Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (39 page)

“Sure would be good for OACET if he turned out to be the bad guy.”

“Now, this is why you need an implant,” she said. “We don’t say things like that out loud.”

Santino laughed. “One of the many reasons I need an implant,” he corrected her. He turned towards his computers and noticed the wooden owl hiding under his houseplants. He glanced towards Rachel as he ran a finger down the owl’s beak.

“That’s Madeline,” Rachel told him. “She lives here now.”

Santino nodded. Sometimes owls happened. He turned off the computers, then reached under the desk and started unplugging them. “Want to help me carry these up to my office?”

“Were those assigned to you?” Rachel asked. “I thought you had to give them back when the task force was disbanded.”

“I will give them back when I’m asked,” he said primly, and began carefully wrapping the cords so they wouldn’t kink.

She chuckled and helped him move them upstairs. After the third trip, Rachel pled boredom and stayed behind in the fishbowl while he upgraded his system.

Her purse lay open beside the couch. Rachel sat and pulled her purse up beside her, then rescued the slightly squished cupcake riding on top of the mess within. She fished around inside the evidence bag until she could peel the frosting from the plastic with minimum loss of sugar. For once, she didn’t feel as though she was starving. The caffeine from the cappuccinos had taken the edge off.

Rachel stretched out on the couch, the evidence bag keeping the crumbs from the cupcake off of her lap. There was a smudge of black across the bag’s label. She flipped her implant to reading mode, hoping she hadn’t accidentally reused a bag that had contained biological samples; she had no idea how some of the stuff that was in her purse got there.

Santino’s handwriting jumped out at her. “RFID, possible Eric Witcham sigture.”

Cute. Her obsessive-compulsive partner had misspelled “signature” and had used her purse as a trash bag to hide his mistake.

Rachel turned the upper part of the bag inside out and used her finger to scrape off the leftover frosting.
Eric Witcham,
she mused. They had been unable to find any connection between him and Glazer. 

Too many loose ends. Zockinski and Hill were out canvassing Glazer’s old neighborhood, trying to find any sign of Glazer’s accomplice. Glazer himself seemed a brand-new person; they had found no evidence that Glazer even existed in any state or federal database. 

She and Santino had run that one into the ground. If Glazer was a hacker whose abilities were almost on par with an Agent’s, it stood to reason that his first move would be to erase himself from the system. Everyone left a trace these days. The only way Glazer could be a truly invisible man is if he wiped himself out entirely. Either that or fake his own
—

Oh Jesus.

The answer hit her like a bolt of lightning. Rachel leapt up and started throwing papers.
Please please please…

There!

Charley’s shoebox, tucked between the couch and a filing cabinet, had survived the purge when the FBI had raided the task force’s office. Rachel hadn’t bothered to check its contents, assuming it was another pile of the same useless crap that had filled Charley’s larger boxes. She slid her thumbnail under the cellophane tape sealing all four sides, then flipped it over. An avalanche of scraps cascaded down onto the floor, business cards and receipts mixed with the odd photocopied subpoena. She dropped to all fours and began pawing through the mess.

She flipped over a handmade coupon for a local dry cleaner’s and found it.

The image printed in silvery ink.

Rachel turned off her implant and sat in the dark as she reviewed her last six months at the Metropolitan Police Department. There had to have been signs. Hints, at least…

When she was done berating herself, she turned her implant back on and went looking for her new autoscript. It crawled out of hiding, eager to please, and she sicced it on the passive RFID tag buried in the ink.

A name and a phone number chimed in her ears.

Rachel reached out to Mulcahy and briefed him, then kept him in her link as she placed the call.

Charley Brazee’s voice greeted her with a cheerful hello. “Agent Peng! Finally.”

“I see the reports of your death have been greatly exaggerated.”

He chuckled. “Not really. By the time I was declared dead, I was already a footnote. No rumors to speak of, just an obituary or two.”

“How did you pull it off?”

“Changed my dental records, altered the DNA on file. The hardest part was finding the right corpse.”

She shivered.
“I’ll bet. And then you went under the knife?”

“Plastic surgery? Of course. Eric Witcham was fairly well known, back in his day. It’d be awkward if I bumped into an old colleague.”

“So what do I call you? Are you Charley Brazee or Eric Witcham?”

The man on the other end of the phone laughed. “Neither. They’ve both outlived themselves. But for you, I’ll answer to either.”

“That’s sweet,”
she said.
“And Glazer?”

“Ah,” Eric Witcham almost sighed. “He was my bodyguard on a previous job. His employer thought he was just a heavy, but he had talent. I took him with me when that contract was over.”

“Well, he gave you up. He’s how I got this number.”

Witcham laughed again. “Nice try, but you got this number from me and no one else. Glazer and I knew the risks, what would happen if one of us got caught. You’re lucky if he’s said five words to you.”

“Can’t blame a girl for trying. What is it that you and Glazer do?”

“Reputations. We make some, we break others. It’s all up to the client.”

“And you were told to break us.”

“Brave new world, Agent Peng. Branding is everything. We do realism branding, scenarios which capture the public’s attention and shape it in a specific way. It’s complex, it’s expensive, but we get results.”

“Conspiracy theories with a marketing department.”

“Something like that. Big splashy events make a better impression than any ad campaign ever could. The media loves us. If you ever see a news cycle that’s dominated by a single story, there’s a good chance we’re involved.”

Mulcahy’s chartreuse avatar popped into the air above her head.  “Do not,” he said, “mention Hanlon. He needs to give up that name himself. Just keep fishing and see what else he tells you while we track his signal.”

She nodded. Mulcahy’s avatar vanished.

“Gotta say, your fallback plan was pretty good stuff. I bet your A-game would have been spectacular.”

“It was one for the record books, Agent Peng.” Witcham sounded wistful. “If you hadn’t found that tunnel… Ach! Nearly six months of prep work ruined.”

“Sorry for the inconvenience.”

“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.”