He dried his hands and went back out.
Emma was still watching the interview.
The go-getter was still talking. “Imagine a smart system that runs your whole house, controls the environment, turns the lights on, and—”
“But computers can do that already, can’t they?” interrupted the interviewer.
“They can only do what we tell them,” the go-getter went on patiently. “The trick is a computer recognizing when to stop doing something or to change what it does. I mean, yes, you can program it with detailed parameters and contingencies, but if next-gen artificial intelligence worked more like human intuition? What if a computer could sense your mood and put on some music you might like? I mean, we’re years away from that, but we’ve already started working with software that doesn’t just give you what you want … but what it thinks you might want. What it thinks you need.”
“That’s amazing,” the interviewer said. “You say it could somehow sense mood. But … but how would it know?”
The go-getter smiled widely. “Exactly.”
Emma stared at the TV without blinking.
“Who is that?” Francis asked.
“That’s my husband.”
12
Francis’s eye popped open, and it took him a few seconds to remember where he was. He’d fallen hard into long, deep sleep, curled all the way to one side of the bed.
Emma had taken the other side of the bed, still wrapped in a towel. When Francis had broached the subject of what would happen next, she’d claimed to be too exhausted to think clearly. All she’d wanted was sleep, but she’d promised to hash it all out in the morning. She’d even go with Francis to the police and explain everything if Francis insisted. He’d been mollified. They’d slept.
He rolled over, looked. Emma wasn’t there.
Francis sat up slowly, rubbed his neck. Various pains still ached his body. He needed to exercise more, maybe join a gym.
He staggered into the bathroom, yawning. He splashed water in his face. He looked up at the towel rack. The panties and socks were gone. It took Francis a moment to realize what that might mean. He jerked his head around, saw her clothes were no longer on the hook.
Shit shit shit.
He ran back into the other room, eyes frantic.
No suitcase. No girl.
“Shit! Fucking dumbass idiot!” How could he have been so stupid? Of course she was gone. She’d said pretty clearly she couldn’t go to the police. What had Francis thought? That he’d won her over somehow?
His hand went automatically to his back pocket. His wallet was gone. No, wait. He’d taken it out last night. He checked the nightstand. It was there. Right next to it was his American Express gold card. Next to that was a stack of crisp hundred-dollar bills, and next to that was a short note scrawled on hotel stationery. He snatched it up and read.
I had to use your credit card. I left enough cash to cover it. Sorry. Had to go.
Francis counted the money. Fifteen hundred dollars.
Credit card? It didn’t make sense. He remembered her warning. That’s how they find you. She’d been pretty serious about it. It was specifically why they’d found a hotel that would take cash only without a credit card or identification. What could she have needed so desperately?
Francis flipped the credit card cover and dialed the toll-free number on the back. He navigated through the automated options until he found himself talking to a live human being on the other end.
“I just need to confirm a recent transaction,” he told her.
She confirmed that his most recent transaction was for two first-class airline tickets leaving from New York’s LaGuardia Airport flying to Los Angeles, California. She rattled off the airline and details of the flight.
“Did you say two tickets?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you confirm those names for me, please?” Francis asked.
“Absolutely,” she said. “Emma Middleton and Francis Berringer.”
Francis glanced at his watch. He had fifty-seven minutes to make the flight.
* * *
“We assembled a team to meet her at LAX as soon as the computer flagged her,” the agent told Gunn over the phone. “There’s an interrogation facility nearby, and our California office has good relations with local law enforcement and airport security. Plus we’ll have ample time for the team to set up at the gate. We thought it a better plan than trying to take her at LaGuardia or diverting the flight.”
“Agreed,” Gunn said. “Arrange a government jet for me. I want to be there when she disembarks. I’ll take command of the team.”
Gunn grinned. The girl had messed up this time. They all do eventually. You can’t run from the federal government forever.
* * *
Bryant sat at his control station, monitoring the traffic from Manhattan to Queens. Cavanaugh and his goons would never make it, but they had to try. The new software had immediately picked up the NSA chatter and the reception they were planning for the girl at LAX, so getting ahead of her there was out. Cavanaugh’s only chance was to try to catch her at LaGuardia.
But … well … just no. It wasn’t going to happen. The bridges were a mess, and anyway, they’d never get through security in time. Cavanaugh’s only chance was that the girl’s flight might be delayed. Considering they were talking about LaGuardia, the odds weren’t really so bad.
Middleton would not be pleased to hear the government had beaten them to his wife. Not pleased at all. Aaron Middleton looked about as benign as a man could on the outside, bland and pale, a computer nerd straight from central casting, but Bryant had glimpsed some streak of menace lurking below the surface, ready to be triggered. He could almost hear the kid ticking whenever they were in the same room.
A dulcet chime alerted Bryant that the computer had something to tell him. He brought it up on the central monitor. The program had been slowly getting better at anticipating the user’s needs, making mistakes at first but then correcting them with little or no input from Bryant. It knew they were searching for the girl. It had been the program that had not only flagged the girl’s name on an airline reservation—which was simple enough, really—but also had identified the NSA activity as directly related to her.
