Spark: A Novel

  Mrs. Driscoll started weeping again while I stood there like another piece of furniture. I didn’t feel any of the emotions listed on my phone’s database. My strongest desire was for more information.

  “What did the police do?”

  “They talked to Micky Sicky, but he denied everything. And he’s still there, out on the street, watching me. Not more than an hour ago, when I looked out the window, he saw me and made a barking sound.” Mrs. Driscoll got up from the sofa. She forgot all the rules and touched me, pulling me over to the window. “Look! There! Can’t you see?”

  I peered out the window and saw four young men smoking cigarettes and talking to each other. “The one with the very long hair and the—”

  “Yes. I see him.” Micky Sicky was a stocky white man in his twenties with matted dreadlocks that touched his shoulders.

  Mrs. Driscoll staggered back to the sofa and blew her nose with the lace handkerchief. “It’s just a dog. That’s what my sister said when I spoke to her on the phone. And yes—yes, that’s true, but …” She shook her head. “But it gives you its love and you give it your love and then it’s more than a dog. So much more.”

  Once again, she curled up on the sofa, and pulled the pillow to her chest. There was nothing I could do for her, so I maneuvered around the furniture and slipped out the door. Riding back to Kensington on the tube, my Spark began to bounce around inside my Shell. I remembered Mrs. Driscoll weeping and the framed photograph of Joey with his feet on a striped ball. And those thoughts continued when I got back to my apartment and drank two bottles of ComPlete.

  When I first met Miss Holquist and began working for the Special Services Section, she emphasized one fact and one rule.

  The fact was: I was now working for Miss Holquist.

  The rule was: I must not work for anyone else.

  If I was given a weapon for a particular target, then I shouldn’t use that weapon to neutralize someone else. Trying to resolve the problem, I told Edward to activate the Power-I program on my computer. I used the program to make two lists:

  Eventually, my Spark was absorbed by darkness, but when I woke up the next morning the thoughts remained. After the shops opened, I found a hardware store and bought a hacksaw and nylon cord. Then I returned to my apartment and cut four inches off the barrels of my shotgun and two inches off the walnut stock. I tied one end of the cord to the barrel and attached the other end to an eye screw twisted into the stock. With some minor adjustments, I could conceal the weapon beneath a navy blue waterproof smock with a fake corporate logo sewn onto the breast. While I was examining my silhouette in the bedroom mirror, the Sentinel camera photographed Mallory’s mistress arriving for her weekend visit. In the past, the bodyguard had always driven her back to the train station on Sunday afternoon.

  It was time to start the plan. I took the tube to South London and rented a white delivery van for the weekend. It was raining as I crossed back over the river. Yellow headlights came toward me like blurry eyes. Cold drops of water exploded on the windshield and trickled down the glass. When I got back to my apartment I sat on the one chair in the middle of the living room with the sawed-off shotgun on my lap.

  I was safe. No one was touching me. But then my Spark began to vibrate rapidly and visions appeared that I could not control. I saw Micky Sicky grab Joey and throw him against a wall. Then he began kicking the dog with his heavy black boots. Smiling. Laughing.

  I do not believe in justice and fairness and decency. These words have no form or shape for me. There is more reality in things: a rusty nail on the sidewalk or a smooth brown pebble pulled from a stream. But thoughts about Mrs. Driscoll, Joey, and Micky Sicky were a distraction that would prevent me from completing my assignment. I needed to do something that would push those thoughts out of my mind.

  Around ten o’clock in the evening, I wrapped the sawed-off shotgun in a throw rug and placed it on the floor of the van. Great Britain had an EYE monitoring system like the United States’, but it was called ARGUS. Although my phone wasn’t connected to my identity, it could still be tracked by scanners. I turned it off as I drove the van north to Stoke Newington.

  I cruised up and down the streets looking for Micky Sicky, but only a few people were out. After an unsuccessful search I parked the car near a hospital and played a computer game on my phone. Then I returned to Watkins Street and found my target leaning against a parked car.

