Blind Spots, page 16
Owens thinks about that weird Jeanie/Amira moment a few days ago. It took him a while to get through the confusion, to figure out what was really happening. Honestly, he’s still not entirely sure what happened. This CleerVu nonsense isn’t as perfect as Ballantine seems to think it is. But … Owens did know that it was Amira, eventually. So maybe the damn thing does work. Mostly.
“And in the bank robbery scenario,” Ballantine continues, “cameras would have captured the real you anyway. Footage would have revealed the truth. We can prove that, to any government regulator in any country. I’m not worried about that. What this Obscura did, though, and this is all according to rumor, but what they did was figure out how to tap into people’s vidders, and from there, their brains.”
Owens still doesn’t follow, but he’s not sure it matters. What he wants to know is, “So then what happened?”
“Some senator found out about the project and cut the funding. Then the lead scientist, who was suddenly broke and under a gag order … He killed himself.”
“And his company?”
“It’s like it never existed. You can’t even find old records anywhere.”
“Then how does anyone know about it?”
“Exactly! That’s why I always figured it was an urban legend. Used to be, paranoid types would talk about jackbooted agents in black helicopters. Now it’s black blurs and government agencies that don’t exist.” Ballantine shrugged. “So, you tell me what to believe.”
“Yet here your company comes along, with an eerily similar product to Obscura’s.”
Ballantine shakes his head. “Obscura made their discovery, fine, but we made ours, independently. Now, maybe the CIA or someone wanted to use Obscura’s information so they could send black blurs all over the planet assassinating people, but we want to use the technology for good. That’s why CleerVu comes with unbreakable safeguards. Whoever’s doing this, they’re … They’re preventing our brains from processing who they really are. CleerVu does not do that.”
“You expect me to believe that whoever’s doing this doesn’t work for EyeTech, and it’s just a wild coincidence that they’d start doing this right when you launch your new product? And that they’d go after you?”
“Whoever’s doing this is not related to my company.”
Said with all the confidence and outrage of a wealthy parent who can’t believe his straight-A, varsity letterman son also happens to be a date rapist.
Owens posits, “Unless it’s someone so inside your company that he knows how to break those unbreakable safeguards.”
Ballantine shakes his head again.
“Then why would they want to kill you?”
Ballantine laughs. “Plenty of people want to kill me.”
Owens thinks for a moment. “You must have bodyguards.”
“Sure, when I travel. At home, only sometimes. They’re annoying.”
Owens tries to make sense of this. Tries to figure out whether the killer could be a business competitor, someone who wants to make EyeTech look bad, or someone who just wants to terrorize the world by making people doubt their vidders forever.
A long silence.
“I wish I believed more of your story,” Owens says.
“So do I. But ultimately, I don’t really care what you think.”
More silence.
Then Ballantine asks, “Did you know I was born blind?”
“I may have read that somewhere.”
“But I never fit in with the blind community. People said I was in denial, or stubborn, because I wanted to make sight real for us. I was at MIT when I was thirteen. Their first blind student in years. When The Blinding hit, I’d already been working on an early-model vidder, and had made decent progress. Then suddenly people started throwing money at me.” He shakes his head like he still can’t believe his life story. “All I’ve ever tried to do is help people, and for the most part they’re thankful. But then you have these … these freaks who insist it’s evil, that I’m somehow corroding their soul. What’s so wrong about wanting to understand the world as it is?”
Owens opens his mouth to answer but is interrupted by a gunshot.
He grabs Ballantine’s shoulder and pulls him to the ground with him. A second shot, and this time he can tell where it came from. He looks up, to his left, and sees a black blur on the roof of one of the factory buildings. From this position Owens and Ballantine are exposed, on the wrong side of the car, nowhere to hide, so he aims and returns fire but already the blur is gone.
The car had driven off, then come back a different way. Or it had pulled over nearby, let one blur out to serve as a sniper. In which case there’s more than one of them.
He looks down at Ballantine and sees the awkward way in which he’s lying there. His head at a funny angle.
Owens pulls on his shoulder and Ballantine’s head turns toward Owens, his right eye replaced by a red hole. Only now does Owens see the blood spattered all over the car behind them.
No.
Even though he knows he’s too late, he drags Ballantine with him as he crawls around to the other side of the car, in case the blur is still up there. He readies himself to lean out into the open and take another shot.
Time passes. Owens checks the roof again, waiting for more fire, which never comes. He exhales for what seems like the first time in a long while, then looks down at another person he couldn’t save.
* * *
Later, this wasteland thrums with squad cars, ambulances that are sadly unnecessary, a fire truck. A news helicopter hovers overhead like the world’s most annoying gnat. Cops everywhere, looking for shell casings.
Carlyle and Peterson question Owens, Khouri hanging in the background. Owens wears plastic gloves, which he’d put on once he was confident the shooter was gone and it was safe to check the car, Ballantine’s body.
He realizes he keeps staring into space and blanking out as they question him. Keeps needing to return to the world. Someone tells him he’s in shock and he denies it, inhales deeply, straightens his shoulders, All is functioning normally, thank you. Knowing he’s wrong but trying anyway.
