Digital Divide

by Spangler, K. B.

  “Is that relevant?”

  “Maybe,” she said as she jotted three entwined Cs on her notepad.

  “Two senators, a congressman, and a lobbyist. I went to Yale Law. Two of them had kids who wanted to apply. I said I’d see what I could do.”

  “What about the others?”

  “I suppose they might have been putting out feelers,” Edwards said cautiously.

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “No. I’m not comfortable giving out their names.”

  “You’re positive you’ve never received any type of payout from these people?” Rachel pushed. Edwards used to be a lawyer; he could tell the truth without telling everything he knew.

  “I said no.” He was growing red again, but his shoulders stayed clean.

  “Okay.” She thought back to what Charley had told her. Charley had never specifically claimed it was Edwards who had accepted the payout. “Is there anyone in your office who would accept money in exchange for influencing you?”

  Edwards laughed. “I like my staff, but they don’t have much influence they have over me.”

  “We had a tip.” Sorry, Charley. “There’s evidence that someone in your office received a payout, and that it was linked to a prominent politician.”

  He was suddenly wary. “What evidence?”

  A sticky pile of ash, she thought. “It was from a confidential informant.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, and was sincere.

  Rachel pushed her pen around the pad in a circle, sweeping over and under the note to check out the country club. What the hell. Go for broke. “Our informant linked you to a senator. I will,” she said, tapping her pad, “be calling the Congressional Country Club and asking for the names of those members who invited you to play.

  “I am very persuasive.” She cut him off before he could interrupt. “I will know those names before the day is out. If they confirm the tip, I will keep chasing this until I learn how it goes back to Glazer. It’ll better for you if you save me the effort.”

  Edwards flashed red; he knew there was only one reason she would pursue this line of the investigation. “Why are you treating me like a suspect?”

  “Why aren’t you giving me those names? And don’t,” she added when he took a breath, “argue the personal privacy angle. You can’t come down here and ask for my help, then shut me down when you don’t like my methods.”

  He paused, then gave a tight nod. “Randy Summerville was the lobbyist.”

  “The telecommunications guy?” She wasn’t surprised. The Agents enjoyed free crystal-clear wireless networking, rain or shine. The telecommunications industry was paranoid that the technology could be adapted to household use.

  “Yes. He implied that I could count on his support.”

  “Nice coup,” she admitted.

  “Yeah.” His colors took on a silent purple-gray sigh as he watched all of that money slip through his fingers. “The senator is Richard Hanlon.”

  Rachel didn’t bother to write Hanlon’s name down.

  Edwards noticed. “You already knew.”

  “I told you, we received a tip. The source implied you were working with him directly to overthrow OACET. If you hadn’t come down here this morning, I would have been knocking on your door this afternoon.” She was exaggerating; it probably would have taken her a few days to get around to it.

  “I didn’t know anything about this.” Truth. “I played a round of golf with Hanlon, had a few drinks with him a week later to follow up…Agent Peng, I’m ambitious, I’m driven, but I’m not a bad guy. Whoever claimed I was a part of a conspiracy against you was wrong.”

  “Uh-huh.” Rachel let her eyes drift over Edwards’ shoulder towards the entrance with its carved wooden owl doorstop, then back to her notepad. “Sure.”

  “Listen…”

  “You nearly got me killed,” she said tersely. “You let three gun-toting men attack me. Forgive me if I don’t believe you. Now,” she said as she reached out to the community server and started recording. “Tell me what Hanlon wanted from you. Be specific.”

  Edwards sat back in frustration. “There are no specifics,” he said. “That’s not how politics works. We had a golf game, and later we had drinks. He never mentioned OACET, or cyborgs, or anything related to your agency.”

  “What was implied?” Rachel asked.

  “That he approved of my opinions on law enforcement and technology.” Edwards thought it over, then added: “And that if some cases ever appeared on my docket that might allow me to apply those opinions, I should hear them out.”