  I stopped the van, rolled down the window, and spoke with an American accent. “Good evening. Maybe you can help me. I just arrived in London this afternoon.”

  “What’s the problem, bruv? You lost?”

  “I work for somebody in the music business and he needs some drugs to get through the night. A girl at a party told me to come to this street.”

  Micky Sicky grinned. Bad teeth. “What’s your man’s name, bruv? He famous? Can I meet ’im?”

  “That depends on what you can supply.”

  “Got everything. Top gear. Whatever you need.”

  “Can we get off the street? Being out here like this makes me nervous.”

  “Go down to the corner, turn left, then right, and park.”

  I had not planned what was going to happen. At that moment, I felt like a line in a cathode tube, jabbing at the boundaries of the screen with sharp movements and sudden bursts of energy. Following his directions, I turned into a dirt alleyway behind some fenced-in vegetable gardens. Light came from a few windows and a security light attached to a tool shed.

  I got out of the van but left the door open. The shotgun was on the driver’s seat, the stock poking a few inches out of the rolled-up throw rug.

  “Hey …”

  Micky appeared at the end of the alleyway and began walking toward the van. Picking up the throw rug, I cradled it in my arms as if it was a wounded dog and approached him slowly.

  As the target drew closer my right hand thrust itself into the center of the rug, grabbed the stock of the shotgun, and let its concealment fall away.

  My legs took two quick steps and then—

  My finger squeezed the trigger and then—

  The shotgun fired and buckshot cut through the air.

  When I was in the clinic, Dr. Noland told me about a logical problem created by a Greek philosopher named Zeno that suggested that the buckshot would never hit its target. The buckshot would take half the time to get halfway there, but then it had to go halfway to the next interval, and halfway to the interval after that, and so on. Since there appeared to be an infinite number of these smaller and smaller distances, the buckshot would never arrive.

  I thought about Zeno’s paradox for several days until Dr. Noland gave me a solution. A distance composed of an infinite number of finite moments is not infinite. If the distance between the shotgun barrel and Micky Sicky’s flesh was fifteen feet, it doesn’t make a difference how many times you divide it into fractions; it’s still fifteen feet. This was helpful to me at the clinic because I realized that no matter how many times my thoughts divided into a multitude of more thoughts, I could still make a single choice and function in the world.

  And this is what happened in the alleyway. The buckshot burst through the paradox and hit my target in his left leg.

  Micky Sicky fell backward, then screamed with pain and started rolling around on the dirt. I took a few steps forward and pointed the shotgun at his head. He had lost control of his bladder and I found the smell unpleasant.

  “Be quiet,” I said.

  Micky’s mouth opened and closed like a Chinatown carp just pulled from the water tank. But he stopped making noises.

  “You killed a little white dog,” I said.

  “Fuckin’ bastard! You just shot me!”

  I cocked the second barrel. “You have three seconds to say one truthful statement. Did you kill a little white dog?”

  “It was nothing,” Micky whimpered. “Just a joke, bruv. I swear. I’m sorry.”

  “Repeat after me: Joey was loved by the angels in
heaven.”

  “Fuckin’ hell!”

  “Say it. If you want to live.”

  “Joey … love … by angels.”

  “Good. Remember that. If I see you in this neighborhood again, I’ll take a blowtorch and burn off your ears.”

  I extended the shotgun like a walking stick and shot Micky in the right leg. He was still screaming as I got in the van and drove away. Although I had disobeyed Miss Holquist, my actions had established two facts:

  1. I would no longer be distracted and—

  2. I knew that my weapon worked.

  I left London early the next morning. A few hours later, I parked a half mile from Victor Mallory’s estate. Outside the van, the sky was a gray, smudged color. The oak and beech trees had lost all their leaves, and the ditch weeds were dry yellow stalks.

  Using my computer, I connected to the Sentinel hidden in the blackberry thicket across the road from the entrance. At 10:57 a.m., a BMW sedan left the estate. The younger bodyguard had the shift that weekend and he was taking Mallory’s girlfriend back to the train station. I waited a few minutes and then drove up to the CCTV camera at the main gate.

