“Is she one of your people?”

“No. But her maid has debts, and we have money. So we can get the maid to place the biot … sorry, nanobots in this case … on Ms. Reid. You then merely have to be on her fingertips when she takes the Pope’s hand, or on her lips when she kisses the ring. Then it’s grab a sample and find your way out.”

A loud guffaw erupted from Bug Man. He turned to look at George, feeling that he had the better of him for the first time. “You don’t know much, do you? What do you think? My nanobots walk back here to the hotel? It’s only a few hundred yards, maybe, but that’s a hell of a long walk when you’re two hundred microns long. A nanobot can’t even see objects at much distance. The optics are calibrated for work down in the meat, so I wouldn’t know where it was and where to make it go, even if we had a month or so to walk it back here.”

“We’ll find a way,” George said, and yawned.

“Oh, will we …”

It was meant to be sarcastic dismissal, but George didn’t take it that way. He clapped his hands once as if drawing the scene to a close. And in fact, he did draw the scene to a close, by leaving behind a baffled, worried—but also excited—Bug Man.

Plath and Keats arrived at the alleyway door of the McLure building after much skullduggery that made them both feel like spies. They were reasonably sure they hadn’t been followed.

They were ushered into a private elevator and whisked to the twentieth floor. It was a bit of an old-home week for Plath, not all of it good. She’d been in and out of this building since childhood, but her last visit had begun with Anya creating Plath’s biots and ended in a massacre between McLure security men, AFGC hired hands, and Caligula. Needless to say, Caligula had come out on top.

Mr. Stern met them in his office then led them down a guarded hallway to an unmarked door.

“So, how are you adjusting to being back in New York?” he asked them both.

“I liked the island better,” Keats said.

“I can imagine. Well, let me show you what we have.” Stern slid a keycard and opened the unmarked door. Inside was just a room with half a dozen workstations, each focused on a large monitor. The ambient light came from the monitors, the keypads with keys outlined in light, and softly glowing touch screens.

It had the feeling of a room that had just been emptied of people. Plath touched a coffee cup and felt that it was still warm. Stern had emptied everyone from the room for greater privacy.

He sat down and Plath and Keats pulled up chairs.

Stern tapped a few keys, then switched to a touch screen.

“You asked me for what we have on the Tulip, and specifically whether there’s a data center,” he said as the image of that strange building appeared. “This is the Tulip. This is a photo, obviously, taken from across the street. And this”—he swiped the screen—“is the heat signature using infrared.”

The skyscraper was now a sort of layer cake of red, purple, and blue—mostly red.

“Of course we had to wait until the building was in shadow so we didn’t just pick up reflected sunlight,” Stern explained. “We took three readings, three different days, and this is the composite heat signature. This—”another swipe—“is the same building but shot from the north. And this is from the east. We don’t have a westerly view, but we have a high degree of confidence that these heat signatures are persistent and not just one-time things.”

“Okay,” Plath said, making a puzzled face at Keats, who was looking intently.

“There’s a lot of variation by floor,” Keats said.

“Oh, obviously,” Plath said, with just a little sarcasm.

“But it’s all centrally air conditioned, yes?”

“It is. Normally,” Stern said with unmistakable pride. “But we turned off the AC. We risked using our back door into their computer network and reset the thermostat overnight. It takes a while for the system to catch up when it’s turned back on, and in the meantime we could get a picture of what’s being done and where.”

“Can you show the temperature readouts?” Keats asked.

Stern winked at Plath. “This one’s smart.” He tapped a few keys, and numbers popped up beside each floor. “You get a clearer picture off this data.”

“One floor is far hotter.” Keats used his finger to count the floors. The eighteenth, yes? Something is giving off a lot of heat.”

“Servers, we believe,” Stern said. “They have their own emergency climate control, but it’s not enough to disguise the heat signature when the overall air-conditioning system is down.”

“So, the eighteenth floor is where they have their main computers. Their own personal cloud,” Plath said.

“That seems likely,” Stern said.

“Okay, how do we get to it and destroy it?”

There it was again in Plath’s head, that crystalline memory of the World Trade Center falling. It seemed almost sensuous. Had she just become used to it? Had she seen that imagery so often that it had lost its potential to shock and had now become almost balletic?

Stern sighed. He pulled up a different diagram of the building. “Those are the elevator shafts. If you see those thicker areas there, that indicates an elevator stop, a door. If you look even closer, you’ll notice there are none for the eighteenth floor. And I’ll spare you the suspense and just tell you that the stairs, the emergency access, also doesn’t open onto eighteen. There is a single stairwell connecting eighteen to seventeen. And there’s a stumpy freight elevator that goes only from seventeen to eighteen, and nowhere else. Floor seventeen, in case you were wondering, is where AFGC security lives.”