As Alana shoved the last piece of fish into her mouth, she saw that Rhys’ gaze was still fixed upon her. She mumbled, her mouth still full, “Whut ur ooh rookin aht?”
Rhys said, “You have some tartar sauce on your chin.”
Alana closed her eyes and swallowed hard, clearing the mediocre mélange that her chemical analyzer identified as whitefish, eggs, flour, canola oil, and monosodium glutamate from her mouth.
Rhys continued, “It’s been there for about five minutes. I was marveling at how it managed to remain in place given how fast your jaw has been moving. If it wasn’t for the small green bits...”
Alana’s eyebrows formed a near-perfect artistic representation of gull wings as she reached for a napkin and wiped away her guilt, “I thought you were above adult humor.”
“You always were a saucy one. I hear that the Japanese have a word for—”
“Don’t go there.”
Rhys leaned back against the solid bench, thinking that it would likely be very uncomfortable if he were still alive. He said, “Not to worry. I can’t go there anymore, even if I wanted to.”
There was a short silence, which Alana finally broke, saying, “Did you ever want to—”
The door to the fast-food fish and chip restaurant flung open, framing a uniformed officer who yelled, “DCI Graves?”
Alana raised her hand. The officer propped the door open with his foot, pointed across the street, and waved, beckoning Alana back toward the taxi company. She cleaned up her mess, and then, with Rhys in tow, jaywalked back across the road. Sergeant Ross of the bomb disposal unit greeted her. He looked younger than the last time Alana had met him, and when she scrutinized his complexion and noticed that his right cheek no longer held the shrapnel scar she vividly remembered, it quickly dawned upon her that he had retired since then. Ross said, “Ma’am, the site is clear.”
Of course, the site would be clear of bombs. The business was created before the mercenaries arrived, they had no contact with the location, and they were only able to transport smaller items through the port gates using the stolen Chinese embassy limousine. “Thank you, Sergeant Ross. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”
Ross smiled as slightly as was possible, stopping well short of a grin, “I wish every call was this eventful.” He turned and walked in the direction of his specialty van, which the remainder of his four-man team was still reloading and repacking with a dozen or so bomb-detecting robots, some crawlers with caterpillar tracks, and some fliers with ducted fans. The pair of tactical drones that had been circling overhead peeled off and flew away. The ART van drove off.
Alana looked up and down the street, focused her gaze on a pole at the nearest intersection, and then stomped her foot, “Damn it! Ben!”
Rhys had drifted away a few feet down the sidewalk, but he trotted to Alana’s side. He asked, “Yes, ma’am?” formally in the presence of the other officers.
“I’m so incredibly stupid.”
“If you say so—”
“Traffic cams. I forgot to look for traffic cam footage from the kidnap sites.”
Rhys offered, “You only linked the kidnapped retirees and the taxicabs together yesterday afternoon. It’s only been a day, and an extremely busy one at that.”
Alana was still displeased with herself, “Still, that should have occurred to me sooner. My brain must be more fatigued that I realized. The transponder data you and I synthesized is up on the whiteboard in the situation room. You should have access rights. Take the car and go on back to the station. Start looking for cam footage while I finish up here.”
Rhys nodded, “Yes, ma’am.”
“Please. I forgot to say, ‘Please.’ Again.”
Rhys simply smiled and nodded as he turned toward their car, climbed inside, and sped off.
Alana gathered up the rest of her team. Brian Comerford from forensics was already there with a team of three junior crime scene investigators, and a late-arriving car brought Wen Jing Lin from cyberforensics onto the nearby sidewalk, along with another junior analyst. Alana waved them all to her side, “Okay, team. I’ll admit that I have no idea what, if anything, you might find here. Use your best judgment, and focus on the taxicabs.”
The investigators broke off and began working, first deploying robots with remote scanning gear, and then physically entering vehicles and buildings to probe into corners and scrape samples from unlikely places.
