Rachel had no idea what to do with them. What would probably happen was she’d fill a garbage bag and leave them on the checkout counter of the local Goodwill without saying a word, but that seemed a tremendous waste. She was playing with the idea of waiting until Christmas and conscripting as many uniformed officers as she could find into her formal escort, and marching them in parade formation to the local mall. Then, she would walk up to Santa, present him with a sack full of penguins, and order him in her best drill sergeant voice to “Give these to the little children!”
Really, when you had a desk full of penguins, the opportunities were endless.
Her subconscious nudged her away from the toys as she spotted something out of the corner of her mind. An almost-familiar core of tropical storm clouds split by lightning jostled its way down the hall.
“What on…” Rachel sent her scans through the walls. Yup, she thought.
“Hm?”
“Unless I’m very wrong—and I hope I am— Jonathan Dunstan is coming to visit us.”
“No shit?” Santino quickly moved his sandwich to the bottom drawer on his desk. Rachel followed his example and started cleaning at hummingbird speed. Even Madeline was shoved behind the curtains for safekeeping. By the time Dunstan was readying himself to knock on their door, the room had been stripped of personality; the only information Dunstan could carry back to Hanlon would be that one of them really liked plants.
“What do you want, Dunstan?” Rachel shouted as the reporter raised his hand to knock.
“I… Can I come in?”
Rachel and Santino exchanged a nasty look. “Sure,” Santino said. “Be our guest.”
Dunstan’s conversational colors were slightly gray as he entered: he wasn’t happy about being there. She noted he wasn’t surprised by Santino’s pocket jungle, and she was instantly furious—anyone who hadn’t been warned about such an impossibly stupid number of plants in one small office couldn’t not be surprised! Someone from First MPD had been keeping tabs on them for Hanlon.
“What do you want?” Rachel asked him a second time, and reached out to the OACET community server to record the conversation.
“This is hard for me,” Dunstan said. “I… You know who I… Occasionally, I do some work with…”
“You’re Hanlon’s lapdog,” she snapped. “We know.”
Dunstan tried to pace the length of the office as he arranged his words. Rachel watched her core of southwestern turquoise and Santino’s cobalt blue trip over themselves within a complicated tangle of colors.
“It’s okay,” she said to Dunstan in her best false-honeyed voice. “Just take your time and you’ll remember what he told you to say.”
He flashed yellow-white in surprise. “I came here on my own!” he snapped.
Liar, she thought, as the pockmarks appeared across Dunstan’s shoulders and temples.
“Fine. What is it you want us to know?” Santino asked.
“Nice phrasing!” she said appreciatively.
“Thank you.”
Dunstan’s colors started to roll with red loathing. “I’m here because I’ve got proof that Homeland’s responsible for Gayle Street,” he said. “If you don’t want to hear it—”
“No no,” Rachel said, launching to her feet. “Sit. Please.”
She let Dunstan take her chair, and she and Santino fawned over him for a minute or two before her partner asked, “What proof?”
“I can’t just hand it over,” Dunstan said. “You know that’s not how this works. But… Agent Peng? You know how you told me to think about what side I wanted to be on? Well…”
“Some things you can’t ignore,” she said, shaking her head sadly.
“Right. We need to bring those who destroyed Gayle Street to justice. So… Let’s say I got a hot tip about when and how those canisters went missing, and I’ve got the documentation to prove it. If OACET is willing to commit to going after Homeland—”
Rachel cut Dunstan off. “Don’t say anything else,” she told him. “Not right now. Not until I’ve had a chance to talk to Administration.”
“But…”
“No,” she said, shooing Dunstan out of the room. “Mulcahy or Glassman will be in touch, I promise. This is simply over my head.”
“But I just got here!” Dunstan stuttered in protest, as Rachel shut the door in his face.
Santino hummed the Jeopardy! theme, exactly thirty seconds long, while Rachel watched Dunstan slither his way down the hall.
“Lying?” Santino asked her when his countdown ended.
“Like a rug made of pants on fire,” Rachel said. “I chased him out of here because he was wasting our time.”
“Yeah,” Santino sighed, his colors a wistful purple-gray. Rachel felt the same: if it had been a normal day, they would have played with Dunstan like cats given a half-dead mouse. “Why the hell does he want OACET to go chasing after Homeland?”
“To discredit OACET, maybe break our alliance with the MPD as a bonus,” she said. It was becoming a familiar refrain: she was almost relieved to learn that Hanlon was a one-trick pony. “You and I go screaming after the government, Hanlon wrings his hands and says ‘I told you those people were nuts…’ God, what a bastard he is, trying to use something like Gayle Street to his advantage.”
“Does that mean Hanlon knows who did it?”
Rachel weighed that idea, then said, “Probably not. Except he doesn’t have evidence which might incriminate Homeland—there’s no way Hanlon would give us a lead that would actually benefit us.”
“What if he’s got the opposite? What if he’s got evidence which clears Homeland? Think he’d use that?”
“Oh yeah, definitely. Set OACET up to look like idiots, then drop the evidence to clear Homeland? One-two punch for him.”
