“Understandable.”
Now that she could breathe again, Rachel was able to scan the store. It was both messy and spotless; there were piles upon piles of stuff, but not a speck of dust or trace of cobweb. McCrindle probably knew every inch of it, and could locate anything from a single baseball card to the taxidermied buffalo head staring down at her with its black glass eyes.
McCrindle matched his store. He seemed overlarge, somewhere in the middle range of three hundred pounds, but was too tidy in a white button-down shirt and pressed pants, and a core color the deep red of living garnet.
“Nice place you have here,” Rachel said, and meant it. She had seen a couple dozen art galleries and antique stores that day, and the Trout and Badger seemed the only one with any love invested in it. There was an oily haze in the air, but she was pretty sure that wasn’t McCrindle’s fault. “Sorry about the raccoons.”
The man shrugged. “Not the worst thing that’s happened,” he said. He wasn’t quite lying, but his conversational colors took on some gray. “And I’ll get a nice bit of money out of it. There’re laws against poisoning large animals in cities for this reason.
“Now, what can I do for you? You’re not here to browse, or you’d have turned and run as soon as you came in.”
“I’m with the MPD,” Rachel replied. Unless she was trying to intimidate someone, she usually avoided mentioning she was OACET’s liaison to the police, not unless she was willing to answer questions like, “You’re a cyborg?” and “Are you really a cyborg?”
She took one of Jason’s replicas out of her purse and held it up as a prop. “We’re investigating a robbery. These were taken from a secure location that required substantial planning to access, so we know they were after a specific object.”
“A bank vault?” His colors lit up with the notion of a movie-style theft.
“Let’s go with that,” Rachel said, grinning, and began placing the rest of the replicas on the table. “I’m not at liberty to disclose the details.”
“A museum heist!” McCrindle made an eager sound. “How wonderful! When do you think the story will break? I can keep quiet for a week, but I can’t promise any longer than that.”
Rachel laughed. “One thing at a time. I’m just here to learn if you’ve had any customers interested in these pieces, or ones like them.”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “May I touch these?”
She slid the replicas towards him. McCrindle picked up the one closest to him, a bracelet shaped from a spray of flowers. “Plastic?”
“3D-printed replicas,” she replied, and then tapped that oddly-shaped sixth lump. “But this one is printed in metal.”
“Are these life-sized?”
“Yes.”
“Interesting technique,” he said. “Loses a lot of detail of the original piece, and the colors are terrible, but good enough for Show and Tell, right? I assume you’ve got photographs?”
Rachel called up the archivists’ records on her tablet, and McCrindle busied himself between the six objects and their dossiers. He was polite enough to not ask questions about the black lines running through certain facts, such as the donors’ and recipients’ names, or fish around for other clues.
She lost track of time as he worked, and allowed her scans to roam around the store. She found the raccoons—three of them, about ten days dead and ripe to the point of bursting—in the wall behind the buffalo’s head. By the door, an ordered wall of colored glass bowls glowed, lit by strands of LEDs running along the shelving. There were books by the hundreds in a dozen different display cabinets, and paintings and portraits and all manner of photographs covering every inch of exposed wall space.
Aside from the stench, the store felt warm and homey. It took her a moment to realize it reminded her of OACET headquarters.
“Okay,” McCrindle said. She turned her scans back to him, as he slid the metal object towards her. “This is what you’re looking for.”
“What?”
“To answer your question, no. I’ve had no customers asking after any of these items. But nobody would ask after any of these five,” he said, as he pushed the plastic objects aside.
“Why not? Our specialists tell us they might be rare collectables.”
“Oh, these are rare,” he said. “And precious, and valuable, and all of that horseshit. You can also get ones just like them through any good antiques broker. If you’re looking for something special…” he said, and slid the metal object towards Rachel, “…this is it.”
He looked into her eyes. “…but you already knew that.”
She glanced away as a reply.
