Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (20 page)

“If you think I’m going in there without gear, you’re fucking crazy,” Phil retorted. “Guys who play with chemical weapons get their chuckles from making people die in agony, and I don’t even want to know what guys who build clockwork bombs are like. I’m not going in an apartment that might be booby-trapped to all hell.”

Santino came back into the stairwell and shouted over Jason and Phil to let them know he had put in a call to Sturtevant to get the ball rolling on bomb disposal. The Chief of Detectives had said they could expect backup within five minutes, but because of the unprecedented nature of their report, Sturtevant wasn’t sure who’d be showing up. 

(The nexus of federal and local law enforcement agencies, political leaders, national landmarks, and global financial institutions all situated in or around Washington meant that bomb threats were subjected to a Gordian knot of bureaucracy. Sturtevant would call someone at the Department of Homeland Security, who would determine if the site of the bomb was especially prominent or of strategic import; if not, it got bumped back to the MPD’s in-house Homeland Security Bureau, who would call someone on their Special Operations Division, who would call someone in the Tactics Patrol Branch, who would then contact the Explosive Ordinance Disposal Section, which would then activate a tactical team to respond to the threat. And sometimes even when the police were handling the situation, a federal tactical unit might still tag along for the ride. The entire process was needlessly complicated at every level: Rachel’s orientation packet at First District Station had contained a checklist on how to document a bomb threat, with items such as “If a bomb threat is received by email, do not delete the message” and “Remember to ask the caller his/her name,” but the contact information of persons or agencies who would act on this information was conspicuously missing. When she asked her orientation officer about the process for submitting a completed bomb threat checklist, he said she should give it to her superior officer at the MPD, and when she said she didn’t have one, he had shrugged and advised her to wing it. Rachel had politely excused herself and rushed to the bathroom to laugh herself numb.)

In Washington, as in most cities, the building’s manager was responsible for deciding when it was necessary to evacuate private property in the event of a bomb. The superintendent laughed at the suggestion but said if they needed him, he’d be at the deli down the street. Their small group returned to the stairwell and killed time wondering if the bomb squad could move fast enough to be in and gone from the apartment before Glazer got back. Jason and Zockinski nursed the fantasy of setting a trap and capturing the enemy as he returned home from a day of nefarious deeds, none the wiser until the disembodied voice read him his rights from the darkness. The rest of the task force sat back in silence and let them play imaginary superheroes until the team from the MPD arrived.

With the exception of a chiseled-jaw behemoth they kept around to swing the battering ram, the members of the unit were built to a man like Phil Netz. Their sergeant, a stoic man named Andrews, was well past the age of wanting to be the first one through the broken door and had let himself get away with a slight paunch, but he had retained the same wiry frame and lightning-fast movements as Phil and the rest of his squad. He identified the small Agent as kin on sight; a long-lost SWAT-team cousin, perhaps, or some other professional relation remembered from a chance meeting at the annual convention. 

Phil borrowed a rubber band from Rachel’s voluminous purse and tied his shock of wild blond hair into a rough ponytail as he and the sergeant talked shop. At least half of the sergeant’s questions were designed to test the Agent, and their conversational colors moved up and down the spectrum until they aligned near a companionable forest green.

That was when Phil told her they had decided to send her in.

Explosives had never been her thing: she was usually called to investigate the scene after they had done theirs, so she was understandably wary about two thin walls separating her from four of them, inert or not. But she nodded and smiled, chest out, hands crossed firmly above her butt, as Phil had her go out-of-body into the apartment and send back what she saw to her tablet so he could talk the Tactics team through the scene. Her avatar looked up, down, north, south, east, west, and walked through the apartment as directed while Santino steadied her physical self in the hallway. 

Rachel thought that if she didn’t already know Glazer was a borderline sociopath, his apartment would have been the tipoff. The tight space was packed with enough couches, chairs, and audio-visual equipment to qualify as a franchise of OACET’s headquarters. She found it easier to walk her avatar through the furniture rather than find a way around it, but Phil kept her on the path of most resistance so she could mimic Glazer’s movements. 

