THREE
“How was it?”
Raul Santino had waited up for her. He was pretending to watch basketball, but was literally glowing green with jealousy.
Rachel decided to poke him. “It was all right,” she sighed, as she slipped out of her party shoes. She knocked the soles against her palms, and two wads of toilet paper hit the floor. “Nice place. Lots of flowers. Ever been there?”
Her partner glared daggers at her.
“Oh, right. You said you had a membership.”
“That would be a lifetime membership.”
She covered her mouth to hide her smile. Santino collected plants in the same way that he breathed: unrelentingly and without conscious thought, and if he ever stopped, Rachel would check for a pulse. The first thing he had done when he had moved in was turn her yard into a botanical garden; the second, to convert her house to an arboretum. She wasn’t exactly happy about it, but he paid his rent on time and she was never without a ride to work.
(Not to mention how she had become an expert in plants through nothing but immersion and osmosis. She figured if this cyborg stuff didn’t pan out, she could always become the world’s foremost resentful horticulturist.)
“It was really beautiful,” she said, scooping the sweaty wads of paper into her hand and tossing them into the nearby bin in one smooth motion. “Each table had a different flower as a theme. Mare and I were at the one with… What are those white flowers, the ones that look like roses but have a stronger scent?”
A strangled moan came from the direction of the couch. “Don’t do this.”
“Gardenias, right. And they left the main building open so you could walk around and check out the exhibits. It was great. Zero tourists. I had the conservatory all to myself.”
“I will destroy you.”
“And the liquor! Seriously, Santino, the champagne was—” She dodged the thrown pillow, and headed to the kitchen, laughing.
He followed her, grumbling under his breath. Her partner was tall and lanky, with a core of cobalt blue, and dark hair which he kept swept back from his face. The only other feature that registered with Rachel were his glasses. The wire frames were thicker than fashionable, and the right earpiece dead-ended in what appeared to be an overlarge hearing aid. They gave him a somewhat bookish appearance, but Santino, nerd through and through, loved it.
Rachel went straight to the fridge. It was, for all practical purposes, a cooler; there was nothing in there but beer, hard cider, and a bag of baby carrots that had devolved from orange to white to a dim fuzzy gray. She opened the crisper drawer and pulled out two bottles of spring lager, cracked their tops, and passed one to her partner before he hopped up to his usual perch on the counter.
“So,” he said.
“So.”
“Josh said the game was afoot? Are we a-footing?”
“And then some,” she sighed, as she chose a kitchen chair. “Murder.” He nodded, and she waited until he was drinking before adding, “At the White House.”
“What?!” Santino coughed and sputtered. “The White… The White House?!”
“Yup.” Rachel reached into the oversized handbag dangling from her chair, and found her tablet. “Here, take a look at this.”
Santino caught it on the fly, and blinked at the dead man on the tablet’s screen. “Whoa,” he said, his fingers tapping to resize the image. “This happened at the White House?”
Rachel nodded. “They even know who killed him,” she said, and called up a still frame from an overhead camera. A fiery redhead, tall and stunning in a low-cut blazer and matching skirt, walked beside her future victim. They had their heads close together, as if they were sharing secrets.
“Uh-oh. Someone got played.”
“Like the world’s stupidest violin. His name was Casper Ceara, and he had a reputation for hitting on anything that moved.”
“Good-looking guy,” Santino acknowledged. “That, plus working in the White House…”
“Yup,” Rachel said. “Nobody thought anything of it when he took our mystery woman out for a midnight tour of his penis.
“Here are the facts,” Rachel continued, and counted the points off on her fingers. “One: last night, a certain Grammy-winning pop star performed a private concert for the President and several influential donors. Two: pop stars don’t travel without an entourage. Three: her usual makeup artist was in a suspiciously-timed car accident, so a certain Joanna Reed was picked as a replacement. Four: Reed may have been vetted by the Secret Service, but Reed’s body was found in the trunk of a locked car a few hours ago, so whoever visited the White House wasn’t her.”
She took a breath. “And five? Members of an entourage aren’t allowed to move about the White House. They stay in a reception area in the basement, sit around until the show ends, and then pack up and leave.”
Santino wasn’t slow. “So if Joanna Reed was killed before… Our mystery woman needed access to the White House’s basement.”
“Bingo.” Rachel grinned at him. “Now, guess what they keep in the White House. Beside the President and his family.”
