Don't Look Away (Veronica Sloan)

by Leslie A. Kelly

  “That dog,” he whispered, shaking his head, then smoothing back the strand of silvery hair that fell forward over his brow.

  It had all started so innocuously, with the dog. Just a little lost terrier one of his students had been crying over one day not long after the turn of the century. He’d asked if he could help, and had been there when she’d received a welcome call. Her beloved pet had been found and identified by a microchip imbedded in the fatty layer beneath his skin, which she’d had injected into him as a pup.

  Her happiness had been something to see. He smiled, even now remembering that moment when he’d shared her joy. And suddenly, like the proverbial light going off over a cartoon figure’s head, it had sparked an idea in him. Because those were the days when the news was full of the story of that poor child who had been abducted from her room while her sister slept in the next bed.

  The connection had been instantaneous, and certainly not unique, since others in dawn of the bioelectronics age were already considering the same possibility. If suitable for animals, why not for people?

  Some had thought he’d get the Nobel Prize when, many years later in 2016, Congress had proposed a law requiring every American citizen to be implanted with one of the microchips he had created.

  Some had wanted to throw him in prison.

  Phineas himself had never truly expected the measure to survive the legal challenges. Certainly some—protective parents, caretakers to the elderly, those with medical conditions—had already embraced the technology and put it to good use. Secure government installations had already been using implanted devices to insure against access by unauthorized people. In some cases they had replaced key-cards and I.D. badges, and quite successfully, too.

  But despite a public weary of anonymous terrorists setting off suicide bombs in shopping malls and chemical attacks in movie theaters, mandating the imbedded identification seemed totalitarian and many had spoken out against it. Including himself.

  Then came October 2017. When the world had spun in a completely different direction.

  “Oh, yes,” he murmured. Staring out the window of his office at the neatly trimmed lawn surrounding his brand new, state-of-the-art research facility, he rubbed his jaw. “Everything spun around that day.”

  And they had done it. The fools had actually made the thing into law, taking advantage of the population’s numbness to get it through. They’d begun the injections within six months of the destruction of the nation’s capital, when the country would still agree to just about anything if they thought it would keep the horror from being repeated.

  Once the numbness had worn off, of course, the protests had started, the lawsuits had begun. Discrimination charges had abounded when lawmakers had decreed that anyone who didn’t obtain—or who removed—the device would no longer qualify for social service programs. When a scandal had broken out over the sale of private medical information to pharmaceutical companies, he’d received death threats.

  Oh, if he thought he had been hated before then, it was nothing compared to what the following years had brought.

  But he could have changed that. Would have changed that, with his next enormous breakthrough. He had planned to offer it up as a gift to mankind. A mea culpa for his previous sins. His revolutionary optical recording device would have given him atonement. Redemption. Forgiveness.

  If only it hadn’t been stolen from me.

  “There’s been a murder.”

  Phineas jerked his attention away from the window, away from the past. His son, Philip, hadn’t knocked on the office door, simply bursting in. His face shone with visible excitement. Over a murder.

  How very odd.

  “Did you hear me? We have to go now. Right now.”

  Phineas pursed his lips and shook his head, fussing with the handle of his desk drawer. “Blasted thing sticks. You would think with the amount of money our government spent on this building they could manage to procure for me a desk with drawers which do not stick.”

  His son, usually so calm and suave as he spun his financial webs, crossed the room in a few long strides that were just short of a jog. “Father, did you hear me? There’s been a murder. We have to go.” He placed his hands flat on the vast, highly-glossed surface of the mahogany desk. Phineas watched with interest as Philip’s fingers spread apart, then tightened, only to started tapping an impatient staccato beat on the wood. Philip was in quite a state, indeed.

  “I don’t see why...”

  “Because the victim is one of ours. One of the five-thousand.” His voice almost shaking with excitement, his son added, “She was found murdered at the White House this morning.”

  And Phineas finally understood Philip’s excitement, even if he was not able to share in it.

  Well, perhaps he shared in it a little.

  It appeared they were about to discover whether or not his brilliant invention, originally intended to benefit the millions of Alzheimer’s victims in this country, had instead performed the function the U.S. government, and his own son, had decided it should.

  Would it be able to solve a crime?

  -#-

  By noon, rumors of the slaughter that had taken place in the White House sub-basement had spread across the entire Patriot Square zone, flung like handfuls of sand, reaching every crevice and corner. Outside, as if they were rubberneckers at a crash scene, construction crews and authorized government employees kept showing up, trying to get the latest bit of information.

  Ronnie had never fully appreciated the scope of this project until she saw just how many workers were rebuilding America’s most famed monuments. “I think every carpenter, bricklayer and mason on the eastern seaboard has to be right here,” she said to Daniels as the two of them stood at the corner of the site, surveying the crowd. It was about an hour after they’d arrived on scene and they were preparing to walk the perimeter.

  He nodded. “No wonder the unemployment rate is so low. Wonder what’ll happen now that we’re supposedly at peace and assholes are gonna stop knocking down our buildings.”

