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her head a little, a motion small enough that no one in the room would notice.
    A graveyard, she thought, or else New York City because that’s a good place to start the process of getting lost.
    Actually, she wondered whether the two places were equally appropriate for a disappearing act.

5
    In an office in Amsterdam…
    In a bedroom in Bangkok…
    In a study in Tokyo…
    At an Internet bar in Santiago…
    On a laptop in a library at a university in Nairobi…
    … And fed into a flat-screen television mounted on a penthouse apartment wall in Moscow. The room where the television was located was filled with partiers drinking iced vodka from crystal glasses and eating fine caviar, as one might expect. They turned down the blasting techno music and instead focused their attention on the screen, which had been silently showing a replay of a soccer match between Dynamo Kiev and Lokomotiv Moscow. A man sporting a large Fu Manchu mustache held up his hand, signaling for the room to grow quiet. It was his party and his apartment overlooking Gorky Park. He wore an expensive black suit with a purple silk shirt left unbuttoned and gold jewelry with the requisite Rolex on his wrist. In the modern world where gangsters and businessmen often look fundamentally alike, he could have been either or maybe both. Beside him, a slender woman easily twenty years his junior, with a fashion model’s hair and legs, wearing a loose-fitting sequined evening dress that did little to conceal her boyish figure, said first in Russian and then in French and subsequently in German: “We have learned that there is to be an entirely new series on our favorite Web broadcast beginning this evening. It should be of considerable interest to many of you here.” She stopped there, not offering any further explanation to any of the guests as to what they were going to see. The way the group crowded around the television, slipped into comfortable couches or perched on chairs, indicated that many were already familiar with the offering that came blinking to life in front of them. Indeed, the eagerness in their eyes perhaps suggested that the party was being thrown specifically in celebration of the images that were coming through the computer system into the penthouse.
    A large PLAY arrow prompt appeared on the screen and the party host moved a cursor over the signature and clicked a mouse. Immediately, there was some music: Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” It was played on a synthesizer, followed by a large picture of the very young actor Malcolm McDowell, holding a knife as Alex in Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange. The picture dominated the screen. He wore the white jumpsuit, eye makeup, hobnobbed boots, and black bowler hat that the collaboration between performer and director had made famous in the early 1970s.
    This image prompted a smattering of applause from the older people at the party, who remembered the book, remembered the film, and remembered the performance.
    The picture of young Alex disappeared, replaced by a black screen that seemed to pulsate with anticipation. Within seconds, vibrant red italicized writing appeared, slicing across the frame like a knife, carving the words: What Comes Next?
    This faded into a second credit sequence: Series #4.
    The image then shifted into an anonymous basement room. It had an oddly grainy, almost single-dimensional quality, despite a broadcast originating with a modern, expensive high-definition camera. The basement seemed a gray, destitute place. No windows. No indication where this scene was taking place. A place of total anonymity. Initially, all the viewers gathered in front of the television at the party could see was an old, metal frame bed. On the bed was a young woman, stripped to her underwear, a black hood pulled over her face. Her hands and legs were cuffed and attached to rings fixed dungeon-like to the walls. The young woman didn’t move, other than to breathe in and out heavily, so the