“What’s up with the door?” she asked.
“Shawn,” he replied. “He said he wanted to do something quick and fun.”
As she entered the room, he moved to retrieve a file from one of the ubiquitous filing cabinets that lined nearly every vacant space in OACET’s new headquarters. In this post-Agent age, paper trails had taken on new importance; the War Room had been named for its files, most of which held the names and last known locations of those whom OACET considered viable threats to their organization.
Rachel threw a scan through the filing cabinets on the west side of the War Room, double-checking the hidden safe secreted away in the wall behind them. It was a smallish safe, about the size required to store a decent collection of shotguns. That safe held the really dangerous files, the ones that had the names of senators and congresspersons and the other powerful folks who were responsible for OACET’s creation. Not the sanitized story that had been sold to Congress in exchange for funding. That story was a happy tale of government agencies coming together to work for the Greater Good, an alignment of young professionals from different federal agencies to smooth out the problems inherent in complex bureaucratic systems.
No. The files had nothing to do with that story.
In the real story, the one hidden in those dangerous files, networking the Agents had only been the first step in building America’s new cyborg army. The next step had been five years of intense mental conditioning. Brainwashing, really, a thorough deconstruction of personal autonomy. The technology which allowed them to access any networked machine was bioorganic in nature, and needed a human host to function. The politicians, though, didn’t need those human hosts. No, they didn’t need them at all. Those who were involved in this part of the plan didn’t want cyborgs; they wanted robots in human bodies, ready to act and react as directed. So they had planned that the five hundred young people who received the cybernetic implant would be broken down, slowly, until nothing was left but the willingness to follow orders.
It hadn’t worked out that way.
Rachel knew she could never repay Mulcahy and Hope Blackwell for what they had done to break the surviving Agents free. If it hadn’t been for them, she would still be in California, living alone in a cold apartment, blind from staring up at the sun for days—
Nope.
Rachel scanned the edges of the safe again, making sure that it was invisible to any members of the FBI who might need to run a security sweep. She was one of the few Agents who knew Mulcahy and Josh had copies of those files somewhere else, backups kept in yet another secure location that wasn’t on government property in case the worst happened, but they had never told her where and she hoped she’d never need to learn.
Josh’s conversational colors moved in and out in varying shades of orange as he searched through the files. She flipped frequencies to look at him, and found he was fairly neat and tidy: his too-long-for-government-work dark brown hair was neatly combed, and his clothing looked less rumpled than usual.
“You okay?” she asked. His colors glazed over with orange-red irritation, so she quickly added, “You’re too organized.”
He glanced up at her, and she pantomimed running her hands through her hair.
“Shit,” he said. He used his hip to slam the filing cabinet drawer closed, and began to finger-comb his hair so it fell across his eyes. “Thanks. I’ve got to go on camera soon.”
“Your clothes, too,” she said.
“Yeah, this suit came straight from the cleaners. I didn’t expect to work today,” he replied, as he stripped off his pants and handed them to her. “Here. Mess these up a little.”
Rachel wadded his pants into a tight ball and sat on them. Her friend did the same with his suit coat.
They faced each other across the War Room’s small table, and she gave him an anemic smile.
Josh knew her too well. “What?”
“I think—” That sickening sensation in her stomach rolled into the back of her throat, and she paused to bite down on it. “I think I’ve got another problem for you.”
“It’s the right day for it,” he muttered, as his digital barrier sprang into place. “Shoot.”
Josh’s shield differed from hers or Mulcahy’s. Where Rachel took strands of frequencies and wove them into shining chainmail, and Mulcahy forged them into an impenetrable fortress, Josh’s shield looked like a glowing plate of spaghetti. His barrier contorted and writhed, a mess of frequencies that seemed to have no purpose other than to clutter up the EMF.
Except anything that touched this mess got tangled up within it.
It had taken a few light pokings before Rachel had realize that Josh’s barrier was as intentionally sloppy as the rest of him. When he was under his shield, any targeted contact was bundled up and moved aside, its information registered so Josh could follow it back to its source at his leisure. Josh was as safe as she was behind her own shield, and had the additional benefit of trapping the signal of anyone stupid enough to snoop on him.
She felt him reach out and tug on the ends of a few loose frequencies, pushing them into an order that must have made sense to him. “There we go,” he said. “I don’t like how this place is crawling with the FBI. Better safe than sorry. What’s on your mind?”
Rachel wanted to tell him—she started to tell him!—but her mouth sidestepped the inevitable one last time by moving to the newest problem on her list. “What’s wrong with Mulcahy?”
Josh’s colors shot towards an anxious orange. “What do you mean?”
She thought about the best way to describe what she meant and came up empty. There was no good way to describe the lack of Mulcahy within Mulcahy. Vagueness would have to do.
“He’s here,” she said, tapping her head, and then laid her hands across her heart. “But he’s not all here.”
Blue relief came over him. “Christ, Rachel, you see too much,” he said. “Leave this one alone.”
“Josh—”
“This is how he’s getting through it,” he said. “He’s fine.”
They weren’t sharing a link, but her reaction to the dimples in his conversational colors—Liar!—was so strong that it jumped between them.