Having scanned the first taxi with their sensing gear, Wen Jing approached Alana, “There’s nothing I can see that stands out. It’s just a standard robocab. But I’d like permission to tow one back to the station to dissect in case there’s something hidden inside.”
Alana nodded, “Fine. There are a couple more things I want you to check specifically. There is a deactivated security Joebot inside the office. Trace it back to where it came from; check its security camera footage, et cetera. You know the drill.”
Wen Jing nodded, “Yes, ma’am. What’s the other thing?”
An object in the sky caught Alana’s attention. As it rapidly approached, its markings gave it away as a local news drone. They would have been banned from the airspace while the tactical drones were in action, but now that they were called off, the airspace was apparently reopened to the press. “Wendy, I need you to figure out the system that was used to control these cabs, as well as where the commands originated. I didn’t see anything obvious when I was inside the office.”
Wen Jing nodded again, her perpetual smile still in place. Alana nodded in return, and Wen Jing rejoined her assistant.
Alana strolled around the parking lot, looking for anomalies, but aside from a few minor scratches and one slightly cracked windshield, nothing stood out. There were no obvious signs of violence or struggle near the car doors. All twenty-two of the cabs in the parking lot were aligned in numerical order, with the two inside the garage being numbers 23 and 24.
About an hour later, Comerford gave the all-clear signal, admitting Alana back to the office and to the garage. Wen Jing and her assistant hauled the disabled Joebot away with a hand truck as Alana slowly orbited the office, making a high-resolution video record of her circuit. A slow trip around the adjoining garage followed, but for all her troubles, Alana did not spot anything that she felt rose to the level of a clue. The only firm conclusions she drew was that the entire operation was fully automated and set up from the very beginning as a delivery service for the kidnapped.
Alana hitched a ride back to the station with the last of the forensics vehicles, its cargo area only half-filled with artifacts that would likely prove unhelpful upon closer examination. She turned to Comerford, who was seated beside her, and asked, “What do you think? Waste of time?”
Brian replied, “For my team, probably. We didn’t find a scrap that wasn’t buried under a layer of dust. How much effort do you want me to put into what few ‘objects d’interest’ we gathered?”
Alana said, “I think the buildings are just fronts, and if I were a betting woman, I’d wager that neither a living soul nor even a cybernetic one ever went through the doors after the taxi company was founded. Concentrate on the cabs. I’m particularly curious as to whether there are any traces of living, human passengers.”
Comerford closed his eyes and nodded, a starkly silent contrast to his typical double-whammy of cynicism and sarcasm. Alana looked over the other humans in their van, and noted that two of the four had likewise closed their eyes, and no one was conversing. She was likely running them ragged processing evidence from this case, burning up their weekends and normal dinnertimes alike with unpaid overtime. Yet, none of them complained. Neither did any of the team from cyberforensics, who were likely working even longer hours—except for Srinu, for whom complaint was not merely a raison d’être, but a hobby that rose to achieve a form of fine, artistic expression.
Tuesday, 11 July, 18:00
Alana left the others at car-sized cargo elevator that provided access to the basement labs and storage
areas and headed straight back to the situation room. It was already six o’clock, and the night shift of police officers and support personnel for the station had already swapped places with the denizens of the day. When she opened the door, she found Detectives Rhys and Washington standing in front of the whiteboard, working together on some aspect of the case. Washington shifted back and forth with one hand rubbing his flank, as if his lower back muscles were sore or strained. They glanced at Alana as she closed the door behind her, but they did not stop working.
Alana asked, “Did the Chief check out?”
Washington said, “Yes, ma’am, he said he was getting too old for this shit and to call him at home if you needed him before tomorrow’s briefing.”
“Is that how all the male policemen talk when the women are out of the room?”
Rhys stopped what he was doing and turned toward Alana, raising an eyebrow and pretending to clear his throat, “Ahem. Chief Inspector, it is a well known fact that—”
Alana cut his complaint short, waving dismissively, “Yeah, yeah, I know. My reputation precedes me severely. What do you two have for me?”
