Rachel shushed him. “Don’t talk. Stay still. You’ve got—” She paused, and ran a scan through his body. Her new medical diagnostic autoscript gave her an itemized injury report. “—fractured ribs, a diaphragmatic hernia, and serious damage to your brachial plexus.”
Santino’s eyebrows went up. Rachel wished the physician who had written that autoscript had thought to add layman’s terms; she was sure she had butchered the clinical pronunciations, and rather hoped Santino wouldn’t ask her to explain the diagnosis.
The man coughed and then twisted, trying to protect his broken self. Santino tried to hold the man down by his shoulders, and he screamed at Santino’s touch.
“I’m getting your wallet out,” Rachel told the man, swatting Santino away. “We need to give your name and any medical information to the EMTs.” She slipped her hand into what was left of the man’s jacket. His wallet, thick brown leather, had survived. She drew it from his pocket as carefully as she could, and flipped it open.
“Jordan Meisner? Hey, Jordan,” she said, handing his wallet to Santino. “You hear that? The truck driving up? That’s your ambulance. You’ll be resting on a morphine cloud before you know it.”
The burned skin around Meisner’s mouth twitched, his colors brightened ever so slightly. “Morphine,” he whispered. “…heard good things…”
The EMTs arrived with shouting and shouldering, and Rachel and Santino were almost ten feet away from the victim before they knew it. They watched as an ambulance was let through the barricades, and then waited until the man was loaded inside before they turned back to the buildings.
“Aw hell,” Santino muttered.
“What?”
He held up Meisner’s wallet. “They took his license and insurance card. I didn’t even think about it when the EMT handed the rest back to me.”
Rachel opened her voluminous handbag and her partner tossed the wallet inside. “We can drop it off at the hospital. I’d like to follow up with that guy, anyhow, see if he’s going to pull through. I’d like to think we saved one.”
“We’ve still got another few blocks after this,” Santino said.
Rachel nodded. They started walking again, their black mood wearing lighter.
“Do you know what you said back there? Because I sure don’t.”
“Shut up.”
“No, really,” Santino said, waving a hand as if searching for a thought. “I think you told him he’s got soft tissue and nerve damage, but you might have been listing car models. It’s hard to be sure.”
“Not all of us are overeducated nerds, Santino.”
“Obviously.”
She casually stepped on the back of his shoe, then sped up ever so slightly so he’d have to shuffle behind her to fix his flat tire.
Good. His grays had taken on a very small tint of purple. She was sure hers had changed, too; she’d have to bring Phil up to speed on reading human emotions so he could check her own colors for her.
She was the only OACET Agent who could perceive the emotional spectrum. Jenny Davies, the physician who had developed the diagnostic autoscript, had a pet theory that moods had different wavelengths or frequencies, like color or sound, and that these were part of the electromagnetic spectrum. (Once, Jenny had asked Rachel to write down those emotions she could name—yellow for fright, blue for calm, and so on—and Rachel had invited Jenny over to see her kitchen. Jenny had taken Rachel up on her offer, and… Well. Jenny had let the subject drop after that.) But Rachel couldn’t see her own colors, and sometimes grumbled over the circular irony of her own emotional state remaining inaccessible to herself.
The next block in the chain was the busiest. This had been the largest payload, and the buildings had sustained the greatest damage. But, happily, this was also the site of the fewest casualties; the firefighters were still trying to put out the blaze, but the paramedics were standing to either side, unneeded. She made a mental note to find out why.
“What was this place?” Rachel asked.
“Bookstore,” Santino answered automatically. The purple hue was gone. “They had a great gardening section.”
“Was there a café, too?” She scanned the burning hull, unable to find anything other than hollow spaces where paper and wood had once been.
“Yeah.”
She ran her mind up and down the street, foot tapping on the pavement.
“What?” her partner asked.
“You know Disneyland?”
The purples in his conversational colors returned. “I might have heard of it. Little place out in California, right?”
Rachel ignored him and pushed on. “Have you heard the story of how Walt Disney spaced out the refreshment stands?” She threw a scan over her shoulder and spaced the distance between the bookstore and where they had found Meisner. “He was having a business meeting in the park, right before it opened. He bought an ice cream cone at one stand, and he and his buddies walked along while he ate it…”
“… and when he had finished the cone, he told them, ‘Put another refreshment stand right here,’” Santino finished for her. “I’m not sure if that really happened or if it’s apocryphal.”
“Small words, Santino,” she said. “Normal human beings use small words.”
“You don’t get to lecture me on what’s normal,” he said, as he grinned at her. “Anyway. What’s your point? That the bad guys dropped a bomb every time they finished an ice cream cone?”
“No,” she said. “Maybe. Just a stray thought. They had to pick their targets somehow. If they were trying to do as much damage as possible, easy walking distance between those shops might figure into it.”
“It’s not our job to figure that out,” he said.
“Oh, you wide-eyed innocent,” she said as they moved towards the next site. “When bombs are involved, it’s everybody’s job.”
FOUR
A BOMBING WAS LIKE THE murder of a family member: even if the two of you weren’t exactly close, it still shut down your routine. When a bombing occurred, every schedule, every plan, got pushed aside, and the many clans of law enforcement would come together and put aside their differences to avenge the dead.
