Brute Force

by Spangler, K. B.

  She looked. She flipped frequencies, and looked again. Then, she flicked her implant off and on a couple of times, and looked again, as hard as she could, before she accepted there was nothing wrong with her scans.

  “Is that supposed to be me?” she finally asked.

  Her friend brightened. “You can tell?”

  “I’m a little confused. What’s happening…with the… Is that a cornucopia?”

  “It’s not sexual, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he said, in the pure blues of an artist who had confidence in his work. “All cornucopias are symbolic of vaginas.”

  “Maybe,” she hedged. “But not all cornucopias are symbolic of my vagina.”

  She flipped frequencies again, and made herself look away from the central image of the piece. The rest of it was rough brushwork over light pencils; Shawn had barely begin to fill in the forms. There were handcuffs and guns, an owl shaped from green light, a man made of shadows, and more.

  “I’m trying to depict hypocrisy,” he said, as he picked up a brush and dabbed some paint on the canvas. “It’s an interesting idea—we see hypocrisy as evil, right? It’s a negative concept; if we’re being hypocritical, we’re wrong.

  “I don’t think you were wrong, though, or intentionally doing harm,” he said. “So how could it be evil? I’ve been rethinking it, and hypocrisy is, perhaps, when you make decisions that aren’t…authentic.”

  “Authentic,” she said, as she rolled the word around to taste its flavor. “Interesting.”

  “Not sure it’s coming out the way I intended,” he said, gesturing towards the painting with the tip of his brush. “The symbolism is too aggressive. I’m thinking something more like Titian’s Venus of Urbino, with you lying naked on a bed…”

  “Um—” Rachel began, and then noticed that Shawn was rippling with purple humor as he held in his laughter. She socked him in the arm hard enough to bump the paint brush across the canvas; he grinned at her as he spun more blue paint across his brush, and then painted over the woman’s figure on the canvas in wide strokes.

  “You didn’t have to wreck it,” she protested, rather weakly.

  “I did. I think this version is better.” He turned the canvas over. On the reverse side, framed by exposed wood covered in canvas, was a white square contrasted against a black square. The edges of these overlapped as if they were becoming as one. “There’s a meditation exercise where you have to envision a white shape and a black shape simultaneously. They need to occupy the same space in your thoughts, but not shift into each other, or turn into a single gray shape.”

  “Sounds impossible.”

  “It does at first, but it’s not. I think it’s easier for me than most people, though,” he admitted. Two squares of different shades of green appeared in midair as Shawn shaped his digital projection. These two squares slid into each other effortlessly; he flipped the projection around in the air, and the squares separated. “This is how I think of you. At least, since your confession the other night.”

  “I don’t know how I feel about it,” she admitted, as she traced the lines of the green squares with her mind. Separate, always, even when together…

  “I want to buy this,” she decided. “How much?”

  He laughed. “Let me flip the canvas and paint over the reverse,” he said. “If it comes out clean, we’ll talk.”

  “Keep it the way it is,” she said. “You can say the positioning is symbolic of the dual meanings of…hyperbole and…other shit.”

  “Always the poet,” he said, still purple. “I’ll think about it.”

  They left the fourth floor and went downstairs to collect Adrian and Sammy. They were curled up in the center of a table covered in small pieces of metal and electronics; Sammy seemed to be building a robot that looked like a silver block of cheese. They were both wearing clothes, which made it easier; Rachel managed to get Sammy on his feet and walking without clashing up against the mutiny of his mind.

  “C’mon, Sammy,” she whispered, her emotional scans off and her own sleeves pulled down over her fingers. “Let’s get you to bed.”

  He looked at her with huge brown eyes, and let her lead him upstairs.

  “I still think this is dangerous,” she said to Shawn, as Sammy leaned against her. She braced him as they climbed to the fifth floor, one slow step at a time. “Has anyone figured out they’re Agents?”

  “Probably,” he said. “But we’re all artists now, and artists are supposed to be nuts.” He grinned at her as he kissed Adrian on top of his head.