“The whole car was blacked out?” Carlyle in disbelief.
“Yes, sir.”
“And there were no other witnesses?”
“How the hell do I know? Have someone ask around! You think I’m making this up?”
Carlyle stares at him for a long moment. Peterson behind him, brow wrinkled with concern. Finally the captain steps away, and Peterson walks over, claps Owens’s shoulder hard. As if trying to snap him back to normalcy, if such a thing exists anymore.
* * *
Carlyle quietly confers with Khouri.
“Ballantine’s nav was on, so you can reconstruct his route,” he says. “Find every security camera that he drove past. See if it looks like anyone was following him.”
“And if there wasn’t?”
Khouri is tired of seeing these men fuck up left and right. The veterans from The Blinding. Tired of the corners they cut, tired of the slack that their superiors cut them. As if they’re allowed to get away with it because once upon a time they saved the world or something. They didn’t. They were the ones with the unfortunate timing to wear a badge during all the turmoil, yes, and she sympathizes, but the hard truth is, many of them are damaged as a result. Some of them did unspeakable things that they’re still trying to hide—she’s sure of it—that the Truth Commission is belatedly bringing to light. For the Department to keep letting broken—and worse—cops like these wear a badge is a gigantic risk. Tantamount to malpractice. Putting civilians’ lives in danger.
Owens was a fair and patient mentor to her, once. Gave her a hard time, sure, but delivered sound advice. Yet even then she had thought, This man just ain’t right.
Something had once come loose that cannot be re-screwed. The threads are gone.
Carlyle hasn’t answered her. He’s watching Owens, who stands thirty feet away, talking with Peterson. Really Peterson is talking, Owens staring blankly beside him. Looks like a goddamn zombie, and surely Carlyle sees it.
“Captain?” she repeats. “What if I find nothing?”
“Then you’ll tell me and we’ll go from there.”
Carlyle walks off to confer with some techs. Khouri stays where she is and keeps watching Owens and Peterson, thick as thieves. Wishes that weren’t the phrase that pops into her mind, but it is. Something is very wrong here.
She watches as Owens makes a face, reaches into his pocket. His phone buzzing.
He checks the screen. Takes the call.
“Dr. Pelzer, what can I do for you?” she hears him say as he looks up at his partner. “Yes, sir. We’ll be there tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 21
The murder of Kai Ballantine kicks this case into a new stratosphere.
That night, Owens is briefed (lectured, more like it) by the Department’s chief information officer and several of her underlings. He’s warned that his apartment may be staked out by reporters who indefatigably cover celebrity murders, as if to make up for all the homicides they ignore. The CIO warns Owens how sophisticated some of the reporters have become, especially the tech-obsessed paparazzi. He should expect that his phone and email will be hacked, his social media histories scoured for anything he’d ever posted that might possibly be construed as evidence he’d always hated EyeTech and had been plotting Ballantine’s murder.
Carlyle walks up to him right after the CIO leaves.
“She told you to talk to no one, right?”
“Of course.”
“And say nothing about these black blurs, to anyone,” Carlyle says. “Understood?”
The last thing the captain wants getting out are stories that some invisible serial killer is on the loose. Or that everyone’s vidders are compromised. If someone can kill one of the most famous men alive, he can kill anyone. That sort of thing inspires panic, mobs, chaos. The Blinding gave the Department its fill of chaos, thank you very much.
Yet what Owens feels is precisely panic. It’s hours since the shooting and his heart rate hasn’t returned to normal and he hasn’t eaten and isn’t hungry and his nerves and muscles are so fired up he feels he could jump fifteen feet high.
“Understood?” Carlyle repeats.
I don’t understand a goddamn thing that’s happening.
“Yes, Captain.”
* * *
He makes it home long after midnight.
No press, not at first. But an hour after he gets home, and showers and pours a stiff drink, the calls start. All of them unrecognized numbers. All of them reporters who got his number somehow, leaving messages, questions. Then texts. Then a call from the doorman downstairs, saying he has a visitor. Lots of visitors.
Owens apologizes to the doorman, whose job he’s made far more difficult. Apologizes and says, No, no visitors, don’t even let them in the lobby.
Closes his blinds so no one can photograph him, Mark Owens, the detective who was there with Kai Ballantine when the wunderkind was killed. Wonders how long until the headlines recast him as the detective who probably killed Kai Ballantine, then made up some crazy story about black blurs to cover himself.
It’s no doubt happening already.
* * *
The next morning, making it through the gauntlet of reporters outside his building and ignoring their questions without snapping at any of them requires all his self-control and more. He misses the days of sunglasses, wishes he could use the dark lenses to hide his face. Knows he looks tired, bedraggled. Imagines it reads suspicious, guilty.
They holler at him, People want to know!
No shit, he thinks. I want to know, too. But he has no answers.
