No Return Address

The package came the next day, at ten minutes to nine, and by nine o'clock the entire second floor knew about it.

I was in the squad room, standing at the window with a cup of tea, trying to make sense of a sentence Max Kane had spoken in a doorway. It was a confession. I had turned it over and over, as one turns a stone in a pocket, and I had not got to the end of it. Behind me, the morning's business went on: telephones, printers, the clatter of a keyboard, a quarrel about parking. And then it all stopped, between one breath and the next, as though someone had pulled a plug.

I turned.

A young civilian from the mail room stood in the doorway, very white, holding a small brown cardboard box at arm's length, as one holds a dead rat by the tail.

"Dr. Vaughn?" he said. "This came for you. It's, um. It doesn't have a return address. I thought—"

"Put it down," said Leo.

He had come up behind me without a sound. He took the box out of the boy's hands, gently, and laid it on the nearest desk. It was about the size of a paperback, wrapped in plain paper and bound with a double strip of tape. On the top, in neat black capitals, a hand had written:

DR. ATTICUS VAUGHN. BEHAVIORAL CONSULTANT.

I stared at it. The letters were even and upright and unhurried, the work of a hand that had never once been in a hurry.

"Clear the floor," said Leo.

…

They cleared it in four minutes.

I will say this for the Philadelphia Police Department: when it is frightened, it moves with an efficiency that would shame the Royal Navy. Detectives took their coffee and left. Secretaries went down the stairs in a quiet file. By nine o'clock the squad room was empty, and the corridor outside had been taped off at both ends, and a man in a heavy green suit had arrived from the Bomb Squad with a dog.

The dog was an elderly black Labrador called Duchess, with a gray muzzle and a calm, rather disappointed expression. She walked once round the box, nose down, tail still. She sat. She looked up at her handler with an air of mild reproach.

"Clean," said the handler. "No explosives. No accelerants. No chemical trace."

"X-ray," said Leo.

They did it in the corridor, with a portable machine. I looked over the technician's shoulder at the screen: a pale gray rectangle, with the faintest outline of an object inside, small and flat and straight-sided, like a razor blade or a stick of gum. No wires. No batteries. No hidden compartments.

"It's a thumb drive," said the technician. "I'd stake my pension on it."

"Don't," said Leo.

He stood for a long moment with his big hands on his hips, looking at the box. Then he turned to me.

"This is him," he said.

"I should think so."

"This is the guy. The one who did the lights."

"He seems to have a fondness for deliveries."

"Don't be funny." But there was no heat in it. Leo ran his thumb across his jaw, and I heard the rasp of stubble. "I'm not letting you stick that in anything connected to the network. I'm not letting anyone. If it's got a virus on it, it eats the whole department. If it's got a transmitter, he knows where we are the second you push the button."

"Quite right."

"So what do you want?"

I had been thinking about it for some time. I had thought of it before Leo spoke, in the part of the mind that works while the rest of it is occupied with something else, and I had come to the conclusion that I had very little choice.

"An isolated machine," I said. "Not connected to anything. No wireless card. No Ethernet. No microphone. No camera. A laptop that has never been on the department's network, with a clean operating system that Mr. Okafor has installed himself, in a room with no signal." I paused. "And I should like him there, if he'd be so kind. And Detective Castellano. And one person to take notes."

"You want an audience."

"I want witnesses," I said. "I've learned my lesson about being the only one who's heard."

Leo frowned. For an instant I thought he would ask what I meant. Then he nodded, slowly, and went to find Ryder.

…

The room they chose was in the basement.

It was a small, bare, windowless chamber at the end of a corridor, with walls of unpainted concrete and a floor of gray linoleum. It had once been a storeroom for evidence. There was a steel table in the middle and four plastic chairs and a ceiling fixture that gave out a flat white light. There was no signal. Ryder had checked, walking from corner to corner with a gray box in his hand, nodding to himself. There was a single cable lying across the table like a snake, and at the end of it, plugged into a separate power point, sat a laptop so new that the plastic still smelled.

"Sandbox," said Ryder. "It's running off its own battery and a virtual machine. If it's got something nasty, it can only hurt itself." He pushed his glasses up. "I took the radio out. The speaker's the only thing that's connected, and that's analog. Sound comes out. Nothing goes in."

"Excellent."

"I'll be recording the output from three feet away on a separate rig. In case it does something." He looked at me with his large dark eyes. "You okay, Dr. Vaughn? You don't look okay."

I considered the question.

"I am a little cold," I said.

It was not entirely a lie.

I sat at the table. Vera took the chair across from me, with a notebook open on her knee and her pen held like a scalpel. Leo stood against the wall. Ryder sat on my left, with one hand over the keyboard. Nobody spoke. The fluorescent light buzzed in the ceiling. I could hear the breathing of four people, and the very faint hum of the laptop's fan.

"Go," said Leo.

Ryder inserted the drive.

…

There was a single file.

It was called good_morning.mp4. I almost laughed.

Ryder clicked it. The screen went black.

It was a flat, rich, velvety black, with a thin white bar of progress crawling along the bottom. The bar moved. It reached the end. Somewhere in the speaker a very faint click sounded, like a latch.

