ELEVEN

“Don’t come here hungover. It throws off my results.”

Rachel glared at the small bald man in front of her. “I’m not hung over,” she said. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”

Her dreams were about shipwrecks. Even the autoscript designed to put her in a sedated sleep state didn’t help; it kept her in a deep sleep where she was lost, not quite dreaming but still tumbling around the bottom of the ocean like a broken bag of bones…

“Then don’t come here when you’re sleep-deprived,” the man muttered, as he typed another series of commands into the computer. “Now, turn it off, and look straight at the light.”

“Pick one or the other,” she said. “I can turn off my implant, or I can look at the light. I can’t do both.”

Dr. Gillion was usually deep within the angry reds, but today he was especially furious with her. “What?”

“Obviously you have problems understanding what it means to be blind,” she said. “Which is strange, considering your line of work.”

There was a not-subtle cough from a nearby chair. Bradley, a large man who worked as Gillion’s secretary except when Rachel was in the office, was accustomed to reminding the two of them that they had a witness.

The world’s foremost neuro-ophthalmologist gritted his teeth. “Look at the light, focus on it, and then turn off your implant,” Gillion growled. “Your muscle memory can hold your left eye steady long enough for me to get a reading.”

“Fine,” she said. She fixed her scans on the red light in front of her left eye, and then flipped off her implant. The light and the examination room vanished.

She had contacted Dr. Gillion and his organization, Visual Cybernetics Incorporated, after an especially difficult case in which a bombing victim had lost the use of his eyes. Rachel had decided that since the world at large was hell-bent on careening wildly out of her control, she’d do what she could to fix it. If that meant outing herself as blind to a scientist who specialized in studying the connections between eyesight and the human brain, she could live with that decision.

If she had known that Gillion was a cut of prime Grade-A asshole, she wouldn’t have bothered.

Gillion styled himself as a living, breathing Albert Einstein, and his colleagues let him get away with it. He was an unparalleled genius in his field, yes, but he was also conceited and more than a little misogynistic.

That attitude hadn’t gotten much traction with Rachel.

After their initial meeting, Gillion had called Bradley into the exam room and had told him to assume sentry duty. Both Rachel and Gillion had agreed to this arrangement: Gillion didn’t want to get sued for punching a patient, and Rachel didn’t want to go to jail for murder.

(And she had made sure Bradley was properly terrified of her. Not that she had wanted to traumatize the poor bug-eyed man, but it was either that or risk seeing her name in the tabloids under a headline using some version of the words Reputable Source, OACET Agent, and Blind! Thanks, but no thanks.)

“Now,” the odious little doctor said, “turn it back on.”

She did: the red light was where she had left it.

“Again.”

They repeated the process several times, both of them silent except for Gillion barking the occasional order. Then, once he had his readings, they repeated the process with the other eye, and then moved on to a different battery of tests.

For all of his faults, Gillion was thorough. It took several hours to complete the testing regime, and by the end, Rachel felt as hungry and as mentally exhausted as if she had spent the entire time out-of-body.

“I’ll call you the next time I need you,” Gillion said, and left the room.

“Two days’ notice!” she shouted after him. “Give me at least two days’ notice before you expect me to show up!”

Gillion didn’t answer her. She rounded on Bradley. “How can you work for him?”

Gillion’s assistant blinked his overlarge eyes at her before fleeing.

She ripped the electrodes from her scalp, and stormed out of the office.

She was standing on the sidewalk, staring straight up at the sun, when Santino pulled up to the curb in his tiny hybrid. They were three blocks from Visual Cybernetics Incorporated when she was finally calm enough to turn thoughts into coherent words.

“Tell me why I suffer through that… that…”

“You called him a ‘prick of mountainous proportions’ last time.”

“That prick of mountainous proportions and his ego!”

He sighed as he turned into the parking lot of a convenient fast food restaurant. “Because Gillion will use this data to develop a version of your implant that can help process various EM frequencies, and turn those frequencies into stimuli for the optic nerves,” he said. “It’ll be analogous to how the cochlear implant functions for the deaf. It’ll transform the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. You can suffer through a couple of hours of Gillion and his ego for that.”

“Right,” she snarled. “Right.”

