“Yeah, well…” He winced in orange uncertainty and green guilt, but those were offset against a pale soft blue she didn’t recognize. “In neuroscience, housekeeping is what they call energy expenditure designed to maintain non-signaling functions—”
She held up a hand.
An opaque glaze filmed over his conversational colors. “You’ve heard of synapses, right? How the brain uses electric impulses to activate them?”
Rachel nodded as she fumbled with her straw. Mountain Dew? A king-sized dose of caffeine and high-fructose corn syrup sounded like just what a very shady doctor would order.
“Well,” her partner continued. “When a synapse is involved, that’s a signaling function. Those are responsible for the majority of energy consumed by the brain. Housekeeping tasks are what the brain spends the rest of that energy on—they’re processes that the brain uses to clean up after itself. You remember me telling you about the research which is used to show that there are higher energy requirements after mental exercises?”
“Yup.” She could practically hear the rabbit scream as it fell to its death down the tangent-hole. “But I ate last night, right after the link. Josh carb-loaded me.”
“You loaded on the front end. Has your headache been getting worse all day?”
“Yeah,” she admitted. That smug pink was getting fierce.
“I’m betting your brain has a lot of housekeeping to do after last night,” he said. “That type of link probably needed a lot of cleanup. Josh made sure you replaced your reserves to recover from the active signaling functions, but housekeeping has been sucking you dry all day. How’s your head now?”
“Still hurts,” she said. She craned her neck to test it. “But getting better.”
The smug pinks overtook him, as he pulled back out into traffic.
Rachel pointed at him. “No more experiments.”
“Sure,” he said, as his colors rolled over themselves in a saucy wink.
Eight miles and ninety minutes later, they showed their credentials at the FBI’s first security checkpoint. The FBI Laboratory at Quantico was one of the most sophisticated buildings she’d ever visited. She was familiar with the general layout; Jason worked at the Consolidated Forensics Lab, and the D.C. Metropolitan Police had borrowed heavily from the FBI’s design when they constructed their new state-of-the-art forensics department. While older, the Quantico building was similar in that it was steel, glass, and concrete, and above all, clean. The leather soles of Rachel’s boots squeaked on the smooth composite floors as they walked to the first security checkpoint.
Elissa Smith was waiting for them. The FBI ballistics specialist had a core the color of a purple orchid, and was bouncing on her toes in eagerness. “Agent Peng!” she shouted, waving. “Officer Santino! C’mon down!”
Rachel waved back. Smith was small and almost flighty, except when she was handling weapons. Put any type of firearm in her hands, and she turned from a bubble-headed soccer mom into a calm, steady-handed professional with deadly aim. Rachel imagined her kids won every Bring Your Parents to School Day, especially if their mother showed up with visual aids. Say, oh, a bazooka.
“Come on, come on,” Smith said. “Hey, Agent Peng, while you’re here—”
“I can’t,” Rachel said, forestalling the inevitable. She liked Smith, but the woman had an inexhaustible interest in ballistics science, and that made Rachel and her shooting abilities a treasure in Smith’s eyes. Every time Rachel came down to Quantico, Smith took her out to a different firing range and put her through a dozen tests on different weapons. “I want to get back to the city after this. The kidnappers are coming to OACET headquarters later today. I should be there if I can.”
“Oh.” Smith’s bright yellow anticipation of an afternoon at the firing range blurred in grays. “Yes. Yes, of course. Let’s get going, then? Coffee first? Coffee later?”
Smith’s prattling moved off to the edges of Rachel’s consciousness as she handed her credentials over to the guard at the second checkpoint. His conversational colors sharpened to a point as he checked her ID, traces of cautious yellow and uncertain oranges appearing around OACET green.
Caution? Maybe. This wariness was new.
No. Not new, her subconscious reminded her, as it stretched and rolled over, ready to resume an already full day of nagging. It used to be like this all of the time.
