Russians Came Knocking

by Spangler, K. B.

  Zockinski and Hill stood to the side, faces blank, watching them. Santino had put in his time on the force so he wasn’t cherry, but she was an unknown. Rachel was in uncharted mood-territory and had no idea what was going on in their heads (what translated to opalescent yellow-green?); she assumed they were waiting to see what she would do, but she couldn’t tell if they were impressed at her composure or waiting for her to vomit, swoon, or get the vapors.

  “Don’t touch anything. An-y-thing.” Hill said.

  “I know. Didn’t you check up on me?” she asked, following the blood. The woman had been wearing heels, as large and tiny spots chased each other in a clean pattern until a heavy blotch blurred the tracks. The blood told a story: Griffin had been attacked while she stood at the ATM, had tried to run, had lost her balance…

  Hill didn’t answer so she took a moment to glance up at him. “I was a Warrant Officer with Army CID. Did three tours in Afghanistan before this,” she said, pointing to her head. He flashed an unusual shade of teal but didn’t respond.

  “Seriously,” Rachel said as she returned her attention to the scene. “I used to be a real person and everything.”

  She squatted on her heels, as far away from the blood as the small room would allow.

  “You’re supposed to be looking for cameras.” Zockinski was getting angry, his surface hue going red again.

  “I am. I did,” she amended. “They were first on the list. But they aren’t the only things out there.”

  Or in here, she thought. Her sixth sense swept down and out, moving into the marble to follow the utilities as they carved their way through stone. She poked and prodded from top to bottom, then started laughing when she hit the void.

  Clever! She began rolling through different frequencies to test for residue. Agents lacked an olfactory connection so chemicals were generally imperceptible unless they could be detected visually. Same with fingerprints, although those usually showed up when the source was sweaty or greasy, but she could almost always tell when disposable gloves had been used as those left a powder similar to that on moth wings.

  Her tongue tapped at the roof of her mouth, ticking like the Predator on the hunt. She hadn’t realized she had adopted this little mannerism while she flipped through the spectra until Santino had called her on it a few months ago. It was crazy how quickly new habits were formed.

  Dust sparkled and she laughed again. Behind her, Zockinski and Hill were shifting like frightened rainbows, but Santino was gradually building in excitement.

  Rachel gestured at her partner. Santino crossed the room and knelt beside her. “As a representative of OACET with no authority in Metro,” she said quietly as his eyes widened, “I’m hands off from now on.”

  “No shit,” he whispered. They had never invoked this policy before; there had never been a reason. If this case went to trial, she’d be treated the same as a psychic hired by the department to give a grieving mother some hope. Her name would appear as a consultant who had assisted Metro at their request, and the services she had rendered would be swept under the jargon. The Agents were so new that the judicial process hadn’t caught up with their abilities. It was safer to take herself out of an investigation than to risk having the case thrown out in court.

  “If I were you,” she said, including Zockinski and Hill in the conversation, “I’d check for prints here and here.” She indicated two separate spots placed a few feet apart on a square marble block set on the lowest tier. “And after that, I’d press them both at the same time.”

  The homicide detectives didn’t move.

  “If you won’t, I will,” Santino offered.

  Hill went looking for Forensics, and Rachel whispered to Santino that there would be no prints since the guy had been wearing gloves, so she was mostly covering the bases, but was also sort of jerking Zockinski and Hill around. Santino approved; he preferred to multitask, too.

  Forensics taped the surface and found nothing, but their team hung around to watch as Zockinski pushed on the two locations Rachel had indicated. As Zockinski removed his hands, there was a thin click and one side of the block popped out from the wall. Hill hissed through his teeth as a four-inch thick marble slab swung open on well-oiled hinges.

  “Magnets. Big ones,” she explained. She looked at Santino, “I should have checked for magnets first. They’re easy to find, but they’re used in everything so they can throw me off when I’m searching.

  “He set it up like the doors on a glass display cabinet,” she continued. “Apply a little pressure, and the clasp releases. I guess he stuck two in there to make sure no one kicked it open by accident.”

