Digital Divide

by Spangler, K. B.

  Rachel realized she had cocked her head to the side as though she could hear the growing anxiety. Her partner was watching her. “What?” Santino whispered.

  “Something’s wrong,” she replied.

  She found Hill in the mess, plowing through a group of people who flashed panic and anxiety, each of them crowding him with questions until he managed to break away.

  She had the door open for him when arrived.

  He stared down at her, then looked over her head at the rest of the team. “We need to go.”

  THIRTEEN

  She was glad the dinosaurs were dead. Not because of the teeth or the tonnage, but for the selfish joy she stole from their bones. Rachel checked to make sure the security guard was busy with Zockinski and she leaned out over the glass partition to stroke the spine of the closest skeleton. Her fingers lightly brushed the pebbly-cool surface; stone, but not stone, and somehow still alive in the way of all inanimate wonder. Rachel flipped the frequencies on her implant to read the plaque (Camptosaurus, herbivore), and looked around the room to see if she could manhandle the Tyrannosaur before getting caught.

  Sadly, no. A child too young to have wandered off from her school group watched her with a scowl.

  “...n’t do hat,” the girl said. She was in the final stages of finding her new front teeth, but some of her consonants were still missing.

  “Shh,” Rachel whispered conspiratorially. “I’m a cop.”

  “Sill sln’t do hat.”

  Kid would change her mind if I let her pet the T-rex, Rachel muttered to herself. She flipped open her suit jacket to put her badge on display and walked the girl over to a gang of children wearing matching shirts which branded them as property of the Essex County school system. She passed the girl off to a harried teacher’s aide and told the woman in dark terms that she was to keep her students in sight at all times. There was a thinly veiled or else! in there, and Rachel made sure the aide saw her badge and its hallmark stamp of OACET green before she stalked off. Sometimes it was good to be a monster.

  She turned back to her post and caught Zockinski sneaking a soft pat on the thigh of the Triceratops. He was warm blues over golds, his colors almost reverent, and Rachel thought maybe it wasn’t a fluke that he had ended up with her in the Hall of Paleontology.

  The call had come in to First District Station at seven in the morning, the man from the Department of Homeland Security claiming that someone had hacked the Smithsonian. The same nineteen images kept rotating through the security system, he said, locations from the Institution’s nineteen core museums and parks. Each image had two names written beneath them in an elegant copperplate script, set off in a decorative frame. The images formed a list of people and places; most of those on the list were cops, but the members of the task force had been included. Detective Hill and Phil Netz were sent to stalk the Renwick Gallery, while Santino and Jason Atran were given an especially picturesque location on the Castle grounds.

  And she and Zockinski had pulled the dinosaurs.

  There was no evidence whatsoever to connect the hijacking of the security system to Glazer, but the Metropolitan Police Department was done coddling coincidence. The gut reaction had been to interpret the images as an overt threat and to shut the Smithsonian down for the day, but saner heads had prevailed and had decided there was no reason to take anything other than precautionary action. The museums would remain open, and security would be increased. Including those thirty-eight persons named in each of those nineteen rotating images.

  Chief Sturtevant had raged: the task force had been moving so quickly that this was most likely a delaying tactic designed to buy Glazer some time. Sturtevant had said, loudly, he wouldn’t allow his team to waste an entire day standing around waiting for Glazer to make the next move, that Zockinski, Hill, and the rest would be put to better use following known trails than standing around, genitalia in hand, waiting for the unknown.

  He had been overruled.

  Thirty-five personnel from First MPD and three Agents had marched with slow and measured steps to their designated locations. They weren’t alone. The parks and museums were crawling with cops in plainclothes. Attendance among younger and middle-aged males was up, the janitorial service was ridiculously overstaffed, and tourists were ushered into groups with guides who stammered and had to consult their notes.

  Hours of this.

  Her early morning had disappeared into mid-afternoon, but apart from the feeling that someone had chained her in place, Rachel was enjoying herself. As far as stakeouts went, the Museum of Natural History was a far cry above the typical parked car or seedy diner. She had told herself she needed to visit the Smithsonian at least once a week since moving to D.C., but it had never popped on her to-do list. She needed to come back when she wasn’t working, maybe take some time to appreciate the collections and the building’s gliding lines of architecture without worrying about whether she was lined up in a sniper’s telescopic sight.

  And working with Zockinski had been astonishingly pleasant. The first few hours were like standing in barbed wire, as they didn’t so much as move for fear of getting cut. After that, boredom and the ever-present swarms of students had blunted their edges. It was impossible for Rachel to maintain an active snit among the dinosaurs, as wave after wave of children swept into the hall in a prismatic riot, followed by a crash of emotion breaking over them as they saw the raw stuff of dreams.

  Or nightmares: some of the younger ones plunged into terror. Rachel and Zockinski had made a game out of picking those kids who would break down in tears. They had played for money until they realized nothing was changing hands; they were each too good at reading the crowd. When he asked, she had straight-up lied about being trained by the Army to read microexpressions, and Zockinski eventually let slip that he had worked as a guide in this very hall during his college summer breaks.

