her hand.
He opened his eyes and saw that he had covered most of the globe in red. He carefully brushed his fingers over the rest.
He pulled his hands back, and traced a sign in the air.
The stars blanked out, leaving the sphere darker than before. The scene was almost black now, only a faint metallic gleam on the sphere, barely enough to still see it. His eyes shifted slightly, and the globe became blacker as the radiation sensors in the robots came on-line.
He reached for the sphere again, this time checking it for any light leaks. Such a leak would indicate the data hole he was searching for, whether it was in any part of the emittable spectrum or not.
It was larger now, about the size of a hot-air balloon, representing the scale change necessary for this test. He worked slowly, feeling the massiveness of the sphere as he turned it, carefully staring at each piece on the macro level while legions of robotic sensors scanned it at the micro.
His eyes had adjusted to the darker light, and now the segment of the sphere he looked at appeared brighter, almost silver…
Jay blinked twice to shake the image, and continued to turn the globe. He had to be sure to hold it in each position for three seconds so that he could see all of the surface within the three-second window that the sphere represented. A tiny turquoise bar-graph at the edge of his vision constantly counted off the time, filling up with gold and then reverting to blue at the end of each interval.
A wire-frame model below the bar showed his progress. Two segments left.
Jay completed the search.
He started his next check, a chemical examination of the sphere, using his olfactory sensors. The globe had shrunk now, to a basketball. He pulled it close to his face and started to sniff.
As he did this, the robot armies, now germ-sized on his scale, deployed spectral analyzers, checking the atomic makeup of the sphere, looking for variations that could not be explained. There was a slightly pinelike smell, almost antiseptic.
This wouldn’t do.
Jay activated a control and the smell shifted to a more pleasant cedar, taking him away from thoughts of Mark.
He turned the ball, sniffing, a bloodhound looking for something that didn’t smell right.
A bell chimed, and he realized that he’d completed the search.
He hadn’t found anything. But he should have. The interface had been tested, the robots’ AI performed flawlessly, and the metaphor was good. There was the tiniest chance that they’d gotten the time frame wrong for the sphere, but it seemed unlikely.
Which left
Jay let out a long breath. He’d been distracted, thinking about Mark. He must have missed something, some factor.
He was going to have to try something else.
23
After they alighted from the cab, Thorn said, “See that lot over there?”
Marissa nodded.
“Holds two hundred cars, and it’s full. That’s the parking for Tials. See all those people at those outdoor tables, under those ratty umbrellas? That’s the dinner crowd.”
It looked like a busy evening at a country fair’s food plaza. Maybe three hundred people in the warm summer night, at long rows of wooden picnic tables set end to end. The diners were laughing, talking, eating.
“Come on.”
She followed him around the corner. There were three lines of people queued up in front of what looked like a market stall, a pole barn with counters and a dozen men and women inside it, no walls, just a roof. Fragrant smoke rose from the place in a thick cloud.
Behind it was a stubby, rectangular building the size of a small two-bedroom house — that held a refrigerator, freezer, and a lot of storage space.
“Looks like the waiting line for a ride at Disneyworld,” she said.
He nodded. “The long line is for new customers, the medium-long line for regulars. The short line is for cops and firefighters only.”
“And this is enforced how?”
“If you are in the regulars or cops line and somebody doesn’t recognize you when you get to the counter? You don’t get served — you have to go to the back of the new-customer line.”
“And these dedicated people are lined up to eat what?”
“Chiliburgers.”
Marissa shook her head. “This is it? Lord, Tommy. I was guessing maybe you were taking me someplace where they served fugu or some weird Tasmanian snail or something. You flew us all the way to New York — to Queens, of all places — to have
“Best in the country, maybe best in the world,” he said. “So how come a crack CIA operative like you doesn’t know about Tials?”
“I don’t even know what kind of
“Acronym, actually,” he said, heading toward the cop/firefighter line.
“How do you rate the short line?”
“Well, I was a regular, but Bruce decided that becoming Commander of Net Force made me a cop. Best perk I’ve gotten from the job so far, present company excluded.”
“Uh huh. You were explaining the name of this place?”
“ ‘There is always a Larry somewhere.’ The first letter of each word — T-I-A-L-S.”
They reached the end of the line. The man in front of them turned and saw them. “Hey, Thorn,” he said.
“Hey, Mickey. Marissa, this is Mickey Reilly, Detective Third, NYPD. Mickey, Marissa Lowe. Marissa is an operative for one of those, ah, federal agencies usually known only by their initials.”
“Pleased to meetcha,” Reilly said.
“Likewise.”
She looked back at Thorn. “Explain the name, please.”
“What? Mickey?”
“I
He smiled. So did Mickey. “Well, Bruce used to work in Hollywood. He was an up-and-rising screenwriter, wrote a couple movies for guys like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, like that. But it got to him after a while, all the Hollywood crap, so he took his money and quit. He bought a secret family chili recipe from some Greek guy back in the old country, then set up shop here.”
“And?” she asked.
“The story Bruce tells, he would go into meetings with studio executives to pitch a script. And they’d go back and forth, but nobody ever wanted to make a decision right there and then. They always had to check it with somebody first. Only a handful of folks in La-La-Land can actually greenlight a movie. So they’d tell him, ‘Baby,