Rachel and Santino knew they were decidedly second cousins, at best. They had been allowed on site to search for the living, and once she confirmed all survivors had been located, they were told to leave. Politely, to be sure; Rachel’s discovery of Meisner had led to friendly nods and high-fives all around, but now that their job was done, she and Santino were in the way. Santino passed out their new business cards, the FBI and Homeland and the rest promised to keep in touch, and each pretended they wouldn’t immediately forget the other until the next time someone needed a favor.
“Lunch?” she asked her partner as they crossed the first checkpoint.
“After that?” Santino was horrified.
“They’re dead. We’re not.” Rachel shrugged. “Life requires food.”
“I used to shop at that bookstore,” he said wearily.
There was nothing she could say to that.
As they walked back to his car, they saw Detectives Matt Hill and Jacob Zockinski waiting for them on the far side of the barricade. Their colors brightened when Rachel and Santino came into view, but they kept themselves to tight nods; homicide detectives were, by definition, too cool to wave.
“Got called in?” Santino asked them.
No,” Zockinski said, shaking his head. “We were told…” he said, and his voice dropped an octave to mimic that of Edward Sturtevant, their Chief of Detectives: “‘Get down there, find the Agents, and make yourselves useful.’”
“Aw, that’s so sweet,” she said. “Sturtevant thinks we need you.”
“Hey, he said useful. Maybe he meant we should arrest you before you make things worse.”
“Not one word,” she said to Santino, who pantomimed zipping his lips.
Zockinski and Hill had worked with them a couple of times since the four of them had gone hunting sociop
aths back in August. Zockinski had seniority; he was older than Hill by a few years, and he had been with the MPD the longest of the four of them. Hill was an up-and-comer in Homicide, and Rachel considered him a distant relative; Hill had recently reunited with a cousin in OACET, which made him kin.
“What’s the damage?” Hill asked her, nodding towards the far side of the street.
“Nothing you haven’t seen before,” she told him. Hill had served in Iraq and Afghanistan a few years before her. They never spoke about what they had done when they were over there, but she knew his unit had been one of the first on the ground and she had drawn her own conclusions. “But not stateside.”
Hill’s colors folded in on themselves in a purple-gray sigh. “This is going to change a lot of things around here.”
The four of them turned towards the U.S. Capitol, not quite a mile away but hidden from sight by the city.
“Right on their doorstep,” Santino said. “Coincidence? Anybody?”
No one bothered to answer.
“Are we using the T-word?” Rachel asked.
“Terrorism?” Zockinski snorted. “Of course. When was the last time we had an event like this and didn’t call it terrorism?”
“When it was committed by a white guy?” Rachel replied, and Hill chuckled.
Santino and Zockinski, both white guys by way of different shores of the Mediterranean, ignored them. “Did anyone report a bomb threat?” Santino asked.
“No.” Hill crossed his arms and tilted his head towards the Capitol. “Nothing, unless Homeland is playing it tight.”
“They wouldn’t,” Rachel said, and shook her head. “Not with something like this, unless you believe the conspiracy theorists.” Hill raised an eyebrow, so she added, “You know, the ones who say the War on Terror is finally winding down, so there’ll be a staged attack to drum up renewed support, funding…”
Hill glanced back towards the street, then met Rachel’s eyes. She shrugged to say: That’s not a conversation for today. There be dragons in it.
“Who’s taking credit?” Santino asked.
“So far? Everyone,” Zockinski said. “If an organization has a black band on its file, they’ve claimed responsibility.”
“Great,” Rachel said. “They’re going to make us flip this town upside down as payback.”
“Who?” Zockinski asked. “Terrorists?”
Rachel pointed in the direction of Capitol Hill, and started walking the other way.
The three men followed her. Lucky for her, really. She had no idea what she was doing or where she was going, but with the others in tow she felt as though she had a sense of purpose.
She was not, however, fooling them; they had barely taken ten steps before they realized they were wandering aimlessly. A bomb scene on the other side of the buildings and they had no direction… Well, isn’t that annoyingly symbolic? Rachel muttered to herself. Let’s just knock that off right now.
“So,” Zockinski said, as if reading her mind. “Do we head back to First?”
They all glanced back over their shoulders towards their cars, then the crowd, and down the street to where traffic was a thick smear of taillights. Ah, logistics, Rachel thought. First District Station was within walking distance but annoyingly so, and the Metro lines had been shut down due to the bombings.
“No, but let’s not stand around here,” Rachel said. Her stomach pinched a reminder, and she shot a cold glare at her partner. It would be so much easier if he had an implant. She had to rely on body language to communicate how if he didn’t feed her soon, she would be forced to kill and eat him.
“We could,” Santino said, “wait at that pizza place a few blocks over.”
Oh thank God. Rachel sighed, as the others agreed.
She didn’t know whether the restaurant would be empty or packed with tourists and ambulance chasers waiting for an opening. It was neither; most of the other patrons were in law enforcement themselves, killing time while the first responders finished the rescue and recovery phase. Once the last of the victims had been removed and the structural damage assessed, the scene would be turned over for evidence collection and processing. Until then, the forensics teams had little to do—at least, those who worked with buildings instead of bodies.
