Spark: A Novel (10 page)

Sergio’s eyebrows moved and the corners of his mouth turned upward. “It’s a pleasure to serve you, sir. Will you activate your card today?”

“Yes.”

The voice sensor had already received my request, but Sergio pretended to type instructions with a keyboard. A few seconds later, a yellow travel card slid out of the slot.

“Have a great day, sir. I hope you enjoy exploring our wonderful city.”

“You’re a machine.”

“That’s right, my friend. And I’m a damn good-looking one.…”

As I stepped away from the booth, the bot’s eyes followed my movements.

I left my loft at eight o’clock that evening and walked down Broadway to the Financial District. I disliked visiting the area in the daytime, when the sidewalks were crowded with people who pushed past you and jabbed you with their elbows. But at night, surrounded by the skyscrapers, Wall Street was a clear and quiet maze of dark canyons. Limousines and black town cars idled outside office buildings, their exhaust pipes giving off puffs of white while the drivers waited for their passengers. A phone-repair truck was parked on Cortlandt Street, and its flashing blue light felt like a shrill sound within my mind.

The Brooks Danford Group occupied a twenty-eight-story building on Maiden Lane. The first two floors were an atrium lobby with an enormous abstract painting on the inner wall. The outer wall was glass so that you could look at the art from the street but never get close to it.

I passed through a revolving door and encountered an older black man talking to the young guard at the security desk. He had a shaved head that gleamed under the light, but his Shell was round-shouldered and saggy.

“Mr. Underwood?” the man said.

“Yes.”

“I’m Jerome Evans, head of corporate security for BDG, New York.”

“I’m here to get more information about your missing employee.”

“Our building is protected by a PAL system. Do you know what that is?”

“Personal Authorization Link. It tracks everyone.”

“The CEO’s office requested that there be no video record of your visit here tonight. The lobby cameras have already been disabled, but it will take a few more minutes to switch off the upper floors.” Evans slipped on a headset and spoke to his Shadow. “Deactivate security sector three and elevator five.”

While we waited for confirmation from the system, I wandered across the lobby and inspected the painting on the east wall. Out on the street, the painting appeared to be a tidal wave of different colors, but it was actually a collection of tiny stenciled images of pigs and machine guns and old-fashioned cash registers.

Shoes clicked across the floor and then Evans stood beside me. “We’re ready to go.”

“Who designed this painting?”

“A British artist named X-Nemo. Did you see the blood?”

“What are you talking about?”

“A couple of years ago, the artist was accused of being a nubot owned by a consortium of art galleries, so he … look there … right
there.
”

I peered around a potted rubber plant and saw a dark red handprint on the lower edge of the wall.

“When X-Nemo finishes a painting, he cuts his wrist and leaves his blood on the canvas. The artist’s DNA authenticates the work. Frankly, I think most people in the creative field should do something like that. These days, you can’t really tell if it was a computer or a human that wrote a film script or created a pop song.”

I followed Evans into the elevator and he touched the button for the fourteenth floor.

“So why did they hire you?” he asked. “Are you some kind of investigator?”

“I know how to find people.”

“Yeah … well … I do, too. I was a cop for sixteen years.”

“I was told that Ms. Buchanan received an e-mail from the Dubai airport.”

“That’s right. PAL would have picked it up right away, but private client messages aren’t read by the system.” The elevator door opened and Evans led me down a hallway. “Maybe Buchanan was involved in something illegal or maybe she jumped on a plane to Tahiti. I still don’t know what’s going on.”

We entered a small office and sat down on opposite sides of a desk. Evans swiveled his computer screen toward me, then began typing commands on a keyboard. “PAL reads e-mails, monitors employee phone calls, and analyzes images from our system of surveillance cameras. This is digital footage from one of the cameras in the bull pen, where the associates work. And this is Emily Buchanan.…”

A black-and-white video appeared on the monitor. It showed a section of a large workroom filled with desks and workstations. The date and time were in a box on the bottom of the screen. Using his mouse and keypad, Evans fast-forwarded the video, and then went to a close-up of a woman staring at a computer screen. All I could see was the back of her office chair, her shoulders, and long brown hair.

“The associates do the grunt work for the managing partners. It’s typical for them to work late if they’re preparing a bond offering or an investment proposal. Ms. Buchanan was sitting at her desk at eleven twenty-four in the evening when she read the message from Dubai. You can see her reaction the moment it appears on her computer screen.”

Evans fast-forwarded the digital video until “23:24 EST” appeared on the screen. “Okay. Now watch this. The e-mail from Dubai arrived at our server at eleven-eighteen p.m. Our records show that Buchanan accessed her e-mail six minutes later.”

When the message appeared, Emily shifted in her chair and sat up a little straighter. Suddenly, she turned and glanced over her shoulder—as if she was aware that someone might be watching her. Without my phone download of different expressions, I wasn’t capable of interpreting her emotions.

“See? You see that?” Evans asked. “That’s the reaction of someone who is guilty of something.”

“What did her supervisor do when she didn’t come to work?”

“Buchanan sent an e-mail to Human Resources. It said that a routine gynecological examination had resulted in an abnormal Pap test. She had to get a cervical biopsy and would be out for a week. Of course no one questioned that. A biopsy? Maybe cancer?”

“So when did you realize that there was a problem?”

“Five days went by, then her supervisor called her cell phone and discovered that it was switched off. He contacted me and I called the medical contact listed in her file. Buchanan’s doctor said she had no knowledge of a biopsy or any other problem. I called her only personal contact … an uncle who lives upstate in Warren County. He didn’t know where she was.”

