I used it as a chance to give Rachel the once-over. She’s been out of the Army for close to seven years, but she’s usually as crisp and tidy as if she were still in uniform. Tonight, she had the look of a woman who was miles from her bed.
She sighed as she turned back to me. “Sorry,” Rachel said again. “National security. Secrets. You know how it goes. Had to check with the boss first.”
“The boss says it’s okay to tell his wife,” Sparky said.
Great. This had all the hallmarks of OACET drama, and now I was miles from my own bed, too.
CHAPTER TWO
“We’re investigating a robbery,” Rachel said to me.
No surprise there. Rachel Peng is OACET’s liaison to the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. She and her team are specialists who get called in when the crime is due north of normal. They’re usually tapped to handle assassinations, bombings, criminal masterminds, and etcetera.
Come to think of it, robbery is pocket change for her.
“A man was found murdered in the basement of the White House,” she continued. “It looks like his death was used to cover up a theft.”
Bingo.
I yanked my legs off of Sparky’s so I could sit up. He didn’t flinch: not at me, and not at what Rachel had said. I was the only person in the room who hadn’t known about the corpse. “What?! Why isn’t this on the news?”
Rachel shrugged. “Because he was found murdered in the White House. I’m under a gag order, myself. Ah…Hope?”
I pantomimed zipping my lips.
“Thanks,” she said. “Since the crimes took place in Washington, the Secret Service is working with the MPD to solve the homicide. They’re also handling the robbery.”
“Wait,” I said, my fingernails tapping against the ceramic coffee mug. “Play that back. I thought you said—”
“I did.” Rachel cut me off. “There’s the official story,” she said, and held her hand at eye level. “And then there’s us.” Her hand dropped below the tabletop, out of view.
I nodded.
“We’re reporting to the Secret Service, as well as our supervisor at the MPD,” she said. “So it’s not like we’re doing this off the books. We just get a little extra flexibility.”
“What happens if this blows up in the press? Is it gonna come back on OACET?” This is a new mode of thinking for me, by the way. Not too long ago, I thought I’d grow up to be a reporter. Then my world turned into spycraft and code names, and I’ve had to train myself to look at it through reputation-colored glasses. Trust me, life’s just easier when you’re not trying to stare through the shit you’ve created for yourself.
“No,” Rachel said. “We’re covered. If this comes back on anyone, it’ll be on the Secret Service. They were the ones who asked us to help; they want to show they’re making every effort to put things right.”
“What’s the problem?” Sparky asked. His voice was getting some rough edges from lack of sleep. “I thought the case was over. Your team caught the suspect.”
News to me. They weren’t being rude. Rephrase: they didn’t mean to be rude. Their native language isn’t spoken aloud. Those of us who can’t headtalk have to pick up fragments of spoken conversation and fit them together as we go along. It is annoying as fuck, and Sparky and I have had more than a few fights about it.
Rachel winced as my mood dipped towards grrr! Cyborgs. She ran both hands through her short black hair. “Sorry,” she said to me. “The short-short version is the crimes have been solved. We’re done. It’s over. But the loose ends…”
She sighed. “There’s something bigger happening, and I can’t quite see what it is.”
“Did you find the object?” Sparky asked. “I’m assuming there was a reason it was stolen.”
“Yeah, we’re working that angle,” Rachel said, her hand moving towards the inner pocket of her suit coat. “It’s hard to explain… Here.” She took out a small black box made from carbon fiber, sleek and shiny and durable as hell.
Rachel glanced up at me. “This was entrusted to me for tonight only,” she said, answering a question I hadn’t gotten around to asking. “I nearly had to sign away my soul before the Secret Service would release it to me.”
“What is it?” The box was the right size for a medium-sized piece of jewelry. A bracelet, maybe. My brain had jumped to gold and diamonds, maybe an antique brooch studded in gems. It’d have to be precious if it was worth storming the White House.
