“Isn’t Parker getting ready for the big college search?” she asked. Brenda made a point of knowing the names and approximate ages of everybody’s children. “He’s a junior this year, isn’t he?”
“A sophomore,” the clone told her. “Pretty soon, though, yeah.” The clone smiled again and turned on his heels, sensing a reasonable escape. “Take whatever time you need on Friday,” he called over his shoulder.
As the clone walked the short distance down the hallway back to his office, the ViMed camera hovered for another instant on Brenda, and Jeremiah saw something almost imperceptible change in her face. It stung him.
“That was kind of rude,” Brent said.
“He’s got work to do,” Jeremiah protested. “People can’t just sit around chatting all day, you know.”
“Still.”
Silently, Jeremiah agreed and made a mental note to look up Brenda’s birthday before he got out of here. He realized at that moment that he couldn’t remember a single one of those gatherings being organized for her.
After Brent left that evening, Jeremiah made a ham sandwich and nibbled at it absently as he took a closer look at Mel’s painting on the living room wall. All this time, he’d looked at it with a casual distaste when he bothered to notice it at all. Now that he knew who the artist was, he felt obliged to at least give it a second chance. He’d never understood the appeal of abstract art. If someone put that much effort into a painting, he thought, it ought to at least resemble something familiar. To his eyes, this still looked like a jumble of circles, something a child might draw. They ranged in size from a dime to a dinner plate, painted in grays and deep blues. Some overlapped, some seemed to recede into the distance. Some were bordered in sharp lines, others had edges that bled into the background.
He positioned himself a few feet from the wall and stood there for a few minutes, tilting his head and squinting at it, but he couldn’t recognize any form in the thing. If it was supposed to elicit something from him, he didn’t know what it was, other than a slight sense of vertigo. Moving closer, he noticed there were places where the brush had pulled the paint up from the canvas in tiny ridges. Maybe it was meant to be tactile, he decided, and began to run his fingertips over it.
It was then that he noticed, camouflaged perfectly in the center of a tiny gray circle, the smooth glass lens of a camera. It had been almost imperceptible before. But when he saw the glint of it, he knew instantly what it was. He immediately pulled back his hands and took an unsteady step backward, turning his gaze away, suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t have. In the grips of that absurd sense of guilt, Jeremiah sidestepped over to the bookshelf, out of the camera’s view, and pretended to busy himself with the books. Every time he looked back at the painting now, his eye went directly to the camera lens, pulled there despite his best efforts. Now that he’d found it, it was the only thing he could see.
He wondered vaguely if there were other cameras hidden anywhere. Not likely in this room, he decided. The position of the painting would have offered a clear, sidelong view of Jeremiah as he sat in front of the monitor each day to watch his clone. He figured that was probably the thing Charles Scott wanted to see.
Still, he found himself examining the room, casually lifting books, fingering baseboards and checking the bulbs in every light fixture. He found nothing. A quick scan of the kitchen, with all its smooth, steel surfaces, offered no evidence of any additional devices. Even a tiny lens would have been readily visible in there, especially now that he was looking for it.
Finally, he retreated to his bedroom, quickening his pace slightly as he passed by the painting, and examined every corner of that room. After an hour, when he’d found nothing, he switched off the lights and climbed into bed, where he spent a fitful night tossing and turning, unable to shake the feeling he was being watched.
Chapter 16
Day 90
Brent wasn’t due until after eleven the next morning, and Jeremiah spent three hours slinking by the painting between the bedroom and the kitchen. Ordinarily he might have passed the time reading or watching the news on the monitor, but he couldn’t get himself to sit in the living room now that he knew Scott could be watching. So, instead, he ate three bowls of bran cereal standing at the kitchen counter and then took a shower until the water went cold. He was getting dressed when he heard Brent come in and went into the living room to meet him.
“Come into the kitchen for a minute.” Brent was sitting on the couch, directly in line with the surveillance camera, and Jeremiah paused with his back purposely toward the painting. “I have a new smoothie recipe.”
“Smoothie recipe? Okay, Jamie Oliver. But if it’s made with that fat-free yogurt, I’ll pass, thanks.”
“I’m serious, it’s good. Just come in.”
Reluctantly, Brent got off the couch and followed him to the kitchen. Jeremiah poured half a carton of low-fat milk into the blender, tossed in a few ice cubes and switched it on.
“That’s your recipe?” Brent asked above the din.
“I know this place is bugged,” Jeremiah blurted. “I found the camera. In Mel’s painting. I want to know if you knew about this.”
“Bugged? What? There’s no way.” Brent looked at him with an expression of authentic doubt, enough to make him believe he knew nothing about it. It was possible, Jeremiah thought, that Brent was in the dark about a lot of things.
“Go see for yourself,” he told him. “It’s almost exactly in the center, inside one of those little circles. You can see it if you get up
