Bell nodded. “Yes! Well, no. Not these. These are dummies with Arduinos to track overall rotations of the impellers at the beginning and end of the system. We’re testing these to see if it’s feasible to use water lines to generate power.”
“Like a water wheel…” Becca said, standing upright.
“Same principle,” the girl said. “Water lines go everywhere, so there’s untapped hydroelectric power everywhere. If we could figure out a way to harness that energy without impeding the flow…”
“Free renewable energy,” Rachel said. She threw a scan into the building below them, running her mind along the existing water lines. Dozens within this one building, hundreds if she added those apartments to either side. Sinks and showers and toilets… Oh my.
“Exactly!” Bell said. She sounded pleased, but Rachel spotted flecks of green in her conversational colors. “Well, not quite free. Not until we get a full-fledged wireless energy transmission system up and running. Until then, we’d have to hook each impeller array into the existing power grid, and that would probably cost more than it’s worth. Right now, we’re just getting the math right.”
“You don’t think it’s going to work,” Rachel said, finally placing those flecks of green as doubt.
Bell shrugged. “It’s not my project. The guys who built this thing a couple of years ago don’t think it’ll work, either, since they’re trying to break the laws of thermodynamics. It’s sort of a…”
“A what?” Becca asked.
“… a pipe dream,” Bell said, and then had to wait until the women stopped groaning. “But you don’t learn what’s possible if you don’t experiment.”
“If they do get it to work, this would be a marketable idea,” Becca said. “Should you be talking about this to strangers?”
Bell shrugged. “We’ve already got patents on it,” she said. “Besides, we’re big believers that information should be free. Ideas don’t grow in the dark.”
That last line tripped off of Bell’s tongue like a mantra, and the cop part of Rachel’s brain flickered awake. “Who’s ‘we’?” Rachel asked her. “Whose name is on the patent?”
“Ours,” Bell said, gesturing to the invisible spirits still at their workspaces throughout the room. “When we come up with something new, our patron pays to get the patent filed, but it’s in our name.
“Don’t worry, we’ve got a contract,” Bell said, noting Becca’s expression. “We’re not stupid. Our arrangement is that he pays for all utilities and the rent on the loft, and if any of our patents start earning a return, he gets fifty percent.”
Becca recoiled. “Fifty percent!”
“This place isn’t cheap,” Bell said defensively. “The entire top floor of a warehouse in the middle of the city? I’m sure it’s, like, five thousand bucks a month or more. We wouldn’t have this place if it weren’t for him, so we’re happy to let him think of us as an investment.
“And there’s no guarantee any of our patents will ever pay out,” Bell added. “So this arrangement is totally worth it to us. It’s a privilege to be offered a free space here—it’s the best maker space in the city. I was on the waiting list for over a year.”
“Santino told me he has to rent his space,” Rachel said.
Bell gave a little smug pink shrug. “You have to qualify if you want to stay here rent-free.”
“I wish I had my checkbook on me,” Becca said. “What you kids are doing here is fantastic. I’ll have to mail in a donation.”
“I take Visa and Mastercard,” Bell said, pulling out her cell phone. “No Amex, though. I can’t afford the service fees.”
Rachel covered her mouth with a hand and walked away, snickering. She hadn’t intended to bust Becca’s budget, but she’d make it up to her by offering to buy dessert…
Over by the window, the octopus gurgled on.
On their way out, they took the stairs. These were joyously solid after their ride in the old cage-lift elevator, and the stairwell was no less beautiful. If the loft was the sky, the stairwell was the earth, and they walked down through layer after layer of painted continental crust. The paintings were richly detailed; at one point, Rachel had to flip frequencies to take in the fossil matrix of an ichthyosaur, and found the cinderblock wall had been chipped away to mimic the rise and fall of old bone. Each landing in the stairwell had its own theme, and Rachel paused on the third floor to peer at what lay beyond a fire door which sparkled like the center of a geode. She found the lower levels of the old warehouse had been converted into offices, a few white-collar professionals still burning the midnight oil in the spaces beyond. She wondered how they explained the stairwell—or that elevator!—to visiting clients.