He fears someone will ask, Is it true you saw the shooter only as a black blur? No one does, fortunately. That news isn’t out, at least not yet. He wonders how long it will take one of them to discover it, which cop will crack first.
How long till his fear goes viral, and panic once again descends on the city.
* * *
Owens and Peterson sit for the third time in the office of Dr. Pelzer, a man who has now lost not one but two of his employees to murder. They were back again a few days ago, after Dr. Leila’s murder, to see if by chance Pelzer had uncovered any signs of interoffice intrigue that might have inspired homicide. If the doctor/businessman had seemed skittish during their first visit, the second time he seemed wan, like the mere act of pondering what had happened was too much for him and he might pass out.
Today he looks every bit as pale, plus nauseated. His hair appears thinner than a couple days ago, which doesn’t seem possible.
He had called Owens to say he’d found something he could only discuss in person. So the detectives once again make themselves comfortable in his expensive chairs as he gets down to it.
“You had asked me what Dr. Jensen had been working on. The truth is, I wasn’t entirely sure. Our PIs have a lot of latitude to pursue their own research. And he in particular was known for pursuing certain projects for quite a while before letting anyone know exactly what he’d been up to.”
Nice job to have, Owens thinks.
“After you left,” Pelzer continues, “I was checking into his files and … they’re gone.”
Owens doesn’t follow. “Gone, how?”
“His work space was cleared out, and his files were all deleted.”
“When did you figure this out?” Owens says.
“Three days ago.”
Peterson asks, “Three days ago, and you didn’t tell us till now?”
“I’m sorry. I’d … assumed it was an internal problem, something competitive among our staff. Or maybe another company had sent in a spy. That sort of thing happens, you know—corporate espionage. We don’t always involve the police in such matters.”
Owens and Peterson exchange a glance, then Owens turns his full fire on Pelzer. “Two of your staff have been murdered, and you didn’t want to involve the police?”
“I realize in hindsight it was the wrong decision.” He folds his hands on his desk. “But again, you have to understand, the things we do here … Many millions of dollars are at stake when it comes to these projects, and I couldn’t just let two men I didn’t know into our proprietary matters just because—”
“Just because we’re cops investigating your employees’ murders?” Peterson looks ready to strangle him, and Owens feels the same way. “You condescending asshole.”
Pelzer sounds defeated as he mutters, “I did consult with our lawyers, and they adv—”
“Oh, it must be okay, then,” Peterson mocks.
“Look, I’ve called you here today, all right? The point is, the reason I called…” He sighs. “Well, I need you to promise to be discreet about this. What I’m about to tell you, it’s very—”
“Do we need to remind you that there are laws about obstruction of justice?” Owens asks.
Pelzer holds out his palms. “Okay. I had our IT people dig through our system to unearth deleted files from an old network, and they found this.” He hands them a tablet. When they touch the screen, diagrams and words appear. Might as well be in Greek.
“What are we looking at?” Owens asks.
“It appears to me that Dr. Jensen was trying to cure blindness. Without vidders.”
Owens looks away from the gobbledygook and at Pelzer. “I thought that was impossible.”
“Well, yes. Everyone thinks that. The vidders are our cure for blindness. But Jensen apparently thought he could find a way around them. A way to cure people without devices, so that we could return to our wonderful old vision.” He says this with a fanciful air, the tone of someone who clearly feels that life is better now, because his bottom line certainly is. “But when I sat down and reviewed his research … Well, there’s no guaranteeing anything, but … it seems he made significant progress. His ideas—there’s no way to tell without further study, of course, but … they could work.” He pauses. “They could possibly let us see the old way again.”
Owens and Peterson take this in. It’s like hearing someone say that a pill currently in development might let people grow wings and fly.
“Do you honestly believe that?” Owens asks.
“As I said, it’s early, so it’s still theoretical and unproven.” He holds up his hands again. “But, judging from the science, it appears possible. At the very least, it’s worth running some of these tests he’d proposed.”
“And you think someone wanted to kill him over this?” Peterson doesn’t seem to buy it.
The good doctor calmly folds his hands on his desk, full lecture mode. “Detectives, in the years since vidders were invented, do you know how many peer-reviewed studies have attempted to find biological cures for blindness?”
“No clue,” Peterson says.
“Zero. Because there’s no money in it. Maybe initially, for the surgery or the vaccine or whatever it would be. But after that, when we can all see again, without devices? Think of the economic havoc that would wreak. The vidder industry would be crushed, as would several other segments of the tech industry. Not just tech: without vidders, all sorts of companies wouldn’t be able to advertise in our brains anymore. It would be enormously disruptive for the entire economy.”
Owens thinks aloud. “EyeTech sure wouldn’t like it.”
“No,” Pelzer agrees. “But they’re merely the largest company that would be harmed. There are plenty of others: advertising, marketing, PR, communications, media, every good or service that gets advertised to us through our vidders … We’d be talking a complete remaking of our economy, after all we’ve already been through to put the pieces back together.”
Owens scrolls through the tablet again, as if he might understand any of the scientific jargon or the diagrams of brains and nerve cells.