“He’ll be fine,” Josh amended. “Once he’s done what he’s got to do. Leave it alone.
“Please,” he added. “This’ll just waste time we don’t have.”
It wasn’t as clear a dismissal as the one she had received from Mulcahy, but coming from Josh, he might as well have taken her arm and escorted her to the door. She told herself to stand, and couldn’t.
He moved to place a hand over hers; she yanked her own hand away before he could touch her. Skin contact would be the end of any secrets. Jason, she reminded herself. There’s Jason.
He closed his eyes as the sorrow and stress strengthened within his colors. “Tell me,” he said, softly.
She sighed, and did.
Rachel told him nearly everything, all about Glazer—now Marshall Wyatt—and helping him escape, about what had happened in the police station. About the psychopath who had practically turned up on her doorstep and had offered to do the things she couldn’t. About how this might not be just a kidnapping, not if he was involved.
She let the words run together, fast and sometimes in the wrong order, and even though she couldn’t help but think about Jason, she managed to keep his wooly gray fixed in her mind. Gray, gray, gray, gray…
Never his name.
Through it all, Josh kept his fists pressed hard against his temples, his colors frozen and yellow-gray from shock and sickly horror. “You realize…” he began.
“What I’ve done? Oh, yes. Absolutely.”
“No.” He shook his head, his brown hair sliding over his knuckles. “This is… This goes way beyond…”
He stopped. She counted along with him—ten, nine, eight, seven…the simple grounding technique that all Agents used to keep themselves in the here and now—and he tried again when his colors finally unwound t
hemselves from their tangled knots. “I knew the police station had been booby-trapped, but you think they did that just to facilitate an escape?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s disturbing,” he said. He stood up, and swung his suit coat over his shoulders. “Almost epically disturbing. How long had they been planning for Glazer to be captured?”
Rachel shrugged as she handed him his pants. “Best I can tell, as soon as they learned I was to start working at First District Station. The building renovations were mostly finished by the time I was finally cleared to work.”
“Right. So, how’d they learn you’d start working there?”
She blinked.
“They didn’t learn it from us,” he continued. “Our internal security is too good. Nobody has ever been able to break into our systems and snoop around, and they’ve tried. Hard.”
She began to run the options around in her head. The idea of a spy within OACET wasn’t even a consideration, and she trusted Josh’s knowledge of their digital security. Two options emerged, neither of them all that pleasant.
“Someone on the MPD,” she said. “Or someone....a private party with connections to Congress.”
“Let’s consider the MPD option first,” he said, as he ran his fingers along the surface of the nearest filing cabinet. There wasn’t much dust, but he smudged what he could find along the collar of his white dress shirt. “Why would they think to have connections at the MPD on the off-chance that they could get a shot at OACET? That’s bullshit. That’s too much ground to cover for any two people, no matter how smart they are.”
“Could have been coincidence,” she said. “Somebody from the MPD said something to someone, and it got back to Wyatt.”
“Except now he’s back,” Josh said. “The moment before things got bad.”
Now it was Rachel who was rubbing her temples. “Oh shit,” she muttered. “Yeah, that’s definitely not coincidence. Shit shit shit.”
His hands slammed down on the table beside her. “Find his source,” Josh said, his colors picking up in a red whirlwind. “Your only job is to learn who’s feeding him information. Because there’s a huge difference between your part-time job and this kidnapping, and if the information on both of those came from the same place—”
“—then the kidnapping was protected information,” she finished. “He only found out about it after enough people got involved to create a leak.”
He opened a link, and the sensation of close-kept terror crashed into her. “And if it’s protected information, we’re screwed.”
Rachel nodded. The idea of protected information made her feel sick. Bad enough that Avery was taken; worse—unimaginably worse—if she had been taken as part of a professional operation.
She pushed back against their link until it broke. “Say this is protected info. Who do we want running it, a government op or private party?”
“Either comes with its own special brand of fuckery,” Josh said, electric blue energies running across his conversational colors. “Did Wyatt ever say that he knew what was about to happen? Did he even hint at kidnapping?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Just that something bad was about to go down.”
Josh began pacing the length of the War Room. “So he’s probably not in the loop,” he said. “Not directly. He probably just got word of mobilization when whoever’s in charge hit the switch and the plan went into action.”
“Could be something simple,” she said. “Maybe he’s monitoring email, phone calls… Has an active keyword search, like the NSA.”
“That wouldn’t be enough reason to go to the effort of booby-trapping a police station,” Josh said. “It’d have to be a sure thing. You’ve got to find his source.”
“Right,” she said, and stood to leave. She kept herself closed tight, and tried to crush her relief into a tiny ball to be played with at a later time.
Josh placed a hand on her shoulder, high enough so his skin brushed against hers as he opened a link. “Not so fast,” he said, anger flooding her mind.
Busted.
“Yeah,” Josh agreed. “You are. There’s going to be a hell of a reckoning for what you did. But, unlike Mulcahy, I have to prioritize. Holding you accountable for something two years gone is on the bottom of my list.”