“The things those kids are doing here…” Becca had stopped to inspect the handrail. It was shaped from fused lengths of sculpted stone, twisted yet smooth to the touch. Rachel had visited a cave on a school trip, years before, and the handrail reminded her of the time-polished nodes which lined the cave walls.
“I know, right? Bell says everybody in their community is pursuing their own ideal of beauty. I believe it.”
“If they can get that renewable energy process to work, it’ll be worth a fortune,” Becca said. Rachel could practically hear the numbers crunching in Becca’s head; Bell was right, everyone’s definition of beauty was different. “I wonder if they’d take me on as an investor.”
“Absolutely. I have the feeling that money is a huge problem for them,” Rachel said. “The first time I met her, Bell said something that makes me think she had to drop out of college.”
“A bright kid like her? That’s a sin.”
Rachel nodded. “Hope Blackwell gave her some money,” she said. “And…?”
The other woman sighed. “I said I needed to see a proposal first. With an itemized list of expenses.”
“That’s sensible.”
“You don’t get to be rich by taking risks.”
Rachel nearly fell down the stairs. She looked at Becca and tried to keep herself from laughing.
“Risks are how you get to be insanely rich,” Becca added, slightly red with embarrassment.
“Well, I probably won’t invest. I’ll just buy art from the kids after they’ve finished making it,” Rachel said. “The only one of them I’ve met who seems to have their act together is Bell, and she doesn’t think that renewable energy process will ever work.”
Becca shrugged. “I don’t see why it wouldn’t. We’ve already got something similar in place with water meters.”
Rachel froze. “What?”
“You know, water meters? The things the city sticks on the side of your house to measure how much water you use? A displacement water meter works by measuring the volume of—Why are you looking at me like that?”
And then, to both of their surprise, Rachel kissed Becca squarely on the mouth.
“You are wonderful,” she told Becca as she clasped the other woman by her shoulders. “You’re smart and funny and I don’t even mind your pathological insistence that fantasy football isn’t Dungeons & Dragons for jocks. But right now, you should probably go home while I keep the country from coming apart.”
NINETEEN
TELEVISION HAD DONE THE Justice Department a valuable service: any schmuck now thought they could build a bomb using a bag of fertilizer and plans off of the Internet. This was a highly effective way to separate the crazies from the curious: both would download the plans, purchase the fertilizer, and then stare at the tiny crater they had made in their backyard. Those with a last lick of sense would do the math, shrug, and head inside to do something more productive with their time.
The crazies would figure they had done something wrong and try, try again. They would buy more fertilizer and up the payload. They’d visit cached files of Inspire and browse al-Qaeda’s starter recipes (Simple jihad! Nothing but a pipe and nails required!), and test those at their leisure. When those failed to give a sufficient bang for their buck, they’d find people with
similar interests, start going to meetings, talk about bigger and better explosions. “Bigger and better” required a little more kick than potassium nitrate and a trip to the hardware store, and they’d realize, all of a sudden, that bombs were more complex than what they saw on the weekly procedurals.
So they’d reach out through various contacts, friends of friends and the like, to find a supplier for the parts they needed to carry out their master plan. And, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the friend of a friend just happened to be an undercover officer.
The Justice Department adored television.
Local law enforcement, on the other hand, couldn’t stand television. Procedural cop shows had made their job that much harder. Not because it taught a criminal the right way to commit a crime, but because the police didn’t need the extra hassle of explaining to a jury that no, bleach does not eliminate blood evidence and yes, murders can be committed without shedding incriminating DNA all over the body.
