The Ministry for the Future

26

You can hide but you can’t run.

There were cameras everywhere, of course. On the public transport systems, in the stores, on the streets. If he went out to get food, he would pass by surveillance cameras several times no matter where he went. If he tried to leave the country, there would be passport control. Not so much within Europe, but still, a check could happen; if he traveled, he would eventually get checked. He had a fake passport, but he didn’t trust it would work in situations like that. He was stuck here, in one of the most surveiled countries on Earth.

But he had already learned where and how to hide. He had a place to live; high on the side of the Zuriberg, overlooking the city, were several blocks of community gardens. These plots of terraced and cultivated land were studded by little wooden garden sheds, storage containers for tools and fertilizers and pesticides and the like. One of them had a side wall panel he had pried off in a way he could glue back into position, and once inside the shed he could replace the panel and lie on the floor in his down sleeping bag, and be gone by dawn, leaving no sign of his incursion. This shed he could use as his base. He could hide in Zurich itself.

His fake passport had been the passport of a man back in the States who had died and never had a death certificate filed. Frank’s photo had been inserted into it, and to that extent he was this other man, Jacob Salzman. It would stay good for another three years. And he had created a credit card in that name, with some money in the account; and he had converted most of his remaining money to fifty-euro bills. He had a visa for his fake ID that allowed him to stay in Switzerland for most of the coming year, and a supposed job back in America, and an apartment rented in that name down in the city. All that had gone well, over a year ago. There were cameras at the entrance to that apartment building, of course, but the back door that led to the trash compactor didn’t have a camera, so he could come and go by that back way sometimes, and use the apartment’s bathroom. As Salzman he was a member of one of the lake swim clubs, and could use those facilities too.

And all day he could walk. He could wander without revealing his presence in any obtrusive way. He ate from food stalls that didn’t have cameras, and bought other food from Migros, and spent his days in parks where the cameras were few. Thus he lived a life that was not much registering in the system, but was not flagrantly off-grid either. Just low profile. No doubt after kidnapping a UN ministry head and forcibly entering her apartment and spending a night haranguing her, he was the subject of a big police search. Not to mention what had happened down at Lake Maggiore. Salzman might have to be abandoned. But for a good while, at least, he could hide just a kilometer or two from the minister’s apartment. And so, for the time being, he did.