Something. He must do something. But Everett couldn't move. This must be what shock felt like. Posttraumatic stress. So many actions he could take. He imagined himself running after the black car, running at full pelt up the rainy Mall, tailing the black car through the rush hour. He could never catch it. It had too much of a lead. The city was too big. He couldn't run that far, that long, that fast. Maybe he could stop a taxi, tell it to follow that car. Tejendra had told him once that every taxi driver longed to be told that. Even if he could ever track the black car through the London traffic, what did he think he could do against three big men who had lifted his father as lightly as a kitten? That was comics stuff. There were no superheroes. He could ask the people huddling under umbrellas, collars turned up, arriving for a public talk on nanotechnology: Did you see that? Did you? He could ask the door staff in their smart shirts. They were too busy meeting and greeting. They wouldn't have seen anything. Even if they had, what could they do? So many wrong actions, but what was the right thing, the one right thing? In the end there was one right thing to do. He hit three nines on his phone.

“Hello? Police? My name's Everett Singh. I'm at the ICA on the Mall. My dad has just been kidnapped.”

The police station stank. It had been redecorated, and the smell of industrial high-durability silk finish paint had worked through every part of it from front desk to the interview room. Everett wouldn't smell anything else for days. Already it was making his head spin. But that might also have been the bad strip-lighting, the too-hot radiator, the deadly dry air conditioning, the chair that caught him in the back of the knee and cut off his circulation so that his legs were buzzing with pins and needles: any one of the dozens of things about a police station that the police never think might unsettle ordinary people.

“Could I have some water, please?”

“Of course, Everett.”

There were two police, a man and a woman. The woman was a Family Liaison Officer and did all the talking. She was meant to be friendly, empathetic, nonthreatening. Everett guessed she was maybe thirty; a little chubby, with over-straightened dyed blonde hair that made her face look big. She looks like a male comedian playing a woman police officer, Everett thought. She'd told Everett her name, but he'd never been any good at names. Leah, Leanne, Leona—something like that. Police shouldn't give you their first names.