Our destination was the southwest corner of the floor. This part of the operation was quieter, with a row of offices banked along the south wall. The corner suite included a secretary, who was handling a phone console with the panache of Solti on the podium. Tania bent to murmur in the secretary’s ear. The woman looked at me in surprise, made a call of her own, hit a key on the computer on the desk, and unlocked the inner-office door.

Tania followed close behind her. They shut the door too fast for me to see inside, but not too fast for me to hear my uncle’s voice raised in a hoarse shout. So Peter, too, wanted to know what Strangwell had his daughter doing. That was a help. The politico might share more with her father than with her PI cousin.

A few armchairs were arranged to give visitors a view of the Bean, the big sculpture in Millennium Park in which you can see sky, city, and self reflected in its stainless steel curves. I stood for a few moments at the window, watching tourists photograph themselves, but the light was so bright that I had to put my dark glasses on, and then I couldn’t see much.

As the minutes stretched on, I left the window. I tried the office door, but it was locked. I scowled at it, then left the area looking for the NetSquad. I had a feeling that if I didn’t find Petra’s coworkers now, I’d be hustled off the floor before I could talk to them.

The campaigners were deep in conferences or text messages and cellphones. A youth who finally responded to me told me the NetSquad was in Sector 8.

“Sector 8 is which way?”

“We’re in pods. Communications is Pod 1, nearest the elevators. Pod 2 is R and D. Sector 8, the NetSquad, straddles the two.” He went back to his computer, finished with me.

Pods, sectors: they’d clearly grown up playing too many sci-fi games on their handhelds. The energy and self-absorption of the campaigners, which had seemed entertaining at first, began to grate on me.

When I finally found Sector 8, I saw the young woman who’d wanted Petra’s input on oil drilling in the Shawnee Forest. About five kids were at their computers. It was hard to get a real count because they never sat still for long. Someone would type furiously for a bit, yell, “I’m sending you this, read it before it goes live,” and then take off, while another two or three staffers would emerge from other pods, look at what was on-screen, sit down to type a comment, then drift away again.

I finally managed to get a young man with a shock of black hair falling into his eyes to pay attention to me. “Petra Warshawski.”

“Petra? She’s not here. She disappeared. They think she’s been kidnapped.”