Glazer was staring directly at Rachel. He had locked on to the security camera when the banker left him alone in the vault. Then he turned away from the camera to swing the steel door shut behind her. After the heavy metal door had closed, Glazer took off his suit jacket and went to his knees to pull out one of the lowest and largest boxes in the vault. Using his jacket as a shield, he blocked the camera’s view of the contents of the safe deposit box as he transferred them to an oversized leather briefcase.
Then Glazer stood and moved to the work station in the middle of the room. He laid a piece of stock copy paper on it, folded it in half, and applied a Sharpie marker in swift, aggressive strokes.
When he held it up to the camera, two lines of black print stood bold against the white.
HELLO OACET
YOU’RE EARLY
TEN
Everyone knew the task force was the bureaucratic equivalent of a bunch of gaily-painted wooden ducks. Their small group was a show of faith and strength and unity, of the good guys coming together in force to prove to the public that the threat was external and easily managed. Their role as decoys explained why Hill was permitted to work his own case, why Edwards was the pen behind the warrants, and why Rachel was not buried under preparations to testify against three men with matching haircuts. Due process was not ignored, but public affairs was the pretty younger sister in this whole mess and everyone paid her court first.
Just past the camera’s range was a veritable armada of the Metropolitan Police Department’s best officers. These officers were the ones doing their grunt work, the ones who dredged through stacks of video evidence dating from the time of the gas station assault through the present day to try to find anything hinky, who returned to canvas the scenes of the three known crimes with fresh eyes, or any of the other countless thankless tasks that went into the unglamorous side of policing.
This set the members of the task force to quaking. Cops had long memories. When Glazer went down, the task force would get the credit, but if they hadn’t earned it? Well. If the task force was truly nothing but a sham, if those behind the scenes were the ones who built the case, then Santino, Zockinski, and Hill would be forever punished through all of those myriad and subtle rites of workplace torture, and the Agents would be shown no quarter until they severed ties.
So they must succeed. Not only that, but they must succeed as quickly as possible, and without help if they could avoid it.
No pressure.
And then there was the nagging doubt at the back of Rachel’s mind, telling her that maybe they were already succeeding too quickly, and maybe that was a very bad thing.
Back at the bank, she had felt a rush of righteous vindication when Glazer had held up his snide little sign, but that was crushed beneath the surge of hate and adrenaline and the overwhelming urge to stick her thumbs in his eyes until her nails scraped the back of his sockets. She had left the building as quickly as possible, instinct driving her to look up at the sun and remind herself of consequences. As she had passed the vestibule where Maria Griffin had fallen, her rage rose anew when it hit her that a woman had been killed because someone was in a snit about something as small as her implant.
“What?” Rachel asked her partner. Santino, dusky purple with concern, had been watching her closely since she had kicked open the door of the bank manager’s office and left the rest of them behind to finish up.
He dropped back a few steps and they fell behind the group. Glazer’s apartment building was three blocks away from any semblance of parking and they were hoofing it. The narrow streets were barely wide enough for a car and the neighborhood was slipping into decay, but it was just a matter of time before it would be demolished to make room for high-end condos: location, location, location, with glimpses of the white of the Washington Monument through the alley straightaways.
Santino scouted the street. “Is he here?”
Rachel snorted. “I’d have mentioned.” She had run the local public spaces for someone of Glazer’s height and weight and had come up empty, but you never knew who was lurking behind the blinds of someone’s private residence. Caution paid all, and she was keeping a weather eye out for sudden movement behind them, or in the windows of the apartments above.
Then he said: “Tell me.”
“Glazer’s a planner; he knew to get in and out of the bank the second I found that tunnel. And he’s committed. Have Jason tell you exactly how Glazer made those videos. Prepping those would have taken him more labor than I’ve ever sunk into a single project in my entire life.”
“Yeah?”
“I know planners. OACET’s ruled by planners. You realize our administration debated for six months to decide how we should come out? They made this master plan here,” she said, sketching a space in the air with her hands, “but they had a hundred other plans branching off of it, just in case the main one fell through. Contingency plans everywhere, Santino!” She scattered that space with a flit of her fingers. “The goal stayed the same, but every day they adapted the strategy.
“Glazer’s not going to change his goals.” Rachel pointed her face upwards to hold on to the heat of the sun. “All we’ll do is force him to work around us.”
“Ah, then we’re fine,” he said, hinting at humor. “Everyone’s always telling us that we’re good for nothing but getting in the way.”
“This isn’t funny.”
“Since when do you find me funny?” Santino was doing his best to keep things normal. He was hurting but was able to hide it. No one outside of OACET knew he had been injured, although Hill kept telling him he shouldn’t go out drinking with the girls if he couldn’t keep up with the men the next day.
He could pull it off with anyone else but her. Only Rachel saw how the pain had bloomed out from the wound to cover his entire lower arm and tint the rest of his conversational colors in red. She knew that scarlet bloom would haunt her until he healed, so she played along and they talked about basketball until they caught up with the rest of the team at the corner of Glazer’s building.
“What’s the scope of the warrant?” Phil asked.
