Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (30 page)

They staggered up the trail through the broken brush. The buses were parked side by side, a normal, routine sight except for the corn and the crows. They were far enough away so the people swarming around them seemed child-sized; Santino went purple-gray as he gave a silent sigh. 

A lone figure was sitting in the back of an ambulance, surrounded by a tight knot of FBI and paramedics. Rachel pushed a fast scan through the crowd. The witness was a young woman, slightly heavy and extremely pretty. Her features and her core colors were somehow familiar, and she sat motionless as Gallagher leaned towards her and tried to coax a response.

Good luck with that,
Rachel thought. The witness’s surface colors were flat and layered between whites and grays. Shock, maybe, definitely some sort of trauma. Gallagher pressed the witness’s hands around a bottle of water, encouraging her to drink… Rachel stumbled over a small hillock and she yanked her sixth sense away from the ambulance to focus on the knobby path.

Their small group hung back at the edges and watched. Gallagher’s team was efficient. Their SAC had been right when she had said extra bodies would get in the way. Every few minutes, the team from First MPD was forced to shuffle to the side as the space they had occupied was repurposed by the FBI.

“Why are we here, again?”
Jason’s fingers drummed against his upper arms.

“We’re helping,”
Rachel replied.

“Ah.”

There was just enough of a breeze to blow the heat around. The mosquitoes struck like clockwork, and the ticks took a particular liking to Zockinski’s ankles. They had passed the point of feeling awkward when Gallagher left the ambulance and crossed the field towards them.

“Agent Peng? Do you have any experience as an interviewer?”

“Army CID,” Rachel said dryly. She hated it when people pretended they hadn’t been briefed.

Gallagher feigned surprise. “Oh? Good. Could I borrow you for a moment?”

The SAC started walking back towards the ambulance, and Rachel looped Phil and Jason into her perspective as she fell into step beside her. “I’d like to send you in to talk to the witness,” she said. “Her name is Ellen Lewis, she’s a teacher from Culpeper County. She’s been mostly unresponsive, but…” Gallagher paused. “Someone mentioned there were Agents here.”

Rachel stopped dead. “Listen,” she said. “If you want to use me as a scare tactic, that’s fine. But not with a victim, okay?”

“No.” Gallagher shook her head. “She overheard my team talking. When they brought up OACET, she showed interest, wanted to know who was here.”

“Huh,” Rachel scanned the ambulance again. The surface colors of the witness
—Ellen Lewis,
she corrected herself
—
was slightly brighter, the whites and grays less pronounced. “We’ve got our fair share of fanatics and groupies,” Rachel said. “Maybe she’s one of those.”

“It’s possible,” Gallagher said. “I’m willing to try anything right now.  You’re a woman, you’re her age… Try to be her friend, get her to feel safe. Be sure to remember what she says to you. We need information, and we need it as soon as possible.”

Rachel took her tablet out of her purse and passed it to the older woman. “I’ll do you one better,” she said. “You can sit in.”

They arrived at the ambulance. Rachel opened the rear door and hopped up on the gate. The paramedics in the cab up front had pulled the privacy curtains for Gallagher’s interview, but every so often the fabric would bump and rustle as they checked in on their patient. The motor was running and the relative coolness of the air-conditioned interior felt as though she had entered a small little world within the greater one of the field. 

Ellen Lewis was curled upright in a tight ball on the paramedics’ bench, staring down at the floor. Rachel bounced her hands on the low portable stretcher to make sure it wouldn’t fold up beneath her, then sat facing Lewis.

“Hey,” Rachel said. “I’m Agent Peng.”

Lewis had lost her last hour to the FBI’s Special Agents, so she made no distinction for Rachel’s title. The woman’s eyes barely flicked towards Rachel before she lost interest. Her gaze fell, but touched on the green and gold badge at Rachel’s hip on the way down. “OACET?” Lewis asked, focusing on Rachel for the first time.

