“That’s why some of the explosions were smaller than the others,” Rachel said. “They were at the end of the main line.”
Phil nodded. “By the time the ones at the end of the line blew, the main line was exhausted. The smaller explosions had the reservoir tank and what was left in the local line, and that was all.”
“Ingenious,” Rachel said.
“Definitely,” Phil said. “And royally screws up the investigation, too. The chemical composition of the explosive material is usually one of the strongest pieces of evidence in a bombing. This guy took away the chemical signature by using a fuel source that already existed on site.”
“What triggered it?” Josh asked.
“We haven’t figured that out yet,” Phil said. “We know it had to have been on a timer, and it would have had to convert the reservoir to vapor, so there might have been a small explosion to detonate the canister first… We haven’t seen something like this before, so we just don’t know.”
“I hate to say it,” Josh said, “but this definitely sounds like something out of the abilities of your average backyard terrorist.”
“That’s what we’re thinking,” Phil said. “Some of the canister scraps we’ve collected have serial numbers on them. It’s going to take Forensics some time to put the pieces together, but from what they’ve got now, they say it looks like military equipment.”
“Maybe not,” Rachel said. “On our way home yesterday, Santino took me to see a maker community. I get the feeling a lot more people can pull something like this off than you’d expect.”
The downside of being out-of-body was the loss of the emotional spectrum, but she was fairly certain the look that the two men exchanged was the same eye-rolling reddish-purple sigh that she had shared with Zockinski and Hill over pizza the day before. She made a mental note to buy an enormous bottle of whiskey for Santino as an apology.
“All right, boys, let’s try this again,” she said. She fixed the image of the loft in her mind—the solar system, the rolling blackboards, the clever little machines, Speak, Friend, and Enter!—and brought that glorious room to life in the wreckage of the broken basement.
She kept the construct active long enough for Josh and Phil to gasp, then let it drop. No wonder Jason sucked down half of a pizza, she thought. Maintaining something that size takes a hell of a lot of energy. Maybe it’s easier if you’re not also out-of-body when you’re projecting it.
“That was…” Phil started.
“I know,” she said. “It’s a playground. It’s really… It’s beautiful. I’ll have to take you guys there after all of this is over. Just try and keep an open mind about what’s possible, okay? These guys convinced me that a couple of not-so-average dudes could pull this off.”
“Who was the woman?” Josh asked.
“What?” For a brief moment, Rachel had no idea what he was talking about, then realized she had imagined the loft with its occupants. He had spotted Bell. “Oh come on. I have that up for all of five seconds and the only thing you notice is her?”
“Not the only thing,” he said. “But by the amount of detail you put into her, you noticed her, too.”
“I’m a cop,” Rachel said. “People are my job. Besides, I’m seeing someone.”
“Oh?” Phil perked. “News to me. Who is she? How’d you meet her?”
“Hold that thought,” she said as she heard her own name echoing through the basement. “I think I’m getting out of here.”
She dropped her out-of-body self, but kept herself still while she counted backwards from ten. Disorientation was always a problem after spending a goodly bit of time outside of one’s own skin. When she felt centered, she shouted back to Zockinski: “What?!?”
“I said, we’re ready!” His voice came from the rear of the building instead of the front, and she brought up her scans to see him standing beside a window at the top of the back stairwell.
“I’m on my way!”
Rachel looked around for Phil and Josh. Phil had returned to his body, and she found him in the bomb squad’s office at First District Station. But Josh was still floating beside her in greens.
“I’ll be fine,” she told him. “You can go.”
He started to protest, then sighed and disappeared. She felt his quick hug through the link, and heard his voice in her mind: “Just hurry.”
“No chance in hell. I’m taking this slow and steady, and then I’m never going into a coffee shop ever again.”
Josh laughed, and she felt him ease back in the link without breaking the connection; she knew he’d stay with her in some way or another until she was safe outside.
She climbed down from the stack of melted plastic as carefully as she could, then made her way across the floor. Wet ash sucked at her feet and crept up her boots and the cuffs of her trousers. By the smell of it, she was shuffling through a swamp of scorched wood and coffee.
The back staircase was poured concrete and had survived the fire intact. She pulled herself out of the muck and crawled up the slippery staircase on all fours; she was keeping a firm scan on Zockinski and the others, and none of them were close enough to prioritize dignity over safety. As she reached the top, she stood and walked up the last two stairs, then turned the corner to step into the waiting arms of the firefighters.
They hauled her through the window. The sill had been covered in a firefighter’s turnout coat to protect her from the glass and the newly-cut metal of the security bars. Rachel let herself fall forward as soon as her knees crested the sill, and as they caught her, they all shifted from bright reds and oranges to a deep relieved blue.
She was swimming in apologies: the firefighters were appalled they had put her at risk.
“Not your fault,” she told them. “The floor was stable until I jumped up and down on it. If it’s anybody’s fault, it’s mine.”
There was an ambulance waiting for her. She let the EMTs clean and bandage her hands, then shouted them off when they tried to take her to the hospital.
