“We don’t have toys like this at Einstein,” he says, glancing over his shoulder. “I could play with this thing all day.”
“Nothing beats walking the floors,” I tell him. “Give you a feel for the space. Half hour to go until the first meeting downstairs. Go wander a bit, meet me there. I have some busywork to do.”
He doesn’t seem to pick up the chips and cracks in my voice, or else he does and doesn’t want to say anything. “Sure thing, boss. Meet you downstairs.”
I wait for the door to close behind him and turn to Ruby, back in its charger. “I don’t want the following logged or recorded. That includes any and all searches. Got it? This is completely dark.”
“Understood.”
“Bring up the camera feeds. Every moment before and after I saw leather daddy at the coffee urn.”
Ruby beeps and whirs, and the grid of tiny video feeds expands to six large ones, and they show the man’s movements, with time stamps. He came into the hotel around the time I was meeting with Tamworth. Skulked around the lobby, trying to look relaxed about looking for someone, then went to get coffee. I watch myself cross in the corner of one of the videos, headed for Reg’s office. I notice him but he doesn’t notice me, until I’m out of his field of vision, and then he watches me very intently, until I close Reg’s door behind me. Either my ass looked good in those jeans or he knew who I was. And those weren’t my ass jeans.
From there he tosses the coffee cup in the trash, checks his phone, and leaves toward Atwood. I watch him from feed to feed, disappearing off one screen and appearing on another.
Until he doesn’t appear.
He’s just gone, when he should be showing up at the elevators. I wait, like maybe he bent to tie his shoe in a blind spot or something, but the video keeps going. He doesn’t show up again, and there’s no place in that hallway for him to disappear to. It’s a bare tunnel from the lobby to the elevator bank.
“Ruby, what’s wrong? Where did he go?”
A few seconds pass. “There appear to be issues with the time stamp. The numbers are jumping around. I’m trying to figure out how it affected the video recording. I’m…not sure.”
Never a fun answer to get from an all-knowing machine.
“Has anything like this happened before?”
“We’ve lost single frames in the past due to time fluctuations, because of the way the data is encoded. But a few milliseconds at a time. Never for this long.”
“You never told me that. Why have you never told me that?”
“Because it wasn’t statistically relevant.”
I put my hands flat on the hologram table and breathe deep, so as not to pick up the nearest thing and throw it. “It’s relevant now. Run a diagnostic on the system. And run every feed for the past few weeks, to see if he appears on any of them. And I want you running facial recognition. I need an ID. Every database you have access to, and if that fails, break into the ones you don’t. I noticed a tattoo on his forearm. Couldn’t make the whole thing out, but it looked like flowers. See if that helps.”
“That’s a lot of processing. It’s going to take time. And I can’t promise I can hide all of that from the network.”
“Then get started. Face the corner while you do it.”
“Am I in a time-out?”
“Yes.”
Ruby whirs indignantly and turns away, giving me a little privacy. I slump into a roller chair, glide to a computer terminal, and open an incognito browser. Something that won’t log my searches. Ruby probably assumes I’m looking at porn, because that’s usually what my incognito searches are for. Instead I look up Unstuck case studies. Play with keywords, looking for anything I can find about longest recorded slips. Thirty or forty clicks later, I can’t find anyone who experienced a first-stage slip longer than two minutes.
Next up I search for slips along with references to frozen moments. I come up with nothing, but I’m not surprised about that either. I could talk it out with Ruby and see if its searches can do better, but what would be the point?
Because this is just confirming my worst fear. If I’m this far gone, someone—Danbridge most likely, but Tamworth has his eyes out too—will force me to leave the hotel. And medically speaking, they’d be right to do so.
Which means I can’t tell anyone what I saw.
And I have to limit myself in how I figure this out, because the wrong question or search might ring a bell that ends with me on the curb, my bags packed, waiting for a cab.
No more Mena.
This hotel is the only place she knew me. I know that when I see her, I’m just reliving past moments. Conversations she had with me, maybe sometimes with someone else. Home movies in 3-D. But that recognition in her eyes, when it’s there, it’s enough to keep my heart beating a few moments longer.
To my right is a legal pad and a red pen. I slide it toward me and turn so I’m out of Ruby’s field of vision, then jot down some notes.
John Doe enters hotel, 8:57
Coffee urn, 9:23
Disappears in Atwood hallway, 9:37
It’s not a lot. But I need to keep track of this and I can’t trust Ruby to do it. I tear off the page, fold it tight, and shove it into my inside breast pocket, along with the pen. Pull out a cherry lollipop and put it in my mouth. The stick juts out the corner of my lips, and I grip it between two fingers, take it out, and blow. If I can’t smoke at least I can satisfy the oral fixation.
“We should head downstairs,” Ruby says. “I’ll keep the searches going in the background.”
“Yeah,” I tell it, squaring my shoulders. “Let’s dance.”
* * *
—
Nik is waiting outside the Lovelace ballroom, walking and talking to a lithe woman in a flowing black burka who doesn’t so much stride as float. I approach them and ask the woman, “You work for the prince?”
“Prince Mohammad al Khalid bin Saud,” she says, in a way that is not terse, but still corrective.
The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, colloquially known as MKS. Trillionaire number one.
“My name is Eshe,” she says. “And you are January Cole, the head of security.”
“That is correct.” I turn to Ruby. “Any other bidders or staff joining this shindig?”
“Nobody else responded,” it says.
That’s annoying. It would have been nice to get all four, or at least their reps, into the space now, but I already walked all the way down here, so, may as well get started. “Take the minutes and send them to everyone involved, as well as Danbridge and Senator Drucker, and file requests as needed,” I tell Ruby. Then I turn to Eshe and Nik. “Let’s head inside.”