  “Eccentric,” Adrian murmured quietly. “We’re eccentric, not nuts.”

  Rachel squeezed her eyes tight as hard as she could to keep herself from crying, and hugged Sammy to her.

  She took the bed in the empty fourth room. The sheets smelled like bottled gardens and home, but sleep kept yanking itself away—as soon as she got close enough to touch it, the bed would drop an inch beneath her and she would jolt awake.

  Rachel activated her implant and peered through the walls; everyone but her was sleeping in soft cloudy blues.

  Instead of activating her healing autoscript, she conjured two squares of different shades of green, and tried to force them to fit together until the sun came up.

  SEVENTEEN

  It was Rachel’s deep and secret shame that she adored golf.

  Worse, she was good at it.

  Correction: she was great at it.

  Had her stars aligned differently, she could have gone pro. But no, they had aligned in such a way that her parents, upstanding suburban white-collar laborers that they were, had seen her aptitude for the sport at an early age and had (horror of all horrors) encouraged her. In those days, the Second Coming of Tiger Woods had put them in mind of a daughter who could place in the LPGA and fund a respectable lifestyle on endorsements alone. Her golf bag had been full of clubs with fancy names and space-age alloys, which were replaced annually as she outgrew them. They had made sure she had the best instructors, and sent her to exclusive summer camps to work on her follow-through.

  As soon as she had graduated high school, she had gone straight into the Army. It wasn’t as if her parents had given her much choice in the matter, right?

  These days, Rachel assumed her parents spent a lot of time laughing about the way things had turned out.

  Wind, southeast, 5mph. Distance to pin, 130 yards. The autoscript that helped her plan her strokes took her scans down the fairway, exploring the local environment and turning it into advice. She instinctively knew that this hole had been built with an easterly pitch, and the bent grass was still in dormancy. The ball would have a choppy landing.

  7-iron it was, then.

  Her golf gear was second-hand but decent. Not top-of-the-line, not like when she was a kid, but definitely decent. The 7-iron was easy to find: she used a pink sock with white kittens stitched into the fabric as its cover.

  “Agent Peng?” The man’s voice was nasal and irritating, even for a congressman’s. “You should probably use a different club.”

  She ignored him.

  “Agent Peng—”

  The 7-iron came up, paused, then whipped down to strike against the ball with a solid crack! The ball shot forward like a missile until it shed momentum, bounced once, twice, and rolled onto the green. A perfect shot. Even a blind moron (*cough*) could sink it in a single putt.

  She smiled politely at the congressman on her way to gather up her bag.

  Charlotte Gallagher fell in step with Rachel as they moved down the first greenway. “Remind me to never play you for money,” Gallagher murmured.

  “Back at you—you’re two strokes behind me.” Rachel shrugged, settling the heavy bag across her shoulders. “If I’m ever roped into a playing a ladies’ tournament, I might drag you along as a partner.”

  Gallagher laughed, a ripple of purple humor running over her core of dusty pollen-white. “Deal.”

  The other members of their foursome reached their balls ahea
d of Rachel and Gallagher. The women fell back to allow their partners to play through, mainly out of self-preservation. Chief Judge Andrew Edwards, current chair of the Joint Committee on Judicial Administration in the D.C. circuit courts, could shank a ball into the rough like nobody’s business. He was an absolute menace: since October, Edwards had hit two caddies, four golf carts, a snack stand (the same one twice), and managed to shear the head clean off a Canada goose.

  The congressman was no better. Gallagher’s partner made a fantastic show of checking the lay of the land, even going so far as to toss a handful of yellowed grass into the air to test the direction of the wind. Rachel and Gallagher each made a conscientious effort to avoid eye contact as he drove his ball straight into the nearest sand trap.

  Whatever. It wasn’t as if they were there to play golf, anyhow.

  Gallagher had been a pleasant surprise. Most of those whom Edwards invited along tended to be like the congressman—there to invest in three hours of quality schmoozing with the judge, the Agent, or both.

