“It was Jason’s salutation in the instructions he sent to me for the celebration. ‘I will be the machine in the ghost.’”

  “What does it mean?”

  Lily shrugged. “Absolutely no idea.”

  He thought she was about to tell him something else, but her lips tightened. She whispered goodbye, turned, and walked away.

  He felt someone else leave with her. A tarpit was a lonely place. He dropped the stone.

  With a sigh, he set down his board to head home when a brilliant light swept over him. On the other side of the pit, above Wilshire, on a 3D billboard, a radiant thirty-foot-long porpoise glided through green water. Startlingly real, it emerged from a high-resolution, curved LED screen, but as it leaped, the viewer might have expected it to fly across the boulevard, seawater dripping from its sleek body. A chyron of 3D foot-high letters flowed across the billboard.

  yangtze finless porpoise. Extinct. Are you prepared?

  The words vanished to leave the magnificent porpoise propelling itself through the green sea.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  In Raphael’s kitchen, the kettle whistled full throttle. He turned off the pot and poured the boiling water on the napping tea bag, hoping it wouldn’t scream. It awakened silently. He lifted the bag by its string and dipped it several times.

  He sipped the Darjeeling, holding the sweet, warm liquid on his tongue.

  He was sure Lily was straight, but she wasn’t telling him everything. She had assured him Klaes was dead, but she had left Raphael on a mysterious note. The machine in the ghost. What the hell could that mean? Lily had brought him no closer to the truth of Klaes. At least their meeting didn’t leave one thing in doubt. Norval was profiting off of Klaes’s work.

  After draining the tea, he took his airtight container of oil paints from the refrigerator, carried it to the living room, and set it on the deck to climb the scaffolding. He stretched out on the plywood, adjusted the pillow, and considered the vast canvas. No matter how unhinged his world, the painting had to go on.

  Rolling sideways, he opened the plastic container, uncapped two tubes, and squeezed their oils onto the palette. He gazed across his work and sighed. What would a stranger make of the painting? All of his experience was there, but could anyone interpret a single brushstroke? It meant everything and nothing. It was the brain at the instant of death. A life was contained within that curved canvas, but only the person who had accumulated that life had access to it and could decode its meaning and value. Then, all gone. Everyone. Everyone. Sadness fell on him like a blanket.

  Under the sad blanket, he shifted on the plywood, peering right and left, up and down, and shifted several more times until he lay under the northeast corner of the canvas where several years ago, he captured a vivid memory of Pan Pacific: the man who taught him skateboarding from a hundred yards away, the park’s grassy slopes always separating their concrete paths. Years later, he painted him emerging from a gray and green vortex.

  Above the vortex was a space where he had sketched an image he had no interest in finishing. It would be a good place for the Blanks of Pan Pacific Park. From the box of accessories, he took a fat pink eraser and began rubbing out the charcoal lines. He paused and lowered the eraser to his lips. Dive into the oil and swim across, climb the bank and escape. He took an experimental plunge but never hit the surface. Lifting the abrading rubber, he drew it back. His canvas had changed again. He wriggled until he was under the animatronic tiger. In the center of the image was a dark spot he hadn’t painted. He touched the spot. It was dry but didn’t have the texture of oil.

  Shifting to the edge of the platform, he extended his head and shoulders beyond the frame until he viewed the tight space between the painting and the ceiling. The lights shining on the canvas weren’t enough to illuminate the space. He held on with one hand, got out his phone, and powered the flashlight. Six feet from the edge, over the joint where the two center sheets of plywood met, was a crimson circle. He played the light over the stain and then onto the ceiling, which displayed a second circle the same size as the one below. The ceiling circle welled at the center as if pursing its lips.

  Shit. A burst pipe? A sink overflowing in the apartment above? A leak could destroy his life’s work.

  He, climbed down from the scaffolding, bolted from his apartment and, not waiting for the elevator, scrambled up the stairwell to the twelfth floor. He sprinted down the hallway to stand before apartment 1227.