  Zockinski hunched down, then dropped down to all fours so he could peer inside a goodly-sized hole. “You could hide in here for a couple of hours, easy…”

  Rachel covered her mouth. It was another new habit, one she had picked up from Mulcahy who sometimes didn’t want to be caught smiling.

  “Whoa!” In his excitement, Zockinski nearly dove headfirst into the hole. Hill grabbed him by his jacket and pulled him back before he could contaminate the scene. Zockinski looked up at Rachel. “A tunnel?”

  She nodded. “You guys might want to shut down the bank again. The other end comes out next to the first teller’s window on the other side of this wall.”

  “Well, we’ll leave you to it,” Santino said, and gripped her shoulder. “Let us know if we have to sign anything.” Her partner steered them towards the door. She raised a curious eyebrow at him. “Just go,” he whispered.

  “Let them have this,” he explained on their way back to the car. “They lose face if we stick around and take credit. But you just gave them their biggest lead, and they won’t forget it, and it really didn’t hurt that you performed freakin’ magic in front of the Forensics team!

  “We are...” he said as he spun on a heel in a sleek Astaire pirouette, “Golden!”

  Several hours later, buried under an avalanche of electronics, they had only unlocked eighteen passwords and she was on the verge of snapping an iPhone in half with her teeth.

  “Tarnished gold is still gold,” Santino said.

  “Stop that.”

  “I know what you were thinking.”

  She snorted. “Obviously not. Gold doesn’t tarnish.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “You need to stop buying your girlfriend jewelry at the same place you buy bananas.”

  “They had a sale,” he muttered.

  On the way back to First Metro, they had wondered why a bank had a secret tunnel. They thought about this for the space of a millisecond, then agreed it had been a remarkably stupid question. Rachel took a moment to search for robberies committed in old D.C. banks over the last century or so, and gave up when the number of results made it unlikely she’d find any information without some hard, targeted digging.

  (The problem, as she had explained to Santino during one of their pub crawls, was that they couldn’t relate to the seemingly nonsensical nature of electronic data. The information might exist, but there was so much of it that the human mind, augmented or otherwise, would require an eternity to sift through it to find anything useful. Unless they knew how to interact with a specific hierarchical or relational database, the Agents were left to grope around aimlessly in mountains of meaningless code. Santino, who was a programmer in his spare time, had asked how on earth they managed, and Rachel had replied they generally used Google like everyone else.)

  She tapped the stack of paperwork in front of her. Warrants, warrants, warrants; searches, seizures, and discoveries… Every item was documented before it reached them but she had to check each by hand a second time before she unlocked the equipment. Rachel certainly wasn’t making any friends among the judges’ clerks who had processed these warrants once already. When she called for confirmation, she was shunted to hold almost as soon as they recognized her voice.

  Oooh, the Bee Gees. She was always grateful that Judge Richards’ office had an unwavering a
nti-Streisand policy. Rachel tapped her pen to the beat.

  “‘Stayin’ Alive?’” Santino’s voice came from beneath the table where he was untangling wires.

  “Yeah… wait, how did you know that?” she asked.

  There was a knock on the door, followed by the slow emergence of a Krispy Kreme bag and a legal folder through the philodendrons.

  “You guys in?”

  “Hey, Charley,” Rachel said, and went to help the clerk navigate the jungle. The only perk of Santino’s new position was a massive private office with southern exposure, and he had covered the walls in plants. She had never seen him tend to them, but they grew at the speed of a tropical rainforest. He adored them and added to the collection almost every other day: she thought the room stunk of ozone, and was nursing a small phobia of falling asleep long enough to become fertilizer.

  “Hey, Peng. We heard you were doing passwords today,” Charley Brazee said, handing her the folder. She bent her head and shoulder to keep the phone against her ear and flipped the folder open.

  “Hah! Confirmation letters,” she said to Santino, thumbing through a baker’s dozen of notarized documents from Judge Edward’s office. “Charley, this is whole hours of time right here. Thank you!”

