“I can fix it. I hope.”
A glass of water entered her scans; one of the officers had found the sink. “Thanks.”
“Listen, Agent Peng—”
She cut him off. “Get him in restraints,” she said. “Have the lawyers talk to me if they give you any shit.”
With that settled, her headache decided it was as good a time as any for her to black out.
FIFTEEN
Mulcahy’s office wasn’t nearly as vivid as usual, but the humans had faces, with eyes and ears and all the pieces in between. They wore clothing that was more than just fabric, color, and folds, and stood in a room where the books had titles on their spines. The scents of the room were less distinct than she was used to, but sounds were sharper; she wondered how Josh could go through life when every little noise sounded like the beginnings of something serious.
Smell… Musk and gun oil, standing out in equal parts, with a little bit of leather wafting up between them as Josh leaned to one side and his nose came closer to the couch. All masculine smells, which surprised her—she would have assumed Josh’s senses would have been cued to the women in the room.
“I was working,” he reminded her, a small measure of irritation coming into their link.
“I’ve seen you multitask,” she said, and he laughed aloud.
She tried to swing her perceptions around to check for other differences, but experimentation hadn’t been Josh’s priority when he made the recording. His attention was on Nicholson and the militia men. Anything else was peripheral information that had made it into his memories of the meeting by exposure, not intention, regardless of its interest to Rachel.
(Case in point: Memory-Josh finished resettling himself on the couch. Rachel, riding along in the sensations of his body, felt the unfamiliar relief of testicles freed from the weight of a nearby thigh. Weird!)
Mulcahy picked up the coffee table and threw it across the room.
“That’s when you started recording?” she asked.
“Yes.” In the memory, Josh’s focus swung towards a tall Chinese woman with short black hair. Rachel couldn’t place the woman’s face until she heard her taunt the man in the camouflage jumper beside her.
“Oh Lord,” she said, as the man in camouflage—Ethan Fischer—grabbed Memory-Rachel by her head and drove it straight at Mulcahy’s mahogany desk. Memory-Rachel screamed like a movie starlet as she landed with a crash. “Why did anybody buy that? I phoned it in.”
“Everything was moving too fast,” he said. The perspective of the memory swayed from Fischer to the door. FBI agents swarmed into the office, shouting commands. Most of Memory-Josh’s attention was on two of the FBI agents with their fingers on the triggers of their guns; out of the corner of his eye, he watched as Fischer put up his hands and played the part of a good submissive minion.
“That’s a tipoff right there,” Rachel said. “Everything we’ve got on sovereign citizens says that when law enforcement pushes them, they make a stand and fight back. This guy’s got to be a plant.”
“Yeah, but why?” Josh replied. “And who put him here? Did you get a read off of the FBI?”
“They’re legit,” she said, as the FBI agents stood down. “Real reactions. None of them were playing along with Iron Core.”
“Who?”
“Sorry. Ethan Fischer. Nicholson’s second. The guy who’s hogtied in the hospital as he waits for them to reset his face.”
Fischer wasn’t literally hogtied in his bed, but only because Rachel had been unconscious when the officers did the tying. Her body had decided it was done getting clubbed in the head for the day, and the hospital floor was comfortable enough. Santino had saved her from the doctors and whatnots by insisting that no, she didn’t need a CAT scan, and did you need to reread those forms you made her sign? He had still been shouting when Rachel’s personal physician had arrived: Jenny Davis had thrown around the proper medical terminology until everybody had calmed down, and woken Rachel up long enough to get her out of the hospital and back to OACET headquarters.
Jenny had told her to lie down and rest until her headache went away. So Rachel had ordered an extra-large pizza and asked Josh to brief her on the meeting while she stuffed herself with pepperoni and cheese.
Rest was relative.
To be fair, nobody was resting this afternoon. It was getting on towards sunset, but the building was still full of Agents, agents, and others. The guys from Homeland weren’t even trying to be subtle about their presence anymore, and were lurking openly in the halls. Worse, the FBI said some randos had jumped the barricade and snuck in while everybody’s attention was on Nicholson and the media in his entourage. They had torn through the old post office, grabbing souvenirs whenever they could. There were signs of snooping everywhere.
Mulcahy had let the FBI know that this would not be tolerated. To their credit, the FBI had taken this to heart—the only places where they hadn’t set up guards were in the private offices. Hence, this briefing on the couch in Mulcahy’s office, as Josh was firmly believed that a recorded memory should be viewed under circumstances as close to the original conditions of the recording as possible.
It was an odd experience, to be sitting in the same place across time and in two different bodies. Rachel would have been happier sitting in one of the comfy club chairs, but nooo, she had to sit right here where Josh had sat when he made the recording, and deal with the phantom discomforts of anatomy.
Not so much of that at the moment, though. She shuffled around on the leather couch as the top layer of Memory-Josh shouted around her, waving his arms and doing everything he could to make the stand-off in the office as bad as it could get. He kept telling the militia men to back off, Back Off! his voice cracking from panic. The militia wasn’t nearly as well-trained as Fischer; they began to press forward—
“So close,” she sighed through their link, as Fischer soothed the room through calm assurances. “He knew exactly what to say to get everybody back under control.”
