“That applies to everything after the coffee shop, too,” Rachel said, as she used an old piece of tape to tack up a map of a section of the Potomac River, a bright blue circle ringing the spot where the officers’ car had been located. “The dump site was off of a main road, in a popular boating area. Could you pick a worse place?
“And he chucked the gun down the storm drain,” Rachel finished. “Less than a block from the site. Do we really think our guy is this stupid?”
Even Bell nodded at that, but Zockinski was still pushing back. “He could have panicked,” he said. “He goes back to the coffee shop to retrieve the canister—”
“There was no evidence to suggest a canister was ever in that store,” Rachel interrupted. “No scuff or drag marks in the dust, no scraps of pipe on the floor. Just a crimped gas line to suggest something had been removed. That’s another thing—that’s the biggest thing—why blow the store after the scene was discovered, and not before?
“Timing is everything in this case,” Rachel said, making herself wipe the emotion from her voice. She needed the men to understand this next part, not sell them on it. “Who, what, where, and how...? The usual questions don’t matter. When is the only real question, because Gayle Street was a major terrorist event in perpetual stasis.”
Santino had already caught on; she watched as white-hot excitement started to pop within his colors. “Our guy could blow Gayle Street any time he wanted,” he said. “Nobody’s come forward who remembers any utility work being done over the last two years. Those canisters were put in place around the same time the gas lines were updated, when our guy was just another person in a utility uniform. The store owners assumed that any new equipment was part of the upgrade.”
“Exactly. So, timeline again. Why did he decide to blow Gayle Street this week, and why did he decide to blow the coffee shop after we discovered the murder scene?”
When they didn’t answer, she nodded. “Now flip those two questions around.”
Hill snapped to his feet. “Because he wanted us to find the murder scene.”
“Because?”
“Because nothing at the coffee shop pointed to Homeland.”
Rachel was nearly dancing. “But…?”
Hill sighed. “But it did point to the military.”
“Our guy was too smart,” she said. “He outthought himself when he planned this scheme. He planted canisters that could be traced back to Homeland. He probably knew enough about forensics to realize that we’d be able to recreate the bombs, and he assumed no one would believe that Homeland would be behind it—nobody’s stupid enough to use their own equipment! But he didn’t know Homeland would block the investigation, or that the general public would jump at the chance to assume that Gayle Street was just one more destructive thing our own government did without expecting to get caught.”
Hill walked over to Zockinski, their conversational colors rolling as they turned over the possibilities. Zockinski flipped through his notebook, and said, “Every piece of evidence taken out of the store implicated the military.”
Rachel nodded. “We thought he waited until everyone was out of the store to blow it to keep from hurting the Forensics team. That’s not true—he just needed to make sure most of the evidence was out of there. Most, not all... if the store was blown, it’d leave room for reasonable doubt if any evidence recovered didn’t quite match up. And he ditched the gun where it’d be sure to be found, too.
“The public wanted Homeland to be the villain,” she finished. “And we were so busy managing the fallout from that, we never asked who the bomber wanted as the villain.”
“Jesus,” Zockinski said. He looked up from his notepad. “If you’re right, we’ve got a profile. A man with a grudge against the military. One who’s got the skills to build a bomb, and the ability to work with commercial utility lines.”
“I think we can narrow it down a little more,” Rachel said. “Bell?”
The girl’s head snapped up. “Agent Peng?”
Rachel took the chalk from Jason and sketched a circle smaller than the toe of her shoe on the blackboard. “Would your Arduinos fit in something this size?”
“You could get about two of them in there,” Bell replied. “Maybe more, if you used small ones.”
“And could these be locked to a signal or a frequency? Say, they could only be activated if someone unlocked them with a management code?”
“Yeah, we do it all the time with Arduinos,” Bell replied. “I’ve seen them with RFID and Wi-Fi adaptors… I even built an Arduino cell phone a few years ago.”