Rachel nodded. Lewis leaned forward, then collapsed on the floor before Rachel could catch her. Lewis grabbed Rachel around her legs, sobbing into her lap.

“Ellen, right?” Rachel tried to detangle herself from the weeping woman. Ellen Lewis had lit up like Christmas when she had realized Rachel was an Agent, a warm rose glow interwoven with a hair-thin strand of that same odd teal. It was a definite improvement over the usual shirking terror but certainly no less visceral, and Rachel had no idea what it meant.

“My brother,” Ellen Lewis sniffed and dabbed her eyes with her shirt cuff. “Can you call him? My phone’s gone.”

“Your bro
—Graham?
” Rachel felt exceptionally slow; the woman was a plump feminine version of her fraternal twin. “You’re Graham’s sister?”

The schoolteacher nodded, and Rachel pushed down her own surprise as she reached out through the link. Graham was working back at the mansion. He dropped everything and ran for the nearest unoccupied room when Rachel told him his sister had come within an inch of being abducted.

“Do you know what we can do?” Rachel asked. 

Lewis nodded again. “Graham’s told me everything.”

Doubtful,
Rachel thought. Mulcahy would be wearing a new Graham-skin jacket if he had. “He’s finding a private place where he can talk,” Rachel said. “Can you answer some questions until he gets here?”

“Yeah,” Lewis sniffed, then started sobbing into Rachel’s pants again.

Rachel helped Lewis back to her seat, giving Gallagher a subtle wave out of the ambulance’s back window. Gallagher flashed an uncertain yellow as the screen of the borrowed tablet turned on, framing Ellen Lewis’s face. Several yards away from Gallagher’s team, Santino waved his own cell at Rachel; she split the feed in two to bring him in on the interview.

“Can you tell me what happened?” Rachel pressed again as she searched her voluminous purse. She found an almost-clean stack of paper napkins and passed them to Lewis, who took them gratefully.

Lewis nodded. “Field trip day,” she said thickly. “I teach fourth grade. We were supposed to go to the Smithsonian. You know, see the dinosaurs.”

Rachel smiled.

“So… It was chaos. Field trip day is always chaos. It’s almost two hours to get into the city, so we left early. The driver said the GPS rerouted him,” Lewis said into a napkin. “I was sitting up front so we were talking. We were going up Highway 29 like usual, then the GPS just took us off of the map. It said there was a major accident ahead so the driver followed the alternate route. 

“We got out here,” Lewis pointed towards the highway, close but unseen over the ridge. “There was a police car blocking the road.” 

“Agent Peng, does this… uh… does this go both ways?” Gallagher had traded the tablet for Santino’s phone. Her voice in Rachel’s head was halting. 

“Yes,”
Rachel replied.

“Okay… Okay, good. Ask her if it was state or local.”

“Do you remember what type of police car it was?” Rachel couldn’t recall where Graham had worked prior to OACET. She hoped he had been with law enforcement; no one made a distinction beyond the generic Police! unless they had some frame of reference.

Ellen Lewis shook her head. 

“Do you remember colors? Silver, blue, brown…?”

“Silver,” Lewis said. “Silver and blue.”

“State,” said Gallagher, and a member of her team peeled off to call the Virginia State Police and ask if they had had any vehicles stolen recently.

Graham’s chartreuse avatar appeared in the ambulance, and he nodded when Rachel asked him to wait until they finished the interview. He sat beside his sister, pained when his hand passed through hers. Behind them, Rachel saw Gallagher and her team jump at the sudden appearance of a bright green stranger who only showed up on their screens, and Jason moved from her group to theirs to explain.

“So after you found the road was blocked, what happened?”

“An officer came on the bus,” Lewis said, and a storm of grays and oranges rolled over her; the woman didn’t want to revisit this part. “I remember thinking he was really good-looking,” she whispered.

“That’s the first thing most people notice about this guy,” Rachel encouraged her. 

