FIFTEEN

 

“HOW ARE YOU DOING?”

Santino took a deep breath, and replied with a whispered, “Interesting place you feds have here.”

“Don’t blame me for this. I would have commandeered a high school gym.”

Santino forced a chuckle. He was doing his best to pretend he was Anywhere Else, his hands buried deep in his pockets, his conversational colors firmly set in the crisp window-cleaner blue that meant he was powering through his OCD. As for herself, Rachel was glad her new boots came up to slightly below her knees: judging from the graffiti on the walls and the somewhat sticky stains slopped across the floor, the Department of Homeland Security had leased this site from the local teenage potheads.

In the movies, when law enforcement needed more space for their investigations, they moved to an airport hangar or the floor of the local coliseum. As a staging element, this made nothing but sense: the camera loved the drama of those little specks of character far, far below.

The reality was much less poetic. Law enforcement got what was available. Abandoned big-box stores usually made the top of the list: the rent was dirt-cheap and the size was almost on par with that of the mythical airport hangar—you didn’t appreciate how big the physical space of a building could be until the mess inside of it had been removed—even if it didn’t come with the same level of visual romance. Judging by the pile of broken crockery swept against a nearby support post, Rachel was fairly sure they was standing where the housewares section used to be.

Brown plastic tarps covered the cracked linoleum floors, held down at the edges with long strips of silvery duct tape. The residue of Gayle Street had been spread out on the tarps; each site was defined by its address, all materials that might be related to the bombing placed on the corresponding tarps for processing. When a specialist found an overlooked item that might be part of the bombs, it was dropped into a sterile plastic box and whisked away to safety. The rest of the mess was all fragments and stray pieces of what might have been evidence but was most likely garbage: what was left of the barista counters rearranged to show the direction of the blast; the scraps of tabletops and chairs laid out in a parody of seating; the personal effects of the victims.

Too many of those, Rachel thought, her scans brushing across the charred cover of a Hello Kitty day planner. She reminded herself that young children have no need for day planners, and kept walking.

Her golfing buddy had come through. As soon as she had arrived at work that morning, Judge Edwards’ office had called her and let her know that the warrant had been issued. Homeland Security was required to turn over all documentation that might help the MPD locate how, when, and where the canisters used to make the bombs had gone astray. When the paperwork had failed to arrive by lunchtime, Rachel had placed a call to a disgruntled security chief over at Homeland. The chief had done some stonewalling, and then done some yelling, adding more than a few veiled threats against the MPD and OACET, and finally ended with several specific insults leveled at Rachel herself. Receiving a warrant was one thing, complying with it was another, and the security chief expressed several interesting strategies she could use to dispose of a warrant issued by a lowly D.C. Circuit Court judge.

After she had placed Santino’s desk phone back in its cradle, Rachel started reaching out to every person and organization she knew who was directly involved in Gayle Street. She quickly learned that Homeland had been doing quite a lot of stonewalling: even Special Agent Campbell said his team hadn’t received clearance to the site where the evidence had been stored.

(That news had sent shivers down her spine. Campbell worked with the Joint Terrorism Task Force; as such his team was integrated into the Department of Homeland Security. When she had spoken with Campbell the previous evening, she had assumed that he already had everything Homeland had on Gayle Street. Learning that the FBI was as thoroughly locked out as the MPD had caused her to doubt—just for a moment—her conviction that Homeland wasn’t behind the attacks. And then Rachel had remembered how the government worked, the closet bickering and in-fighting and territoriality that locked the system into an unmoving lump of frozen parts, and she felt both better and worse about the entire mess.)

Rachel had no problem playing by the rules. If Homeland was going to use perfectly legal tactics to keep the MPD from making progress, she would be happy to waste an hour or two to show them that turnabout was unfair play. By the time she and Santino had arrived at what had once been a booming strip mall, a caravan of forty police cars, black SUVs, and specialist vans were making their way through the back streets of D.C.’s rougher suburbs to join them.

