asks, worried.
She looks at him without comprehension for a moment, then realizes he's referring to her dislike of tight spaces. "Oh. Yeah, no problem. Tents are fine. Don't ask me why."
"Oh." He looks baffled. "Well, I guess it's irrational by definition, right?"
A little annoyed by that, Veronica stoops and tosses her day pack into the tent, then stands, looks up at him and says, "We should go eat."
"Not yet."
He disappears into the tent without another word, taking the flashlight with him. It takes his gangly body a moment to negotiate the doorflaps. Veronica looks around. She is dimly lit by the electric lights of the central buildings and the open flames that dot the refugee camp. Mosquitoes are buzzing everywhere, she's glad she brought insect repellent, and the background hum of conversation in the distance is ever-present, like static. Veronica doubts she has ever been in a more densely populated patch of real estate that didn't involve skyscrapers.
She follows Jacob inside. Being in a tent, lit by flashlight, feels like being back in summer camp, when she was a teenager, when the world seemed bright and full of promise. Jacob has unpacked and turned on his breadbox-sized spectrum analyzer, has both it and his hiptop out, and is examining the readouts on their respective screens.
"Did that thing get anything useful from the scrapyard?" Veronica asks.
Jacob, studying his hiptop, shakes his head. "A few phones. None Mango except the one I already knew about."
"What are you doing?"
"Checking the GPS record. They didn't go over the border. The pickup went offroad just before the turnoff to the camp, at about six this morning, stopped there for twenty minutes, then came back."
"So they're gone," Veronica says.
"Maybe not. I don't think they would have crossed the border by day. They would have waited until tonight. Probably the middle of the night, a few hours yet."
"You want to go back out there now? I - no. No. Absolutely not. Jacob, we agreed, we wouldn't do anything crazy, and going out to where these things are hidden in the middle of the night all by ourselves is crazy."
"That's not what I want to do right now. I want to find Derek's contact."
"Who?" she asks.
"The other phone signal from this refugee camp, remember? Whoever it was that Derek came to visit. Wasn't Susan. Somebody else. Somebody here. Maybe they know something."
"I thought you said you couldn't track locations out here. Only one base station."
"Right. That's why I brought this." Jacob taps the spectrum analyzer like he's petting a good dog. "It acts like a portable base station all by itself. It also boosts the signal from the existing station, which allows my hiptop to connect over GPRS to Kampala and the Internet, which is pretty amazing all by itself, if you think about just how deep in the middle of nowhere we are right now. I just checked the central database to see if Derek's contact's phone is here and active. Guess what? Yes it is. Somewhere in this camp, right now."
"Great. How do we find it?"
He pets the analyzer again. "We get this within a hundred metres of that phone, close enough to triangulate its location."
"Oh."
"So let's go take this puppy for a little walk."
* * *
Veronica leads the way with their flashlight. Jacob carries the heavy and cumbersome signal analyzer, and has strapped on his day pack as well, full of other equipment. They walk in a slow circle around the camp's administrative center. Nobody asks them what they are doing; nobody else is out and about. He isn't surprised. Outside of major cities, Africa lives on a dawn-to-dusk schedule.
The spectrum analyzer picks up plenty of cell phones within its range, almost all of them Mango, but none are the phone that Derek called. Soon they are back at their tent and the analyzer is running low on power. Jacob wishes he had thought to charge it fully before leaving Kampala. He brought both a hand-crank recharger with him, but they don't really have time for either.
"No good?" Veronica asks.
Jacob shakes his head.
"Maybe it's not in the camp. We didn't know exactly where that phone was, right? We just know it was six kilometres from the base station."
"Right. But everything else six klicks out is just bush. It has to be here. Nothing else makes any sense. Let me make sure it's still alive." Jacob puts down the spectrum analyzer and logs on to the Kampala master database server with his hiptop, via that same