Immigration was next – a choice of one of three queues. US citizens could step through a screen, glancing up at the camera that read their retina and confirmed their identity from the tags on their passports, and be out in the arrivals hall without further checks. NAFTA members had to have their documents machine-read before going through a similar arch. Everyone else was herded to one side like cattle, and subjected to a laborious manual process that was going to take the best part of an hour.

“Screw that,” said Petrovitch to a passing teletrooper. It heard him, and its metal feet stamped to a halt. It turned what passed for a head towards him, and light flashed out across his face from its visor. And again. It couldn’t work out who he was that way, and its camera lens whirred as its vaguely humanoid metal frame leaned in for a closer look.

Petrovitch could feel its presence: not just the burnished metal skin and hydraulic pumps that marked its physicality, but its electronic self, its processors and servos. That someone in a room nearby was hooked up to a VR rig was almost immaterial. The thing itself was what was important. It reminded him of the New Machine Jihad.

He probed the protocols and routines that joined the two entities, slave and master. Not tamperproof, then. Not this model, anyhow. He mentally backed away and kept the information for later.

The teletrooper still couldn’t work out who he was looking at, and repeatedly tried to scan him. Petrovitch smiled up at the camera. “Done? Good.”

He turned his back on the metal giant and started for the US-only gate. He reached into one of his pockets for a bag. It contained two squash-ball-sized spheres, and he tore at the bag with his teeth, spitting out the strand of plastic when he’d done.

He selected one of the spheres and held it up at head height as he walked through the scanner. This time when the camera peered down at him, it could find a name, an address and a social security number. He strode through, following the plaid back of a man just in from Kansas.

Petrovitch was done with the visible security presence. He had no doubt that he’d been picked up already by human agents, but he didn’t bother sifting through the digital chatter for code words deliberately designed to be obscure and difficult. The Freezone data miners could do that later at their leisure.

Instead, he stood and waited for Newcomen to catch up. He could see him through the high perspex barriers that separated the airside from the landside, searching the non-US line for his charge. At first he appeared merely harassed, but on his second trip along the queue of patient supplicants, he grew more agitated.

He stopped, put his hands on his hips and appeared completely bewildered. He looked around jerkily, searching every face, his head turning one way, his body another.

Petrovitch decided to put him out of his misery when the teletrooper started showing an interest in the agent’s increasingly erratic behaviour.

He dialled Newcomen’s number, and eventually he picked up.

“N-Newcomen.”

“You’re looking in the wrong place. Through the screen. I’m waving at you.”

Petrovitch raised his hand and waggled his fingers, and he couldn’t tell whether Newcomen was going to faint dead away or burst into tears.

Whichever, he forgot to look up as he cleared the arch, and had to be manually scanned by one of the transportation officers with a gun-like device which they pressed against Newcomen’s eye socket.

He was still blinking away the after-image when he staggered up beside Petrovitch.

“How? How did you get through so quickly?” The agent’s luggage trailed after him like a lost puppy and banged into the back of his legs.

Petrovitch uncurled his hand to reveal two artificial eyes, the irises staring boss-wise up from his palm. “It’s not like it was difficult.”

Newcomen reached for one of the eyes and Petrovitch closed his fist firmly before rebagging and pocketing the items.

“You went through the wrong channel.”

“So sue me.”

“You’re just making a mockery of, of…”

“Everything? Newcomen, so much of this is beyond parody. This whole building is dedicated to security theatre, and it plays every single hour of every single day. Very little of what goes on here actually makes you any safer, but because you all participate in this consensual illusion, you’re willing to put up with all the indignities and intrusions.” He snorted. “Meh. Eto mnye do huya. What you do in your own country to your own citizens is up to you. But you don’t do it to me.”

They stood while all around them people passed by. The babble of voices, the sounds of the announcements, the bright displays, the steady stream of bodies and odours: it was a world away from the near silence of ruined Dublin.

Petrovitch, the city street kid, overwhelmed by crowds now as well as awed by snowfields.

He was going to have to get a grip. He was soft.

Finally he said: “How were you planning to get us out of this mad house?”

Newcomen blinked. “Uh. What? There’s the connecting flight to Seattle in,” and he searched the sky for a clock when there was a perfectly serviceable one on his wrist. “Four hours. We could grab a coffee, something to eat…”

“Okay, Newcomen, it’s like this. Firstly, four hours here is going to make me go postal. Secondly, I’ve changed the flights. We’re going later.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Clearly I can,” said Petrovitch. “What you’re saying is I shouldn’t. I have things to do here in New York. And you have to come with me, whether you like it or not.”

“Our travel plans were made days ago. They’ve been filed.”

Petrovitch reached up and snagged Newcomen’s neck. He tried to pull away but found he couldn’t. They were touching foreheads when they spoke again.

“I’ll do what’s necessary to find my Lucy. Anything and everything. If that means messing last minute with someone else’s schedule, I’ll do it without hesitation, and if they don’t like it, they can suck my yelda.”

Newcomen recoiled, and Petrovitch increased his pull.

“At least let me tell AD Buchannan.”

“You don’t get it, do you? Your saintly Assistant Director already knows. For the moment, he’s content to let it happen. They have to allow me the appearance of acting freely. Only at the last moment will they try and pin me down.”

“You’re paranoid. First you think your daughter’s disappearance isn’t an accident, and now you think everyone’s out to get you.”

“It wasn’t, and they are.” Petrovitch let go, and Newcomen massaged away the finger marks. “Now, are you coming?”

“I guess so.”

“Taxi rank’s that way. Let’s find us a yellow cab.”

8

There was a long queue for the taxis, but there was also a long queue of cabs waiting for a fare. It was painfully inefficient, with all except one access point roped off and the order enforced not just by public opprobrium but by a couple of uniformed cops, buttoned up against the cold. The cab driver at the front of the procession of cars would leap out, glad-hand his fares and stow their luggage, then drive off. Everyone would move up one space, and the ritual would be repeated.

If they’d allowed everyone who needed a ride just to grab one, both queues would have vanished in an instant.

“Who the huy designed this?” muttered Petrovitch.

“We have to wait in line. It’s the way we do things here,” Newcomen explained. “It’s polite.”

Petrovitch writhed in mock agony. “Arrgh, the stupid: it burns, it burns!”

Things were moving, though. Slowly, but moving. Seeing no easy way to subvert the system, Petrovitch seethed his way through the next five minutes and watched the aircraft drifting lazily overhead as they rose to their operating altitude. It was strangely subdued. Objects that size should have been making a thunderous noise. As it was, giant cigar shapes were hanging in the clear air, their engines ticking over, barely producing enough thrust to clear the airport. Just because he’d made that whole process possible didn’t mean he was comfortable with it.