“Do you always need two Agents for this?” Sergeant Andrews asked, tablet in hand.

“No.” Phil scratched his chin as he made a rough sketch of the apartment on the back of a receipt. “I could go in there instead of her, but it’d be harder for me to talk you through what she’s doing…” he said, tapping the tablet with his pen, “… at the same time. This is new to you, and being in two places at once is hard on me. Hey, Rachel, three meters to the left? What’s that silver thing under the armchair?”

“Empty can of Budweiser.” 

“You sure it’s empty?”

Her avatar crouched low to peer through the hole, and her body said, “Yup.”

Andrews reminded Rachel to keep her distance from it, just in case; chemical bombs were sneaky little weasels.

“Doesn’t matter,” Phil shook his head. “Rachel’s… Ah, the Rachel in the apartment… She’s a projection. She can’t physically connect with anything.”

“And if something in there goes off?”

“Don’t worry. She’s perfectly safe.”

Two walls,
she thought.
Crumbling pressboard between us and oblivion.
She wondered what might happen if she was blown to bits while part of her mind was out-of-body, if ghosts might be what was left of those who had atrocious timing when they took a mental walkabout.

“We’re done,” Phil said. “Rachel, come on back.”

She dropped her avatar and drew herself together, and the colors of the crowd came up around her. The sergeant had brought six men, all of whom were burying their excited yellows and purples under a blue so dark it matched their uniforms.

“You coming in with us?” Andrews asked Phil.

He shook his head. “No gear.”

“Then you’re in luck. Officer McCall has the sniffles,” the sergeant said, and the man closest to Phil in size went gray. “McCall, let the Agent borrow your equipment.”

Phil changed clothes right there in the hallway with an officer who would have gladly burned Phil’s suit and sauntered home stark naked if his commander hadn’t been watching.

“Door or window?” Andrews asked Phil.

“If this is up to me? Neither,” Phil answered. “Glazer does chemical weapons. I don’t trust chemical guys. They love to trap entry points, and there are plenty of cavities between us and his living room. I wouldn’t put it past him to fill them with something nasty.”

He tapped the wall beside him. “Rachel, find a way to get us in there.”

“Sorry,”
he sent over the link.
“I know I’m asking you to run a lot of data, but…”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re in the middle of a job interview, I get it,”
she said in a fake sulk, and he coughed to cover a chuckle.

Rachel flipped through the most likely frequencies and found nothing, but it was the luck of an itchy nose which caused her to find the device tucked behind the door jamb. She turned her head to lean into her thumbnail, and what she thought was a reinforced door catch turned into a long tube attached to a metal rectangle the size of a pack of cigarettes. 

“What the heck is…?” Rachel knelt and ran her hands over the wall to see if her fingers could feel what her implant couldn’t quite see, but she found no bumps or nulls in the plaster. Whatever the device was, it had been installed from the inside of Glazer’s apartment. 

“What the heck is what?” Jason dropped down beside her, and she looped him into her field of sight in the link.

“Stop,” Jason whispered and pressed his thumbs to his temples.  “Stopstop
stop!
” 

“Oh, sorry,” she muttered as she broke off the visuals. Most of the time she could pass her perspective to the other Agents with no ill effects, but every so often she plunged them straight into a Stygian hellscape. 

Jason scraped the top of his tongue against his upper teeth.
“I think I tasted that.”

“Santino? Phil? I’ve got something. It’s not another bomb, but… I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it before.” She grabbed her tablet from the floor and handed it to her partner, then connected her tablet to a user-friendly version of the same image she had sent to Jason, gussied up to appear as similar to a plain old X-ray film as she could make it.

“This main box? I think this is an RFID scanner,” Santino said. “But the rest of it…”

“This part is photoelectric…”

“… memory card here…”

“I don’t think this thing has its own power source! It’s hooked into the building’s grid.”