She had marched in through the sliding doors, her new boots drumming a military march against the water-stained floor, Santino beside her, and several other members of the MPD bringing up the rear. The armed guards stationed at the entrance had tried to block them, but the green and gold badge at her waist had its advantages: in the extended family of the U.S. government, OACET was accountable to no one.

She had signed herself into the roster as Agent Rachel Peng, OACET, plus guests. At last count, more than a hundred people in all walks of law enforcement had used her to gain access to the site, and more were arriving by the minute.

Now, Rachel and Santino were taking themselves on a slow tour of the building while they waited for a ranking official from Homeland to show up and yell at her.

For once, she didn’t feel alone against the world. There was Santino at her side, of course, but two other Agents were picking through the mess in different corners of the building. Phil was there with Sergeant Andrews and several other members of the MPD’s bomb unit, as was one of the Agents serving as a temporary liaison to the FBI.

“Rachel?”

“Phil wants us,” she told Santino, and they began to creep around the various teams to reach him.

She was thrilled to see the pops of joyous yellow among those combing through the debris. Whatever had motivated Homeland to seal off access to the evidence had done more than slow down the investigation; it had also broken the camaraderie that had united the different law enforcement teams who were working Gayle Street. Rachel had known the investigation had stalled, but she hadn’t realized that the primary reason was Homeland itself.

Sturtevant couldn’t have known, she thought to herself. Just coincidence, how I’d be needed to come in here and break the stalemate. Really.

Rachel decided to bring the Chief of Detectives a good bottle of Scotch, for no reason. Really.

They crossed the length of the old store to reach Phil. The MPD’s bomb unit had taken a position near the front of the building, picking through pieces laid out across multiple tarps. She flipped her implant to reading mode and saw that each tarp in Phil’s section had the same address from Gayle Street scrawled across the linoleum beside it in black permanent marker.

“Well, that’s not coming off,” she muttered under her breath.

“That’s okay.” Santino had heard her. “I’ll remind Homeland to burn this place behind them when they move out.”

The men from the MPD’s bomb unit greeted them, and Phil nodded curtly at her as she and Santino reached him. He hadn’t worked through his anger from the previous night, but Phil was a professional; his conversational colors showed her turquoise core wrapped tight in reds, set aside to deal with later. He was also yellow-white with excitement as he knelt by the edge of a tarp, a thin metal probe in his hand.

“What’s up?” Rachel asked Phil as she dropped to the ground beside him.

“Check this out,” he said, using the probe to carefully nudge a scrap of melted plastic aside. Beneath this were two sections of small bronze rings, a scorched face plate sandwiched between these. The rings were still bolted to a badly damaged segment of pipe. Rachel scanned the bronze rings and found a layer of broken glass above the face plate, like the protective glass bubble which shielded the face of a clock.

“What was this?” she asked.

“We’ve seen pieces of these at a couple of the other sites, but this one is the best example so far,” he said. “We think it was part of a velocity water meter.”

“And?”

“Gayle Street uses external displacement water meters at utility junctions. This type of meter is designed for a private residence. There’s no reason for something like this to have been inside of a building.”

Rachel stood up so quickly she heard the blood rush in her ears. Behind her, she heard Santino say, “Whoa.”

“Yeah,” Phil said. “And if we’re right and this was part of the bomb, it was probably the arming device. Take a peek inside,” he said to Rachel.

She did. Her scans found traces of copper and gold, with the residue of plastic and solder burned to a coarse residue around the interior of the bronze ring. “Electronics?”

Phil nodded. “There was something digital in here. I don’t think we’ll be able to reconstruct it—there’s not enough of it left—but it could have been a receiver, maybe an old cell phone… Something simple, with a power supply. It released the gas in the line, primed the reservoir, and sparked the explosion.”

“All of that with this?” Rachel tapped the tarp next to the bronze rings with the toe of her boot. The rings were small enough to vanish under her foot.

Santino shrugged. “The largest component would be the power supply. The rest of the mechanism would take up practically no room at all.”

“Batteries aren’t that big,” Rachel said.

“Batteries are too unreliable,” Santino said. “Two-plus years in an active device might drain them dry. They’d need a long-term power source, and those would take up space.”