“So it’s possible that he could have set the bombs up, and then left them there indefinitely.”
“No. Even if they’re just turned on once a day to synch, wireless interfaces need a ton of power. Once the power supply ran out, they’d be useless, and it’d—” Bell began, and then trailed off, her colors bleaching as she turned, almost against her will, towards the copper octopus in the back of the room. She looked back at Rachel, eyes wide.
Rachel nodded. “The key to this whole thing is the power supply,” she said. “Once our guy figured that out, he could commit terrorism at his convenience.
“Bell?” she asked, trying to be gentle. “How many people have access to that hydrology project?”
“Agent Peng, we didn’t—”
“How many, Bell?”
“It’s like I told you,” Bell said, nearly pleading. “We’ve got patents on this technology. The ideas are out there, and this loft? People are walking through it all of the time. I can’t give you a list of who would have access… And it’s not the world’s most unique idea! Water wheels have been around for millennia!”
“Ones with a wireless Arduino interface?”
Bell was saved from having to answer by the sound of the fire door opening. A man with a chestnut brown core entered the loft. The girl brightened with recognition, and was out of her chair and running into the man’s arms before he could close the door.
“Silver Bell?” He glanced over at the room full of strangers, his conversational colors twisting in bemusement as he took in the room full of strangers. “What’s going on?”
“They think we blew up Gayle Street!” Bell said, her voice shaking.
“What?” The man’s colors snapped into reds and oranges. “Who are you people? Do I need to call my lawyer?”
In Rachel’s experience, people who asked for lawyers had a history of asking for lawyers. She gave him a thorough scan: late middle-age, balding, pudgy, and rich. No one wore a suit that expensive to a warehouse in the middle of the night, not unless they wore a suit like that all of the time. The investor who owned the loft had just arrived.
The investor whose son was killed while serving in the military, her little internal voice reminded her.
Rachel considered this, and ran a diagnostic scan over the newcomer to be sure. Nope. His heart rate and blood pressure was through the roof after four flights of stairs; no way in hell he had moved two dead bodies, not without dropping dead himself.
Anybody with a warehouse full of strong, young artists-slash-heavy weapons manufacturers indebted to him is worth a closer look, whispered that little voice.
The newcomer’s eyes bounced from face to face, finally landing on Zockinski as he decided the oldest member of their group must be the leader. “You,” he said. “Explain yourself.”
“Jacob Zockinski, Metropolitan Police. This is my partner, Matt Hill, and he’s Raul Santino, also from the MPD.”
Rachel half-hoped Jason would know to keep his mouth shut and let Zockinski paint the target on himself, but that wasn’t how Jason worked. “Agents Atran and Peng,” he said, before she could ping him. “Office of Adaptive and Complementary Enhancement Technologies.”
“Agents. You brought more Agents, so… You’re serious?” he asked Jason. “You think these kids are terrorists?”
This time, Rachel was able to shout in Jason’s head before he could answer. Wha
t came out of it was a smooth, “We can’t talk about an ongoing case.”
“You obviously have,” the man said, stressing the last word as he put a protective arm around Bell. “What did you tell Silver Bell?”
“I’m sorry,” Jason said. “Who are you?”
The man’s colors dipped from anger to scorn. “Terry Templeton,” he said. “I own this building.”
Santino’s colors fell to a sickly bluish-gray; he hadn’t recognized Templeton on sight. The detectives’ colors jumped to money-green, then snapped into professional blues: Zockinski and Hill knew that if they weren’t careful in how they handled Templeton, the backlash might put them out of a job.
And Jason started to burn red.
“Careful,” she warned him.
“Another IT billionaire,” Jason snapped through their link. “Coincidence?”
“Until we know more? Yes. Let Zockinski deal with this. You and I can poke around later and see if he might be connected to Hanlon.”
He felt her doubt at the idea, and shrugged it off: as far as Jason was concerned, anyone outside of OACET could be allied with Hanlon. But he did relent, his anger fading slightly as he let her talk him down.