Rachel popped the lid and moved aside a protective sheath. An old corroded piece of metal about the size of my palm lay on the batting.
I gasped. I couldn’t help it.
Have you ever seen something—a place, maybe, or an old tree—and just known? Known there was something more to it than just the object itself? That there’s a layer of history to it that just…makes it more than itself?
This pitted chunk of brown-black metal on my kitchen table was screaming history at me.
I wanted to run and hide.
Instead, I reached out and gently ran two fingers along its surface. The screaming bubbled away until the object was nothing more than a piece of crumbling bronze and a new memory.
“Hope?”
I pulled myself away from the box and its contents. They were looking at me, Sparky and Rachel both.
“Hope?” Rachel repeated. “What’s wrong?”
“Where did you—Um, where did the White House get this?” Oh, answering questions with questions. So useful.
“Gift of State from the Greeks over a century ago,” she said. “Do you recognize it?”
“Should I?”
A tiny angry line appeared between her eyes; she knew I was dodging. “Not unless you study ancient computers.”
I laughed. “That’s not a computer. Whatever that is, it’s thousands of years old.”
“It is a computer. It’s…” Rachel pushed back from the table. “It’s complicated. Let me get Santino. He’s better at explaining these things.”
Sparky and I watched her leave until she was out of earshot, and then he leaned in close. “What happened?” he asked.
I dragged the box towards me so I could study the metal. There were tiny flecks of golds and greens under the corrosion. “Every so-called psychometric I’ve met has been a stone-cold fraud,” I whispered. “But if there are psychics who can tell what happened to an object in its past, they’d kill to get their hands on this.”
“What is it? Can you read it?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I know it’s important. I just don’t know why.”
There were footsteps on the flagstones where our front door used to be, and then Rachel returned with her partner in tow. Raul Santino, a tall guy with dark hair, was wearing a suit as rumpled as Rachel’s and was rubbing his face with both hands to wake himself up.
We exchanged the usual hellos, and Santino funneled coffee into himself until he was good to talk. He’d been to our house a bunch of times, and the thrill of chatting it up with Rachel’s famous boss was long gone. Santino was more fun to be around now that the hero worship had vanished. The man’s a total sassy-pants.
“Right,” Santino said, reaching across the table to grab the polished black box. I had a quick flash of irrational anger as he took the strange piece of metal away from me. Rachel’s head came up again before I locked myself down. “Can I have a tablet? Mine’s in the car.”
Sparky grabbed one from a nearby charging station on the counter. There’s always a tablet handy when you’re dealing with cyborgs: it’s a translation device to help them talk about what they see in their heads. But, as Santino’s fingers pounded away, it was clear he wanted to show, not be shown.
He spun the tablet towards me. A Wikipedia page was on the display, the only visible graphics looking suspiciously like the chunk of corroded metal on the table.
“The Antikythera Mechanism,” Santino said. “The oldest known computer. Discovered in 1900, but built nearly two millennia befo
re.”
“Wait, what?” I was sure I misheard him as I mathed my way backwards through the centuries. “Like hell there were computers back then. Might as well claim Jesus Christ used to email progress reports to Dad every few weeks.”
Rachel took a noisy sip of coffee as she tried not to laugh, but Santino just sighed. “Different kind of computer,” he said. “The Mechanism was driven by gears, like an analog clock. Whoever invented it used it as a celestial calendar, among other things.”
Sparky gave a small grunt. His eyes were unfocused: he was reading websites as fast as he could. “A lunar calendar…looks like it had a zodiac component, too… It was a very crude device,” he said. “Should it really be considered a computer?”
“Yes,” Santino muttered. “The Mechanism computed. Ergo, computer.”
Rachel took a breath that was just a little too quick. From her, that was the equivalent of gasping and falling into a dead faint. Santino glanced at her, then back to Sparky as he realized he had snapped at her commanding officer. “I’m sorry,” Santino said. “I’ve spent the better part of the day explaining this, so I’m a little burned out. Computers aren’t defined by consumption of electricity, or how many processors they use. They’re defined by function. The Mechanism performed complex equations. As far as we know, it was the first of its kind.