Lewis nodded, staring down at the pressed rubber floor of the ambulance. “Then he took out a gun,” she said softly. “He had us drive off of the road. The other bus was already here. Nobody knew what to think. He told us where to park and had us all get off of the bus… the kids were crying. One of the parents is a pro hockey player, thinks he’s a real hard-ass. I was scared to death he was going to try something, but he just kept his hands on his daughter’s shoulders the entire time, like he was going to wrap her up if things got bad. All of her friends were hanging on him… it was so sweet and sad…

“The man had them all get on the truck,” Lewis said, and those outside the ambulance watching the interview brightened at the new information.

“This truck, we don’t know anything about it. Can you describe it?” Rachel asked.

Lewis shook her head. “Normal shipping truck,” she said. “Huge… I think they’re called semis, the ones that haul those big freight trailers. You see them all the time on the highway.”

“Was there a trailer on this truck, or was it just the cab and engine?”

“An orange trailer. That’s where he took the kids. That’s where he took everyone,” she corrected herself. “He took the parents and the other teachers, too.”

“Okay, you’re doing really good,” Rachel said. “This is important. Did you see what happened when he put them on the truck?”

“Yes,” Lewis nodded quickly. “Yes, he said I was his witness. He told me to watch. The other man stood at the back of the truck—”

Gallagher shouted in Rachel’s head.

“Could you tell me about this other man?” Rachel asked. “This is very helpful. We didn’t know there was anyone else involved.”

Lewis shrugged. “I can’t, I’m sorry.  He wore a mask and he never said anything.”

“Height, weight, race…?”

“Short, a little overweight, I guess. I didn’t see any skin so that’s all I know… He wore black gloves and one of those black stocking masks that covers your entire face but you can see through it.”

“Okay, good,” Rachel said. “Thank you. What else was he wearing?”

“Um… Jeans and a shirt? I’m sorry, I wasn’t really looking at him.  The other man was doing all of the talking.”

“What happened then?”

“They loaded everybody up. There were already a lot of people from the school in there, kids and adults. The other bus on the trip was about fifteen minutes ahead of us because we got separated when we had to stop for a train. The rest of us got on the truck, and he made them sit with their backs to the wall. Then he went back to the road—”

“You said them,” Rachel interrupted. “What did he make you do?”

“They had me sit on the edge of the truck with my back to the open door.” Lewis paused. “Everybody looked at me. They were angry with me, like I was blocking their escape…” 

“You know you weren’t,” Rachel said. “That’s survivor’s guilt talking.  Don’t listen to it.”

“The men were at the back of the truck.” Lewis pressed her face into the napkins and sobbed. “I could have run, tried to get help...”

“And you would have been shot,” Rachel replied. “You did the right thing. Don’t let the guilt talk you out of it.”

Lewis nodded, but there was no heart in it. Her brother reached out and his hand passed through his sister’s shoulder; avatars offered no comfort, except for other Agents.

“We’re almost done. What happened after everyone was on the truck?”

“I don’t know what happened to them,” Lewis said. “They put me back on the bus and tied me up with… I don’t know. Those plastic strips that hold shoes together at Target.”

“Zip ties,” Rachel said. 

“Yeah. Like those, only bigger. I tried to get out of them, but they cut up my wrists.” She held up her hands to show the light bandages. “After that, I heard the truck drive off. Then nothing for… I don’t know how long it was.”

“You’ve been out there pretty much the entire day,” Rachel said.  “The FBI probably has a change of clothes if you want it.” Nobody would be so crass as to call attention to the faint smell of urine, but Rachel was sure it was weighing on the schoolteacher’s mind. “One last thing, though. Can you think of any reason they’d take everyone else but leave you behind?”

“The bright green man sitting beside her?”

“Boys?”
It sounded like Jason’s voice but she hadn’t been paying attention.
“Let me work.”

“I don’t know why they picked me,” Lewis said, shaking her head.

“It’s almost funny,” she added as an afterthought. “But this is twice in two days I’ve been part of something illegal without, you know, meaning to.”

“What do you mean?”