She recovered Madeline and returned the owl to its place of honor in the center of her desk. It was too large for the space, but Rachel had developed a habit of touching it when she was thinking. She reached out to stroke the time-worn wood of Madeline’s beak. It had been polished by time and casual hands, and she wondered how many people before her had petted the owl for comfort.
“Did we make any progress today?” she asked Santino.
He shrugged. “We know how McElroy and Reeves died,” he said. “And, thanks to Dunstan, we know Homeland isn’t responsible, but we can’t prove it.”
“And we know our guy was an amateur.”
“At using a gun? Definitely. But he did manage to blow up an entire street and get away clean. You can’t call someone like that an amateur.”
Different types of intelligence, Rachel thought, running her thumb over the owl’s carved feathers. A person smart enough to set up a bomb, but not skilled enough to pull off the other parts of a successful crime. She mulled that over, then said, “That’s what I don’t understand—why did he go back to the coffee shop? We had already pieced together enough about the bombs from fragments to know how they worked and where the source material came from. There was no reason for him to recover that canister.”
She sighed. “If we don’t catch a huge break soon, he’ll have not only pulled off one of the top three deadliest terrorist attacks on American soil, but got away clean after the fact.”
“Oklahoma City, September 11… What about the Boston Marathon?”
“The Boston Marathon bombings killed three people. Three. Yeah, a couple hundred were injured and it shut the city down for a week, but that was the best those schmucks could do with some pressure cookers. Gayle Street is… It was a huge and incredibly efficient bombing, but everything since then has been sloppy. I mean, he couldn’t even dump a car in a river properly.”
“Additional proof that one guy did this,” Santino said. “Just one guy. Someone who was great at building and hiding bombs, and lousy at everything else.”
Hearing Santino say it aloud sealed it as fact; Rachel’s relief was so intense she sighed and slumped forward on her desk. I knew this was another set-up.
I just knew it. I…
“Oh shit,” she said aloud, as she snapped upright in her chair. “Did what happened in August cause Gayle Street?”
“Hm?”
“Hidden bombs, set-ups, conspiracies…”
“No,” Santino said, digging through his desk drawers as he restored their office to normal. “That’s one thing we can be sure of—nobody’s come forward to say they noticed a dude from the gas company installing weird equipment in their stores. Those canisters had to have been in place since the last time the gas lines were refitted in that part of town, and that was around two years ago.”
“Maybe everyone who knew a different story died in the explosions.”
“Maybe. Unlikely, though.”
They both trailed off, poking at their own ideas. Rachel dropped her head on top of her desk again, and sighed.
Why is this never easy? she thought. She rested her chin on her closed fist and pulled Madeline towards her with her bad hand. One guy. Just one. He can blow up a street like a pro, but he can’t kill when he’s face-to-face with his victims…
She stared into the owl’s eyes, resisting the urge to flick the rest of the yellow paint from its irises with her thumbnail. The paint had been there for fifty years, easy; she had no right to hurry the owl along into entropy.
Entropy… Nothing…
We have no motive. And because of that…
Because of that, their most likely suspect was Homeland.
Or was it? She knew it wasn’t Homeland; so did Santino. So did Hanlon. And so did everyone else working the case, really… Even Sergeant Andrews, angry as he might be, didn’t consider Homeland to be a suspect as much as an institutionalized barrier to the investigation.
Because we’re so fucking egotistical that we think the only one clever enough to pull something like this off is our own government.
“Santino?” She shoved Madeline away from her. “Who benefits from chaos?”
“Hm?”
“Say Josh is right and Gayle Street becomes the tipping point for the middle class. Who would benefit from the change in the status quo?”
“Oh jeez… Politicians, anarchists, the upper and lower classes, the military… I can give you a historical background and rationale for each of those—”
“Please don’t.”
“—but it really comes down to anyone who hates the existing system, and thinks it needs to be shaken up if it’s to be changed.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Rachel said, as she pushed Madeline away from her and reached for Santino’s desk phone. “It’s time to call my golfing buddy.”
FIFTEEN
“HOW ARE YOU DOING?”
Santino took a deep breath, and replied with a whispered, “Interesting place you feds have here.”
“Don’t blame me for this. I would have commandeered a high school gym.”
Santino forced a chuckle. He was doing his best to pretend he was Anywhere Else, his hands buried deep in his pockets, his conversational colors firmly set in the crisp window-cleaner blue that meant he was powering through his OCD. As for herself, Rachel was glad her new boots came up to slightly below her knees: judging from the graffiti on the walls and the somewhat sticky stains slopped across the floor, the Department of Homeland Security had leased this site from the local teenage potheads.
In the movies, when law enforcement needed more space for their investigations, they moved to an airport hangar or the floor of the local coliseum. As a staging element, this made nothing but sense: the camera loved the drama of those little specks of character far, far below.
The reality was much less poetic. Law enforcement got what was available. Abandoned big-box stores usually made the top of the list: the rent was dirt-cheap and the size was almost on par with that of the mythical airport hangar—you didn’t appreciate how big the physical space of a building could be until the mess inside of it had been removed—even if it didn’t come with the same level of visual romance. Judging by the pile of broken crockery swept against a nearby support post, Rachel was fairly sure they was standing where the housewares section used to be.
