Hill went mustard yellow in surprise. He gave Rachel the same curious probing look he had used on Phil the day before in the interview room, a trace of that wine red coursing through the yellow, then took out his ID card and opened the door for her.
“Thanks,” she said, stepping into the chute. She popped the lock on the second door and returned the favor.
Zockinski had acted as their vanguard, delivering theirs and Hill’s packages to Sturtevant. The older detective was finishing a phone call in the hall, relief washing over him in blues.
“They’re fine,” Zockinski said as he hung up, then laughed. “They went to get ice cream and she forgot her cell, can you believe it?”
“Of all the days,” Hill said, almost smiling.
“What’s so funny?” Rachel asked.
“My wife’s a diabetic,” Zockinsi said, then shook his head and chuckled. “Doesn’t keep anything sweet in the house. The girls have to wear her down for weeks before she gives in.”
Sturtevant and a handful of other high-rankers were waiting for them in the task force’s glass fishbowl. They entered the office and Rachel saw the six bureau chiefs were wearing Sturtevant’s core colors over a layer of reds. She would have loved to have been an out-of-body fly on the wall when Sturtevant tore the MPD’s administration apart for letting half of their finest officers loiter around the Smithsonian while their suspect snapped children up off the street.
Rachel picked a quiet corner and fell straight into parade rest. The cards and envelopes that had come in with Zockinski were waiting for Forensics in two clean Tupperware bins. She noticed a stack of identical containers off to the side and realized each of the teams sent into the field had gotten the same type of package.
Her new autoscript put Phil and Jason in the same car as Santino’s cell, barely half a block away and closing fast. The adrenaline rush was starting to fade and doubt was stealing its way in, helped along by the six bureau chiefs sneaking quick and angry glances at her. Someone was always at fault in cases like these, and it was easy to hang the outsiders. In fact, now that she thought about it, it was amazing it hadn’t happened before now. Hello OACET, you’re early…
Hill tapped her on the shoulder and pointed her towards the empty chairs on the other side of the room.
“The handwriting on the packages matches samples from Glazer’s apartment,” Sturtevant said to her and Hill as they found their seats. “We’re willing to bet he’s our guy. If we’re wrong, you’re gonna be another day behind, but...” the Chief stared daggers at his counterparts as he spoke, “...that’s not your fault. We all agree these missing kids are the priority.”
Rachel closed her mind against the image of dull red brushstrokes across white marble. Dead was dead and children were children, but Maria Griffin deserved better.
“We don’t know much right now, but what we do know is that the kids named on these cards are missing,” Sturtevant said, and tapped the side of the closest bin. “They were on a field trip from a school in Virginia. Guess where they were headed.”
This might as well have been a rhetorical question. Another batch of kids had been robbed of their chance to see the dinosaurs.
“The principal sent us their itinerary,” Sturtevant continued. “They were supposed to start at the Castle, then split up into groups to cover other parts of the Smithsonian. We’re still checking the ten-cards from the other teams, but they all seem to be enrolled at the same school. The principal can’t find the buses, the drivers, any of the chaperones…”
He paused. “Worst-case scenario is a hundred people are missing. That’s a little more than the maximum capacity for two buses. The principal thinks it’s probably less than that, and he’s getting us the full list.”
“GPS?” Rachel asked.
“Not working. Their school district invested in embedded GPS and vehicle diagnostics for their fleet, but these two buses aren’t on the grid anymore.
“And,” he continued with a fresh surge of red, “kidnapping is a federal crime, so we’ve just lost jurisdiction.”
He looked at Rachel when he said this, a piercing bright blue filtering through his anger and pointing directly at her. She had seen this phenomenon before, always when Mulcahy or Josh were hoping the person they were speaking about was smart enough to sift through their words to find the hidden meaning.
She nodded, very slightly, to let him know she understood, and his red faded at the edges.
“The FBI is on their way.” Sturtevant rose and walked towards the door. “They’re going to want everything we have on Glazer, so pack it up and put a bow on it. They’re taking control, but they’re still our next-door neighbors so we need to stay friendly.”
He left to meet the FBI at the front door, most of First MPD’s bureau chiefs dogging his heels. Two stayed behind to start boxing up the case files, but Rachel drove them out by crowding them and asking, over and over again, if they were sure she couldn’t help? They fled as Santino and the other Agents entered, awkwardly pretending Phil and Jason didn’t exist while still trying to use the door at the same time.
Rachel held out a Tupperware container and Santino placed an envelope identical to hers into it, holding the open end by its corners as he carefully laid it flat on the bottom of the bin.
“Hope you didn’t pamper it the whole ride home,” she said. “This is a forensics dead end.”
He shrugged, sick purples and grays as she placed his bin next to hers. “Data is data.”
Hill clipped his phone back to his belt. “The others’ll be here soon,” he said, and began spreading the bins out across the table. “Everybody got the same package.”
“Fine,” Zockinski said. “Let’s turn this over to the FBI and get out of here. The paperwork’ll keep until tomorrow.”
“God, what a quitter,” Rachel said.
He looked at her, annoyed. “We’re done. This went federal.”