“What did you do after that?”

“I searched through her e-mail. Yesterday I got permission to decode and found the message from Dubai. I contacted the CEO’s office and now I’m talking to you.”

I took out my phone and spoke to Laura. “Please display the e-mail address for cloud storage.”

“Yes, sir.”

When the address appeared, I placed the phone on the desk. “Send me a copy of Ms. Buchanan’s personnel file and all her e-mails for the last ninety days.”

“I can’t do that. You’re not an employee of BDG.”

“You were told to be helpful to me. This is not being helpful.”

“I don’t have to follow orders from a nonemployee who wants me to violate security protocol.”

The Transformation had given me a certain kind of cold energy that could influence others. Without saying a word, I stood up and stared at Mr. Evans. He tried to meet my gaze for a few seconds, then gave up and looked down at his computer keyboard.

“If you don’t wish to be helpful, then I will contact Miss Holquist, my supervisor. Miss Holquist is a very efficient person. She will call someone … and by ten o’clock tomorrow morning, you will not be in this office, you will not be in this building, you will no longer have a job with this bank.”

“Bullshit. That’s not going to happen.”

“Most of your job is already being done by the PAL system, Mr. Evans. You’re just the human interface.”

No response. So I picked up my phone and began to walk out of the room.

“Hold it! Just … calm down. Okay? Give me the address.”

I returned to the chair and watched Evans download the requested information. Then he forced a smile. “Anything else? You want my birth certificate?”

“I want to see the desk she was using in the video.”

“There’s nothing there. I’ve already searched it.”

“Then we’ll do it again.”

Evans sighed loudly, and then guided me down to the fourth floor, using his Shadow to systematically disable the PAL system as we passed through the building. We ended up in a large windowless room that looked like a factory for a mysterious product. A table piled with printed documents was at the center of the room, surrounded by a ring of gray steel desks and battered file cabinets. The brown carpet was stained with ten years’ worth of food spills and had a moldy odor. At some point, a decorator had brought in a few bamboo plants, but all that was left were brittle stalks and a few yellow leaves.

It was late in the evening, but several people were still working at their desks. One of them was a plump young man wearing a dark blue button-down shirt and a loosened necktie. He looked like a plastic beach toy, puffed up by too much compressed air.

The young man was muttering “Fuck, fuck,
fuck
” while he stared at a computer screen. This chant was almost overpowered by the hum of the fluorescent lights overhead. The harsh light sharpened all the edges and the corners of the room. I wondered if I would cut myself if I touched a chair.

“This is the room you saw in the video,” Evans said. “We call it the bull pen. It’s used by the analysts and associates who help the senior executives.”

“Where’s the desk?”

“Over here.”

Evans led me to a desk and file cabinet near the dead bamboo.
When I sat in Emily’s chair, the little wheels made a squeaking sound.

“So what are you looking for?”

“Any data that might lead me to her current location.”

“You’re wasting your time. Look at the surveillance video. Ms. Buchanan received the e-mail from Dubai. A few minutes later, she sent a message to her supervisor about the biopsy. Then she took everything personal out of her desk and left the building.”

Not knowing what else to do, I opened up the middle desk drawer and found paper clips and felt-tip pens and some pink packets of artificial sweetener. That’s when I realized that I could do this job better than Jerome Evans and a squad of detectives.

But when I look at an object, I can feel its warmth and coldness, its smooth or sharp surfaces. Since I’m not distracted by emotions, I see a more detailed reality.

“There’s nothing important in the desk,” Evans said. “All you’re going to find are pennies and old pencils. Crap like that.”

I discovered a list with little checkmarks beside each task or obligation.

“An organized mind,” I said.

Evans rolled his eyes. “Everyone who works for BDG has an organized mind. This is a sausage factory for deals. A lot of blood and guts get ground up and packaged into cute little hot dogs.”

I opened the side drawers of the desk. Note pads. Folders. Envelopes. The file cabinet contained proposals for business deals in binders with the BDG logo. There were lots of graphs and charts
and clear plastic pages to separate each section. An athletic bag was in the leg space beneath the desk, so I zipped it open and peered inside.

“Checked that, too,” Evans said. “Sweaty socks and gym clothes.”

As I sorted through Emily Buchanan’s clothes, I realized that the bag had a black nylon liner. I slipped my hand beneath it and found a pair of keys.

“Where’d you get that?” Evans asked.

“Beneath the liner. It’s a backup set of apartment keys in case she lost her regular set. What’s her address?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I’m going to search her residence.”

“You can’t just waltz into someone’s apartment. That’s breaking the law.”

“Address?”

Evans sighed again, then accessed Emily’s file with his computer pad. “Buchanan lives at 215 West Eightieth Street.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me?”

“The night Buchanan received the e-mail, she had a conversation with one of the associates. He’s here right now.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“Be my guest. But that’s a waste of time.”

I followed Evans across the bull pen to the plump young man who had been chanting obscenities when we entered the room. Now he was staring at three versions of the same document on his monitor screen while he stuffed corn chips into his mouth.

“Mr. Underwood, this is Preston Donnelly. He’s a second-year associate.”

Donnelly kept chewing. “What’s going on?”

“As I told you this afternoon, we’re concerned about Emily Buchanan. He’s making sure she’s okay.”

“Well, I don’t know anything,” Donnelly said. “She was just another monkey in the cage. It’s all shit. We’re shit. I could give a shit. We got a pitch meeting at ten a.m. tomorrow and I’ve got four more hours of work before I can go home.”