Book 2: Chapter 86: Into the Unknown (1/2)

Dan marveled at the sheer amount of crap being pulled out of what appeared to be an eight by ten shack. Uniformed officers and the occasional SPEAR Team member passed documents, hard drives, and bags of shredded paper out of the narrow entrance to the People cache. MPD specialists had already come and gone, clearing the inside of the building with clockwork efficiency. No lingering traps nor esoteric effects had been found in the shack, so the gathered officers immediately went about pillaging the contents.

Dan monitored their progress with his eyes and his veil. His entire purpose here was to monitor the situation. Anastasia clearly worried something would go unreported to her, either because of a mole, political machinations, or some other threat that Dan was missing. He knew all that, yet he'd still brought this cache out into the open. Had he not been short on time, he might have looked for another way, but that wasn't the case. He was giving up some level of anonymity here, but it wasn't as if the People weren't already his enemy. Still, it was discomforting. The uncomfortable reality of the situation had settled heavy around his shoulders. Any of these officers could be a People sympathizer, and any one of them could attempt to hide or destroy evidence.

Not on sight; Dan doubted it would be so simple. There were eyes everywhere at the moment, with over a dozen officers inside the shack alone. Most of what was retrieved was too big to stuff down one's shirt or in a pocket, but Dan scanned each person exiting the building with his veil, just in case they were hiding something. Every piece of evidence was loaded into a waiting van, which Dan had dedicated the rest of his veil to monitoring. If a piece went missing, or never arrived, he would know almost instantly. No one could take his prize.

Nor could they attempt to attack Dan himself. He was surrounded by armed men, most of whom seemed to expect an attack of some kind, all with itchy trigger fingers. Dan was no different. If someone drew on him, he'd be gone in a blink, and they'd likely be dogpiled by their fellow officers. He had no fear for his life at present.

Dan almost hoped someone would be dumb enough to make a move. Having a mole to interrogate would be incredibly convenient. Despite this cache having obviously been concealed, its contents appeared to be less than immediately useful. There was just too much of it. Bags upon bags upon bags of shredded documents were pulled from the shack's insides. Dusty, crusty hard drives filled with rust and dead bugs, manila folders packed with hundreds of fast food receipts, and literal discarded trash were among the other things being taken out and carefully documented.

Dan didn't think the People needed a spy here. It was looking increasingly more likely that there was nothing worth hiding inside this cache. That did lead to a more interesting question, though: What had Donovan Drake done with all the stuff he had needed to hide. Undoubtedly, there had been something that the owner of this house had needed to conceal before going on his suicide mission.

”This does not look promising,” Hauss commented from beside Dan. The lead investigator had finally arrived on scene not twenty minutes ago. He watched the shack being unloaded with a critical eye and a deep scowl.

”Could be something useful on those hard drives,” Dan noted quietly.

Hauss snorted. ”Nasty things looked like they were from the eighties. I'm not rightly sure if our IT department can even spin up something that old. Not to mention how degraded they were.”

”They were a little rank,” Dan admitted. The rusted computer parts had the musty stench of something that had sat beneath a pile of rotten wood and leaves for a decade or two. ”But why bother hiding it, then?”

”To waste our time,” Gauss answered with certainty born of experience. He waved at the officer taking inventory, and the increasingly long list of items being carefully bagged and catalogued. ”We'll need a second van at this rate. Time, tools, and manpower that could be used otherwise will now be spent on this trash. And we have to do it, too, because there might genuinely be something useful in this mess.”

”He did have something to hide,” Dan pointed out. ”There must be something incriminating that he had to get rid of. Maybe we're just looking in the wrong place?”

”I've already put out our man's name and description to the local dump,” Hauss replied grumpily. ”They'll check their records and see if he's paid them a visit in the last month. I've also got officers checking dumpsters within a a mile of here, which they already hate me for, but none of that will turn up anything.”

”No?” Dan asked. It sounded like Hauss had covered his bases pretty well.

”No,” Hauss repeated. ”There's too much ground to cover. I can't look everywhere. He could have dumped anything useful in the ocean, and we'd never find it.”

”I didn't see a car,” Dan commented.

”No car. He has a driver's license and a bus pass, but no vehicle registered to his name.”

”A friend's, maybe?” Dan asked. ”I imagine you've got people interviewing the neighbors?”

Hauss grunted an affirmation. ”We'll see what turns up.”

”But you're not hopeful,” Dan observed.

Hauss' scowl said everything his mouth would not. He gestured to the little building, then to Dan.

”You're supposed to be the specialist,” Hauss said. ”Do you usually find useful information in these things?”

That was tricky to answer honestly. He had no idea how much he should or should not say. Given Anastasia had made no particular demands on the subject, Dan went with the truth.

”Usually, yeah, but it's not like I'm the guy who makes that evaluation,” he said. ”But those were all old caches. The People weren't really a threat again until very recently, and I'm assuming that this cache was hidden in the days leading up to the attack on the Keys. I don't have any answers for you, Hauss. I just find the stupid things.”

It took another hour to fully remove and document the container's contents. As Hauss predicted, another evidence van had been needed, and had arrived shortly afterwards. Dan kept his veil on both, carefully monitoring the contents for anything odd. Nothing at all happened. If the People had a spy on the premises, they were very patient.

With everything finally documented, Dan could relax his guard. At the very least, if something were to go missing now, they would know it. He had become fully bought in to Hauss' theory that this was designed to waste their time. He couldn't imagine finding much of use in the metaphorical and literal trash heap they'd pulled from the building. But that was fine. Dan had another purpose, here.

He hadn't forgotten Anastasia's... he was going to be charitable and call it a request. It was important to know whether or not the People could use these 'caches' as portable safe houses. They obviously resided in the Gap when not deployed in reality, and the Gap was violently hostile to human minds. That said, Dan's own power proved it was entirely possible to shield oneself from the effects of exposure.

Neither the shack, nor its contents, were tainted with cosmic radiation. It was the very first thing that had been tested for, even before the specialists had arrived. García had a handheld scanner in his cruiser, something apparently standard for the MPD. He had waved the thing at the shack and found exactly nothing. Dan thought that to be very strong evidence in favor of Anastasia's theory. The cache-creating Natural—Dan decided to mentally refer to the Natural as Vault—could obviously shield the contents of whatever he shunted into t-space. That in mind, he needed to run a few experiments.

”I need to run a few experiments,” he told Hauss, as they watched the last evidence van drive away. Only a handful of officers remained, including García and the pair of officers who had first arrived on scene.

Hauss looked at him askance. ”Experiments? With what?”

Dan pointedly turned towards the back yard.

”With that?” Garcia threw out incredulously. ”What do you want to do with it?”

Dan considered how best to explain, then shrugged. ”I'm gonna poke it with a stick and see what happens.”

”I can't condone that,” Hauss replied immediately.

”Okay, but not really,” Dan said grinning wryly. ”I want to put something living inside of the shack, then send the whole thing back to where I found it before pulling it out again.”

”You can do that?” Hauss asked, eyes narrowed. ”Just make that thing vanish and reappear at will?”