He sighed, and rolled the object over the back of his fingers, like a magician with a misshapen coin. “It’s got a history, this does. Came from a shipwreck, the file says?”
Rachel nodded.
“Lots of things out there, at the bottom of the sea,” McCrindle said. He stood and made his way to a nearby floor safe, spun the dial and opened the lock, and returned with a bundle of white cotton cloth. He flipped a corner of the cloth back to show a piece of metal similar to the one already on the table.
“An orichalcum ingot,” he said, his professional blues moving within pleased pinks. “I’m holding it for a buyer. You might have heard about it—Plato mentioned orichalcum when he described Atlantis.”
“The entire circuit of the wall, which went round the outermost zone, they covered with a coating of brass, and the circuit of the next wall they coated with tin, and the third, which encompassed the citadel, flashed with the red light of orichalcum,” she said quietly. The ingot in the white cloth didn’t glow in the slightest, let alone flash with a red light, but Rachel was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
“You know Plato’s Critias?” McCrindle said, impressed, as he moved to return the ingot to his safe.
Shit. Rachel winced. She hadn’t introduced herself as an Agent, and hadn’t thought to censor herself before quoting the online text aloud.
McCrindle didn’t notice. “Not too many of these out there,” he said, yanking on the safe’s lever to make sure the door was locked. “They discovered about forty ingots off the coast of Sicily, and the rest have turned up here and there. Turns out this mythic metal is just an alloy mostly made from copper and zinc. The only thing that makes it special is its history.”
“So what’s this?” Rachel said, picking up her own piece of mystery metal. “Another orichalcum ingot?”
“I doubt it. It’s a part of something. Look here,” he said, and pulled up an image of the fragment on her tablet. “You see these jagged edges? Your piece broke off of something much larger. And it’s got writing on it.”
Rachel flipped the image around in her mind, but saw nothing resembling writing. “Ah, Mr. McCrindle…”
“Oscar, please,” he said. “Yes, that’s writing. The original fragment needs to be cleaned to bring out the details, but it’s definitely got an inscription on it. A big one, too. Covers the entire surface.”
“Hm,” Rachel muttered, her scans trying to penetrate beneath the surface of Jason’s metal printout. There was nothing there but more metal. If there was an inscription on the original, it hadn’t transferred to its clone.
“In my opinion, that’s why your museum got robbed,” he said. “The thief wanted this because of its history, or the inscription, or both. Although why your museum never bothered to clean it…”
“They didn’t keep this item on display,” Rachel answered.
“No excuse,” he grumbled to himself, and his colors moved to a self-satisfied pink as he gazed proudly at his spotless (albeit odorous) store. “All right then, can I do anything else for you?”
“Thanks, but you’ve been extremely helpful,” Rachel said. “If somebody does approach you to buy or sell, though, they’re dangerous. Don’t stall them. Just treat them like any other customer, get their contact information, and call me as soon as they’re gone.”
He nodded. “Of course. G
ot a card?”
This time, he saw her flinch, and his colors moved towards an uncertain orange-yellow, no doubt wondering to whom he had really been speaking (or, perhaps, what kind of murder-of-the-week scenario was about to unfold in his store). “Ah… Detective Peng?”
She passed him one of her business cards. “Agent Peng, actually.”
He blinked, a thread of curious yellow winding its way into his uncertainty, and then saw her title on the card. “Office of Adaptive and… Oh.” Sage green comprehension moved into his conversational colors, tempered with blue relief. “That’ll teach me to check a badge first. I thought you were about to…”
“I’m the OACET liaison to the MPD,” she said. “I get a lot of resistance when I introduce myself with my full title.” Oscar McCrindle seemed like a good person; she supposed she could run the “Yes, I really am a cyborg” gauntlet for him.
“I’ve always wanted to meet a—an OACET. I mean, meet an Agent…”
“It’s okay,” she assured him. “I get this a lot.”