“Gifts given to the President, special collections… Mostly stuff that’s been donated and needs to be stored, but not displayed.”
“Aw,” she said. “You spoiled the surprise.” Rachel made sure to throw some sarcasm in there. Santino had an encyclopedic knowledge of pretty much everything that existed. Or had existed. Or might possibly exist in the future. Like most of her partner’s traits, Rachel found this to be simultaneously marvelous and annoying.
“What did she steal?”
Rachel shook her head. “The Secret Service doesn’t know. Most likely something from the same room where they found the victim’s body. He was left in a locked room, of course.”
“Of course. Probably one without security cameras.”
“Of course. There were cameras up and down every corridor. The storerooms were kept locked except for personnel with special access, and their keycards are logged each time they’re used. Plus, you know, it was in the White House, so nobody would be in the basement who hadn’t received access to the building in the first place. As far as security went, they thought they were protected.”
“Except when a pretty lady charms a staff member into giving her a tour.”
“Yup. As always, the weakest link in the security chain is the people involved,” Rachel said before she took a long pull off of her beer. The lager lacked the tingle of champagne, and felt somewhat lifeless as she swallowed. She made herself chug half of the bottle; there was no way she could afford a hundred-dollar-a-glass champagne habit, so she might as well forget the taste as quickly as she could.
“How did he die?” Santino asked, sliding the image around the tablet. “I don’t see any blood.”
“Poison. Strong poison. They’re not sure what kind, but it shut him down within seconds. There’s a copy of the preliminary autopsy findings in the file.”
“Makes sense. Easier to sneak poison into the White House than a gun. How’d she get away?”
“Same way she got in,” Rachel said. “She rejoined the entourage and left with them after the concert was done.”
“Kill someone in the White House and then wait it out?” Her partner gave a low whistle. “Mystery Woman has ice water for blood.”
“Yup.”
“So,” Santino said, tossing her the bottle opener. “I assume the MPD and the Secret Service are investigating the murder. Where do we come in? Um… I’m assuming this isn’t just an OACET thing.”
“Yup,” Rachel said again, as she opened a fresh bottle. “You and me and the guys? We’re good to go. Technically, we’re not investigating the murder. We’re tracking down the object.”
“Hm,” he grunted. “Seems as though that means we are looking into it, what with theft being the probable motive for the murder.”
“Technicalities and legalities, then. Our private clue club has a great closure rate on important cases, and we fall into that blind spot between departments, so we can do more with less oversight. The Secret Service came to Sturtevant and asked him to turn us loose.”
“Heh,” Santino chuckled, his colors brightening. “It’s nice to be noticed.”
“Not so nice, maybe.” Rachel pointed at the tablet, and he glanced down to find the image had changed to one of a large room full of shelves, boxes covering every inch of the space from floor to ceiling. “We have to find out what was taken before we can track it down.”
Santino blinked at the tablet, his conversational colors slowing with mild shock. “Oh no,” he said.
“Oh yes. And it gets better.”
“Of course it does. Lemme guess: more than one of these boxes is empty?”
“Nailed it.” Rachel grinned at him. “Plus, Mystery Woman moved the contents around as much as she could before she ran off. She swapped items that were in boxes of the same size, and put the boxes back in their usual places on the shelves.
“And she dumped a bunch of boxes on the floor,” she added. “And they’re not sure if she took more than one object, or even took anything at all.”
“So…”
“So the Secret Service is doing a full inventory, and they want us to sit in,” she told him. “Go upstairs and change.”
Getting onto the White House grounds after midnight was surprisingly easy. A private car came to pick them up. A man who spoke a total of five words (“Let me see your IDs.”) took them straight from her driveway to a side door at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The other two members of their team had beaten them to the scene, and were waiting for them just inside the security alcove. Rachel and Santino had changed into their best suits—stiff, horrid things better suited for funerals than a late-night crime scene—but Santino still burst out laughing when he saw Jacob Zockinski. Rachel flipped frequencies to find the older detective in a black three-piece tuxedo.
She blinked at him.
“Go ahead,” Zockinski said in purple-gray resignation.
“I can’t,” she said. “My mouth’s clogged. All of the jokes want to come out at the same time.”
Matt Hill, the other detective from the MPD, was slumped against the wall, as if he had already laughed himself to the point of exhaustion. He nodded at Rachel, and said, “Tomorrow was supposed to be his day off.”
It took Rachel a moment to wedge the context of the comment into the conversation. “Everything’s at the dry cleaners?”