“And…” Santino paused. “The Mechanism was so complex, it wouldn’t be duplicated for another fifteen hundred years.”
Shit.
Sparky and I locked eyes.
Rachel’s head came up a third time, and she bounced between me and Sparky as she tried to figure out why our moods had shifted. “What?” she asked him.
Sparky pretended to misunderstand her. “Rachel’s right. I don’t get it,” he said to Santino. “What do you mean by fifteen hundred years?”
“Just that,” Santino said. “The Mechanism wasn’t just the first computer of its kind. It was so unique that it’s considered an out-of-place artifact. You might think it’s a crude piece of metal, but the Mechanism was technology that was so advanced, whole civilizations had to rise and fall before its like was seen again.”
I knew it. Just knew it. But what I said was: “Damn. Dude who built it musta been a real genius.”
“Yeah.” Santino got up to refill his coffee. “Not like we’ll ever know who that was. Not for sure. There’s no historical record of the Mechanism. Cicero has a brief mention of a complex device built by Archimedes, and some archaeologists swear that the calculations of the Mechanism include the date of an eclipse in Archimedes’ era, but other scholars believe that Posidonius built it after Archimedes’ death—”
“Santino?” Rachel cut in. “Nerd it down a notch.”
Her partner glared at her as he dumped sugar into his cup. “Anyhow,” he said, “the backstory’s irrelevant. Point is, all of the known fragments of the Mechanism are considered national treasures of Greece. They’re kept in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. If this is part of the Mechanism—”
“It is,” Rachel and I said together.
She rounded on me. “Okay, what’s going on here?” she snapped. “I can see the writing stamped on the metal—I know it’s an ancient artifact!—but how in the hell do you—”
“Agent Peng,” Sparky said, soft steel within his tone. “Take a walk.”
Rachel sat motionless, her dark eyes fixed on him. I felt her anger roll back under her control. “Yes, sir,” she said to Sparky. “May I use your restroom?”
He nodded, and Rachel disappeared.
(I hated seeing that. Rachel doesn’t realize it, but she’ll go along with almost anything Sparky says. Even when she thinks it’s indefensibly stupid. She’s got this default setting in her subconscious which is flipped to Obey! around him. I think some of it is due to her Army days, and the rest of it is because of the collective. She treats him like a cross between an officer and an older brother. Not the fun kind of older brother, either. Sparky is that one brother who works in a prestigious law firm, and shows up on birthdays and holidays to make you feel bad about yourself by example. Rachel should know better than to jump when he says frog, but I don’t think she’ll ever realize she does it.)
Santino, still standing by the coffeemaker, fidgeted. “It’s late,” he said. “We should probably leave.”
“Please,” Sparky said, and gestured towards Santino’s chair. “Sit. I should explain.”
Sparky doesn’t like to lie, and I don’t like to laugh out loud when he’s doing damage control, so I went in search of Rachel.
We’ve got a bunch of bathrooms, and it took me some time to learn she hadn’t headed towards any of them. I found her sitting on a pile of landscaping boulders in the half-finished greenhouse, a dark shape under the plastic canopy and a fuzzy-filmed moon. I came up beside her, and plopped down on a nearby rock.
My patience gland is seriously underdeveloped. I waited nearly thirty whole seconds before I said, “It’s not like we want to keep things from you.”
“I know,” Rachel said.
I hoped she’d follow that line up with something a little more descriptive, but she’s a cop and an empath. She knew all she needed to do was give me enough silent air and I’d fill it. “We can’t talk about what happened before we rescued you guys,” I told her. “There are some secrets we promised we’d keep.”
“Half-truth,” she said.
“What?”
“That was a half-truth,” she repeated. She flipped a chunk of plaster into the dry trough that would soon turn into a fake streambed. “I can tell when people are lying to me, and you were getting close.