  “Instead of recusing yourself?”

  The judge shrugged. “I suppose so. As I said, there are no specifics.”

  Interesting. She had assumed Hanlon was courting Edwards because of Edwards’ political ambitions, but Hanlon might be laying the groundwork for a hearing or a trial.

  Rachel scribbled notes as quickly as the ideas came to her. If Glazer had tried to frame OACET and succeeded... If the crime was local, an Agent would be brought to trial in D.C.... It wouldn’t be the first time a docket had been rearranged, she thought. Hanlon could have put Edwards into play and locked the verdict.

  “What are you thinking?” Edwards asked.

  “Things might be falling into place,” she said. “I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Tell me,” he insisted.

  “Give me a few days,” Rachel told him. “It’s nothing but guesswork right now.”

  Edwards reached out and ripped her notepad out from under her hand. Rachel was so surprised she didn’t bother to pick her pen up. It left a long black streak across the paper, cutting through her loose loopy script.

  “Wow,” she heard herself say, then bit down on her next comment. She was still recording and Mulcahy did not need to see her go after the judge. “Please give that back,” she said instead.

  He held up a finger as he flipped the pages. “Your handwriting is the worst I’ve ever seen.”

  I’m blind, asshole. She rarely bothered to flip frequencies when taking notes during an interview; she’d be able to make sense of them, even if no one else could.

  “This,” he said, and pointed to the scrawl underneath the bold heading, GLAZER. “Tell me what this says.”

  “Thank you for coming!” Rachel snapped at him, and started packing up her stuff. She found a plastic evidence bag in her purse, shook it out, and dropped the cupcake into it. The cappuccino was still too hot for anything but tiny sips, so she reluctantly pushed it away as she stood to leave.

  Edwards called her bluff. “Tell me what this says,” he repeated, waving the notepad at her.

  “Keep it,” she said. Most of the relevant case notes had already been transposed to the new notepad in her jacket pocket. “Consider it an early birthday present.”

  “Tell me,” he insisted, and he reached across the table and grabbed her wrist.

  Rachel didn’t bother to twist away. Instead, she spun towards the counter where the baristas were watching the confrontation with open mouths. “Call the police,” she said. “Right now.”

  “Don’t.” Edwards released her as the pretty barista reached for the store phone. “It’s just a misunderstanding.”

  “I have a lot of those with you,” Rachel said, rubbing her wrist. It was the same one that Jason had grabbed the day before. She might need to start wearing thicker shirts.

  “I’m sorry,” he said as he slid her old notepad across the marble tabletop. “The last few days have been stressful.”

  Lie, she noticed. The last few days had no doubt been stressful for him, but Edwards was anything but sorry. Rachel leaned down and plucked her notepad off of the table. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Agent Peng? I am sorry.”

  Nope. She nodded curtly and pulled her purse strap over her shoulder, then dropped her connection to the OACET server.

  “Is there anything you need from me?”

  “That owl,�
�� she said on a whim. The door was closed against the afternoon heat but the carved antique wooden owl was pushed to the side, waiting for its opportunity to prop open the door and let in the evening air.

  “What?”

  “I’m walking out of here with it,” Rachel said. She stood and shoved her old notepad into her purse. “Put it right.”

  She waved goodbye to the baristas as she crossed the coffee shop, scooping up the wooden owl on her way out.

  The owl was heavier than she had expected, roughly twenty pounds of old weathered oak. It was tall enough to rest its head against her shoulder as she cradled it in the crook of her right arm. Once upon a time, it had been painted; there were flecks of blue and gray stuck in the deeper cracks. The golden rims around its eyes suggested these had been bright yellow.

  Well, Madeline, she thought, the owl’s new name coming to her for no obvious reason, I sure hope you aren’t someone’s family heirloom.

  Mulcahy would pitch a quiet fit if he learned about her petty theft, or that she had put Edwards in the position of accomplice, but Rachel was tired of playing nice. The judge needed to learn that every time he tried to coerce her, she would respond in kind.

