He referred to “NJH” throughout: Nels J. Hansson. The notes also alluded to a plan to escape; an accomplice by the initials MDM.
Lux browsed the folder of image captures from the documentation Nels had given him. MDM. Morris McDonald. The men’s uncle. A research doctor and a former senior executive at NeuroSys, though other information on him was scant. He had left the company several years prior.
Lux switched to his wider net connection and sent a query to Artemis, a hacker who specialized in deep, discrete skip tracing. “{morris d. mcdonald}” was the full text of the communiqué. Artemis would perform the search for their standard fee and deliver results when he had them.
Within the bedside stand Lux found another bunch of handwritten notes: a clump bundled together and pressed into the back of the drawer. These notes were more desperate than the others, more paranoid. In them Horace complained that NJH was having him tracked. That he was being followed by government agents. Lux thought of the corpse in the bathroom.
He returned to the body in the bathroom and stood over it for a half-minute, then knelt down beside it. There was a rigid edge in the soft tissue behind the ear, where the splinter was embedded. It was a patch that, in full light, would be slightly discolored; skin grown over it.
Lux flipped up a tiny needle point from the ring finger of his bionic arm and coaxed it into place where he thought the splinter’s port would be. He eased it through the skin and felt it meet resistance at the edge of the splinter. He adjusted the angle and probed again, this time penetrating the port of the splinter.