TWENTY-TWO

Over her brief tenure in OACET, she had visited more mansions than her eight-year-old self would have thought possible—hell, she had been to a party at the White House just this past week—but she had never seen a room like this one. Teak and brass chased each other in thick stripes through the floor and into the ornate wainscoting. The walls were plastered in that one dark maroon that could only be put to proper use by the super-rich, and the paintings were by artists whose names she actually recognized.

It screamed wealth and privilege, and she felt woefully out of place.

The receptionist was in the middle of her early morning chores when Rachel and Hill barged through the last set of doors. Rachel was wearing her best suit, the one she wore when she knew there would be at least one press conference at the end of the day, but it was still far below the pay grade of those who usually came this far into Summerville’s inner sanctum. She thought her suit was the reason the receptionist was gaping at her, until she remembered her face looked like a half-made sausage.

“Agent Peng?” Randy Summerville, going over the day’s tasks with his receptionist, was bright yellow in surprise at finding her in his office. He took in her face, Hill’s arm in its sling… The yellow surprise turned into red concern. “What happened to you? This wasn’t from the car chase, was it? I saw you right after that happened!”

“Detective Hill’s injuries were from the chase. Mine were received in an unrelated incident,” she said, as she managed the twinned thoughts that Summerville’s information network needed an overhaul, and also that ‘A Series of Unrelated Incidents’ might be an excellent name for Hope Blackwell’s fists. “May we talk in private?”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “Danielle, we’ll take coffee on the patio.”

Patio? We’re four stories up, how could there be a…

But Summerville’s office had a wall made of windows and a set of ornate French doors, and these opened onto a patio with a glorious view of the monuments. There were enough container plants to make Santino weep in envy, and a set of furniture made from the same rich teak as was found in Summerville’s office.

There was even a rug. Not one of those tacky indoor-outdoor affairs, but an authentic Persian antique carpet. Rachel’s heart went out to the poor maintenance man whose job it was to roll it up every night, and wondered what Summerville did when it started to rain.

Her scans hit on Jordan Summerville puttering about the patio, grooming the ground around the plants for dead leaves before today’s schedule began, and realized the kid’s job probably included carpet duties. His uncle tried to chase him off, but Rachel stopped him—Jordan needed to hear what she had to say.

“This isn’t a personal call,” she said, taking a seat on a nearby couch. “It’s related to the White House break-in.”

Both uncle and nephew went a little red at that. “What do you mean?” Randy Summerville asked.

She had dreaded this meeting. One misstep, and the possibility of an alliance between OACET and the telecommunication industry might vanish.

And, God help her, she actually liked Randy Summerville.

“As you know, OACET is a federal agency,” she began. “We conduct our own threat assessments, as do the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, and numerous other agencies. One of our analysts checked for possible connections between OACET and the White House murder.” Technically true: she supposed Lulu qualified as an OACET analyst, even though the computer itself had been bought and paid for by the MPD. “We took the security footage from the Dupont Circle Farmers’ Market, and we ran it through our own threat models. We were surprised when facial recognition got a hit.”

Yup. There’s the flash of red.

“Why are you here, Agent Peng?” Summerville asked, his conversational colors beginning to shutter themselves.

“I’d like to state for the record that we don’t have a warrant,” she said. “Your compliance is completely voluntary—”

“My compliance?”

“Sorry,” Rachel said, holding up her hands for peace. “I didn’t mean to be vague. That wasn’t directed towards you… We’re here for your nephew.”

Summerville’s colors locked themselves down. Behind him, Jordan’s panicked red flared, fire-bright.

Hill touched Rachel’s shoulder in warning; whatever he had spotted in Jordan was as accurate as watching his conversational colors was for her.

“As I said, we don’t have a warrant,” Rachel said. “We’re merely eliminating potential suspects. We’ve recovered DNA from a victim. It’s saliva trace—it looks like she hit her assailant in the mouth before he killed her.”

Jordan’s hand twitched, as if he was keeping himself from touching a half-remembered injury. Rachel remembered the first time she had seen him, during the reception at the White House, when his colors showed he had taken a solid punch to the face.

“We’re collecting samples.” She reached into her jacket pocket, and took out a laboratory-grade mouth swab in its sealed container. “This is only to eliminate possible—”

“No!” Rachel thought this was the first time she had ever heard Jordan speak. His voice was deeper than she had expected, and hoarse from stress. “Hell no!”

His uncle’s colors fell to grays.

“Maybe you should call your family’s lawyer,” Rachel told him.

The lobbyist nodded. “Please leave, Agent Peng. If you’re able to get a warrant, feel free to contact us.”