“But,” she sighed, “it was more truth than lie. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. I’d tell you more if I could.”
I saw her teeth flash white in the dark: she was smiling. “That was completely true.”
“Yeah.” I tossed a second piece of plaster after hers. It bounced and skittered over the concrete, kicking up dust as it went. “I hate this spy shit, by the way. I never wanted to live my life around secrets.”
Rachel chuckled. “True.”
There was a gust of wind, and the flap of plastic that the group of moderately-armed yahoos had used as a door snapped open. I shivered: the stones were cold, and I was still in my nightshirt. Rachel didn’t feel it, because cyborg. Their metabolisms are like portable nuclear reactors. I, on the other hand, was freezing my thinly-clad butt off on slabs of geologically-displaced granite.
“Come on,” Rachel said, as she jumped down from the rocks. “Let’s get back before the boys come to find us. You’re freezing.”
“I hate it when you do that,” I muttered, but I hopped down beside her.
“I know that, too,” she said. “And I’m going to keep poking that button until I figure out what it’s connected to.”
“Have fun trying,” I said. My life is hard enough to figure out when you’re living it. “So. Back on point—what’s bugging you about this weird Greek clock?”
“It’s…” She threw up her hands. “Something about this case is nagging at me.”
“The bad guys?” Ugh. Bad guys. Is my spy jargon lacking or what? “Someone had to know that fragment was in the White House’s basement. Was it the Greek government? Santino said the clock’s a national treasure.”
“No.” Rachel shook her head. “Nobody at the White House knew what the fragment was until today. The White House did a digital inventory of their gifts of state about five years back, but they didn’t realize the fragment was a part of the Mechanism. If they did, we’d have offered to give it back to the Greeks out of goodwill—better that than having to manage a scandal if they learned we were keeping it from them. The Greeks know this, too. If they ever learned we had a piece of their famous clock, they’d just ask. There’s precedent for sitting Presidents giving gifts of state back when asked. It’d be good press for everybody.”
We passed into the house proper, and I tried not to dance around a
s my feet hit the floors. In-floor radiant heating is usually a godsend, but if your feet have adjusted to a cold night in early spring, you might as well have jumped straight onto a summer beach at high noon.
“Private buyer?” I guessed.
“Yeah.” Rachel glanced down at my feet before adding, “What we think happened was that a photo of the fragment was spotted by an information broker, and a private buyer commissioned the break-in.”
“How could the buyer know it was from that old clock? Seems a pretty big risk to take based on a photo.”
“The locations and dates of discovery line up. Also, another Agent did some digital modeling, and the archived photo of the fragment fits into the pieces of the clock on display at the Museum. It didn’t take him more than a couple of minutes, so if the buyer has access to a good digital artist, he or she had access to the same information.”
I tossed the facts around, and they kept falling into the same pattern. “Enough reasons to steal it, I suppose. If you desperately wanted a piece of an old clock, that is.”
“Exactly. And that’s what’s nagging at me,” she said, as we reached the kitchen. “Why would anyone want that fragment?”
Sparky and Santino had their heads together over the tablet. All was forgiven, apparently. Sparky took a moment to search my face before giving me the slightest smile—Thanks for the save, Sweetie—while Santino said, “Hey, I might commit murder for a piece of the Mechanism. Lots of people would.”
“Sure,” Rachel said.
“We’ve been arguing about this all day,” Santino said. “I know it’s worth theft and murder. Rachel politely disagrees.”
Rachel politely disagreed again, this time using words that made me blush. Me.
“Well, you don’t murder people over rusty shoehorns,” I devil’s-advocated. “But getting your hands on part of the world’s oldest computer might be worth a deep shivvin’. Seems a better reason to kill someone than wanting their Toyota.”
Still.
I didn’t need to be part of the collective to know that Rachel and I were sharing an uh-huh, right moment.
Greek Key Page 2