Shahim quickly found the entrance to the basement but was surprised to see very little of interest down there. After briefly scanning its empty boxes and other sundry junk, he decided to check the rest of the house, parts of which were not visible from across the street. For the next twenty minutes, he carefully searched the house, focusing on specific parts of rooms that he could not see from outside. He found Neal’s laptop and downloaded its hard drive just in case, his machine mind analyzing it as it was parsed into his mind and telling him that there was nothing of interest there.

After twenty-three minutes, he had completed a thorough sweep of the entire house, every drawer had been opened, every closet explored in every room on both floors, and he had found nothing of interest. If Shahim had not had specific reason to be suspicious, he would have been forced to assume that Neal was not a threat. But the fact remained that he had not found any viable explanation for why Neal had been out of sight for such long periods of time.

He reviewed the feed from the AIs overhead. He could not contact them directly while he was in the house, but he could receive information from them anywhere, and among the steady flow of data coming through subspace, the AIs were providing him a running update on Neal’s whereabouts. Seeing that his quarry’s bus was still en route to the Pentagon, he thought about his options. He had plenty of time, and he still needed an explanation to take back to the ever-pleasant Princess Lamati. So he decided to return to the basement to examine it once more before calling the search off.

Coming back down the thin wooden stairs, he started to review each box that was stacked in the big room in detail. They had all appeared innocuous on his first review, and he found nothing on a second pass to change that evaluation. He scanned the walls as he had in every room already and found, as he had before, that they were riddled with the same holes and pipes that wove under most houses.