Brute Force

by Spangler, K. B.

  Then, their joined selves broke apart, and they found themselves in their own skins.

  Reorientation involved lots of wiggling, an unconscious survey to make sure that all of the right bits were still in their remembered order. Bodies were strange. They stretched and moved and meant everything until you went out-of-body, and then they meant nothing.

  (It was more likely that bodies meant everything, as entwined deep links were an anomaly within the collective. It was more likely you’d accidentally trip over someone else’s mind and find yourself in two places at once, or ten, or a hundred. Limbs and knees that were intimately yours, with scars you remembered collecting in childhood or an ass you’ve wiped each day of your sentient life, suddenly becoming as much a part of the collective as the mind itself. What a nightmare.)

  Rachel stretched. Her right elbow throbbed; the injury wasn’t hers, and she shook out her arms until the pain went away.

  “Overextended it while boxing,” Phil explained, tucking his own arms around himself protectively as he settled himself back in his own body.

  “Getting old is going to suck,” Rachel grumbled aloud as she snapped their link. She hopped down from the bed of the truck, and began brushing the dirt from her pants.

  “Yeah,” Phil said. He followed her down, favoring his bad arm. “All the problems of aging, and we won’t even need to complain about them.”

  “We’ll still complain,” Rachel said, taking point and leading them back down into the dark recesses of the parking garage. “But it’ll be by shoving our sciatica into each other’s heads.”

  “Or Alzheimer’s,” he said.

  “Jesus!”

  “You haven’t thought about that? If someone in the collective gets dementia or worse… There are enough of us so the odds are really good it’ll happen.”

  Dementia within a hivemind… Rachel had to stop and lean against a nearby sedan. “Fucking ray of sunshine, Phil. That’s what you are.”

  “Yeah, well,” Phil shrugged and kept walking, moving his right arm gingerly to test its range. “We’re still young. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll cure old age by the time we get there.”

  She wasn’t too sure about that. OACET Agents tended to live fast. No one had died since the collective had been fully activated, but Rachel figured it was only a matter of time before the good-looking corpses began to pile up.

  Knock on wood.

  They backtracked through the parking garage. The relative peace of the upper levels gave way to the chaos of the crime scene, and the two of them plunged into the mess.

  “Want to see if they’ve learned anything new?” Phil asked, nodding towards the local and federal crime scene techs.

  Rachel paused and checked their colors: yellow-orange frustration was beginning to blur into gray stress, with none of the complex colors of hope within them. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

  “Nope,” she replied. “They know less than we do. Plus we’ve got a suspect to question, and they don’t.”

  “Point.”

  They kept their heads down and crossed to a staircase safely away from the yellow crime scene tape. Rachel’s attention was on the grounds below, so she was just as surprised as Bryce Knudson when she opened the door and walked straight into him.

  The Homeland Security agent recoiled from her, but as he leapt backwards, he started grinning. His mouth was in no way involved: the thick line of smug pink split Knudson’s conversational colors like a smile.

  “Hi, Bryce!” She waved at him with her left hand like an eager child. He saw the mass of scar tissue and his colors flinched towards red shame. She felt no qualms whatsoever about poking him. Twice a day, she had to massage lotion into that hand and run it through a physical therapy program, just to maintain flexibility. In her opinion, Knudson could deal with some reminders of the consequences of being an asshole.

  “Peng,” he said with a nod, and tried to push past her.

  “And Netz,” she said, cementing herself in his way. “Agent Netz. You’ve worked with him about a half-dozen times, I think? He’s with the MPD’s Bomb Unit? Has probably saved you guys from big booming painful death?”

  Knudson’s colors were already bright with OACET green, but they took on some of the greens of guilt and Phil’s silverlight. “Yes,” he said. “Good to see you again.”

  Liar, she thought, even before she spotted the dimples across his shoulders. She stood to the side and grinned back at him.