“So broad we could hide a corpse with it,” Santino answered. He was exaggerating but not by much. With Edwards behind the pen, the task force was cashing the judicial equivalent of signed blank checks.
They picked up the key from a superintendent who asked them when he could start cleaning out the apartment, then threw them out of his office when Zockinski told him Glazer was still nothing but a suspect.
Glazer’s apartment was several flights up. There was no elevator. Brown streaks of water damage chased each other down the drywall, and Rachel saw the glaze of rat urine peppering the stairs.
“Nice.” Hill pointed at a sprig of exposed wires where a lamp had been torn away.
“They’re live,” Rachel said, noting the glow, and Santino took out his cell to put in a fast call to the fire department.
They found the right floor and the right door. As Zockinski went to open it, Rachel idly scanned the room behind it. The apartment had that empty feeling of nobody home, but she swept the corners for men wielding machetes.
Then: “Holy crap!”
She body-checked the older man before he could touch the key to the knob.
“Bomb!” Rachel shouted, pushing the group down the corridor at a run. “Back! Get back, get back!”
They took shelter in the stairwell, and half the group fell into the chaos of whats? while the others collapsed into the how? Zockinski and Hill tried to brush her off until the other three bullied them into accepting that yes, if she could find a hidden tunnel, she could find a hidden bomb.
“There’s a table in the west bedroom,” she said when the adrenaline rush had subsided. “It’s got some hardware on it… Could be radio equipment, but I don’t think so. It looks very…” She stopped herself before she gave voice to the amorphous “explody.”
“Shit.” Santino went for his phone again. “I’m calling SWAT.”
“No, wait. Let me check it out before you cause a riot,” Phil said. He removed his sunglasses and covered his eyes with his free hand. Rachel saw his vibrant green avatar appear in Glazer’s apartment and walk quickly towards the table.
“Ugh,” the Phil in the stairwell snarled. “She’s right. These are chemical bombs. Nasty pieces of work, too.”
“What is he doing?” Zockinski asked Santino.
“He’s in there,” Rachel said, pointing up the stairs. “Just…” She waved a weak hand and let it fall. Describing the same thing over and over to the neophytes exhausted her. “It’s a thing we can do.”
“What!? Is he going to set them off?” Zockinski moved towards Phil, but Jason laid a strong arm across his path.
“Come on, think, man! Why would he set anything off when we’re standing ten feet away?”
“I couldn’t even if I wanted to,” Phil said. “These aren’t digital. They’re analog… basically clockwork! Nobody builds like this anymore.”
He shook his head savagely as he came back to his own body. “Four devices,” he said, sliding on his dark glasses. “All inert. Right now they’re nothing but framework. The explosives are situated but there’s no trigger or chemicals. And that explosive payload is too small to be the main source of any damage. They’re harmless.”
Hill, who had arrived at the MPD by way of U.S. Special Forces, grimaced. “You’re thinking ventilation systems.”
Phil nodded. “There’re only four of them but it’s summer, and the air conditioning is on. You get a strong aerosol agent, set off all four in a medium-sized building at night… Yeah, you could definitely wipe out everyone in there.”
“But they’re inert? You’re sure?” Jason was moving towards a strong electric blue.
“Don’t even think about it,” she said to him.
“Anyone else would have found those bombs after they went in.”
“We’re not everyone else!” she said, a little too loudly. The detectives went yellow and she took a breath. “Boy Wonder here still wants to check out the apartment.”
“No,” Hill said. “We do this right. We call Sturtevant and let him know we need the bomb squad.”
“Hang on, the... Agent Atran’s right. We don’t know what’s in there,” Zockinski said as he rapped the stairwell wall with a thick knuckle. “I’m sure as hell not going to call the Chief of Detectives and look like an asshole when the bomb squad doesn’t find anything.”
“And that’s different from you normally looking like an asshole, how?” Rachel unsnapped her handbag to look for an aspirin, Tylenol, a travel-sized bottle of chloroform, anything that could muzzle Zockinski short of actually muzzling Zockinski.
“We’re not calling Sturtevant,” he said, flushing red.
“Your boxers have cute little Scottie dogs on them,” she snapped, and his mouth dropped open. “You really want to keep making me prove what I can do? Because you’ve been at it all day and I’m running low on examples.”
“We don’t need to get anyone else involved,” Jason said. “Phil is the bomb squad. He dismantles them and we go back to First ahead of the game.”
“If you think I’m going in there without gear, you’re fucking crazy,” Phil retorted. “Guys who play with chemical weapons get their chuckles from making people die in agony, and I don’t even want to know what guys who build clockwork bombs are like. I’m not going in an apartment that might be booby-trapped to all hell.”
Santino came back into the stairwell and shouted over Jason and Phil to let them know he had put in a call to Sturtevant to get the ball rolling on bomb disposal. The Chief of Detectives had said they could expect backup within five minutes, but because of the unprecedented nature of their report, Sturtevant wasn’t sure who’d be showing up.