Brown plastic tarps covered the cracked linoleum floors, held down at the edges with long strips of silvery duct tape. The residue of Gayle Street had been spread out on the tarps; each site was defined by its address, all materials that might be related to the bombing placed on the corresponding tarps for processing. When a specialist found an overlooked item that might be part of the bombs, it was dropped into a sterile plastic box and whisked away to safety. The rest of the mess was all fragments and stray pieces of what might have been evidence but was most likely garbage: what was left of the barista counters rearranged to show the direction of the blast; the scraps of tabletops and chairs laid out in a parody of seating; the personal effects of the victims.
Too many of those, Rachel thought, her scans brushing across the charred cover of a Hello Kitty day planner. She reminded herself that young children have no need for day planners, and kept walking.
Her golfing buddy had come through. As soon as she had arrived at work that morning, Judge Edwards’ office had called her and let her know that the warrant had been issued. Homeland Security was required to turn over all documentation that might help the MPD locate how, when, and where the canisters used to make the bombs had gone astray. When the paperwork had failed to arrive by lunchtime, Rachel had placed a call to a disgruntled security chief over at Homeland. The chief had done some stonewalling, and then done some yelling, adding more than a few veiled threats against the MPD and OACET, and finally ended with several specific insults leveled at Rachel herself. Receiving a warrant was one thing, complying with it was another, and the security chief expressed several interesting strategies she could use to dispose of a warrant issued by a lowly D.C. Circuit Court judge.
After she had placed Santino’s desk phone back in its cradle, Rachel started reaching out to every person and organization she knew who was directly involved in Gayle Street. She quickly learned that Homeland had been doing quite a lot of stonewalling: even Special Agent Campbell said his team hadn’t received clearance to the site where the evidence had been stored.
(That news had sent shivers down her spine. Campbell worked with the Joint Terrorism Task Force; as such his team was integrated into the Department of Homeland Security. When she had spoken with Campbell the previous evening, she had assumed that he already had everything Homeland had on Gayle Street. Learning that the FBI was as thoroughly locked out as the MPD had caused her to doubt—just for a moment—her conviction that Homeland wasn’t behind the attacks. And then Rachel had remembered how the government worked, the closet bickering and in-fighting and territoriality that locked the system into an unmoving lump of frozen parts, and she felt both better and worse about the entire mess.)
Rachel had no problem playing by the rules. If Homeland was going to use perfectly legal tactics to keep the MPD from making progress, she would be happy to waste an hour or two to show them that turnabout was unfair play. By the time she and Santino had arrived at what had once been a booming strip mall, a caravan of forty police cars, black SUVs, and specialist vans were making their way through the back streets of D.C.’s rougher suburbs to join them.
She had marched in through the sliding doors, her new boots drumming a military march against the water-stained floor, Santino beside her, and several other members of the MPD bringing up the rear. The armed guards stationed at the entrance had tried to block them, but the green and gold badge at her waist had its advantages: in the extended family of the U.S. government, OACET was accountable to no one.
She had signed herself into the roster as Agent Rachel Peng, OACET, plus guests. At last count, more than a hundred people in all walks of law enforcement had used her to gain access to the site, and more were arriving by the minute.
Now, Rachel and Santino were taking themselves on a slow tour of the building while they waited for a ranking official from Homeland to sho
w up and yell at her.
For once, she didn’t feel alone against the world. There was Santino at her side, of course, but two other Agents were picking through the mess in different corners of the building. Phil was there with Sergeant Andrews and several other members of the MPD’s bomb unit, as was one of the Agents serving as a temporary liaison to the FBI.
“Rachel?”
“Phil wants us,” she told Santino, and they began to creep around the various teams to reach him.
She was thrilled to see the pops of joyous yellow among those combing through the debris. Whatever had motivated Homeland to seal off access to the evidence had done more than slow down the investigation; it had also broken the camaraderie that had united the different law enforcement teams who were working Gayle Street. Rachel had known the investigation had stalled, but she hadn’t realized that the primary reason was Homeland itself.
Sturtevant couldn’t have known, she thought to herself. Just coincidence, how I’d be needed to come in here and break the stalemate. Really.
Rachel decided to bring the Chief of Detectives a good bottle of Scotch, for no reason. Really.
They crossed the length of the old store to reach Phil. The MPD’s bomb unit had taken a position near the front of the building, picking through pieces laid out across multiple tarps. She flipped her implant to reading mode and saw that each tarp in Phil’s section had the same address from Gayle Street scrawled across the linoleum beside it in black permanent marker.
“Well, that’s not coming off,” she muttered under her breath.
“That’s okay.” Santino had heard her. “I’ll remind Homeland to burn this place behind them when they move out.”
The men from the MPD’s bomb unit greeted them, and Phil nodded curtly at her as she and Santino reached him. He hadn’t worked through his anger from the previous night, but Phil was a professional; his conversational colors showed her turquoise core wrapped tight in reds, set aside to deal with later. He was also yellow-white with excitement as he knelt by the edge of a tarp, a thin metal probe in his hand.
Maker Space Page 23
