“Need me to fill out any paperwork—” Rachel started before the men slammed the door in her face. “Guess not.
“Well, come on,” she said to Miss Armani. “Off to jail you go.”
Rachel moved the woman to the curb and forced her to sit, legs crossed, on the pavement. Rachel leaned against the bumper of a nearby SUV, out of arm’s reach but close enough to kick the suspect in the face if necessary.
The woman glared up at her. There was a mouse swelling over one eye, and she seemed to have developed a serious limp.
“Just in case you’re thinking of blaming those on me,” Rachel told her, “think again. I’ve been recording this whole lovely chase scene. I expect it to be a huge hit at the OACET holiday party. Which reminds me…you recognized me. Now, how did you do that?”
The woman in the Armani jeans shrugged. The gesture was somewhat muted by her pose and the handcuffs, but the message got through.
“Aw, c’mon,” Rachel said. “The Secret Service agents are a couple of blocks away. This is your one chance to talk off of the record.”
This time, the suspect replied. Her French accent had relocated somewhat closer to Quebec. “You just told me you were recording everything I say.”
“Yeah, but I’m a consummate optimist. It’s my single biggest failing.”
“What?”
“Sunshine and kittens, everywhere I look.”
“What?”
“Who told you how to break into the White House?”
Nothing.
“Okay, then,” Rachel said, and resigned herself to silence.
Miss Armani glanced down the sidewalk, her colors turning over and under themselves as she judged her chances.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Rachel told her. “I’m not running you down more than once in the same day.”
The woman didn’t answer.
“Fine,” Rachel said, and settled back for some impromptu sunbathing.
Hill arrived before the Secret Service, his long legs better equipped to navigate city streets and back alleys than any surveillance van. He took in Rachel leaning against the SUV, the motionless woman sitting on the ground.
“You didn’t bring any coffee?” Rachel asked him.
He ignored her and knelt beside Miss Armani, and bent low to look her in the face. The suspect’s colors wrapped tightly around herself, but Rachel didn’t see any signs of Hill’s forest green core within them.
“Is she talking?” Hill asked.
“Nope.”
Hill’s colors shifted towards a professional blue, with flecks of purple scattered across them. The purple grew stronger and pulled itself into a line pointing down towards Miss Armani. “What embassy is this?” he asked.
“Not sure. One of the Eastern European ones, I think,” she said, playing along. It was always fun to watch Hill work. He was First MPD’s best interrogator—he was the best interrogator she had ever seen, really. Rachel imagined some sort of crossroads deal had gone down, where the Devil traded Hill a silver tongue, but Hill could only use it a limited number of times before screeching demons came to drag him away.
“I ever tell you about the time I got jumped by those guys from Topanastan?”
“No?” She ran a quick search for the term and found that not only was the place a figment of his imagination, but the majority of results were for nude Jennifer Aniston photos. This was going to be good. “You did not.”
“So my unit and I are just outside of Kabul,” he said. “We’re supposed to be running reconnaissance, but our lieutenant is a God-awful joke, and we all know he’s sent us out because he doesn’t know what else to do with us.”
“And you get jumped.”
“Of course we get jumped,” Hill said. “We’re lucky, things have started to calm down because winter is right around the corner. Nobody wants to be caught in an altercation, which could turn into a situation, which could turn into a firefight, which could turn into another battle.”
“Right.”
“These guys, they turn out to be from Topanastan. Nobody in my unit speaks whatever the hell version of Afghani they speak in Topanastan. They have two guys who speak maybe ten words of English each, and most of those are words are for fruit. Cherry, pomegranate, apple…”
“Got it.” Rachel was keeping a close watch on Miss Armani’s colors. The woman was staring off into space and feigning boredom, but her conversational colors were wrapped within Hill’s core of forest green as she listened to his story.
“They took us back to camp and interrogated us for three days. You remember what they did over there.”
“Hell yes,” Rachel said, loosening the laces on her boots. Blood flowed, and her sore ankle started to pound in time with her pulse. “Very effective interrogators. Lousy communicators, but great interrogators.”
“Torture’s not always physical, you know. Some of the guys in my unit had the skin stripped off of the soles of their feet, but me? They just…talked to me.”
Rachel suppressed a shudder when she realized Hill wasn’t lying. “I bet you learned a lot from them,” she said. “About how to…talk.”
“It’s amazing how much talking you can do when you only share a couple of words. I still can’t eat fruit,” Hill said. He grinned at Miss Armani. “The Secret Service gets you first. You better talk to them, or you and I are going to have one long, involved conversation.”
Neither Rachel nor Hill expected the woman to smile back. She did, traces of blue confidence returning. She was more comfortable talking than fleeing. “I love when it’s long and involved,” she said, rolling the words within her accent.
The van arrived, and Alimoren, pleased in pinks, decided to take her to Indiana Avenue. It was the closest MPD station, and as good a place as any to slam a suspect in a locked room until they figured out who had jurisdiction over the arrest. Rachel and Hill assumed they were done, but Alimoren tapped Rachel on the shoulder and sent her back in.