The wannabe criminal could, however, pick up some pointers along the way, which is why the gun in the storm drain had been driving Rachel absolutely batty. Anyone who had access to a television over the last thirty years knew you never tossed a gun in a storm drain, especially not a drain located a mere block away from your murder scene, and especially not when you were already on your way to a river to dump the bodies!
The power supply locked it all into place.
“Water meters?” Zockinski wasn’t convinced.
“Yes!” Rachel was pacing across the wooden floor. Bell hadn’t been happy that the MPD had invaded the loft, but Jason had shown up with pizza and all was forgiven: the girl was devouring slices as though her last meal had been at the diner. “When Phil gets here, he’ll be able to walk you through the connections. The bottom line is, there’s something in this very room that could power the arming device indefinitely.”
The fire door on the other end of the loft opened. Santino came in, uncharacteristically unkempt in dirty jeans and a sweatshirt; when Rachel had called him, he had been digging in their garden.
“This better be good,” he said, brushing scraps of metal off of one of the old slate-topped lab tables so he’d have a place to sit. “I was trying to get a tree in the ground.”
“At eleven at night, in the middle of October?” Zockinski asked.
“Only time I’ve had to do it since Gayle Street,” Santino said, yawning.
The floor started to shake and the windows rattled in their frames. Rachel glanced around in mild panic, noting that Jason was doing the same; they had both been stationed in OACET’s West Coast office, and shared a learned caution for earthquakes. It was only when her scans hit upon the elevator grinding its way upwards that she stopped searching for a good place to take cover from flying glass.
“Why don’t you guys fix that thing?” Rachel said to Bell, as she went to open the main door for Hill.
“Can’t,” Bell mumbled around a mouthful of pizza. “’s illegal. Haf to be licensed to r’pair an ele’tor.”
There was a hard banging on the door; Hill wasn’t in the mood for games. Rachel twisted a curved brass knob and the door swung open. Hill blinked as he saw the loft, the sides of his mouth twitching at the solar system above them, and then he noticed Rachel. The orange-yellow irritation in his conversational colors fell away in a rush of her southwestern turquoise and a very different sort of red.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she muttered, dragging him into the loft with her good hand. “Yes, I’m wearing a dress. Go, go.”
She followed him over to where Santino was setting up a rough staging area, and briefly toyed with the idea of retrieving her coat. Screw it, she decided. The loft was warm and she was comfortable: Hill would just have to deal with her legs.
“We good?” Hill asked the others. “It’s getting late, and I don’t like the streets tonight.”
“Agent Netz,” Zockinski told him. “He’s the last one.”
“Phil’s stuck in traffic,” Jason said. “There’s some crazy accident off of the highway. He says he’ll catch up when he gets here.”
Rachel threw her mind towards Phil, and found him sitting in his car, drumming his fingers against the steering wheel, the sound of car horns blaring around him.
He felt her touch. “What?”
“Just checking.”
“I’m fine,” he said. He was still angry with her, and his emotions hummed across their link. She felt his anger hitch as something caught his eye.
“Phil?”
“Some assholes are trying to flip a sedan,” he said. He pulled her into his perspective, and they watched as several younger men grabbed the bumpers of a parked car with a license plate that marked it as part of the D.C. government fleet. Before Phil could get out to intervene, an MPD cruiser zipped to the curb, the officers waving the men off.
“Not good,” Phil observed.
“Definitely not good. Am I’m overreacting if I ping the rest of Administration and have them put out an OACET-wide curfew?”
She felt Phil grin, as he said, “Maybe a little.”
Rachel sighed. “Just hurry. I noticed a lot of red out there.”
Phil nodded. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
When Phil broke their connection, Rachel took a moment to check on Becca. Over the past half-hour, the woman’s cell phone had moved from the loft to a taxi to a condo complex in a swanky part of town. Rachel wondered if her new not-quite-girlfriend read to herself before bed.