“You should have gone with them,” Zockinski told her as the ambulance pulled away. “You’re a wreck.”
“Hm,” Rachel said, looking down and pretending to notice the state of her person for the first time; one did not crawl through a fire pit and emerge on the other side untarnished. She had kept a firefighter’s emergency blanket and had draped it over her shoulders, but it was doing nothing to help either her appearance or her filthy, freezing feet. “You’re right, I should have! Whoever drives me home is going to have a hell of a mess in their car.”
Zockinski groaned.
The two of them moved to the center of the street. Rachel kicked a fallen lamp post to make sure that it, at least, wouldn’t move out from under her, and then used it as a back rest as she sat cross-legged on the ground. She had reclaimed her purse from Zockinski, and groped around in the hidden pocket of her bag for a soda and an energy bar. Going out-of-body for an hour had left her famished.
“See anything down there?”
“Yeah,” she said as she popped the tab on the can. “Phil and Josh came down to keep me company. Phil walked us through the crime scene.”
“How…”
“Out-of-body, plus a bunch of projections like Jason showed us back in his lab,” she said, but he was still slightly orange. “Just smile and nod,” she sighed. “It’s easier that way. Smiling and nodding is how I get through life.”
Zockinski’s colors shifted to a solid purple and he laughed. She found herself laughing along with him. Sometimes it was easier to laugh than fret about needing a shower. Or near-death experiences. And then, because she was a perpetual giggler once the danger was over and the pent-up stress had time to escape, she spent the next couple of minutes clinging to the lamp post so she wouldn’t roll around on the ground in a small happy fit.
“You malfunctioning or something?” Zockinski asked her when she was sober again.
“Shut up,” she said. “I’m dirty, I’m cold, and I just spent
an hour in a basement wondering if I was sitting in my own tomb. I can damn well laugh about it if I want to.”
“Fair enough.” Zockinski shrugged. “Phil tell you anything interesting?”
“Yeah,” she said, and told him about Phil’s description of the bomb. When she had finished, Zockinski was quiet. It was such a change that she reached over and poked his leg.
He jumped. “What?”
“Hill’s already mastered his role as the strong, silent cop. You’re the belligerent comic relief. What’s are you thinking?”
“I’m not comic relief.”
“You can tell yourself that if it makes you feel better.”
He snorted. “All right. Here’s what I’m thinking: I was working at the MPD when September 11 happened.”
“Ugh, no,” Rachel groaned. “Please, Esteemed Elder, do not treat me to a story from the Days of Yore.”
“I’m five years older than you.”
“Or ten. Maybe fifteen. Twenty? Honestly, I have problems counting that high.”
“Want me to toss you back in that basement?”
“I’d like to see you try,” Rachel said, grinning up at him. Zockinski had eight inches and eighty pounds on her, and neither of them had any illusions of who would win in a fight.
“All right, Agent Sass-Ass. You and Hill have the combat experience, and Santino’s the academic, but I’ve been here longer than any of you children. I got my B.A. and joined First MPD,” Zockinski said. “And not too long after that, we’ve got September 11.”
“Right, right. The unthinkable has happened, the world has changed overnight, yada yada yada,” Rachel said.
“Do me a favor and try not to reduce it to a yada yada yada,” Zockinski said, the center of his conversational colors starting to glow red.
“Hey, I got turned into a machine thanks to the yada yada yada,” Rachel said, parting her short black hair to show him the long white scar beneath. “There’s a lot of stuff living and breathing and dying horrible deaths inside of the yada yada yada. As George Costanza said, it’s a real timesaver.”
Zockinski snorted and the red cracked into purples. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll give you that.”
“So, O Ancient One…”
“So we’ve got September 11,” he repeated, “and that became the model for our training and preparedness scenarios. We planned for big events, bombs that took out entire football stadiums, a nuke loose in the city, that level of attack. And we planned for single events, like a parked car in front of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, or a terrorist in a suicide vest getting inside the Capitol.”
“Gayle Street counts as both,” Rachel said. “A Mass Casualty Incident with multiple bombs, but basically a single big event.”
Zockinski nodded. “Fits right into what we we’ve been expecting. But here’s the thing… After the Boston Marathon? We realized all of this was probably bullshit. Training for single big events is probably not going to help us. We need to develop skills relevant to how terrorists might really fuck us up.”
“Backpacks,” Rachel said. “A big chunky purse, like mine. Hell, those stupid little fanny packs, or a big brown paper sack. Everyone’s always got some sort of bag.”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “I forgot. You’ve been working with the MPD since last spring.”
“That, and this is how we used to prepare in Afghanistan. None of this is new, Zockinski. It’s just finally come home to the States, and that’s new.”