“Right,” Phil agreed. “Rachel, when we found the murder scene last night, did you notice anything that looked like a water meter?”

“No,” she said, thinking back to the smooth dusting of drywall and ash which had covered the floor. “All I found was the blood and those footprints.”

“That’s it?” Phil sounded surprised. “No drag marks, no impressions to show where a canister had been set down?”

“No, nothing,” Rachel said.

“That’s weird,” Phil said. “You’d think he would have put the canister on the floor when the cops interrupted him.”

“I might have missed it,” Rachel admitted. “Hope and I didn’t stay there too long.”

Phil stifled a yawn. “That, and it was really late.”

“I miss all of the good stuff,” Santino said, half-joking.

Rachel wasn’t sure if there was a proper name for the glare that your friends gave you when you reminded them in an offhand way that you were sleeping with the most beautiful woman on the planet—the Germans might have had one, she didn’t know—but this was probably one of those times when words weren’t needed anyhow. Santino took a step backwards and pretended to fend them off with an open hand.

“Hey, Rachel?”

Rachel tossed a quick scan over to the Hardware section. Joie Young, one of the Agents on loan to the FBI, waved to her. Joie’s conversational colors were slowly churning in antagonistic reds and oranges across her core of rich scarlet. “Bad news?” Rachel asked her.

“A friend of mine over at the NSA just let me know that Homeland’s sending Bryce Knudson.”

Exhilaration and adrenaline swept through Rachel. Five hundred feet away, Joie burst out laughing. “I thought you hated that guy,” Joie said.

“I do,” Rachel replied. “Oh, I do. This’ll be fun.”

Like most things in her professional life, antagonizing Homeland Security had been a calculated risk. OACET came first—OACET always came first—little else mattered except the welfare of the collective. Rachel’s duties at First MPD had been to make alliances, to bind the police to OACET as closely as she could. She had made rapid progress within that community, and now she was slowly expanding her reach outward to encompass the other law enforcement organizations which worked with the MPD.

The Department of Homeland Security didn’t fall within her scope. Not yet, at least. In August, Rachel had fallen deep in the stink over at Homeland, and she hadn’t found a good opportunity to pull herself out of it. Today, she had decided to go with the odds: since Homeland had alienated its brethren, she’d use that to OACET’s advantage. And, hell, if throwing OACET’s weight around could help solve Gayle Street before the country burned itself down? So much the better. They would all remember that, even Homeland.

Especially Homeland. If she could get the Gayle Street investigation rolling again, Homeland would have to realize that OACET made a better friend than an enemy.

(No matter the outcome, she did not expect to smooth things over with Bryce Knudson. Even if Rachel and Homeland resolved their bumpy patches, she was sure Knudson would keep her on his personal shit list. She was fine with this; she’d never forgive him, either. That one time they had worked together, Knudson had tried to coerce her into breaking the law in a way that would have most likely cracked OACET wide open, and when she refused to take the bait, he had told the press that she and the rest of OACET were child-killing machines. After things had settled down, Santino had asked her if she was going to have Knudson fired, and she had laughed and said she was looking forward to working with Knudson for years and years and years.)

Rachel and Santino walked to the front of the store, where a catering company had set up a few coffee machines on a folding table. There were some mismatched chairs nearby, but judging by their condition they predated the occupation; when Rachel suggested they should have a seat and wait for Knudson, Santino shivered and his colors ran a sickly green. Instead, they stood around and chatted with the various officers and agents who found their way to the coffee.

The automatic doors squealed open a few minutes later, and Bryce Knudson pushed his way towards her.

If she could still see, Rachel was sure that her conversations with Knudson would have been especially awkward. His head was shaved to the scalp, and Santino assured her that light reflected off of it in a truly spectacular fashion. Her encounters with Knudson usually occurred when he had reached the point of rage, and to her, his head glowed as though it was lit from within. Had she the use of her eyes, she would have surely lost control of their arguments by trying to make his bald dome pop like a tick.

He was bright red now, and shining as though he had been polished. Rachel covered her mouth to hide a smile.