“And when he wins the Nobel Prize for Medicine—”

“Oh, I’ll be damned if that fuckin’ jackass wins the Nobel thanks to me—” she started, and lapsed into a nasty sulk when she realized Santino was laughing at her in purples.

She was most of the way through her cheeseburger when Zockinski’s ringtone (Los del Rio’s “Macarena”—when he made that request, she had realized that he and Hill were just messing with her) sang out in her head. “One sec,” she said to her partner. Then, to Zockinski, “What’s up?”

“How’s your day off?” the detective asked her.

“Over, I assume?”

Zockinski laughed. “Yup. Come to Indiana Avenue. Jenna Noura wants to talk to you.”

“‘You’ as in me and Santino, or ‘you’ as in me, myself, and I?”

“Just you,” he said. “She says you know why.”

Zockinski disconnected, and Rachel was left wondering what the hell Noura had meant by that.

They drove up and down the streets near Indiana Avenue until they finally found a parking spot, and then headed towards Zockinski’s cell phone. The detective was waiting for them in the prisoner holding area, Hill standing silently beside him. Off to the side were several uniformed officers, and a man in a shabby tee-shirt fiddling with the monitoring equipment.

“He’s already talked to Noura,” Zockinski said, pointing at Hill.

“How’d it go?” Santino asked.

“I think he’s in love,” Zockinski said. “She made him smile.”

Rachel pressed the back of her hand to her forehead and fell into Santino’s arms in a full Southern Belle swoon.

“Funny,” Hill said.

“So what does she want?” Santino asked, as he propped Rachel on her feet.

“She wants to talk to Peng,” Hill said, pointing at Rachel. “Didn’t say why.”

“Maybe she likes you,” Zockinski said with a wink.

“Her timing’s bad,” Rachel said with a dry laugh. “Becca gets home tonight.”

“What’s the setup here?” Santino was looking around the prisoner holding area. The MPD’s station on Indiana Ave was more of an administrative showpiece than their own station, its location in the center of the city placing it decidedly in the “law” side of the “law and order” equation. It was adjacent to the city’s courthouses, and allowed a certain amount of comfort for those persons working with the police.

“Like ours,” said Zockinski. “Normal one-way mirror that lets us see into the interview room. Everything is recorded.”

The guy in the tee-shirt waved.

“Nifty,” Rachel said. She borrowed Noura’s dossier from Hill, and went to talk to a master thief.

Jenna Noura was sitting quietly, a paper cup of coffee beside her. The officers must have decided she was enough of a risk to leave her handcuffed to the table, and the cuffs looked overlarge on her wrists. She brightened as Rachel entered the room, strands of hope held up by Rachel’s Southwestern turquoise: whatever it was she wanted, she was sure Rachel could deliver.

“Bored?” Rachel asked her.

“A little,” Noura replied. “I’m highly susceptible to cabin fever.”

“Prison’s going to be rough for you, then.” Rachel opened the manila folder and flipped frequencies to examine Noura’s file. “You’re thirty-one. That’s awfully young to be looking at a life sentence.”

“Maybe there’s something I can do for you,” Noura said. She spoke slowly, the words something of a caress.

Oh, please. Rachel was used to innuendo in interviews, but she hadn’t expected it from Noura. “There is something you can do,” she said. “We need to know who hired you. Would you like me to get you a lawyer?”

“No,” Noura said. “Just you and me.”

“Okay.” Rachel waited. When Noura didn’t offer any new information, Rachel started writing out her shopping list on the folder. Beer, hard cider… Becca’s coming back, so buy that bread she likes… Throw out those old carrots before she notices…

“I don’t know who hired me,” Noura finally said.

“Sorry, then,” Rachel said, as she added a few more items to her list. “You’re useless. Enjoy prison.”

“I’ve got other things to offer,” Noura said in that same sensual voice.

Rachel kept writing. Flowers… I should buy some flowers, but Santino gets so pissed when I buy hothouse roses…

“I’m one of the world’s best art thieves,” Noura said. She leaned towards Rachel, like a cat settling in for a long stretch. If the jumpsuit had a low neckline, and if Rachel had been limited by a set of working eyeballs, the view would have been deep and smooth.

