CHAPTER 10
Late that night, after catching up on my sleep and having a big pot of coffee with my dinner, I made my way back to North Hampton. I went about it differently this time, seeing as how I was planning on a little breaking and entering, and wanted to minimize the chances I’d be identified. For one thing, I left my car at home and used the monorail network to get there. I paid in cash for a day pass instead of using one that would be linked to my ID.
I also made it a point to disguise my appearance. I put on some black cargo pants, a hooded sweatshirt, and a well-used jacket that was loose enough to conceal my gun under my arm. A worn work cap and a used pair of sneakers that I’d picked up at a secondhand store finished the ensemble. I kept a supply of these kind of clothes for just such an occasion, and when dressed I looked like a vagrant. A little bit of theater makeup on my face made me look like I’d been living on the streets for a while. I put in contact lenses that would spoof most retinal scanners and change my eye color.
The last thing I put on was a particulate filter mask that covered my nose and mouth. It had a built-in electronic voice modulator that would thwart most attempts at voice-matching.
It was past midnight when I made it to North Hampton. Unlike Delta City proper, this part of town was pretty dead at night. Traffic was light and only a few people could be seen on the streets or walkways. Instead of the imposing towers downtown, this neighborhood consisted mainly of very expensive one- to three-story family homes and rows of somewhat-less-expensive attached houses for those who traded less maintenance for less privacy. I couldn’t afford a townhouse like Dr. Ivery had on my income.
It was about a mile from the nearest monorail station to the street where Dr. Ivery’s home was. The streets were well lit and these houses would all have security cameras. I had my hood up, my mask on, and kept my head down. Sometimes in these richer neighborhoods, private security will stop and hassle people out on the streets at night, citing city vagrancy laws, so I kept moving and tried not to draw attention to myself. It must have worked, because a security drone buzzed overhead without even stopping to scan me.
Dr. Ivery’s house was in the middle of a block-long row of townhomes across the street from a small municipal park. I stayed on the sidewalk on the far side of the street and did my first pass by the house. There was no law enforcement around that I could see, not even a robot or an aerial drone. I held a small screen in my hands and stared at it, as people often did. In my case, though, I wasn’t playing a game or scrolling feeds on my handheld. In fact, I’d left my handheld at home (you should never have your handheld on you if you’re up to something shady; they can track you that way). I had a discreet optical and radio-frequency detector in the pack slung over my shoulder, with the sensor cluster barely poking out of the top flap. It scanned in multiple spectra and looked for things like radio transmitters, the reflection of camera lenses, and infrared sensors. The screen in my hands was the scanner’s display.
I kept walking without stopping, going around the park, analyzing the results of my sensor sweep. There were, as I expected, security cameras on every home in the row of townhouses, including Dr. Ivery’s. Since this was kind of an upscale neighborhood, there weren’t any security cameras mounted to posts like you see in the rougher parts of town. The people who live in North Hampton have enough money to successfully lobby the City Council to respect their privacy and not put cameras everywhere.
After lapping the park, I kept going, following a side street. The rows of townhomes were built back-to-back, with a narrow service road running between them. This road was gated off at either end, and all of the homes had an eight-foot privacy fence around their backyards. Still, as near as my scanner could tell, there weren’t any cameras back there, nor were there any streetlights, so that seemed like my best option.
There was a camera on the security gate itself, though, looking down at it from an eight-foot pole on one end. It was a remote camera with a signal transmitter antenna and its own power supply. I had two options: one was to ignore it and hope it wasn’t being monitored in real-time. This is how most security cameras are set up—they’re more for deterrent and evidentiary purposes than for catching criminals in the act. On the other hand, in a neighborhood like this, there was a chance the camera feed was being monitored by an AI, and that it would notify the authorities right away if it saw me climbing the fence. Then it became a race to get in and out before the private security or even SecFor showed up to investigate, because they would probably first check the house they knew was empty and was involved in a recent murder investigation.
The other option was to disable the camera. A camera going down on a monitored network would usually result in an automatic maintenance request, but it would probably be the next morning before anyone showed up to look at it. Some systems are set up to put in an emergency call if anything happens to the cameras, but that’s usually only when a place has high-end private security, and that North Hampton neighborhood wasn’t that rich. SecFor isn’t going to respond every time some AI reports that a camera isn’t functioning in a city of thirty million people. If a technician or even a security guard did show up, I’d be in Dr. Ivery’s place before they got there, and they weren’t going to search the empty house like SecFor would.
It was still a risk, but of the two options, disabling the camera was the less risky. I come prepared for that possibility. Sometimes you can jam the camera’s broadcast transmission, but these days you see more and more systems using frequency-hopping encryption regimens that makes that difficult without very powerful equipment. Other times you can just cut the power cord, but this one had its own internal power supply. You can blind the camera with a laser, but the laser itself might draw the attention of a security drone.