  He should have called maintenance, but by the time they arrived the ceiling might have turned into a waterfall. He knocked, waited ten seconds, and then knocked again. “Excuse me. I’m your neighbor from the floor beneath, apartment 1127. My name’s Raphael Lennon. I think something is leaking from your apartment.”

  His heart pounding, Raphael knocked again. “Sorry to disturb you, but we don’t have much time …”

  He grabbed the knob and, heart pounding, turned the cool brass. It rotated without resistance. He eased the door open. The hall light threw a wide beam across the darkened living room. If it matched his own apartment, the light switch would be on the right. He reached inside, found the switch. He pressed it. Nothing. He drew in the odor of old fur and skin. Something else? Something metallic.

  “Hello? Is anyone at home? I’m your neighbor from the floor below. I think something is leaking from your apartment. It’s damaging an irreplaceable artwork.”

  Steeling himself, he switched on his phone’s flashlight and played the beam across the plush furnishings and walls.

  A pair of eyes stared at him within the beam’s circle. He jumped and dropped the phone, which met the floor with a thunderous crack, leaving the light eclipsed by the hardwood. He hunched, retrieved the phone, flipped it over, and lifted the beam to the wall again to find the globular, brown eyes of a deer—a deer’s head.

  What had the Tar Tower security guard said when Raphael asked where Dr. Royer lived? “I can’t reveal that, but let me say, take Paul Simon’s advice. The song his mother used to play. She would even sing the lyric. The dual nature of ceilings and floors.

  Swallowing, he swung the light left, where a leopard bared its teeth to charge. The moving beam found a solemn gray wolf and a moping waterbuck and a lion’s fiery orange mane and the gray, rubbery head of a bewildered baby elephant. He spotlighted a dozen more mounted heads, then scanned to the right. There was a recent addition the taxidermist hadn’t bothered to clean up or mount on a plaque. Screws twisted tight on outstretched ears held Royer’s head to the wall. His eyes appeared calm as if anesthetized by nitrous oxide, but his mouth gaped and from the open throat hung crimson strings.

  Raphael swayed, cupped his mouth and spread his legs to maintain balance. He stumbled to the room’s enormous, white-leather sofa and collapsed.

  He sank into the soft, smooth skin. Breathe. Breathe deep and exhale. The foul odor filled his nostrils. He lowered the flashlight to the floor where a naked body lay on its side in an inky pool. The killer had ripped the torso open from groin to neck.

  The scream stayed in Raphael’s throat. He backed toward the entrance, drawing up his shirt to wipe his prints off the light switch and door handle. He cleaned off the outside handle, but left Royer’s door open. Rushing back to his apartment, he soaked his face in the kitchen sink, drank three glasses of water, and waited until his head cleared. He didn’t call the police. Royer was beyond help, and his coming forward held no good outcomes. Someone would notice the horror soon enough.

  In his living room, Raphael opened the window and listened. Wheels shirred on concrete. Music burst from other open windows. Metal rattled on external fire escapes. The tamped roar of a jetliner vibrated the air. Silly drones dropped deliveries. A street coyote howled. Atop towers, UV-C bulbs glowed, sweeping the city with invisible light.

  No sirens rent the serenity.

  His phone beeped. A local number. “Hello.”

  “Hey, Raphael. This is Dr. Royer. Remember the tooth—”

  He ended the call.

  After placing a pan above the painting to catch the remaining drips of bodily fluids, he crawled onto his scaffolding, lay on his back, and decided Royer’s death was now part of his life and deserved its place on the painting. But hadn’t Royer’s blood already left its stain? Image enough and nothing if not expressionistic.

  He descended the scaffolding, grabbed his skateboard, and rushed from the apartment into his larger prison to skate the boundaries until he churned himself into butter and melted into the sidewalk. He pushed through the Tar Tower’s lobby door to see a moving van lurking in the roundabout. Dropping his board, he glanced at the van and its lowered ramp, struck by a vague memory of a task he’d assigned to himself involving such vehicles. In his mind, he ran through the file of memories on hold, but could pull nothing from the thousands of words and images stretching back through time, resisting chronology.

  He abandoned the search, tossed down the skateboard, and soared toward Fairfax.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Can’t keep you away,” said Mandy, when Raphael signed in at Norval’s rear-entrance security desk.

