Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (34 page)

“No,” the other woman said, anticipating what Rachel was about to ask. “Realistically speaking, we would not have found them in an hour without your help.”

“But you still would have found them.”

“Yes. We had dog teams en route. The dogs would have had to walk up and down every aisle because there’s no trail, but they would have hit on the scent.”

Rachel sighed and threw her sixth sense across the shipping yard. She could not get over the scope of the place. The FBI would have needed dozens of dog teams, but they probably would have located the trailer before the kids got too hungry or thirsty. And the sun would be going down soon, so they wouldn’t have been baked alive when the fuel ran out…

Planners.
It had been a timed exercise for OACET, with the victims as incentive. 

“What do we do about this?” Gallagher asked. 

Rachel chuckled dryly. “I have no idea.”

Gallagher’s phone vibrated. “Excuse me,” she said, and stepped outside the trailer.

Rachel began exploring. She didn’t expect to find anything new, but she had just been proven wrong and was willing to let her sixth sense go in favor of walking the scene. She hadn’t gone more than ten feet into the container when Gallagher lit up yellow-white with excitement. The SAC said something to the FBI agents closest to her, and they scrambled towards the service vehicles.

She reached out to Jason.
“Good news?”

“I don’t know. Something’s happened,”
he replied,
“but they’re keeping it close.”

She left to find Santino. He was standing by the crime scene tape with Phil, Zockinski, and Hill. “What’s going on with them?” Santino called out to her.

“I don’t know. They didn’t tell me,” she said. As the news spread, each member of the FBI turned brilliant yellow-white with excitement.  “It’s good, whatever it is.”

“We’ve caught him!”
Jason said across the link.

“Caught who?” Rachel said aloud. “Caught Glazer?”

The officers stopped. “What?” Zockinski demanded. “They caught him? How?”

She shushed him to listen to Jason.

“His truck. It broke down just outside of the shipping yard. A security worker found him before he could ditch it and run, and his ID didn’t check out. Rachel, we drove past him when we came in.”

She repeated this to her team, then turned as Gallagher waved towards the group from First MPD.

“Agent Peng,” Gallagher called as she stepped aboard a cart. “Meet us by the Railroad Avenue Entrance.”

Easier said than done. The road looped halfway around the port, and the service vehicles vanished along with the FBI. Phil and Rachel pointed the group towards Jason’s signal and they started walking. Ten minutes later, an empty service cart bumped down the road towards them; Gallagher had sent someone back to pick them up.

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 earth 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.