Spark: A Novel

  “See? You see that?” Evans asked. “That’s the reaction of someone who is guilty of something.”

  “What did her supervisor do when she didn’t come to work?”

  “Buchanan sent an e-mail to Human Resources. It said that a routine gynecological examination had resulted in an abnormal Pap test. She had to get a cervical biopsy and would be out for a week. Of course no one questioned that. A biopsy? Maybe cancer?”

  “So when did you realize that there was a problem?”

  “Five days went by, then her supervisor called her cell phone and discovered that it was switched off. He contacted me and I called the medical contact listed in her file. Buchanan’s doctor said she had no knowledge of a biopsy or any other problem. I called her only personal contact … an uncle who lives upstate in Warren County. He didn’t know where she was.”

  “What did you do after that?”

  “I searched through her e-mail. Yesterday I got permission to decode and found the message from Dubai. I contacted the CEO’s office and now I’m talking to you.”

  I took out my phone and spoke to Laura. “Please display the e-mail address for cloud storage.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  When the address appeared, I placed the phone on the desk. “Send me a copy of Ms. Buchanan’s personnel file and all her e-mails for the last ninety days.”

  “I can’t do that. You’re not an employee of BDG.”

  “You were told to be helpful to me. This is not being helpful.”

  “I don’t have to follow orders from a nonemployee who wants me to violate security protocol.”

  The Transformation had given me a certain kind of cold energy that could influence others. Without saying a word, I stood up and stared at Mr. Evans. He tried to meet my gaze for a few seconds, then gave up and looked down at his computer keyboard.

  “If you don’t wish to be helpful, then I will contact Miss Holquist, my supervisor. Miss Holquist is a very efficient person. She will call someone … and by ten o’clock tomorrow morning, you will not be in this office, you will not be in this building, you will no longer have a job with this bank.”

  “Bullshit. That’s not going to happen.”

  “Most of your job is already being done by the PAL system, Mr. Evans. You’re just the human interface.”

  No response. So I picked up my phone and began to walk out of the room.

  “Hold it! Just … calm down. Okay? Give me the address.”

  I returned to the chair and watched Evans download the requested information. Then he forced a smile. “Anything else? You want my birth certificate?”

  “I want to see the desk she was using in the video.”

  “There’s nothing there. I’ve already searched it.”

  “Then we’ll do it again.”

  Evans sighed loudly, and then guided me down to the fourth floor, using his Shadow to systematically disable the PAL system as we passed through the building. We ended up in a large windowless room that looked like a factory for a mysterious product. A table piled with printed documents was at the center of the room, surrounded by a ring of gray steel desks and battered file cabinets. The brown carpet was stained with ten years’ worth of food spills and had a moldy odor. At some point, a decorator had brought in a few bamboo plants, but all that was left were brittle stalks and a few yellow leaves.

  It was late in the evening, but several people were still working at their desks. One of them was a plump young man wearing a dark blue button-down shirt and a loosened necktie. He looked like a plastic beach toy, puffed up by too much compressed air.

  The young man was muttering “Fuck, fuck, fuck” while he stared at a computer screen. This chant was almost overpowered by the hum of the fluorescent lights overhead. The harsh light sharpened all the edges and the corners of the room. I wondered if I would cut myself if I touched a chair.

  “This is the room you saw in the video,” Evans said. “We call it the bull pen. It’s used by the analysts and associates who help the senior executives.”

  “Where’s the desk?”

  “Over here.”

  Evans led me to a desk and file cabinet near the dead bamboo. When I sat in Emily’s chair, the little wheels made a squeaking sound.

  “So what are you looking for?”

  “Any data that might lead me to her current location.”

  “You’re wasting your time. Look at the surveillance video. Ms. Buchanan received the e-mail from Dubai. A few minutes later, she sent a message to her supervisor about the biopsy. Then she took everything personal out of her desk and left the building.”