Rachel shifted her attention back to Templeton. Zockinski was assuring him that, no, he did not need to call his lawyer, and no, they had neither a suspect, nor any evidence to incriminate any single member of the loft.
“We’ve learned that a component in the bomb might be similar to a device in the loft,” Zockinski said, his professional blues wavering slightly at the edges as he realized he didn’t know much more than that.
“What?!” Templeton’s conversational colors of reds and oranges deepened.
“We’re just here to do research,” Santino spoke for the first time. His colors were weaving in and out of themselves as he weighed Templeton’s involvement.
“Gayle Street’s been keeping us busy,” Hill added. “We’re chasing every lead we can, even if it eats into our personal time.” He nodded towards the others from the MPD.
Templeton followed Hill’s eyes and noted the details: Jason and the detectives in jeans and casual jackets, Rachel in her fancy-restaurant finery, Santino covered in dirt… Templeton’s colors started to move towards blue relief. “Fair enough,” he admitted. “What can I do to help?”
“First off, can I ask why you’re here? It’s late, and you’re a busy man.”
Templeton’s colors changed again. He had locked on to Zockinski’s core of autumn orange, and this was centered within a deep business-suit charcoal. “I try to come down here every couple of weeks and check to see how the kids are doing.” Templeton said. “There’s a lot of people on the streets tonight, so it seemed a good night to drop in, maybe offer them a ride.”
Bell beamed up at him, and he gave her a one-armed hug in return. Her smooth gray core was reflected in his colors, offset with a light money green.
The loft is an idea farm, Rachel realized. Bell and some of the other makers (Jake came to mind) weren’t the sort of people who would thrive in a corporate structure. Templeton gave them equipment and resources and let them go nuts, and came along later to file the patents.
Rachel couldn’t decide if she should be furious on Bell’s behalf: college degree or not, there was no doubt that Templeton would have had offered the girl a job. It was Bell’s decision to shuffle between free meals, but Templeton had cash to burn, and stipends had been invented for a reason.
“Now,” Templeton said. “I’m calling my lawyer, and when he gets here, you can explain how my property might be connected to terrorism.”
And then, as if speaking those words summoned the act itself, the building shook.
TWENTY
THE EXPLOSIONS HADN’T BEEN CLOSE; the windows rattled, and some dust fell from the solar system overhead, but that seemed the worst of it, nothing more serious than what might happen if a truck crashed into a wall a block or two away. Then, the others jerked, traces of yellow-orange uncertainty blooming. Rachel had sometimes worried that she might accidentally out herself in the event of a sudden power failure, but she knew what had happened as soon as the others did: Bell’s machines had stopped singing.
“Guys?” Santino asked.
“On it,” Jason said. Rachel felt him touch the power lines and trace them from the building as he searched for the cause of the blackout.
She took a different route. While the others started calling around, Rachel hopped into the frequencies of the nearest police cars and listened to the radio chatter. She was the first one to hit on the problem. “Pepco says four of its transformers went out across the city,” she said, as she repeated the back-and-forth between officers. “They’ve asked the MPD to check and see if it’s just coincidence.”
“Even with Pepco, that’s an atypically high failure rate,” Santino said, searching through the pile of coats for his old jacket.
“Nerd,” Zockinski said, as he and Hill stood and joined him in rummaging through the pile.
Jason paused on his way to the door. He appraised Rachel with a critical eye. “Peng…”
“I know,” she said as she opened a link. “Just keep Santino safe.”
Jason nodded, and followed the other men downstairs.
“All right,” Rachel said in a bright and cheery voice. “Do you have any candles here?”
“Candles?” Bell’s tone was almost as scornful as her conversational colors. “Please.”
“I should head on out,” Templeton said, as he watched Bell navigate the room by the light of her phone. “I need to get home to my family—”
“Actually,” Rachel interrupted him, “I’m going to ask you to stay.”
