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high-paid engineer. With a broken elevator? In the northeast quarter of town? Not only is this a rough area, it’s too far from your offices. He didn’t steal your camera, Monica—though I’m tempted to guess that you’re trying to steal it from him. Is that why he ran?”
    “He didn’t come to us with a prototype,” Monica said. “Not a working one, at least. He had one photo—the one of Washington—and a lot of promises. He needed money to get a stable machine working; apparently, the one he’d built had worked for a few days, then stopped.
    “We funded him for eighteen months on a limited access pass to the labs. He received an official badge when he finally got the damn camera working. And he did steal it from us. The contract he signed required all equipment to remain at our laboratories. He used us as a convenient source of cash, then jumped with the prize—wiping all of his data and destroying all other prototypes—as soon as he could get away with it.”
    “Truth?” I asked Ivy.
    “Can’t tell,” she said. “Sorry. If I could hear a heartbeat . . . maybe you could put your ear to her chest.”
    “I’m sure she’d love that,” I said.
    J.C. smiled. “I’m pretty sure I’d love that.”
    “Oh please,” Ivy said. “You’d only do it to peek inside her jacket and find out what kind of gun she’s carrying.”
    “Beretta M9,” J.C. said. “Already peeked.”
    Ivy gave me a glare.
    “What?” I said, trying to act innocent. “He’s the one who said it.”
    “Skinny,” J.C. put in, “the M9 is boring, but effective. The way she carries herself says she knows her way around a gun. That puffing she did when climbing the steps? An act. She’s far more fit than that. She’s trying to pretend she’s some kind of manager or paper-pusher at the labs, but she’s obviously security of some sort.”
    “Thanks,” I told him.
    “You,” Monica said, “are a very strange man.”
    I focused on her. She’d heard only my parts of the exchange, of course. “I thought you read my interviews.”
    “I did. They don’t do you justice. I imagined you as a brilliant mode-shifter, slipping in and out of personalities.”
    “That’s dissociative identity disorder,” I said. “It’s different.”
    “Very good!” Ivy piped in. She’d been schooling me on psychological disorders.
    “Regardless,” Monica said. “I guess I’m just surprised to find out what you really are.”
    “Which is?” I asked.
    “A middle manager,” she said, looking troubled. “Anyway, the question remains. Where is Razon?”
    “Depends,” I said. “Does he need to be any place specific to use the camera? Meaning, did he have to go to Mount Vernon to take a picture of the past in that location, or can he somehow set the camera to take pictures there?”
    “He has to go to the location,” Monica said. “The camera looks back through time at the exact place you are.”
    There were problems with that, but I let them slide for now. Razon. Where would he go? I glanced at J.C., who shrugged.
    “You look to him first?” Ivy said with a flat tone. “Really.”
    I looked to her, and she blushed. “I . . . I actually don’t have anything either.”
    J.C. chuckled at that.
    Tobias stood up, slow and ponderous, like a distant cloud formation rising into the sky. “Jerusalem,” he said softly, resting his fingers on a book. “He’s gone to Jerusalem.”
    We all looked at him. Well, those of us who could.
    “Where else would a believer go, Stephen?” Tobias asked. “After years of arguments with his colleagues, years of being thought a fool for his faith? This was what it was about all along, this is why he developed the camera. He’s gone to answer a question. For us, for himself. A question that has been asked for two thousand years.
    “He’s gone to take a picture of Jesus of Nazareth—dubbed Christ by his devout—following his resurrection.”

I required five first-class seats. This did not sit well