“Holy…” breathed Hill. “That’s me.”
Zockinski snatched her tablet off of the car. “When was this taken?” he asked Hill.
“Two, three months ago? This was from that training seminar when I still had my ankle taped up. Same shirt, same shorts.”
“Hang on,” Santino said, and moved closer to the monitor. “You mean this guy doesn’t just look like you?”
“No,” Hill told him as he hit replay. His digital twin attacked the victim and started the assault anew. “This is me.” He looked around, almost panicked. “This video, it’s… I’ve never been here.” He gestured with the tablet, taking in the parking lot, the dark buildings, the old and broken street. “This is me, but it’s from a class a while back where we did unarmed combat. I was picked to do the demonstration. They had me subdue…”
“This guy.” Hill paused the video. “This guy right here.”
The victim on the screen appeared to be in his late twenties and in great physical shape. Rachel had wondered why he hadn’t fought back.
“This is a setup,” Zockinski said, and glared at Rachel.
“If you don’t stop thinking what you’re thinking,” she growled, “I will kick you so hard you’ll be able to pee out of your knees.”
“So First MPD holds a training seminar,” Santino said, touching her shoulder until she relented. “Was the man on the tape the instructor or an assistant?”
“Assistant,” said Hill.
“Hill performs a few takedowns with the assistant. A month after that, the assistant is assaulted here, and the security film shows Hill in place of the assailant. Definitely sounds like a setup.”
“No shit,” said Zockinski. “When did this happen?”
“Uh…” Rachel checked her notes. “July ninth.”
Hill exhaled, relieved. “That’s the day my sister got married. There’s a hundred witnesses who saw me give a toast at a botanical garden in New York.”
“This is really clever,” Santino said. He had taken her tablet and was reviewing the video. “You couldn’t swap Hill’s face over the original without having to render everything separately, and there’d always be a seam between the real and the altered. What I think they did here is take a clean shot of the background and then add the figures over it. They’d have to adjust the lighting but…”
He looked up to three blank faces. “Ah, this is how they make cartoons,” he said. “They take a background and then superimpose the action over it.”
The detectives turned to Rachel for confirmation. She shook her head. Excepting drunken binges on old Powerpuff Girls reruns in her late teens, she hadn’t seen a cartoon since she was twelve.
“Don’t you know how this stuff works?” asked Zockinski.
“I’m a pretty lousy cyborg,” she said.
Santino’s expression didn’t change but he glazed over with a white opaque film. She had seen this reaction before, always when he had resigned himself to explain something which was, to him, extremely straightforward.
“This is a composite,” he said, holding up the tablet. “The footage of the background is real and so is that of the fight. They made it by putting the one over the other. The end result is a fabrication, but they grounded it by adding light sources and shadows. And since it was shot in black and white, they didn’t have to worry about color matching.”
“Is that possible? You can make a video out of pieces?” Zockinski was completely out of his element.
“Definitely. It’s very similar to how they use green screens in movies. A digital forensic specialist can tell you exactly what was done here.”
“Do we have one of those at First?” Hill asked Zockinski.
“Yes, but I know where you can find a really good one,” Rachel said.
The detectives went gray and cold.
She shrugged. “Fine. Your funeral.”
“The tech doesn’t matter,” Zockinski said. “All we have to do is track down the other man.”
“Who? The guy that taught a class to a bunch of cops just to set one up for assault charges?” Santino snorted. “I’m sure he’ll be easy to find.”
“The cameraman,” Rachel said. “Even if he works for the MPD, talk to him. He needed to get a specific angle to make it seem as though the video was shot from the security cameras, so the cameraman was either in on it or had contact with them.”
Hill nodded, his tension easing. Old-fashioned police work was a comfort.
“We can’t do anything until we clear this with Ward Six,” said Zockinski. “And we have to talk to the Lou first.”
“Yeah,” Hill said. “That’ll be an interesting meeting. ‘Hey Lieutenant, want to see something that will put me away for ten to twenty?’”
“God, yeah. What a cock-up this’ll be.” Zockinski took off without another word. Hill followed, then paused to give her and Santino a cautious wave goodbye.
Baby steps.
FIVE
“Oh hello,” Santino said. “Look who’s here.”
They had decided to check out the coffee store where the second assault had occurred before they called it a night. Santino had driven them back to Ward One along posh tree-lined streets where each person was accompanied by a minimum of two yappy dogs. Rachel was struck by the differences between this neighborhood and that of the gas-and-go, which was just miles away but was worlds apart.
The sun had set, leaving the front wall of the coffee shop a bright bank of windows in the night. Inside, Judge Edwards was standing and addressing a few dozen people. Reporters with handheld cameras made up a third of the group.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Rachel, delighted, opened the door and jumped out. Santino yelled something about waiting for him to stop the car first, but he was barely crawling forward and she had never been at one of Edwards’ press conferences before. She was sure no Agent had ever attended one in person, and she didn’t want to miss the opportunity.
