They reached a secondary gate to the shipping yard. Just outside the perimeter, the cab of a semi truck had skidded off of the road, leaving deep marks gouged into the hot pavement in arcs, the tracks of a seriously broken axle. The asphalt was summer-soft, but the damage proved that Glazer had been going at a decent speed when his truck gave out.
“Damn,” Hill whistled, using his foot to test the depth of the ruts.
“I know,” Santino said. “Glazer’s lucky the cab didn’t roll.”
Lucky? Rachel pushed a scan through the crowd. She couldn’t find Glazer at first, and then when she did, she shuddered.
She no longer noticed faces. Faces were irrelevant, a second-rate identification system that couldn’t compare to the nuanced individuality of core colors. She supplemented core colors with physical markers such as height, weight, and body language, including general facial gestures. The detail-oriented spectrum she saved for the environment. Buildings and spaces didn’t broadcast who or what they were; she had to go search those out on her own.
Rachel didn’t expect to have to search for Glazer’s face. She thought he’d pop out of the cluster of law enforcement on his own, his core colors insidiously dark or his conversational colors raging. Instead, he blended perfectly into the other excited professionals and she had to cross-reference his face with that of the Glazer from the video to make sure the figure that had all the hallmarks of a man under arrest was actually him.
It was. Glazer’s core was an almost-warm sandalwood. His conversational colors were slightly gray but this minor anxiety was woven into uniform-dark blues, with a goodly hint of purple. He was surrounded by cops, handcuffed, locked in the back of a sedan with wire mesh across the windows, and exactly where he wanted to be.
And he found all of this to be funny.
“Shit,” Rachel said.
Gallagher overheard. The SAC looked from Rachel to Glazer and back again, and raised an eyebrow in question.
“This isn’t right,” Rachel said to her. “You know this isn’t right. A guy like this doesn’t get caught because of equipment failure.”
Gallagher’s eyes traveled back to Glazer, but she said nothing.
“Ted Bundy was caught during a traffic stop,” Zockinski said.
“And Ed Kemper had a body in the trunk when he was pulled over for a busted tail light, and he got away clean,” Rachel said. “Bundy’s not the norm.”
“Randy Kraft.”
“Stop listing serial killers! Glazer’s smarter than your average bear-strangler. Look,” Rachel said, and pointed to the security guard who had apprehended Glazer. “Small guy, getting on in years… Glazer’s already a murderer, remember? What kept him from putting a knife in one puny old man and stashing the body somewhere in the yard? And how does a guy who can manipulate tech like Glazer does get caught by a bad ID?”
“What are you saying?” Gallagher asked. Rachel’s own turquoise core moved throughout Gallagher’s conversational colors; Gallagher already agreed with her, but was letting Rachel take the risk.
“I’m saying he plays the long game.” Rachel nodded towards the truck and its broken axle. “And so far, anything that’s seemed like a coincidence with him hasn’t been one.”
“He wanted to be caught?”
Darned skippy, Rachel thought, but shrugged. “Who knows what someone like him wants? I just think we shouldn’t assume we were lucky enough to bag a criminal mastermind because he forgot to get his front end checked.”
“Good point. We know he works with explosives.” Gallagher waved her team away from Glazer’s cab, then started running. They all followed, not stopping until they were five hundred feet away and secure behind the husk of an old FEU. The sedan carrying Glazer pulled in behind them. Glazer had gone to a rich purple; he thought this was hilarious.
“Do we need to get a bomb squad in here, or can you check it?” Gallagher asked Rachel.
Rachel looked to Phil, who nodded and took off his sunglasses to go out-of-body.
“What’s he doing?” Gallagher pressed.
“It’s a thing we can…” Rachel began, almost automatically, but caught herself. Gallagher knew the basics by now. The SAC wanted useful information. “He’s checking the truck from a safe distance,” she amended.
“Are you doing that, too?”
