“Tough single mom in a working-class bar where she probably screws half the clientele? Catnip for a natural bottom like you.”

“What?”

“Look at you, you’re so tense you’re practically brittle.” She reached into her purse and fished out her pipe and the tiny, ornate wooden box in which she kept her weed. “We’ll share a little of this, then you can take your clothes off and I can fuck you silly.”

The smoke went directly to my head. I felt an unsatisfied need to explain, but the words were elusive. “It was,” I said, “I mean, I shouldn’t have let her think—”

“Oh, stop. You got the sketches, right?”

“Sure, but—”

“That’s what’s important. The rest of it doesn’t matter.”

CHAPTER 9

My research team hit a snag that week. The cranial sensors used in Affinity testing were a proprietary design, and their specifications had not been among the data Meir Klein had provided. We determined that the closest equivalent was a neural scanning sensor manufactured by a company in Guangzhou called AllMedTest. These were dime-sized devices, incredibly sophisticated, and an array of six or seven would be enough to generate the kind of imaging the test required. But they were expensive, and buying them in quantity would be a major investment.

When I approached Damian about it, he said not to worry: “We have T-Bourse money to invest, and I can’t think of a better use for it.”

“Okay, but the sensors are fairly delicate, which we have to factor into the design. And my tech guys have to know exactly how much processing power they need to build into a portable device. They’re complaining that the flow of information from the theoretical side has slowed way down.”

“They’re right,” Damian said. “The thing is, we’ve come across some anomalies in Klein’s data.”

“Anomalies?”

“Some unsettling implications.”

“Such as?”

He looked unhappy. “We’ll talk about it on the weekend. You, me, Amanda, the two team leaders, plus a security detail. I rented us a place on Pender Island. We’ll be out of harm’s way and we’ll have a couple of days to think it through. Okay?”

It sounded like trouble, and I wanted to know more. But Damian wasn’t ready to talk.

*   *   *

The ferry from Tsawwassen to Pender Island chugged through a rainstorm that raised whitecaps on Georgia Strait and turned what should have been a postcard view into a gray obscurity. Damian was too moody to make conversation, and Amanda was using the downtime to read through a report from her team leader. I crossed the promenade deck of the ferry and found an empty seat by a rain-slicked window, took out my phone, and returned a call that had come in that morning. The call was from my brother’s home, but it was Jenny Symanski who picked up.

I had talked to Jenny only sporadically since her marriage to Aaron six years ago, not because of any lingering awkwardness between us but because my brother had become the wall over which any communication had to pass. When I spoke to Jenny it was usually at Christmas or Easter, and it was Aaron who handed her the phone and Aaron who took it back when the conversation was finished. If Jenny carried a phone of her own, neither she nor Aaron had given me the number. “Jenny,” I said. “Is this a bad time?”

“No,” she said. “No, it’s fine.”

“Is Aaron around?”

“He’s in DC for the day. A congressional briefing or something.”

The truth was that talking to my family (my tether family) had become a duty, not a pleasure. Lately I had heard more from the house in Schuyler, since my father had entered into negotiations to sell his faltering hardware-store businesses to a national chain. “We’ll be able to retire very comfortably,” Mama Laura had told me, “though I dread what idleness will do to your father.” (Her dread wasn’t entirely hyperbolic: even a long holiday weekend could drive my father into a state of sullen, resentful boredom.)

My brother Aaron was working as an assistant to Mike Menkov, the Republican congressman from the Onenia district, and it seemed like he was making a career of it. He had learned his way around the federal labyrinth and had even drafted a couple of Menkov’s speeches. I knew this because Aaron made a point of mentioning it whenever we talked, and anything he neglected to tell me would be relayed from Schuyler by way of my father. And I always congratulated Aaron when he announced his latest triumph … even though Menkov was a pliant tool of the corporate lobbies and would endorse any noxious idea that seemed likely to boost him up the political ladder. Lately, Aaron himself had been talking about running for office.

But Aaron wasn’t home today, and Jenny had sounded a little uncomfortable telling me so. “Look,” I said, “I can get back to you if this is a bad time. Tell Aaron I returned his call, okay?”

“No, wait. Geddy’s here! That’s why I called earlier. He wants to talk to you. Is that okay?”

“Of course it’s okay. What’s Geddy doing in Alexandria?”

“Well, it’s a long story. You know he was playing with a band, right?”

Mama Laura had kept me posted on Geddy’s music career. Some natural talent, plus a little formal instruction and Geddy’s capacity for obsessive repetition, had made him a better-than-average reedman. A little over a year ago Geddy had joined a band called The Humbuckers, currently making a minor reputation for itself across the northeastern states. It was a precarious living—barely a living at all—but since the family had long ago concluded that Geddy was probably unemployable, it seemed like a good thing.

But life on the road had not agreed with Geddy. He had left The Humbuckers after a gig in Syracuse and bought a bus ticket to Alexandria. Two days ago he had shown up on Aaron’s doorstep with an unhappy expression and a duffel bag full of dirty laundry. Shockingly, he had pawned his Mauriat tenor sax, an instrument he had scrimped to buy and which he had insisted on holding in every recent photograph of him I had seen. Asked why he left the band and sold his sax, Geddy would only say, “It didn’t make me happy anymore.”

Jenny texted me this information later; here on the Pender Island ferry, all I knew was that Geddy had expressed a completely uncharacteristic desire to talk on the phone. So I waited while Jenny gave him the handset. “Hello?” he said. It was Geddy in two syllables. Timid but somehow courageous, as if he had forced out the word on a cloud of pure bravado.

“Good to hear your voice,” I said.

“Where are you? It sounds loud.”

“I’m on a ferry in Georgia Strait. That’s the engines you hear.”

“You’re on a boat?”

“Yeah, a boat.”

“Do you still live in Toronto?”

“I do, but I’ll be out west for a few weeks more.”

“Okay.” He was silent a few moments more, and I had learned to respect Geddy’s silences. Eventually he said, “I wish I could visit you.”

“That’s not possible right now, but maybe in a few months. What are you doing at Aaron and Jenny’s place?”

“They agreed to let me stay a while. I don’t really have anywhere to go. I didn’t want to go back to Schuyler.”

He didn’t want to go back to Schuyler because my father would have humiliated him for his failure. Neither of us needed to say this aloud. “Are you okay there?”

“Aaron says I can’t stay forever.” Now he just sounded tired. “I don’t know what to do, Adam.”

“The band didn’t work out, huh?”

“There was a girl. I really liked her. She needed money. So I had to sell my saxophone. She took the money, but…”

“I understand.”

“People are pretty fucking mean sometimes.”

His brief career in the music business had made Geddy more casual about what he would once have called “swear words.” Worse than that was the bitterness in his voice. It was entirely self-directed. Geddy would never despise the woman who had taken his money. Instead, he would despise himself for his own gullibility. And learn nothing from the experience. I suspected Geddy would go on trading luck for love for as long as it took him to give up on love. “If you need a little money to get you through, Geddy, no problem. I can send it care of Aaron and Jenny.”