contained a manila envelope of small adhesive stickers—the sort of thing that growlers slapped up on walls that weren’t being watched by surveillance cameras.
CLOSE THE EYE!
RESIST!
NOT NORM-ALL!
I also found some tools—a hammer, socket wrench, screwdriver, and pliers—along with a canvas bag that contained torn jeans, old running shoes, and a T-shirt that was splattered with blue and white paint. No words on the T-shirt. But it did display a simple drawing of a house:
When I had finished searching the room, I lay down in the middle of the bed and tried to figure my next move. Emily’s sheets had a faint citrus scent from detergent, but I could also smell shampoo and some kind of bath powder that was a mix of flowers and vanilla.
“E-mail in your message box,” Laura announced and I glanced at my phone’s display screen.
// Find the uncle. If the missing customer is at that location, make a complete sales presentation using your new equipment.
Still lying on the bed, I used my phone to access Emily Buchanan’s employee file. Her only listed personal contact was her uncle, a man named Roland Jefferies, who lived in a small town near Lake George in the northeast region of New York State. Laura said that the location was a four-hour drive north of the city.
“Do you have a car, sir?”
“No.”
“Should I obtain a rental car?”
“Yes … please.”
“A reservation has been made at National Car Rental. The pickup location is three blocks north from your present location, on West Eighty-Third Street.”
“Thank you, Laura. You’re very efficient.”
She didn’t answer me right away. Somewhere in cyberspace her consciousness was evaluating my statement. Shadows were programmed to deal with human anger and stupidity, but they still found it difficult to recognize compliments.
“I hope efficiency is something you value, sir.”
While I was waiting in line at the car rental office, I used Google Maps to get a street view of Uncle Roland’s residence in Chestertown. It was a large, two-story house surrounded by a lawn dotted with a few apple trees. It was possible that Emily was staying with her uncle. If that was true, then Miss Holquist wanted me to make a
complete sales presentation
→ and kill everyone in the building.
But how would I know if she was hiding in the attic or a back room? After I left the car rental garage, I dropped by my loft in Chinatown and retrieved the thermal-imaging scanner I had used during my search for Peter Stetsko. The scanner gave me the ability to look through walls. During that cold night in Brooklyn, the scanner had revealed that the Russian wasn’t home. I didn’t need to knock on doors or peer through windows—so I stood in the shadows and waited until Stetsko returned.
As I headed north on the Taconic State Parkway, the world wastransformed into a series of flat images framed by the car windows. If I had stopped and left the car, I could have strolled around a three-dimensional service station, but during the drive my Spark saw reality as pixels on a monitor screen—little bits of light that gave the illusion of solidness and depth.
I drove for four hours, then turned off the parkway and entered the lake district of Warren County. There were patches of snow on the ground and the two-lane blacktop wandered past frozen lakes edged with cattails and dead reeds that jabbed at the sky. Billboards announced that the area was a “playground” for hunters and fishermen, but most of the small white cottages were boarded up for the winter. I stopped to buy gas, and then entered Chestertown.
A memorial to the war dead was at the center of the town square, surrounded by a bank and a courthouse and several other brick and granite buildings. Laura told me to turn right, so I left the square and drove past two-story clapboard houses with gray slate roofs. Old cars with rust bubbles around the wheel wells and pickup trucks with gun racks were parked in gravel
CLOSE THE EYE!
RESIST!
NOT NORM-ALL!
I also found some tools—a hammer, socket wrench, screwdriver, and pliers—along with a canvas bag that contained torn jeans, old running shoes, and a T-shirt that was splattered with blue and white paint. No words on the T-shirt. But it did display a simple drawing of a house:
When I had finished searching the room, I lay down in the middle of the bed and tried to figure my next move. Emily’s sheets had a faint citrus scent from detergent, but I could also smell shampoo and some kind of bath powder that was a mix of flowers and vanilla.
“E-mail in your message box,” Laura announced and I glanced at my phone’s display screen.
// Find the uncle. If the missing customer is at that location, make a complete sales presentation using your new equipment.
Still lying on the bed, I used my phone to access Emily Buchanan’s employee file. Her only listed personal contact was her uncle, a man named Roland Jefferies, who lived in a small town near Lake George in the northeast region of New York State. Laura said that the location was a four-hour drive north of the city.
“Do you have a car, sir?”
“No.”
“Should I obtain a rental car?”
“Yes … please.”
“A reservation has been made at National Car Rental. The pickup location is three blocks north from your present location, on West Eighty-Third Street.”
“Thank you, Laura. You’re very efficient.”
She didn’t answer me right away. Somewhere in cyberspace her consciousness was evaluating my statement. Shadows were programmed to deal with human anger and stupidity, but they still found it difficult to recognize compliments.
“I hope efficiency is something you value, sir.”
While I was waiting in line at the car rental office, I used Google Maps to get a street view of Uncle Roland’s residence in Chestertown. It was a large, two-story house surrounded by a lawn dotted with a few apple trees. It was possible that Emily was staying with her uncle. If that was true, then Miss Holquist wanted me to make a
complete sales presentation
→ and kill everyone in the building.
But how would I know if she was hiding in the attic or a back room? After I left the car rental garage, I dropped by my loft in Chinatown and retrieved the thermal-imaging scanner I had used during my search for Peter Stetsko. The scanner gave me the ability to look through walls. During that cold night in Brooklyn, the scanner had revealed that the Russian wasn’t home. I didn’t need to knock on doors or peer through windows—so I stood in the shadows and waited until Stetsko returned.
As I headed north on the Taconic State Parkway, the world wastransformed into a series of flat images framed by the car windows. If I had stopped and left the car, I could have strolled around a three-dimensional service station, but during the drive my Spark saw reality as pixels on a monitor screen—little bits of light that gave the illusion of solidness and depth.
I drove for four hours, then turned off the parkway and entered the lake district of Warren County. There were patches of snow on the ground and the two-lane blacktop wandered past frozen lakes edged with cattails and dead reeds that jabbed at the sky. Billboards announced that the area was a “playground” for hunters and fishermen, but most of the small white cottages were boarded up for the winter. I stopped to buy gas, and then entered Chestertown.
A memorial to the war dead was at the center of the town square, surrounded by a bank and a courthouse and several other brick and granite buildings. Laura told me to turn right, so I left the square and drove past two-story clapboard houses with gray slate roofs. Old cars with rust bubbles around the wheel wells and pickup trucks with gun racks were parked in gravel
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