hot!”
    He hugged her back, suddenly conscious of the way he smelled after a night of invasive Googling. “Maya,” he said, “what do you know about Google and the DHS?”
    She stiffened as soon as he asked the question. One of the dogs began to whine. She looked around, then nodded up at the tennis courts. “Top of the light pole there; don’t look,” she said. “That’s one of our muni Wi-Fi access points. Wide-angle webcam. Face away from it when you talk.”
    In the grand scheme of things, it hadn’t cost Google much to wire the city with webcams. Especially when measured against the ability to serve ads to people based on where they were sitting. Greg hadn’t paid much attention when the cameras on all those access points went public; there’d been a day’s worth of blogstorm while people played with the new all-seeing toy, zooming in on various prostitute cruising areas, but after a while the excitement blew over.
    Feeling silly, Greg mumbled, “You’re joking.”
    â€œCome with me,” she said, turning away from the pole.
    The dogs weren’t happy about cutting their walk short, and expressed their displeasure in the kitchen as Maya made coffee.
    â€œWe brokered a compromise with the DHS,” she said, reaching for the milk. “They agreed to stop fishing through our search records, and we agreed to let them see what ads got displayed for users.”
    Greg felt sick. “Why? Don’t tell me Yahoo was doing it already . . .”
    â€œNo, no. Well, yes. Sure. Yahoo was doing it. But that wasn’t the reason Google went along. You know, Republicans hate Google. We’re overwhelmingly registered Democratic, so we’re doing what we can to make peace with them before they clobber us. This isn’t PII.” Personally Identifying Information, the toxic smog of the information age. “It’s just metadata. So it’s only slightly evil.”
    â€œWhy all the intrigue, then?”
    Maya sighed and hugged the lab that was butting her knee with its huge head. “The spooks are like lice. They get everywhere. They show up at our meetings. It’s like being in some Soviet ministry. And at the security clearance we’re divided into these two camps: the cleared and the suspect. We all know who isn’t cleared, but no one knows why. I’m cleared. Lucky for me, being a dyke no longer disqualifies you. No cleared person would deign to eat lunch with an unclearable.”
    Greg felt very tired. “So I guess I’m lucky I got out of the airport alive. I might have ended up ‘disappeared’ if it had gone badly, huh?”
    Maya stared at him intently. He waited for an answer.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI’m about to tell you something, but you can’t ever repeat it, okay?”
    â€œUm . . . you’re not in a terrorist cell, are