As Santino moved to take her place with the guard, Rachel scanned the others in the main entrance hall. Most were going about their business, treating her and Santino as part of the background.
Others, a very few others, were watching her. They all wore that same cautious yellow.
Stupid woman, you thought things had changed.
She told her subconscious to shut up, and kept walking.
The Firearms-Toolmarks Unit was kept in the basement. As they descended via the usual chain of stairs and elevators, Rachel noticed familiar faces here and there, old acquaintances from past cases. When they spotted her, OACET green bloomed, followed by that same cloud of yellows and oranges. One man, caught off-guard as he turned a corner and nearly bumped into her, froze in shock before turning yellow and walking quickly in the opposite direction.
Santino had noticed. He bent low and whispered, “What’s going on?”
She moved her scans up and down the hall to be sure.
Yup.
She leaned towards her partner and whispered back: “They’re scared of me.”
TWELVE
AKA: Lobo’s handgun was simple.
She kept trying to think of a better description, but “simple” worked. Not cheap, not complex, just a decent all-purpose gun from the NORINCO factory in China.
“We’re seeing more and more NORINCOs over here,” Smith said, her colors darting back and forth as she searched through the FBI’s firearms database. “They’ve been trying to break into the international market. Decent weapon. Inexpensive. This model is used by the People’s Liberation Army as their designated sidearm. Ever fired one?”
“Hmm?” Rachel shook her head and broke away from her deep scan. “Yeah. In Afghanistan.”
“Right, right, Afghanistan is the global clearinghouse of weapons,” Smith said, tapping on her tablet’s miniaturized keypad. “Used to be. Syria is catching up. Caught up, I suppose. 2012 was a good year for Syrian arms dealers. Not so good for the rest of us… Ah, found it! You’re sure of the serial?”
“Yeah.” Rachel was having a hard time following Smith’s train of thought. The woman’s conversational colors bounced from topic to topic faster than she could fire them off verbally. Smith’s emotions didn’t shift too much—everything stayed within the hues of professional blues—but the yellows and whites of intense concentration moved around like a laser light show across a dark navy sky.
“This is it.” Smith flipped the tablet around and tried to pass it down to her.
“I’m good. I’ll read it from over here,” Rachel said. Her headache was back. Grabbing the serial numbers from AKA: Lobo’s handgun had been relatively easy, but she had gone through every pore of the gun to make sure she hadn’t missed any evidence. Her scans had come up with black dirt, a different kind of black dirt, granite dust, gun oil, and yet another kind of black dirt, for all the good it did them. She rested her head on the cool steel tabletop of Smith’s office workstation and began reading. Her head came up a moment later. “The PLA reported this gun as stolen?”
“Yes, along with a larger shipment of firearms,” Smith said. “Much larger. Several thousand guns. All makes and models from NORINCO. What was in those crates?”
“Not several thousand guns,” Rachel replied. She had told Smith about scanning the crates. (Had scanning those crates been legal? Santino had argued that anyone knowledgeable about Agents should assume that an ‘in plain sight’ standard applied to hidden objects as well as objects left in the open. He felt that since Nicholson and his men had obviously done their research on OACET, they should have expected Josh
and Rachel to poke around in the figurative medicine cabinet. She’d have to talk to Judge Edwards at their golf game tomorrow to see if this would fly in court, or whether it should be introduced at all since very few other Agents had her capacity for scanning; doing so might unnecessarily complicate the already-complicated discussion of Agents and the legal system with the assumption that what one could do, they all could do, and damn them all for differences. For the time being, she had cloaked it in the chaos of the kidnapping. Smith had accepted that excuse at face value, and Rachel had to resort to her old fallback of crossing her fingers and hoping that everything she did wouldn’t spin around to bite her in the ass.)
There was a knock on the door to Smith’s lab. Rachel tossed her scans over her shoulder to see Santino let himself in, three bottles of soda stacked on top of each other like a precarious tower. His core of deep cobalt blue was covered in a shifting layer of gritty gray sand.