  Knudson stared at her as his smug pink grew until it swallowed the rest of his conversational colors, and then the door slammed closed between them.

  FIVE

  Rachel loved interrogations.

  She especially loved running them with Hill. The detective saved up a week’s worth of words and honed them to arrowheads, then used them to pierce his suspects until they were all but bleeding to death on the floor. But today, Hill was pacing on the other side of the one-way glass, his murderous reds whipping towards the man in the too-new suit.

  Instead of Hill, it was Santino who sat beside her in the interrogation room, the two of them watching the man across the metal table squirm.

  “Really?” Rachel asked him. “You’re a Staff Sergeant? What unit?”

  The man glared at her with deep-set eyes. He could have been anywhere between his late twenties and his early forties, depending on how well life had treated him; Rachel guessed he was much closer to twenty.

  “John Smith, Staff Sergeant, eight-four-eight.”

  “This is hilarious,” she said to Santino. “He couldn’t come up with anything better than John Smith?”

  “Could be true,” Santino said, as he nodded kindly to the man. “There’re a lot of John Smiths out there. I heard there’s even a John Smith convention.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Google it.”

  She cocked her head to the side and stared off into space as they let the man fidget in his suit. He had removed his tie and opened the buttons on his collar, showing off an impressive bruise where Hill had clotheslined him.

  “In case you’re wondering,” she told him, “we’re trying this new thing in interrogations. We’re all friendly-like nowadays.”

  Santino nodded. “The Obama administration sponsored an investigation into police interrogations, what works, what doesn’t. Turns out that when we treat you like a buddy, you’re more likely to talk.”

  “Ideally, we should be holding this conversation in a neutral location, like a coffee shop or a hotel room,” she said. “It’s been shown that police stations aren’t the best place to build a friendly rapport. But we’ve got to follow protocol.”

  “Takes protocol some time to catch up to the science.”

  “So true.”

  “People hate change.”

  “Preaching to the cyborg choir, brother.”

  “Amen.”

  The suspect’s conversational colors twisted in on themselves in the grays and oranges of stress and annoyance.

  They were lying, of course. Not about the research, but about having to keep the man in the suit in that particular interrogation room. The cops at the MPD loved that room. Two years before, Jonathan Glazer had picked his handcuffs and escaped from that very room, leaving a trail of smoke and flash bombs behind him. The cops had decided the damage made a lovely backdrop for their routine harassment of criminals. The linoleum floor was puckered from the grenades, charred streaks of soot marred the paint around the doorway, and, if you knew where to look for it, there was a dent in the metal tabletop the exact size of Jason’s forehead.

  Rachel drummed her fingernails against that dent, glancing from the man in the suit to the tabletop as if to say Your Head Goes Here.

  “Would some coffee help?” Santino asked him. “Some studies have shown that you’re more likely to trust us if you’re holding a hot beverage.”

  “Oh, no no no,” Rachel cut in. “I’m a little too angry at this guy. Let’s not give him something that I can throw
at his face.”

  “We’ve got no proof he’s part of the kidnappings,” Santino said. “So what if he’s giving us nothing but name, rank, and serial number? He could just be an antiestablishment nut.”

  “Well, I do my best to be all righteous law and order.”

  “Chung-chung.”

  “Exactly. So while I’m happy to question our alleged Mr. Smith, I’d rather not push the limits of my tolerance. After all,” she continued, as her eyes began to bore into the suspect’s, “I don’t know what I’ll do—this is the first time anyone’s kidnapped my niece.”

  The man’s colors blanched, then flashed shock-white as someone pounded on the other side of the one-way mirror with a large fist.

  “Sorry. De facto niece,” she said. “But Avery Hill is Detective Hill’s cousin’s child. I still don’t know what that makes them, exactly, except that Hill is very likely to beat the everlovin’ shit out of you if you don’t start giving us answers.”

  Santino cleared his throat.

