Digital Divide

by Spangler, K. B.

  “No, no, I’m loving this, Agent Peng! I’m so proud of your people. I know what happened to you, those five years… What they did to you? That was an abomination. Then coming together like you did, taking my technology public and changing the entire world with it?” Witcham sighed with a small chuckle in it. “I’m just so proud. I had to tell you that before I left.”

  “Then why try to break us? Why not help us? Are they really paying you enough to make it worth destroying your legacy?”

  Witcham was silent, then said: “Think it through, Agent Peng. You too, Agent Mulcahy.”

  “Hello, Doctor Witcham.” Mulcahy’s voice resonated through her head. It might have been a guess on Witcham’s part, but Mulcahy was not about to let an opportunity slide by playing possum on the line. “Thank you for your work on the implant.”

  “You’re most welcome. Thank you for what you’ve done with it.”

  “I would appreciate it if you gave me the name of your employer.”

  “You’re recording this, I assume?” Witcham said. “I’m sure you would love to put that name into the record. But my customers appreciate confidentiality. I’ve got my own reputation to keep.”

  “What if I were to hire you?”

  “I’m worth more than your fiancée has, Agent Mulcahy. Besides, money is cheap for someone like me. I’m mostly in it for the challenge.” Witcham paused, then asked: “Would you consider a trade? I need access to a hardened database. One minute of your time for one name. That sounds fair to me.”

  “Lie!” Rachel shouted at Mulcahy across the link. “For once in your life, just fucking lie!”

  Mulcahy didn’t respond to either her or Witcham. After a few brief moments, Witcham chuckled again.

  “Thought not. Had to try. It has been a real pleasure working with you, Agent Peng. And you, Agent Mulcahy. Best of luck to you and OACET.”

  The line went dead.

  Mulcahy’s avatar appeared in the task force’s office. “Marketing,” he said. “This was all about marketing.”

  “Hang on,” she told him, and hurried around the glass fishbowl, lowering the blinds. The MPD did not need to catch her shouting at an empty room. When they were alone, she kicked Witcham’s cunning little shoebox as hard as she could. It hit the cinderblock wall, a tornado of paper scraps in its wake.

  “He used me!” Rachel paced next to Mulcahy. “He used Santino, he used the police, he used Edwards… God damn it, Mulcahy!”

  “It’s not the first time we’ve been used.” Mulcahy’s voice was ice. “Could you have known?”

  She thought back over the last few months, each interaction she’d ever had with Charley that she could remember. “The parking garage,” she said. “You saw the video. He kept flashing excitement and lies. I thought he was following a script. And before that…”

  The coffee shop, she thought. Charley—Witcham—had gone brilliantly red when she walked in on Edwards’ press conference. She had assumed it was a negative emotion but maybe it was something else, something she had never seen before. Was there a name for what burned in your breast when your cyborg stepchildren made good?

  “No.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t have known. Witcham was just this annoying guy in the background. He almost never read as anything other than average, and when he did, there was always a reason to justify it.”

  “Then it’s a non-issue,” Mulcahy said.

  “No, it’s not,” she growled. “Not for me. Did you track the call?”

  “Yes, to thirty different cell towers across the D.C. area. We couldn’t trace the source or triangulate the signal.”

  “Figures. Damn it!” Rachel kicked Witcham’s box again. Mulcahy’s avatar watched it sail past his head and bounce off of the blinds on the other side of the room, denting them. An officer peeked in the new hole and then quickly scurried on. “All of this was about us. He kidnapped kids because of us!”

  “But we were the ones who got them back,” Mulcahy said. “We’ve been playing as heroes in the news cycle for the last day.”

  “That is not my point at all!” Rachel snapped. “Those kids are still alive because it wasn’t part of his master plan to kill them. A woman is dead because it was! And there were four bombs, Mulcahy! What was he going to do with those before we stopped him?

  “He’s getting away with murder,” she said, and looked up towards the lights, then back to his avatar. “Hanlon is getting away with murder.”

  Mulcahy held up a cautionary finger. “Not out loud.”

  Rachel closed her eyes and nodded, then took out her service weapon and broke open the magazine. She reached into her purse and searched until her fingers closed around the waxed cardboard of a small but heavy box.