“Right,” Rachel said. “Thank you for your time.”

Beside her, Hill took out his phone and hit a single button. There was a pause, and then he said, “Lawyered up. Go ahead and process it.”

“We’ll see you in a few hours,” Rachel said to Jordan. “It’ll take about that long to run the other sample.”

“What sample?” The kid’s panicked yellows started to whip around him. “I didn’t give you permission to take a sample!”

“Officer Santino followed you to work this morning. You threw your Starbucks cup in the gutter. He’s got the cup in evidence, so—”

Jordan Summerville took off.

Rachel knew from those whipping yellows that Jordan had been looking for an escape route. She had expected him to cut around her and Hill towards the French doors, and then run straight into Zockinski who was standing guard by the receptionist’s desk. Or, if Jordan was clever, he’d find Santino waiting for him in the side stairwell.

She didn’t think he’d jump over the edge of the patio.

“Fuck!” Hill shouted.

“It’s okay!” she said, as she spotted Jordan on the fire escape six feet below. “It’s not a suicide! C’mon!”

Rachel threw off her suit coat, and scouted around for a place to store her gun before she noticed Hill. The big man was still seated on his chair by the doors, statue-still.

He pointed at his injured shoulder.

“Aw!” Rachel groaned, and handed her gun to Hill. His colors changed to curious yellows.

“There’s no way in hell I’m going to chase down this kid when armed,” she said, looking at Summerville as she spoke.

“It’s policy,” Hill said.

“MPD policy, maybe,” she said. “I’ll bring him back unharmed,” she promised Summerville.

The lobbyist didn’t reply, his colors angry reds and mournful grays, and she couldn’t help but wonder if a possible future had gone up in smoke.

And then she was gone.

A clean jump over the side of the balcony, and six feet down to where her feet clanged on the top landing of the fire escape. She had decided to be good to her much-abused body today, and was wearing her most comfortable work shoes, the ones where the sides and the soles were made from the same buttery-soft leather. These were perfect for her controlled fall down the side of the building, letting her grip each stair and every rung of the ladder as she descended from floor to floor. By the time she reached the ground, she had nearly caught up to Jordan.

As soon as she began running, she realized they were the worst shoes she could have worn. The alley was covered in broken glass and pieces of metal, and she felt each of these press through the thin soles. She slowed her pace and picked her way across the mouth of the alley, and spotted Jordan as he raced across the busy street.

“I am not doing this again,” she muttered, and hailed a passing cab.

The cabdriver was a good sport. For twenty bucks and a story about a lover’s quarrel, he was happy to follow Jordan at a discreet distance. It gave Rachel plenty of time to send the signal on Jordan’s phone to Santino, and she watched in relative comfort as the kid’s colors began to ease from fiery panic to the ruddy grays of stress. She watched as Jordan ducked into a coffee shop, and told the cabdriver to let her off at the next block.

Rachel looped around to the rear entrance of the coffee house, her implant firmly fixed on the signal from Jordan’s phone. She flashed her badge to the startled barista, a finger pressed against her lips while she pointed towards the busy main room of the café.

He’s not here… she thought, scanning the crowd for Jordan’s core of sun-drenched purple velvet. But the signal from his phone was bright and strong, and she chased it down to where it lay beneath a nearby table: Jordan had ditched it so he couldn’t be tracked.

“Fuckin’ perfect,” she muttered, as she sent her scans out in all directions.

She chased core colors up and down the nearby streets, as far as she could push herself without bringing on a headache, and when that didn’t hit on Jordan, she expanded her range. So many people within these four city blocks, not just running wild on the ground, but all stacked on top of one another in rooms within rooms within buildings, or down along the highway a few streets away, an anthill of color, and so many of them were purple…

There.

She sent a brief apology to her feet, and began to run.

This time, her race through the streets wasn’t even close to her relentless pursuit of Noura. She kept herself one street over from Jordan, and was able to jog towards him at a sensible pace. There was no traffic to dodge, no pedestrians to run over. Jordan thought he was safe, and while his conversational colors kept a trace of her Southwestern turquoise, he was mostly focused on the professional blues of the police. Rachel had no problem cutting down one street to run parallel to him, and then taking the next turn to bump into him at the corner.

“You’re lucky I like your uncle,” she said, as she clicked the cuffs on his left hand.

He hit her.

She saw it coming, and tracked the movement of his right fist as it came straight at her. But getting the cuffs on him had brought her in too close: it was either take it and keep her hold on the cuffs, or drop them and get out of his way, and she made the mistake of thinking, Hey, what’s one more fist to the face, anyhow?

