Thomas lingered behind to take one last look. A strange vertigo haunted the room, like the delayed reaction to a near miss on the freeway. He had a drunken memory of Neil disappearing through the doorway. Not his friend Neil, but the Neil looming behind the frame of Cynthia Powski's final porn. Neil the shadow. Neil the knife.

'So he had the run of the place…'

Thomas found Agents Logan and Gerard in his office. Sam was studying his giant satellite poster of the Earth on the far wall, framed by high-resolution whorls and continental land masses.

'Space buff?' she asked.

He suddenly felt embarrassed by how juvenile it looked. 'When I was a kid,' he explained. 'I put it up to cover the tacky panelling more than anything else.'

'Still, nice picture,' Sam said, as though she understood the wonder of such things.

'No tits,' Gerard chimed, leaning back to peak behind a bookcase.

Despite their earlier laughter, something about their carefree attitude sparked resentment in Thomas. Then he realized: when you lost a trail, you followed a search pattern, which was little more than a systematic attempt to squeeze dumb luck out of an indifferent world. For the human mind there was precious little difference between looking for something unknown and looking for nothing.

So they were going through the motions. Same as him.

He walked over to the oak desk that he and Nora had spent a laborious summer refinishing. Everything seemed to be where he'd left it. A stack of draft course outlines. Sticky notes with meaningless reminders. He turned on his desk light—the green glass one Neil had given him for Christmas years ago in college. What he saw punched the breath from his lungs.

'Sam,' he said numbly.

'Nine inches in dog years,' she was saying in a you-take-the-cake tone.

'Sam,' he repeated. 'Come here.'

He pointed to the light.

'What about it?'

'That wasn't there before.'

'Shelley!' Sam shouted. 'You're going to want to look at this!'

In a blue marker all but invisible against the green glass when the light was off, someone had written

Not someone. Neil.

There could be no doubt, Thomas realized with horror.

He was part of the game.

He stood by woodenly as Sam sat at his desk and fired up his computer.

You already have Nora, was all he could think. Just leave me alone.

Within moments, his office was crowded with people, and Thomas was numbly explaining how he found the web address. Atta had Gerard chase all the newcomers except Dean Heaney from the room, then call someone named Lamar at 'CI'.

'And tell him to keep it under his hat,' she snapped. Gerard nodded, frowning in concentration.

'Got it!' Sam cried.

They all crowded around the flat panel. Gerard muttered on his palmtop behind them.