  “Those might wreck your gun,” Mulcahy said.

  “Urban myth,” she said as she replaced the MPD-issued rounds in her gun with the solid flat-nosed bullets she had bought for their last target practice session. “Unless I fire about a thousand of them, and then they might warp the barrel ever so slightly. You know that, I know you know that, so just say what you really want to say.”

  “Did you think this through?”

  “Yes. I’m going to shoot him,” she said, and drove the magazine home with the ball of her palm. “I might even kill him. It depends on my mood at the time.”

  “It would be better for us if you didn’t kill anyone.”

  “My mood will certainly take that under advisement.”

  “Rachel.”

  She rounded on him, gun in hand. “Why did you put me here if you don’t trust me to do my job?”

  “I do,” he said. “But you need to remember what your job is.”

  Shit. The familiar worn grip of her gun was suddenly hot in her hand. Rachel nodded again, and holstered the weapon. “Sorry.”

  “I am, too.”

  Rachel shoved a stack of files aside and leaned against a table. She was oddly attuned to her gun. Its weight was different at her hip. “Catching and punishing Witcham should still be a priority, Mulcahy. Especially if you want me to show how valuable we can be.”

  “I know,” he said. “It is, and I do. But he can’t give testimony when he’s dead.”

  “Noted,” Rachel agreed.

  There was an almost-timid knock on the door, and Santino poked his head in. “Hey, Rachel? Is everything okay?”

  Her partner was already slightly yellow-orange, and this deepened when she said: “No.”

  “Um…” Santino came inside and shut the door behind him. “What’s wrong? Because there’s a few people out there who are wondering about all of the yelling.”

  Rachel shifted her focus from Mulcahy to the exterior of the room. Dozens of officers lined the hallways, most brilliantly orange and trying to catch a glimpse of her through the blinds. She nudged Santino aside and stepped into the hallway to wave at the startled officers before slamming the door on them.

  “Your congeniality is inspiring,” Santino said.

  “Mulcahy’s here,” Rachel pointed to where her boss stood. The TV in the corner came to life with the image of OACET’s green seal, and Mulcahy’s voice boomed a greeting at Santino from the speakers. She rushed to turn down the volume.

  “Should I leave?” Santino asked.

  “No, you need to hear this.” Rachel sped through her conversation with Edwards and the discovery of the planted phone number, then replayed the phone call with Witcham through the TV.

  “Jesus.” Santino, wide-eyed, shook his head as the recording ended. “Mousy Charley Brazee’s a mad social scientist. Who would have guessed? Actually…” he paused, “…are you positive he’s Witcham?”

  Rachel and Mulcahy looked at each other. “Good question,” he said.

  “No, we’re not,” she said to Santino. “He said he was Witcham, he gave the right details… Why would he lie about that?”

  “Guess it doesn’t matter,” Santino shrugged. “Witcham’s as good a name for him as any. Get the card. We’ve got to bri
ef Sturtevant.”

  Mulcahy left in a tiny flash of green.

  Rachel and Santino rarely had cause to visit the Gold Coast, the wing of First District Station reserved for administrators and ranking officers. Rachel didn’t think she had come down since she had received the perfunctory welcoming handshakes several months before. There was real tile here, not linoleum, and wood trim throughout, but each office had been diced off by carving chunks out of the school’s wide hallways and stacking the extra space onto the depth of the classrooms. Long and narrow, each office was a fancy paneled tunnel lined with track lighting, broken up by drywall and doors into a smaller room with a secretary at the front who barred access to the official in the larger room at the rear.

  The Chief of Detectives ignored his protesting receptionist and waved them in while he finished a conference call with a local reporter. Rachel took in a quick surface scan of the room while they waited. Her mind traveled over diplomas, service awards, the various trophies and photographs. Here was more evidence that Sturtevant did not play politics: only the occasional notable was nestled among the framed vacations and graduations. Behind her was a tall stack of media equipment, crowned by a ridiculously tiny monitor. A picture of a smiling young woman in a blue cap and gown was perched atop the DVD player.