  Not knowing what else to do, I opened up the middle desk drawer and found paper clips and felt-tip pens and some pink packets of artificial sweetener. That’s when I realized that I could do this job better than Jerome Evans and a squad of detectives.

  They saw → objects in a drawer.

  But when I look at an object, I can feel its warmth and coldness, its smooth or sharp surfaces. Since I’m not distracted by emotions, I see a more detailed reality.

  “There’s nothing important in the desk,” Evans said. “All you’re going to find are pennies and old pencils. Crap like that.”

  I discovered a list with little checkmarks beside each task or obligation.

  ✓ Remco

  ✓ M. Fowler meeting

  ✓ Pitch at TAL

  ✓ Fix computer

  ✓ Prepare Power-I slides

  “An organized mind,” I said.

  Evans rolled his eyes. “Everyone who works for BDG has an organized mind. This is a sausage factory for deals. A lot of blood and guts get ground up and packaged into cute little hot dogs.”

  I opened the side drawers of the desk. Note pads. Folders. Envelopes. The file cabinet contained proposals for business deals in binders with the BDG logo. There were lots of graphs and charts and clear plastic pages to separate each section. An athletic bag was in the leg space beneath the desk, so I zipped it open and peered inside.

  “Checked that, too,” Evans said. “Sweaty socks and gym clothes.”

  As I sorted through Emily Buchanan’s clothes, I realized that the bag had a black nylon liner. I slipped my hand beneath it and found a pair of keys.

  “Where’d you get that?” Evans asked.

  “Beneath the liner. It’s a backup set of apartment keys in case she lost her regular set. What’s her address?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m going to search her residence.”

  “You can’t just waltz into someone’s apartment. That’s breaking the law.”

  “Address?”

  Evans sighed again, then accessed Emily’s file with his computer pad. “Buchanan lives at 215 West Eightieth Street.”

  “Is there anything else you can tell me?”

  “The night Buchanan received the e-mail, she had a conversation with one of the associates. He’s here right now.”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  “Be my guest. But that’s a waste of time.”

  I followed Evans across the bull pen to the plump young man who had been chanting obscenities when we entered the room. Now he was staring at three versions of the same document on his monitor screen while he stuffed corn chips into his mouth.

  “Mr. Underwood, this is Preston Donnelly. He’s a second-year associate.”

  Donnelly kept chewing. “What’s going on?”

  “As I told you this afternoon, we’re concerned about Emily Buchanan. He’s making sure she’s okay.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything,” Donnelly said. “She was just another monkey in the cage. It’s all shit. We’re shit. I could give a shit. We got a pitch meeting at ten a.m. tomorrow and I’ve got four more hours of work before I can go home.”

  “I was told that you talked to her on Saturday night.”

  “We were working on the same pitch book for a bond-underwriting presentation. She said that the managing partner had signed off on the ‘Exp
ertise’ section … which is the part that explains why we should be hired to play the piano in the whorehouse. I got stuck with the ‘Valuation’ section, which means proving that the whorehouse is actually worth something.”

  “Have you worked together before?”

  “Of course. We’ve all done projects with each other. Nothing special about that. Emily and I were in the same group of eight associates hired two summers ago.”

  “And what was she like?”

  Donnelly glanced up at Evans. “I already told you I don’t know where she is.”

  “Mr. Underwood is trying to get a little background information. Management is concerned about her disappearance.”

  Donnelly crumpled up the empty chip bag, tossed it at a wastebasket and missed. “You know anything about BDG?”

  “Not really.”

  “A lot of women work for this bank, and I’m not just talking about the secretaries. We’ve got a female managing director and a couple of women senior vice presidents. So, hey, it’s equal and all that crap, but this place is basically a boys’ club. Twelve-hour days and assholes yelling at you. Dumb-ass jokes. Strip clubs. Golf weekends. So imagine what happened when Emily walked into the bull pen for the first time. She’s a small woman who dresses conservatively … white blouses and skirts with jackets … the usual crap. She wore a headset whenever she was in the building and was constantly talking to her Shadow. Emily wasn’t flat-out aggressive like everyone else around here … so we figured that she was somebody’s niece. A glorified banking assistant.”

