Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (33 page)

“Well?” Rachel asked, comfortable in parade rest.

“There are provisions for a general external search,” Gallagher said, and pointed to the helicopter. “They’re doing thermal imaging. Would that cover it?”

“I’ve been doing thermal scans myself and haven’t found anything.” Rachel shook her head. “What about a direct search? Say we start on one end of the yard and go into each container?”

“How?” Knudson asked.

“It’s a thing we can do,” she replied, her new default response for questions she didn’t want to bother with. “We can cover a lot of ground, definitely faster than opening each container. But does the warrant cover individual entry?”

“No,” Gallagher said. It was almost a sigh.

“Can you expand the warrant?” Rachel asked.

The SAC shook her head. “Not on this scope, no.”

“Hey!” Rachel singled out the worker who had driven her in on the utility cart. “Who owns these? Does Portsmouth Marine Terminal have the authority to open any container?”

“It depends?” He looked around, wide-eyed at suddenly being the center of attention. “If they’re abandoned, yeah. But if they’re full and waiting for transport, no. We have shippers sign a dock warrant when they store the FEUs, but we don’t hold those, the consignee does.”

Rachel looked at Knudson. “Homeland’s got authority for yard-wide searches, right?”

“NINs first,” he said. “Then, if there’s cause, we can open to confirm contents.”

“Technically, we’d count as non-intrusive inspection technologies. We would not be physically present in the container.” Rachel raised her voice to carry through the crowd. “Can you guarantee that Homeland will protect us if there is a legal challenge?”

“Start looking,” Knudson replied. “I’ll make some calls.”

“No,” she said coldly. The man’s shoulders were thick with dimples. “Get a judge to sign off on this first. I need to see that we’re covered by the warrant. Then we’re completely at your disposal.”

“There are kids out there,” Knudson moved towards her, a little too quickly. His chest bumped into Hill’s outstretched arm. The man from Homeland backed down. “Kids,” he said again, more quietly. “Just get out there.”

“If I heard you correctly,” Rachel said, “you’re asking us to break the law. We will not participate in that.”

Anger was building.
Thank God these people are professionals,
she thought. They might want to tear her limb from limb, but at least they’d do it in effigy. Rather than attacking, they started to turn away: one solution didn’t work; time to find another.

The helicopter made another pass. She tipped her head skyward to call attention to it.

“But,” Rachel said. “I have an alternative.”

Within the space of ten minutes, nearly two hundred Agents had joined them, green avatars spread out across the sky. Rachel had put the call out through the link for volunteers to help in the search for Glazer’s missing container. Even Mulcahy, sitting in Senate hearings back in D.C., had stepped out-of-body to help. 

Rachel organized them into a traditional grid pattern with two Agents per sight line, half traveling north and the other half traveling west. She told herself this was no different than a good old-fashioned ground search, where visibility was directed down instead of out; still, the other members of law enforcement grumbled. Most had left to run their own searches, leaving only Gallagher and her team to mingle with those from OACET and First MPD.

“You’re looking for one container,”
Rachel shouted through the link, and sent the cleanest satellite images of the truck and the shipping yard to the Agents.
“Check the numbers and iconography, compare those with notable dents, scratches, and other markings. All of these FEUs look alike, so if you find one that you think is a match, note the location, then compare what you see to the satellite images on the grid before you call it in.

“We’re looking for something new,”
she told them.
“An FEU that wasn’t there before. Glazer’s good at manipulating digital images, so cross-reference everything and run anything you find past Jason to make sure it’s authentic. Got it?”

They did. The Agents moved forward in pairs, the first serving as advance scouts, the second reviewing and comparing. Communication through the link was a flurry of false positives, with Rachel, Phil, and Jason throwing new images up on tablets and cells as quickly as they came in. These slowed as the excitement wore off and the Agents above started to work in earnest, crossing over each other’s lines and circling back when they reached the edge of the yard.

“Hey! Hey!” Phil, surrounded by taller men, held up his tablet over their heads while he shouted. She picked the image off of it and sent it around her group. “I think we’ve found it! It’s close!” Phil shouted. “Two rows over.”

“That’s it,” Zockinski said as he compared Phil’s find to the satellite image of Glazer’s FEU. “Same color, same markings.”

“Agent Peng?” Gallagher tapped her on the shoulder. “You have confirmation. The FBI will be opening that container, no matter what.”

Rachel nodded.
“The warrant covers this one,”
she told Mulcahy, and threw her mind towards the swarm of avatars gathering around the container. Two rows over, maybe, but a single row on this scale could be measured in football fields. She grabbed at Santino’s good arm to steady herself as she pushed herself past her limit.

Mulcahy’s avatar stepped through the metal doors at the same moment her scan went through its walls. 

“Oh, Penguin,”
he whispered to her across the link.

“I know.”

She dropped her scan. “Alive,” Rachel said to Gallagher. “I don’t know if they’re unharmed, but they’re all definitely alive, kids and adults.”

Everyone in earshot went blue in relief.

The fitter members of the FBI were already running. The team from First MPD joined them. Rachel felt each step in her knees as she moved across the hard-packed earth. She fell behind, motioning Santino and the others to keep going when they waited for her to catch up.

A service cart piled under with Gallagher and the rest of her squad slowed down, letting her grab a roll bar and swing herself up. Rachel clung to the side of the cart, feet slipping from the wheel well as they bounced down the track. They turned down one alley, two…

She let herself drop off when the cart slowed. The orange FEU was at ground level, with other units piled neatly all around. Rachel marveled at how fast Glazer had moved. They had assumed that wherever his container ended up, time constraints would have put it on the top of the stack. The unit was surrounded by law enforcement of all stripes on the ground, Agents in the air. Most of the green avatars were half-in, half-out of the container, trying to console children who had no way of knowing they were there.

