“After I’ve had dinner.”
“Woodbine and Santana at nine o’clock.”
“Wouldn’t miss it. One thing.”
“What?”
The other tables in this quadrant of the restaurant are still vacant, but Calaphas lowers his voice to a stage whisper. “It’ll be next to impossible to apprehend Mace and hard to find him. But if I can find him, I can kill him.”
“The director might have other ideas.”
“He’s a man of big ideas.”
“Take no executive action until you receive instructions.”
“‘Executive action.’ How you thrive on euphemisms.”
Grantworth chews on his lower lip, contemplating a forceful response, but again he lacks the fortitude to do what he knows he should. He is no doubt thinking about his second wife, the stunning Giselle, whose great beauty makes him the envy of other men, and of his first wife, Martha, whose looks were as common as her husband’s and who died in a tragic accident that not only freed Julian but also enriched him with an inheritance of thirty-two million dollars. Calaphas and Grantworth both know to whom he owes his good fortune, though they have never discussed the matter; Calaphas is willing to speak the truth about what happened to Martha, but her widower dares not raise the subject.
Grantworth lifts his chin, and his nostrils flare like those of a show horse entering a dressage competition, and he looks down at Calaphas with what he imagines is withering contempt. “Woodbine and Santana at nine o’clock.” He turns and makes his way through the restaurant. He is tall, slim, with the ramrod posture of a guard at Buckingham Palace, his exquisitely tailored suit the summation of him. He thinks he’s good at the game, but he doesn’t understand the rules of the simulation in which they exist.
TRIGGER
In the library of the ocean-view Corona del Mar house, all the books are as white as the bleached sycamore shelves on which they are ordered. The spines feature no titles, no authors’ names, no publishers’ logos. Michael examines several and discovers that the original jackets were replaced by thick but flexible white vellum trimmed to fit each volume precisely. Thrillers by Janet Evanovich and David Baldacci, novels by John Irving and Don DeLillo, romances by Nora Roberts, and nonfiction tomes on a variety of topics are shelved with no regard to subject or genre. They seem to have been bought by the pound from a used-book dealer, not to be read, but to represent the concept of a book. Shape without form. Shade without color. This is the idea of a library as it might be in the virtual world of a shooter game where the avatars are too busy killing and being killed to have any time to read, where the only purpose of a library is to serve as the scene of yet another violent encounter during which the all-white decor will be vividly splattered with gore.
Among the data triggers that Michael has planted in systems connected to the internet, one is at the ISA. It notifies him any time his name and that of Durand Calaphas appear within two hundred characters of each other in written reports or within thirty seconds of each other in recorded statements or conversations. As now. Blue neon flows through his mind’s eye, providing a location in the ISA archives. Standing with book in hand, he mentally ravels the blue light toward him, as if he is reeling in a fish. He opens archived audio of a conversation between Calaphas and Julian Grantworth, the deputy director of the ISA, conducted mere minutes earlier and just now transmitted by Grantworth to his one superior at the agency. If others had been present in the library, they could not have heard what Michael hears.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you at your dinner, Durand, but I’m afraid there’s been a wrinkle in the case.”
“Wrinkle. What’s the wrinkle?”
“There was an incident at three thirty this morning . . .”
Michael returns the white-jacketed biography to the shelf. In the end, all books are white books, those that are wise and those that are foolish, white jackets and white pages. The world reads but does not long remember, and what truth people find in books they most often dismiss as irrelevant. Humankind, the poet said, cannot bear very much reality. Delusions are preferred, delusions and the comfort of a virtual reality.
“Woodbine is pissed, and he’s calling on his relationship with us to find this thief.”
“As if we’re his personal police force.”
“Like I said, he’s a valuable asset to us.”
Michael steps to a window. The storm and the surging sea speak of one truth, which isn’t invented by men or women, which can’t be rendered obsolete by the so-called New Truths that enfever them. The metaverse isn’t a universe, only a vague and distorted shadow—a cartoon—of the majesty of space-time. Even in their most intricate design, virtual realities—whether those that men and women invent for themselves or those conjured by tech wizards—always will be voids into which troubled souls empty themselves.
“Anyhow, Santana says the man who took the half million was a witness in that case six years ago, a security expert who was testifying for the prosecution . . . Michael Mace.”
Men and women of a certain class, a self-congratulatory elite who have much learning of what is currently thought important and little understanding of their own human nature, dream of immortality through quick self-evolution into cyborg form, instant access to all knowledge without the effort of study, godlike power. This is yet another void, just the latest version of the fantasy of absolute authority that has wrecked so many civilizations over the millennia. Michael is the embodiment of the Singularity, but he intends not to use his power as the dreamers dream of using theirs. Instead, he wants to live long enough to bring the world back to reality before it descends irretrievably into delusion.
“This attorney have any security video of Mace?”
“No. He’s a ghost, as at the lab in the valley. But Santana has a photo from the time of the trial.”
Rudy Santana has a photograph. Maybe it was originally on his phone, where Michael could have found and deleted it. But Santana has now printed it.
Michael scrubbed every photo of himself from every website, from every file and device connected to the internet. He burned links to his past when he incinerated his house and everything in it. As a security consultant, he has long followed his advice to wealthy clients and has been camera shy, although a few hard copies of photos surely exist. However, he has imagined that the ISA, even with its vast resources, will need weeks to find an image suitable to assist them in a nationwide search.
Weeks would give him time to squirrel away somewhere and prepare to do what he feels destined to do. Now, depending on the quality of Santana’s snapshot, Michael might have only a day or two before the ISA is able to share his image with thousands of agents by the old-fashioned expedient of wanted sheets and posters printed with obsolete technology and then distributed by hand.
A realization pivots him from the window. Now that they have so unexpectedly, fortuitously connected him to Carter Woodbine, they must know that he fled Beverly Hills in the attorney’s Bentley. They are able to monitor its unique GPS signal and swiftly track it to its current location, the garage on the top floor of this residence. In fact, they should already be blocking off the street, surrounding the house.