Washington and Rhys exchanged glances and a round of banter, “You go first? No, you. Are you sure—”
Alana decided for them, “Washington, I like your voice better. You go first. What happened to that Bulgarian scrap trader?”
Washington smiled. Being the second most senior DI in the precinct, next to DI MacGruder, he knew that Alana’s bark was constant, but that her bite was usually reserved for people who didn’t follow instructions. He was also old enough to be immune to her particular form of firmness. He said, “His body hasn’t turned up yet, but I have four airborne camera drones searching the ditches and culverts along the Pacific Coast Highway from his warehouse to all points north.”
Alana asked, “Does that mean you found his warehouse?”
Washington nodded, “Yes, ma’am, I did. It was just south of where Topanga Canyon tees into the coast road, on the waterfront. That fishing boat you ID’d in the satellite pics was parked at the dock. It was a robot ship, but Kaloyanov had set up a nice living space below deck. From the number of live wells which lacked a fishy smell, I’m guessing that he did a good bit of smuggling before he pissed off the wrong men.”
Alana didn’t want to sound impatient, but she wanted to know the facts more quickly that Washington was likely to be able to regurgitate them in his slow baritone, “Go on.”
“Between the warehouse and the fishing boat, we found a few hundred...,” he twirled his right index finger around as he searched for the words he wanted, “...debrained? Unbrained?”
Rhys looked puzzled as well, “Decapitated?”
Washington said, “No, their heads were still on. Their brains were gone.”
Alana was stumped as well. She didn’t know the official term for having one’s brain removed. She said, “Vira, call Brian Comerford... Hello, Brian? No, I just have a stupid question. What’s it called when you take someone’s brain out?”
A woman’s voice answered cheerfully from the direction of the doorway, “A politicotomy!” The three detectives turned to see Wen Jing closing the door behind her. No one had heard the diminutive, young woman sneak inside.
Detective Washington laughed, “Ain’t that the truth!”
Alana finished her query with the pathologist, “A cerebral excision? Thanks, Brian. No, that was all for now. Goodbye.” She turned back to Washington when he had finished chortling, “How many?”
Washington continued, “I stopped counting when I got to two-hundred. They were packed into crates real tight. I’m guessing he had at least five-hundred still on him. The pathologists will be going over it for at least a day. I had the area cordoned off until you decide what to do with them. We’ve literally got no room at the inn.”
Wen Jing was standing behind them, raising herself up and down on her tiptoes as she waited her turn. Alana turned to her next, “What’s up, Wendy?”
“While we were out, the day shift cleared the first four victims for interrogation, if you want to talk to them before we ship them to the shopital.”
Alana said, “Damn right I want to talk to them. Where are they now?”
“I’m having them relocated to Interrogation Room One as we speak so you can record everything. It should be less than five minutes before they’re inside. They’re still in the life support crate they were packed in when you found them. It fits through the door, just barely.”
Alana nodded, “Thank you, Wendy. I’ll be right down after we finish here. Have you heard anything from Brett today?”
Wen Jing said, “He called me while we were at the taxi lot. He’ll be back in the office around noon tomorrow. Bad jet lag, he said.”
‘Bad jet lag and lagging hangover,’ Alana thought.
Wen Jing continued, “Did you need to talk to him sooner?”
“No, I just wondered if he needed more pointers from me or had more baseball questions for Rhys. If he does, have him call. I haven’t forgotten about him.”
Wen Jing nodded and dashed back the way she came, still displaying every bit as much energy as Alana had ever seen a human being do without the aid of a stimulant overdose.
Rhys volunteered, “I found a couple traffic cam records already.”
Alana whipped back around to face him, “Show me!”
Rhys stepped to the whiteboard and pointed to two video windows, both showing an angled perspective on typical urban or suburban streets. He said, “The one on the left is from Golden, in what used to be Colorado. Let me just play it for you,” as he tapped the triangular ‘play’ button at the base of the video window.