She shifted her attention back to the loft. The men from the MPD were watching her, different hues of reds and orange flickering across Rachel’s own southwestern turquoise. Jason, however, was deep in conversation with Bell. The girl was wearing a pair of Santino’s optical display glasses, and was laughing in delight as Jason conjured a bower of digital roses for her.
Sorry, Phil, Rachel thought to herself. You never had a chance.
“Right.” Rachel pulled one of the rolling blackboards over to her and swept the receipts covering it to the floor. She nodded at Jason, who turned orange-yellow in annoyance, but still went to find a piece of chalk. “Bell, maybe you should leave?”
“Are you telling or asking?”
“Telling.”
“She can be trusted,” Santino interrupted. “Besides, it’d be good to get an outsider’s opinion on this clusterfuck.”
“Okie-dokie,” Rachel said. “All right, I’ve two good reasons for busting up your night. First? The formal investigation for Gayle Street is going nowhere. Second? Sturtevant doesn’t want us to be part of the formal investigation, maybe for that very reason. Because honestly? I’m beginning to think Sturtevant’s clairvoyant.”
“Your point, Peng?” Zockinski was moving past irritation to anger.
“Hear me out, and then we’re going to start looking for the bad guy in new places. Different places. I think a big part of the reason we haven’t made any progress on the case is because we all—us, the MPD, Homeland, the general public—made the same basic assumptions.
“So,” she said. “What’s the one major part of Gayle Street that doesn’t make sense?”
“That Homeland wants to block the investigation,” Zockinski said.
“That Homeland is involved at all,” Jason said from behind her, jotting down notes on the board.
“Bingo,” she said. “Why?”
When they didn’t answer, she did it for them. “Because you can’t pull off something like Gayle Street with an entire government organization. A few guys from Homeland? Maybe as many as five or six of them could keep their shit together long enough to set Gayle Street up, and keep the secret after the fact, but there is no way an entire organization could do that.”
“Rachel and I are already convinced that Homeland’s not involved, so I’m playing devil’s advocate here,” Santino said. “What if a few guys from Homeland did cause this, and Knudson or someone else in Homeland’s administration found out? That would explain why Homeland’s been so�
�� bureaucratic.”
“Oh, I like that one,” Zockinski said.
“I do too,” Rachel said, “except for the evidence which suggests that Homeland’s involved. Why would people who work for a government agency leave enough behind to show it was responsible for this type of crime? Hill?”
Hill usually responded to direct questions. “Because they’d want Homeland to be held responsible.”
“Held responsible,” she said. “Perfect. That’s the perfect phrase. And if that’s the case, then does it really matter who blew up Gayle Street?”
“Jason, can you write ‘motive’ up there? Draw a bunny beside it.”
“Shut up, Zockinski,” Rachel told him. “I’m getting to motive. If you think about it, we don’t have that many suspects. There’s a foreign military or agency, there’s our own military or agencies, there’s fringe nutcases, and there’s lone wolves. And lone wolves are usually fringe nutcases, so…”
“What about mercenaries?” Hill asked. “Business tycoon hires them to start a war?”
“Too complex,” Rachel said. “Wars tend to start themselves. Revolutions, on the other hand…?”
“No,” Zockinski stood and started pacing. “Too unpredictable. Nobody in their right mind would set up something like Gayle Street and count on it to start a revolution.”
“You’re right,” Rachel said. “But he might, if he wanted to influence the public just enough to get them to put pressure on Congress. Like, say, before a big vote on military spending?”
There was a single beat in which the conversational colors of everyone in the room froze. Her partner stopped scraping dirt out from beneath his fingernails. “Oh shit,” he said. “The coffee shop.”
“Exactly.” Rachel couldn’t help but cross her arms and smile. “The murders in the coffee shop was the part of this that never fit. You’ve got an astonishingly clean terrorist event on one hand, and a clumsy-ass murder scene on the other. Why take the time and the effort to pull off the perfect crime if you have to follow it up with something so sloppy?
Maker Space Page 30