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The nice thing about concrete is, while you can try and sterilize it with an EMP, since it’s not conductive you won’t get very far. The science on psychometry is still mostly out, but we do know it’s somehow related to electromagnetism. Conductors retain psychometric imprints poorly – especially when you hit them with an electrical current – nonconductors retain it well. So concrete is one of the best candidates for long term retention in modern life. But impressions can also be covered over by new layers, so a person walking down a sidewalk will leave traces of his passage but other people crossing the same stretch of sidewalk will quickly wipe them away.

It’s really a lot like other kinds of forensics in that respect.

The FBI was already swarming over a half a dozen parking lots and public parks inside the theoretical launch zones they’d established for the crop duster attacks. They’d started in those areas because the drones used in to spray the peanut oil required a fair amount of clearance for a safe liftoff and were on the large side – larger than the drones used in the previous two attacks – so the working theory was that they were brought in and out via a truck or large car.

It was a solid theory based on the logistics and timing of the crime. It was also turning up exactly zero.

Each of the two overlapping sections of map that they were checking was about a mile square and that covered a surprising number of parking lots or similar suitable launch zones. Eugene told me as we left headquarters that they’d covered most of them and were beginning to look at rooftops and other more inaccessible places the attack might also have been staged from already.

Four hours later, standing in parking lot number five, I was tired, irritable and hadn’t found anything more on my side of things. It was full dark and Eugen had gone to get something for us to eat, leaving me surrounded by normal FBI agents who hadn’t been read in on psychometrics and were clearly wondering why the Asian guy in beige was wandering around and poking at the concrete with ungloved hands every so often.

At least they were polite enough not to give me a hard time about it.

Unfortunately most of them were wondering if I was some kind of psychologist or similar profiler brought in to waste taxpayer money as they did the hard work of collecting evidence that could actually be taken to trial. At least, that’s what I assume the suspicion, annoyance and contempt signified. I couldn’t blame them. I wasn’t getting anything they couldn’t have gotten on their own and it’s not like they knew I could pick up on their inner emotions. Normally I’m good at tuning that kind of flack out but the last couple of days had wrung me out pretty good and I was well on my way to total exhaustion today, too.

I pulled my gloves back on and crossed the street to the low railing running by the boardwalk. Below it was a quaint little marina full of sail boats and other personal watercraft. Gingerly I rested my forearms on the metal railing and stared out at the moonlight on the Pacific.

The ocean is a fantastic psychometric insulator. Unless water is very pure it’s an excellent conductor, plus it’s a liquid so it’s always in motion even in a sealed container so even in distilled water psychometric impressions tend to break up quickly. Young psychometrics are told to imagine waves on a beach as a basic exercise to help them insulate themselves from psychometric overstimulation as one of the first mental disciplines we learn. Some days you just have to go back to the basics.

With eyes closed it was easy to imagine myself on a boat far out on the ocean, rocking along quietly, with no FBI or homegrown terrorists making demands of my time or energy. Adrift on the waves I was even insulated from the constant demands of my own Gift, free of the dozens of types of mental “noise” that bombarded my synesthesia addled brain day by day. If you really wanted to hide from a psychometric forget about EMPs, you could just –

I snapped back to reality with a horrible realization, touching the SIM card in my pocket just long enough to send a text to Eugene. And Natalie and Hennesy for good measure.

This wasn’t a copycat attack. It was the same group but using a new method of attack. Assuming our terrorists did know about the existence of psychometrics, they couldn’t use EMPs to sterilize every attack site they operated from. The collateral damage from a pulse strong enough to suit their purposes would highlight the staging area they used like a spotlight. A half a city block losing power would be all it took for the dozen local and Federal agencies looking for them to zero in on their location in seconds. San Francisco police response times weren’t the best in the nation but they wouldn’t have to be.

And that was before taking in to account that someone had apparently set up a satellite to observe the area for the foreseeable future.

No, it would obviously be much safer to simply do the operation from a boat and let the ocean do all the work sterilizing the environment for you. Then you could sail a ways out and finish the job with an EMP far from potential collateral damage. Assuming you were even worried about scrubbing the trace evidence from your boat. It’d be a high bar to clear just to get a warrant to search the thing.

A high bar, but not impossible. A new idea occurred to me and I pushed off the railing and started towards the marina’s main office, scanning the railing and light poles until I saw what I was looking for: A dingy metal sign that said, “Protected by video surveillance.”

A few of those cameras had to look out at the ocean, and the FBI probably wasn’t going to get the video from them unless they asked for it specifically. I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask for it. That was my second mistake for the day.

The main office was locked but I saw an intercom that I was willing to bet would let me talk to a security switchboard. I was fishing through my pockets, looking for my magnetized rod to push the intercom button with when they knocked me out from behind.

——–

Psychometrics don’t react well to violence.

I know that sounds absurd on the face of it. No one reacts well to being bashed in the head. But psychometrics react poorly to causing violence as well. Not just killing each other and sparking a chain reaction, like I’d described to Natalie. Causing violence demands a certain level of detachment take place in your mind. Most psychometrics who cause violence of any kind have a very hard time recovering from that detachment, one of the many quirks of our psychology we don’t really understand. My personal theory is that this is similar to the way higher level math or religion also disrupt our thought processes. Like those unhealthy influences, violence is not something we experiment with, choosing to keep a certain distance from it instead.

Of course, that doesn’t keep violence from coming to us on occasion. As with all human mental states, the mind of a violent man or woman is something the Gifted pick up on and is influenced by. So we can wind up in a state of permanent mental detachment even when we’re the victim of violence rather than the perpetrator of it.

All this is to explain why, when I woke up and found myself lying belowdecks on a rocking boat, listening to the waves, I thought maybe my mind had finally imploded in on itself and shut itself away from all the depraved thoughts I’d found in my career as a forensic. It certainly had all the hallmarks of a delusion. It was focused on something I’d been thinking about right before being clock in the back of the head. It didn’t follow directly from where I’d been before. And it had a certain dreamlike quality to it, right down to the ridiculously dressed man sitting on the bunk across from mine.

He was wearing a black suit and cowboy boots. His trademark aviator sunglasses hung from a strap around his neck, revealing mirthful, intelligent eyes beneath. He had graying, curly hair cropped close to his head and laugh lines around his eyes that most of the public probably never saw though his mirrored eyewear. He was the one puzzle piece that didn’t fit in the whole fiasco and I’d been trying to cram him into place since he first came up, so clearly my finally getting to meet him had to be the final touch on this fancy delusion I’d crafted for myself. It was almost as good as the fugue trap from earlier, I told myself, but still every bit as unreal.

That was my third mistake for the day.

When he saw that I was awake he clapped his hands on his knees and said, “Good to meet you, weakArmor. Do you mind if I use your working name?”

His voice was radio smooth and surprisingly deep for what look like a thin man. I stared for a moment and snorted a laugh, weakly looking around at my environment, surprised I wasn’t restrained at all. At least, not directly. The room might be locked.

“Do you know who I am?”

I focused back on the other person down in the hold with me. “Well, I know who you look like.”

“Oh?” That seemed to amuse him. “Who’s that?”

“A.J. Jackson.”