“Yeah,” Zockinski sighed. “And you don’t come to the White House in a sweatshirt and jeans.”
“This,” she said to Santino, “is why I always keep an emergency suit ready.”
The insults had begun to flow when Mitch Alimoren pushed open the interior door to let them into the White House proper. He was carrying a nylon garment bag, which he handed to a grateful Zockinski.
“There’s a bathroom you can use to change,” Alimoren said to Zockinski. “And then I’ll take you to the East Room. You won’t be allowed to go anywhere unescorted—we’re all on edge, and security’s as high as we can get it.”
It wasn’t Rachel’s first time in the White House, but the men from the MPD had the iron-jawed stiffness of people trying not to stare. She understood. When her boss had taken her to meet the President, she had set her scans as tight as she could to keep from tripping her way down the halls. An image of the White House had already existed in her imagination, a composite of rooms made up from stills and televised press conferences. In reality, it was both smaller and grander than she had expected. When it was built, the White House had been a massive structure, on par with the palaces of kings. These days, the larger McMansions had roughly the same square footage. The scope had shrunk to commonplace.
But there was something else there, some other quality that defied description. If the term “character” didn’t evoke heavily scuffed floors and crooked windows, Rachel might be tempted to use it, but it was more than that. The building had its own sense of purpose. It simply was. Visiting the White House was like walking through a cathedral. The purpose—the meaning—of the place had sunk into the wood and stone.
Rachel wondered if that sense of purpose existed apart from the White House itself. If this building burned to the ground, if the ghost of Dolly Madison failed to carry off the art, would what came after feel the same?
She rather thought it would. It might take a couple of decades for the patina to soak in, but any building that served as such a home to power would become…more.
They reached the bathroom. As Zockinski changed, Alimoren briefed them on their progress. “The archivists have moved the items in the storeroom upstairs to the East Room. It’s the only space we have available where everything can be laid out at once,” he said. “They’re still opening boxes and sorting items. It’ll be a few hours before they can do a full inventory.”
“You let them into the scene?” Santino said a little too sharply.
“The murder occurred last night,” Alimoren said. There was defensive orange within his conversational colors. This ran from his head down to his knees, the shape vaguely reminiscent of armor. “Homicide from First MPD cleared the room this morning.”
Hill crossed his arms, and Rachel kept herself from sighing. The Agents were still so new that Rachel was rarely called to a scene until after it had been processed. It drove her team crazy: she found more at cold scenes than Forensics did when the bodies were still warm.
“Can we see it?” she asked. Unlikely that she’d pick up anything, not after the scene had been trampled by the foot traffic required to move a treasure trove, but it was worth trying.
Alimoren nodded, and when Zockinski finally emerged from the bathroom in an expensive dark navy suit, he led them downstairs. Security got lighter the deeper they went: someone had had the brilliant idea that the murder might have been a ploy designed to draw the Secret Service into the basement, and had made sure they were posted in force along the ground floor. There were guards stationed at every intersection, each of them wearing the grays and oranges of stress and frustration, and too focused on proving they could do their jobs. Rachel quickly grew tired of flashing her credentials.
Alimoren noticed as her attention moved from the Secret Service on the ground to the security cameras overhead. His colors fluttered towards a deeper uncertain orange, but he said nothing.
“Habit,” Rachel assured him. “I can tell where the cameras are without looking.” She could tell where the Secret Service agents were stationed, too, but Santino was the only member of the team who knew her eyes no longer worked. Well, Zockinski had been dropping hints, and Hill might know because his cousin was an Agent… No. Zockinski was just guessing, and Mako Hill would never let her secret slip.
She pointed out several hidden cameras for Alimoren, just to put his mind at ease.
Odd, that. A year ago, when the Agents had first gone public, locating cameras by their frequencies would have frightened someone like Alimoren. Now, this too-simple trick helped her prove her value.
“We figure we’ve got maybe three more days before the story breaks,” Alimoren told the group as he took them past one final checkpoint. “And then everybody in the country is going to turn into an armchair security specialist. We already know we’re going to catch the worst of it,” he said, a nearby Secret Service agent nodding in agreement. “It’ll look good if we’ve made some progress on either the murder or the robbery before then.”
“We’ll help where we can,” Zockinski said. As the oldest member of their team, and the one who met the universal expectations of what a high-ranking cop should look like, Zockinski usually ran point during interactions with those outside of the MPD. The four of them had decided it was easier that way. Not better. Just easier, especially when they were working a case.
