There was a lot going on, so it wasn’t like babysitting the civilian was necessarily a priority. The offices had televisions all over the place, and all of the sets were tuned to the local cable news feed, as the events at the jail unfolded. This would surely take up every available agent’s time, as it should. Erica was pretty sure Maggie was already at the scene, and maybe so were Francie and George. Plus, Erica had a visitor’s pass around her neck, and had already been vetted for some top-secret info (or, whatever it was called here) in the form of the device she’d spent most of the morning examining.
She decided, shortly after George disappeared, that she’d run out of things to learn from the apparatus. It was possible there was more there, and perhaps, had she been involved in ATSV design rather than theory, she’d be in a position to glean that information. But her technical knowledge had an upper limit.
The problem of bridging the video gap remained unresolved. She could say with some certainty that with the virtual reality device attached to the exoskeleton, it was possible for the person wearing to be physically manipulated by the person on the other end of the device, but even if that person was like Corrigan, the information coming through the feed shouldn’t have been any more special than it would be if it was Erica on the other end instead.
She managed to isolate the solution to that mystery to one component: a rectangular device strapped to the back of the exoskeleton. She at first thought it was a battery, until she found the actual battery, and then she didn’t know what she was looking at anymore. It was clear that all sorts of wires led into and out of the rectangle, but she couldn’t figure out why, or what it did.
She needed to open the box up, which meant getting her hands on whatever kind of screwdriver handled the screws in question. (Neither the flathead nor the Phillips’ head she’d been provided fit.) This necessitated poking her head out of the conference room that had been the entirety of her experience in the FBI to this point, to ask for help.
That was when she realized how empty the place was, and how she ended up wandering into the room with the yarn on the wall.
Maybe the first interesting thing to come out of this discovery was that the State House bombing was evidently connected with the Borowitz and Ledo terrorist case. This connection had been made by linking up a symbol on the bomb to a symbol on an earlier device. Erica found that particularly interesting, because the mystery component—which she was walking around with, although she probably wasn’t supposed to be—had the same symbol on it. It was barely visible, because it had been applied to the same part of the rectangle that rested on Bernard Jenks’s back, and so had been partly rubbed off. But it was definitely the same thing.
“Hey, can I help you?”
The voice made her jump. It belonged to a guy who looked like he had some Indian heritage. The accent was pure Southern Cali, though.
“Oh, hi!” she stammered. “Sorry, I didn’t…I shouldn’t be here, right?”
She held up the visitor badge.
“You’re the consultant, huh?” he said, with a thin smile.
“How’d you guess?”
“George described…um, yeah, sorry, he asked me to look in on you, and I straight-up forgot. I’m Patel.”
He extended his hand, which she took.
“Is that your first name or your last name?” she asked.
“It’s Agent Patel. Mike. Mike’s my first name, but everyone calls me Patel.”
“Okay, should I call you…”
“Patel is fine. It’s not actually Mike, it’s Madhavaditya but really, literally, nobody calls me that, not even my parents.”
“Okay, Patel. Nice to meet you. I’m Erica.”
He was doing that thing guys did around her sometimes, which was to babble awkwardly. She could only guess at what, exactly, George said to Patel when describing her, but Erica could turn heads, whether she wanted to or not, so it was probably some combination of crude and flattering, as was just about typical. Patel’s current struggle appeared to be with the fact that he found her attractive, which was overriding the problem of finding her where she wasn’t supposed to be.
She pointed to the television, currently airing what looked like the beginning of a battle incursion of some sort.
“This is crazy, huh?” she said, nodding to the screen.
“Yeah, they’re going in,” Patel said. “We’ve got people…hey, you probably aren’t supposed to be in here. I don’t want to be rude or anything, but…”
“No, it’s cool, sorry.”
She held up the component.
“I’m looking for something that can help me open this. Take a look?”
He squinted at the screw heads, and then smiled.
“Yeah, that’s a T15,” he said. “I got one. Is that from the thing?”
“It is. I’m trying to figure out what this piece does.”
“Awesome. C’mon, let’s pop it and find out.”
It was almost another hour before they finally breached. It took that long for McCarthy and BPD Chief Gregorian—who arrived at the scene about twenty minutes after Maggie—decided they knew enough to at least secure the front lobby. They were still getting conflicting information from inside the jail, but the consensus was that the gunfire had stopped.
The lack of communication with the perpetrators of the attack remained troubling. Nobody was even sure what to call them: terrorists, anarchists, bombers, hostage-takers…none of that seemed appropriate until they had a good idea what their intent was. They also continued to not know how many hostiles to expect.
Getting inside would enable them to patch into the internal security loop, which was a start.
Maggie geared up in a spec ops vest and helmet, and was one of the last through the door. She glad to go, even without being sure why she was invited; her entire reason for being there was to establish contact with Joe and Dave, and she’d done that, even if that didn’t result in useful information.