“Listen—” Rachel began aloud, and then gave up on trying to keep him out of her head. She knocked his hand off of her shoulder and turned to face him. “You weren’t there. Mulcahy had just finished telling me that Hanlon was pushing the Senate to get us forcibly impressed into military units! He told me to buy him time to keep Hanlon off of us. I did my job, Josh!”
He stared at her, weighing her Southwestern turquoise against OACET green, a slip of sandalwood moving through these dominant colors as he tried to figure out where it should fit.
“Mulcahy told you to buy time, not blow up a police station and let a murderer go free,” he replied. “If you had gotten caught, that would have been the end of us. Not might—would.”
She wanted to hit him. She wanted to cry.
She settled on nodding.
“It’s in the past,” he said. “We got lucky. Things turned out for the best—that was our first big break, and you made it happen. But that was a gamble you shouldn’t have taken.”
Rachel couldn’t find the right words to sum up impossible choices. What she could do was grab his hands with her own, and shove every ounce of those moments into his head. All of her fear, her panic… Forcing him to relive those moments when she knew that Wyatt would escape, and that he would commit a whole boatload of murder on his way out, and she was the only one who might be able to mitigate that damage.
No, not might. Would.
“Fuck gambling,” she said, as she felt her friend’s mind squirm beneath the onslaught. “I made a bad call, but the alternatives were worse. I did what I had to do. I’ve gone over the options a million times, and I’d do it again.
“And,” she added, as she gave him the image of Wyatt on the other side of a fence. A psychotic, a killer…and there to help. “Whatever else he is, Wyatt helped us once before. He’s here to help us now—he wasn’t lying, Josh! Do you want me to turn him away, or turn him in, before we know what comes next?”
She gasped as he pulled her into a hug. Fear, both remembered and all too recent, tried to come inside, and they held each other to keep it at bay.
“No, you’re right,” Josh said, all but whispering into her hair. “You’re absolutely right. They took one of our children, Penguin! Do whatever it takes to get her back.”
FOUR
Detective Matt Hill was waiting.
For who or what, Rachel couldn’t tell. She was on her way upstairs to find Jason when she caught a glimpse of his forest green core standing just inside those huge bronze front doors. She raced down the stairs again to find him staring down at the FBI agent running security. The FBI agent was on her com, chattering nervously about needing clearance for a Metropolitan Police detective who wasn’t saying much but also wasn’t leaving…
“Hey, Hill,” Rachel said, as she circled around the FBI agent. “Guess you heard. I’m so sorry.”
He cocked an eyebrow, and his conversational colors moved towards curious yellows.
Rachel’s own eyes widened. “Oh shit,” she hissed, and grabbed him by his arm to haul him aside.
He humored her: she didn’t have much chance of manhandling any member of the Hill clan. Matt Hill might have been nowhere near as broad as Mako, but he was just as tall and nearly as solid. She maneuvered him around the protesting FBI agent and deposited him in a nearby chair. “Okay,” she said, as she stood over him. “Who called you down here? Your cousin?”
Hill’s colors moved towards Mulcahy’s cerulean blues.
He was here officially, then. Good.
“Gotcha,” she said. “Promise you won’t freak out?”
“Peng—”
“Promise me!” Hill was standing again, the reds of alar
m and panic beginning to surface. She pushed an index finger against his sternum until he returned to the chair. “Avery’s been abducted.”
His colors froze in place, white shock bursting within them. “No.”
“They took her and Hope Blackwell. Mulcahy’s told me to get our team together and start turning over rocks. Now. I bet the others are—”
One of the bronze doors opened with a bang. Raul Santino, his cobalt blue core nearly lost beneath layers of orange and red, blinked a few times to accustom his eyes to the dim light of OACET headquarters. Something in his jacket pocket began to beep, and he peered into the gloom. “Rachel?!”
“Here,” she called out to her partner.
Santino sprinted over to her and Hill, nearly knocking the FBI agent down on his way. The beeping grew louder; Rachel reached out to his phone and told it to shut the hell up, and the proximity alarm cut out mid-tone. It was replaced by the squeak of sneaker rubber on polished stone, followed by the semi-awkward half-hug shared by troubled men.
“Where’s Zia?” Rachel asked.
Santino and Hill broke apart. “I told her to stay at home,” Santino said, concerned reds and worried yellows growing more intense as he thought of his girlfriend. “It’s—”
“Perfect,” Rachel cut in. After her partner had fortified her own security system, he had then all but turned Zia’s house into a castle. Surrounded by a moat of lava. With an aerial defense grid of drones, and starving tigers roaming the grounds. “Best place for her. What do you know?”
“Nothing,” he said. “There are rumors that—”
Hill put a hand on Santino’s shoulder.
“Okay.” Rachel put both of hers up in surrender. “Hill just now found out about Avery. Let me run through what I know.”
It took her all of a minute. By the end, Santino had gone pale and Hill…
Hill was fiery, fiercely red.
Shit.
“Hey,” Rachel said, “don’t go getting any ideas.”
He glared down at her, the barbed tips of his anger beginning to point towards her.
Brute Force Page 4