“Door or window?” Andrews asked Phil.
“If this is up to me? Neither,” Phil answered. “Glazer does chemical weapons. I don’t trust chemical guys. They love to trap entry points, and there are plenty of cavities between us and his living room. I wouldn’t put it past him to fill them with something nasty.”
He tapped the wall beside him. “Rachel, find a way to get us in there.”
“Sorry,” he sent over the link. “I know I’m asking you to run a lot of data, but…”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re in the middle of a job interview, I get it,” she said in a fake sulk, and he coughed to cover a chuckle.
Rachel flipped through the most likely frequencies and found nothing, but it was the luck of an itchy nose which caused her to find the device tucked behind the door jamb. She turned her head to lean into her thumbnail, and what she thought was a reinforced door catch turned into a long tube attached to a metal rectangle the size of a pack of cigarettes.
“What the heck is…?” Rachel knelt and ran her hands over the wall to see if her fingers could feel what her implant couldn’t quite see, but she found no bumps or nulls in the plaster. Whatever the device was, it had been installed from the inside of Glazer’s apartment.
“What the heck is what?” Jason dropped down beside her, and she looped him into her field of sight in the link.
“Stop,” Jason whispered and pressed his thumbs to his temples. “Stopstopstop!”
“Oh, sorry,” she muttered as she broke off the visuals. Most of the time she could pass her perspective to the other Agents with no ill effects, but every so often she plunged them straight into a Stygian hellscape.
Jason scraped the top of his tongue against his upper teeth. “I think I tasted that.”
“Santino? Phil? I’ve got something. It’s not another bomb, but… I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it before.” She grabbed her tablet from the floor and handed it to her partner, then connected her tablet to a user-friendly version of the same image she had sent to Jason, gussied up to appear as similar to a plain old X-ray film as she could make it.
“This main box? I think this is an RFID scanner,” Santino said. “But the rest of it…”
“This part is photoelectric…”
“… memory card here…”
“I don’t think this thing has its own power source! It’s hooked into the building’s grid.”
The bomb squad gathered around them and their sergeant went straight to the only question that truly mattered: “Will it blow up?”
“No.” Santino was sure. “It’s surveillance equipment, but we’re not sure what kind.”
“Is it connected to another device?” Andrews asked.
All three Agents and Santino shook their heads. “It’s not hardwired into anything other than the building’s power supply, and we can suppress any wireless signals it puts out,” Phil told Andrews.
The sergeant’s conversational colors brightened. “You can do that?”
Phil pretended surprise. “Suppress the wireless? Yeah, of course”
Andrews, who worked with men’s lives on his conscience, went blue in relief.
Rachel switched to the other side of the door and found a clean void between the studs with nothing on the opposite side of the wall. Phil took out a pocket saw with a wicked curve to its blade. The building predated current construction codes and was made with the cheapest materials available; Phil sliced through the thin firewall in seconds. He removed a square panel the size of two large loaves of bread, and was up and through the hole in a blink.
“Clear!” he shouted, and the members of the D.C. tactical unit followed him in, their broad-shouldered giant complaining bitterly.
The bombs were disassembled and their component pieces brought out in specialized padded bags for delivery to Forensics, then the tactical unit ran the room. Their methods were slower than Rachel’s sixth sense but were as thorough, right up until the walls got in their way.
“Rachel, Jason? Can you come here?”
After the bomb squad had entered Glazer’s apartment, Santino and Hill had gone downstairs to stake out the doors on the slim chance that Glazer hadn’t abandoned his apartment. No one expected Glazer to show, but Santino was looking for an excuse to sit down and Hill was spoiling for a fight. Everyone reminded Hill of the minor issue that the man who had set him up would probably recognize him, but Hill was confident the blind corners of the back entrance would allow him ample opportunity to properly introduce himself to Glazer.
When Hill had insisted on leaving, Zockinski had insisted on staying. He was vocal about keeping someone from the MPD on hand to babysit the Agents at all times; apparently Sergeant Andrews was so friendly with Phil that he couldn’t be trusted. Zockinski and the rest of the task force had spread out across the hall and busied themselves with the minutiae of documentation and police procedure as they waited for the bomb squad to finish. When Phil called out, Rachel and Jason’s heads came up in synchronous motion; the officers went orange, and poor Officer McCall nearly fled for home in Phil’s nice new suit.
Jason got up without a word but Rachel muttered a quick explanation to keep Zockinski in the loop. She hoisted herself through the hole to join up with the Agents on the other side, and came through to find Jason and Phil staring up at an off-brand fire alarm positioned directly over the door.
“Did it insult your sister?” she asked.
“Ping it,” Phil said.
Rachel did. A motion sensor and a pinpoint camera the size of her little finger were tucked into the alarm’s usual hardware.
“Well. That’s certainly….something.”
Phil showed her a similar alarm cradled in the crook of his arm, its plastic case cracked open to show the guts within. He was dissecting the alarm piece by piece, dropping each component in his gloved hand as he plucked them from its body. “There’s one in each room. Apartments, even dumps like this, have a centralized alert and fire suppression system. I didn’t even notice these until somebody on the tactical team realized they shouldn’t be here. I pinged one to check if it was another bomb or just extra personal safety, and got the same thing as this,” he said, slowly rolling the fragments around his palm like a prospector panning for gold.