As it was, Rachel rolled those eyes as hard as she could. “Knock knock,” she said, as she pushed her grocery list aside.

“What?”

“No, who. As in, ‘Who’s there?’”

Noura’s conversational colors changed to an annoyed orange. “Don’t waste my time with jokes.”

“Damn!” Rachel slammed her palm on the table. It was a swift, unexpected motion, and Noura leapt backwards at the loud pop! “You already knew the punchline.”

Noura wrapped her colors around her, and they settled into professional blues.

“Does that ever work?” Rachel asked.

“More often than it should,” Noura replied. She scooted her chair back and sat up primly, handcuffs and all, changing from seductress to schoolmarm as easily as slipping off a sweater.

“You were saying? World’s best art thief?”

“One of them,” Noura said. “Do you know how we work?”

“A broker, I assume.”

The woman nodded. “The client approaches the broker, and I get my jobs through the broker’s intermediaries. There’s never any fewer than two degrees of separation between me and a client.”

Rachel pretended to make a tick in Noura’s folder. “Good news for the client when you get caught.”

“Right. And if I were a stupid woman…” Smug pink started to show within Noura’s professional blues.

Rachel took that pink and ran with it. That first day, back in her holding cell… She knew what the fragment was before we did. “You might not have information about your client, but you did get information about the item.”

“Of course,” Noura said. “I’ve got an excellent reputation. My clients know to treat me with respect. They’ll tell me exactly what it is I’m stealing, so I can make sure they’re paying me a fair price commensurate with the item and the risk involved.”

“And breaking into the White House…”

“Huge risk,” Noura said, raising one hand. The other came up to meet it. “Huge payout.”

“Tell me this also came with a huge stack of information to help you plan your getaway.”

“That, and…” Noura looked at Rachel, her conversational colors sharpening to a point as she waited.

On the other side of the mirrored glass, Santino turned yellow-white with excitement, but neither of the detectives seemed to pull anything significant from Noura’s last statement.

Something science-y then… Rachel leaned forward. “Tell me they weren’t stupid enough to give you a backup wristwatch.”

Noura inspected her fingernails. “I’m not about to kill my own frogs.”

“Mhmm,” Rachel said. “Just White House staffers trying to get lucky.”

“I was careless,” Noura said. Mournful gray and sickly green guilt pushed aside the professional blues. “He paid the price.”

“Technically, you’ll still be the one who pays the price,” Rachel told her. She wished Noura didn’t feel guilty about killing Casper Ceara; it was easier to deal with the bad guys when they were simply bad. “That’s what our justice system is for.

“If you cooperate, the justice system can be lenient. That’s why they invented plea bargains. As you murdered someone in the White House,” Rachel said, fingers tapping on her notepad for emphasis, “you’re completely screwed unless you can give us something good. Extremely good. Names. Account information. That wristwatch. Hard data we can use to track down your client, and patch some of the holes in our security.”

Noura nodded. “What time is it?”

“Two-thirty-eight,” Rachel said automatically, before realizing she hadn’t actively consulted her implant.

Fabulous. I’m a living, breathing Timex, too.

“Good,” Noura said. “You’re going to need to take me out of here.”

Rachel laughed.

“Let me tell you how this will happen,” Noura said. “You drive me to where I’ve stashed my information, and I give it to you. I need to sign for it in person before they release it.”

The woman wasn’t lying, but her conversational colors were somehow…off. Rachel couldn’t figure out why Noura’s colors struck her as strange until she realized that there were small voids, empty places where colors and movement should be.

So that’s what a lie of omission looks like, she realized.

“Or,” Rachel said, “You tell us where it is, and we get a warrant.”

“No,” Noura said with a smile. “I go with you, or this doesn’t happen.”

“Talk me into it,” Rachel said. “You haven’t given me a good reason.”

Noura pointed towards the manila file. “May I?”

Rachel found a blank sheet of paper, and tossed it towards Noura. It glided over the steel table, Rachel’s pen rolling beside it. “Be my guest.”

Noura tore off the smallest corner of the top sheet, scribbled a few quick words on the paper, and then pushed the paper towards Rachel with one hand while holding the notepad in the other as a shield against the men and the cameras. Before Rachel could take either scrap or notepad from her, Noura dragged them both out of reach.