The door to the coffee shop was propped open by a carved wooden owl. Rachel bent down and patted it on its head before she stepped inside. The store was one of those old places formed entirely from dovetailed aesthetics. Rachel moved her sixth sense past the crowd to examine the room: it was small, made tiny by the number of people jammed inside, and she went past them to look at the old brass hardware and hand-cut mosaic tiles of what must have once been the local apothecary. A glass mirror gone smoky with time was stationed behind shelf after shelf of canisters holding exotic teas, and a heavy stone countertop polished by a century of elbows displayed working antique Gaggia brewing equipment worth slightly less than her house. The very air pulsed with the scent of chocolate and freshly ground beans. Rachel had never wanted a cappuccino more in her life.
An eclectic assortment of furniture had been pushed to the side to clear a stage for Edwards. It was not a good location for a press conference, but in Rachel’s recent experience, press conferences didn’t happen the way they did on television. The crash of reporters clamoring for quotes was great drama but made for a terrible working environment. Large conferences were calm and civilized. The best analogy Rachel had come up with was that of a classroom where the teacher’s pet was chosen first, and if they didn’t ask the right question then the second-favorite was called, and so on down the pecking order. Geeks, nerds, and hangers-on rarely made the cut and were forced to compete for interesting sound bites dangled over their heads by the popular networks.
Smaller press conferences were not nearly as friendly. Since the only ones who bothered to show up were the bottom feeders, the rules of the false society did not apply. Most of these conferences were about backpatting and grandstanding instead of news. If something of interest did take place, the networks had found it more cost-effective to purchase clips from their lesser affiliates rather than pay to send the trucks out. Reporters at these lesser conferences knew the only reason they were there was because they weren’t important enough to be somewhere else, and they behaved accordingly.
Rachel
was sure this particular conference would be of the backpatting-and-grandstanding variety. Edwards was a would-be politician who lacked political strategy. It was a savagely dangerous combination; he knew he had to get his face out there but wasn’t quite sure how. Judges were nominated by a commission in the D.C. circuit judiciary and Edwards had earned his nomination from his record as a trial lawyer, but his fledgling platform was nothing more than a mix of his own views and items culled from the headlines.
(She had read his colors several times and wasn’t sure if the judge was as vehemently against OACET as he claimed, or if he had accidentally tripped over a topic he could use to distinguish himself as a candidate. She had never caught him lying when he ranted against them, but she still thought it might be the latter since Edwards was awfully comfortable with blending technology with the law when it suited his purpose. The man was a trainwreck, she had told Mulcahy, and her boss had agreed but said the problem with trainwrecks was that people got hurt.)
She entered the store and Edwards’ eyes slipped over and past her. Rachel was insulted; she had met him no fewer than four times at various functions. Charley stood at the counter off to the side, hands cupped around a cold drink. He saw her in the crowd and his conversational colors leapt to vivid red, then gray as his face fell. Rachel associated red with strong and sometimes negative emotions and she didn’t know what to make of it in Charley. Shame that she had caught him in a lie, maybe.
“Can’t be helped, Charley! Work is work.”
He glanced down as his phone vibrated. He faded back to his normal bluish-gray as he read her text, and gave her a shy smile.
“They tell us we’ve entered a new era.” Edwards’ voice was too big for the store. “One in which technology might have finally outpaced our ability to control it. I say we’ve not only been living in that brave new world for decades, but we welcomed it with open arms! We are responsible for this lack of control. We are the reason a man was beaten within an inch of his life, right here.
“Because we didn’t act.
“We let them build their toys, those almost magical devices which let them spy on our every waking moment, and we didn’t say no. We allowed them to take these toys and to put them them into use in law enforcement and the courts. Even if these toys violated the law, the Constitution itself, we created reasons for their use through applying false logic or hiding behind our willful ignorance.
“Friends, we have rationalized away the integrity of our justice system for the sake of convenience and the unattainable goal of complete security. We have been seduced by the idea that we must throw away our values and rebuild ourselves for a changing world each time the opportunity presents itself.”
Rachel moved into the crowd. When she had first started developing her sixth sense, she couldn’t go anywhere with more than a small smattering of people or she’d have problems processing the madness of human emotion. Now she loved crowds for that very reason. She especially loved crowds with a purpose. Movie theaters, concerts, places where crowds were focused on a single concept… It was beautiful to watch human beings break from their self-centered ruts and come together. Each person was still unique, still kept their same cores, but their conversational colors blended and harmonized within a shared spectrum. This past Fourth of July, Rachel had gone to the fireworks display at the National Mall and hadn’t bothered to look up once.
“Friends, newer is not always better. No matter what they tell you, we are not dangling by a thread over obsolescence. My experiences have taught me that an authentic society isn’t built on the backs of technology, but is supported by basic human decency. It is time—it is past time!—for us to recognize that innovation is not always a good word. We are the ones who decide what to do with our fancy little toys, whether we want to trade who we are for the sake of innovation. It’s long past time that we all take a step back and look at what we’ve built, and then ask ourselves what we risk if we continue down this path.”