  Donnelly opened a bottle of cola and reached for another bag of chips. “Then one afternoon Dave Muller went over to Emily’s desk and asked her to help him with a spreadsheet. She didn’t say anything for a few seconds, and then she flicked her hand and said: ‘I don’t shovel anybody’s shit.’ ” Donnelly laughed and ripped open the bag. “That became her favorite line. She was famous for it. After a while we’d get some new guy to ask her for help just so we could hear ‘I don’t shovel anybody’s shit’ one more time. Emily works hard … twelve-hour days … and it’s pretty clear that she’s going to get promoted.”

  “And you were friends?” Evans asked.

  “Emily was polite with everyone … even the banking assistants and the janitors … but she never got too personal. One guy I know from the trading desk asked her out and she told him: ‘I don’t want friends. I want money.’ Every associate in the bull pen works like a machine, but she practically lived here until three or four months ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “She got a boyfriend. At least I guess she did. Nobody ever met the guy. But she started to say things like ‘I saw that movie with Sean. I went up to Vermont with Sean.’ He definitely didn’t work for the bank. Must have been somebody from the civilian world. And then one more thing happened.…”

  “Go on,” Evans said.

  “She stopped wearing her headset, except to make phone calls. You got to understand … Emily was really connected to her Shadow. So that was a big change. Don’t you think?”

  I asked Evans to e-mail me the surveillance camera footage of Emily taken one hour before and one hour after she had received the e-mail from Dubai. Then I left the BDG building and began walking north—back to my loft on Catherine Street.

  In order to find Emily, I had to understand her—why she ran away and where she would flee to if she needed a hiding place. This might be a simple task for Miss Holquist. But for me, Emily Buchanan was just a scrap of paper blown down Worth Street—an object in motion rising and falling with the wind.

  I stopped at the curb and watched the pedestrian walk light flash red in the darkness. But my Spark stayed with the problem, nosing through it and sniffing each detail like a Chinatown dog rummaging through an overturned trash can. Emily’s story about the biopsy was very clever; it gave her more than a week to hide. Her thoughts were organized. She anticipated future actions.

  Green light. Time to go. As I stepped into the street, I realized something important. Emily had deliberately left her keys in the gym bag. She realized that they would be found and that someone would take the keys and unlock the door to her apartment.

  Perhaps she was still there, waiting for someone to find her.

  When I got back to the loft, I switched on my computer and dictated an e-mail in soft language.

  // Checked the workspace of the missing customer. Received download of customer’s e-mail activity and background information. Found key to apartment and will go there tomorrow.

  “And who is the recipient?” Edward asked.

  “Holquist.”

  “Message sent, sir.”

  I transferred Emily’s personnel file to my computer and began to search through the data. She received a BA in economics from the University of Vermont, spent one year as a banking analyst in Boston, and then received an MBA from the Wharton School. The bank had hired her two years ago and, so far, all her quarterly evaluations had been positive. Intelligent. Asks the right questions. Works well under pressure.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Edward said. “But you’ve received another e-mail from the Brooks Danford Group.”

  As requested, Jerome Evans had sent me two hours of downloaded surveillance video. I opened up a second bottle of ComPlete and stared at the black-and-white images. I rarely look at Human Units for more than a few seconds, but now I was forced to watch Emily Buchanan and find the meaning behind her actions.

  Nothing significant happened during the first hour. Emily sat working at her computer, stood up once, and returned with a cup of coffee. But after she read the e-mail from Dubai, her actions were quick and purposeful. Stopping every few minutes to glance over her shoulder, she took a purse and a tablet computer out of her desk and stuffed them into an attaché case. I stopped at several moments during the security video, held up my phone, and scrolled through my images of human emotions. Was Emily scared? Angry? Her image was too blurred for me to make a conclusion.