Apparently, the program now had something else it thought Bryant wanted to know.
Information scrolled across the screen. Emma Middleton’s life story unfolded before his eyes. Every pay stub from every job, every place she’d ever paid rent or had mail delivered. Names and addresses of relatives. Every scrap of information that had ever been collected and digitized.
Again, this was not beyond the capabilities of intelligence programs already in existence. It was exactly how the NSA’s mainframe had tracked the girl. But as Bryant watched the computer monitor, he realized yet again he was seeing something different. The program was sorting the information, discarding some bits of data, rearranging others. It was doing the work normally done by a human analyst who sifted the raw data to come up with educated guesses and likely scenarios.
The program knew what Bryant wanted and traveled down informational back alleys, linking together unlikely scraps of information that might not be obvious to others. It had its guess and showed it to Bryant.
Bryant picked up the phone and dialed Cavanaugh. “You’ll never make it to LaGuardia in time to catch her, but I’m arranging a charter flight for you and your men. I know where she’s going.”
* * *
Francis gulped for breath. He’d run all the way to the gate. They were still boarding when he arrived. He spotted the suitcase first, registering a fraction of a second later it was Emma carrying it. She fell into line with the last few stragglers boarding the plane.
Francis ducked into the magazine shop across from the gate. Emma obviously wanted to be shed of him, so she could still bolt if he surprised her before boarding. He pretended to browse the magazines, keeping one eye on the gate.
He spotted the ne
w issue of Adventure Travel. On the cover was a gorgeous woman in a bikini, snorkeling underwater with a spear gun. The water was an impossible blue, and colorful fish swarmed around her. The issue would eventually arrive at his apartment, but it was a long flight from New York to Los Angeles, so he hastily paid the cashier, then jogged to the gate.
The door was just starting to close when Francis arrived. The gate attendant frowned at him but took his boarding pass and waved him through.
The flight attendant in the first-class cabin looked him up and down. He remembered he was wearing yesterday’s outfit, clothes he’d actually slept in. He probably wasn’t coming off as first-class cabin material, but his boarding pass spoke for itself. She managed a welcoming smile and gestured toward his aisle seat four rows back.
Emma sat in the window seat, pensively looking out the little portal.
In his head, Francis had rehearsed a few different ways to do this. He hadn’t had a lot of practice making an entrance, and the best he could come up with was to flop down into the seat next to her and say, “I’ve never flown first class before. Kind of makes multiple near-death experiences all worth it.”
Her head snapped around, eyes shooting wide. Surprise instantly turned into acute annoyance. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Apparently, I have a ticket.”
“Idiot.”
“You know, I did chase you down in a taxi when those guys grabbed you,” Francis said. “I’m not saying I rescued you just to be thanked … but it would be nice to be thanked.”
“I was thanking you, dumbass. Why do you think I bought you a plane ticket? When the credit card flags what we’re doing, they’ll stop looking for you in New York because they’ll think you’re flying with me to California. Except now you are flying with me to California. Sort of undermines the whole strategy.”
Ah.
“Well,” Francis said. “I … uh … did not know that.”
She crossed her eyes at him. “Duh.”
“You still could have said something,” Francis insisted. “Waking up to find you gone was … disconcerting.”
“Disconcerting?”
“Very.”
“Probably I was trying to avoid this exact conversation.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not cool.” He remembered Enid saying something similar about leaving a note so she could avoid an awkward conversation.
Emma considered him a moment, softened her voice, and said, “Listen, Frankie—”
“I don’t really go by—”
“—the thing is I’m sorry if this isn’t cool,” Emma said. “You seem like a decent regular guy. I got you into something you didn’t want to be part of. I get it. But as I think you’ve noticed, this hasn’t been exactly cool for me either. Quite obviously, I have some shit going on. I did my best to get you out of it, but you fucked that up. Okay, so I didn’t let you in on the plan, and that’s on me too. But I have very important life-and-death shit on my plate right now, and I don’t have time to babysit you.”
“Who’s helping you?” Francis asked.
“I don’t need anyone’s help.”
“We’ve already seen that’s not true,” Francis said. “Here’s a radical idea. Yeah, I didn’t ask for this, but here I am. So maybe you tell me what’s going on, and I can help. Look, I help you, I help myself, right? If you just vanish, God knows how I explain myself, but if I help you solve whatever this is, then that clears you to come explain to the police that I’m just some dumb schmuck who found a suitcase in an alley. How about that?”
She shook her head, laughing in that way people do when nothing at all is funny. “Forget it. I’m talking to a brick wall. Just sit back and relax, okay? It’s a long flight.”
“Fine with me.” Francis showed her the copy of Adventure Travel. “I have a magazine.”
13
The light in the room rose to 15 percent. Enough to see but not enough to jar the sleeper’s waking experience. The sound of rain and flowing water rose very gently and slowly in volume through hidden high-definition speakers. Climate control brought the interior temperature up two degrees.
Gently, Middleton’s eyes opened.
