Lock In (Lock In, #1)(12)

“I want to get a better look at that hotel room,” Vann said, and sucked on her cigarette. “Trinh hustled us through it pretty quickly. I’m ready for a slow dance.”





Chapter Four

“THIS DOESN’T LOOK like the Watergate,” I said, as we entered the third subbasement of the FBI building.

“We’re not going to the Watergate,” Vann said, heading down a corridor. I followed.

“I thought you wanted to take another look at the room,” I said.

“I do,” Vann said. “But there’s no point going back there now. Metro police have been all over it. Trinh and her people have inevitably messed it up looking at things. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Trinh released it to the hotel for cleanup.” She stopped at a door. “So we’re here to look at the room instead.”

I read the placard next to the door. “Imaging Suite,” I said.

“Come on,” Vann said, and opened the door.

Inside was a room roughly six meters to a side, white walls, bare except for projectors in each corner and a space where a technician stood behind a bank of monitors. He looked over at us and smiled. “Agent Vann,” he said. “You’re back.”

“I’m back,” Vann agreed, and motioned to me. “Agent Shane, my new partner.”

The technician waved. “Ramon Diaz,” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

“Are we ready?” Vann asked.

“Just finishing diagnostics on the projectors,” Diaz said. “One of them’s been wonky for the past couple of days. But I have all the data that came over from Metro.”

Vann nodded and looked at me. “Did you upload your scan of the room to the server?”

“I did that before we left the room,” I said.

Vann turned to Diaz. “We’re going to use Shane’s scan as the base,” she said.

“Got it,” Diaz said. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

“Fire it up,” Vann said.

The hotel room popped into being. The scan wasn’t a live video feed of the room but instead a mass of still photos knitted together to create a static, information-dense re-creation of the room.

I took a look at it and smiled. The whole room was there. I had done a good job of panning and scanning.

“Shane.” Vann pointed at a curving object on the carpet, not too far from the corpse.

“Headset,” I said. “Over-the-head scanner and transmitter for neural information. It suggests that this guy, whoever he is, was a tourist.” I figured Vann knew this but was checking to see if I did.

“Looking to borrow Bell’s body,” Vann said.

“Yeah,” I said. I knelt and got a better look at the headset. Like all these sorts of headsets, it was a one-of-a-kind affair. Technically speaking, the only people cleared to use Integrators were Hadens. But wherever there’s a less-than-legal demand, there’s a black market.

The headset was jammed-together medical equipment designed for early-stage Haden’s diagnosis and communication. It was a kludge, but a clever one. It wouldn’t give the tourist anything close to the actual, full Integrator experience—you needed a network implanted inside your head for that sort of thing—but it would offer something like high-definition 3-D with additional faint but real sensory perception. It was more real than the movies, anyway.

“This one looks pretty high-end,” I said to Vann. “The scanner’s a Phaeton and the transmitter looks like General Dynamics.”

“Serial numbers?”

“I don’t see any,” I said. “Do we have the real thing in evidence?”

Vann glanced over at Diaz, who looked up and nodded. “I can take a closer look at it if you want,” Diaz said.

“If you don’t find anything on the exterior, see if you can scan the inside of it,” I said. “The processing chips probably have serial numbers on them. We can see when the batches were sent off, and from there piece together who’s supposed to be owning the scanner and transmitter.”

“Worth a shot,” Vann said.

I stood up and looked over to the corpse, facedown in the carpet. “What about him?” I asked.

Vann looked back to Diaz. “Nothing yet,” he said.

“How does that happen?” I asked Diaz. “You have to get fingerprinted to get a driver’s license.”

“Our examiners only just got him,” Diaz said. “Metro took fingerprints and did a face scan. But sometimes they take their time sharing information, if you know what I mean. So we’re doing our own and running those through our databases now. We’ll be doing DNA too. We’ll probably find him by the time you’re done here.”

“Let me see the face scan,” Vann said.

“You want just the face, or the wide-angle shot when they turned him over?”

“Wide-angle shot,” Vann said.

The man on the floor instantly flipped. He was olive-skinned and looked mid- to late thirties. From this angle the severity of the cut throat was a whole lot more dramatic. The wound slashed from the left side of the neck, near the jawline, and continued downward, terminating on the right side of the hollow of the throat.

“What do you think?” Vann asked me.