He was an excellent public speaker but the crowd was bored to the point of beige; Rachel couldn’t shake the feeling she was surrounded by carpet samples. There was no unification of color here, just a mass of people feigning interest. His audience was mostly reporters or entourage, and both groups had heard it all before.
Except...
As she moved among them, she noticed that some of them were emotionally involved in what the judge was saying. Three men ran strong with Edward’s golden teak, with ribbons of jagged, electrified red wrapped around it.
Aw hell, she thought. This was her first time seeing this particular phenomenon but she had a good idea what it meant. It wasn’t too much of a jump to assume that the local anti-tech or anti-OACET zealots would rally to Edwards as a leader. She checked them for weapons; all three men were armed, one with a Heckler & Koch MP7 under his suit.
Honest, stark terror shot down her spine. Washington D.C. had some of the toughest gun control laws in the country, and these guys had some serious boundary issues if they were willing to carry concealed to a public event sponsored by a judge.
Rachel called Santino’s cell. “I’m leaving,” she told him.
“What?” It was always strange to hold a phone conversation in her head. Santino sounded as close as an Agent. “I already parked. I’ll be there in a minute.”
“I scanned the crowd. There’s a disturbingly high gun-to-creep ratio here. And somebody brought their kid and I don’t want things to escalate,” she added, noting a mother and a young boy playing beginner’s Sudoku together in the window seat by the front door. They had the petulant air of persons forced to kill time and Rachel wondered who had dragged them along.
“Wow. Yeah, okay. I’ll meet you on …” he said, then paused to check for street signs.
“I’ll find you. Get to a bar a couple of blocks away and we’ll hole up there until—”
“Agent Peng?”
She swore across their connection as Edwards caught her on her way towards the door. She heard Santino start to run as he promised he’d be right there, and he hung up to call for backup.
“I thought I recognized you,” Edwards said, all smiles. “Ladies and gentlemen, it seems we have a representative from OACET with us. Is this a formal visit?”
Rachel smiled back. “No, sir, this is pure coincidence. I just love a good cup of coffee.”
She reached out through the link and poked Administration. “No time to chat,” she said without waiting to learn who was on duty. “Send someone to me for damage control at an Edwards event. Possible mob.”
“Why don’t you stay and join us? We’d love to hear your thoughts.”
“Sorry, but I’m off the record tonight,” she said cheerfully, breaking her attention away from the panicked chatter on the other end of the connection.
“Really? You have no opinions about the attack?”
“No comment.” This was bordering on harassment. No sensible politician would selectively target someone at a rally. Edwards needed a campaign manager in the worst way. She had a sudden mental image of a sophisticated older woman in a pantsuit floating down from an unseen cloud like Mary Poppins by way of a banner with Vote Edwards! stenciled on its face. Oh, the songs they would sing.
“A man was brutally attacked, right outside this store. They saw it,” Edwards said as he swept out an arm. He got a lukewarm response from the baristas. “But since it didn’t show up on video, the police say it didn’t happen.
“A concussion, four broken ribs, and a collapsed lung, Agent Peng, and the MPD claims it didn’t happen? What’s wrong with this picture?”
“No comment,” Rachel said. Most of the crowd had done the usual sideways leaping thing they did when they learned she was OACET, climbing over themselves like lemmings pushed towards a cliff to avoid touching her. The exceptions were the media, who pressed forward, and the three armed men who swept through the cracks to form a human barrier across her path.
“We’re all just here to learn, Agent Peng. Can OA
CET explain why the tape was in error?”
She ignored him and pushed forward, trying to intimidate the three men in front of her with a quick sweeping stare. No luck.
“Come on, Agent Peng. Why won’t you help us out?”
Edward’s small and self-appointed militia wore very nice suits to complement their very expensive haircuts. They had the look of well-fed young lawyers right before they made partner and were allowed to put on weight. Rachel would have been more comfortable if there was just the smallest hint of camouflage or religious iconography somewhere on their persons; being gunned down by yuppies in an upscale coffee house was not a scenario she had played out in her mind and she felt woefully unprepared.
They came at her slowly, three wide, and stopped just out of arm’s length. Rachel cut to the side to walk around them. The crowd parted for her but the men moved to block her path to the exit a second time. Edwards’ militia couldn’t decide what to do. They knew what they wanted to do (turbulent red, with thick streaks of black), but they couldn’t find a reason.
Rachel was not about to give it to them. She stopped and stood at parade rest. She kept her voice flat, her body completely still. “Please move.”
They stood their ground. The door was open to let in the night air and she was so close to escape she could have chatted with the passersby walking their yappy dogs.
“Please move.”
Nothing.
“Judge Edwards, please ask them to move.”
The militia split and two of the men flanked her, and she realized the situation was actively dangerous. She should have guessed from the matching haircuts; the men had come to the coffee store as a group. An individual could be persuaded, but a group was unified by a cause.
She hated being a cause.
And Edwards didn’t know they were armed.
Digital Divide Page 5