"Good morning, Dr. Vaughn."

I felt Vera's pen stop.

It was a man's voice. It was low and level and unhurried, and it had been run through some process that stretched it thin and gave it a faint raw metallic edge, a rasp of a file on steel. Under the rasp, I thought, I could hear the original, as one sees a face behind frosted glass. It was a courteous voice. It had the beautiful unforced courtesy of a very well-bred man addressing someone he respects.

"I trust you are well rested. I understand you were up rather late. That is a pity. I have always thought that a man who does the kind of work you do should sleep as much as he can."

Leo made a small sound in his throat.

"My congratulations on the elevator, by the way. It was nicely done. I had not thought you would find the chip before the end of the week. I confess I was rather proud of it. I am glad it went to someone who could appreciate the work."

A pause. In it I heard a faint, rhythmic, ticking sound, very soft, like a wristwatch at the far end of a quiet room.

"You are, I think, a worthy successor."

I did not move.

"To Magnus, I mean. He was a brilliant man. He saw the wound in the flesh with a clarity I have never seen in any other physician, and I assure you I have looked. But he never understood what made the wound. His scalpel could not reach so far. It could find the mark of the hand, but it could not find the hand. You, Doctor. You can. I can. We are the same sort of creature, you and I. We read what is hidden."

"I must tell you, I find it a relief."

…

It went on for another four minutes.

I will not give it all. There was a good deal of it, and much was merely the self-regarding murmur of a man who likes the sound of his own voice. But there was one passage that I have never forgotten, and it ran as follows.

"I want to be clear that this is not murder. I understand that is the word you will use, and I understand why, but I should like you to try to think about it differently. Murder is when one man takes something from another. I have taken nothing from anyone. I have merely arranged for certain people to meet what they already carried. You called it a machine, I believe. That is exactly right. It is a machine for returning things to their owners. Call it consequence, if you like. Call it cause and effect. There is nothing in my work that was not first in theirs."

"They have always been free to stop. They never did."

"And there is one who has not yet been given his turn."

The ticking grew louder.

"He has stood at the very top of the world for fifteen years. Fifteen. He has a name, a house, a mother who weeps when he is mentioned. He believes the ground will hold him. He has built a whole life on the belief. It will be a pleasure to show him the floor."

"I have set the stage. I shall be most interested to see whether your eyes are sharp enough, Doctor, to stop the wheel."

The voice paused.

"I don't think they are. But I should like very much to be wrong."

The screen went dark. A burst of static tore out of the speaker, so sudden and so shrill that Vera cried out and Leo flinched back from the wall. It rose to a scream. It cut off. And from the side of the little black drive, in the dead stillness that followed, a thin white thread of smoke began to curl up toward the ceiling.

"Pull it!" cried Ryder.

"Don't touch it—"

"It's burning, it's going to take out the—"

But the thread was already thinning. A smell of scorched resin reached me, bitter and chemical. The plastic casing had cracked, and through the crack I saw the circuit board, curling and blackening like a leaf thrown on a fire. It lasted perhaps eight seconds. When it stopped, there was a small black twist on the table, and a gray scorch mark on the steel, and nothing else at all.

Ryder let out a long shaky breath.

"Self-destruct," he said. "Thermal. There was a heating element built into the board. It must have been on a timer." He lowered his hand from his glasses. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Dr. Vaughn. I should have copied it before it ran. I should've mirrored the whole damn thing."

"You couldn't have known."

"I should have." His voice was thin with misery. "It's gone. There's nothing. No serial number. No firmware. No metadata. I'll run the audio through every tool I've got, but he's put it through a processor so hard I don't think we'll get a thing. Not a region, not an age. Not a sex. It's a voice made of metal."

…

Nobody spoke.

Leo had slumped against the wall. Vera was staring at the table, her notebook shut on her knee, her face white and very still. I looked from one to the other of them, and a strange thing happened.

I was calm.

I do not know why. I have thought about it since. I think it was because, for the first time in two weeks, I had been given something to hold. Not a fact, but a shape. A voice, and a way of speaking, and a pattern in the way that voice had chosen to unroll its sentences.

I closed my eyes.

A narcissist, I thought. A man who loves to hear himself. A man who believes he is the only audience in the room that matters. He records the message himself, in a place where he feels strong. He does not use a studio. He would never use a studio. A studio is a white room, a sterile room, a room where he is only a voice. No. He records at home. At his altar. In the place where his power lives.

And a man like that never thinks about the room.

I opened my eyes.

"Mr. Okafor," I said.

"Yes, Dr. Vaughn?"

"You still have the audio from the secondary rig."

"Yes, sir. Three feet away. It should be clean."

"Good." I stood up. My knees clicked. "Then I'd like you to do something for me. I would like you to take that file, and I'd like you to take the voice out of it."

He stared at me. "I'm sorry?"

"Strip it," I said. "Take it all out. The words, the processing, the tone. I am not interested in what he said. I know what he said. I could recite it." I looked at the screen, where the waveform lay flat and gray. "I want to hear the air behind him."