“Yeah,” Josh said. “Thanks for getting him out of there.”
“No matter what else happens, Nicholson’s lost him. Did you see anyone else who could take over for him?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t have a fallback waiting at the factory.”
They watched as Fischer left the room. Then came Mulcahy’s assurances that there would be no more misunderstandings, and the FBI followed him out. The woman standing by the window opened it, and Rachel watched herself leap from the third story.
“At least that looked believable,” she said.
“Heart-stoppingly believable,” her friend muttered.
In Josh’s memory, the militia men gasped and rushed to the window.
“Stop.” The remembered version of Mulcahy’s voice was as hard as the original. “Calm down, or the FBI will come back. You won’t be able to get rid of them again.”
This time, the militia men looked to Nicholson, then to each other when he offered no guidance.
“Stand down,” Mulcahy told them, and they moved away from the window. The memory of Josh shook as he tried to keep from laughing, his quiet puffs of air lost in the shuffle of combat boots on expensive area rugs.
Mulcahy turned towards Nicholson. “You wanted to talk to me,” he said, standing in the space where the coffee table had been. “Talk.”
“Yes. Yes, well…” Nicholson squirmed as the blond giant in front of him walled him off from the rest of the room. “OACET… Your organization has been… Yes. Three years ago, when OACET—”
“No,” Mulcahy said. “No sales pitches. No prepared speeches. Tell me why you kidnapped my wife and oldest godchild.”
“Listen—”
Mulcahy held up his hand. It appeared to be a call for silence, but a glowing red dot appeared in the center of his palm. Nicholson’s mouth snapped shut at the sight of it.
“This isn’t yours,” Mulcahy said, as he moved his hand through the air. The dot tracked the
center of his palm, pulled together from fluid motes of light which seemed almost alive.
“What?” Nicholson couldn’t pull his gaze from that red dot.
“My team took down your scouts before the meeting,” Mulcahy said. “Don’t worry, we didn’t hurt them. They’ll be released when we let you leave.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Nicholson said loftily as he tore his gaze away from the laser.
“It was a cute workaround.” A voice—a very close, very loud version of Josh’s normal speaking voice—dominated the recording. Rachel felt her cheeks contort as the memory of Josh grinned at Nicholson. “You can’t use normal communications when OACET’s involved. We’d yank a cell phone signal or an email out of the air, just like that!” Their fingers twisted and a snap! shot through the room. “We had to watch the EMF around the warehouse until we figured out your communications strategy.”
“A ten-milliwatt laser can be seen from over three miles away,” Mulcahy said. “You’ve been running Morse code with someone in a local high-rise. That line of communications will be closed by the time this meeting is over. We’ve located your contact and we’ll have her taken into custody as soon as you leave this building, and we are very interested to learn who her contact is.”
“I don’t have a contact—”
“We thought you’d double up on the same strategy to let your men back at the warehouse know we didn’t screw you in this meeting,” Memory-Josh said. “You didn’t disappoint.”
“Your spotters took a position where they could see into my office from the roof of that building,” Mulcahy said, pointing towards a nearby skyscraper. “They planned to signal another spotter in position on the east side of the city. The go-between is the one with the phone, and he’s the one who’d call the factory if the spotters saw us take you down.”
“Same way you’ve been getting messages in and out of the factory,” Memory-Josh said.
Nicholson was shaking his head. “That’s not what I’ve done,” he said. “The spotters, yeah, I put them in place for this meeting. Can you blame me? I need to stay in contact with my men back in Maryland. But I’m not getting Morse code messages… I’m not sending them, either! I don’t have to!”
“You don’t,” Mulcahy said. He put his hand down, and the red dot vanished. “Someone else does. Who gave you the idea for the communications setup for this meeting?”
Nicholson’s eyes darted towards the corner where Fischer had stood, but he didn’t reply.
“You’re being played,” Mulcahy said. “Someone is manipulating you, and they’re using…Ethan, I believe? as their mouthpiece. You’ve got five minutes to convince me that you’ve got enough control to salvage this situation before I take all choice away from you.”
Nicholson stared up at Mulcahy, dumbstruck.
“Get him out of here—” Mulcahy began.
“It’s too big!” Nicholson blurted.
Mulcahy took another step towards him.
“I know what we said, but you should always have your elevator pitch locked and loaded, no matter what,” Memory-Josh said. “Otherwise, you’ll miss the best opportunities.”
Nicholson just shook his head, but another member of the militia spoke up. “No!” The other man paused, as if shocked that he had opened his mouth, but he pulled himself together and added, “Not…not the plan. He means the government.”
Nicholson tried to stand; Mulcahy laid a hand on Nicholson’s shoulder until he sat back down. “We want the same thing,” Nicholson tried. “We—everybody here—just wants to be free.”
The head of OACET didn’t respond, but Nicholson pushed on through the silence. “This country has lost its way,” he said. “The government is too powerful. Not the elected government—the one that exists behind the bread and circus. The people don’t have power anymore! That’s why Hanlon tried to take control of you—he knows that politics isn’t power. I mean, the guy decided he wanted to be a Senator, so he became a Senator. But he did that to get control of OACET. If politics was power—real power!—he could easily have become President. But why should he want to? The so-called most powerful man in the world is just a figurehead who gets five years older for every one that he’s in office.”