They snagged a booth near a window and pretended to talk about sports. Nobody’s heart was in it, and their eyes kept wandering towards the street to watch the people walking by, the men and women too wide-eyed and alert, the couples holding each other a little too close.
Too much red or too much gray, and no joy anywhere: even on the rainiest day, there were always dots of happy yellow in the crowd. Rachel sighed and flipped off the emotional spectrum. It was a decision she regretted almost immediately, as no sooner did their food arrive than Edward Sturtevant walked in and headed straight for their table.
The men glared at her: she was almost always able to give them some warning before the Chief of Detectives dropped in on them. She gave a small one-shouldered shrug. Sorry guys, dropped the ball. Outside of OACET, only Santino knew she identified people by their core colors instead of their physical characteristics, and she rarely bothered to tell him when she turned off emotions.
Core colors were unique to each person. These formed the center of their selves, and were almost always unchanging; when these cores did change, the change seemed to reflect a permanent change within the self. Sturtevant’s core had been a dark burnished gold since the day she had met him; the color suited him. It was solid, official, and had earned a rough patina by rite of time and experience. She flipped the emotional spectrum on, and this dark gold core appeared, surrounded by a layer of what Rachel referred to as conversational colors. These floated just at the surface; conversational colors reflected a person’s mood, and were thus always changing and in motion. Right now, Sturtevant’s surface colors were so dark they were nearly black.
Rachel was still learning which mood was accompanied by which color, but she was pretty sure she had nailed down black.
Sturtevant stopped at the edge of the booth and looked down at them, and the three MPD officers scrambled to find him a chair.
Rachel stayed in her seat and gave him a jolly little wave.
“That thing you can do…” he told her. “Do it. But let them see us.”
She usually hated ambiguous orders, but this time Sturtevant had his reasons. Rachel nodded, and flipped off visuals to concentrate. When it came to playing with frequencies, she was the best Agent in OACET by an enormous margin, but what the Chief was asking required a hell of a lot of concentration.
A bubble. A bubble large enough to seal the table away, to block any and all surveillance devices before they could record their conversation? Easy enough. But one which let them be seen and not heard, that was a trick and a half. Patrick Mulcahy, head of OACET, had shown her how to block frequencies by running what was essentially a series of scans, but his method was too crude, a shield built from scraps of stray frequencies and shoved into place to repel or scramble most of the major EMF frequencies before they could reach him.
No thank you. No generic all-purpose barriers for her. She had decided that if blocking frequencies was just another type of scan, she was going to master it.
She let her mind slip into the pizza parlor, gathering specific frequencies together like picking strands of woven silk from the air. Each time she did this, the frequencies needed to be different. There would always be radio—that was a given, there was almost never a time when she didn’t use radio—but radio was a massive thing in and of itself. She had to pick out how and why radio should be used, and blend it into those other frequencies she selected to block, to counter, to screen…
Well. She was a cop. She loved puzzles.
An opaque silver sphere, invisible to everyone but her, wrapped around the table. She was smack dab in its middle, but that was mostly for convenience; trial and error had shown her that she could throw this sphere wherever she damn well pleased, and it
would work just as well without her pretending to be the center of its universe.
Rachel opened her eyes and flipped on visuals.
“We good?” Sturtevant asked. She nodded. “Good,” Sturtevant said, then turned to Zockinski. “How are the kids?”
They killed a few minutes discussing Zockinski’s twin daughters until anyone who might be eavesdropping from the nearby tables would be thoroughly bored, and then Sturtevant said: “We’ve been expecting this for a while.”
They all shut up, except Rachel. “Who’s ‘we’?”
“The MPD, the Feds, everybody. It’s so fucking easy to walk into a coffee shop and blow it up,” Sturtevant said, his conversational colors slipping into furious reds as he spoke. “It was just a matter of time.”
Agreement all around; the four of them had sat through the preparedness scenarios and those endless repetitive drills.
“We were expecting an asshole with a backpack bomb,” Sturtevant said. “Nobody expected a coordinated attack over a fourteen-block stretch in downtown D.C.”
He was quiet for a few moments, lines of red snapping through the black like thin whips. “I don’t like it,” he finally said. “It doesn’t play right. This isn’t a bunch of idiot kids with pressure cookers, and there’s been no chatter to suggest it’s an organization. This is…”
“Surgical,” said Hill.
“Yes,” Sturtevant agreed. “Surgical. Good word. If an organization is behind this, it’s a new phase in how they operate. If it’s not an organization…”
“Oh, shit. Military,” Rachel said, snapping upright. “You think this is military?”
“An attack by a foreign national on our soil?” Sturtevant said. “That’s worst-case scenario. That’s absolute worst-case scenario. And right now, it’s an option.”
“Can we not jump straight to the scenario that puts us in a war?” Santino said, “Just because this is the first time it’s been big and clean doesn’t mean a foreign power’s behind it. There are zealots out there, and there are people who know how to build very good explosive devices. It was just a matter of time before those two came together.”
Maker Space Page 3