  I pressed the red button below the camera and, a moment later, heard Mallory’s voice. “Who are you?”

  “Dave Pinnock,” I said, speaking with a South Wales accent. “I’m from Jolly Good Fellow.”

  “Jolly Good … what?”

  “Jolly Good Fellow, sir. I have a delivery here for Victor Mallory.”

  “I didn’t order anything.”

  “It’s a gift, sir.” I was wearing a fake ID card attached to a cord hanging from my neck. Holding the card with two fingers, I waved it at the CCTV camera. “Jolly Good Fellow is a specialty gift service. Or motto is: ‘When Flowers Aren’t Enough.’ ”

  “I don’t give a damn about your motto. What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve got a holiday gift for you, Mr. Mallory, sir.”

  “Leave it at the gate.”

  “Sorry, sir. But I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I do hate to spoil the surprise, Mr. Mallory. But the gift is a case of French champagne. It’s against our procedure to leave alcohol or jewelry at an address without someone signing for it.”

  “And who the hell is sending me champagne?”

  “Can’t tell you that, sir. It’s on the gift card and the card is in the box. Champagne is a popular gift right now because of the holidays and—”

  “Open up the box.”

  “I am sorry, Mr. Mallory. But it is against procedure for employees of Jolly Good Fellow to—”

  Five seconds of cursing emerged from the speaker box, followed by the statement: “You are one more example of why this whole bloody country is not competitive in the global economy!”

  “We at Jolly Good Fellow are proud of our high level of service.”

  There was a buzzing sound and the gate glided open. The sawed-off shotgun was hidden beneath the waterproof smock and I shifted the weapon to my right side as I drove up the gravel driveway.

  Mallory’s house was on the top of a hill with oak trees dotting the landscape. I drove past flower beds covered with blue plastic tarps and leafless trees that looked like twisted strands of rope that were reaching toward the sky.

  The pale-yellow house had a domed rooftop pavilion and arched pediments above the ground-floor windows. As the van entered the circular driveway, the door opened and Victor Mallory came out wearing a brown tracksuit.

  I got out of the van, loaded the gift box onto a hand trolley, and wheeled it over to the door. I had seen Mallory numerous times on my computer screen, but I now encountered the three-dimensional reality. My target had stained teeth and a dissipated face, but his eyes were alert and focused. Smiling broadly, I stopped in front of him and made a grand gesture to the gift box.

  “Good morning, Mr. Mallory. Jolly Good Fellow is pleased to deliver you a Special Holiday Gift.”

  “Yes. Good. You told me. Champagne. Bring it inside.”

  He turned away and I followed him through a row of ground-floor rooms. Mallory didn’t own the house; he had rented it from a former member of Parliament who lived in Ibiza. The rooms were decorated in the English country style with solid, well-padded furniture and paintings of dogs on the wall. There was an artificial Christmas tree with twinkling lights set up in the study, but no sign of any gifts.

  We ended up in a large kitchen connected to a breakfast room. A half-filled teacup and plate with pastry crumbs was on the breakfast table as if Mallory had just finished a snack. But the most important feature in the room was a computer monitor that showed four images from the estate’s surveillance cameras. Once I had completed my assignment, I would have to find the video recorder and take it with me.

  I wheeled the dolly over to the sink area and placed the gift box on the counter. Watching me carefully, my target retreated into the breakfast room. “Open the box,” he ordered.

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “Open it. Take out the champagne.”

  “But this gift is for you, sir.”

  “Make a presentation. It’s part of your job.”

  Was Mallory afraid of me? No. He was focused on the box. Perhaps he thought it was a bomb. I shrugged, untied the red ribbon, and opened the box. Four bottles of champagne had been packed in shredded newspaper along with a sealed envelope containing the gift card. Mallory relaxed when I pulled out one of the bottles and placed it on the breakfast table with the envelope.