McCrindle laughed, a little nervously. “I should’ve guessed when you knew the Critias. Nobody’s bothered to memorize that in millennia. Were you reading that aloud?”
“Yeah. But to be fair, I have read it a few times,” she said. “I love poetry, and my mom’s an architect. It’s hard to beat Plato for stupid-long flowery descriptions of buildings.”
“Huh,” he grunted. He looked down at her card again, and the sage green came back in a strong surge of color. “I didn’t recognize your name at first. You’re the one who stole the owl.”
It took her a little time to work that one through. She had performed many a questionable deed in her twenty-eight years, but she was sure she’d remember—“Oh! The wooden owl from the coffee shop?”
“Yes. When you walked off with it, you caused a bit of a fuss in the local antiques community. Do you still have it?”
Of course Rachel still had it. Madeline was the only personal item on her office desk, a memento of her and Santino’s first successful case. With Jason’s help, she had digitized every single carved claw and feather, and turned Madeline into her personal animal avatar. But she just nodded and said, “Yes. It’s safe.”
“Good,” McCrindle said. “It’s got an amazing story, if you’d like to hear it.”
She was sorely tempted, but she already knew her owl had history. It had been beautiful, once upon a time. Most of its paint had been rubbed off through misuse, and there was a shallow scar down its left side that looked as if a chainsaw had made a pass at it and barely missed. Teeth marks on its base suggested it had been used as a chew toy for a large dog, or maybe a small lion. It had suffered water damage and erosion and all manner of abuse, but the old wood was still rock-hard and had kept itself intact. No matter what it had endured, it was still an owl.
“No,” Rachel said. “It’s got a new story now.”
His conversational colors began weaving her Southwestern turquoise into the sage greens: McCrindle was trying to figure her out. “Interesting,” he said. “Not what someone in my line of work likes to hear, though. Things without stories are just things. It’s the pieces which form the wholes.”
“Maybe I’ll come back,” Rachel told him, and as soon as she had said it, she realized she would be back. In fact, she knew she’d be back within the week with a court order, a crowbar, and the professional trauma cleaning service the MPD used after an especially morbid crime scene.
“Anytime,” he said, his colors a warm and friendly yellow.
SIX
Sunday was one of those bright days in early spring that brought the entire city out of hibernation. Washington D.C. was a place of parks and open spaces: on a weekend such as this, the first truly warm weekend of the year, there were farmers’ markets and bicycle races and streets jammed to full with food trucks and their happy customers. The cherry blossom festival was still a few weeks away, but the tourists were already beginning to arrive, smiling from their unexpected sunshine shots of Vitamin D.
If you were a murderer wanted by the Secret Service, you could do worse than to plan your getaway on such a Sunday.
They couldn’t be sure their suspect hadn’t left the city. Due diligence with security footage from the usual places—airports, bus stops, rental car companies, highways, traffic cameras, and the like—hadn’t pinned her down. But their suspect had already proven she was good with makeup, so it was anyone’s guess as to whether they were wasting their time looking for a fiery thirty-something when they should have been searching for a tottering grandmother.
Alimoren had decided to act as if the suspect was still in town. The FBI was chasing out-of-state and international leads, but unless their suspect was also counterfeiting hundred-dollar bills, Alimoren had little authority to pursue an arrest outside of the city limits. He had rallied his staff and the MPD, and had begun a localized manhunt.
(Rachel was sure the suspect had thrown on a new identity and driven straight to Manhattan as soon as she left the White House, but nobody had asked her opinion, and she was pretty sure Alimoren shared it.)
They had set up their operations office in a hotel conference room. As logistics went, a hotel in downtown D.C. was more centrally located than the Secret Service’s headquarters out by the Anacostia River, or even the MPD’s flagship building on Indiana Avenue. The hotel district near Embassy Row allowed easy access to museums, subways, parks, shopping and fine dining…all the usual places a savvy criminal might decide to use as her smokescreen.
