Instancer does not speak, but the glint in his eye is unmistakable.

He turns toward me. Instancer meets my eye for a fraction of a second, then wheels and bolts down the stairs.

Manning lurches to his feet.

MANNING

(to me)

Go. Go!

Twenty seconds later I’m spilling, behind Manning, out the ground-level door and into the alley.

No one to the right.

No one to the left.

Rain has started—the leading front of an unseasonable tropical storm rising fast out of the Carolinas. Already drops the size of silver dollars are splatting onto the dark pavement and the hoods and roofs of parked cars.

I scramble behind Manning into the street. Security alarms are blaring. Shomrim men race from the auditorium.

Manning peers up the street and down. Lights are coming on in building after building. Heads appear in apartment windows. Cries in Yiddish resound. Already the space between the curbs is filling with grief-stricken Chasidim, men and women, pouring from buildings and brownstones.

Instancer is gone.

MANNING

Fuck!

Manning’s glance searches the shadows left and right. The mounting downpour makes it harder and harder to see. Suddenly, across on the opposite curb, Manning spots the woman.

She’s alone, eyes wild.

She sees Manning.

MANNING

You!

Manning shouts to the woman to freeze. She bolts. I take off straight at her. Manning sprints half a step behind me.

A twenty-year-old Hi-Top van sits double-parked at the curb. The woman leaps into the driver’s seat. The engine starts. The van screeches away.

Manning and I still have no weapons.

MANNING

Sonofabitch!

13

CHASE MODE

AN NYPD SELF-DRIVING VEHICLE is meant to operate autonomously. The car doesn’t even have a steering wheel. In override mode you accelerate, brake, and steer with a tiller that rises between the driver’s legs like the control stick on a fighter plane.

Manning plunges into the tiller seat and commands the unit verbally to switch into manual. He unlocks the Remington twelve-gauge from the ready rack between the seats. I snatch his backup sidearm, a nine-millimeter P226, from its slot beneath the dash.

In the two seconds that the mystery woman appeared on the sidewalk, I got a good high-resolution photo of her. This pic I send now to the car’s automated pursuit system. I do this by hovering the phone over the dash screen while pressing the SEND PHOTO icon. It’s like holding a fugitive’s sweaty shirt beneath the nose of a bloodhound. Instantly the photo, including its FaceRec parameters, enters the pursuit database of every street-corner surveillance camera, precinct house, and patrol vehicle in the city.

Manning jams the tiller forward. The car lurches wildly into the street. The reason there’s no steering wheel on a self-driver is because you aren’t supposed to drive it. The whole point is that the technology is smarter than you.