“Appreciated.” Alimoren stopped by a battered white metal door. He slid a passkey through a lock, punched a code on the keypad, and let them inside.
It was anticlimactic. There was no blood, no mess, no taped-off area to indicate where the body had been found. The room was about the size of a large kitchen and was close to empty. In the far corner, a woman with a pale pink core loaded the last few white boxes onto a pushcart. The metal shelves, some against the walls, some freestanding in rows down the middle of the room, were almost completely bare.
“Can I walk around?” Rachel asked Alimoren. When he nodded, she dropped her purse, took a few long steps away from the men, and let her mind wander.
She heard Alimoren ask her team if they wanted to join her.
“No,” Santino said. “Agent Peng’s working.”
Her scans fell away, roaming across the floors, the walls, the ceiling, and beyond. She pushed her mind through the edges of things, deep into the thicks and thins and hollows of structures. There were no utilities other than electricity, no voids other than ventilation runs. No secret rooms, no hidden explosives attached to the gas lines… Fool me twice, she thought, expanding her scans to take in the rooms beyond, shame on me.
Nothing.
“What’s she doing?” Alimoren spoke in a low whisper.
“Scanning,” Rachel replied. “If I can ping it, or if it resonates on the EM spectrum, I can pick it up.” She tried to ignore how the archivist in the corner was turning yellow-orange with fear and uncertainty: the woman had just realized Rachel was an Agent.
“EM spectrum?”
“Just electromagnetic fields,” she answered, almost idly, “but there are a lot of them.” She tuned her scans to search for secretions. After a visit to a hospital a few months back, she had promised herself she would learn how to detect biological agents within small spaces, and had gotten remarkably good at it in a relatively short span of time. Oily fingerprints were one thing—fingerprints were everywhere, and she had learned early on how to detect them—but she had had no idea the world was encrusted with a thick skin of… Well. Skin, for one thing. Shed skin, cells dropped from human bodies with each caress, every time a comb was moved through hair. Little flakes, little flecks, tumbling around before they came to rest, and then devoured and pooped out in turn by those miniscule things whose singular purpose it was to eat and poop, and eat and poop…
She adjusted her scans again, and the room bloomed in filth.
Blood, snot, spit, and shit, she thought. Life is disgusting.
Some distance away, a tiny fleck of dead red layered over black on gold caught her attention.
“Hey…” she said, walking across the room and towards one of the empty freestanding shelves. The archivist shied away as she approached. “Somebody get me a pen and an evidence bag.”
Rachel flopped down on her belly, and waited until Santino shoved a pen and a small plastic baggie into her open hand. “Thanks.”
“Whatcha got?” he asked.
“This…” Rachel said, using the butt end of the pen to prod a nearly invisible piece of metal away from where it had come to rest against the leg of a shelf. She carefully jockeyed it into the evidence bag. Once it was in, she adjusted her scans for a tight visual. A gold object, much thicker than a pin but about as long, lay at the bottom of the bag.
She handed the baggie to Santino. “I think it’s a really bad idea to touch that with bare skin,” she warned him.
“We need an empty box,” Santino said to the archivist. “Something that can be covered.”
The archivist handed him a fancy white shoebox with the Presidential Seal on the lid.
“Can we come in?” Alimoren asked from the door. His voice was eager. Rachel reset her scans to normal, and saw the Secret Service agent was running yellow-white with excitement.
“Yeah,” she said, brushing the floor dust from her pants. “Did you find out what type of poison killed the victim?”
“Test results are still coming in. The best guess is a concentrated batrachotoxin.”
Rachel didn’t bother to try to search the term. She glanced at her partner, who whispered, “A neurotoxin extracted from tree frogs.”
“Any ideas on the delivery mechanism?” she asked, running a last scan through the metal object in the box. It was hollow, with a spring resting beneath a protrusion at one end.
“Injection,” Alimoren said. He had closed the distance between them, and peered into the open shoebox. “The entry wound is too thick to have been caused by a syringe. Beyond that, they don’t know.”
“This might be it,” Rachel said. “It’s hollow, there’s blood on one end, and whatever was inside of it is organic.”
“This?” Alimoren picked up the baggie and held it up to the light. The narrow end of the metal tube was tapered to an edge along a single plane. The bulb at the other end was flat, its surface crumpled like a thick sheet of aluminum foil. There were grooves cut into the sides of the bulb, crushed and folded in on themselves by the same force that had ruined the shape of the bulb.