Both Rachel and Phil had missed the alarms, but there was no blame. The devices blended into the digital ecosystem. Alarm systems, cell phones, thermostats, security cameras, all the rest of those little electronic things, these were the insects of the modern world. They were everywhere, droning away in a monotonous mechanical buzz, important within their own specific ecological niches but generally ignored by everyone and everything else. It was beyond an Agent’s capacity to recognize each individual device—kick over a rotten log and you disturbed a nest of water meters—so these were shoved into the background, white noise across the mind. It was only when they flew straight in your face that an Agent remembered: Oh, yes. Those. and then only just long enough to wave them away.
Behind them, Zockinski’s face appeared at the hole in the wall. Phil, nice guy that he was, brought the rest of the task force over to him and explained the oddity.
“Cameras?” Zockinski looked at the alarm over the door, then back at Rachel. “I thought you could find cameras.”
“Usually,” she said. “But these are retaining data, not talking to a separate storage device. Point-and-clicks are harder to locate unless we’re paying attention.” When she searched for cameras, she usually checked for movement, the flash in the underbrush of information scurrying from one point to another. If the machine hunkered down and kept quiet, her mind would usually pass over it without noticing it was there.
“Did you get the thing out of the wall yet?” Zockinski asked Phil.
“No,” Phil said, glancing towards the spot where Glazer had stashed the RFID scanner. A stack of electronics and audio-visual equipment had been piled in front of it. The bomb squad was carefully, cautiously moving these away from the site t
o give Phil enough room to apply his wicked little saw.
Something had been nagging at Rachel since she had gone out-of-body to walk Glazer’s apartment. She moved about the living room in her own body, testing if the flow of the room was as halting and awkward as it had seemed when she was in her avatar.
It was. She shuffled around a chair to the kitchen, then to the back bedroom where the burned-out husk of a computer tower had been left for Forensics. Rachel kept one eye on Glazer’s oversized television as she moved from room to room. An opinionated Chinese traditionalist for a grandmother and a neoclassicist architect for a mother had convinced her that feng shui was the snake oil of interior design, but the layout of Glazer’s apartment room was both physically and psychically offensive. Rachel could almost hear her entire matrilineal line call shenanigans.
“Gentlemen, I’m about to go girly on you,” Rachel warned.
“Duly noted,” Phil said.
“How would you arrange your furniture in here?”
They looked at her, then at the room, then back towards her, and their conversational colors ended somewhere in the yellows as they tried to guess what she wanted.
She tried again. “Where would you put that TV?”
Glazer’s television set was ninety inches of pure high-definition plasma magnificence, and all three men agreed the only logical answer was to put it in the trunk of Zockinski’s van as quickly as possible.
“Santino would get this,” she muttered. “Okay, sports fans, it’s the third quarter and you’re watching the game while building your doomsday device in the office. Why is the TV on that wall…” she pointed to where the bomb squad was untangling cords, “… when you could see it from your workshop if it were over there?”
“Oh.” Jason went yellow and gray in turns. “Camouflage?”
She nodded. “I think so. That’s a lot of crap piled in front that RFID reader for no good reason.”
“You don’t buy a TV that expensive for no good reason,” Zockinski countered.
“It’s a prop,” Rachel said. She watched as the bomb unit removed the gigantic set from its cradle on the wall. Maybe she could pull some strings to get it shipped to OACET for storage. They were using an ancient projection TV from the Eighties in their community rec room. “Glazer used it as a screen to hide the scanner.”
Yeah, the guy’s definitely a planner, she thought to herself. Glazer would have ditched his apartment around the same time he cleaned out the safe deposit box, but that machine had been built into the wall long before that. The AV system had been purchased to conceal the RFID scanner rather than for Monday night football. Glazer might have plastered over the device six days or six months ago, but whenever it was, he had anticipated that someone with the ability to detect hidden electronics would be standing in his living room.
Sergeant Andrews signaled to Phil that they were ready to start cutting, and the Agent left to join them. Rachel and the others scooted behind the kitchen cabinets. Those, at least, were solid wood lacquered over in fifty years of cooking residue; she felt the cabinets made much better cover than pressboard.
The bomb unit severed the device from the building’s power supply and Andrews declared it good and dead. The Agents and Zockinski gathered around the hole to poke at it in situ; Rachel looped a finger under the remaining drywall between the device and the door jamb and started to rip it away, allowing the others to see it from her perspective. Once the wall had been removed, the exposed device seemed almost menacing. A hollow metal tube the diameter of a quarter ran from a hole drilled in the frame of the jamb to a dust cover slightly smaller than a pack of cards, giving the impression of a tiny tank capable of blowing planets loose from orbit.
Phil tapped the rectangular dust cover with a pen. “RFID reader,” he said, then ran the pen up the length of the tube. “Um…”
“I know what this is,” Zockinski hit on the answer. “It’s an identification system. You said this was supposed to be camouflaged?”
Rachel nodded.
