“Yes, sir.”

“Be advised: I will check the surveillance log.”

“We scanned him, sir.”

“Then I’m not understanding. Do you mean someone on your team helped Mr. Grady?”

“No, sir. Someone at Hibernity must have helped him. That van was clean. The hypersonic transport was clean.”

Morrison got in his face. “You’re suggesting the guards at Hibernity had access to unregistered foglets?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“The garrison there doesn’t even have access to tech level eight.”

Hedrick rotated his chair to face the young BTC officer.

Morrison placed a glittering diamond on Hedrick’s desk. “The response team found Grady’s q-link in a ventilation shaft.”

Hedrick picked up the diamond, studying it—then looked up at the young Morrison clone. “Am I to believe Jon Grady dug this out of the base of his spine on the spot?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“And how did he even know about his q-link?”

Varuna’s voice chimed in from above. “Beta-Upsilon is speaking the truth to the best of his knowledge, Mr. Director.”

Morrison glowered. “An honest idiot is still an idiot.”

“Dad, we had no way of anticipating—”

“I sprayed surveillance dust onto the headliner. I know you were all watching the Tigers game instead of the prisoner. I have the whole god-awful mess on video. Grady had unregistered utility foglets collapsed on his person, and you didn’t spot them.”

“The scanner said he was clean.”

“Some clever son of a bitch manufactured unregistered nanotech. That’s why you have to do this thing we call ‘searching’ prisoners. With your eyes and hands.”

“We patted him down.”

“And how much cash did he take from your wallet?”

The guard looked suddenly sheepish. “Uh, I don’t . . .”

“Yes, I saw that, too. How much?”

“Probably four or five hundred in dollars, sir.”

“All of it.”

“Maybe half that in other currencies.”

“You really make me ashamed of my genomic sequence.”

“Dad—”

“Don’t try that ‘Dad’ crap on me.” Morrison looked to Hedrick. “And someone tipped off Grady not to take the guards’ equipment. We have no direct method to track him.”

“Enough. Get him out of my sight.” Hedrick dismissed the guard with a wave of his hand.

The young man nodded grimly and left; the doors opened and then immediately closed behind him.

Hedrick sighed. “Varuna, reassign Beta-Upsilon and his team to the Hibernity garrison for a year.”

“Yes, Mr. Director.”

Morrison came up alongside Hedrick’s chair to gaze out the window at the faux Hong Kong below.

“Who is the warden at Hibernity, Mr. Morrison?”

“Theta-Theta.”

“We need new leadership there, apparently. And a top-to-bottom review of their operation.”

“How could they get their hands on a utility fog? That’s advanced weaponry.”

“I don’t think they did.”

Morrison cast a confused look at Hedrick.

“Min Zhao is in Hibernity.”

“Okay . . .”

“He perfected foglets less than a decade ago.”

“You really think prisoners are creating their own technology? Prisoners?”

“I don’t know.”

“But . . .” Morrison pondered this gravely. “I don’t see how it’s possible.”

Hedrick felt a fear he could hardly contemplate. “Your number-one priority at the moment, Mr. Morrison, is to find Jon Grady. Escaped, Mr. Grady is an existential threat to this organization. I don’t think either of us relishes the idea of a gravity weapon like Kratos in the hands of our enemies.”

“When we locate him, I suggest we fry him from orbit.”

“No. I still need him alive. If he won’t work for us voluntarily, we have no choice but to use force. But it appears his consciousness is truly unique. So I want him captured. Is that clear?”

Morrison nodded. “I’ll need a higher tech level approved for the forward team.”

“I don’t want you annihilating city blocks to get at him. Nonlethal weapons only. And no publicity. I’ll allow tech level four.”

“Four? They’ll barely be able to overpower the authorities.”

“Then they’ll need to be smarter this time. I can’t have any more advanced technology going missing. Tech level four will be sufficient. Is that clear?”

Morrison sighed in irritation but nodded. He turned to leave.

“One more thing . . .”

Morrison halted.

“Once you’ve got Grady, I want you to pay a surprise visit to Hibernity—in force.”

“Do we clean house?”

Hedrick picked up a small model that he kept on his desk. It was supposedly of his first fusion reactor design. “Yes. And I want a manual prisoner count.”

“That’s a big job. Opening up every cell will take—”

“I want you to lay eyes on him—personally.”

Morrison studied Hedrick. “Archibald Chattopadhyay is dead. His cell has been dormant for a decade. No food. No water. He’s entombed in nine hundred feet of solid rock.”

“I want you to lay eyes on him.”

“There’s no way he could have—”

“Just do it.”

Morrison stared for a moment, then nodded.

At that moment the office doors opened to admit Alexa. Both men looked up; Hedrick brightened at the sight of her.

“What is it, my dear?”

“The deep packet AIs have a lead on our Mr. Grady.”

Hedrick felt the relief wash over him. “Well done. Where?”

“Last night an FBI agent in Chicago ran fingerprints on a suspect and got a match for Jon Grady.”

Hedrick slammed his hand on his desk. “Then they have him.”

“No. And an FBI agent started doing Internet searches for the ‘Federal Bureau of Technology Control.’”

Hedrick scowled.

“It was the arresting agent in the Richard Louis Cotton case: one Denise Davis.”

Hedrick looked shocked. “You don’t think Cotton has—?”

“No. Cotton’s a lot of things, but he’s not an idiot. His sense of self-preservation is legendary.”

Morrison nodded to himself. “Chicago’s just a few hours by car from here.”

She turned toward Hedrick. “This Davis woman has been all over the media lately for the Cotton trial. Perhaps Grady saw her and thought he could trust her.”

Hedrick motioned impatiently. “Do we know where Grady is?”

“We know where he was.” Alexa brought up a holographic video window that showed thousands of video thumbnails all running simultaneously. “I had the AIs go back through the last twenty-four hours of street-level surveillance on all systems they could access within five miles of Agent Davis’s location in downtown Chicago, looking for Jon Grady’s likeness in the streets. A lot of federal and city cameras in the area, so we had good coverage.”

“And?”

“No hits on Jon Grady.”

Hedrick threw up his hands.

“I decided to do a search for Agent Davis’s movements, figuring he must have followed her for a while, waiting for the right moment to make contact. And that’s when I found this . . .” She selected and then expanded a single video image and froze it.

The surveillance camera image wasn’t anywhere near as detailed as what the BTC’s cameras could produce, but it was clear enough. It showed a woman with short hair walking with several men in suits on a crowded Chicago sidewalk. The woman was highlighted by the system in a red rectangular box.

But Alexa pointed to a man walking several yards behind her, wearing jeans and a hoodie. The man’s face was notable in the crowd because it was obscured by pinpoints of blinding light.

Hedrick frowned in confusion. “What am I looking at? And how could a person be walking in a crowd with such bright lights without drawing attention?”

Alexa looked up. “Varuna, can you explain what the subject in this image is wearing?”

The disembodied voice of the AI said, “Yes, Alexa. It is an exploit first seen in Hibernity prison, used by prisoners to defeat early facial recognition systems.”

Hedrick narrowed his eyes. “Used by prisoners?”