  Sturtevant was right-handed; she peeked in the lowest right-hand desk drawer and found the traditional bottle of cheap scotch.

  He hung up the phone and opened that drawer, then slid two tumblers across his desk. A third tumbler and the bottle of scotch followed.

  “Sit,” he said. “You’ve got bad news. I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Sir,” Santino began.

  “Oh, I will hear it,” Sturtevant said as he poured a thin finger of scotch in each tumbler. “There’s no doubt about that. But I’ve been having a fantastic day and I might as well consider it over.

  “Cheers.” They raised their glasses and drank; the scotch was awful.

  Sturtevant tipped over his empty glass and pointed at Santino.

  “We found Glazer’s accomplice,” Santino said.

  “That should be good news,” Sturtevant said. “Why isn’t that good news?”

  They told him. Rachel ran the phone call with Witcham through Sturtevant’s fancy audiovisual system. The Chief of Detectives listened to it twice, fingers drumming on his old leather desk blotter. “Agent Peng, anybody ever tell you that you’re more trouble than you’re worth?”

  “Frequently, sir.”

  “Well, prove them wrong,” Sturtevant said as he paged Zockinski and Hill. “You might as well get the other two Agents back here,” he said to Rachel. “I’ll call the FBI and let them know someone is still playing games.”

  Rachel stepped out of Sturtevant’s office and reached through the link to Phil and Jason. Phil was in the secure rooms in First District Station’s basement, working with Sergeant Andrews and the bomb squad to dissect Glazer’s machines down to their nuts and bolts. Jason was a few miles away at the Hoover Building with the FBI’s tech squad, reviewing the videos for any sign of Glazer’s accomplice. She told them to head to the fishbowl at double time, and played them the recording of Witcham’s bragging confession as they ran.

  “How did you miss this?” Jason demanded.

  She broke their link without answering.

  Sturtevant’s receptionist was bright red as she caught him eavesdropping at the Chief’s inner door. Rachel pushed past him with a raised eyebrow and made sure her jacket was pushed back just enough to expose her ugly green badge; leaks to the press were all well and good, but she wouldn’t let it happen until they were closer to Witcham. Inside, Santino and Sturtevant were arguing legal process. She returned to her chair and listened to them hash out how the MPD should chase Witcham down.

  “We know him as Charley Brazee,” Sturtevant said. “That’s the name that’ll go on the warrant.”

  “But he confessed as Eric Witcham.”

  “Irrelevant. It’s not the first time we’ve had a suspect use someone else’s name. And playing dead is rare but that’s happened, too. Once we get him, we’ll find out who he is.”

  “No, we won’t,” Santino shook his head. “If DNA, dental, and fingerprints for the original Eric Witcham belong to a dead man, then we’re just left with this guy’s word. We might never know for sure.”

  Rachel pushed a foot flat against the front of Sturtevant’s desk. It was Edward’s argument against the Forensics God all over again, and she was not in the mood to wade through the metaphysics of personal identity in the digital age. In her opinion, who he was would never be as important as what he had done, or what he was capable of doing. Charley... Witcham…(whoever!) had provided them with little evidence but an abundance of character, and Rachel was happy to let him call himself whatever he wanted as long as he did it from the inside of a prison cell.

  Sturtevant ended the discussion with a call to a judge. Rachel couldn’t help herself; she listened in to the silent side of his conversation. Judge Richards shared the same floor as Edwards at the District Court, and he knew Charley Brazee by name. Richards’ shock carried through the phone, and Sturtevant’s conversational colors had fallen into irritated reds and yellows by the time he hung up.

  “This had been such a good day.” Sturtevant slammed the desk phone down into its charger so hard she heard the plastic crack. “Out,” he told them, and set the example by pushing open his office door. His receptionist was lurking by the window and the door bounced off of his head. Sturtevant glared at the young man, then stalked through the tunnel and into the main hall.

  “Are you okay?” Rachel asked the receptionist, who picked himself up off of the floor and pretended she wasn’t there.

  Behind her, Santino’s conversational colors blurred to yellow as he ran his hands up the door jamb to Sturtevant’s office, his fingers prodding the small hole cut into the metal. He stepped into the office to stare at the mess of electronics, then back into the hallway.