There is one method of disabling a camera that works every time, though. First, I grabbed a small can of aerosol paint from my pack, then I shimmied up the pole the camera was mounted to, staying out of its field of view. Reaching around, I sprayed the camera lens, covering it completely. Stuffing the paint can into my pocket, I swung around the pole, climbed over the gate, and dropped down on the other side. I jogged down the service road into cover of darkness. The lack of security on the place made my job a lot easier, but I’d still have to be quick. There was at least one security drone patrolling the neighborhood and the darkness wouldn’t hide me from its thermal cameras.
Dr. Ivery’s place was the fifth house on my left. The tall fence around the backyard didn’t have a gate in it, but I didn’t need one. I jumped up and grabbed the top of the fence. Using my feet to help me climb, I hoisted myself over and dropped down into the yard. I hurried across the grass and onto the ceramicrete patio at the back of the house. There was what looked like a glass door there, but it was actually one of those security doors made of insulated safety transparency. I’d have been there all night trying to cut through it, so instead I went for the lock. It was a standard electronic residential door lock. I had my locksmithing tools with me and within a few minutes I was in the house.
The interior of the house was dark enough that I pulled out my flashlight. The place looked like one of those display homes with the ultramodern furniture, glass tables, and abstract art on the walls. A Mrs. Tidy robot was in its charging station against the wall, and just like at Cassandra Carmichael’s apartment, the drives had been pulled. In fact, as I looked around it became obvious that SecFor had already been there and conducted a search. There was a home office on the main floor that had also been cleaned out—no computers, no paperwork, and nothing that the little electronic wafer the scientist had given me would go to. The good news was, the home security system had been disabled, too. Whatever cameras were in and around the home were no longer functional.
I didn’t find anything useful downstairs so I headed to the second floor, being careful not to shine my light across any windows. The upstairs was even more sparsely decorated than the ground floor. At the top of the stairs there was a sunroom with nothing in it, not even any chairs to sit in. I noticed, too, that there were no pictures or personal effects hung up anywhere. The house was a rental, and I don’t know who, if anyone, the late scientist had listed as her next of kin, but her few belongings were still in the house. I was willing to bet the furniture had come with the house and that she hadn’t even bothered rearranging it. Whatever other eccentricities she may have had, Dr. Ivery seemed to have a lived a solitary life.
Down the hall were a small bedroom, a bathroom, and a master bedroom at the end. I decided to start with the master bedroom and work my way back out. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking for. It was possible that whatever device the electronic wafer went to had been taken by SecFor and that I was wasting my time.
The bedroom door slid open with a tap of the touchpad on the wall. At the center of the room was one of those therapeutic smart beds, complete with a retractable dome in case you wanted to sleep at higher or lower than normal air pressure. The dresser was a built-in, automatic one, the type that connect to the laundry. They’re nice, if you can afford one—toss your dirty clothes into the laundry chute, and the system will wash, dry, press, and fold your clothes before putting them away for you.
There was one thing in the room that really stood out, though. In fact, it seemed out of place given how impersonal and bland everything else in the house was. In the corner by the closet door was a statue on a pedestal of rough-hewn stone. The statue was metal, real bronze from the look of it, and stood four feet tall. It was the striking figure of a woman, dressed in flowing robes, hair braided and tied up. She had an arrow drawn back in a bow, ready to strike. “Diana,” I said aloud. “Just the woman I’ve been looking for.” I was sure this is what Dr. Ivery had been talking about—a statue of the Roman goddess Diana.
Leaning in, I studied the statue closely. The column it stood upon was about two feet tall and felt solid. It took a lot of effort just to move the sculpture; between the stone pedestal and the solid metal figure, it must have weighed several hundred pounds. My scanner didn’t detect any electromagnetic or radio-frequency emissions from it, and there didn’t seem to be any kind of a slot to stick the wafer into. No seams, compartments, or doors were apparent.
While the sides of the pedestal were roughly hewn, the top of it was polished smooth. A Roman coin was embedded into the stone at the goddess’ feet. On the coin was the profile of a man’s head and the letters m. agrippa.l.f.cos.iii. It was covered with a laminate so that the surface of the pedestal was completely flat. Touching it did nothing, so it wasn’t a button or a control, but I realized it was the exact same size as the little disk that Dr. Ivery had given me.
Could it be that simple? I placed the disk directly on top of the coin. It seemed to align itself perfectly and was held in place with a small electromagnet. A blue light on top of the wafer lit up, and with a loud beep, the entire sculpture started to lift itself up on hydraulic pistons. It raised up about a foot, revealing a compartment. In it was a cylindrical metal canister with a screw-on end cap.