“Agent Peng!” Knudson’s low bellow made her think of a bull who had learned to talk.

“Hello, Knudson,” she said as she topped off her Styrofoam cup of coffee, her voice all syrupy sweetness. “Can I help you with something?”

Laughter rolled towards them from all corners of the room. Knudson’s head snapped around, his conversational colors whipping with reds and blacks, as he realized he was in the center of a group of heavily-armed people who did not think kindly of him.

“Come with me,” he snapped, and then turned and walked away from her, heading towards an empty doorway cut in the nearest wall.

“You coming?” she whispered to Santino.

He shook his head. “If I do, I drag the MPD into a federal fight.”

“Yeah,” she sighed. “I’ll try and keep you out of it.”

She went after Knudson, the sound of their feet the only noise within the suddenly silent building. Rachel passed a quick scan through the doorway and found a flight of stairs that led to what must have been a manager’s office. The stairwell was dark, the lights busted out years ago. Knudson might have been hoping she’d trip and fall, but the joke was on him.

(Or maybe it was on her—sometimes it was hard to tell.)

At the top was a wreck of a room. Graffiti covered the walls and ceiling. A one-way mirrored window had been smashed out years before Homeland had taken control of the building. It took Rachel a moment to realize why Knudson had brought her up here, until she realized that the pile of trash which covered the floor had been swept aside to make a small clearing near the missing window. In that clearing was a folding table and a matching chair set up like a desk, a desktop computer surrounded by fast food wrappers, a portable clip lamp gripping the edge of the table like a miserable bird… This was Homeland’s on-site office.

Beneath them was the whole of the store with its audience of more than a hundred law enforcement officers, all of whom were pretending they couldn’t see Rachel and Knudson on what was, for all practical purposes, a balcony.

This idiot wants to feel like he’s in control of the situation, so he goes and puts us on a stage? Rachel thought. How delightful.

Knudson rounded on her, black and red rolling within a dark storm-cloud gray. “Agent Peng, you had no—”

“Let me stop you there,” she said, putting herself into an unmovable parade rest as he came at her and tried to use his size to force her backwards. “I had every right to come here and bring my team and our support staff to assist. We’ve already made some terrific progress—members of the MPD’s bomb unit think they found part of a detonator—and we will share this information with you.

“Because that,” she said as she took a fast step towards him, “is what we are all supposed to be doing. Collaborating to find those responsible and bring them to justice. Or am I misquoting the rhetoric?”

“You want rhetoric?” Knudson snapped. “Try watching the nightly news. The last few days, Homeland’s been tried in the media. They’ve decided we’re responsible for Gayle Street.”

“And you think this is going to help?” Rachel gestured towards the floor below. “How is shutting the rest of us out supposed to improve anything? The purpose of Homeland was supposed to promote collaboration, not more territoriality and infighting.”

“I don’t know most of these people,” Knudson said. “I can’t keep track of what they’re bringing in or taking out. Homeland is vulnerable, Peng. The public doesn’t understand what we’re supposed to do, and the only time we make the news is when they’re screaming about how we’ve fucked up. If Homeland doesn’t control who has access to our information, it could be used against us.”

She suppressed the sudden urge to smack her forehead: at least when she had this argument with Mulcahy, her frustration was usually offset by the novelty of riding in a classic sports car. “If you do control access—especially like this, like you’ve got something to hide!—the media, the general public, they’re going to assume the worst. If you collaborate, you’ve shown how the police and the other federal agencies will back you up. If the media is dumping on you, Knudson, spread the blame around!”

“Because that’s worked so well for the NSA,” Knudson said, the sarcasm so thick within his conversational colors that the reds and blacks literally dripped. “Let’s all thank Edward Snowden for this brave new world of transparency and accountability, and the NSA is finally the super-villain we all knew it was.”

“Snowden is full of shit,” Rachel heard herself say.

“Don’t you fucking dare!” Knudson snapped. “OACET is worse than Snowden! Every single one of you should be tried for treason!”

