Easy-peasy. As the app kicked out its photos and background data on Gelfland, Ki started belting out a tune from his extensive mental playlist. His current selection being “The Irish Rover,” he let loose in his best Shane MacGowan growl, feeling he was on a productive roll. It was a habit he’d picked up at home after Mark died, though he supposed the Terminal’s odd acoustical properties had encouraged it at work. His office was small, bare and square. It had exactly enough room for a desk, with three computer screens, some file cabinets and a couple of chairs. Plain and unadorned, with the notable exception of its high tin ceiling, which the interior designers had left as a decorative touch when they converted the building’s original storerooms into modern workspaces.

That ceiling was where the quirky acoustics came in.

Ki had noticed its ornate panels and moldings immediately after being assigned the office. Not long afterward, he also noticed they would vibrate sympathetically when he sang to himself, almost as if humming along. Meanwhile, the building’s thick brick walls tended to mute most sounds, so no one around him seemed disturbed.

All told, Ki found it great for singing while he worked, and he was taking full advantage right now. His eyes on his monitors, the ceiling resonating overhead, he was about to launch into his favorite line—the one about Johnny McGurk being scared stiff of work—when somebody somewhere uploaded something to Facebook that changed everything about his thus far routine search.

“What the hell’s this?” he whispered under his breath, the song abruptly clipped off his tongue, the ceiling panels no longer humming.

He got only his own puzzled silence for an answer.

Grigor’s twentieth-floor room at the Westin-Marriott was big, bright and bland. A midrange reservation, no conspicuous suites, nothing to draw attention to himself.

As soon as he arrived there, he put his suitcase and carton down on the bed, unzipped the suitcase and got his scanner out of an inner compartment.

It looked like a cross between a smartphone and a pocket transistor radio. Black with two antennas: a stub and a collapsible. It had a display screen, some LED indicator lights, some button controls. A tiny camera lens on its upper right.

The antennas would detect any radio signals emanating from hidden cameras or microphones. The camera lens was for an AI visual inspection. Its high-definition computer eye could pick up finer details than any human eye and would not be fooled by camouflage. As the scanner processed the video images, its software would analyze them in real time with machine learning, looking for the shapes and characteristics of the surveillance devices in its database. A library in the hundreds of thousands. If it recognized one, it would show an alert, identify its manufacturer and give precise factory information about its settings and operation.