“Uh-uh,” Noura said. “Eyes only.”

And with that, she ate the scrap of paper.

“Oh Lord,” Rachel muttered, loud enough for the men to hear. If she hadn’t already had her frequencies set to reading mode, she would have missed Noura’s message altogether. “Talk about melodrama.”

Her bluster was purely automatic. Inside, she had gone shock-white and cold at what Noura had written.

 

Glazer says hello

 

“Got it?” Noura said.

“I don’t think I understand,” Rachel lied.

“It’s simple. You drive me to a specific location, and I give you the goods,” Noura said with a smile. “The rest is all up to you.”

“Drive?” The icy pit in Rachel’s stomach grew. She trusted her augmented senses above normal vision except when it came to piloting a massive metal device through one of the world’s busiest cities. With practice, she’d probably be an excellent driver, but the learning curve would be steep and paved with tombstones.

Noura took her silence as confusion, so the thief tried to dumb it down. “I’ve hidden the data. I’m the only one who can get it back. You’ll need to get me out of here if you want it.”

The emphasis on those five words was slight, and Rachel might have missed it if Noura’s conversational colors hadn’t been pointing straight at Rachel’s Southwestern turquoise as she said them.

“Let me see what I can do,” Rachel said.

She stepped out of the interview room and shut the door behind her, her mental wheels spinning to come up with a reason to give Noura what she wanted. It had to be a good one, good enough to get Noura out of lockup and alone in a car with Rachel—oh shit I can’t drive what the fuck am I going to do—without tipping anyone to the real reason she was about to break every protocol in the book—oh God oh God this is going to be a disaster—

Mitch Alimoren was there, glaring through the glass at Noura. “She’ll talk to you,” he said to Rachel by way of greeting. “She’ll talk to Hill. But she won’t talk to the Secret Service.”

“Probably because she thinks we’re easier to play,” Rachel said, faking a chuckle. “Thanks,” she said, as Santino handed her a hot cup of coffee.

Catching Alimoren up to speed took a little extra time. So did the jokes: the men couldn’t get over the part where Noura had eaten the scrap of paper. Rachel fed their laughter, declaring she would not be the one who went after it, and when they had finally pulled themselves together, she had a plausible story lined up.

“What did she write?” Alimoren asked, his colors moving slowly towards curious yellows.

“A bunch of numbers,” Rachel replied. “I think it was a combination, or coordinates, or part of a phone number or a bank account…”

“What were they?” Santino asked, and she rattled a series of digits off the top of her head. Her partner jotted them down and got to work decoding them. “Not latitude or longitude,” he said. “Maybe it’s part of an IP address…”

“Hell if I know,” Rachel replied, and then made sure to put her left foot exactly under Hill’s as he turned back towards the mirror. She gasped as she jumped, and hissed as the coffee burned her hand, and excused herself from Hill’s apologies to go run her hand under cold water in the nearest bathroom.

The bathroom was empty. She leaned against the door and took a deep breath, then another, and grabbed onto the feeling of the cinderblock walls around her. Glazer says hello…

And as the cool of the bathroom soaked into her, she realized she had panicked for no good reason.

Nobody at First MPD—not even Santino—knew she had helped Jonathan Glazer escape from police custody. It had been the lesser evil: Glazer was combat-capable and had extensive military training, and she was sure he would have escaped without her assistance. Tossing him a MacGyver lockpick was her way of saying, Go on, get out of here, and don’t hurt any of my people while you’re doing it.

In exchange, Glazer had bought OACET time and credibility.

Rachel still considered it more than a fair trade.

She laughed quietly to herself, the sound of it bouncing around the empty room. So what if word had gotten around the darker side of society that she was willing to aid and abet? Noura had nothing to offer OACET. Pretending to cooperate with Noura would only ensure the thief would willingly turn over all information to buy Rachel’s goodwill.

It’s not as though Noura had any proof. Glazer had escaped in the middle of a firestorm. Nobody was sure of anything, and the only security footage that did exist showed Rachel permanently crippling his partner.

She’s not leaving this station, but I can still convince her she’ll get something for nothing, Rachel thought. And maybe this’ll tell the underground gossip mill that I can’t be bought.

Well, she corrected herself, not unless it’s for the right price.