A middle-aged man in nondescript street clothes, presumably one of the cyborg victims, walked into the frame from screen right. He stepped up to the curb just as one of the yellow-green Flash-Drive taxis pulls up. The door swung open, and he climbed inside. The car pulled away and disappeared in the distance.
Alana asked, “That’s it?”
Rhys nodded, “The simplicity is overwhelming, isn’t it? Ready for video two?”
Alana nodded, and Rhys played the second video recording. It was almost identical to the first, except that the venue was San Diego, and the victim was an older woman in a sundress and flip-flops. As with the first video, the woman walked up to a corner, a cab arrived, and she boarded it.
Detective Washington said, “I know that Srinu said it’s impossible, but either that woman got into that car voluntarily, or she was under some kind of control.”
Alana said, her doubts about her security finally registering with her skeptical mind, “It’s supposed to be impossible.”
Rhys said, “One way to know for certain is to interview—”
Alana started for the door, “—the victims.”
Stopping in the doorway, Alana said, “Washington, finish up what you’re currently working on. Once you’re done, I’ll probably team you up with DI Alvarez to help match the missing bodies up with the missing brains. Catalog all their transponders so we can match the right head to the right body. Ben, come with me.”
Alana and Rhys met Wen Jing at the interview room door, which she opened for them as soon as they rounded the corner. The white, polyxytate case was placed against the back wall, opened, with its side cover leaning against it. Four ovoid, cybernetic brain cases were locked inside a four-sectioned frame with a large battery and life support system mounted at the center of the aluminum tubing. As they stepped into the room, Alana asked, “Are they awake and wired up?”
Rhys closed the door and Wen Jing answered, “All four are awake, and they should be able to hear us now, but they can’t see us. I only have one portable voice synthesizer, so I’ll need to hot-swap the plug between them so you can talk. Just tell me when to connect it.”
Alana looked up at the main camera. Mounted above the door, it watched the entire room through a fisheye lens, “Begin recording. It is eighteen-fifty hours on Tuesday, 11 July, Twen
ty-Ninety. This is an interview of four cybernetic kidnapping victims rescued during a recent raid. The case number is zero-six-nine-four-five-three-seven. I am Detective Chief Inspector Alana Graves. Present with me in the room are Detective Benjamin Rhys and Cyberforensics Analyst Wendy Lin. The purpose of the interview is to obtain testimony from the victims regarding the events surrounding their kidnapping. Wendy, what are the names of the four retirees?”
Wendy knelt before the crate. She placed a small, black box on top, and extended a cable. She stopped just short of plugging it in, and read the names of the four brain cases from labels that she had previously pasted onto each shell, “Martha Ryder, Jeremy Benford, Martina Rodriguez, and John White. Martha will be the first to speak.”
Alana nodded to Wen Jing, and she inserted the cable into a small port at the bottom of the brain in the ten o’clock position. When it was secure, Wen Jing asked, “Good evening, Martha. How are you doing?”
A squeaky, skittish female voice issued from the black box, “Oh, God, how much longer are we going to be like this? I don’t know how much more I can take.”
Alana said, “Martha, I’m Chief Inspector Graves. Wendy tells me that you can only hear right now—”
“Yes, that’s all. I don’t know how long I’ve been like this. It feels like weeks. When can I get back inside my body?”
“Soon, Martha. Very soon. I was locked in sensory deprivation for a while about a month ago, and I know exactly how you feel.”
“I’m scared! I don’t know what’s happened to my life! I feel like I want to scream, but every time I do, it’s lost in the dark, not even an echo.”
Alana asked, “Can I ask you about the day you were kidnapped?”
Martha said, “Kidnapped? Was I—is that what happened to me?”
“Do you remember what happened the day you were taken?”
“I’m not sure. Everything just suddenly went black. Was it just a while ago that I finally heard a real voice—that girl? Are you still there?”
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