Nicholson paused to catch his breath. “That should mean something to you,” he continued. “That to him, political office was just a means to get control of OACET.”
Mulcahy didn’t respond. Neither did Josh, or any of the other Agents in the room.
The militia leader tried again. “The government doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. “Not in the way that was guaranteed to us by the Constitution. The system is set up so there are no more winners or losers, just an endless status quo.
“You can’t let them do this,” he said. “They could hurt—No! They do hurt too many people. OACET can change that. You have the power to wipe the slate clean. Everything’s gone digital. You can dump it. Dump it all. Wipe out this system of lies so we can start from scratch.”
“If what you’re saying is true, you’ve admitted that OACET is in power,” Mulcahy said. “What makes you think we’d be sympathetic to you?”
The militia man who had spoken before called out: “Hanlon.”
Nicholson nodded. “You’ve been hurt,” he said. “He tried to break you, but you fought back and broke him instead. He gave you power and you used it to take down a Senator—Why not take them all down?
“Listen, America might not have started out as a feudal society, but that’s what it’s become. As it stands now, the system is set up to profit from the people. The system is broken—irreversibly broken! We’re here…” he said, as he gestured towards his men, “…because we love our country. We don’t want to see it destroyed.”
His men were nodding. The brave one said, “You have to help us.”
“No,” Mulcahy said. “We don’t.”
Nicholson stood and tried to stare Mulcahy down. It was like watching a Honda Civic drive straight at a canyon wall. “Yes,” he shouted, “you do! You’re obliged to help your country!”
“Obliged?” said Memory-Josh.
“Morally obliged! Ethically obligated!” Nicholson shouted. “You’ve got the power to help us break free of this system, and if you can’t recognize that, we’ll make you!”
“Fuck!” Rachel broke her link with Josh and leapt off of the couch. “Fuck fuck fuuuuuuck!”
Josh rubbed his temples as the recording snapped into fragments of light and sensation. “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
“Jesus H. Christ!” Rachel’s voice sounded high and strange in her own ears. “What I wouldn’t give to go back in time and sit on Chuck Palahniuk until he comes up with a better plot.”
“He’s not completely wrong,” Josh said. “Nicholson, that is. Not Palahniuk.”
“I know,” she said. Then, more quietly: “What do we do?”
Josh didn’t reply.
The memory had faded away and had taken the sharp details of the room with it. The familiar soft forms of her world weren’t nearly as welcoming as usual: the room still stank of agendas and frightened men.
“We’re trapped,” Josh finally said. “We can’t negotiate with Nicholson. Not at all. If we do…”
“…he’ll be the first of thousands of anti-government conspiracy nuts,” she finished for him. “All of them looking to OACET for salvation.”
He nodded. “The terms have changed. It doesn’t just end with getting the hostages back. We’ve got to have a decisive victory, real scorched-earth. No survivors, figuratively speaking. Or we might as well not win at all, because others will see us as sympathetic to the cause and they’ll keep coming.”
Rachel flopped back down on the couch; the smell of leather puffed around her. “Fuck Hanlon,” she said. “He knew this would happen.”
“No, he didn’t,” Josh said. He stood and moved to search a spot high on a bookshelf, nudging framed photographs aside but coming up empty. “He’s not a god. All of u
s together are four hundred times smarter than he is… Where’d Pat hide his brandy today?”
She pointed to a drawer in a nearby cabinet. “Check the shoebox behind the legal briefs.”
“Thanks.” He returned to the couch with a squat glass bottle, and they took turns passing it between them until they began to feel marginally better.
She didn’t realize she had sighed aloud until Josh said, “Penny for your thoughts.”
Rachel burst out laughing.
“I know, right?” he said with a grin.
“Oh God, we were such sweet summer children,” she said, and opened a new link. She sent him her own memory, of a stairwell and a tall man made of forest greens, with a complicated mess of colors stitched over that green. The man-shape said, in Hill’s voice, “Martyrs. Scary as fuck.”
Josh took another drink, and asked, “Is Nicholson a martyr?”
“You tell me,” she said. “You’re better at reading people than I am.”
“Couldn’t tell.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “He seemed sincere, but not to the point of sacrificing himself for the cause.”
“Where’s the woman? The one on the building who was sending the messages to Fischer?”
He shrugged. “We don’t know. She slipped her tail.”
“Great. Just great. Is there more to the meeting?”
“Yup.”
“All right,” she said, as she resettled herself in Memory-Josh’s position on the couch. “Let’s do this.”
“Where were we?” Josh asked, as images and sounds moved themselves around.
“You didn’t pause it?”
“You can’t pause a memory.”
“But you can record one?”
She felt him push aside the bundle of complex answers before saying, “Ah, we were here. Ready?”
She consented, and the feeling of being crammed inside a body larger and heavier than her own crushed her down against the leather couch again, as the physical details of the room took on edges, letters, and faces.
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