  “Yeah, there’s always something.”

  She pushed her hair from her forehead. “Those new programming guys working the night shift left. What a crew.”

  “They went home?”

  “Don’t you ever relax, Raphael?”

  He ignored her question. “They’re gone for the night?”

  “Sushi break. God, what boys,” she said.

  Raphael glanced through the glass door to the quiet parking lot, wondering how much time he would need. “When will they be back?”

  Mandy tugged on her ear. “Maybe an hour.”

  Raphael slipped away.

  He got off the elevator at the second floor, walked to the stairwell, and climbed to the third floor.

  He entered Ms. Goloda’s night-lit office, located the remote, and opened the door to the executive wing. Heart racing, he entered the zigzag hallway and advanced beneath its strobing lights. At the intersecting passage, he paused before Research, the home of Lean’s ghosts and the programmers’ haunt.

  The last time he’d tried to enter Maglio’s, the door had stalled a half-inch from the jamb. He played the phone flashlight over the glass and again saw the same accommodating space. His pulse quickened, and his cheeks felt damp. In his last attempt to gain Maglio’s office, he had merely knocked. This time it would be breaking and entering. He lifted the skateboard and offered the tail to the crack.

  A sliver too thick. He raised the board higher on the crack, hoping to find a wider spot, instead the opening diminished. He crouched and tried the base of the door. The board slipped in.

  He was committing a crime, no doubt a felony. He’d be the next one faking death to avoid the police blotter: the possum.

  A geographically challenged possum.

  Using the board’s angled tail as a lever, he threw his weight against the front end. With a shriek, the door opened another two inches. He pulled out the board, gripped the door with both hands, leaned back, put his right foot against the doorjamb, and pulled.

  As he caught his breath, a motor screeched as if in pain. He moved back from the door and put his ear to the wall. The elevator?

  He set both feet on the jamb and tried again.

  Something moaned, and flickers of light appeared in the door’s black glass.

  His legs straightened. The door slid into the wall.

  He scooped up the skateboard and scrambled into the room, where blackout curtains admitted only a few slender bands of streetlight, enough for the task at hand. He dropped into Maglio’s seat, started up his computer, and waited. The screen lit up. A rectangle in the center demanded a password.

  Except for the digital eye, Maglio was old school. He carried a pen and sticky pads when walking around the company, and Maglio wasn’t as sharp as he was five years ago. He would need a real-world backup to his own memory. Using his phone flashlight, Raphael inspected several drawers, hunting for an odd name or combination of letters and symbols. In the bottom drawer were two silver eggs, marked with capital L’s, and a tube of Ocular Lubricant. He picked up one of the silver eggs and set it back down in the drawer as if it were slimy. He pushed away from the desk. Dimming the flashlight, he searched the office. The bookshelf was too obvious, but he scanned it anyway. A thin layer of dust covered all the books, as if on the shelves of the city’s abandoned libraries, and even to the custodian they were invisible. Staring at the Solarium Tanner, he opened the machine, on which only the leaching of Maglio’s perspiration stained the white surface. Raphael found no sticky notes, no rug to pull up on the hardwood floors, nothing stuck to the ceiling. He then shone the light on the paintings and sculptures. Now you’re getting ridiculous, Raphy. Nobody’s going to pull a painting off the wall every time he forgets his password.

  Raphael let the light linger on one print. Three melted clocks, one a saddle for a dead prehistoric creature, the trio set against an enervated shoreline. Salvatore Dali’s Persistence of Memory. Maglio couldn’t have resisted. He set the flashlight on the floor, clasped the sides of the painting, hoisted, and the artwork came off its hooks. He set the painting face down on the floor and inspected the backing with the flashlight but found nothing.

  Damn.

  He flipped the painting over and grabbed the sides to return it to its hooks. As he lifted, the flashlight illuminated the melted clock on the left, the most prominent of the clocks. Its face showed the digits one through seven and then twelve. Eight, nine, ten, and eleven were missing. He set the painting on the floor.

  Raphael sat down in Maglio’s chair and filled in the password: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-0-0-0-0-1-2.