“Thing is,” she said, grinning at him and making a fast circle with her finger which encompassed Phil, Jason, and herself, “so did we.”
Santino brightened. “The charter.”
She nodded. “They can’t keep us out.”
Long before anyone underwent brain surgery, the OACET charter was written in such a way so the cyborgs wouldn’t be limited by jurisdiction. As the Program was designed to cross the boundaries between federal agencies, its charter granted Agents the authority to go wherever they wanted, to intrude in those affairs which caught their interest, so long as they perceived a valid need. It was the type of back-door political shenanigans that, like OACET itself, should never have been approved.
Rachel did her best to pretend this part of their charter didn’t exist. Better to follow her agreement with the MPD and take herself out of an investigation than force herself into it and risk a jury tossing the case. Those few other Agents working alongside law enforcement followed similar policies, and anyone outside of OACET was generally unaware an Agent could seize a case on a whim.
But Sturtevant had known. At least, that’s what Rachel was betting on. She hoped she had read him correctly: it would be awkward if she pulled rank on the FBI when he had meant instead that Rachel should pass the case to the Feds and take the rest of the week off.
“We’re back in the game?” Hill asked.
“We were never out of it,” she told him. “The FBI’ll just try to convince us we can’t play in their court.”
The other teams started to trickle in, dropping their packages in the bins before leaving for the break room or clustering in groups to gossip. Rachel moved to her makeshift desk and started shoving the untidy but well-organized files into neat and abhorrently chaotic stacks for the FBI.
Zockinski came towards her, his autumn orange caught under a prism of reds, grays, and a thin but beautiful blue. He leaned towards her. “About what you said before,” he whispered. “What you offered to do for my family…”
She shook her head. “Don’t mention it,” she replied so
ftly. “I mean it—don’t mention it. The only reason I brought it up was because we didn’t know if Glazer had your kids. It’s something I’d never do otherwise, and I feel filthy for suggesting it, so do me a favor and let’s pretend it never happened.”
Rachel turned her back on him and stormed off to the ladies’ room, making a show of rubbing her upper arms as she left. Behind her, his reds faded and the blue running through him bloomed, and she quickly scratched her nose to hide her smile before remembering he wouldn’t be able to see it as she walked away.
She felt awful for playing Zockinski so soon after they had found some common ground, but she had been sent to First District Station to make allies, not friends.
The suggestion to pop in on his family hadn’t bothered her. Rachel’s internal compass pointed somewhere other than due north, but the planners at OACET had told her that her purpose at the MPD was to show through word and deed that Agents were governed by integrity. She was absolutely fine with this: she knew the value of order, and that was a good enough reason to throw her full weight behind the law. (Better than most, actually. She had no idea how seemingly rational people could claim to have a strong moral code and still go about their average workaday lives; everything was a contradiction if you picked at it.) Rachel followed the letter of the law so closely she was a blight among law clerks and officers alike, and was happy to do so as long as this guaranteed they would each swear up, down, and sideways that she was such an outstanding example of good conduct they had considered drowning her in the sink.
But she also couldn’t ignore the value of a co-conspirator. Zockinski had been there at Glazer’s apartment and had seen her search for things unseen; if his kids had been taken and she hadn’t made the offer, he would have never forgiven her. That Rachel would ask him—quietly, secretly—if he wanted her to do this thing that wasn’t technically illegal or unethical but was still certainly both would do more to bind Zockinski to her than if she had stood idly by.
Ah well, she sighed to herself. It wasn’t as though Zockinski would ever find out.
When she retraced her steps to the task force office, she found the windows jammed in black and blue suits. The FBI had arrived. Apparently they had decided to hold the briefing in the fishbowl instead of one of the conference rooms. Rachel took this as a compliment; she had arranged the visuals and the timeline covering most of the back wall herself. If you cannot bring the presentation of the crime scenes to Muhammad…
She walked in and took the vacant folding chair next to Jason, nodding pleasantly at the FBI agent seated on her other side. He looked up from his phone and quickly appraised her with a little bit of lusty red, then recognized her and went vividly gray.
The door snapped open and a woman in her early fifties and her hair in a shoulder-length brunette bob walked in, Sturtevant and the rest of First MPD’s bureau chiefs following close behind.
Everybody told themselves they could command a room by entering it. Rachel, who routinely bumped elbows with politicians and generals, had met a grand total of four people who could do this without trying; one of them had walked her to work that morning. The rest were con artists. Heavy steps, quick movements, words just a little too precise, these were tricks they used to set themselves apart from the rabble. Special agent-in-charge Charlotte Gallagher’s technique was to enter a room and say her name as she cleared the threshold, as if she were getting something essential out of the way so they could then focus on the trivial.
Gallagher wore her confidence like armor and had likely earned it; the FBI wouldn’t have trusted this case to green wood. She was exceptionally polite but her message was clear: kidnapping was a federal crime, and kidnapping on such a large scale demanded an immediate response. “What we have here is not as much an investigation,” she told them, “as a rescue mission.”