Unless we’re all dead is useful information, she thought. Maybe we should expect zombies?
The large, glassed-in front lobby took ten officers only about thirty seconds to secure, at which point Maggie and McCarthy and a half dozen of his deputies went in.
The BPD spec ops team was being run by an officer named Huang, whom Maggie met for the first time two minutes prior to the breach. He seemed to possess the degree of hyper-competence you really want to see in a police officer whose job involved handling military-grade firepower.
“Lobby’s secure,” Huang said, when she and McCarthy made it inside. “Two behind the desk.”
“We’ll hold here,” McCarthy said. “Start with the cells.”
Huang took five and went through the door that led to the jail cells.
Maggie had been in this building a couple of dozen times, and all but one time had gone through that same door. It was where Dave and Joe would have headed.
She pulled her phone out and listened again. The line remained open. Since Joe wasn’t talking, the call served a new purpose: a beacon. When the team got close to finding him, she’d know it.
So far, nothing. That just meant he made it past the first room.
The front desk was on a raised platform. She stepped up and went around. The two behind the desk Huang mentioned were a pair of deputies, either unconscious or dead. Both were women, one old and heavy-set, the other looking like she was too young to die like this.
A corrections officer with some basic medical training was kneeling over them.
“How are they?” Maggie asked.
“This one’s out,” he said, meaning the heavy-set one.
“Out, dead?”
“No, no. Unresponsive, but not dead. She took a hard blow to the back of the head. That one’s awake, but groggy.”
At the door, another ten officers entered. Half went toward the jail door, the other half to the administrative side. Someone must have decided it was safe enough to start getting people out.
Maggie k
nelt down next to the younger one. Her eyes were blinking open. There was blood on the back of her head. Her nametag read Binney.
“Hey,” Maggie said. “Officer Binney, is it? How are you doing?”
The girl looked at Maggie for a long second.
“Hi,” she said. “You’re FBI, huh? I’ve seen you.”
“Yes.”
She helped Binney sit up.
“What happened?” Maggie asked.
“I was hit. I was hit from behind. I can’t remember…Oh my God, is she dead?”
Meaning, the heavyset one across the floor.
“No, she’s not dead,” Maggie said. “Look, we’re a little behind the eight-ball here. Can you tell us anything that can help? Like how many there are?”
“Don’t know. Five? I think five. Felt like more, but I only saw five.”
“That’s very helpful, officer. Were they armed?”
“Not when I was looking at them, but it…it was a surprise. I’m sorry, I can’t remember how I ended up on the floor.”
“What’s your first name?” Maggie asked.
“Sheila.”
“Sheila, I’m Maggie. Do you have any idea why they might be doing this?”
“No, sorry.”
Sheila touched the back of her head and winced. Her hand came back bloody.
“Oh geez,” she muttered.
“Paramedics are right over there,” Maggie said, nodding to the front door. “They’ll have you out in a second.”
“Okay.”
“Did they say anything? Anything at all.”
“Who? Oh. I’m sorry, Maggie. It was blitz attack, I think. I think it had to have been. God, my head really hurts. I wish I had more for you.”
“It’s okay.”
The medics got to work on the older one first. Maggie really wanted to get over to McCarthy, who was working with a tech to get the internal video monitors to do what he wanted, but now that she’d traded first names with Sheila Binney, she didn’t feel like it would have been right to walk away until a paramedic arrived to claim her.
“Hey,” Binney said. “I remember.”
“Great, what is it?”
“No, I’m sorry. Not that.”
She blushed a little, perhaps a good sign she hadn’t lost a lot of blood.
“You were dating that Corrigan guy, weren’t you?” Binney said. “That was you, right? How is he doing?”
“He’s…he died.” Maggie said.
“Well, sure. That’s what the story is.”
McCarthy got a picture. Maggie could see some of the scene from over his shoulder.
“Maggie?” Sheila said.
“Yeah?”
The images were black-and-white, and not in focus, and Maggie was several feet further than she should be for optimal viewing clarity, but already, she’d spotted three bodies.
“How is he, really?” Sheila asked. “Is he gonna pull through?”
“They think he’ll be fine. Look, I have to go. The paramedics will be with you in a few seconds. You okay?”
“Yes, of course. You go. I’ll let you know if I remember anything.”
“Good,” Maggie said. “Thank you for the help.”
All concern regarding whether or not Erica was where she should be, was discarded as soon as she handed Patel a problem to solve. He took her to a room at the far end of the floor, well outside the realm of the central bullpen space, which he called the junk room. It was where old electronic equipment went to die.
In a way, it reminded her of the lab at MIT, where they first cracked the advanced temporal viewing problem, and in so doing, ensured most of them would end up being murdered.
Kilroy.
Hardly a day went by when she didn’t think about him, even though Corrigan assured her that the creature was dead. Once you’ve been introduced to the idea of an invisible, unstoppable killer, you don’t really forget about it.