“I’ve seen something like this before,” Santino said. “Can’t quite place it, though.”
“Looks like part of a watch,” Hill said.
Zockinski’s conversational colors shifted to a more confident reddish-orange and clicked into place. “He’s right,” Zockinski said. “It’s the…ah…the part you turn to wind a watch.”
“Winding crown,” Santino offered, gingerly turning the end of the baggie towards him for a better view. “It’s too big to be one of those. A real winding crown is just a crank to turn the cogs. This is almost the size of a penny nail.”
“You’re assuming the watch needed to work,” Rachel said. “If it was just a storage system for the poison…”
Alimoren hissed. He let Santino reclaim the box and its contents, and started to tap on his phone.
“Check my purse,” Rachel said. “There’s a tablet you can use.”
The Secret Service agent was too preoccupied to realize she had been watching him call up the video footage of the crime scene. He hunted around Rachel’s purse until he located her tablet: the image of the suspect was waiting for him. The tablet was large enough for the team to cluster around and confirm Hill’s guess.
“Yes,” Alimoren said, his voice tight. “Look. She’s wearing a watch.”
The woman’s wristwatch was large, and just barely on the fashionable side of clunky. It was meant to be seen, falling like a bangle from beneath the cuff of her suit sleeve. It was right at home on the arm of a high-end makeup artist. Rachel played with the resolution until the image squealed in blurry pixels, but she couldn’t quite get a clear impression of the winding crown.
“We’ve sent the files to digital specialists at Quantico and the MPD,” Alimoren said. “I’ll put in a call and see if they can get us a good close-up on the watch.”
Oh, did you now? Rachel thought to herself, and reached out to locate Jason Atran through the link. She pulled back once she found him, but he might not have noticed her even if she had pinged him directly: he was burning the midnight oil in his private lab at the MPD’s Consolidated Forensic Laboratory. She lurked in his computer system just long enough to see that he was working on the footage from the White House’s security cameras, and then drew her mind back into her body.
Santino was watching her. She nodded at him; her partner rolled his eyes and took on an undertone of scornful orange.
“Who’s on Forensics tonight? I’ve got something I want tested for batrachotoxin.” Alimoren spoke low and hard into his phone. Behind him, the archivist skulked away as quickly as she could, pushing the cart laden with white boxes before her.
“If this is the murder weapon, why’d she ditch it?” Zockinski asked, taking his turn examining the pin in its baggie. “She had to know we’d find it.”
Hill and Santino both grinned at him, a smug pink running through their conversational colors.
“Knock it off. We could have found it without Peng,” Zockinski insisted. “We got along just fine before the freaking Agents showed up. No offense,” he added, nodding at Rachel.
“None taken, asshole,” Rachel replied in a voice just above a whisper—they were still in the White House, after all. “Would you risk trying to stick your poison-covered weapon back into its holster? I’d chuck it as far as I could and run.”
“Still.” Zockinski’s opinion wouldn’t be moved. “We would have vacuumed the scene.” He jumped as Hill elbowed him in his ribs. “We might have vacuumed,” he amended. “But if there was even a chance in a million we could have found the murder weapon, why did she leave it behind?”
“Probably because it won’t help us find her,” Alimoren said as he rejoined them. His conversational colors were a bright yellow-white, with alternating threads of red, yellow, and blue hope moving through his excitement. “Our pathologists say that batrachotoxins are easy to make. All you need are the right frogs.”
“Or beetles,” Santino added. “Probably be smarter to extract batrachotoxin from beetles, anyhow. Melyrid beetles would be easy to smuggle into the U.S. because they look like ordinary bugs, but it’s hard to miss a poison dart frog.”
Alimoren blinked at Santino. “They… Forensics didn’t mention beetles.”
“I can get them some literature on the topic,” Santino offered.
“Can we head upstairs?” Alimoren asked Rachel. “I want to get this to Forensics as fast as possible.”
“Yeah—yes,” Rachel said, as she cast her senses over the room once more. Nothing resonated on her scans, and that annoying too-smart voice which popped up whenever her subconscious wanted to nag her about something she had missed stayed silent. “We’re good.”