Problems with the chain of custody tended to summon defense attorneys, so Rachel watched from the sidelines as three female officers and a female Secret Service agent made sure that Miss Armani stripped to her skivvies. The wristwatch was removed by the Secret Service agent, who had taken the precaution of slipping a pair of heavy-duty construction gloves over a pair of skin-tight nitrile surgical ones.
They found the nylon travel wallet taped to her torso. Two of the officers carefully removed this, while the third made sure Miss Armani wasn’t about to make another escape attempt.
Rachel held out a small Tupperware container, and an officer placed the nylon wallet in the bottom of the bin. Rachel ran a long, careful scan through it and came up clean: no small ticking bombs, and nothing that resembled poison, lurked inside the Velcroed folds.
The object itself, however, was fragile, held together by pockets of stone embedded within old, old bronze. It reminded her of scraps of coral, so thoroughly worn by the sea that shells and sand had fused into its structure.
She nodded to the officers, and walked out of the women’s holding cells to rejoin the men.
“We got it,” she confirmed, holding up the plastic bin in triumph.
Mitch Alimoren and the other members of the Secret Service team went blue in relief.
“How do you want to handle custody?” Zockinski asked Alimoren. He not-too-subtly nudged Rachel’s foot with his own as he spoke.
She knew what he wanted. If Rachel wanted to, she could sweep in and yank Miss Armani away from Alimoren, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. She had been the one who had slapped the cuffs on the suspect, and she was an Agent besides: as a member of OACET, she outranked most other federal officers. Her rank was legal doggerel left over from when OACET had been a Congressional wet dream, with the Agents’ charter written so they had the authority to intrude wherever and however they deemed necessary in federal matters. They never invoked that clause of their charter if they could possibly avoid it. The longer they refrained from abusing tha
t power, the more likely Congress would forget about it and the risks it posed.
So she smiled at Alimoren and said nothing, and when the Secret Service agent looked away, she kicked Zockinski in the shin.
The detective pulled her aside. “Come on, Peng,” he whispered. “This’ll look good for us.”
“And what else do we get out of it?” she snapped. “The Secret Service is going to burn for this in the media. Letting them claim they found the item and the murderer is the best possible option for them.”
“But they didn’t,” he growled. “We did.”
Rachel almost never put herself in a showdown with Zockinski. She considered him a friend, for one thing, and she was pretty sure he knew—or at least had strong suspicions—she was blind. Staring him down was risky. She could mimic the kinesthetics of a person with working eyes easily enough, but prolonged eye contact practically shouted that something about her was broken.
She turned her cyborg stare on him, and he took a step back. “The Secret Service knows what we did,” she whispered. “Everybody in the MPD’ll know it, too. Those’re the people I want to impress, not Oprah or Ellen or whoever’s got the popular couch these days.”
Rachel stomped off to put the door of a women’s bathroom between her and Zockinski.
Sometimes she hated her job. Her real job, not the enjoyable crime-solving chores that came with working for the MPD. Mulcahy had put her at First District Station to make alliances within law enforcement, and to prove that OACET was worth keeping around. She had already done this with the MPD and several federal organizations. Today, she was working on the Secret Service, and Zockinski’s professional ambitions weren’t her concern.
By the time she left the bathroom, Miss Armani had been processed and sent down to Holding. Rachel followed the signal from Santino’s phone, and joined the men from First MPD in front of Miss Armani’s cell.
“Where’d Alimoren go?” she asked.
Zockinski didn’t look at her. His core of autumn orange appeared redder than usual, his anger coloring the rest of his emotions, but there was enough of Alimoren’s workaday blues to make her think that they hadn’t ended up in Holding by accident.
“He’s making calls,” Santino answered.
And left the four of us alone with the suspect? Rachel thought. Okie-dokie.
It wasn’t the oldest trick in the book, but it was up there. Miss Armani was looking at an eternity of formal interviews with the Secret Service. Before those began, she might say something unguarded to the local yokels who had brought her in.
Rachel wondered if she should go hide in the bathroom again so Hill could work.
“Fingerprints came back,” Zockinski said, speaking a little too loudly. “Jenna Noura. She’s a professional art thief.” He pronounced it with a short O, and chopped up the R.
“That’s Noo-rah,” the woman said, settling back on her bunk as if getting ready for bed. “It’s Lebanese.”
“Pretty name,” Santino said.
The woman rolled her eyes at him before turning away to face the wall.
“The Secret Service says you’re wanted by Interpol.”
No answer.
Santino tried again. “That wristwatch you were wearing when we brought you in? It’s just a watch. If you give us the one you wore to the White House, it might help us track the pieces back to its maker.”
No answer.
“Gonna talk to us?” Hill asked.
“Not now,” replied Noura. “Let me know when you’ve got something worth my time.”
The four of them glared at the woman on the cell’s bed as they realized they weren’t going to make any progress. They had Noura’s name, her arrest record, and enough evidence to put her away for life, and none of that was enough to get her to talk to them without a lawyer present. Noura wasn’t new at this. She knew motive was her only bargaining chip, and she’d hold onto it until she could turn a deal to her advantage. They needed more to work with before she’d disclose anything worthwhile.