Memories seeped back slowly. He’d suddenly felt so exhausted, so overwhelmed, like the entire world was squeezing in on him tighter and tighter. He didn’t want to go back on the medication, but maybe he’d have to. He would have shut down completely if Meredith hadn’t been there.
She’d taken over the decision-making process, told the movers to bring in all the furniture and to set it up. If it took all night, then so be it. She hadn’t wanted them to come back and create a whole new clusterfuck—her word. The movers had worked fast, and Meredith had taken Middleton to the one room that didn’t need any furniture.
The indoor pool was huge. The glass ceiling could be tinted almost opaque or slide back completely to allow natural sunlight. In the corner of the pool complex was a large, built-in whirlpool bath. Meredith had rapidly brought the whirlpool up to temperature, and Middleton had sat on the edge, shoes and socks off, trousers rolled up to the knees, and let the warm water soothe him.
And Meredith had talked. Not about anything important. Siblings. Old college roommates. The time she nearly bowled a three hundred game. Most importantly, she asked him no questions, made no conversational demands on him. Her voice washed over him as soothing as the warm water swirling around his ankles. Everything about her—her light touch, musical voice, the faint smell of citrus from her shampoo—was a balm to him.
Eventually, the text came that the movers had completed their task. He had only the vaguest memory of Meredith taking him by the arm and leading him to his new bedroom, pulling the covers up to his chin. Blissful silence and darkness and he’d closed his eyes and left the chaos of the day behind him.
Now he sat up and took in his surroundings. The lighting came up another 10 percent.
The walls were perfectly white and smooth. A modern easy chair sat in one corner, his suit jacket thrown over the back. He got out of bed. The carpet was soft and comfortable under his bare feet.
He walked toward the bathroom, which sensed him coming. The lights came on. The heating coils beneath the floor brought the tile up to a comfortable temperature. These are the system presets, Middleton realized. As he lived in the house and got the feel of it, he would tweak all the automated systems to suit him.
Middleton used the bathroom. Showered. Again, the water temperature was factory preset. He decided to leave it for now.
The door to his walk-in closet had been designed to seem just another stretch of wall. It slid to the side as he approached. The closet was the size of a two-car garage. Everything was perfectly organized—suits, casual wear, shoes, underclothes, and socks. He approached a rack of tracksuits. Middleton despised exercise, but found the suits comfortable. He selected a black one with white stripes down the sleeves and pant legs. Sneakers. Ankle socks.
Something bothered him, and he wasn’t sure what.
“What time is it?”
“It is 9:39 A.M., Pacific standard time,” said a disembodied voice. The voice was male, a calm, nonthreatening baritone. Another factory preset. Yes, that would need to be changed as soon as possible. Middleton didn’t like that guy at all.
He figured it out. Usually by this time in the morning, there were already a dozen things that needed his attention. Meredith must still be keeping the hordes at bay for his benefit.
He got momentarily lost trying to find the kitchen, but the fresh aroma of hazelnut drew him on. He found a white ceramic cup in the cabinet next to the dispenser, placed it under the nozzle, and pushed the button. It dispensed a cup of fresh black coffee. He sipped. Perfect.
“What’s your name, computer?”
“Adam.”
“Is that factory preset too?”
“Adam is the default start mode name assigned to your household system.”
Marion Parkes had designed the system for him, and Middle
ton felt a quick stab of regret, thinking of the man. But it had to be done, hadn’t it? Parkes and the others? He couldn’t control what they might do, who they could speak to. Middleton felt the old panic start to rise up again and immediately put Parkes out of his mind. That was the past. This was the here and now. He focused exclusively on his coffee, sipped, enjoyed the aroma.
“Adam, where is Meredith?”
“Biometric identification has yet to be calibrated,” Adam said.
Okay, so he’d find her the old-fashioned way. The house wasn’t that big.
Except it was, and was designed to seem even bigger, hallways curving in such a way to foster a sense of many areas, ceilings vaulted or slanted in such a way to emphasize space. He passed spare bedrooms and a library. He found an enormous atrium, sunlight flooding in from above, and circled around it, finally finding the formal living room. Grotesquely expensive modern art covered the white walls. Middleton lacked appreciation for most art. The paintings here had been chosen for their rigidly symmetrical patterns and unobtrusive color palettes.
Meredith curled on a white leather couch, her shoes on the floor. She must have been equally exhausted, he realized. Constantly being the buffer between him and the rest of the world in its entirety would likely drain anyone.
He turned to leave her in peace.
“It’s okay.” She sat up slowly, pushing loose strands of hair out of her face. “I’m awake.”
“There’s coffee.”
“Good. Can you show me where the kitchen is?”
“Follow me.”
In the kitchen, she sat on a stool at the big island, sipping coffee and tapping like mad at her smartphone. “I’ve canceled everything nonessential and told them we’ll get back to them about rescheduling when we can. Your morning board meeting has been pushed to after lunch, but if you want to video in, then you won’t need to leave—”
“Hey.”
She looked up at him, the question in her eyes.
“It’s okay. You can just drink your coffee,” Middleton said. “You don’t have to hit the ground running just this once.”
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