Rachel pulled up Gallagher’s service record and skimmed it while Gallagher gave a status report. Rachel could have delivered the exact same speech herself, as no progress had been made on locating their best suspect, no progress had been made on locating the buses, and approximately sixty children and twenty adults had gone missing, names coming soon.
It was unnerving to realize the FBI knew nothing more than the MPD. All of those resources and Glazer was still a cypher.
Then Gallagher segued into the standard FBI boilerplate about how the Metropolitan Police Department was a valuable asset and they would still play a large role in the investigation, but as this had evolved into a mass kidnapping and there was no proof the victims had ever crossed the D.C. city lines? Well, Gallagher was sure the members of the MPD understood this phase of the case was now out of their jurisdiction.
Liar. The dimples were there; Gallagher knew. Rachel looked to Sturtevant, who caught her eye and nodded.
Okay then, she thought.
Gallagher wound down her quick speech by assigning tasks and setting check-in times for updates, then ended with the perfunctory: “Does anybody have any questions?”
“I’m assuming you want my team to drive separately?” Rachel asked. On the far side of Jason, Santino went smug pink. “We’ll stay out of your way as much as we can.”
Gallagher tinged orange in annoyance, but to her credit she didn’t play dumb. “Agent Peng, I trust my men, and I try to keep a bare minimum of personnel in the field. Do you really think your presence will be necessary?”
Has been so far, Rachel thought, but instead she repeated, “We’ll make sure we stay out of your way.”
Then Gallagher made the mistake of trying to stare her down.
Rachel waited, smiling politely.
She had no problem maintaining the illusion of social eye contact. The brief passing glance, the brush of eyes during casual conversation, these little moments of humanity were easily preserved via the visual frequencies of her implant. But she was careful to keep all contact short because the longer it went on, the more the other person began to suspect that something about Rachel was…off. And that’s when their colors usually wrapped tight around them like a shield, because everyone knew that the eyes were the windows to the soul and...well...that meant...
(Her windows might be broken but her soul was just fine, thank you very much.)
Rachel had an entire arsenal of her own tricks, and most of those were much more fun than a staring contest. But this particular trick was the most effective. So Rachel sat, legs crossed daintily at the expense of her bruised and screaming knees, as the woman’s strong blues started to flicker and run orange.
Oh, little alpha dog, Rachel thought, smiling kindly at her. Don’t waste your time barking at me.
Rachel stood up and Gallagher stepped backwards, then recovered as she realized the Agent wasn’t coming at her but was walking towards the door. Rachel opened it in time for the young officer who had been sprinting down the hallway to come in without breaking her stride. The officer searched for Sturtevant in the crowd, then sidestepped Gallagher to hand him a packet of papers.
Chief Sturtevant flipped through the stack. “We’ve got their names,” he said. “There are a total of seventy-two missing. Eighteen adults, the rest are kids. And...”
He flipped to the last page, skimmed it, and said: “And the Virginia State Police found the abandoned buses about a half-hour south of D.C. The vehicles are empty, but they left one teacher behind as a witness.”
Sturtevant glanced up at the young officer, annoyed. “Never bury the lede.”
FOURTEEN
Two school buses had been driven straight off of the road and into one of Virginia’s over-ripened corn fields. Coupled with the corn, the ridge between the field and the road had done a fair job of hiding the buses from sight; then again, anyone driving past would have seen the neat cluster of yellow and assumed nothing out of the ordinary. Howdy kids, come to see the cows?
The rural highway was narrow and Hill parked as far off to the side as possible without rolling the SUV into the ditch. On the high side of the vehicle, Rachel tried
to push the door open and found gravity working against her. She gave the door a hard shove and caught it with her foot, then lowered herself down.
It was hot, it was humid, it was nasty. August in the South, Rachel mused, her mind roaming across the nearby field and through the yellow buses. School started early here, the students locked away from the summer heat. She followed the edge of the road to where the vehicles had left it, both buses driven down into a ditch and across two bundles of railroad ties before going up and over the crest of the hill. The lash straps holding the railroad ties had been cut apart and scattered across the field to slow down any who followed; these were engulfed by the FBI’s forensics team and would not be put into practical use again. On the far side of the ditch, her long-legged partner held out his good hand and helped her jump across the worst of it; blown trash and scraps of tires, and for a brief moment she found herself weightless over the husk of what might have once been a deer.
They staggered up the trail through the broken brush. The buses were parked side by side, a normal, routine sight except for the corn and the crows. They were far enough away so the people swarming around them seemed child-sized; Santino went purple-gray as he gave a silent sigh.
A lone figure was sitting in the back of an ambulance, surrounded by a tight knot of FBI and paramedics. Rachel pushed a fast scan through the crowd. The witness was a young woman, slightly heavy and extremely pretty. Her features and her core colors were somehow familiar, and she sat motionless as Gallagher leaned towards her and tried to coax a response.
Good luck with that, Rachel thought. The witness’s surface colors were flat and layered between whites and grays. Shock, maybe, definitely some sort of trauma. Gallagher pressed the witness’s hands around a bottle of water, encouraging her to drink… Rachel stumbled over a small hillock and she yanked her sixth sense away from the ambulance to focus on the knobby path.
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