  “If we let him,” she amended. “Which we won’t. Because we’re all friends here.”

  Hill pounded on the mirror again.

  “We’re just thinking of your safety,” Santino said.

  The man in the suit took a deep breath. “John Smith, Staff Sergeant,” he said. “Eight-four-eight.”

  Rachel stood up so quickly that the man in the suit jumped in his chair. She leaned forward and gave him a big toothy grin before she moved to the door.

  “Ah…” Zockinski was on the other side, one hand raised as if to knock. Rachel grabbed a file from his other hand before she slammed the door on him. She dropped the file in front of Santino, and resumed smiling at the man in the suit.

  “Ah, Mister John Smith?” Santino said, skimming through the papers with the perfection of a professional scholar. “Your prints came back. Says here your real name is Damian Brady. Also known as Lobo, last seen with the Sugar Camp Militia in Pennsylvania.

  “FBI’s got a hell of a file on you,” he added. “They’re sending it over. Until then, we know that you’re mushrooming us.”

  “Keeping us in the dark and feeding us bullshit,” Rachel clarified, then shouted: “It’s a joke!”

  The man in the suit jumped again, ever so slightly.

  “This is a good time to start talking, Mr. Brady,” Rachel said.

  “Maybe he only answers to his alias,” Santino said. “You could start calling him Lobo.”

  “No, I can’t. Not ethically.”

  Santino stood and left the room.

  Rachel began to whistle. She was terrible at whistling. Santino had told her on more than one occasion that he wanted to stuff her inside a tea kettle to see if she could learn anything. Today, she was working on a nautical medley, with lots of high, shrill notes.

  Santino’s phone number flashed through her mind. She opened the connection, still whistling.

  “Rachel?” Her partner’s voice wasn’t muffled, as it had been back at the parking garage. It was as clear as if they had been joined in a link, with none of the emotions that came with contact with another Agent.

  “Go.”

  “How’s he look?”

  “We’re not going to break him. He’s fighting stress and anxiety, but he’s got those under control.”

  “Yeah, Hill says he’s jumpy but locked down.”

  She cranked up the volume on her whistled sea chanty, and watched AKA: Lobo begin to turn green. “Does the FBI want him?”

  “No. Hell no! The guy Zockinski talked to? He said the Sugar Camp Militia is one of those sovereign citizen organizations. You arrest one of their members, they bury you in claims and litigation. He recommended holding Lobo as long as possible, but that we should avoid actually arresting him.”

  “Too late for that,” Rachel said. She had never gone up against a suspect who subscribed to the common law doctrine before, but she had known she’d trip over one of them eventually. It was too easy to use the legal system against itself. The legal system was a bureaucratic labyrinth of procedural items that needed to be just so! in order to function. Sovereign citizens walked up to this labyrinth and dumped enough paperwork into it to drown anyone unlucky enough to be inside at the time. “He was carrying concealed and tried to flee the scene.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I told the guy at the FBI. He said we should turn him loose before the militia’s lawyer gets involved. Said the lawyer’s a real shark.”

  “They have a lawyer?” Rachel’s sea chanty hit four false notes in a row; the man in the suit began to grind his teeth. “Militias don’t have lawyers. How the hell did that happen?”

  “They might not respect the law, but they have no problem using it to their advantage,” Santino said. “Think of it as a DoS attack on the legal system.”

  “DoS?”

  There was a long pause. “Are you sure you’re a cyborg?”

  “Right!” Rachel said aloud. Blue relief appeared in Lobo’s conversational colors as the whistling ceased. “New deal, dude,” she said. “We’re going to hold you for forty-eight hours. If nothing else comes up, we’ll let you go.”

  The suspect glared at her, then nodded.

  “Anything else?” she asked.

  The man in the suit shook his head.

  “You’re okay with this? With sitting on your ass in a police station? During what I assume is a very exciting time for your militia buddies?”

  The man sat motionless.