“Agent… Peng, is it? I’ll drop Silver Bell off on my—”
“You can leave if you want, of course, but it’s very likely the city’s about to riot,” she said. “I’d feel better if you weren’t on the streets. And I’m definitely not about to let Bell outside until I know it’s safe.”
He grinned at her, as if the idea of a citywide riot was adorably old-fashioned. “I think I’ll be fine.”
As if on cue, the unmistakable sound of a gunshot cracked outside. Templeton’s colors bleached themselves down to white, and he started towards the windows to see what was happening in the street.
She grabbed his arm. “Let’s wait over here,” she said, pulling him away from the glass.
There was a faint smell of gas, and the tail of a brass comet kindled into flame. The fire pulsed bright, then settled down to a steady glow as Bell adjusted the fuel supply. Rachel scanned the comet to learn why the flame traveled the length of the tail instead of shooting straight up, and found the comet’s tail was lined with multiple jets.
Bell rejoined them. She had wrapped an old bed comforter around herself like a polyester cocoon. “Good?” she asked, pointing at the comet’s tail.
“Great,” Rachel said, and went to the second item on her mental checklist. She threw a scan downwards, passing through the office spaces on the lower floors. She had expected the building to be empty, but two people, a woman on the third floor and a man on the second, were still there.
“I’m going to do a sweep of the building,” she said. “If I find anybody, I’d like to bring them up here, make sure everybody is in the same place.
“I’ll be right back,” she added. “I know it’s tempting to see what’s happening outside, but stay away from the windows.”
“We will. Here,” Bell said, handing her the phone.
“Thanks,” Rachel said. She activated the phone for the light from its screen, and pretended to bump into a table on her way out for good measure.
Somehow, Rachel thought to herself as she clattered down the stairwell, the ability to see in the dark does not make this place any less creepy. She hadn’t realized the building was as poorly insulated as it was; the heat was sucked straight into the night through the skylights and the elevator shaft. She had a better tolerance for cold than she used
to—her new metabolism kept her body temperature ticking a few degrees higher than a normal person’s—but the converted warehouse was already turning to ice as the heat escaped.
And then there were the rats. They scurried inside the walls and through the ceiling above, and, God help her, the damn things kept stopping to watch her through cracks in the plaster. It felt as though she was being circled by a school of small, fuzzy sharks.
She decided to start with the third floor: the man on the floor below them was sitting in his desk chair, but the woman was going through the motions of packing up her stuff to go home. Rachel walked down the hall, knocking on each door and shouting, “MPD! We’re doing a building walkthrough. Please come out of your offices and we’ll escort you to a safe location.”
The woman’s anxious oranges and frightened yellows shifted into relieved blues. Her office door opened. “Hey!” she shouted. “Over here!”
Rachel walked over, holding Bell’s phone above her head to telegraph her location. “Agent Rachel Peng. I work with the MPD.”
“Grace LaPonsie.” She had a core of watered-down cinnamon and was wearing quite a lot of silk. The light from Bell’s phone traced the edges of her face in green. “Are you here alone?”
“There are others in the loft,” Rachel said, and started walking and shouting again.
LaPonsie chased after her. “The loft?” she asked. “You’re with those… The artists?”
Rachel didn’t have the strength to bother with the question. “We’ve set up a staging area,” she replied. “There’s light, heat, and pizza.”
“You’re a police officer?” LaPonsie asked, taking in Rachel’s dress and elbow-high cast.
“I was off-duty when the power went out.”
They reached the stairwell, and Rachel handed LaPonsie the phone. “Why are you here so late?” Rachel asked her.
“I’m an independent real estate agent,” LaPonsie replied. “We never stop working.”
“Really? Here?” Rachel could think of a hundred more appealing locations than the old warehouse. “I’d think that elevator alone would scare off your clients.”
Maker Space Page 31