  (Rachel went along with it in part so she could shut down Josh’s lectures on the importance of making and maintaining political connections, but mainly because of Edwards’ coveted new membership at the Congressional Country Club. She had been politically ambitious herself, once upon a time, but the paisleys of political ambition clashed hard against a hivemind’s houndstooth. Ambition tended to be fairly one-sided, and if you did enter politics for the sake of your people, you tended to end up like…well, like Mulcahy. Sane through force of will alone.)

  The women watched as Edwards finally managed to put his own ball in the general geographic region of the pin, and they resumed their walk up the hill.

  Gallagher’s pace was slow; Rachel hung back and fell into step beside her.

  Oranges weighed themselves against professional blues in Gallagher’s conversational colors, but Rachel wasn’t worried. Edwards had told her that the bidding had been fierce to get into the fourth slot on their Wednesday roster, as plenty of people wanted to the opportunity to talk to Rachel about OACET’s position on Nicholson, militias, and similar.

  Gallagher had won, and Rachel was glad of it. As one of the FBI’s foremost experts on kidnappings—and, by no coincidence whatsoever, sociopaths and psychopaths— Gallagher should have been brought in the moment that Nicholson set up shop in his family’s factory. But no, she hadn’t been tapped for the Nicholson case. So, here she was, walking up a fairway with Rachel.

  Who, also by no coincidence whatsoever, was involved in the Nicholson case.

  “What’s on your mind?” Rachel asked.

  The oranges were joined by OACET green, and these pushed back against the blues. A mournful red appeared, but it was hazy, as if Gallagher was viewing it from a great distance. “We had Nicholson’s militia under surveillance before he came down to Maryland.”

  Rachel blinked, and forced herself to keep to their steady pace instead of shouting, oh, perhaps, “Holy balls, woman, why didn’t you do anything!?” or some other bridge-burning phrase.

  “Really?” she said instead, very mildly. “Undercover, I assume.”

  The older woman nodded, her tight brunette bob sweeping across her shoulders. “It’s no secret that the FBI’s been infiltrating militias.”

  “Right. Militias are the new terrorists.”

  A flutter of purple amusement came and went across Gallagher’s colors, but she didn’t allow herself to laugh. Terrorism was apparently still not a laughing matter, at least not in public.

  “On the record? International terrorists who have set up cells within the United States are still our top priority.”

  “And off the record?”

  “We’re broadening our internal definition of what it means to be a terrorist.”

  “Ouch.”

  Gallagher nodded. “The memos are starting to slip out. You’ve probably seen them?”

  “Yeah,” Rachel said. “Your national domestic threat assessments are bumping up against…Oh, jeeze, I forget the term du jour. Are we talking about sovereign citizens here?”

  “No,” Gallagher replied. “There’s some overlap in the ideologies of most militia groups, but members of the sovereign citizen movement share the same basic manifesto. If they’ve been shown to be aggressive but don’t identify as sovereign citizens or survivalists, we usually just call them extremists.”

  Extremists. Rachel hated that word. Such a mealy-mouthed attempt at pacifying everyone at once, to assure the public that, yes, we’re all generally good at heart but never forget that one person in a million thinks nothing of setting the world on fire. Oh, and it’s partially your fault if we don’t catch him before it happens, because we can’t be everywhere at once. Now get out there and watch your neighbors.

  “Question for you,” Rachel said. “Are they still called extremists when there’s a couple hundred of them living in the same compound?”

  “I’ll ask,” Gallagher said dryly. “To be honest, we prefer it when they gather in large compounds. Those’re easier to monitor than small cells.”

  “Easier to put a man on the inside, too.”

  “Yes,” Gallagher admitted. “But extremists aren’t dumb—most of them aren’t dumb,” she corrected herself. “And militias run by stupid people don’t stay in operation very long. It’s relatively easy to get someone inside a militia, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for them to gather intel.”

  “What about Nicholson?” Rachel asked.

  “Textbook narcissist,” Gallagher replied. “Most militia leaders have some narcissistic personality traits, but in Nicholson’s case, it’s full-blown.”