It wasn’t nearly as powerful as one of Hope’s insane haymakers, but her face was a step removed from ground beef and the new pain shooting through the old was astonishing. Rachel couldn’t help but sputter, and she yanked Jordan towards her by the handcuffs.

Another mistake: he followed up by hitting her straight in the throat.

She was sure it had been a lucky shot. Jordan had all of the fighting finesse of a kid on the playground. And she still went down, gasping for air.

He kicked her in the face.

Broken noses were a force unto themselves. Rachel curled up in a ball on the sidewalk, and tried to breathe around the blood. Her scans took on a fuzzy halo, and her brain got the message that if she wanted to pass out for a while, her body would be totally okay with that.

She found her feet, and took off after Jordan.

Rachel knew she was a sight. There were fewer pedestrians out this way, and more cars, and the sight of a bloodied, battered Chinese woman running like hell on fire was literally stopping traffic. Jordan had managed to put some distance between them, but he had nowhere to go and he knew it. One block south, he was standing on the edge of the road, searching for something—a taxi, a bus, anything!—to take him away from the Agent.

Rachel kept going.

She knew she didn’t have much left in the tank. Agent or not, she still needed air, and between her broken nose and the punch to her throat, she was doing an excellent impersonation of Darth Vader on the last lap of a four-minute mile.

Just another block, she promised herself.

Jordan looked over his shoulder and saw Rachel charging straight at him down the middle of the sidewalk. His colors went white in shock, then bloomed bright yellow in fear, and he picked up speed.

There was nowhere to go, and he knew it. The street had turned into a four-lane straight shot, an overpass above the interstate entering the tunnel just below them, and Jordan wasn’t fast enough to get to the other side before she caught up.

Rachel knew she had him.

Except the panicky kid decided his best option was to hop the low concrete barrier.

“Oh come on!” Rachel shouted.

She stopped running the instant Jordan became his own hostage situation, the kid dangling himself above a highway full of traffic, his footing barely there on a tiny ledge, his arms wrapped around the thick metal handrail running along the top.

“Jordan?” she shouted, as she sent a text to Santino’s phone that said something along the lines of Backup, now! and Where the fuck are you?

“Stay away!” the kid shouted back at her. He was searching frantically for a way out, not realizing until too late that he trapped himself.

“I am,” Rachel assured him. “I don’t want anything to happen to you. Let’s get you out of this.”

“Leave! I’ll come back up once you’re gone!”

“I can’t do that,” she said. “I can’t just walk away from a possible jumper. Regulations, you understand. What if your arms get tired? I have to be close enough to help you.

“You’ve got all of the power here,” she assured him. She was inching closer to him, slow and steady. “All I can do is make sure I give you what you need. What do you need, Jordan?”

The look the kid gave her was almost hot enough to sear her bruised skin. Rachel shrugged. “Listen, I have to try,” she said. “Give me something. We’ll make it work.”

Her mind was split between her senses. Sirens, growing louder by the moment; Jordan’s colors, tripping between fear and panic; the pain of her broken nose, her face, her feet where she had run straight through the thin soles of her shoes…

Jordan saw the truck coming before she did. She had her scans fixed on him, not on the traffic beneath him, and it was only when she saw the complex colors of hope well up within him did she stop to look around.

“Oh my God,” she gasped. “Jordan, don’t!”

Fuck Hollywood, she thought. Fuck those movies where the hero leaps from the bridge onto the speeding semi…

Jordan readied himself to jump.

She almost didn’t make it. She wouldn’t have, if Jordan hadn’t decided at the very last moment that he was about to do something irrecoverably, unsurvivably stupid, and hesitated.

It was just enough time for Rachel to grab the back of his shirt.

She hauled, throwing all of her weight and muscle into keeping him on the ledge. Fabric tore, but you get what you pay for: Jordan’s expensive dress shirt held together long enough for Rachel to wrap both arms around his waist.

She couldn’t lift him over the barrier, and Jordan was too heavy to hold up on her own. The kid spun in her arms to grab the handrail, and Rachel seized the cuff dangling from his left hand. The handrail was too thick around to accept the cuff—her own wrist wasn’t. She jammed her right arm through the gap between the concrete barrier and the handrail, and ratcheted the cuff shut. Short of a key or an amputation, neither of them was going anywhere.

She heard the sounds of sirens dying, of Santino shouting, and her heart lifted to find her partner running towards her. In another minute, ninety seconds at the most, none of this would be her responsibility anymore.

Rachel turned her full cyborg stare on Jordan. His colors, already yellow and trembling, blanched as the bloodied woman with the cold, unmoving eyes glared at him.

“You are so fucking lucky I like your uncle.”