Ki got his results within minutes, and they were a letdown. Not a single match out of all those many millions. He frowned, unwrapped the cheesecake, poured some coffee from the maker and dug in his fork. When Mark was alive, he would not have eaten compulsively. Certainly not after his former six o’clock cutoff for snacks. He was only five foot six with a sluggish metabolism and had struggled to keep trim. But in the past ten months he’d developed a bulging waistline. It wasn’t going away anytime soon.

Several bites of cake later, he logged into Guardian with his visitor credentials. The time stamp on his screen said 19:37 p.m. He waited less than fifteen minutes and again was disappointed. There were no potential candidates.

He tried TIP/PISCES. No luck.

TIDE was likewise a washout.

At half past eight, Ki went to stretch his legs in the hallway, then returned to his office and put on a fresh pot of coffee. While the machine gurgled and hissed, he returned to his computer, opened the INS database, scanned in his Fake Gelfland image and clicked Enter.

The coffee maker beeped. At the same instant, his computer screen flashed:

NO RESULTS

It was ten minutes to nine.

He poured some coffee and carried it back to his cake. He had exhausted every outside search engine and felt discouraged. His last shot was Mirror Image, and he wasn’t expecting much out of it. It had not been designed as a repository of criminal photos, and its galleries weren’t nearly as inclusive.

Ki finished the cake, balled up its wax-paper wrapper and overhand-lobbed it into the wastepaper receptacle. Trashetball. Then he submitted his photo, turned up the volume on his phones and sat back to wait.

It was nine o’clock on the dot at that point.

At four minutes past the hour, his result appeared on-screen. It read:

TOTAL MATCHES: 1

PROBABILITY RATING: 98%

FILE PINNACLE: ACCESS DENIED

CODE 8752 RESTRICTED D/DISLE

APPROVAL REQUIRED

Ki stared fixedly at the monitor.

“Access denied,” he read aloud. “This is bizarre.”

He turned off his music and leaned forward in his chair. He had found his first match for Fake Gelfland’s photo using Net Force’s own unfinished search engine. And at the same time run into his first brick wall.

Access to the file was blocked.

D/DISLE stood for Director, Department of Internet Security and Law Enforcement.

Blocked.

By Alex Michaels.

“Why would he do that?” Ki asked aloud. “And what the hell is Pinnacle?”

There was a flat, unanswering silence in the room.

It was 9:12 p.m., and he had just made his ultimate discovery.