Rachel ran her hands under the tap, sprinkled some water on her dress shirt, and left the bathroom. She was beginning to feel pretty good about the situation when she realized that Noura’s message had a second meaning: Noura had admitted she was in contact with Glazer.

Oh! She had to shove her fists deep in her suitcoat pockets to keep from dancing around like a happy child. After breaking out of First MPD, Glazer and his partner had disappeared. Despite the MPD’s best efforts, the manhunt had turned up empty. This was the first solid lead since they had vanished. If she could somehow coax Noura into telling her the details, maybe she could track down Glazer and his partner, and finally check that item off of her To-Do list.

This, Rachel told herself, is turning into a very good day.

She swung around the corner, and stopped dead in her tracks. The colors within the interview room were Southwestern turquoise and poppy-seed gray, through and through.

Good mood gone, Rachel sighed, tipped her chin up, and walked into the room wearing her best poker face.

“What?” she asked as the men turned towards her.

“Alimoren wants to play along,” Santino said.

“If she keeps stonewalling us, we’ll never find out who hired her,” the Secret Service agent said. “There’s a bigger security risk out there than chauffeuring Noura to her drop site.”

Beneath her poker face, Rachel winced. Alimoren had a point: learning how Noura got into the White House took priority. But…

Santino saved her. “Rachel doesn’t have a valid driver’s license,” he offered.

Zockinski and Hill went a dark sage green. “That’s why you make us drive everywhere,” Zockinski said.

She shrugged. “We live in the city,” she said. “Driving didn’t seem important. I haven’t had a valid license since I enlisted, and I did that when I was eighteen. Trust me, you don’t want me on the road.”

“No problem,” Alimoren said. “Detective Hill, Noura seems to like you. Can you drive? That’ll let Agent Peng focus on Noura.”

Hill nodded.

“If we do this,” Rachel said, as she felt the weight of inevitability settle on her shoulders, “the Secret Service takes custody of her. Not me and Hill, or OACET and the MPD in general. I want to go on record that I think this is a bad idea. She asked about the time—maybe she’s got friends out there who are ready to help her escape.”

“Agreed,” Alimoren said. “I don’t like this, either, but I’ll make sure the Secret Service bears the responsibility. You’ll have backup the entire way.”

It was done except for the details, and Rachel allowed herself to grin like the wickedest of witches as she returned to the interview room.

“First,” Rachel began, as she returned to the chair across the table from Noura. “I don’t have a driver’s license, so I’m not driving you anywhere alone. Hill will be our driver.”

Noura began to protest, and subsided only after Rachel shot her a private wink. “Fine,” the cat burglar said, hope rising in a multicolored surge.

“You should know that if you’re trying to play us, it won’t go well for you,” Rachel continued. “We’re not your average cops—we’re used to dealing with criminal masterminds.” She put an oh-so-slight emphasis on “dealing”, and watched the threads of Noura’s hope twine around each other and strengthen.

“As long as you’re fair with me, you’ll get what I’ve promised you,” Noura said.

“You really need a lawyer here,” Rachel told her. “Otherwise, you’ve got no guarantees that we’ll keep our deals.”

“I’m not concerned.” Noura smiled. “Rumor has it that you keep your side of the bargain.”

There was a slight flurry of curious yellow on the other side of the mirror, and Rachel decided to wrap things up before her too-smart partner began to revisit old mysteries. “Well,” she said. “For cops, we do okay. Now, you’re also going to need to wear a remote transmitter…”

It took another hour to get Noura released into their custody, and another few minutes of pretending that the police cruiser they were using for transport had been issued to them at random. It wasn’t: the MPD kept a couple of cruisers fitted out with hidden recording equipment. Anything Noura said during transport would be seen and heard by Santino, Zockinski, and Alimoren and his team as they followed in a surveillance van.

Rachel approved. She was still burned out from overuse as a camera during the past couple of days. Anything that took some of the strain off of her brain was fine by her.

Noura didn’t. When Hill opened the rear door of the cruiser for Noura, she peered inside in disdain. “You must be kidding,” she said. “It smells like vomit.”

“It’s a police car,” Rachel said, as Hill put Noura in the cruiser. “They all smell like vomit.”

