And you might end up in a place like that. Tied up. Abducted. Alone. Hungry. Thirsty. Humiliated. Reeking of your own urine.

Derelict buildings, dreadful places, worse even than the car trunk from which you had just been dragged…Even a little kid could set fire to a wrecked building. How many kids were you willing to wound, or injure, or kill with an automatic antitheft "armed response"? After all, the kids were just kids…kids were always trying to look around…explore…do some graffiti…throw some bricks through the glass windows…steal some furniture…vandalize the building and burn everything to the ground.

Teenagers were energetic and had poor impulse control. Teenage kids were stigmergic, they learned and acted like termites-they had no grand master plan, but they learned fast and easily from their peers, whatever they saw other kids doing.

So many places like that in Los Angeles…in every big town really…where security cameras had stored months of perfectly shot and focused video of a steadily gathering mayhem. The mere fact that a machine «saw» things happening didn't mean that a machine could apprehend the crime, prosecute it, convict it, put an end to it…

What if the surveillance itself was the victim of the crime? They called that "sousveillance"-when angry people countersurveilled the surveillance. Some bold souls made it their business to spy out all the surveillance spies, map them, track them, spot them, shoot them, steal them, hack them, tap them, hold the machines to ransom…

Radmila rolled around on the grimy, derelict, unlit floor, testing the plastic wires that bound her arms. Her wrists were cinched, her arms were trapped behind her back, her ankle was snagged to a piece of furniture. Wire had no knots. She couldn't break wire or pick wire or chew wire.

Nobody would ever find her in here. Not in this blackspot. She was as good as dead. That fast, that simple.

Radmila was strong and her body was flexible. Given a week, she might have shrugged and wriggled her way out of the wires. But whenever she worked hard to escape her bindings, she needed some air, and the duct tape over her mouth was there to deny her that air.

It was extremely dangerous to have her mouth duct-taped shut in this way. She could die easily from that, because she might begin to weep in here, from her fear and despair and shame, and then her nose would clog from the weeping, and she would black out, and smother to death in her own snot.

That simple, that quick, that dead.

She had vanished from her world in twenty seconds. She had left the set, carrying the heavy hem of her costume, and naturally followed a friendly, beckoning ninja security staffer, then suddenly, instantly, with no warning, wham, her elaborate costume went stone-dead all around her. Then she was body-blocked straight into the open trunk of a car.

In seconds, off rolled the car, one mobile blackspot with Mila Montalban hidden inside of it. Who would ever see that? Who would ever guess that? Who would know?

Frantic with herself, Radmila had managed to squirm free of her destroyed costume, inside the cramped black confines of the car trunk.

That was an impressive physical feat, something few women could have done, but the air was thick and stuffy in the black car trunk, and when she was done she was half stunned.

Then the trunk popped open. Before Radmila could think, act, or even shriek, she was struck by something that shot through her like lightning. Her hands were lassoed, her mouth gagged with tape.

When her kidnapper ran out of wire and tape-that took a while-she was hauled, ankles-first, up a set of barnacled stairs and through the yawning, graffiti-bombed door of a derelict Malibu beach house.

This blackspot lair featured drooling patches of mold on every wall, warped wooden flooring, strange arching cantilevered walls of old cement…custom-designed and full of architectural genius. This must have been a gorgeous Malibu beach getaway, once, back when the sky was stable and the sea behaved itself. Some nice place for a rich family.

The airy living room, its sea-viewing windows sprayed opaque, was full of loot.

Someone had been on some dainty feminine crime spree. Cosmetics, mostly. Sweet, tempting little beauty kits that a thieving woman could easily hide in her hands. And other loot, more ambitious: handbags, women's boots and shoes…stockings, perfumes, jewelry exploding from small discarded plush boxes…pink-cased electronics, sexy vicuna scarves, sunglasses in crushproof cases, cashmere throw rugs, thirsty towels, thirsty hand towels, thirsty face towels…Thirsty tampons, thirsty condoms…And crates and crates of thirsty booze.

Dying of thirst from the shock of her abduction, unable to move her bound, numbed arms, Radmila stared in anguish at a wooden rack of California chardonnays.

After dark fell, Biserka returned from her busy wanderings. Biserka was still wearing the Family-Firm ninja costume she'd used when she had kidnapped Radmila, only now this fake, phony costume of hers-it was amazing how shoddy it looked now, it was a cheap, halfhearted effort like some kid's Hollywood souvenir-it was ominously covered with freshly dug dirt.

Biserka plucked her black ninja hood off and ran her black-gloved fingers through her sweaty, smashed, blond hairdo. Biserka had six fancy emerald studs in her ears and green weepy eyeliner streaming down both cheeks. She'd been sweating like a pig inside that cheap costume.

"Time for Miss Montalban to go walkies," Biserka remarked.

Radmila lashed out and kicked Biserka in the shin. Biserka stepped back, with a sour, tired expression. She then came around, leaned down, and pinched Radmila's nose shut with her thumb and finger.

In moments Radmila had a scarlet agony in her lungs and fatal darkness roaring in her ears.

"You don't do that again," Biserka explained. She left, stooped behind the couch, opened a beautiful shoplifted Italian leather satchel. She removed a bloodstained parole breaker's knife. It had the blackened chips, the melted plastic, and the stink.

She then seized a hank of Radmila's hair and sawed loose a fistful of it.

She threw the hair into Radmila's watering eyes. "Do you want to walk for me now, or will there be more attitude?"

Radmila gusted air through her nose and shook her head.

Biserka stuck her fingers through the network of cinched wires around Radmila's chest. She hauled her upright, with an effort. Tired, she changed her mind and shoved Radmila onto an abandoned couch, which exploded with dust.

"I have a feeling we won't see this locale again," Biserka said, gazing around the mold-spotted walls and the damp-collapsed ceiling. "That is such a pity, but, you know, you get a sixth sense about a blackspot. I'm a girl who has a very negative rapport with ubiquitous systems."

Biserka's English had an odd foreign accent. It might have been French, or Chinese, or maybe both French and Chinese.

"I travel light," said Biserka, "so we have to leave my toys here as a nice surprise for sneaky kids. Kids these days! They love to steal, because they have so little…But professional theft is over! All the smart players traffic in revenge! Vendetta. Venganza. Rache. That's the universal language. It's hard to steal from people-but to steal the people… Goods are trackable, but people are stalkable. "

Biserka gazed around her derelict hideout and sighed. "All my pretty toys! Should I burn the house down? You think?"

Biserka rummaged in a handcrafted box that might once have contained some fine hobject. "I do want my pearls. They're my favorites. I'll let you carry my pearls." Biserka sank her clawed fingers into a mass of strung pearls and pulled them out like cold spaghetti.

"I was being funny, you know, because 'Biserka' means 'Pearl. So I tell the jewelers: 'I'm Mila Montalban, show me all your pearls. And they are like: 'Oh yes certainly Miss Montalban! Such a pleasure to see you here in person! Would you like to see the wild pearls from the years before the seacoasts rose, or would you like to see the modern cultured pearls? And I reply: 'Why not see both? "