“Nope,” Rachel said as she peered through the side of the cab. “I can’t tell a carburetor from a fan belt from a battery. Matter of fact, I don’t even know what a carburetor is. Whole thing could be a bomb and I’d never know until it went off.”
“And Agent Netz?”
“I grew up in an auto shop,” Phil replied for her, his eyes covered by one hand, sunglasses dangling by an ear stem in the other. “I know what belongs and what doesn’t.”
“Really?” Rachel hadn’t known.
“Yeah, it’s how I ended up with the bomb squad,” Phil said. “I’m good with machines. Can I piggyback on your scan and make sure he didn’t stick something inside the fuel tank?”
“Yep.” Rachel looped him into her scan and let Phil explore the interiors of various compartments on the truck. “After this is over, you’re definitely getting lessons.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I have no idea what I’m looking at.”
“All clear,” he said aloud.
“Um…”
“Mostly no idea,” he clarified. “There’re no bombs.”
“Good. Take his rig down to Quantico.” Gallagher said to her team. She pointed at the cab, then at Glazer. “Him, too.”
The small group from First MPD exchanged sad smiles. They knew they’d never put their hands on Glazer once the FBI had gotten involved. Still…
Rachel caught the fluttering shutters of digital cameras at a distance. “How long has the media been here?”
“They just arrived,” Jason answered. “Gallagher made a call to a friend in the press after the kids were taken to the hospital.”
Excellent, Rachel thought to herself. This was the type of press that OACET badly needed. She threw a scan through the gathering crowd and her new autoscript fed her data: name, rank, and the media’s equivalent of a service number made a tidy list in her head. At the periphery was Bryce Knudson, her new friend from Homeland Security, his head tucked in close to a network reporter. She sent a quick note to Josh to be ready for possible damage control.
Hill tapped her in the shoulder. Rachel glanced back at him, and he nodded towards the service carts.
“Yeah,” she agreed. They were done here.
They made sure to pass the sedan on their way to the carts. Rachel kissed her fingers and pressed them against the glass of the rear window as they passed.
Behind it, Glazer smiled at her.
SIXTEEN
Left took them towards the Palisades, right took them back towards the city and its dense fringe of suburbs. Rachel slumped forward over her knees. “I just want to go home,” she said, and Santino nodded and started to turn right.
“No.” She leaned over and touched the wheel. “Sorry, no. Not my house.”
They were both exhausted. Sturtevant had kept them late; the media was pressing First MPD for details on the kidnapping and he had none to give until he debriefed his team. She and Santino were interrogated as though they were suspects themselves. They were separated and asked the same questions over and over again until the words lost all meaning. Then came the paperwork, both digital and hard copy. They would still be filling out forms in triplicate but for Santino’s overloud sigh that at least he and Rachel were on overtime. The Chief of Detectives had thrown them out; time-and-a-half was sacrosanct.
Santino began to turn onto the parkway automatically, then realized where Rachel wanted to go. Zia’s new violet surged within him, mixed with yellow apprehension. “I don’t know if they’ll want to see me.”
She rested her forehead against the window. “After Shawn,” she said, feeling the coolness of the glass against her skin, “there’s nowhere else on ea
rth you’re more welcome.”
Rachel turned off her implant and they drove in silence until they arrived at the mansion. The grounds were lit by reproduction gas lamps and straggling fireflies. Half the usual number of cars were in the lot, as most of the Agents had already gone home for the day. Santino parked beside a third-generation Plymouth Barracuda; Mulcahy was working late.
The front doors were kept locked after dark so Rachel took them around the back to the solarium. Like the kitchen, this room had been kept relatively free of mess. The solarium was a peaceful place, especially at night when the windows were open to the sound of crickets. Stained glass ran up to the ceiling and melded with the roof, wrought iron defining the edges. The Agents had layered every stray rug in the mansion to hide the floor, which had been remodeled in a glossy golden walnut parquet around the same time the skulls had gone in; the carpets were firm enough to walk on but soft enough for sleeping, and she and Santino carefully stepped over those Agents scheduled to come on for the graveyard shift.