“We didn’t—” Rachel started, but caught herself even before she saw the burst of anxiety from both Phil and Joie, fifteen feet below. She quickly sent her argument down a safer path. “We came out with as much information as we thought the public could bear at one time, and we were open about what we chose to share, and why. The way Snowden disclosed information, like he was teasing the highlights of a movie? It turned the issues, intent, and methods into the same shitty mess.”

“He was one employee. No, not even that. Snowden was a contractor.” Knudson barked a laugh. “OACET is a federal agency. At least one of you things should have remembered your oaths.”

“You’ve got to be joking,” Rachel said. “When we volunteered to join OACET, we didn’t know what they would do to us. Before they stuck all kinds of ungodly crap in our heads, each of us swore to uphold the Constitution. After we learned what they wanted us to be, we realized there was no way to keep our oaths without going public.”

“I’ve heard that story before,” Knudson said. “And Manning gave a better press conference.”

“Okay, try this: when you have a misinformed public, you get a misinformed response. Can you imagine what might have happened if the press found out what Homeland’s been doing here?”

Knudson leaned towards her. “Is that a threat?”

“No, Knudson, but you should ask yourself why you think it could be one.” Rachel decided to give him one last chance. “Listen,” she said, as calmly as she could manage. “Try and see what’s going on here from my perspective. What do you think would have happened if the public found out about OACET through a news site? If they learned about OACET any other way, it could have destroyed the country—it would have destroyed America’s reputation. Once we found out that we had been lied to about our purpose, we came out to put the record straight. Not because we couldn’t have stayed in hiding, but because the consequences of being caught were too high.

“I’m saying the same type of thing is happening here, now. In this building. By suppressing information, you’re creating conditions where the outcome will be a hundred times worse than if you were open from the start.”

“If that information gets out, maybe,” Knudson snapped. “But if it’s locked down, then everybody benefits. The atomic age is over. A bomb is just a fucking bomb—nuke Manhattan and maybe twenty million people get sick and die—but in the digital age, information is power.

“You don’t get it,” he said, and now his underlying rant was beginning to emerge. “OACET was supposed to be the next generation of weaponry. We could have had decades to establish a competitive edge. But thanks to you, every enemy we have is trying to develop their own versions of OACET, and you know they aren’t going follow your false moral code.”

“False?” Rachel arched an eyebrow. She had wondered why Knudson hated the Agents, and now she knew. “I am the living embodiment of the surveillance state, and I’m sick of hearing how that means I should have no say in how I use my own technology. Ask any Agent—we’re scared shitless of what we could do, so we all make sure we don’t do it! It’s pretty fucking simple!”

“Don’t you dare pretend to take the high ground with me!” Knudson shouted, all cold blue ice. “If OACET had stayed undercover, we could have monitored you. But you know how this works—you know that once the technology is out there, we start getting sloppy about how we use it. OACET may pretend to be all moral today, but it’s just a matter of time before you lose that fake edge of yours. Come back in a couple of years, Peng, once everybody is used to you and you think you can get away with doing whatever you want. Then tell me how you’ve never once abused your powers.”

“Thank you,” she said to him.

“What?” His colors froze; he hadn’t expected that.

“I couldn’t figure out why you had forced Homeland to close the others out of the evidence,” Rachel said. “That was you, right? You were the one who made that decision? I couldn’t understand why you’d force Homeland to do something that stupidly self-involved. But what you just said told me more about your personal philosophy than anything else.”

The anger flared within his colors, so bright she nearly recoiled. Instead, she stepped forward, coming up on her toes to break through his personal space. She lowered her voice so the crowd below couldn’t hear her as she pushed him. “You’re a coward, Knudson. Worse, you’re a coward who’s got power, and you’re incapable of seeing that other people with power aren’t afraid to do the hard thing—the right thing!—and reach out and help... Not hiding in a hole and covering their own asses.”

When she could think again, the first word in her mind was centiseconds. That must have been all of the time she needed for her conscious and unconscious selves to go to war, because she very clearly remembered making the tactical decision to take the hit. Instead, she found herself rolling away so Knudson’s heavy fist grazed her right shoulder instead of landing on her face.