  The next morning, Miss Holquist’s e-mail was waiting in my message file.

  // Obtain a holding mechanism, then go to church to pick up equipment. If you find the missing employee, escort her to a suitable location for a detailed interview.

  Although Miss Holquist had been my supervisor for three years, I knew very little about her life. After she mentioned that her youngest daughter was obsessed with figure skating, I began dropping by the handful of public ice rinks in Manhattan. Early one morning, I found Miss Holquist at the Chelsea Piers Sports Center. She was sitting in the warmest part of the rink, at the top of the bleachers, a dot of royal blue in the middle of a row of light gray seats.

  I stood in the shadows of an entry portal, watching her dictate e-mail messages to her computer. Meanwhile a blond teenager wearing black leggings and a red sweater cut a series of patterns in the ice while her skating instructor gave instructions.

  “Lift your chest and shoulders down,” the instructor said. “Now press into the sit.”

  The daughter came out of the spin, turned her head, and glanced up at her mother. But Miss Holquist kept whispering “Do this, do that” to her computer—the words translated into binary impulses of energy.

  I switched off my computer, dropped by a Chinatown hardware store, and bought a packet of cable ties—the locking strips of plastic that the police used during mass arrests. The cables would be the “holding mechanism” that would immobilize Emily Buchanan. Then I took the subway uptown and walked over to the St. Theodosius Ukrainian Catholic Church on East Ninety-Third Street.

  An old man named Gregory lived with his wife in a basement apartment below the church. He swept the floor, did minor repairs, and took out the trash. Gregory had once owned a janitor’s supply store, and then retired because of medical problems. Selling unregistered guns was a side business that supplemented his Social Security check.

  When I reached the building, I pushed a button labeled DELIVERIES and Gregory opened the door. He had white hair and pale skin?
??like one of those cave creatures that lived underground and never encountered sunlight.

  “Good morning, Mr. Underwood. I was expecting you. Your lady friend called me yesterday.”

  Gregory’s lungs made a wheezing noise as he led me upstairs, unlocked a door, and motioned me into the church. The windows and door frames were made of white marble, and the redbrick walls had bands of ornamental stone that looked like some mysterious form of writing. There was a mosaic of Christ high up on the wall behind the altar, but the windowpanes were ordinary glass. Over the years, the windows had been covered with dust and soot from the city and now—even on a bright winter day—the sun was feeble and distant. The room was so cold that our breath came out in little puffs of white.

  “You’re lucky you don’t need an assault rifle,” Gregory said. “All I have are handguns right now. I’m supposed to give you two of them.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Your lady friend said that you’re gonna be talking to people and you might need a smaller weapon that can be easily concealed.”

  Three large drawers fastened with padlocks were built into the back of the wooden altar. I had no idea what the top two drawers contained—candles, perhaps, incense and communion supplies. A ring of keys was attached to a hook on Gregory’s belt and they jingled against each other as he unlocked the bottom drawer. It was filled with green and purple clerical robes, but he pushed them aside, revealing a half-dozen handguns.

  Gregory held up a semiautomatic pistol with a laser sight. “Last time, I gave you a nine-millimeter just like this. I’ve got a paddle holster that will work. You can carry it inside your waistband.” Reaching back into the drawer, he picked up a revolver with a two-inch barrel. “And this is a Thirty-Eight Special with a shrouded hammer spur. I got some hollow-point bullets for this. And an ankle holster.”

  I took the ankle holster, sat down on a pew, and strapped it onto my left leg. Then I slid the gun into the holster and placed a retention strap over the handle. When my pants leg was pulled back down, the gun was undetectable. But I could feel it hanging there, heavy, expectant, like a piece of machinery that had burst out of my skin.