Spark: A Novel (4 page)

I dislike mirrors, but it’s difficult to avoid them. I forced my eyes to look downward at the sink as my hands opened the bathroom cabinet. When the mirror was facing the wall I inspected the cabinet shelves and found a rolled-up tube of toothpaste and some nail clippers. But on the top shelf my target had left a prescription drug container with a physician’s name on it. I dropped it into my suit coat pocket, stepped back into the bedroom, and surprised Darla.

“Thank you. I’ve seen enough,” I said.

“Yes … Yes … Marvelous.” But she held up her cell phone as if she wanted to call the police.

There is something wrong with my appearance. Although the scars from my accident are hidden, strangers look away when they first encounter me.

The problem could be caused by my haircut. Because I won’t let anyone touch me, I cut off all my hair with electric clippers on the first day of the month. I met the estate agent three days after this procedure and the stubble on my skull made me look like an army recruit or a chemotherapy patient.

It’s important for my work that I appear as normal as possible. I don’t want to be distinctive in any way. When traveling, I’ll take phone photos of my fellow passengers sitting in the VIP lounge. Then I’ll go to department stores in New York and tell the salesclerk to find clothes that duplicate the costumes of these travelers. I usually wear dark slacks, a button-down shirt in solid colors, and black shoes. But the new clothes always hang loosely on my body as if they don’t belong to me.

I take a shower every day (Rule #2) and then smear deodorant
beneath my arms and splash aftershave on my face. The aftershave makes me smell like pine trees—the bright green needles brushing against my clothes as I hike through a forest.

I’ve learned to nod my head when someone speaks to me. I’ve learned to say “thank you” and talk about the weather. But there’s something about me that makes Human Units uncomfortable.

When I was recovering at Marian Community Hospital, I saw patients brought in who were bleeding and unconscious, their legs and arms strapped together as if their body parts had detached and were about to fly off in different directions. A few weeks later, they were smiling and thanking everyone as a nurse wheeled them out to the front entrance. These patients were broken into pieces, and then had reassembled themselves.

But I haven’t changed.

When I returned to my apartment in Islington, I called the doctor whose name was on the pill container. I spoke to a receptionist and said that I wanted to pay a bill online. Using my computer, I visited the payment Web site and used “safecracker” software to enter the patient database. Victor Mallory’s listed address was the abandoned London town house, but I found what I was looking for—a mobile phone number.

The rest was easy. Pretending to be the company that made his device, I sent a text message to Mallory’s phone asking him to install a system update. Twenty minutes later, he pressed the pound key, which linked him to a fake company Web site created by my employers. In three seconds, the Web site downloaded malware to Mallory’s phone. Now I could turn on the device’s microphone, monitor text messages, and access its GPS location.

A few minutes later, I was looking at a satellite image of a country estate in southwest England. Victor Mallory lived in an eighteen-room manor house built on a low hill and surrounded by an eight-foot hedge. There was a clay tennis court, a picnic pavilion,
and an empty swimming pool. Now I had to figure out a way to pass through the barriers and kill him.

It was raining two days later when I rented a car and drove north to Gloucestershire. I had no idea where to turn left or right, but Laura helped me find the estate. If I said I was lost, she would answer, “Don’t worry, Mr. Underwood. I know where we are.”

Laura sounded like a calm, youngish woman—not your friend exactly—but the competent executive secretary back at the head office who always finishes her assignments on time. Some people buy software that creates an avatar for their Shadow, but I preferred the image in my mind. I decided that Laura didn’t wear jeans and T-shirts when she was working, but a navy blue skirt and matching jacket. Her hair was short and black and she had bangs that cut a straight line across her forehead. Edward was very formal and polite. I pictured him with thinning hair and flushed cheeks, wearing a blue suit, white shirt, and regimental striped necktie.

Victor Mallory’s estate was surrounded by a hedge that concealed a six-foot-high spike fence. Now that I was monitoring his cell phone, I realized that he never left this protective circle. CCTV cameras were mounted on steel poles at each corner of the lot, and a fifth camera was attached to the intercom panel directly outside the electronically controlled entrance gate.

I had bought three solar-powered Sentinel cameras at an electronics supply store in New York City and decided to use two of them. The rain had stopped falling, but wind pushed against me, whispering in my ears. Moving quickly, I forced my way into a blackberry thicket, planted a tripod, and attached a Sentinel camera so that it was pointing at the gate. Then I returned to my rental car and drove to a dirt road behind the estate. An oak tree grew near the hedge and I attached a camera with the long-range zoom lens to one of the branches.

I activated the cell phones attached to the Sentinels and returned to London. There was a photograph of Victor Mallory on the
Times
database; he was a man in his late sixties with white hair and a saggy face. The next morning, I was sitting at the kitchen
table when my target came out of the manor house with a golf bag, stood on the terrace, and hit a basket of balls onto the lawn. A bodyguard carrying an assault rifle followed Mallory down the hill as he picked up the balls and then returned to the terrace and hit them out a second time.

I still hadn’t received a weapon, so I sent an e-mail to Miss Holquist:

She replied a few minutes later:

Once I had set up the Sentinels I could sit in my apartment and watch live-time images of the estate on my computer. If I got restless, I would leave the flat and take my computer to La Boucherie—a North London butcher shop turned into a café. It was a loud and echoey place, but if you bought a cup of coffee, the staff left you alone.