The bomb squad gathered around them and their sergeant went straight to the only question that truly mattered: “Will it blow up?”

“No.” Santino was sure. “It’s surveillance equipment, but we’re not sure what kind.”

“Is it connected to another device?” Andrews asked.

All three Agents and Santino shook their heads. “It’s not hardwired into anything other than the building’s power supply, and we can suppress any wireless signals it puts out,” Phil told Andrews.

The sergeant’s conversational colors brightened. “You can do that?”

Phil pretended surprise. “Suppress the wireless? Yeah, of course.”

Andrews, who worked with men’s lives on his conscience, went blue in relief. 

Rachel switched to the other side of the door and found a clean void between the studs with nothing on the opposite side of the wall. Phil took out a pocket saw with a wicked curve to its blade. The building predated current construction codes and was made with the cheapest materials available; Phil sliced through the thin firewall in seconds. He removed a square panel the size of two large loaves of bread, and was up and through the hole in a blink. 

“Clear!” he shouted, and the members of the D.C. tactical unit followed him in, their broad-shouldered giant complaining bitterly.

The bombs were disassembled and their component pieces brought out in specialized padded bags for delivery to Forensics, then the tactical unit ran the room. Their methods were slower than Rachel’s sixth sense but were as thorough, right up until the walls got in their way.

“Rachel, Jason? Can you come here?”

After the bomb squad had entered Glazer’s apartment, Santino and Hill had gone downstairs to stake out the doors on the slim chance that Glazer hadn’t abandoned his apartment. No one expected Glazer to show, but Santino was looking for an excuse to sit down and Hill was spoiling for a fight. Everyone reminded Hill of the minor issue that the man who had set him up would probably recognize him, but Hill was confident the blind corners of the back entrance would allow him ample opportunity to properly introduce himself to Glazer.

When Hill had insisted on leaving, Zockinski had insisted on staying. He was vocal about keeping someone from the MPD on hand to babysit the Agents at all times; apparently Sergeant Andrews was so friendly with Phil that he couldn’t be trusted. Zockinski and the rest of the task force had spread out across the hall and busied themselves with the minutiae of documentation and police procedure as they waited for the bomb squad to finish. When Phil called out, Rachel and Jason’s heads came up in synchronous motion; the officers went orange, and poor Officer McCall nearly fled for home in Phil’s nice new suit. 

Jason got up without a word but Rachel muttered a quick explanation to keep Zockinski in the loop. She hoisted herself through the hole to join up with the Agents on the other side, and came through to find Jason and Phil staring up at an off-brand fire alarm positioned directly over the door.

“Did it insult your sister?” she asked.

“Ping it,” Phil said.

Rachel did. A motion sensor and a pinpoint camera the size of her little finger were tucked into the alarm’s usual hardware. 

“Well. That’s certainly…. something.”

Phil showed her a similar alarm cradled in the crook of his arm, its plastic case cracked open to show the guts within. He was dissecting the alarm piece by piece, dropping each component in his gloved hand as he plucked them from its body. “There’s one in each room. Apartments, even dumps like this, have a centralized alert and fire suppression system. I didn’t even notice these until somebody on the tactical team realized they shouldn’t be here. I pinged one to check if it was another bomb or just extra personal safety, and got the same thing as this,” he said, slowly rolling the fragments around his palm like a prospector panning for gold.

Both Rachel and Phil had missed the alarms, but there was no blame. The devices blended into the digital ecosystem. Alarm systems, cell phones, thermostats, security cameras, all the rest of those little electronic things, these were the insects of the modern world. They were everywhere, droning away in a monotonous mechanical buzz, important within their own specific ecological niches but generally ignored by everyone and everything else. It was beyond an Agent’s capacity to recognize each individual device
—
kick over a rotten log and you disturbed a nest of water meters
—
so these were shoved into the background, white noise across the mind. It was only when they flew straight in your face that an Agent remembered:
Oh, yes. Those.
and then only just long enough to wave them away.