  “There you go, sir. Please thank your friends for having the good taste to pick Jolly Good Fellow as their Executive Gift Provider.”

  “Executive Gift Provider?” Mallory muttered. “Bloody nonsense …” But his attention was now on the gift card. First, I examined Mallory’s photograph on my phone and confirmed that I was in the same room with my target. Then I turned away from him, unzipped the navy blue smock, detached the carrying cord, and pulled out the shotgun. I pivoted on one heel and fired both barrels.

  Blood sprayed out of Mallory’s body and he fell backward onto the floor. I snapped open the gun’s breech, loaded two more rounds, and then strolled over to the breakfast area. My target was pressing his hands against the bright red wound in his chest as if he was trying to force the blood back into his body.

  “Help … help me,” he said. I leaned down and plucked off his headset. Now he couldn’t talk to his Shadow.

  “Who are you?”

  “That’s not important.”

  Mallory started talking, the words spilling out of his mouth. “I know who sent you. Those goddamn Nigerians. Swear to God I didn’t steal their money. The market collapsed and everyone took a hit. There was no guaranteed investment. I told them that from the start.”

  “So you’re a businessman?” I asked.

  “Yes. That’s right.” He was gasping for air, and the quick puffing sounds filled the room.

  “I’m a businessman, too.”

  I took out my phone and accessed my file of emotions. About a year ago, I purchased a book published in nineteenth-century France called Émotions Humaines. The book had a long essay written by a French philosopher and black-and-white photographs of an actor named Jean LeMarc. Using only facial expressions, LeMarc displayed forty-eight different emotions—everything from grief to joy. I carried the book around for several months and used it to figure out what Human Units were feeling. Eventually, I realized that it was far more convenient to scan and download the photographs.

  Bending over my target, I held the phone next to his face and scrolled through the photographs. Mallory’s face showed anger, then confusion, then fear. As a pool of blood formed beneath his body, his face changed one last time. Was it boredom? It looked like boredom. Perhaps it was something different. Acceptance.

  “Cold,” Mallory whispered.

  “Your body is telling you that, but it’s not true. You’re going into shock because your brain isn’t getting enough blood.”

&
nbsp; “Dying.”

  “Yes. That’s a logical conclusion.”

  “I am”—blood dribbled out of the corner of his mouth, but he managed to say one last word—“dead.”

  “Me too.”

  As usual, I traveled first class on the flight back from London.

  I dislike being touched—even if it’s only someone’s elbow on an armrest. First class allows me to travel within my own defined perimeter. Everything else—the champagne and wine, the cheese plate, the Dover sole sautéed in butter, the fresh-baked scones with clotted cream—was unnecessary. I told the flight attendants that I was fasting and they offered me three different kinds of water.

  When I walked out of customs at JFK Airport, I was surprised to see a limo driver holding a rectangular piece of cardboard with the message: J. UNDERWOOD—BA009. My birth name is on my passport, but “Underwood” is on my Freedom ID cards.

  “I’m Mr. Underwood,” I said. “But I didn’t request a car.”

  The driver was a pudgy little man with a badly knotted necktie. He sighed, pulled out his phone, and checked his messages.

  “The reservation was made by Edge Tech.”

  “I’ve never heard of that company.”

  “I talked to a lady named Holquist. She said I was supposed to drive you into the city for a meeting.”

  “Okay. Now I understand. Let’s go.”

  I followed the driver out of the arrivals terminal and into a five-level parking structure. In the elevator, I noticed a pimple on his neck and flecks of dandruff on his black blazer. I am capable of feeling disgust when I encounter any obvious sign of physical decay: body odor and bad breath, a hand tremor and rotten teeth. This emotion influenced the selection of my two Shadows; both Edward and Laura sound as if they’re well dressed, healthy, and clean.

  My driver answered his phone as we left the parking structure. “Yes, ma’am,” he told the caller. “No problem. He’s in the backseat. We might have some rush-hour traffic, so I would say thirty to forty minutes.”