The Insides Read Online Free PDF

salvaged from the depths of a forgotten basement. A statue of a peregrine or some other bird of prey, the very tip of one outstretched wing missing, lost to fracture. Each item swirls with tempting histories, but there’s no time to read them. She takes one final moment to coolly examine the banner hung on the wall behind Unger’s head—emblazoned with what looks like an archaic French coat of arms, featuring a crown—and then she looks Unger in the face.
    Actually, she decides, the accent suits him: he looks like he could have enjoyed a comfortable life in some lower rung of French provincial government. His hair falls into a sort of rough bowl cut that gives off the strong impression that he cuts it himself. He has the chunky, somewhat toadlike face of a minor councilman, a face built by heavy sauces. Bulbous nose like a root vegetable. And yet there’s something troubled in the face as well, something that deforms the picture. The sockets of flesh around the eyes look clenched. There’s an angry welt forming over his cheekbone, something that suggests interesting stresses, convolutions, pain.
    We all end up with the features we deserve
, she thinks again, although she knows that the Archive was right: it’s not as simple as that. She’s looked through enough history books, seen her share of Nazi soldiers looking into the camera, blithely pretty although God only knows what they’d done. She’s worked for psychopaths who smiled at her withtelegenic faces, smoothly untroubled. It’s not what you’ve done that changes your face so much as how you feel about it, what you think about it. And when she looks at Unger, even willing herself not to look beneath the surface, she sees someone who has done bad things, but who has done them with some degree of discomfort, who has done them knowing that they were wrong, fully anticipating to be troubled by them but electing to do them anyway, in the name of some greater good. This, Maja knows, makes him more dangerous than the usual psychopath, not less. So she’ll have to be cautious.
    Unger’s face breaks into a broad grin. “So how do we begin?” he says.
    “I was under the impression that you wanted to use this meeting to address some final questions,” Maja replies.
    “A demonstration,” Unger says. “I would like to ask you for a demonstration. If that is all right with you.”
    “Of course,” Maja says. This is the part that she’s used to. The clients always want a demonstration. “Do you have something in mind?”
    “I do,” Unger says. Of course he does. They always do. “Shall we begin?”
    “Certainly.”
    “And it works like you said? I can ask you to look for something? Does it have to be something specific? Can I say
find something interesting in this room
?”
    “Yes,” Maja says.
    “Then let’s begin there.”
    “That’s fine,” Maja says. She closes her eyes, feels her way around the room. Picks over the desk, the statue, the file folders, the monitor. Of course, viewed a certain way,everything in the room is interesting. The folders are full of fat veins of information but she’s guessing that he’s not asking after anything intangible like that. She follows the cable from the monitor to a big CPU stashed on the floor, hidden from view by the desk. More intangible data there, finely ranked, but for now she skips over that as well, instead letting her perception flow to the back wall, where there is a heavy hard-walled suitcase; she guesses that her fee is inside and quick probing confirms it. Bundles of American currency. She probes a little deeper, checking for anything extra in the case, something tricky, a surprise. But she finds only the usual baseline that most people consider
nothing
: dust, bits of skin, microbes, rich histories of exchange.
    Moving on, she finds a long crate, next to the suitcase.
    She looks inside, and an instant later her eyes snap open.
    “Guns,” she says. “Two guns.”
    “What kind of