The Golden City

33

If a physicist living in Los Angeles had dropped by Mar Vista Park that afternoon, he might have seen a classic example of something called “Brownian motion.” The children moved in erratic patterns like tiny bits of pollen suspended in fluid, bouncing off each other and floating away in opposite directions. Someone gazing down from the heavens might have decided that these particles of life behaved like the electrons in a quantum game of chance.

Sitting on the benches near the child’s play area, the adults saw cause and effect instead of chaos. Shawn was thirsty and kept running back to his mother for a sip of apple juice. May Ling was playing with two mean girls-Jessica and Chloe-and sometimes they accepted her and sometimes they ran away. The positions of the adults also followed a certain order. A group of elderly Chinese men and women sat on the east side of the play area, proudly watching their grandchildren; Mexican nannies with expensive strollers stood on the opposite side, chatting on cell phones or gossiping in Spanish.

Ana Cabral was separate from both groups. She was Brazilian, not Mexican, and she was watching her own children-eight-year-old Roberto and his four-year-old brother, Cesar. Ana was a small woman with a large handbag who worked mornings at a plumbing parts store. Although she didn’t own a closet full of clothes, her tennis shoes were new, and her blue headband matched the color of her blouse.

At this moment, little Cesar was playing with his dump truck in the sand, and Ana’s only worry was that an older child might pull the toy from his hands. Roberto was more of a problem. He was an active boy who had come out of her womb with his hands clenched into fists. Because of the dirty air, he suffered from asthma, and Ana had to carry an inhaler in her handbag in case of emergencies.

Roberto needed to run around with other boys, but Ana felt better when her sons were inside the house with all the doors locked. In the last few weeks, twelve California children had disappeared from playgrounds and schoolyards. The police in San Francisco said they had arrested a suspect, but two days ago a little girl named Daley McDonald had disappeared from the backyard of her home in San Diego.

Don’t think bad thoughts, Ana told herself. Victor is right. You worry too much.

She glanced into her bag, made sure the inhaler was there, then leaned back on the bench and tried to enjoy the day. A little blond girl wearing pink overalls was watching Cesar play with the truck while Roberto lay belly down in one of the swings and pretended he was flying. Ana heard the sound of traffic behind her and the voices of the nannies. Back in Brazil she would have known each woman and the history of her family. That was the most difficult thing about Los Angeles -not the gangs and learning English, but the fact that she was surrounded by strangers.

Mar Vista Park was dotted with picnic areas and Scotch pine trees. The hazy Los Angeles sunlight gave the landscape a slightly flat, colorless appearance, like the drawing of a park in a faded illustration. If Ana looked left, she could see a large soccer field with artificial grass. On her right was a fenced-in concrete oval that was used for roller hockey. The play area was at the center. Four plastic and metal structures built to look like beach shacks were surrounded with sand. If you left the sand and walked across a strip of dead grass, you came to a red brick building that was used for basketball games and Boy Scout meetings.

Beyond that was a side street where someone had parked an ice cream truck.

Wearing a radio headset, Martin Doyle sat in a windowless compartment between the ice cream machines and the truck cab. He leaned forward and stared at a monitor as a little girl wearing a pink sun dress approached the truck and ordered a vanilla ice cream cone with chocolate sprinkles.

A Tabula mercenary named Ramirez was in charge of selling the soft-serve ice cream. He took the child’s money, handed her the cone and watched her walk away. “What are you doing?” he asked Doyle.

“I’m not quite ready to start the target search. Give me a few more minutes.”

Doyle continued watching the monitor. He had a scar on the back of his right hand where the Tabula had inserted a radio chip. An even more powerful chip had been injected into his chest-between his chest muscles and his sternum. I’m a slave, he thought. Boone’s little robot. These days, the team was traveling all over California. If he kept alert, there might be an opportunity to escape.

The high-tech equipment gave him access to private homes and public playgrounds, but he was never allowed to savor the experience. When the team wasn’t working, Doyle lay in bed and ran through his memories; it felt like he was touching each image, holding it up to the light like a cherished photograph. There was Darrell Thompson, the little boy alone in a backyard decorated for a birthday party. Everyone else had gone inside for cake, but Darrell was still jumping on the Moon Bouncer. Doyle remembered Amanda Sanchez, the girl who cried, and Katie Simms, a blond charmer with a band-aid on her scraped knee.

The images he cherished most were the quiet moments when the children first encountered him. Doyle enjoyed the look of surprise on their faces and their frightened smiles. They always stared at his face, really looked at him in a very intense way. Did they know him? Was he going to be their new friend?

