Free Spark: A Novel by John Twelve Hawks Page A

while the drivers waited for their passengers. A phone-repair truck was parked on Cortlandt Street, and its flashing blue light felt like a shrill sound within my mind.
    The Brooks Danford Group occupied a twenty-eight-story building on Maiden Lane. The first two floors were an atrium lobby with an enormous abstract painting on the inner wall. The outer wall was glass so that you could look at the art from the street but never get close to it.
    I passed through a revolving door and encountered an older black man talking to the young guard at the security desk. He had a shaved head that gleamed under the light, but his Shell was round-shouldered and saggy.
    “Mr. Underwood?” the man said.
    “Yes.”
    “I’m Jerome Evans, head of corporate security for BDG, New York.”
    “I’m here to get more information about your missing employee.”
    “Our building is protected by a PAL system. Do you know what that is?”
    “Personal Authorization Link. It tracks everyone.”
    “The CEO’s office requested that there be no video record of your visit here tonight. The lobby cameras have already been disabled, but it will take a few more minutes to switch off the upper floors.” Evans slipped on a headset and spoke to his Shadow. “Deactivate security sector three and elevator five.”
    While we waited for confirmation from the system, I wandered across the lobby and inspected the painting on the east wall. Out on the street, the painting appeared to be a tidal wave of different colors, but it was actually a collection of tiny stenciled images of pigs and machine guns and old-fashioned cash registers.
    Shoes clicked across the floor and then Evans stood beside me. “We’re ready to go.”
    “Who designed this painting?”
    “A British artist named X-Nemo. Did you see the blood?”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “A couple of years ago, the artist was accused of being a nubot owned by a consortium of art galleries, so he … look there … right
there.
”
    I peered around a potted rubber plant and saw a dark red handprint on the lower edge of the wall.
    “When X-Nemo finishes a painting, he cuts his wrist and leaves his blood on the canvas. The artist’s DNA authenticates the work. Frankly, I think most people in the creative field should do something like that. These days, you can’t really tell if it was a computer or a human that wrote a film script or created a pop song.”
    I followed Evans into the elevator and he touched the button for the fourteenth floor.
    “So why did they hire you?” he asked. “Are you some kind of investigator?”
    “I know how to find people.”
    “Yeah … well … I do, too. I was a cop for sixteen years.”
    “I was told that Ms. Buchanan received an e-mail from the Dubai airport.”
    “That’s right. PAL would have picked it up right away, but private client messages aren’t read by the system.” The elevator door opened and Evans led me down a hallway. “Maybe Buchanan was involved in something illegal or maybe she jumped on a plane to Tahiti. I still don’t know what’s going on.”
    We entered a small office and sat down on opposite sides of a desk. Evans swiveled his computer screen toward me, then began typing commands on a keyboard. “PAL reads e-mails, monitors employee phone calls, and analyzes images from our system of surveillance cameras. This is digital footage from one of the cameras in the bull pen, where the associates work. And this is Emily Buchanan.…”
    A black-and-white video appeared on the monitor. It showed a section of a large workroom filled with desks and workstations. The date and time were in a box on the bottom of the screen. Using his mouse and keypad, Evans fast-forwarded the video, and then went to a close-up of a woman staring at a computer screen. All I could see was the back of her office chair, her shoulders, and long brown hair.
    “The associates do the grunt work for the managing partners. It’s typical for them to work