“I’d hoped it would never come here,” he said, looking at what was left of Gayle Street. The purple left his conversational colors and the reds returned, but these weren’t directed towards her. They floated like a poisoned cloud at the edges of his core of autumn orange, anger with nowhere to go. “We told ourselves we’d be ready if it did, but now…”
“Yeah,” Rachel agreed. “I’ve been with you guys on the drills. The new worst-case scenario is similar to what we’ve got here.” She put the empty soda can on the ground and crushed it flat with her boot. “Upscale shopping district, but not too upscale; anyone can come and go without sticking out. Multiple stationary bombs with payloads bigger than what could fit in a backpack, but still small enough to hide in plain sight until the right time. Multiple casualties thanks to bombs timed just right so the first responders don’t have the opportunity to figure out what’s happening or break the pattern. We’ve got the perfect storm for three phases of maximum panic.”
“Three phases?” Zockinski sat up and looked around. “You expecting another attack?”
“Nope. During, Epilogue, and Aftermath,” Rachel said, ticking each point off on her fingers. “There was the big immediate panic of Phase One. That’s when the bombs went off. But Phase One is done, and now we’re stuck in Phase Two, the ‘terrified public’ phase. Have you seen anyone out and about over the last few days? Almost nobody, right? The roads are practically empty. I heard that First MPD had a huge number of people get stomach flu and call in sick yesterday and today, and there’re rumors that cops are even starting to walk out on their shifts.
“But Phase Three’s the worst. That happens about a week from now. That’s when the public realizes they have to get back to their lives, but we still haven’t caught the guy. And that’s when people will start to panic again, but instead of being terrified of the guy who set the bombs, they’re going to be cold and angry and mad at us. Because we’re the ones who are supposed to prevent this from happening, and if we can’t, and they lose confidence in us…”
“If we can’t, they think they’re alone,” Zockinski finished.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “That’s when they start to think that if they can’t depend on us any more, they have nobody to depend on except each other. They’ll band together. Forming groups. Mobs.
“And then,” she finished, “we’re going to see some really terrifying shit.”
NINE
RACHEL WAVED AT ZOCKINSKI AS he drove off down the long driveway. He had wanted to stay and make sure she had a ride home, but she told him she would work it out with one of the other Agents.
“Get a car,” he had told her, scowling at the parts of his front seat that weren’t covered by the fire blanket. Wet ash, thicker than mud, was everywhere. “Gonna have to get this detailed.”
She had promised to look into insurance and start shopping around for a reliable two-door coupe. She wouldn’t: the only place she didn’t trust her scans more than eyesight was on the open road. Besides, it wasn’t as though she had trashed Zockinski’s family minivan. She and Santino might be stuck using Santino’s personal car, but Zockinski and Hill tootled around town in their own unmarked MPD-issued sedan.
She ran up the sidewalk to the front door of the mansion. The path had become something of an obstacle course of late, as the Agents had carved pumpkins the previous weekend. As tradition demanded, they had left them to rot on the front steps until Halloween, at which time they would be set on fire and most likely burn the entire building down. The grounds would probably burn, too; there were three hundred and fifty Agents in the D.C. area, and even the front steps of a mansion couldn’t accommodate every single pumpkin. The lawn had become a sea of grinning orange.
(OACET’s first baby had arrived at the end of August, and everything had become a first. First Labor Day cookout, first apple picking, first Halloween… There was a first Thanksgiving coming up, with a first All-Purpose Exchange of Gifts Day after that—the plans for decorating the front hallway of the mansion included a Christmas tree and person-sized menorahs and kinaras on either side of the staircase. OACET was nothing if not diverse. The pumpkins had been carved in Avery’s name, but the nuanced joy of an all-out pumpkin-innards war on the lawn had most likely been lost on the seven-week-old baby. This was a year of firsts for all of them, and Avery had become a joyous excuse for them to celebrate each one.)
She stepped over the threshold and the mansion welcomed her home.
Rachel was glad Santino wasn’t
with her. If he had been, she wouldn’t have let herself slide down the closed double doors and sit splay-legged on the marble floor while she lived in the link.
There were different levels of connectivity for the Agents. The default setting was access, whole and complete access to all things capable of networked communication, including the Agents themselves. A lovely concept in theory, maybe, allowing the human brain unfettered access to peers and machines, but in practice it had driven them to the edge of screaming insanity. A single person split and made into five hundred? The pressure of holding those hundreds of minds within the body that had once been yours alone was a trauma; the realization that your mind was now split between five hundred different bodies an impossibility. Oh, it wasn’t as though Phil could have possessed her and used her to prepare his mother’s famous Spaghetti alla Foriana, but she could feel his expert touch on the pasta rake as he spooned out the servings with his own two hands.
Now, multiply that confusion times five hundred.
Madness.
Little wonder they had lost so many during those first years. Privacy was as much of a basic need as food, water, shelter, warmth… Deprived of privacy, the mind would struggle and die as surely as if the body had been left adrift on a scrap of wood in the middle of the sea.
But the mind could erect walls.
After the initial excitement had worn off, their gut response to being thrown into each others’ minds was to retreat into their own. Barriers had been hastily cobbled together, like Ben nailing scrap wood and spare doors against the farmhouse walls to keep the zombies out. They had retreated within themselves, as far as they could go to avoid the chaos and confusion when they accidentally scraped against another mind, becoming catatonic souls within functioning bodies.
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