The news of their discovery had spread. Hope was the most complex emotion Rachel had deciphered: hope wasn’t made of one color but many, each of them woven into each other for support. The primary colors that made up blue relief, yellow joy, and red passion were worn by each Secret Service agent, and they smiled and nodded their thanks to Alimoren and the small group from First MPD as they passed. Most hadn’t fully shed the grays and oranges, but these had subsided somewhat beneath vivid hope.
Another flight of stairs and a long corridor, and Alimoren took them through a set of doors and into the East Room.
Again, it was both smaller and grander than it had right to be. Rachel had never attended a formal function at the White House—she had only attended photo shoots in the Rose Garden and the Oval Office—and the East Room came as something as a surprise. It was beautiful, certainly, with its inlaid wood floors and crystal chandeliers, but it was beautiful in a way which refused to tolerate nonsense. It was a room used to hard but perfect use, like a truck stop where the bikers minded the carpets and china or else!
The archivists had turned the East Room into a processing zone. The white boxes laid out in row after row were tidily organized, the archivists stacking their contents neatly on the clean linens beside them. The boxes and their contents had been grouped by size, with the larger items on the far side of the room, the smaller items closest to the main doors.
“Smart,” Hill said.
The rest of them agreed. It made sense to exclude items from the search based on size alone: the murderer hadn’t snuck into the White House with the goal of stealing a framed oil painting. Whatever she had stolen would be small enough to conceal on her person.
A murmur went up from a group of archivists, their conversational colors flaring briefly with yellow-white excitement. A taller man broke away, carrying something carefully with both hands down one row of boxes and up another, before placing it on a folded tablecloth in front of an empty box.
“What happened?” Rachel asked.
“They found another misplaced item,” Alimoren said. “Right now, they’re eliminating what could have been stolen by making sure each item is in its proper place. After that, they’ll make a list of what’s still missing. That’ll be what we use to start tracking down possible buyers.”
Alimoren excused himself, and left to deliver the possible murder weapon to the FBI’s Forensics team. The team from First MPD was left on the edge of the room, alone, but not unsupervised: the Secret Service agents stationed around the East Room gave Rachel the impression that she’d be shot if she tried to open any of the doors.
“What do we do now?” she whispered to her partner.
“We do what we do best,” Santino whispered back.
“Wander around, try to look like we know what we’re doing, and hope we trip over something useful before they learn we’re frauds?”
“Exactly,” he said, and moved off down a nearby row.
Rachel headed south, towards the smallest boxes. This section held the most archivists; she assumed it was because more of the smaller items had been rearranged or gone missing. She turned down a row, keeping her scans steady. Her boss would never forgive her if she accidentally stomped a path through a century’s worth of accumulated history.
Her scans roamed across the hoard. There were plates and cutlery of every possible description: apparently, foreign dignitaries had once feared America’s presidents lacked appropriate tableware. There was less jewelry than she had expected, and most of that came in the form of ornate broaches and pins. She saw an almost countless number of decorative containers, as well as carvings of animals, and, occasionally, containers carved from parts of animals.
She wondered if she could track America’s rise to power through the quality of the gifts. There, resting near a handwritten sign noting that the items came from 1800 to 1830, was a well-worn religious icon with a decidedly Byzantine appearance, the gilt all but gone from the holy Crown. By the middle of that century, presidents were given gemstone-dotted statuettes from the Middle East, and small tapestries woven with rich colors and metallic threads. Another fifty years down the aisle, and the items became more precious still: small portraits, cameos in jade and ivory, and miniaturized depictions of nearly every walk of life, both foreign and domestic.
And that didn’t even begin to cover the antiquities.
Even when she still had her eyesight, art museums had never appealed to Rachel. Paintings bored her: a certain kind of person might appreciate the effort that went into placing the head of St. John the Baptist on its party platter, but she wasn’t that person. She was drawn to the antiquities instead—relics of nations long gone to dust, living on through their statues, their curios, their assorted objets d’art—the older the better.
Much of what was here was ancient.
Cultural artifacts, she was sure, pieces of a country’s oldest memories given to help forge new ones. Gifts given to a young nation to help them remember the grandeur of the old.
(And maybe, just maybe, that all empires crumble.)
And these were just the castoffs! What did the archivists decide to keep, or display, or send out as examples of prizes won to museums and presidential libraries?
She paused by a set of boxes placed just offside the last row. These were empty, the archivists moving between them and a couple of desktop computers that had been hastily set up on a folding banquet table. Rachel recognized the pale pink core of the archivist from the crime scene, and decided to see what would happen if she started pushing buttons.