“Penguin?” Josh, backlit by the glow cast by a crystal chandelier two rooms over, greeted her from the arched solarium door. She stepped over the last of the slumbering cyborgs and dropped gratefully into his hug. His chin brushed against her ear and her mood jumped to him; Josh closed his eyes tight against it.
“Rough day?”
“The worst,” she sighed.
“But you got the kids back,” he said, and looped an arm around Santino’s shoulders. “You guys are heroes.”
“Off-duty heroes,” Santino clarified.
“Right,” Josh said, and steered them towards the kitchen and its not-so-secret stash of liquor.
Someone had forgotten to turn the air conditioner down for the night and the kitchen was almost unpleasantly cold. The dishwasher was going. Rachel positioned her barstool so she could rest her back against the escaping steam. Josh went on a half-hearted search for shot glasses before he gave up and pulled down some pewter beer steins from a rack on the wall. A bottle of whiskey vanished into these before Josh slid their steins to them down the old butcher block counters like a bartender in a Western saloon.
“Want to talk about it?” Josh asked.
“No,” she and Santino replied.
Rachel drank almost half a hand of whiskey before it calmed her down enough so she could feel it. Seated across from her, Santino set down his own empty stein and let himself collapse backward along the length of the island. “You know what I never want to see again?” he said, absently reaching for a copper saucepan dangling just out of reach.
“Truck filled with kids?” Josh was matching Santino drink for drink. Moods didn’t lose their intensity when they jumped from Agent to Agent. The way Josh felt now, he might as well have been standing beside them when the doors had opened.
“They were so scared, Josh…” Rachel said, and slumped forward to rest her cheek against the slightly sticky wood of the island. “That truck was a furnace of yellow…” Santino and Josh exchanged wry grins. “Shut up. Walk a mile in my head and see how you describe it.”
“Eh, furnace of yellow works for me,” Santino said as he tilted his head towards her. “Everybody always says you can smell fear but damned if today wasn’t the first time I’ve ever actually experienced it. That truck reeked.”
Josh held up the bottle for refills and they waved him off, unwilling to get real and truly drunk until the events of the day had faded.
“Well,” Josh said, “the important thing is that you feel really, really shitty.”
“Yes,” Rachel muttered. “Thanks.”
“Yeah, but if anyone had turned up dead, you’d be wrecked.”
“Egads, man,” Santino smiled. “Why aren’t you writing greeting cards?”
“I’ve been known to dabble in Hallmark on the side. Cyborgery doesn’t pay as much as you’d think.”
“Hey…” Rachel said, remembering. She peeled herself off of the countertop and pushed herself back against the dishwasher. “Mulcahy said I got a raise. How much, and when does it kick in?”
The conversation moved towards money, or the perpetual lack thereof. Agents had a generous salary for civil servants but any real profit went to those personable few who were also marketable properties. Josh was one of these, but he also enjoyed his life as a party boy, and his advances and royalties went out almost as fast as they came in. He and Santino got in a pleasant argument about whether it was better to save for retirement or live for the day; Santino was proud of his pension, while Josh had been known to rent out entire restaurants to impress his dates.
They were still arguing when Phil and Jason found them in the kitchen. They had both felt the pull of home. The five of them were soon sprawled across the wide planks of the oak floor, mostly laughing, sometimes falling silent before the others drew them back.
They turned to idle games and stories of pretty women. Santino had found a pack of cards and he and Jason built thin houses over Rachel’s boots. She and Josh took a drunk’s delight in letting them get four rows high before pretending to sneeze.
Phil stared off into space with the glazed expression of a man trying to see through walls. He had received a copy of the target practice autoscript from Mulcahy, and was working to strip the calibrations and calculations from it until only the ability to look through objects was left. Until Rachel could successfully package up her own scripts, this was the only perception script available, and Phil wanted a head start in case Sergeant Andrews came knocking.