  She had to laugh. Daniels did have a way with words. But he wasn’t far off the mark.

  Like the entire country, D.C. had entered an unparalleled time of economic prosperity. Sure, the gangs and drug problems still existed, as did violence and robberies. All the human cruelties continued on the way they had since time began. But, in general, people seemed satisfied. The working class was doing pretty darn well, and the rich were loving life.

  Daniels seemed to be reading her thoughts. “Amazing what can happen when the U.S. decides to tell all the other countries on the planet to take a hike. Lawton’s official reelection slogan might as well have been, ‘Go Fuck Yourself, World.’”

  Her partner was right. Pulling the country back inside its own defensive walls had, after all, been what their president had begun to do immediately after being sworn into office to replace his murdered predecessor in October of 2017. That philosophy had let him cruise back into office on his own in the next election.

  After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. had gone charging out like a wounded bear to take on its enemies. But by 2017, it had had enough. The attack on D.C. had cemented the feelings a lot of people had harbored since terrorism had become common on American soil with weekly suicide bombings and sniper attacks: It was time to walk away.

  The screaming, grieving citizens had demanded that the government focus its attention, money, and military might right here on its own soil. That it stop pissing-off militants who would come here and blow up trains beneath their cities, destroy their houses of government and slaughter thousands of innocent people.

  So that’s what it had done. Walked away. Closed ranks. Put up fences.

  So long, Europe, concentrate on your own problems for a while because we won’t be around for you to blame. Africa? Hate to break it to you, but you’re on your own. Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder and all that. Just kidding, we know you have that whole Aids thing going on, good luck
with that! Middle East—hey, live and let live, let there be peace on earth, we’ll buy your oil and stay out of your business, ‘kay?

  Israel? Well, uh, sorry good buddy, it’s been nice knowing you.

  We’ll trade with you, we’ll visit you, but don’t ask us to get involved with your problems.

  And it had worked, at least in some people’s opinions. America was thriving, with no terrorist attacks in more than two years now. Of course, those same some people didn’t give a shit that the rest of the world was going straight to hell while the land of the free and the home of the brave sat on the sidelines picking its nose.

  America had become another Switzerland. It made Ronnie want to throw up. Probably not a very popular opinion these days, traitorous, some people might call it, but considering the price her family had paid on 10/20, she dared anyone to question her loyalties.

  One ironic thing, though. Even with all the, “See, we were right” bull being spouted, nobody ever mentioned the idea of reverting to B.D.C. security standards. They weren’t that stupid.

  “You think Johansen’s men will be able to hold all of them back?” Daniels asked, looking skeptical. A few armed Secret Service officers were aggressively blocking the entry gate, ordering the curious, shouting onlookers to stay back or risk arrest.

  “An Army squad will be here soon,” she replied.

  If the soldiers were like the ones who had searched her earlier this morning, the construction workers would be racing back to their tractors and cement trucks any minute now.

  “So I guess this team can join the other one Johansen put to work playing hide-and-seek with a head.”

  Ronnie, frustrated beyond belief at having her first shot at an eye-squad case literally snatched away, gritted her teeth at the reminder. She had been forcing herself to focus on the basics of a murder investigation, trusting the Senior Special Agent when he swore there was no way anyone could have left the scene with a bloody head last night after the fireworks. He seemed completely certain they would find it.

  She was more skeptical. Seemed to her that if security had been lax enough to let somebody come in with weapons of torture, they wouldn’t be too focused on catching somebody going out with body parts.

  “Come on,” she said as she headed away from the crowd at the gate, toward the east side of the construction zone. She and Daniels had begun canvassing the area while forensics did their thing in the basement. “Let’s keep doing this the old-fashioned way.”

  “That’s me, just a nice, old-fashioned kind of guy,” he replied, sounding so innocent anyone who didn’t know him would absolutely have bought the line.

  Shaking her head and wondering how he could make her smile even on her worst days, Ronnie strode ahead of him. She found it difficult to walk these rough, patchy grounds, which had once been beautiful green lawns, and not remember what the place had been like when she’d been a kid. Living right across the Potomac in Arlington, she had come over here with her dad and brothers on Sundays to play softball on the grassy areas of the Mall. Had been enthralled by the Spirit of St. Louis in the Air & Space Museum. Had strolled into the Capitol Building and observed a session of Congress. She’d even toured the White House, for God’s sake.

  Now, what was left of the exhibits from the Smithsonian, after the bombings and the subsequent looting, was still under lock and key in some top-secret, protected location. Congress held session in one of those underground bunkers out west somewhere. And the president was moved from location to location, never staying in one spot for more than a few weeks at a time. Right now, he was at Camp David, surrounded by military guards with rocket-to-air missiles that would shoot anything they didn’t recognize out of the sky before it got within ten miles.

  Funny, really. Now that the U.S. seemed to be at peace and had removed itself as a target with its strict policy of isolationism, security was the best it had ever been. Guess that was what some people might call a day late and a dollar short. Personally, Ronnie thought a better analogy would be that it was like guarding the henhouse when the fox was wiping the fried chicken grease off his fingers with a Wet Nap.