Rachel limped over to meet Santino. She had expected to see the First MPD’s task force shunted off to the side again, but they had a spot close to the doors. Everyone was bright with anticipation but they parted for her, some nodding in steady blues and greens.

Well,
she thought, and then the men on the doors determined the container was safe to open, followed by the shouted: “FBI! We’re coming in!”

Then nothing but the screaming yellow terror of children.

Rescued. It should have been a happy moment, but the seventy-two people trapped in the FEU reacted as though a gun had gone off in the doorway; the last police officer they had seen was the one who locked them in. The adults gathered the students to them as they all wept and cowered, waiting for the next blow to land. 

Rachel staggered backwards and dropped the emotional spectrum before she blacked out. She returned to the service cart and sat in its wide back seat as the screams stopped, teachers and parents realizing that it was over, the students slowly transferring their trust from one group to the other.

Mulcahy’s avatar met her at the cart. “Nice job, Penguin,” he said. His hand on her shoulder was air, but she couldn’t help but throw a weak smile back at him.

Gallagher took charge. The team from First MPD was allowed to stay and the paramedics were allowed to enter, but the others were escorted past the perimeter of yellow crime scene tape that appeared like magic wherever Gallagher pointed. (Rachel gave a cheery wave to Knudson as he left; the man from Homeland Security pretended he hadn’t seen her.) Gallagher broke the students into smaller groups and tasked FBI, police, and Agents alike to take their names and call their families, then sent the students off to a local hospital in an assembly line of ambulances.

“Please make friends with Special Agent Gallagher,” Mulcahy told her, and she nodded. 

Things slowed down considerably after that. Mulcahy and the other out-of-body Agents left, and Rachel let the rest happen without her. She stretched out in the back seat of the utility cart and tried to keep to her old Army habit of napping when she wasn’t needed, but when she flipped off her implant, the memory of the rush of emotions from the group trapped in the truck kept circling through her thoughts.

Enough of that.
Rachel turned on her implant and swung herself out of the cart. She made her way over to where Santino was finishing up with his last group of kids. He saw her coming and whispered something to a small boy, who turned a shy violet with curious yellow sparks.

“What would you like to say to Agent Peng?” Santino prompted.

The boy blinked up at her. “’anks.”

“’ur ‘elcome,” she said. He rolled his eyes at her and ran back to his classmates.

“Keep trying,” Santino said, and dusted off his pants as he stood. “You never know. Someday, somewhere, someone might find you funny.”

“I can dream.” Rachel glanced towards Glazer’s FEU. The FBI had covered it from top to bottom in plastic sheeting to preserve the evidence. “Be right back,” she muttered, her subconscious prodding her to move.

She walked up to the crime scene tape and ran a scan through the container. Her scan pinged off of hardware. Machines, none of them digital, all with industry-hard edges and wrapped in insulation. The insulation continued up and around the sides, keeping the temperature in and shielding the interior. Rachel had scanned so many containers that day that she would almost categorize this FEU as a refrigerated unit, but one with a custom design; some of the more common radio and microwave frequencies bounced off at the first layer. She felt a little like Superman trying to see through lead.

Gallagher spotted her. The SAC shook hands one final time with the adults, then came over to join her. “You can go in if you’d like,” the other woman said. “Just stay near the doors.”

“No need.” Rachel tapped her head. Gallagher’s forensic team was carefully ripping the place apart with tweezers and she didn’t want to muck up their efforts. “What have they told you about the modifications?”

“It’s been fitted with lights, an air conditioner, and a carbon dioxide scrubber. They were gas-powered and the tank was getting low. There was probably enough fuel for another hour.”

At least they weren’t sitting in the heat and the dark,
Rachel thought, and said: “So we still don’t know if he was trying to kill them.”

Gallagher was a mild orange; she couldn’t answer. “It might have been for ransom, it might have been for torture. I hate dealing with psychopaths. They only make sense to themselves.” 

“Amen,” Rachel agreed, although the distinction between a psychopath and a terrorist shifted heavily towards the latter in Glazer’s case. Psychopaths didn’t need a reason. There was motive here, they just had to find it. “You’re a profiler?”

“No,” Gallagher replied. “Violent crime specialist. Also, kidnappings.”

Rachel decided not to argue. Gallagher knew her psychopaths.

“I’m going in,” Gallagher said, and pointed at the shipping container. “You’re welcome to come.”

Rachel nodded and held up the yellow tape so Gallagher could duck underneath. They kept to the walkway designated by the forensics team, marked off at the sides by lengths of heavy-duty climbing rope. Rachel prodded it with her toe and looked at Gallagher.

“Doesn’t leave any fibers,” the SAC explained. “Cheap hardware store rope sheds like a cat.”

A metal sheet had been laid across the entrance of the container as a ramp to reduce the amount of dust tracked in. It rang hollow under their feet as they crossed. Rachel had expected the interior of the container to stink, but there was a small chemical toilet bolted to the floor at the rear of the unit.

She and Gallagher stopped in front of a box full of empty water bottles, each tagged in its own individual plastic evidence baggie. Beside that box was another with wrappers from prepackaged lunch snacks.

“Oh hell,” Rachel muttered. She was glad Gallagher had talked her into coming inside; with everything laid out in front of them, it was plain that Glazer had meant to keep the victims alive.

“He knew they’d be rescued before the fuel ran out,” Gallagher had reached the same conclusion. 

“One hour is a brutally tight window.”

Gallagher nodded. 

“I know how this is going to sound,” Rachel began. “And please don’t think this is anything other than establishing a timeline…”