Spark: A Novel Read online

  Collecting information from the Freedom IDs is just one aspect of the EYE program—a massive database controlled by the government. EYE gathers information from thousands of sources—web searches and cell phone calls, blog posts and credit card transactions. Every bit of information is stored in quantum computers, and then evaluated by the algorithms of the Norm-All program. Norm-All monitors the opinions of large groups of people, but it also determines each person’s typical behavior. This normalcy perimeter is like an invisible circle that defines you—contains you. If you do anything significant outside the perimeter, your behavior triggers an Unusual Activity Inquiry that is sent to the police.

  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.

  // I accept the new assignment. Please obtain necessary sales equipment. I will contact you when I obtain a mailing address.

  “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 lik
e 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.

  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:

  // I have arrived in London and have obtained the customer’s new address. Where is the equipment for the sales meeting?

  She replied a few minutes later:

  // We have encountered problems with our regular UK supplier. Continue with your preparations for the meeting.

  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.