She sidled up behind the woman, and said, “You seem to be good at this.”
The woman turned. Rachel ran a quick scan of her face; she was about Rachel’s own age, maybe a few years older, with glasses and tight brown eyes. She gasped and ran her gaze around the room, searching for help, and barbed-wire ribbons of yellow fear and red hate mixed within her conversational colors.
“Agent Rachel Peng, OACET,” Rachel said, holding out her hand. “Mind if I ask you a few questions?”
The woman took Rachel’s hand with all the enthusiasm of someone handed a used plague mask. “Maddie Peguero,” she said. “No, I’m… I’ve got to finish—”
“I’ll just take a few moments of your time.” Rachel was enjoying herself. Public opinion of the Agents had its ups and downs, but Peguero bore the hallmarks of a woman who had Made Up Her Mind about cyborgs, and nothing Rachel did or said would shake that. “Can you explain what you’re doing?”
“Inventory,” Peguero stammered.
“Well, yes,” Rachel said, smiling kindly. “What’s your methodology?”
Peguero must have realized the Agent wasn’t about to go away. She pulled herself together, her colors wrapping tight around her body to protect her from Rachel. “Come with me,” she said, her voice flat. “It’s easier to show you.”
Peguero took her over to the computers. “We did a full inventory in 2009,” she said, pointing to the larger monitor. Rachel plucked the image from it, and found a detailed history and description of a cut-glass wine decanter. High-resolution photos of the vessel sat in an attached file, waiting to be called up when needed. She browsed these, and saw the archivists had taken multiple shots from all angles.
“Nice,” Rachel admitted. “You did this for every item here?”
The archivist nodded. “And in the other storerooms. Took us the better part of a year. It was the first full inventory that’s been done on gifts of state.”
“I bet you found things you didn’t know you had,” Rachel said.
Peguero nearly smiled. “Absolutely.”
Rachel waited, but Peguero wasn’t about to keep talking. “What’s missing?” Rachel asked. “Anything special?”
“No…” Peguero hesitated before adding, “There are still about twenty items missing. We don’t think any of them were worth the effort.”
“Why not?”
Peguero shrugged. “Because we didn’t keep unique items in the storerooms. If it was of historical or academic interest, we’ve got it either on display or on loan.”
“What about items of monetary value? I see a lot of gold and gemstones.”
“There’s no need to break into the White House to acquire those.” The archivist’s colors took on the dull orange of scorn. “You can find gold and gems anywhere.”
“What’s your personal opinion?” Rachel asked. Peguero glanced at Rachel, her colors weaving as she weighed her options, so Rachel added, “Off the record, I promise. I just want to hear what you think happened.”
“Honestly?” Peguero glanced towards the rows of small white boxes. “I think a private collector needed something we had to complete a set.”
Perfect, Rachel thought. Private collectors left muddy footprints through the art community. High-level art theft required deep pockets and aggressive purpose.
“Do any of those twenty missing items belong to a set?”
“All of them could.” Peguero’s orange scorn flared again. “When I say ‘set’, I’m not talking about a matching set of jewelry. Collectors might be after a certain artist’s work, or period pieces, or…anything,” the archivist finished. “Anything can be part of a set.”
Ouch. Tracking down a collector for a random item was harder. Not impossible. Just much, much harder.
A second muted shout went up from the archivists, as another misplaced item was discovered in the wrong box.
“I’ve got to go,” Peguero said.
“One more question,” Rachel said. “Do you have a list of items that are still missing?”
“Yes,” Peguero replied. She shuffled a stack of papers around until she came up with an inventory. The list had some fifty-plus objects, but more than half of these had been crossed off by various shades of pen. “Ignore the ones that have been scratched out. We’ve found those. You can use the computer if you want to see what the missing ones look like. Do you know how to cross-reference a…” Peguero trailed off and her colors went pale, as she realized she had been about to give an Agent instructions on how to use a database.
“I’ll figure it out,” Rachel said, and gave Peguero another merry smile.
The archivist hurried away.
Rachel dropped into a folding chair and swung herself around to face the monitors. She flipped through the inventory, comparing objects on the list to those in the database. At the prompt, she saw a dozen objects. Carved ivory. Gold upon wood. Bracelets of cloisonné irises running together in a chain…
And one little lump of metal the size of the palm of her hand, worn down to blue and green and gray.
One of these things, she thought, is not like the others.