  Although Edwards seemed a slow learner… Half a block behind her, Edwards had his checkbook out and was laughing with the baristas. It wasn’t a real problem for him if he could make it go away by hurling money at it. Rachel shifted Madeline to her other arm and wondered what should come next. Vandalism? Creating a public nuisance? Indecent exposure, perhaps? So many options. She’d just have to wait for the next opportunity to present itself.

  She caught a cab back to First District Station and returned to the fishbowl. The room was empty, the other members of the task force off on their own lunchtime errands. Rachel positioned Madeline on the folding table within the organized tangle of Santino’s shiny new computer system. The owl peered out at her from between the two oversized monitors. She inspected the setup, then pulled a potted orchid forward to give Madeline a dapper floral hat. Perfect.

  Rachel dropped down on the couch and pulled out the two notepads. Her run-in with Edwards was nagging at her, and not just because she could still feel his hand around her wrist. She flipped her implant to reading mode and struggled to read her own notes, trying to make sense of how Charley’s tip and Edwards’ generally honest responses might fit together.

  There was a fast tapping on the glass door, and Rachel looked up, blinking. Santino jumped into focus as he entered the room. “Hey, how was lunch?”

  “Unexpectedly productive,” she replied, and outlined her brief encounter with Edwards.

  “Huh.” Santino sat down at his workstation. “Seems wrong, somehow. A judge taking the time out of his work day to track you down?”

  “He’s a bully,” she said, shaking her head. “This wasn’t the first time he’s tried to get me alone to push or coerce me. I don’t even think he realizes that’s what he’s doing.”

  “But you don’t think he’s involved?”

  She mulled it over. “No,” she finally said. “He’s like the rest of us. Someone’s been pulling his strings and he wants it to stop.”

  “Sure would be good for OACET if he turned out to be the bad guy.”

  “Now, this is why you need an implant,” she said. “We don’t say things like that out loud.”

  Santino laughed. “One of the many reasons I need an implant,” he corrected her. He turned towards his computers and noticed the wooden owl hiding under his houseplants. He glanced towards Rachel as he ran a finger down the owl’s beak.

  “That’s Madeline,” Rachel told him. “She lives here now.”

  Santino nodded. Sometimes owls happened. He turned off the computers, then reached under the desk and started unplugging them. “Want to help me carry these up to my office?”

  “Were those assigned to you?” Rachel asked. “I thought you had to give them back when the task force was disbanded.”

  “I will give them back when I’m asked,” he said primly, and began carefully wrapping the cords so they wouldn’t kink.

  She chuckled and helped him move them upstairs. After the third trip, Rachel pled boredom and stayed behind in the fishbowl while he upgraded his system.

  Her purse lay open beside the couch. Rachel sat and pulled her purse up beside her, then rescued the slightly squished cupcake riding on top of the mess within. She fished around inside the evidence bag until she could peel the frosting from the plastic with minimum loss of sugar. For once, she didn’t feel as though she was starving. The caffeine from the cappuccinos had taken the edge off.

  Rachel stretched out on the couch, the evidence bag keeping the crumbs from the cupcake off of her lap. There was a smudge of black across the bag’s label. She flipped her implant to reading mode, hoping she hadn’t accidentally reused a bag that had contained biological samples; she had no idea how some of the stuff that was in her purse got there.

  Santino’s handwriting jumped out at her. “RFID, possible Eric Witcham sigture.”

  Cute. Her obsessive-compulsive partner had misspelled “signature” and had used her purse as a trash bag to hide his mistake.

  Rachel turned the upper part of the bag inside out and used her finger to scrape off the leftover frosting. Eric Witcham, she mused. They had been unable to find any connection between him and Glazer.

  Too many loose ends. Zockinski and Hill were out canvassing Glazer’s old neighborhood, trying to find any sign of Glazer’s accomplice. Glazer himself seemed a brand-new person; they had found no evidence that Glazer even existed in any state or federal database.