And that extra momentum tipped her straight through the open hole where the windows should have been.

Rachel reached behind her and grabbed the metal sill with her left hand. Distantly, she heard two separate cries of pain: Phil and Joie were riding her body, and they felt the edge of the broken glass stuck in the sill pierce her palm.

Knudson was standing over her, red and orange and yellow as he tried to decide what to do.

“I am not a problem that will go away because of a fifteen-foot drop,” she hissed at him.

He grabbed her arm and hauled her up.

They stared at each other for several long seconds; Knudson looked away first, the professional blue in his colors slowly fading as he realized what he had done. This was a career-ender. They both knew it. You did not attack another federal agent, no matter how she provoked you, no matter if the agency she represented was unpopular. No matter if she wasn’t technically human.

Rachel used her good hand to unbutton her suit coat, and then pressed her other hand against her hip to keep her blood from pooling on the floor. Jenny Davies would never stop shouting at her.

“I used to be a soldier,” she said, when she had finally decided what to do with Knudson.

He didn’t bother to look at her.

“You want to know why you’re wrong? Ask the soldiers. Better yet, go find a commanding officer in the Army and ask them if social networking has changed how they operate. They’ll bite your damn head off.”

A trace of curious yellow appeared in Knudson’s reds, and he turned towards her.

“Soldiers have a voice, Knudson. Do you realize how incredible this is? One soldier asks a question, it gets picked up by others, and soon it’s a big thing and our commanding officers have to give us an answer. They have to give us a good answer, one that’ll stand up if we beat on it to check if it’s true.

“And if they don’t? If they ignore a problem and pretend it’s no longer an issue? The soldiers won’t forget. We remember—we keep it alive. It becomes a part of us.

“This has never happened before,” Rachel continued, as she tried to ignore the hot red stain spreading up her dress shirt. “There have been armies as long as there have been civilizations, and this is the first time that soldiers have access to some of the same information that their officers use to send them off to war. Yeah, it’s a huge pain in the ass for the officers, but ask a soldier if they want to go back to how things used to be, when they went off to die without knowing why.

“You’re right. Information is control. It’s power… But that’s not always a bad thing. It’s a brave new world, Knudson, for better or for worse, depending on how you look at it. We’re all trying to find our way.”

She started towards the stairwell. Somewhere down there, someone had some Band-Aids, or a clean sock, or anything, really: she was losing a lot of blood. There was a tampon in her purse if nothing else turned up, but talk about an undignified solution, that stupid little string dangling from her fist…

“Peng?” Knudson said quietly.

Rachel froze. Knudson’s tone of voice suggested he was about to apologize; his emotions showed he would shoot her dead if he could get away with it. She looked over her shoulder at him, playing along with the niceties.

“Never lecture me again.”

“That better be a request,” she said without bothering to turn around. “Because it’s not an order. Not coming from you. They didn’t just give OACET access to new technology—they gave us the authority to back it up. I walked in here and took over Homeland’s precious little playground, and you can’t do shit about it, Knudson. If I exist because Congress thought that cyborgs were the only way to force the kids in the federal government to share their toys, then by God and country, I’m going to do my job.”

She walked off, telling herself that Knudson wouldn’t be stupid enough to take a shot at her when her back was turned, and besides, she’d be able to see it coming anyhow so it was not an issue and she was not getting woozy from blood loss and…

The hand rail is right beside you if you need it, Rachel told herself, her new boots ringing on the aluminum stair treads as she descended. But you don’t need it now, and you will not fall down once you reach the bottom. Yup, you’re perfectly fine.

The steadiness of the main floor was a blessing; she barely even noticed how the anxious orange of the crowd eased when her feet hit solid ground. Still, she needed to finish the job.

“I tripped and fell out of the window,” she said, as loudly as she could without crossing over into a shout. “If I hear any other version of that story, I will deny it, and I’ll have some strong words for the person responsible for that rumor.”

Above her, Knudson’s conversational colors shifted. Not towards the blues, as she had hoped, but deeper into the reds and blacks. He was not about to accept any favors, not from her.

So be it.