Lexicon

were informing him of three sightings in the past twenty-four hours, plus one from earlier, which were ninety-five percent likely to be Person of Interest number 665006, which, he knew from memory, was Virginia Woolf.
    He returned to Goethe and de Castro. “Frankly,” said de Castro, as if no time had passed at all, “I see little point sitting down to discuss digital interconnectedness and social media when such an overwhelming issue remains unresolved.”
    “It is resolved,” he said. “I honestly don’t know what else I can tell you.” It struck him as remarkably suspicious that there would be a Woolf sighting at this moment, in this meeting. He wondered which delegate was responsible.
    “You can tell me the current location of Virginia Woolf,” said de Castro. “That troubles me, also.”
    “We looked. We didn’t find her. It seems likely she is dead.”
    Goethe looked at de Castro. “He claims not to know.”
    “William, I hear things,” said de Castro, “from people in your organization, as you no doubt hear things from people in mine. And the most disturbing tale has reached me. In it, Virginia Woolf steals the bareword and brings it to Broken Hill not out of some adolescent fit of pique, as you described, but rather at your command, as part of a test of the word’s effectiveness. Clearly, given the current population of Broken Hill is now zero, this test was a resounding success. Which is alarming in itself, William, for as much as we hold you in the highest regard, we are all undermined by your possession of a kind of persuasion against which there is no defense. But the part of this tale that troubles me most is the idea that Virginia Woolf, as your agent, is out there somewhere, engaged in some activity that serves your purpose. I cannot imagine what that might be. And that makes me most uncomfortable.”
    Throughout this, Yeats’s phone had continued to vibrate. He had developed the uncomfortable suspicion that the coincidence of Woolf’s sighting during this meeting might not be due to a delegate. It might be due to Woolf.
    “Confide in us,” said Goethe. “We are your allies, William.”
    “I do not have the word,” he said. “And Virginia Woolf is dead. Now, I am terribly sorry, but I will not be able to attend our meeting after all. Something unavoidable has come up.”
    • • •
    He took a chopper cross-town and set down on the DC office helipad. This occupied thirteen minutes. In the meantime, he attempted to coordinate people via his phone. This proved difficult because every few seconds it wanted to tell him about an incoming message, which required a tap to dismiss, and by the time the building was in sight this was what Yeats was spending the majority of his time doing, tapping to return his phone to a useful state. When a computer server became so busy acknowledging incoming requests that it had no time to respond to them, it was called a Denial of Service attack, a DoS. Yeats was being DoSed. He surrendered and put his phone away.
    Freed from the helicopter, he considered the elevator but opted for the flexibility of stairs. One flight later, he emerged into tastefully muted lighting. His assistant rose from her desk, mouth opening, full of messages. “Not now, thank you, Frances,” he said, and closed the double doors behind him. The lights brightened in response to his presence. This month, his office was a paean to eighteenth-century feudal Japan: paper dividers, low, simple furniture. On the wall behind his desk a samurai sword hung under lights. Yeats had chosen none of this; it was periodically redecorated in a random style, to avoid betraying personal aesthetics. He planted himself behind his desk and tapped the keyboard to wake his screens.
    His predecessor hadn’t used a computer. They had been considered secretarial tools. Hard to imagine now. His displays filled with red boxes. Now that the computer’s thresholds had triggered, it was vomiting up sightings from days ago, even weeks, made newly plausible by more recent data. A voiceprint from a hotel in Istanbul. A woman with matching facial characteristics in Vancouver. He inspected the picture: sunglasses, hat, nothing he would bet on, but the computer liked the cheekbones. A taxicab security photo, grainy and desaturated, from a route that corresponded with what the computer was figuring out about Woolf’s movements. That was Seattle, yesterday. The notification boxes were a moving stream but