Doyle swiveled in his chair, reached up to a shelf, and took down a clear plastic box that held a dragonfly clinging to a twig. He shook the box gently and the insect moved its wings. The dragonfly had been turned into something called a

HIMEMS: an acronym for the term “Hybrid Insect: Micro-Electo-Mechanical-System.” Ramirez and the other mercenaries simply called them “robobugs.”

For many years, the CIA and various European spy agencies had used insect-sized spy drones designed to resemble dragonflies. These high-tech surveillance tools could hover over an anti-war rally and take photographs of the demonstrators. According to Boone, the mechanical dragonflies had several vulnerabilities. They couldn’t hover for more than ten minutes and were blown sideways by strong crosswinds. But the biggest problem was that the drones were obviously little machines. When one of them fell onto the Champs-élysées during a Paris protest against global warming, the marchers had irrefutable evidence of government spying.

A HIMEMS looked exactly like an ordinary insect. When the dragonfly was in a nymph stage, a silicon chip and a tiny video lens were inserted into the larva. As the dragonfly grew larger, its nervous system became attached to the chip, and its movements could be controlled by a computer.

Carrying the plastic box with him, Doyle pushed open a sliding door and stepped around the driver’s seat. He opened a second door and strolled over to the picture table near the park’s soccer field. Making sure no one was watching, he opened the box, took out the twig, and carefully placed the HIMEMS in the middle of table. The hybrid dragonfly was a Blue Darner with a long body, strong, transparent wings and bright blue spots on its abdomen.

The dragonfly had been captive in the box for several weeks and seemed startled to be outside. Doyle felt that he understood the dragonfly’s surprise; he had also been a prisoner, and it was a shock to be back out in the world. Slowly, the insect moved its two pairs of wings, feeling the wind and the afternoon sunlight. Doyle tapped his finger on the table, and the startled insect flew away.

Doyle returned to the ice cream truck, stepped into the compartment, and activated the HIMEMS program on the computer. The first image on the monitor showed something dark, with a rough texture, and Doyle guessed that that the dragonfly was resting on a tree branch. He attached a joystick to the computer and gently pushed the lever forward. The dragonfly responded like a toy airplane, taking off and heading east. Doyle could see the parking lot and the tops of some trees.

In San Diego and San Francisco, he had learned how to control the hybrids. You couldn’t direct precise movements, but you could send the dragonfly in a general direction and then make it stop and hover. Using a HIMEMS meant that he didn’t need to draw attention to himself as he watched the children. Doyle had escaped his fleshy, fumbling body. At that moment, he was a dark angel, floating above the children, watching three boys wander away from the play area.

The Chinese grandparents were leaving, and Ana checked her watch. It was almost five o’clock. She would let the boys play for a few more minutes, and then she had to get home and start making dinner. Cesar was still playing with the blond girl, but Roberto and two other boys his age had gone over to the park building. They stood near the doorway-probably watching some older boys play basketball.

Something passed through the air near the edge of her vision. When she looked up, she saw an insect right above the swings. What did they call that in the United States? A dragonfly. In Brazil, sometimes they called it a tiraolhos, which meant eye thief.

As the dragonfly darted away, Cesar approached her carrying the dump truck. “Broke,” he said in English, and held up the toy.

“No. It’s all right. I can fix it.”

Ana turned the truck over and began to scrape sand away from the dumping mechanism. When she looked up again, Roberto and one of the boys had disappeared, but the third boy still lingered in the doorway.

The second boy came out of the park building, but Roberto wasn’t with him. A minute or so passed until the fear switch clicked in Ana’s brain. She stood up and asked the blond nanny to watch Cesar for a minute, please. She strolled past the swings to the dead grass. The two little boys had been standing near the doorway were coming toward her, but when she asked-”Where’s Roberto? Where’s my son?”-they shrugged their shoulders like they didn’t know his name.

She reached the open doorway of the park building and peered inside. The basketball room had a polished wooden floor and two baskets-a hollow room with echoes bouncing off the bare walls. Two half-court games were being played: one involved two teams of El Salvadorans, and the other game was between a group of teenage boys with bushy hair and slogans on their T-shirts.

“Have you seen my son?” She said in Spanish to an older El Salvadoran man. “He’s a little boy wearing a blue jacket.”

“Sorry. I didn’t see anyone,” the man answered. But his skinny friend stopped dribbling the basketball and approached her.

“He went out that door a few minutes ago. There’s a water fountain out there.”

Ana hurried down the center line of the basketball court as the games continued on either side of her. When she walked out of the doorway on the north side of the building she found a small parking lot and the street. Ana took a few steps forward and looked in every direction, but she couldn’t see her son.

“Roberto,” she said quietly, almost like a prayer, and then a feeling of panic overwhelmed her and she began to scream.