  “Shit,” he whispered. He ran a hand over the top of Sturtevant’s television set, then went yellow-white with sudden realization.

  “What?”

  “Rachel?” The white had faded, replaced with a wary reddish orange. “Have you scanned this wall?”

  “Why… Oh, no.”

  As Charley Brazee, Witcham had enjoyed limited access to First District Station. Glazer had been in the building at least once that they knew of. She scrubbed at the tension lines between her eyes, then sent herself into the building.

  “Yeah,” she sighed as her mind brushed against a small metal device, no larger than a pack of cigarettes, hooked into the building’s power grid and with a tube aimed up towards a hole cut into the door jamb. “Yeah, same setup as before. They’ve been here.”

  They started clearing the media equipment away from Sturtevant’s inner wall. His receptionist peeked inside and squeaked; Santino was holding a clone of Phil’s wicked folding saw.

  “Where’d you get that?” Rachel asked as she scratched a cut line into the drywall with the hooked edge on her badge. Santino hadn’t been with them in Glazer’s apartment and it wasn’t the type of thing her partner normally carried.

  “Phil gave me a spare,” he said, and dug the serrated blade into the wall. “Seemed like a useful thing to have.”

  “You were supposed to follow me out,” Sturtevant said tightly. He watched, arms crossed, as Santino pulled apart his office. “What am I missing here?”

  “You remember that RFID scanner from the raid on Glazer’s apartment? Looks like Witcham and Glazer were here during the renovations,” Santino said, and ripped the drywall away from the studs. The small silver box glinted under a layer of dust.

  The Chief of Detectives took out his phone. “This really had been such a good day.”

  NINETEEN

  Glazer was absolutely still, and perhaps not quite by choice. He was handcuffed, a short thick chain running between the cuffs and binding him to a ring welded to t
he metal table. Beneath the table, his feet were bound to an iron ring set in the floor. No chances.

  The FBI had reluctantly granted temporary custody to the Metropolitan Police Department. Glazer was being held in a federal prison in Virginia prior to arraignment, but he hadn’t said a single word. Moving him to First District Station was a calculated risk: he and Witcham liked to play games, and this building was where it had all begun.

  “If we don’t send someone in, then bringing him here was a waste of time.”

  Rachel had assumed that Sturtevant was another man who liked to pace, but he was almost as motionless as the man on the other side of the glass. He was intent on Glazer, never shifting his attention even as he and Gallagher fought while pretending to discuss strategy.

  “It doesn’t matter who you send,” Gallagher said, shaking her head so slightly that only the tips of her hair moved. “We’ve questioned him for hours at a time. He won’t talk. He barely blinks.”

  Glazer’s head swiveled towards the one-way mirror as if pulled by Gallagher’s comment. He stared at the mirror for one heartbeat, two, three, then turned back to center.

  Hill leaned down towards Rachel and asked in a low voice: “Special Forces?”

  “Definitely,” Rachel replied. Her technical specialty as a warrant officer had been in the Special Forces. Men and women like Glazer had been everything from her best friends to her lovers to her attempted murderers. Glazer was as familiar and as deadly as a favorite gun. “Any bets?”

  “No tattoos,” he said. “Rules out the Marines, most of the Navy. I’d bet Army or Air Force.”

  She agreed. They would never know for sure. If Witcham could erase his own fingerprints and DNA from the government databases, he could do the same for his protégé. At Rachel’s suggestion, Gallagher had resubmitted Glazer’s face to the military and had asked them to do an old-fashioned visual comparison instead of running it through a facial recognition program. Fingers crossed the man still had his original face.

  The dry cleaning coupon with Witcham’s hidden message was on a table by the door, sealed in an evidence bag and resting beside a bin containing the three newly-discovered RFID devices. The one from Sturtevant’s office had been joined by two others cut from the walls of the Gold Coast. Rachel had found those. She and Phil would still be searching, but they had begged a break to watch Glazer’s interrogation. She was not looking forward to the next few days, how they were about to become the cyborg equivalent of drug dogs, forced to sniff up and down First District Station for anything suspicious.