The camera attached to the oak tree photographed Mallory’s daily golf ritual while the Sentinel aimed at the entrance gate showed who had permission to enter the estate. A gardener and a maid worked every weekday, but neither servant lived at the manor house. At approximately 11 a.m., a cook arrived with provisions. Unless there were guests for dinner, she left around 6 p.m. My target employed two full-time bodyguards—a heavyset man in his fifties and a younger man with blond hair. Each guard worked a three-day shift, and then caught the train back to London while his counterpart took over.

Mallory was vulnerable because he had a mistress—a young Asian woman who came up from London on Friday or Saturday, spent the night, and then left on an afternoon train. During these visits, the bodyguard on shift picked the woman up and dropped her
off at the station. This meant that my target was alone for approximately forty minutes.

At the training camp, I was told that doors always open for a man wearing a hard hat and carrying a clipboard. People will allow you into a guarded sanctuary if you give them a logical reason for your presence there. Although I still hadn’t received my weapon, I came up with a plan and began to accumulate the necessary clothes and fake ID cards. But there was one significant problem. I was born in America, but my plan required me to speak with a British working-class accent. I told Edward to search for acting teachers and dialect coaches in London, and he came up with a list of eighteen names. I needed someone who would accept cash and who worked with students in a building that didn’t have CCTV cameras.

After some cross-checking, I picked a woman named Julia Driscoll. According to an acting Web site, Mrs. Driscoll taught students in Stoke Newington—a district in the borough of Hackney. She was not affiliated with any teaching organizations and lessons were given at her home. The Web site showed an airbrushed black-and-white photograph of a middle-aged Mrs. Driscoll acting in a Shakespeare comedy called
The Merry Wives of Windsor,
but a check of the Internet confirmed that she was now in her seventies.

I called Mrs. Driscoll and spoke to her briefly. She had an actress’s voice—very precise about the syllables, but somewhat grand in tone and rhythm. It didn’t sound like she had many students because she said I could drop by her flat whenever it was convenient.

Early that evening, I took a bus to Stoke Newington and wandered around with my phone, trying to find Watkins Street. Stoke Newington had a lot of redbrick terraced houses with white window frames and gardens in the back. The buildings looked solid and solemn and old-fashioned—like rows of Victorian women glaring down at the graffiti on the fences and the trash in the alleyways.

I stopped outside a pub, slipped on the headset, and spoke to Laura. “Am I close to Watkins Street?”

“You are approximately eight blocks from your destination, sir. Continue south on Oldfield Road, then turn right at the corner.”

“Is everything okay, Laura?”

“Of course, Mr. Underwood. I enjoy helping you.”

When I reached Oldfield Road I heard a faint whirring sound—like one of the hummingbirds that darted around the garden at the Ettinger Clinic. I looked up and saw that a faint red light that resembled a human Spark was hovering over the neighborhood. It was a drone aircraft, a surveillance device used by police departments and government-approved corporations to monitor the activities of Human Units. Many of them had infrared sensors that allowed them to record images at night.

“So where am I now?” I asked Laura.

“Walk east two blocks, then turn left.”

Standing on the corner, I glanced around me to see if anyone in the area was wearing the special eyeglasses called “G-MIDs” (Glass-Mounted Information Display). Recently, several companies had also started to sell “E-MIDs”—eye-mounted contact lenses that were connected to your cell phone.

The eyeglasses were marketed as a hands-free, head-mounted display that would respond to voice commands and provide a bit-stream of information, such as weather reports and GPS directions. But the glasses also offered the ability to record continuous videos of people and events without anyone knowing this was going on. These videos were stored forever in cloud servers.

At first, the G-MID providers told the public that these eyeglass videos were private. Then it was revealed that the cloud computers were programmed to scan and categorize the videos for “technical reasons.” A few months after that news, some Swedish hackers proved that governments were accessing the videos and identifying people using facial-recognition systems. This meant that any Human Unit wearing the special glasses or contact lenses was a possible surveillance mechanism.

As I got closer to Mrs. Driscoll’s flat, I passed young men standing around with their hands in their pockets, smoking, coughing, and spitting on the pavement. A few of them were selling drugs—or themselves—and occasionally a car would pull up to the curb and someone would talk to the driver.

Most of these people were petty criminals or “bonks,” who had neurological damage because of the new pleasure machines that directly stimulated the brain. But I also saw men and women wearing the black knit caps or bandannas that showed that they were part of a loosely organized group called “growlers” in the United States and Great Britain. In France, the growlers were called
fantômes
—“ghosts.” The Germans had come up with a more precise term—
Unzufriedene
—which meant “the disaffected.”

Because of the increased use of nubots and Shadow programs, 20 to 30 percent of the young people in Europe and North America were unemployed or working part-time for minimum wage. Four years before the Day of Rage, the World Bank had published a massive report about the international employment situation. The public report was optimistic about the future; it stressed the need for technical education and praised the new opportunities created by automation. But there was also a secret “supplemental report” that was leaked to the Internet by the teenage daughter of a World Bank executive. This report was filled with graphs and algorithms that showed that nubots were now cheaper than human workers and wide-scale unemployment was “permanent and unavoidable.”