Plus, convenient on-site parking. Even the White House didn’t offer that.
Rachel had her feet up on a table, and was enjoying a good cup of coffee and her third cinnamon bun. Hill was sprawled in the chair beside hers, a baseball cap pulled low as he pretended to catnap. The two of them had agreed hours ago that a catered stakeout was by far the best kind of stakeout. Sit back and let the computers do all the work? Yes, please!
A couple of feet away was a bank of monitors that had been set up on folding tables. Jason Atran, sitting in his own office across the city, was coaching a digital imaging specialist from the MPD in how to use his own proprietary blend of facial recognition software.
“—knew how to use it, we’d be done by now.”
Rachel moved her attention from the cinnamon bun to the MPD’s specialist, who was slowly turning red with suppressed rage. “Yes, but—” the specialist began.
“Listen,” Jason said, his voice as crisp within the room as if he had been standing there (which he was, but only Rachel could see his avatar as it stomped around and fumed in bright green). “You’re used to shit software any monkey can program. Mine requires a brain to use.”
“Gonna do something?” Hill rumbled softly.
“Nope,” Rachel said, much more loudly. “I’m not his mom. If he wants to be an asshole and alienate his coworkers, then he can deal with the fallout.”
Jason’s avatar scowled at her, but he took a breath and nodded. The Jason on the monitor then said, “Sorry. Okay. Let’s try this again. Normal facial recognition systems uses established facial features and comparing them to an existing database. You’re using older methods. Statistical algorithms, mostly. Your program examines features, such as the space between the eyes, the contours of the face…mostly single-vector items. You can trick the system if you’re smart and good with makeup, which we know your suspect is. So, you need to use my software, which doesn’t rely on those older algorithms.”
“We can’t use better software,” the specialist said. Her reds were fading, but orange was moving up to replace them: she wasn’t as angry at Jason as she was at the resources provided to her by the MPD. “The software’s not the problem—the problem is the cameras. Some of our traffic cameras haven’t been replaced in a decade. Why should we invest in 3D or imaging software when the cameras have poor resolution?”
“That’s why you need my software,” Jason said. “There are more cameras now than there were when your progr
ams were written. Mine bundles two or more perspectives into the same image.”
The MPD’s digital specialist leaned towards the screen so quickly her folding chair nearly shot out from under her. “So you’ve got multiple cameras working simultaneously—”
“Yes,” Jason said, his old grin peeking around the edges. “I can trick old cameras into generating 3D images. But it requires an insane amount of processing power, so if you can help me pick out no more than ten likely sites…”
Rachel, reassured that Jason wasn’t about to do any new damage to OACET’s reputation, went back to ignoring him. She let her scans sweep through the walls, and into the hotel lobby. She watched as excitable travelers and bored employees shifted into distinctive pops of color. Not for the first time, she wished core and conversational colors showed up on camera: it’d be relatively easy to pick out a suspect based on a core color, and much harder to conceal a core by changing a wardrobe or a face.
Maybe in a couple of years, she thought to herself. Get Mako to figure out exactly how I perceive colors, and get him to replicate that frequency…
But if she did that, then she’d have to disclose that she also perceived emotions, and if she did that, then there’d be a mad rush on assessing the extent of her abilities, and how these applied to the Fourth Amendment, and whether she violated personal privacy, and…and…
Maybe in a couple of centuries.
“Mako says he wants you to drop by his office,” Hill said.
“How do you do that?” she asked him. “I was just thinking about him.”
“Psychic.”
“Come on.”
He smiled. “You’re easy to read.”
That, she believed. “What does he want?”
Hill shrugged.
“Right.” Mako Hill couldn’t be more different than his cousin. For one thing, Mako actually enjoyed talking. She nearly reached out through the link to ping the other Agent and ask him what he wanted, but stopped herself in time: she wasn’t quite ready to turn her day over to incomprehensible mathematical formulae.
State Machine Page 7
