Spark: A Novel (3 page)

Although my day-to-day actions are limited and habitual, my work forces me to travel to different places and behave in unusual ways. Fortunately, Miss Holquist has friends in the Department of Homeland Security. When I lost my birth identity and was reborn as Jacob Underwood, the EYE system was told that I was a “CAP”—a Certified Anomaly Profile that lacked normal predictability. That meant that it was acceptable for me to pace back and forth on the Brooklyn Bridge, and not be red-tagged by Norm-All. Seagulls squawked and fought on a discarded bagel as I gazed at the cables that divided up an infinite sky.

Every citizen on the bridge knew that the EYE system was necessary for a safe and secure society. And there was a specific reason for this new technology—the death and violence caused by the Day of Rage.

I was a patient at the Ettinger Clinic on the Day of Rage. Usually, news from the outside world isn’t allowed to enter the clinic, but the news reports overcame all obstacles. The first rumors were passed from the nurses and the orderlies to the cooks and gardeners and, finally, to the patients wearing pastel pink or baby blue track suits. Staff and patients never socialized together at the clinic, but that morning everyone gathered in the main dining room to watch the news. Dr. Morris Noland, the director of the clinic, sat on a bench between Big George, the second-floor day nurse, and Miss Garcia, the cook. Patients wandered around the room or stared at the television screen.

The first news flash was about bombs exploding at Eton College—the British school for boys near Windsor Castle. Those images of dead bodies and weeping parents were quickly followed by phone footage of an explosion at the Dalton School in New York City. As the day went on, more reports came in from France, Canada,
Brazil, and Germany. An unknown terrorist group had organized a simultaneous bombing attack on schools in nine different countries.

The television set stayed on all night, and I was there early in the morning when the authorities stated that a mysterious group called Day of Rage had claimed credit for the bombings. At this point, the paranoids at the clinic were cowering in their rooms while those patients with obsessive-compulsive disorders had invented private rituals so that the clinic wouldn’t be attacked. When a woman in Ward Four had a panic attack and began screaming, Dr. Noland removed the television from the dining room.

A few days after the bombings, the world was given an explanation—and someone to blame. Danny Marchand was a brilliant young man with a French father and a British mother. When he was nineteen years old he obtained an engineering degree at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris. He started working for a Dutch software company, and then got involved with the Final Wave movement. These fanatics believed in technological singularity—the inevitable development of a supercomputer that could rewrite its own source code. Eventually the computer would know all past knowledge and could predict future behavior. The supercomputer would be as omniscient as God and as inevitable as History.

When he was twenty-nine years old, Danny Marchand quit Final Wave and began to recruit people to join an underground organization. Some of his followers were anarchists or religious fanatics who believed in the End of the World, but most of the bombs were built and detonated for money by mercenaries affiliated with terrorist groups in the Middle East. No one ever found out what Marchand believed because he was killed three days after the school bombings during a police raid on his hideout in Normandy.

I remained in the middle of the bridge, staring up at the cables as I tried to make a decision. Although I didn’t need money at this particular moment, my assignments were difficult and they kept
me busy. The Spark inside every Shell is restless. If we’re bored, our hungry mind feasts on imaginary problems. It doesn’t seem to make a difference if we are standing in the middle of a bridge or lying motionless on a hospital bed. When I was a patient at the Ettinger Clinic I once followed Dr. Noland upstairs to a second-floor room where they kept a patient named Donald Fitzgibbon. The patient’s eyes were closed. His tall, frail body was attached to a respirator, a catheter, an IV tube, and two neural sensors. The room smelled of urine and the respirator made a faint wheezing sound.

“Is he really alive?” I asked.

“Yes, but he’s experiencing something called locked-in syndrome. A CAT scan showed acute lesions in the pontine nuclei area of his brain.”

“Is he thinking?”