  Incorrect. Could the zeroes have been purposefully switched to capital Os?

  1-2-3-4-5-6-7-O-O-O-O-1-2.

  Incorrect.

  It was crazy to think he could be so lucky. There were a trillion combinations. It could be anything or nothing. He’d already spent fifteen minutes getting nowhere. Keep the sushi coming.

  He recalled the onboarding meeting with Maglio. The CEO’s movements and quirks. “I have one more question, Raphael. Consider it carefully.” Maglio paused then, as if giving Raphael time to gather himself. “Can you be loyal?”

  “Yes, sir. I think so.”

  “You think so? Loyalty is a sacred word.”

  Raphael typed in the letters: l-o-y-a-l-t-y.

  Access Denied.

  Damn. Think, possum hunter. Tracks, scat, and a bent twig. Like everyone else, Maglio would have to change the password every month … unless he used biometric entry.

  Maglio had screwed him. He might get lucky with a password but couldn’t replicate Maglio’s face. Besides, he had never seen Maglio wag his head in front of the screen, so it wasn’t facial recognition. Prints had proven unreliable. Retinal recognition was a pain in the ass. Iris recognition, though, had become hot in biometrics. Did the computer contain an iris scanning camera?

  Raphael closed his own eyes and visualized Maglio’s. Once the right and left synced, they were identical. Blue beauties. The bionic eye must have cost several hundred thousand. Maglio wouldn’t have skimped on the iris.

  Raphael’s heart skipped a beat.

  He opened the drawer where the eggs were and chose one, its surface unbroken. He tapped the egg on the desk, and it opened. Maglio’s artificial eye stared up at him. Jesus, it was creepy.

  He pulled the eye from the half-shell. The pupil seemed enormous, the iris a thin blue circle, like the moon in full eclipse. He directed the flashlight at the digital eye. The pupil shrunk, and the iris bloomed in deft imitation of life.

  Raphael’s heart pounded as he set down the phone and thrust the eye toward the password box.

  Nothing.

  He brought it closer. Nothing. Further away. Nothing.

  His stomach churned, and he glanced at the open silver egg. As he did so, his left hand seemed to move of its own volition, hanging over the keyboard and typing in l-o-y-a-l-t-y again. He pointed the eye at the word.

  Maglio’s apps filled the screen.

  Magic.

  Palms sweating, he scanned Maglio’s dense array of desktop shortcuts. Everything was familiar, and what wasn’t didn’t strike him of consequence. He brought up all programs and scrolled. The folders seemed no more promising until he found an old dinosaur, a relic of another era: a zipped tar file labeled Hard Apple. Hard Apple. A misnomer for Pomegranate. Pomegranates were the fruit of paradise and the fruit of the dead.

  He opened the file. It contained every NDMN program Raphael had ever encountered and more folders. “Entombment” labeled one folder and “disentombment” marked the one below.

  Raphael opened the disentombment folder and then clicked on the “disentombment.exe” file. A screen popped up requesting the name of the entombed and the date of entombment.

  He typed in Jason Klaes and the recent date of the entombment. The blinking letters appeared: disentomb.

  Raphael tapped enter.

  As he waited for the data to appear, he found his eyes drawn to Maglio’s pen holder and its inscription. Mr. Maglio—Every time you shove it in, remember us. Your loyal LarAm staff.

  LarAm: Large America. Pink’s former employer. He slipped out his phone and did a search for Large America. The largest wholesale lender implicated in the mortgage meltdown of 2008–2009 … LarAm wrote derivatives based on … Not much of anything. As things fell apart, many regulatory agencies came after LarAm CEO Geovanni Maglio … who slipped them all. … Whistle-blower Marion Jenson, the senior predictive data-analyst in the firm …

  Pink was Marion Jenson, a whistle blower, but undoubtedly a traitor in Maglio’s mind. She was a predictive data-analyst, steeped in algorithms. She could predict the future, Addy thought, and maybe she could.

  A cry seeped through the wall.

  A squealing hard drive? Thirty minutes before the boys came back. Raphael breathed from his belly several times and steeled himself for the task.