“C’mon,” she said to her partner. “Let’s see what we can learn from that chunk of mystery metal she stole.”
There was a chuckle from the bunk.
“Something funny?” Rachel asked Noura.
“You people. If the White House archivists didn’t know what they had, you don’t have a chance.”
They waited to see if Noura would say anything else, but the woman fell silent again. Rachel watched as Noura’s conversational colors slowed and hazed over into cloudy dreams.
Unbelievable, Rachel thought. A three-mile sprint through city traffic, a beating from an Eastern European goon squad, and an arrest, and the woman was still able to catnap.
The four of them left the room, and waited until the fire door had shut before they began to talk in low voices.
“She might be right,” Rachel said. “We spoke with a lot of antique dealers, and nobody knew what that metal object was.”
“It’s from an old Greek shipwreck,” Zockinski said. “So maybe we can narrow down where it came from. How many of those were there?”
“Thousands.” Santino said. “Wish we could get our hands on it. If I could see it, maybe I could… I don’t know. Photographs aren’t enough.”
“Where’s it now?” Rachel asked. “If it’s still here, I can probably scan it for you. It’d be the next best thing to handling it in person.”
Santino went an eager yellow-white, and led them on a fast hunt through the building for the small Tupperware box and the nylon wallet preserved within. They found it on a supervisor’s desk in the evidence lockup, guarded by an officer who had been ordered to not let it out of his sight.
“Fine,” Rachel said to the guard after five minutes of futile arguing. “Just don’t move it while I scan it.” She had hoped that Santino could examine the object for himself, and save her the effort of running frequencies. Her mood had gone dark: Zockinski kept snapping at her, and she had realized she had lost her tablet when she had dropped her purse to run down Jenna Noura.
She leaned against the cinderblock wall of the hallway, and let her scans move into the room on the other side. They passed through plastic and nylon, and ran through the metal object. It had survived the theft and footrace intact. Oscar McCrindle was right: there was scratches within the metal, all but eroded unless she burrowed deep.
“Got it,” she said. Deep, careful scans were difficult. She moved slowly, turning the object over in her mind as she worked. She could feel every single nook and cranny as she scanned them, as real and as solid as if she were examining the metal with her fingertips.
“That antiques dealer I told you about? The one with the dead raccoons? He said there was writing on it.” Rachel narrowed her scope until there was nothing in her scans except the fragment. “I see…something. I don’t know if I’d call it writing.”
“Here.” Santino held up his phone. She flipped her perspective across to its screen. Santino winced in oranges. “Whoa,” he said. “That’s…uh… You think that’s writing?”
“Maybe?”
“I can’t…I can’t make it out.”
“I could be wrong,” she said.
Santino moved the phone closer to his face. “This is like staring into a mud puddle,”
“Oh hell,” she muttered. “It’s a perception clash. Let me run the spectrum.”
Rachel could usually move her perspective from her mind to another Agent, or to a screen, without issue, but there were times when what she perceived didn’t have a direct equivalent within the visual spectrum. She swept her scans across and through the corroded metal, keeping them slow, and shifting frequencies every ten seconds.
Not every frequency could penetrate metal, and those that did tended to leave a garbled image on the screen. Santino shook his head each time she changed frequencies. “No,” he said. “Bad. Bad. Worse. Bad… Wait, go back and try that one… No…”
They had done this before, but never using such an old and d
amaged item as the metal fragment. Rachel was beginning to think the source material was the problem when Santino shouted, “Wait. Wait. Go back!”
She flipped back along the spectra until Santino turned yellow-white with excitement. He held up the phone, his eyes wide and his colors vivid. “Do you see this?”
Rachel tracked his finger along a series of rough edges. She let his finger leave a line where it traveled, and as he moved, the unmistakable silhouette of a mechanical cog emerged on the screen.
He handed his phone to her, and slowly slid down the wall to sit on the floor.
“Santino?”
Happy purples were starting to crowd out the bright excitement as he laughed quietly to himself. “Call Alimoren,” he said, smiling up at his team. “I know what this is.”
EIGHT
“The Antikythera Mechanism.”
Santino spun the monitor to face the others. The screen showed crusty chunks of metal, fused into a single piece by time and sea water. She could make out a large circle containing a set of crossbars, and that was about the end of what was recognizable.
“Yay?” she ventured.
Zockinski and Hill both chuckled.
They were standing in Jason’s lab, the metal printout of the fragment sitting on a worktable. For reasons she didn’t quite understand herself, Rachel had been keeping this one in her pocket. The Secret Service still had the original fragment, and Alimoren had promised to drop it by the Consolidated Forensics Laboratory for further analysis.
Rachel assumed she and the others at the MPD would never see it again.
“One question,” she said.
“Yes, it’s worth killing for,” her partner said. “It’s an out-of-place artifact.”
“A…a what? An out-of-place...” Zockinski started.
“Artifact,” Santino repeated. “Something that doesn’t align with the evolution of similar machines. The Antikythera Mechanism is one of the best examples. They found the first pieces in what was left of an ancient Greek shipwreck in 1901, and have been recovering fragments off and on since then.”
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