  “Anyone you want to call?” she asked, her hands knotting into fists. “A person who might be able to help get you out of here, perhaps someone in a legal capacity…?”

  Nothing.

  “Lawyer, motherfucker, do you want one?!”

  This time, when she lunged forward, the man jumped away hard enough to fall out of his chair. The door opened with a crash: Zockinski grabbed Rachel around the waist and hauled her out of the room, with Rachel thrashing and shouting obscenities at the suspect the entire time.

  “That was fun,” she said, after the door was firmly shut and Zockinski had tipped her onto her feet. “I never get to play the crazy cop.”

  “I’ll take another run at him in a few minutes,” he said. “Why’d you go at him so hard?”

  Rachel shrugged. “He’s not going to break,” she said, “or call that lawyer. But if he really is a sovereign citizen, I don’t want anybody claiming I didn’t try to cram a lawyer straight up his butt.”

  They entered the observation room. It was dimly lit, with a couple of comfy chairs and a twin to the metal table in the other room, minus the head-shaped dent and the rings welded to its face to hold the handcuffs. Hill was leaning against the one-way mirror, both palms pressed flat against the glass as if trying to mentally compel the man on the other side to talk. Beside him, Santino was on his phone, and Phil had the thousand-yard stare of an Agent talking through a link.

  “We need to find that lawyer,” Rachel said.

  Santino held up his phone, one hand covering the receiver. “Already on it,” he whispered. “The FBI’s getting Lobo’s recent history for me.”

  “Got it,” Phil said, his eyes snapping back to the interrogation room. The cardinal red that belonged to Joie Young, one of the Agents on loan to the FBI, was beginning to fade from his conversational colors. “Joie says the lawyer’s moved around a lot recently. Started in Pennsylvania, but moved down to Maryland this past year. I’m tracking his mobile phone number, and it puts him in Maryland right now.”

  “It’s a short drive between Washington D.C. and Maryland,” Zockinski said.

  “Yeah,” Rachel replied. “If I were the lawyer for a militia involved in something shady, I’d like to be within shouting distance when the cops come knocking.”

  “Yeah,” Santino said. “Now, if we could…”

  He trailed off.

  “Can anybody think of a legal reason to track that lawyer’s phone?” Zockinski asked.

  “Nope,” Rachel said. She felt the finger-light
touch as Phil tried to open a direct link, and she shook him off. “Don’t,” she said aloud. “I can’t know that phone number—I’ve run too many traces and might run his without meaning to.”

  “I’ve already run it,” Phil said.

  “Yeah,” she said, “but you’re not the Agent who’ll get dragged into court over this.”

  Hill banged a fist on the glass so hard that it shook in its frame.

  Beside him, Santino’s surface colors turned yellow-white with excitement.

  “What?” she asked him.

  “He came in with a phone, right?” Santino replied.

  “Shit! Yes!”

  Santino ran down to Intake to grab the phone, and Rachel started the long, tedious process of unlocking it.

  Worst part of the job, she thought as she reached out to her golfing buddy. Access to Lobo’s phone would have taken her all of a thought, but she was carrying the judicial system around her neck. At least today there was less of the usual hullabaloo that came with getting a warrant: Judge Edwards had heard about the kidnapping.

  “What can I do?” he asked.

  “I need to crack a suspect’s phone,” she told the judge. “I’ll be honest, we don’t have anything that isn’t circumstantial—he’s a member of a militia, and the abduction was carried out by men who were wearing militia gear.”

  “What did you bring him in on?”

  “Carrying concealed at the parking garage and trying to flee the scene.”

  “That’s slim. Can you make a case for resisting arrest?”

  “Nope,” she replied, remembering Hill’s long arm across the suspect’s throat. “He didn’t get much opportunity to resist.”

  “Try to make this easy for me next time…” Rachel heard the sounds of a keyboard from the judge’s end of their connection. “All right. He’s got an established history with militias?”