Rachel raised an eyebrow; her partner mouthed “Later,” and passed out the drinks.
“What have we learned?” he asked.
“Another arrow pointing straight towards some level of Chinese involvement,” Rachel said, poking the handle of the NORINCO pistol.
“How convenient,” Santino said, as he nudged aside a few papers on the lab table and hopped up beside her.
“Occam’s razor,” she reminded him.
“Occam needs an update,” he said. “If the simplest answer gets blamed for everything, anything even slightly complex gets a free pass. It’s why we’ve been so busy.”
“Apparently…” Rachel sighed. “…Lobo’s gun was part of a large theft of Chinese weaponry. Since when is major weapons trafficking considered slightly complex?”
“If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that a conspiracy is just a bunch of assholes with access to resources,” Santino said.
Rachel twisted open the cap on her soda and didn’t bother to answer him.
“All right. Try this. Which makes more sense? That Nicholson went to China and became indoctrinated in a militia mentality that’s unique to the United States, or that he picked up the sovereign citizen ideology first and went over there to start laying the groundwork for a false trail? Or, hell, maybe he just took a vacation.”
Smith, who had been watching this exchange like a cat following butterflies in the garden, added a slight, “Um?”
“Yes?” Santino said, rather sharply.
“Sovereign citizens? We’re—the FBI, I mean—we’ve classified them as domestic terrorists. To be honest? Nicholson scares us. The movement doesn’t have many charismatic leaders. If he manages to unite them? He gets an army of about a hundred thousand soldiers. And most of them? Gun owners who hate us.”
Smith’s voice moved up and down as she went from question to statement, and her hands fidgeted around her tablet. That, along with the threads of uncertain oranges that kept tearing themselves away from the whole cloth of her conversational colors, drew Rachel’s attention from the handgun in front of her.
“Nicholson’s just a rich kid,” she said to the ballistics specialist. “I’ve seen him. He’s got no experience in leading an army.”
“He’ll find someone who does,” Smith said quietly, the oranges beginning to wrap around her in futile self-comfort. She ran her hands along the pieces of a disassembled assault rifle lying across her work station, then began to put it back together. A metallic shink shink shink echoed around Smith’s office as she slid each piece of the weapon into its place. “The smart ones always do.”
“Yeah,” Santino said. “They know they can’t handle everything on their own, so they delegate responsibility like any good manager. If Nicholson has a good second-in-command, he’ll do his job and let his second manage everything else.”
(Rachel’s subconscious took an older memory out of storage and blew off the dust. An OACET Administration meeting in the War Room, Josh and Mulcahy planning strategy for the coming week, Mare telling Mulcahy that he needed to lay off and let her and Josh manage more of the administrivia of day-to-day operations…)
“Yeah,” Rachel said. “I can see that. But, guns and hair triggers for cops aside, why does that make him a threat?”
Smith’s hands were flying, with shink shink shink chasing each piece of the weapon home.
“The smart ones might start out leading militias,” Santino said. “If they’re lucky, they end up leading countries.”
Smith nodded as she completed her task, and set the assault rifle on the table. “We’re not saying that will happen,” she admitted. “Armed rebellions can be put down. But, you know, it’s not that we’ll win, but that we’ll have to fight. Right?”
(Her subconscious whispered again, not a memory this time, but a threat about martyrs and blood in the streets.)
“Gotcha,” Rachel said. She stood and placed AKA: Lobo’s gun back in its evidence bag. “Thanks,” she told Smith.
“Good luck,” Smith said, one hand resting on the assault rifle, her colors now set in steady blues.
Smith’s office opened into the main floor of the Firearms-Toolmark Unit. The hallway was wide and painted in industrial beiges, with the intermittent muffled sounds of gunshots coming from behind the thick steel doors.
“So, what happened?” she asked Santino.
“This way,” he said, and set out down the hall.
He led her back the way they had come. At the top of a stairwell, a man with a core of pea green was waiting.