She was comfortably tipsy, almost dozing. Josh’s shoulder made for a hard pillow but he was warm. When he laughed, she felt it through the side of her head; his conversational colors were quietly blue, pushing and blending with the others’ colors. Ripples where the water meets, she thought, and Josh glanced down and grinned at her.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. You’re the sweetest little drunk poet.”
Phil’s head came up. His colors dimmed as he looked at the black hallway leading to the kitchen, then towards Santino. “Uh…” he started.
Josh was suddenly standing, comfortably casual as he moved towards the door. “Santino? Someone’s here for you.”
Rachel reached out and recognized the approaching Agents by their colors before they came into view. She swung herself up on her bare feet. “Come on,” she said, tugging on her partner’s sleeve. “It’s Shawn. It’ll be fine,” she reassured him when Santino fluttered yellow. “He’s…”
She stopped before she said “okay”—Shawn was still anything but.
He led his caretakers into the kitchen. Shawn had found an old suit which fit him perfectly except for the slightly too-long shirt sleeves, which covered a third of his hands and were cuffed tight with carved ivory cabochons. Rachel hadn’t seen him fully clothed in ages; so strange, how she hadn’t noticed how thin Shawn had gotten until he was dressed. He seemed half-starved and exhausted, drained, but he came up to Santino with steady steps.
“Blue…” he said in a voice gone to seed. The Agents went white in surprise; Shawn was one of the mutes. “The blue is everywhere, little men with wings.
“This is not me,” Shawn croaked.
“This is Not. Me!” Shawn said again, almost shouting, and banged on his own chest with a fist to keep time with his words.
He reached out towards Santino. His caretakers scurried to block but Rachel told them to back off; Shawn’s colors had never been so stable.
He put his hands flat against Santino’s chest and leaned in close. “Sometimes I can almost see myself,” he whispered. “After that I’m …” And Rachel and the others were knocked back and forth on Shawn’s internal roller coaster, the car buckling up the high track right before the big drop.
“Shawn? Remember to talk,” Rachel said, more to stop her sudden motion sickness than anything else.
He nodded, shaggy hair flying. He stepped back from Santino and covered his mouth. Through his mesh of thin fingers, Shawn apologized.
He
r partner had been as much an observer as the rest of them, heartsick in grays. He sat down at the island and slid the bar stool to his right out towards Shawn.
“You play poker?”
The wight in the old suit smiled.
The cards were swept up from the floor and Santino dealt them in.
At first, they played for Shawn. Santino lost hand after hand, Shawn laughing wildly, until he realized the Agent was going out-of-body to spy on his cards. Their small group grew as others working the night shift wandered in, drawn by the noise and the inevitable arrival of pizza.
When they ran out of chairs in the kitchen, they moved to the game room. Nights in the game room were like sneaking into an arcade after closing, the walls crawling with light cast from the cabinet consoles. A large tournament-style card table was submerged under cardboard, and the Agents quickly cleared away the boxes and replaced them with candles.
They never played cards. When things were fresh and new, they had trained themselves out of the idea of it; cheating was too easy and bluffing too hard. With Santino dealing like a Vegas pro, they studied the table, their hands, each other, with trepidation.
And then, like stars winking out, they started to drop from the link.
Rachel knew better than anyone how their implants had become part of them. Turn them off to play a game? Such a simple solution, and one beyond their imagining; you woke up in a cold sweat over the nightmare of the accident which took your eyes, your hands, your mind… You did not see the loss of such things as solutions.
She played the first few hands but she quickly bowed out to let a newcomer take her spot. Rachel could not drop out of the link herself, not without losing her sight, but flipping between reading and interpersonal frequencies was bringing on a headache. She found some pillows and a ratty handknit afghan, and curled up on top of a bumper pool table with her whiskey, cozy amongst the boxes.
“Rachel?” Phil called from the kitchen, several rooms away. “Do me a favor and hold up some fingers.”
Digital Divide Page 26