  She and Santino had run that one into the ground. If Glazer was a hacker whose abilities were almost on par with an Agent’s, it stood to reason that his first move would be to erase himself from the system. Everyone left a trace these days. The only way Glazer could be a truly invisible man is if he wiped himself out entirely. Either that or fake his own—

  Oh Jesus.

  The answer hit her like a bolt of lightning. Rachel leapt up and started throwing papers. Please please please…

  There!

  Charley’s shoebox, tucked between the couch and a filing cabinet, had survived the purge when the FBI had raided the task force’s office. Rachel hadn’t bothered to check its contents, assuming it was another pile of the same useless crap that had filled Charley’s larger boxes. She slid her thumbnail under the cellophane tape sealing all four sides, then flipped it over. An avalanche of scraps cascaded down onto the floor, business cards and receipts mixed with the odd photocopied subpoena. She dropped to all fours and began pawing through the mess.

  She flipped over a handmade coupon for a local dry cleaner’s and found it.

  The image printed in silvery ink.

  Rachel turned off her implant and sat in the dark as she reviewed her last six months at the Metropolitan Police Department. There had to have been signs. Hints, at least…

  When she was done berating herself, she turned her implant back on and went looking for her new autoscript. It crawled out of hiding, eager to please, and she sicced it on the passive RFID tag buried in the ink.

  A name and a phone number chimed in her ears.

  Rachel reached out to Mulcahy and briefed him, then kept him in her link as she placed the call.

  Charley Brazee’s voice greeted her with a cheerful hello. “Agent Peng! Finally.”

  “I see the reports of your death have been greatly exaggerated.”

  He chuckled. “Not really. By the time I was declared dead, I was already a footnote. No rumors to speak of, just an obituary or two.”

  “How did you pull it off?”

  “Changed my dental records, altered the DNA on file. The hardest part was finding the right corpse.”

  She shivered. “I’ll bet. And then you went under the knife?”

  “Plastic surgery? Of course. Eric Witcham was fairly well known, back in his day. It’d be awkward if I bumped into an old colleague.”

>   “So what do I call you? Are you Charley Brazee or Eric Witcham?”

  The man on the other end of the phone laughed. “Neither. They’ve both outlived themselves. But for you, I’ll answer to either.”

  “That’s sweet,” she said. “And Glazer?”

  “Ah,” Eric Witcham almost sighed. “He was my bodyguard on a previous job. His employer thought he was just a heavy, but he had talent. I took him with me when that contract was over.”

  “Well, he gave you up. He’s how I got this number.”

  Witcham laughed again. “Nice try, but you got this number from me and no one else. Glazer and I knew the risks, what would happen if one of us got caught. You’re lucky if he’s said five words to you.”

  “Can’t blame a girl for trying. What is it that you and Glazer do?”

  “Reputations. We make some, we break others. It’s all up to the client.”

  “And you were told to break us.”

  “Brave new world, Agent Peng. Branding is everything. We do realism branding, scenarios which capture the public’s attention and shape it in a specific way. It’s complex, it’s expensive, but we get results.”

  “Conspiracy theories with a marketing department.”

  “Something like that. Big splashy events make a better impression than any ad campaign ever could. The media loves us. If you ever see a news cycle that’s dominated by a single story, there’s a good chance we’re involved.”

  Mulcahy’s chartreuse avatar popped into the air above her head. “Do not,” he said, “mention Hanlon. He needs to give up that name himself. Just keep fishing and see what else he tells you while we track his signal.”

  She nodded. Mulcahy’s avatar vanished.

  “Gotta say, your fallback plan was pretty good stuff. I bet your A-game would have been spectacular.”

  “It was one for the record books, Agent Peng.” Witcham sounded wistful. “If you hadn’t found that tunnel… Ach! Nearly six months of prep work ruined.”

  “Sorry for the inconvenience.”