“Hey, Campbell!” Rachel brightened.
Special Agent Campbell flushed in reds and the same gritty gray stress that she had seen in Santino. “Peng,” he said. “How you doing?
“Busy. We’ve got to get on the road,” she admitted. “Nicholson’s coming to OACET headquarters this afternoon and I want to be there.”
“I’ll walk you out,” he said, his colors flashing OACET green.
Rachel glanced at Santino. Her partner nodded.
“Yay, intrigue,” she muttered, as she and Santino followed Campbell through the door.
She had worked with Campbell on several occasions. The FBI Special Agent was one of the best crime scene technicians she had ever met. He and his team specialized in homicides; she assumed this was why he hadn’t been called in on the Nicholson case at the parking garage.
Santino picked up his pace. With his long legs, he put a few lengths between them, all the while pretending to be immersed in his phone. Campbell waited until he and Rachel were halfway to the parking lot before he stopped talking about his kid’s softball team. “We’ve been waiting for someone like Nicholson to come along,” he said quietly. “You guys have to wrap this up, and fast.”
“We’re trying,” she promised. “What have you got?”
He glanced behind them, as if looking for shadowy men with microphones. Rachel sighed and tried to direct him over to a nearby bench.
“Listen, I can’t—”
“Cyborg,” she reminded him, as she began to weave her shield around them. “I won’t mess with any snooping devices, promise, but they won’t be able to hear us either.”
“That’s no good,” he said. “Not for me, not here. That’d be as bad as if you tampered with them.”
“All right,” she said, and let her shield drop. “Can I ask a question?”
Campbell’s conversational colors wrapped around himself, like armor. It was a reflexive gesture she associated with interrogations, and it was disconcerting to see it happen in someone she considered a casual friend.
“Sorry,” she said, hands up and empty. “Forget I asked.”
“It’s weird when you do that, Peng,” he said, as a good-humored purple appeared beside an uncertain orange.
“Telepathy’s a timesaver, but I can’t read minds. Not really.” She turned and started walking towards Santino. “Call me if you decide you want to talk.”
“Fine,” Campbell sighed, going just a little red around his edges as he hurried to catch up. “We’re all wond
ering when you’re going to take over.”
Rachel stopped. “What?”
“Not you,” he clarified. “OACET. Well, maybe you, unless there’s someone else at OACET who’d be better at running a criminal investigation.”
“No, that’d probably be me,” she admitted. “Trust me, this is the first I’ve heard about taking over. Do you know something I don’t?”
Campbell’s colors shied away from her Southwestern turquoise.
“Hey, I’m not lying,” she said, as she turned to face the FBI agent. “Why would I kick you guys out?”
“No, you’d keep us around,” Campbell said. “We’d just be…” He shrugged, and gestured towards the FBI Laboratory behind them. “I guess we’d be yours.”
“What’s wrong with that?” she asked. It was a gentle tap to his equilibrium; she waited to see how he’d spin.
His surface colors weaved in and out of themselves, OACET green warring against professional blues and the burnished gold of a special agent’s shield, but he pulled away from answering.
“Campbell, listen,” she said. “There’s no reason why OACET would want to bundle you into our assets. The FBI is the best there is when it comes to kidnappings—it’s not like we could tell you how to improve on what you’re already doing.”
“You say that now,” Campbell replied. “But what happens if we haven’t made progress by this time next week? Your charter—”
“Oh shit,” Rachel groaned, as she finally understood the wariness in the FBI agents that she had passed in the halls of the Laboratory. “That fucking charter!
“I hate that thing,” she said, more quietly. “Sorry. Shouldn’t have taken your head off. It just…”
“I get it.” Campbell nodded. “But we’re worried, okay? We deal with enough inter-agency bureaucratic bullshit without OACET crashing down on us.”
“Where’d this rumor come from, anyhow?”
“It’s just been going around,” Campbell said, without a trace of dimpling. “Everybody’s talking about it.”
Brute Force Page 18