“Have a seat,” Patel said, pointing to one of only two chairs not currently holding up a piece of equipment. He left the device in her hands and dove into the workshop, looking for the peculiar screwdriver they needed.
The biggest difference between this room and the one at MIT—aside from the part where nobody was inventing a new technology at the FBI—was that in their old lab it was basically impossible to tell if you were looking at a discarded scrap of electronics, or at a piece of something important. Erica remembered three different occasions in which she picked up a discarded bit of nothing, only to have it light up because it was plugged into something else. On one of those occasions, she got a light shock, which should have discouraged her curiosity a lot more than it actually did.
She was examining a radio that looked like it was state-of-the-art the same year she was born, when Patel found the right tool.
“Here,” he said, clearing a space on the work bench, by unceremoniously shoving everything that was on it aside. Evidently, nothing there was going to be shocking them. She put the rectangle down, and he extended a light over it.
“You don’t know what this is?” he asked.
“It’s the only part of the thing I can’t figure out,” she said. Then she explained her theory that there was someone on the other end who was actually manipulating the wearer. It went a little easier than she expected, as evidently Patel had been briefed already on what Corrigan Bain was capable of.
“That’s nuts,” he said. “If I’m being honest, I’m not sure I believe any of this, and my boss is dating the guy.”
“It’s real. I should know. I probably have a file here somewhere; look me up sometime.”
“I’ll do that,” he said. “All right, here we go.”
He got off the fourth screw, and lifted up the rear casing.
Erica leaned in for a better look, which didn’t help much because she still didn’t know what she was looking at.
There appeared to be a relay of some sort in there, and something that may have been a second battery, but everything else was just a bunch of wires leading to a central device: an oblong black cylinder.
“Fractals,” she muttered.
“What’s that?”
“It’s just…every time I dig deeper, I find a smaller version of the same unknown. I don’t recognize that thing there, do you?”
“Nope.”
She picked up the rectangle, carefully, so the contents didn’t spill out if they were so inclined to do, and rotated it. She was afraid to touch anything inside without knowing its function.
“Do you think I can take a picture of this?” she asked.
“Depends on what you want to do with it.”
“I might know someone who can help us figure out what we’re looking at.”
“Um…Agent Trent will have to clear that.”
“Yeah, I understand. Let me…” She held up her cellphone. “I won’t send it anywhere, but before we start pulling this apart, let’s…you understand.”
She’d already taken two pictures before he had a chance to consider the point. She didn’t send it—the folks in the lab in Japan who might know what it is were asleep right then, anyway.
“Just, clear it with Maggie,” Patel said. “I like my job, okay?”
“I will, I promise.”
He took the device from her and started poking around inside of it.
“I’m thinking maybe we don’t need to know what this does,” he said. “What we need is to find someone who does know what it does.”
“You mean like Bernard Jenks?”
“No. Yes, he would know, but he isn’t speaking to anyone. And also…”
Patel drifted off. He was looking at a TV monitor in the corner of the room. The television wasn’t on, but she got the point. Jenks was in the jail that was currently under siege. He could be dead, or no longer in custody, so for a lot of reasons, he wasn’t going to be available for questioning any time soon.
“I mean, this was manufactured,” he said. “So who manufactured it?”
&nbs
p; “That’s a really good question.”
“Thank you. You already thought of it, which is why you wanted that photo.”
She laughed.
“Maybe,” she said.
“Did this come from the company you work for? Is that your concern?”
“I don’t think it did, no.”
“that’s good.”
He picked up a pair of needle-nose pliers, pinched the sides of the black cylinder, and pulled it from the casing. The thin wires going through both sides of it came up with it, so without wire-cutters it wasn’t going far, but it did give them a better look at the thing.
“If we can get this under magnification,” Patel said, “there could be a trademark stamp on a component.”
“Or a serial number.”
“Yes. Here, hold the pliers. I think I have a magnifying glass somewhere.”
He handed off the thing awkwardly. The room they were sharing wasn’t all that large even without the electronic detritus; with it, they had only a few feet of common space, so there was a lot of incidental contact going on already.
To get the pliers and the device from him meant, effectively, holding hands and then spooning for a few seconds until he got past her and to the shelf on the left wall. She didn’t mind, because he wasn’t being gross about it. If anything, she wanted to tell him to stop looking so embarrassed.
Something inside of the device caught her eye. It was a flash of illumination, coming from underneath the cylinder. She pulled it further away, to get a better look, and was nearly convinced this was a trick of the light—or her eyes, telling her she should have taken a nap by now—until it happened again.
“Hey,” she said. “Out of curiosity, did the bomb squad look at everything before it was sent over here?”
“Yeah. Of course. You worried that’s gonna blow us up? It’s really too small. Plus, you disconnected it from its power source when you took it off the exoskeleton.”
“It’s got a battery.” She pointed to it. “That’s what that is. Also, it’s blinking.”
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