“Most RFID readers have to be within a couple of inches of a card to access the tag,” he said. “This…” he pointed at the tube, “is a directional antenna. Glazer could hide the reader behind the AV system and amplify its signal to get clean scans off of any tag in a wallet.”
Rachel and the bomb unit cleared the door for Phil, who cautiously opened it and moved under the lintel. He positioned himself next to the antenna. The tube was angled upwards and hit slightly above his hip; it was pointed directly at wallet-height for a man of average size.
“He’s right. Add this to the cameras in the fake fire alarms, and you’d be able to tell anyone who comes through that door. The reader gets the RFID tag on a security badge or a credit card, and the camera takes a picture of the person’s face for confirmation.”
“After,” Jason said. “This wouldn’t have helped him until after he got back and checked the, uh… How was he storing this?”
Nobody knew. With the exception of the hidden cameras, nothing in the apartment was capable of writing data. Despite his stunning AV system, Glazer didn’t own so much as a gaming console.
“Probably that smoking crater where a computer used to be,” Rachel said as she nodded towards the back bedroom.
“Think we’ll get anything useful off of it?” Jason asked.
Rachel looked through the wall to where the melted plastics and metals had congealed in runny pools across Glazer’s worn oak desk. “Probably not.”
Sergeant Andrews came over and said he was throwing them out. “Sorry folks,” he said. “The room’s clean so Forensics wants to move in. We need to leave.”
Rachel felt for Andrews. In times of a bomb scare, the bomb unit took priority over any other department—safety first!—but were then swept aside the moment they signed off on the site, all but ignored until the next time a suspicious suitcase reared its cheap vinyl head.
Phil dumped the pieces of the butchered alarm in an evidence bag and handed it to Zockinski to sign into evidence, then hung back to switch clothes with Officer McCall.
Rachel turned into the stairwell to go pick up Santino. Before she had turned down the first landing, she heard Andrews ask Phil: “That trick she did at the bank, and the one where she found the thing in the wall. Can you do that?”
“No.” Rachel watched through the wall as Phil shook his head. “But I can learn.”
“Get on that,” the sergeant said, and clapped Phil on his arm. “And come talk to me after this is over.”
She pumped her fist and practically skipped down the stairs.
Rachel found Santino sitting in an alcove of a neighboring building, sheltered from the late afternoon sun by a concrete overhang. He was toying with a nap and sighed when he saw her: time to go back to work.
“Smells like hobo pee in here,” she said
“Why are you so sure it’s from hoboes?” he asked, and she laughed. “You find anything interesting?”
“Oh, bombs, hidden cameras, the usual,” she said, and rooted her stance to help him up. “His computer was slag. Looks like a small heat grenade went off inside of it.”
“That’s probably what happened,” Santino grabbed her outstretched hand in his and let her haul him to his feet. “If he’s done making videos, he doesn’t need it.”
“Did Glazer come back?”
“Yes,” he said. “We had lunch. Good guy, if you can get past the supervillainy. Tell me about the hidden cameras?”
She did, and was adding Zockinski’s passion for RFID scanners as a footnote when he said, “Hold on. Did it look handmade?”
Rachel shrugged. “I guess. I’m no expert, but it didn’t look like something he bought off of the shelf.”
He brightened in blues and smiled. “I need to see it. I think I know how to find him.”
ELEVEN
The First District Station might as well have been governed by bells. When the First District Police had outgrown their old precinct house, the city had
commandeered an entire elementary school as a replacement. Unlike OACET’s gentle coddling of their property warehouse, First MPD was not trying to reclaim the old school from ruin, and the contractors had reached a compromise between form and function. Any space large enough to seat more than ten people still looked exactly like a classroom, and the urinals were higher up on the walls but the bathrooms still remembered the begging screams of swirlies. These perfunctory renovations had stopped at the doors, with changes to the exterior perpetually scheduled but never begun. Every time she clocked in, Rachel could almost hear her mother sigh; in a city with some of the most beautiful architecture in America, Rachel spent her days in a building the twin to good old Eastwood High back in Texas. Go Mustangs.
The task force had been given a large meeting room off of what must have been the old cafeteria; when Rachel scanned the walls, she found grease embedded so deep within the concrete that sandblasting hadn’t been able to remove it. The room was situated on a corner and the two walls facing the hallways were nothing but glass, the blinds pulled high to put them on perpetual display to the rest of the station.
Wrinkled suits and ketchup stains, she thought. Now at Macy’s.
She missed the privacy of Santino’s office and its lush tropical forest, but her partner worked fast; three orchids and a fern had appeared in the windows of their new glass fishbowl, and an eight-foot buffet table had been set up in front of those to hold their new computers. Almost every penny of the task force’s budget had been dumped into those machines, Santino’s logic being that if they were asked to go up against someone as tech-savvy as Glazer, they should at least have access to the same type of tools.
Her partner had grudgingly left the tech setup to Jason and had vanished into the Internet. Santino had dissected the device taken from the wall of Glazer’s apartment and had photographed every square inch in a resolution so high his phone screamed for mercy. Typing one-handed on his laptop, he was falling on the mercy of the maker communities, which, he said, was bound to end in some form of highly educational drama.
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