  The small man smiled. “Time-saver for us, too. We’re making copies of these when the warrants are issued so we don’t have to drop everything when you call.”

  Rachel shrugged and nearly lost the phone. “Sorry.”

  “It’s not really a big thing. Ah…” People either avoided her or shotgunned her with questions, there was no middle ground. Charley was a friendly man in his late forties who bribed them with favors for answers. “Why are you on the phone?”

  She feigned ignorance and waved the folder at him. “Because not everyone is as amazing as you are, of course.”

  “No, I mean, why are you on a phone?”

  “I asked her to use it,” Santino’s head popped up from under the desk, then vanished again. “If I can’t hear at least one side of a conversation, I don’t know what’s on our schedule and I fall behind.”

  “What he means is he’s a shameless eavesdropper.”

  “I thought I just said that.”

  Charley leaned against Santino’s overstocked bookcase, the only horizontal surface not completely lost under foliage. “So…”

  “We can’t talk about it,” said the underside of the table.

  “There might have…” Rachel stopped talking long enough to hear the music change to a different song. Nope, still on hold. “There might have been a bank.”

  “Rachel!”

  “What? Charley already knows about the bank.”

  The clerk nodded. “And the tunnel, and that Peng found it. Edwards is frothing.”

  “Oh.” Rachel winced. “Yeah, he would be.”

  Judge Edwards was a mainstay on the D.C. judiciary and a fierce opponent of OACET. Several news organizations kept him on retainer as a counterpoint for stories which framed the Agents in a positive light. In his early fifties and with the combination of telegenic features that would inevitably enter politics, Edwards got a lot of airtime. His big thing was attacking what he called “the Forensics God” (and you could hear those capital letters when he spoke), or the idolatry of DNA and other forensic evidence over personal character. He argued in broad strokes that evidence had become so glorified in popular culture that it had become the only thing which mattered to a jury; he claimed that the disposition of the defendant and the testimony of eyewitnesses were now vilified in the courts; he cited case law to prove that the human element of the legal system played a more substantial role in determining guilt than bloodstains or errant hairs. Santino would rage about lies, damned lies, and statistics when the pundits played an Edwards clip.

  Rachel, who had served in the Army’s version of Internal Affairs, thought the truth was probably somewhere in the middle.

  Charley was a newcomer to Edwards’ staff. As lowest dog in the pack, Charley had caught the job of managing their warrant clearance. Rachel had made Charley laugh during their first phone conversation, and he had started dropping by Santino’s office whenever business took him to First Metro. His core was a smooth bluish-gray which reminded her in turns of the default color at the edges of software windows, or of a little cartoon seal she had loved as a child.

  “Well, he’s pissed at you but, you know, he’s still got those other two cases to keep him busy,” Charley said, thumbing through Santino’s books.

  Santino scooted out from under the table and booted up an ancient personal computer. “No idea why they’d stick encryption on this piece of junk,” he complained. “What other cases?”

  “You know, the mugging in Ward Six, they got it on tape but there were glitches… Uh, and… And the other one. The guy who got beat all to hell but, on video, he’s just drinking coffee…” Charley had signed off on the conversation. His surface colors had been tinted with Santino’s ultramarine, but those had been immersed by his core of blue-gray and the professional blues of business suits as he found something of interest in Santino’s collection.

  “Can I borrow these?” he asked, showing Santino the spines of some old college textbooks. Charley seemed to be a habitual Borrower, but it was not yet known if he was also a Returner. Rachel was still waiting for him to drop off a pack of playing cards he had snaked after poker a month ago.

  “What glitches?” Rachel prompted, but as Charley started to answer she was abruptly moved from hold into a very loud conversation with the intern manning the phones at Judge Richards’ office. Charley and Santino tried their best to ignore her and carry on, but she and this intern shared a seething mutual dislike and spent their off-time honing their material. Charley waved to them and bowed out, taking the books and leaving the doughnuts.

  If you have enjoyed this preview, you can find Digital Divide and other works by

  K.B. Spangler at kbspangler.com

  Thank you for reading!