Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (19 page)

“Yeah,” he squinted at the tiny man on the monitor. The details were hard to make out, but not his movements; this version of Glazer was a precision instrument. 

“Wait, wait. I want to see that again,” Jason said, and the video reversed and resumed to show Glazer glide up to the glass.

The bank manager stood up and walked straight out of his own office.

“There, in the background. Just a second after Glazer shuts himself in the vault,” the Agent said, and pointed. “Riiiiight… There.”

Two men walked past the glass door, accompanied by the manager himself. Rachel blinked her implant off and on, hoping it had malfunctioned. 

“Aw hell,” Phil whispered.

Nope,
she thought,
not a malfunction,
and waited for the explosion.

“Play that back again!” Santino shouted, and Jason did. 

On the screen, the Glazer from yesterday afternoon closed the glass door of the vault right as Hill and Zockinski entered and exited the camera frame on the other side.

Hill crossed his arms and said nothing; red with anger, yellow with self-rebuke, his colors twisted violently while his body tensed. 

“How long were you in the bank after Rachel and I left?” Santino asked.

“To clear the bank and process the tunnel?” Hill said. “Hours.”

“But there are customers,” Santino pointed at the screen. “If you cleared the bank again, this must have happened before then…”

Timeline again,
she thought.
It’s all about the timeline.
Glazer must have jumped into action the instant he heard… what? Her best guess was that he had been watching the MPD process Griffin’s murder, just in case they stumbled over the hidden tunnel when they searched the room. When it had been found ahead of schedule, whatever had been left in the safe deposit box was suddenly yanked out of its proper chronology.

She felt a little flush of pride.
I think I just screwed up a killer’s master plan.

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.”