  He came back towards her and they made the rounds again. Ten times an hour they walked the circumference of the room, checking for anything new or out of place. Rachel had run so many deep scans she was familiar with the gobs of chewed gum shoved into almost every available cranny, some so old they were practically fossils themselves.

  “They’re shutting this place down soon,” Zockinski said as they crested the stairs and resumed their vantage point on the balcony.

  “The Smithsonian?” she scoffed. “I don’t think so.”

  He shook his head. “This exhibit. Some rich guy gave them thirty-five million to fix up the dinosaur hall.”

  She whistled. “That’s a lot of new dinosaurs.”

  “No new ones. They already have the best in the world,” Zockinski said, looking down at the Triceratops. “They’re just going to repair the hall and update the displays. Place’ll be closed for five years.”

  Rachel leaned on the rail and watched the field trip kids rocket up and down the aisles, shrieking at a decibel that would have made James Joyce hastily rewrite his definition of God. Some of those kids would be headed to high school when the hall reopened, she realized. And there would be a good part of an entire generation who would miss out on this experience completely, five years of disappointed field trippers who would come to the museum only to find a barrier of painted plywood between them and the lost world.

  Five years was an eternity.

  Five years could change everything…

  Zockinski was still talking. Rachel shook off her malaise and asked, “Sorry, what?”

  “I said this used to be called the Hall of Extinct Monsters.”

  Rachel smiled and made a note to tell Mulcahy. “I love that. It’s poetry.”

  “But it wasn’t accurate,” he said. “They’ve remodeled the hall a couple of times to make sure it all keeps up with the science, and they’ve always changed the name. They keep the same dinosaurs, but those’re changed too, put in new poses or on new stands.

  “You used to be able to walk under that,” he said, and pointed at the gigantic skeleton of the Diplod
ocus. “Back before they remodeled the hall in the Sixties.” The sauropod stretched the length of the room, blocked off from the tourists except for the skull suspended sixteen feet above the ground. It dangled like a low-hanging fruit and the bolder children would leap up to grab it, then squeal when they crashed back down to earth.

  “What’s it like?” she asked. He looked down at her in curious yellows. “Oh come on, you know you’ve done it. After hours, no guards…”

  He didn’t blush but his conversational colors did, and she chuckled. “Okay, not quite what I meant but yay for you. Did she complain about the fake rocks?”

  “They never did,” he said. “It was a really good job. Summer job,” he clarified as she burst out laughing.

  Their rapport was fragile and they were going out of their way to avoid carrying topics with any weight. Cyborgs were taboo, as were politics. They had mainly stuck to work: good stories were currency in law enforcement, and everyone banked away their best for situations like this. She wove some tales from her ongoing war with Mrs. Wagner into the mix—her neighbor was universally relatable; as far as Rachel knew, every street in America had a slightly racist, extremely homophobic gossip who kept her nose pressed against the window—and Zockinski retaliated with the tale of his epic battle with his homeowner’s association when he tried to build a tree house for his daughters.

  “Rachel?”

  She sighed quietly. “One sec,” she told Zockinski. “I’ve got a call.” She turned away and tried to miss the change in his colors that came up whenever he remembered what she was, and joined Phil in the link. “What’s up?”

  “There’s a courier coming towards us. Jason says he sees one, too. How about you?”

  “Hang on.” She glanced at the hall and saw nothing. “Not yet. Let me go long-range.”

  “The guys say something’s happening,” she said to Zockinski, and expanded her sixth sense to take in the first floor of the museum and the street. The surge of new information crashed into her and she grabbed on to the balcony’s railing to keep her balance; she had misjudged the size of the building and had pulled too much, too quickly. “We’re looking for a courier service. Wait…” she said, as a distinctive brown truck pulled up to the curb. “South entrance.”

  Zockinski radioed the undercover crew and every adult in the room was suddenly preoccupied with little plaques and large skeletons.

  The courier was in his early twenties and resentful. He walked into the hall and searched the faces until he located Rachel and Zockinski. He stomped up the stairs when he realized they wouldn’t come down from the balcony to meet him.

  “Here,” the courier said, jabbing the corner of a rigid cardboard envelope into Zockinski’s gut.

  “Hill’s always saying how some people can’t tell I’m a cop,” Zockinski said to Rachel.

  “Seems pretty clear to me,” she said, and smiled at the courier.

  The courier blanched; assaulting an officer was a law writ wide.

  The handwritten note on the package still smelled faintly of permanent marker. It read: OPEN IMMEDIATELY.

  And in smaller print below: NOT A BOMB.

  “Don’t you hate those weeks where your life revolves around whether things are, or are not, bombs?” Rachel asked Zockinski as she waved over an undercover officer posing as a security guard. She set the officer on the courier with due prejudice. One did not shoot the messenger, but one certainly did lock him up in a small room and ask him pointed questions.

  She took the envelope from Zockinski and flipped it over a few times in her hands, looking for a way in that wouldn’t disturb evidence trapped in the sticky bits.

  Zockinski told her to wait. “We have to call Forensics,” he said, and took out his cell.

  She glared at him and pulled her badge off of her belt. Someone had added a slight hook to the crest and it served dual purpose as a letter opener. She threaded the leading edge under the flap on the envelope and ripped it open.