  “Is the Army going to turn over the data from the crowds coming through the checkpoints yesterday?”

  Ronnie nodded at her partner. “Every person was scanned, either in the weeks leading up to the 4th, or, for the poor losers who had to stand in line an extra eight hours yesterday, on site.”

  “And the advance identity scans got them what, exactly?”

  “Special pass straight to the metal detectors.”

  “How many altogether?” Daniels sounded like he didn’t really want to know.

  And she hated to tell him. “Attendance was capped by the government, with entry awarded by lottery in every state.”

  “How many?”

  “A thousand per state, plus another grand for the district.”

  His head rolled back until he was looking straight up at the sky. “Holy shit, you’re saying fifty-one thousand people were in this place yesterday?”

  “Closer to fifty-five when you count the security teams, military, speakers, politicians, special guests, performers and foreign dignitaries.”

  “I need a drink.”

  “It’s not even noon.”

  “I need a morning drink.”

  She understood the sentiment. Whoever the psycho was, he’d planned this very well. Because yesterday’s 4th of July celebration, during which the President and a bunch of high-level celebrities had re-dedicated the newly rebuilt Washington Monument, was the first time in years any tourists had been allowed outside the viewing tube constructed above the west side of the square.

  Organizers had wanted to recapture the old days when people felt safe being part of a big, public gathering in D.C. And, for the most part, they had succeeded. No, the crowd hadn’t been enormous, like some from the past. There were no longer huge expanses of lawn for a million or two people to watch the proceedings on jumbo-tron screens. Still, it had been pretty impressive. The big “you didn’t destroy us, we’re here for good” celebration to prove America couldn’t be kept down had been the largest security undertaking Ronnie had seen since 2017. Everyone had been patting themselves on the back last night at how perfectly it had gone.

  Then they’d found the body parts in the basement.

  Anytime before yesterday, the pool of suspects, and viable witnesses, would have been considerably smaller. Usually, only military personnel, security, and everyday workers who had gone through tons of screening were allowed inside the barricades surrounding Patriot Square. The guards were equipped to make sure no unauthorized personnel got near the White House.

  But yesterday, with fifty-five thousand people milling around? Damn.

  “Explain to me again, partner, why you and I are out here like a couple of second years trudging the perimeter? Aren’t you supposed to be inside doing your ‘I spy with my little eye’ routine?”

  A smile tugged at Ronnie’s lips. Daniels. What an jerk. God, she loved him, when she didn’t want to punch him. “There’s nothing for me to spy on.”

  “What about the victim’s downloads?”

  “A team is en route to Miss Carr’s apartment to secure her computer equipment; I’ll examine it in the lab later. If she followed her training, her downloads should be easy to find. But the data dump will only include images taken with the implant through early yesterday morning at the very latest...before she came to work.”

  “You think you’ll get anything from them?”

  “They might provide something, a direction, a clue. Anyone she’d had problems with recently. But it’s not going to help me at all with her actual death. The pictures of her killer are still on the chip.”

  “And the chip can’t be accessed wirelessly once the subject is deceased.”

  Her partner knew the drill…he had to, being part of the program himself—a fellow implantee. Daniels’ involvement had been required once she’d landed a spot on O.E.P.I.S., at l
east if she wanted to continue to partner with him. Which she had.

  “Exactly. To prevent anyone from trying to wipe the data to cover-up the very types of crimes this thing was designed to help solve, the Eye chip dies when the subject does.”

  “Requiring manual removal.”

  “Yes.” Distasteful, but necessary.

  Daniels rubbed his lightly stubbled jaw, studying the vast, empty lot where the Smithsonian American History Museum used to be. “I don’t suppose whoever invented the thing envisioned somebody making off with the head.”

  Ronnie had met the inventor of the device, Dr. Phineas Tate, during her intense O.E.P.I.S. training. She didn’t think there was much the brilliant man hadn’t considered. “Maybe they did, but figured it was worth the gamble. The odds were against it since so few people in the country have the chip. Nobody without high-level security clearance is supposed to even know about the program. And anyone who has it faces prosecution if they talk about it.”

  He continued to stare, his green eyes clear and focused. Deep in thought. “So, you thinking the obvious?”

  “Of course.” She’d been thinking about it all morning, and couldn’t help having the same suspicion her partner obviously did.

  “Whoever did this has high enough security clearance to know about the O.E.P.,” Daniels said.

  Ronnie nodded, taking it one dark, bitter step further. “And he took her head because he knew Leanne Carr was one of the test subjects.”

  Chapter 4

  When they returned to the main entrance of the building a short time later, Ronnie noticed two men walking in a few yards ahead of them. She recognized the back of one head, that shiny, silvery-white hair was very familiar. She couldn’t help smiling. Phineas Tate had been a demanding teacher, but he was also one fascinating, if peculiar, person.

  “That’s the chip man, himself,” she told her partner, keeping her voice low.