Free The Imago Sequence and Other Stories by Laird Barron

Lord Raleigh Arms endured the blackness of sweltering apartments and listened to cockroaches scrabble in the hollow spaces behind freshly painted gypsum. Sirens bugled in the city where its towers formed the corner posts of a skein of nictitating lights.
     
    He'd scarcely unpacked when he overheard complaints about noise, especially in regard to loud music practiced by an amateur flautist in a nearby block; then there was the indelicate matter of bag people creeping around late at night. One of his fellow American neighbors, an engineer he'd met in passing, heard a noise in the hall, an odd knock at the door. When he checked through the peephole, an eyeball blinked at him. "The freak's face must've been squashed up against the door!" The engineer was an excitable fellow given to padding bare-chested in striped pajama bottoms around the foyer and community annex. He said he realized the "freak" was a woman when she stepped back and ran away, giving him a better look at her. "Scurried, I mean. Like a cockroach hit with a light. Moved pretty fast, too. All this blasted security and we can't keep bums out! Next thing you know, we'll be getting stabbed in our beds, or rolled up in a carpet and carted off for ransom." For their part, the security personnel did immediately capture vagrants who slipped in on occasion, but denied the existence of any permanent interlopers.
    Similar stories ran through the block. Elvira, as the English-speaking residents referred to the haunt, in reference to her black dress and bone-white face, seemed the most popular object of speculation. Elvira didn't haunt alone, in any case. One of the janitors confided "little friends" followed her around.
    "Kids?" Royce said, thinking of the brats shrieking through the hallways, wild as the painted savages who populated Golding's dark vision.
    The janitor, a sunburned elder statesman in blue paper work clothes, shook his head emphatically and motioned near his hip. "No, no. Little friends." He glanced nervously over his shoulder, then back at Royce. He smiled with the obsequious reflex of a career servant, and pushed his squeaking cartload of mops and brooms down the hallway of doors toward the distant elevators.
     
    The sweep proceeded routinely and monotonously—the life of an investigator was unglamorous and fraught with glacial tedium. Prior to his insertion, he'd been provided a list of "at risk" technologies and the names of persons associated with them. It would've been impossible to monitor the scores of individuals who might be involved in nefarious activity. Instead, he relied on the installation of state-of-the-art security software designed to track anomalous activity on the company network. He received authorization to order a couple dozen wiretaps of private residences. He outsourced the data collection to local specialists and quickly acquired potential informants with connections to the black market. Occasionally, he arranged casual social meetings with subjects on the list and recorded all conversations via a microwire and relayed details of these transactions to his handlers back in the States. The bulk of his work was as involving as watching paint dry.
    Royce felt restlessness more keenly than usual. This wasn't a run-down burgh in Soviet Russia, or a backwater in the South of Italy. This was Hong Kong in all its glitz and glory, a great, seething den of LED-brilliant iniquity; and him marking the hours like a two-bit private eye who'd been paid to keep tabs on a cheating spouse at the local Dew Drop Inn.
    Many of Royce's colleagues frequented a posh cocktail lounge a few blocks from the compound. The bar was called the Rover in honor of its itinerant patrons; a smoky, dim place with poker lamps on chains over the lacquered chestnut tables, and curtained booths; the kind where three sides rise six feet and one could practically jam a small dinner party inside. The help were strictly locals; cute-as-buttons Cantonese girls who might be high