  “That’s usually good for getting a man inside,” Rachel said. Narcissists tended to underestimate those around them. As nobody could possibly be smarter than they were, these people with excellent dental work and suspiciously useful skillsets couldn’t possibly be threats.

  The FBI agent nodded. “Except…” That mournful red came into focus and clung to her professional blues.

  Rachel felt like eating her own foot, and perhaps punching herself in the face for good measure. “What happened?” she asked.

  “We don’t know.” Gallagher paused, then lowered her golf bag to the fairway. She pretended to look for something in the side pocket; Rachel unslung her own bag and knelt beside Gallagher, their heads nearly close enough to touch. Anyone watching would have seen two women searching through the endless peripherals required for the act of putting a small ball into a hole. “He went missing three months ago.”

  “I hate to ask, but—”

  “It’s likely,” Gallagher said. “There’s no body, no evidence he’s been killed, but—”

  Rachel sighed. “But three months is three months.”

  “Yes. It wasn’t my case, and everything I’ve heard has been secondhand…” Gallagher paused as her surface colors roiled; it didn’t take her too long to collect her thoughts, and the reds and blues spun themselves into order as she continued. “He was undercover using the alias Kyle Vanning. Young guy, early thirties. Had worked undercover as a vice cop before joining the FBI, so the Sugar Camp militia seemed a good fit as a first field test for him.”

  “Why? Nicholson seems like a hard first assignment.”

  “Nicholson didn’t run Sugar Camp. In fact, Vanning was at Sugar Camp for nearly four months before Nicholson joined. We were thinking about pulling Vanning out, since he didn’t find anything of concern, but then Nicholson showed up and introduced the sovereign citizen rhetoric. Sugar Camp is a more traditional operation, and we decided to keep Vanning in place to see how the new ideology integrated with the old.”

  “Gotcha.” Rachel spilled every golf ball in her bag onto the ground before handing one at random to Gallagher. The other woman began to pack up her bag; Rachel followed suit.

  “Except…” Gallagher sighed. “Except Vanning disappeared instead.”

  “Disappeared? Any idea where he went? Witnesses?”

  “We
have no real leads,” Gallagher said, as she resettled her bag on her shoulders. The two of them resumed their slow stroll up the center of the fairway. “He was last seen at a bar, drinking with another new member of Sugar Camp. The bartender says that the new member was later seen almost exclusively in Nicholson’s company.”

  Rachel felt as if she had been hit in the gut by an invisible sledgehammer. A deep, quiet breath to pull her rush of anxiety back so as not to call attention to herself within the collective… Concentrating on the grass, the birdsong, those brief hints of spring that proved the world was coming alive... “Ah.”

  “Thought you should know.”

  Rachel sent an image of Ethan Fischer to Gallagher’s cell phone. “This the guy?”

  “Vanning? No, it’s not him. And we never got a good photo of the new militia member.”

  “I’ll send some files over to you, but it might be a closed case—the man in this photo was murdered last night.”

  Gallagher whistled quietly. “Is he the one who attacked you?”

  “Yup. We think he was operating as Nicholson’s second-in-command, but manipulating Nicholson as they went. That’s about all we know about him—his history is pretty ripe.”

  “Where do you go from here?” Gallagher asked.

  “I’m interviewing the leader of Sugar Camp Militia after this,” Rachel said, as she checked the clock in her head again. She had over three hours before her ride arrived, and was very diligently checking the time at the insistence of the annoying voice in her head that kept chiming it’s all about time…it’s all about time… “I owe you,” she said. “Big.”

  “Pay me back by finding out what happened to Vanning,” Gallagher replied.

  “Deal.”

  “Thank you. I don’t know where—” The FBI agent stopped. She tilted her head towards the breeze. “Do you smell—”

  A gunshot broke the air apart.

  Rachel pushed Gallagher towards Edwards and the congressman. “Get them to cover!”

  The FBI special agent went one way; Rachel went the other.