  “Hey!”

  “Oops,” Rachel said. “I’m not of your police community and am unfamiliar with your strange, alien ways. It’s just a few pieces of paper,” she added. “No electronics, no unusual chemicals or dust.” She ignored her bruised knees and knelt on the thin carpet to shake the contents from the cardboard package.

  “Wait,” Zockinski took a plastic grocery bag out of his coat pocket and spread it flat across the ground. “We’re going to catch hell for this.”

  “Sometimes dirt is just dirt,” Rachel muttered. In her soldier’s heart, she agreed with Edwards; the Forensics God demanded too much from its followers. “This is more likely to be time-sensitive than anything else.”

  She carefully tapped the back of the envelope so the stack of paper slid onto the plastic. A couple of cards, covered in black dots slightly smaller than dimes…

  Zockinski, father of two young girls, went white.

  “Call Hill,” she said, giving Zockinski a task before his fears rose up and pulled him under. “Tell him to give the package to Phil. If Phil says it’s clean, have them open it right away.”

  She reached out to her partner. “Santino?” Rachel asked when he answered the phone. “The National Child ID Program. Does it apply to D.C. or just the states?”

  “D.C.’s included,” he replied. “Why?”

  “Trying to narrow the search,” she said. “Have you opened your package?”

  “No, are you nuts? We’ve got Forensics on the way.”

  Rachel stretched her mind across the distance between them. Her implant and her sixth sense might be infinite but her mind was not; the Castle grounds were directly across from the Museum of Natural History and were at the very edge of her ability to make sense out of raw data.

  “Walk towards me and hold up the package,” she said. “I need to scan it before you open it.”

  “Forensics is five minutes away.”

  “And they’re bringing an hour of tests. Santino… Ours had ten-cards.” She closed her eyes but couldn’t look away from the happy comic strip characters spot-printed around ten individual boxes, each box with a black dot in the center.

  The pieces of the conversation clicked. “Kids’ fingerprints,” he said in a dead voice, and she heard the sound of ripping, with Jason shouting in the background.

  “Don’t! Let me scan—” Rachel began, but Santino cut her off.

  “Ours too. Rachel… I have three cards here. Three kids.”

  “Right now it’s an implied threat,” she said. “It might be a distraction. These children might be sitting in a math test as we speak. Turn the scene over to the security detail and meet us back at District Station as soon as you can. Tell Jason to coordinate with Phil; I need to calm down Zockinski.”

  The detective was off in the corner, a riot of fear in yellows and grays. He had his phone pressed to his ear as he left a quiet message.

  She walked over to him as he hung up. “Your daughters,” she said. “Where are they supposed to be?”

  “With my wife,” he looked down to where the security staff was herding a mob of protesting children from the hall. “They’ve got morning kindergarten… They should be home but she’s not picking up.”

  Rachel lowered her voice. “I can check on them,” she said, and he flared a different sort of yellow, uncertain but hopeful. “You give me your wife’s phone number, and I can go to her cell.” She pulled her tablet from her bag. “Or I can go straight to your house if you tell me your address. You can use me as your eyes, like we did at Glazer’s apartment yesterday. You tell me where to go and what to look for, and we’ll see if your family is safe.”

  She took a step away from him; she didn’t recognize the sudden burst of red, and reds outside of passion were never good. “But if I do this, even if you give me permission, this’ll be a huge violation, you understand? There’s no guarantee that I won’t pop in on your wife when she’s cooking, driving...” She let the ideas dangle and hoped he understood. Rachel was the ultimate Peep
ing Tom and he would be turning her loose on his family.

  He did. He closed his eyes and weighed his choices. “Five minutes,” he finally said.

  She nodded and shoved the tablet back in her purse, willing to wait if he was. They slipped the cards back into their envelope, bundled it up in Zockinski’s plastic bag, and left at a run.

  They caught up with Hill on the old dry lawn of the Mall and traded their sedan to an officer with a conveniently-parked patrol car. Hill drove them back to First District Station, siren blaring, while Zockinski sat in the passenger’s seat and divided his calls between Sturtevant’s line and his wife’s voice mail.

  The details were starting to trickle in and a pattern was emerging. The team back at the MPD had tracked down some of the names on the fingerprint cards, but the children they belonged to could not be easily located. Hill asked why, and Zockinski said those children were supposed to be on a field trip but the parents and teachers chaperoning them weren’t answering their phones.

  They stopped talking.

  Hill dropped Zockinski at the front doors and they parked five floors down in the garage. The smell was rank; the ventilation system never seemed to penetrate the lowest parts of this concrete well. They kept close to the center of the garage as they hurried upwards, the void created by the split levels their only source of fresh air.

  “This place is too new to be so poorly designed,” Rachel said, mostly to herself.

  Hill heard her. “Lowest bidder.”

  They reached the security doors and Hill stepped to the side, waiting. It took her a moment to realize he wanted her to open the digital locks.

  “You’re kidding,” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “You realize I can’t win with you guys,” she said. “I’m the biggest freak on the planet, right up until you have to grope around for your keys.”