Well, I’ll be damned, I thought. The statue was a hidden safe. I’d seen these before, of course, but ones like that were all custom-built and unique. They’re shielded to conceal the signatures of their power sources and some are even lined with lead or tungsten to frustrate X-ray attempts. You’d have to cut the thing open to even be able to tell it’s a safe, and that would take time and require power tools. It was too big and heavy to move easily so you couldn’t just make off with the whole thing. I wasn’t surprised that SecFor had missed it. Hell, without the key and the clue that Dr. Ivery gave me, I wouldn’t have known what it was, either.
I grabbed the canister and unscrewed the top. It hissed as I broke the seal and equalized the air pressure. Inside, wrapped in a silk handkerchief, was an oblong object three inches long, an inch wide, and maybe half an inch thick. It was silvery white in color and seemed to shimmer in the light. The material was hard as steel and had no give to it, but the object was as light as a piece of dried wood. One side was smooth as glass. The other side had the texture of tree bark. One edge was jagged, like fractured iron. I couldn’t tell what it was made out of, some kind of metal I thought, but like nothing I’d ever seen. It was cold to the touch.
There was a small plastic card in the canister with the object. On it was a matrix barcode, along with the Ascension logo and some text. It read:
<ext>
<ext>Project Isaiah 24880421NC32448
<ext>Object SERAPH, Sample 36A
<ext>WARNING: ANOMALOUS MATERIALS
<ext>Proprietary Information//TOP SECRET//COSMIC
<ext>PROPERTY OF APHG
<ext>
I had the strangest sense of unease, holding that thing in my hand. I wasn’t sure what they meant by anomalous materials, but began to wonder if the thing was toxic or maybe radioactive. My scanner didn’t pick up any emissions from it, though. In fact, I couldn’t even get the scanner to lock onto it for a detailed examination. It was like it couldn’t differentiate it from the background.
I didn’t have time to screw around anyway. I’d found what Dr. Ivery wanted me to find and needed to get out of there. I carefully wrapped the white shape back up in the cloth and inserted it into its canister. I felt a little better once I had the lid screwed back on. I put the canister in my pack and removed the electronic key from on top of the embedded coin. The statue quietly lowered itself back to the floor, locking into place with a click, and that was that. Maybe they’d realize it was a safe before it went to the estate auction, maybe not.
I left the house the same way I’d come in, locking the door behind me. I climbed the fence and started the long trip home.
Later that morning I got to the office a little earlier than usual—before Lily, something that rarely happened. She was surprised when she came in just, before 0900, to find me already there and making a pot of coffee.
“I didn’t expect you to be in so early, Boss,” she said, sitting at her desk. “You messaged me at, like, oh-four-thirty that you made it home. I figured you’d sleep in a little.”
“That was the plan,” I said. “I had a hell of a time falling asleep. It was like I couldn’t relax or unwind.” In truth I had gotten maybe three hours of fitful sleep. “So I, you know, came in a little early.”
“You look like crap,” Lily said, bluntly. “You sure you’re not sick?”
“I’ll be alright,” I told her.
“So? What did you find? All your message said was that you were home safe.”
Being a private detective doesn’t give me license to break into people’s houses. What I had done was illegal, but sometimes, that’s what the job requires. We’re always careful about things like that—we don’t discuss any details over electronic communications unless absolutely necessary, and then it’s via end-to-end-encrypted chat and we delete the conversation logs afterward. Lily and I hadn’t talked about my trip to North Hampton over the handheld and she didn’t know what I had found. It was easier to show her than to try and explain it.
“Maybe you’ll make more sense of it than I did,” I said, nodding for her to follow me into my office. I knelt down in front of my safe and began to unlock it, using two-factor authentication. It required both a combination number and my biometric data. A light diode turned green as it accepted the authentication, and the safe beeped as it unlocked. I retrieved the canister, carried it over to my desk, and unscrewed the lid. I gently emptied the contents onto my desk and set the canister down.
Lily reached for the silver-white fragment. I grabbed her hand to stop her before she touched it. “Don’t hold it in your hand,” I said.
“Is it dangerous?”
“I don’t know. This is all I know about it,” I said, handing her the plastic card it came with.
“Anomalous materials,” Lily read. She looked at me. “What does that mean?”
I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. I’m assuming it means they weren’t able to figure out what it is.”
“Should we be keeping this here? Is it dangerous?”
“It’s not emitting any radiation,” I said, “at least none that the scanner could detect. It’s not emitting anything at all. It’s just, I don’t know, maybe it’s not safe to handle.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“I don’t know yet,” I admitted. I scooped the fragment up and sealed it back into its canister. “I need to talk to Deitrik. Will you call and make me a dinner appointment?”
“You got it, Boss.”