SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
“That's very true. But if that's what it'll take to convince you, we'd be happy to. Who knows,
maybe there'd be something you could do for us too. Kid like you, you're at least half smart,
which is smarter than most of the sheep out here. But I don't think you wanna go on a long
trip right now, do you?”
The guy in front started the car and eased out onto Mission, and the guy in back put a
gentle hand on my chest before I'd had a chance to move. A pane of opaque glass slid up
between the front and back seats, and something happened to the rear windows, rendering
them black. The only light came from the little dome light on the car's ceiling.
“Where are we going?” I said, and I sounded like a scared little kid, which is exactly what
I felt like.
“Just somewhere more private, Marcus. Glad to hear you're up for a little chat, though.
So, let's talk.”
-..-
If I were a super-spy, I'd have spent the ride counting hills and listening for the tell-tale
cues of San Francisco traffic and figured out exactly where we were headed. But San
Francisco is full of hills, and if you can tell one from the other while you're scared to death
in a blacked-out box, you're a truer San Franciscan than I am.
Timmy hummed softly to himself while we drove. He had taken my jacket and bag and
he methodically went through the pockets of both, taking out every bit of electronics -laptop,
phone, ereader, a little circuit tester I had stuck in my pocket so I could check on
the Ethernet wiring in the office -- and removed the battery from each device, then put
the device and its battery in a heavy-duty freezer bag and set it to one side. Everything
else got a fast but thorough examination and then went back into the bag, except for my
multitool, a cool little Leatherman Skeletool that I'd coated in candy apple red enamel using
the gear at Noisebridge. He turned that over a few times, brought out the blade and tested
it on his thumb -- I kept it razor-sharp -- and smiled and nodded approvingly. “Nice,” he
said, and I felt stupid pride that this bad-ass ninja goon approved of my knife. Maybe that's
the feeling that Masha had felt when she went to work for the DHS the first time around,
or when she joined up with Carrie Johnstone and tossed out Zeb -- if that's what she'd
actually done.
The knife went into a baggie on the seat beside him, with the electronics. He felt carefully
around the seams and edges of my bags, and I realized that he was doing the kind of bag
search that you would get at the airport if the people at the airport actually gave a crap
about finding stuff, instead of putting on a little puppet show about security.
The car came to a stop. We'd been driving for a few minutes, or a hundred years, take
your pick. The divider between the front and the back of the car slid down with that kind of
purring near-silence of a really well-engineered mechanism. The guy in the front, whose
ultra-short hair revealed a gnarly knob of scar tissue that ran from the crown of his head
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