“He’s awake and conscious, but he can’t deliberately move any part of his body.” Dr. Noland shrugged. “Over the last few years, I’ve given an EEG examination to twenty-five normal people. Each time they hear a beeping sound they are supposed to imagine, in their minds, that they’re either wiggling their toes or squeezing their right hand. Even though they aren’t actually contracting their muscles, the EEG machine detects two different kinds of activity in their premotor cortex. The brain response for wiggling the toes is different from the one that occurs when we think about moving a hand.”

“What does that have to do with Mr. Fitzgibbon?”

“I put some earphones on the old man’s head, then switched on a recording that delivered the same two instructions … squeeze your hand, then wiggle your toes.” Dr. Noland glanced at me and grinned. “The EEG machine picked up the same electrical flare in the cortex that occurs with an uninjured brain.”

“So he
is
thinking?”

“Yes. But he’s trapped within his skull.”

My Spark is also trapped, but I still need to think about something. Neutralizing targets for Miss Holquist creates short-term goals that
challenge my restless mind. After pacing on the bridge for an hour, I returned to my loft and sent an e-mail.

“Go to the Web site for British Airways,” I told Laura. “Talk to the reservations Shadow and purchase a one-way first-class ticket leaving JFK airport on Wednesday morning.”

“And where are we going, Mr. Underwood?”

“London.”

I rented a short-stay apartment in North London and flew into Heathrow Airport two days later. The apartment was on the third floor of a modern building on Upper Street in Islington—the sort of place rented by foreign businessmen who didn’t want to stay at a hotel. The first thing I did was cover all the mirrors with masking tape and newspaper, then I moved the living room furniture into one of the bedrooms, rolled up the white Berber carpet, and stuffed it into a closet.

London’s energy surrounded me like a snowstorm. It felt as if bits of energy were drifting down on my head and clinging to my clothes. But I’ve learned one quick way to calm my agitation. I hammered a small nail into the wood floor and attached a length of cord. Closing my eyes and holding the cord with one hand, I paced out a circle.

The calm perfection of this motion centered me and helped my Spark adjust to the new environment. My check-in suitcase contained a ten-day supply of ComPlete. I drank two bottles, and then went out to find my target.

Victor Mallory’s London address turned out to be a town house in Knightsbridge. It had been seized by a bank and a
FOR SALE
sign was attached to the outer railing. Using the name Richard Morgan, I called the phone number on the sign and arranged to see the house that afternoon. The estate agent for the bank was a plump woman named Darla. She had blood-red lipstick and dyed-black hair, and looked like a well-fed vampire. After searching through a ring of keys, she unlocked the front door and we entered the building. It was clear that no one had lived there for several months. The old newspapers and moldy clothes smelled like a grayish green color in my mind. Dead flies were scattered like dots of buzz on the floor in front of the windows.

Darla’s heels clicked across the parquet floor and motes of dust rose up, swirling through a shaft of sunlight that cut through a gap in the curtains. “The bank is open to negotiation on the price,” she announced. “But there will be no negotiation on the condition of the property.”

I was looking for a phone number or an address that would guide me to my target’s current location. The cage elevator didn’t work, so we climbed up white marble steps to the master bedroom on the first floor. There was a slight indentation in the pillow where Mallory had once placed his head, but now the silk pillowcases and the linen sheets were covered with a thin layer of dust.

A guest bedroom and home office were on the second floor. I needed to search the office, but it was difficult with Darla watching me. Silently, we trudged upstairs to a maid’s room and I gazed out the window at brick chimneys topped with soot-smudged crowns. “I need to get a sense of the place,” I told her. “If you don’t mind, perhaps I could spend a few minutes in each room … alone.”

Darla glanced around the maid’s room. A stack of old magazines. Hair clips scattered on the dresser. “No problem at all, Mr. Morgan. I’ll be downstairs if you have any questions.”

I stood in the maid’s room, listening to her shoes tap-tap-tapping down the staircase. Then I returned to the office and searched through the shredded bits of paper in the waste bin. The drawers of the oak desk contained ballpoint pens and menus for takeout food. As quietly as possible, I hurried downstairs to the master bedroom, where I searched the night table and peered under the bed.