“Even the new ones,” Hill added.

The door slammed shut on Noura, and they were underway.

Noura wasn’t chatty. Her colors moved in searching patterns as she evaluated the road around them, offering directions as they went. She took them a roundabout way: it was only after Noura took them past Dupont Circle that Rachel realized Noura was retracing her steps.

“Tell us the address,” Rachel said. “It’ll be easier.”

Noura gave her one of those knowing smiles, and told them to take the next right.

Finally, after another fifteen minutes of navigating traffic, she said, “Here.”

Hill glanced up at the building. “Yup.”

It was a commercial mail drop in a good part of town. Foot traffic would be regular, peaceful, and predictable; the clerks would be attentive and helpful. “You mailed the package to yourself?” Rachel asked.

“Yes,” Noura said. “But not under my name, and I wasn’t the one who bought the drop box.”

Smart, Rachel admitted to herself. There was no way they’d get a warrant to search through each customer’s mail. If Noura decided to back out now, it might be months before they got their hands on the package.

If there even is a package, and if Noura didn’t just create this wild goose chase out of thin air to give you the opportunity to let her go…

Hmm.

Hill slid the car into a conveniently empty space (everyone declined to mention the fire hydrant), and left to scout the store. After some cautious poking around, he gestured for the women to join him.

Rachel helped Noura out of the back seat, and leaned in close. “Tonight,” she whispered. “They’re expecting you to try to escape while we’re here.”

Noura didn’t reply, but her bright hope tempered itself within an uncertain orange.

“Don’t worry,” Rachel assured her, loud enough for Hill to overhear. “We keep our promises.”

“They told me you could do that,” Noura said. “I didn’t believe them.”

Rachel and Hill exchanged a glance. “Do what?” Rachel asked.

“You know what a person is thinking,” Noura replied.

Hill chuckled.

“Is this another rumor that’s going around?” Rachel asked him, and he nodded. “Aw, fuck me,” she said. “Don’t people have better things to do than make shit up?”

“You swear when you get defensive,” Hill said, his colors richly purple.

Rachel put a hand at the small of Noura’s back, and all but shoved the woman towards the clerk while she went to cover the rear exit.

She almost didn’t believe it when Noura returned with a package. It was plain white, with hunter’s orange duct tape securing the edges. Rachel scanned it and found nothing but printouts and an overlarge wristwatch.

“I’ll be damned,” she said to Hill. “Nutty thief came through.”

Hill nearly smiled. “Bombs?”

“No, it’s clean. I’m not opening it, though,” Rachel said, dropping the package in a large evidence bag. “I know a bomb when I see it. Poison is trickier.”

“It is clean,” Noura said, slightly yellow from the implied insult. “I packed them myself.”

“Forgive me if I don’t believe you,” Rachel said. “You lied to me.”

“I’m a con artist,” Noura replied. “Don’t take it personally.”

“No.” Rachel shook her head. “I don’t know what people are thinking, but I am one of those freaks who can read microexpressions.” It was an excuse she had used a couple of times before, and she decided to put it out into the MPD gossip pool to get ahead of the mindreader rumor. “You’re the first person I’ve met in years who’s able to lie without me catching it.”

“Oh,” Noura said. “That. Don’t you know that a con artist never really lies?”

“What?”

Noura smiled at her. “We always believe what we say. It’s the best way to sell the con.”

There were more implications in that statement than Rachel could process. “That’s…” She groped around for the right description. “…sociopathic.”

The woman shrugged. “You asked,” she said. “That’s how it works.”

Interesting. Rachel mulled over Noura’s words. How does that work? If I read emotions instead of minds, she’s not just telling the truth, she’s feeling the emotions that go along with it…

Her grandmother’s favorite saying had been that you can tell the truth without telling everything you know; even lies of omission seemed to register as voids within conversational colors. But if you were emotionally disconnected from the truth, maybe a lie could exist on the same fundamental level as truth.

It put her recent conversation with Mulcahy in a new light, maybe. Nobody could lie within a link, but if she was getting better at hiding her emotions…

Wait. Is it possible to lie within a link?

Rachel thought she might be able to make out the edges of an answer, but it slipped through her mental fingers as she saw the gunman bearing down on them.