(The nexus of federal and local law enforcement agencies, political leaders, national landmarks, and global financial institutions all situated in or around Washington meant that bomb threats were subjected to a Gordian knot of bureaucracy. Sturtevant would call someone at the Department of Homeland Security, who would determine if the site of the bomb was especially prominent or of strategic import; if not, it got bumped back to the MPD’s in-house Homeland Security Bureau, who would call someone on their Special Operations Division, who would call someone in the Tactics Patrol Branch, who would then contact the Explosive Ordinance Disposal Section, which would then activate a tactical team to respond to the threat. And sometimes even when the police were handling the situation, a federal tactical unit might still tag along for the ride. The entire process was needlessly complicated at every level: Rachel’s orientation packet at First District Station had contained a checklist on how to document a bomb threat, with items such as “If a bomb threat is received by email, do not delete the message” and “Remember to ask the caller his/her name,” but the contact information of persons or agencies who would act on this information was conspicuously missing. When she asked her orientation officer about the process for submitting a completed bomb threat checklist, he said she should give it to her superior officer at the MPD, and when she said she didn’t have one, he had shrugged and advised her to wing it. Rachel had politely excused herself and rushed to the bathroom to laugh herself numb.)
In Washington, as in most cities, the building’s manager was responsible for deciding when it was necessary to evacuate private property in the event of a bomb. The superintendent laughed at the suggestion but said if they needed him, he’d be at the deli down the street. Their small group returned to the stairwell and killed time wondering if the bomb squad could move fast enough to be in and gone from the apartment before Glazer got back. Jason and Zockinski nursed the fantasy of setting a trap and capturing the enemy as he returned home from a day of nefarious deeds, none the wiser until the disembodied voice read him his rights from the darkness. The rest of the task force sat back in silence and let them play imaginary superheroes until the team from the MPD arrived.
With the exception of a chiseled-jaw behemoth they kept around to swing the battering ram, the members of the unit were built to a man like Phil Netz. Their sergeant, a stoic man named Andrews, was well past the age of wanting to be the first one through the broken door and had let himself get away with a slight paunch, but he had retained the same wiry frame and lightning-fast movements as Phil and the rest of his squad. He identified the small Agent as kin on sight; a long-lost SWAT-team cousin, perhaps, or some other professional relation remembered from a chance meeting at the annual convention.
Phil borrowed a rubber band from Rachel’s voluminous purse and tied his shock of wild blond hair into a rough ponytail as he and the sergeant talked shop. At least half of the sergeant’s questions were designed to test the Agent, and their conversational colors moved up and down the spectrum until they aligned near a companionable forest green.
That was when Phil told her they had decided to send her in.
Explosives had never been her thing: she was usually called to investigate the scene after they had done theirs, so she was understandably wary about two thin walls separating her from four of them, inert or not. But she nodded and smiled, chest out, hands crossed firmly above her butt, as Phil had her go out-of-body into the apartment and send back what she saw to her tablet so he could talk the Tactics team through the scene. Her avatar looked up, down, north, south, east, west, and walked through the apartment as directed while Santino steadied her physical self in the hallway.
Rachel thought that if she didn’t already know Glazer was a borderline sociopath, his apartment would have been the tipoff. The tight space was packed with enough couches, chairs, and audio-visual equipment to qualify as a franchise of OACET’s headquarters. She found it easier to walk her avatar through the furniture rather than find a way around it, but Phil kept her on the path of most resistance so she could mimic Glazer’s movements.
“Do you always need two Agents for this?” Sergeant Andrews asked, tablet in hand.
“No
.” Phil scratched his chin as he made a rough sketch of the apartment on the back of a receipt. “I could go in there instead of her, but it’d be harder for me to talk you through what she’s doing…” he said, tapping the tablet with his pen, “… at the same time. This is new to you, and being in two places at once is hard on me. Hey, Rachel, three meters to the left? What’s that silver thing under the armchair?”
“Empty can of Budweiser.”
“You sure it’s empty?”
Her avatar crouched low to peer through the hole, and her body said, “Yup.”
Andrews reminded Rachel to keep her distance from it, just in case; chemical bombs were sneaky little weasels.
“Doesn’t matter,” Phil shook his head. “Rachel’s… Ah, the Rachel in the apartment… She’s a projection. She can’t physically connect with anything.”
“And if something in there goes off?”
“Don’t worry. She’s perfectly safe.”
Two walls, she thought. Crumbling pressboard between us and oblivion. She wondered what might happen if she was blown to bits while part of her mind was out-of-body, if ghosts might be what was left of those who had atrocious timing when they took a mental walkabout.
“We’re done,” Phil said. “Rachel, come on back.”
She dropped her avatar and drew herself together, and the colors of the crowd came up around her. The sergeant had brought six men, all of whom were burying their excited yellows and purples under a blue so dark it matched their uniforms.
“You coming in with us?” Andrews asked Phil.
He shook his head. “No gear.”
“Then you’re in luck. Officer McCall has the sniffles,” the sergeant said, and the man closest to Phil in size went gray. “McCall, let the Agent borrow your equipment.”
Phil changed clothes right there in the hallway with an officer who would have gladly burned Phil’s suit and sauntered home stark naked if his commander hadn’t been watching.
Digital Divide Page 15