“Sorry,” Rachel added as an aside to Hope.
“Nah,” Hope said in her too-hoarse voice. “’s fair.”
“If this happened, Hope might get Avery out of there, but she’s not trained for covert ops… It’s more likely that whatever she did would end really, really poorly. It’d be a slaughter. Dead hostages, definitely, and possibly the beginnings of a firefight with the FBI and officers when they reacted to the situation inside the factory.”
“Not so bad for OACET,” Mulcahy said, as he leaned on the chair. It began to creak and sag beneath his weight. “Very, very bad for me. I’d definitely resign.”
“Diplomacy couldn’t work,” Rachel continued. “Your man inside made sure that Nicholson wouldn’t agree to any terms. Once I took him down, Nicholson went completely cheese and crackers. He was an egomaniacal rich kid—he was never someone you could reason with! He thought that once Mulcahy heard him out, we’d be so swept up in how right he was that we’d fall in line. He had no idea what to do once he actually met us; Fischer would have been able to aim him like a gun.
“It was a really good plan, guys. Kudos. You plugged our escape holes ever so nicely. But the one thing I can’t figure out?” Rachel leaned forward, hands tented in her lap, as she glared at Knudson. “The China connection. What’s going on there?”
Knudson had spent the last few minutes staring into space, his surface colors moving in tempo with Rachel and Mulcahy as they laid out the reasons for the kidnapping. He shook his head. “A distraction,” he said. “We got our hands on a few crates of guns stolen from NORINCO, and it turned out they were part of a larger theft. Since Nicholson’s recent history included travel to China, we thought you and the FBI would waste time chasing down the idea that China was arming U.S. militias.”
Rachel leaned forward so her jaw rested on her hands and tried to look thoughtful, and not completely poleaxed by the realization that if Wyatt hadn’t shown up when he did, that would have been exactly what happened.
“Interesting,” she said. “And the rumors that China is developing an implant similar to OACET’s? Did you put those out there as part of the false trail?”
Red—furious, burning red across the table, as each of the men from Homeland sought to hold their tempers.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my goodness. That got y’all going!”
“Peng?” Mulcahy asked.
“Answer the question,” she said to Knudson.
“Those rumors are true.” The Homeland agent spoke through gritted teeth, red spinning off of him like gouts of flame.
“Well, damn,” Rachel said, as she sat up again. She cocked her head so she could look at Mulcahy. “They think a version of China with OACET’s capabilities is a serious threat. I think…” She turned back to Knudson. “…you did this because of national security, right? I mean, there were probably a few suitcases full of unmarked bills, plus the promise of job promotions and all that sweet stuff, but there was some fundamental civic duty in there, too. You did this so you could bring OACET under Homeland and get ahead of the Chinese threat.”
Some of the Homeland agents nodded, and Knudson said, “Not just China. If the technology was invented once, it’ll be discovered again. We need to get ahead of the threat, not react when it finally happens!”
“I’ve heard all of this before,” Mulcahy said. “A million times over. And our answer is the same: we were not intended to be weapons. We have free will and the ability to use it, and if the situation arises in which we might act as weapons to save American lives, we will address that situation as it comes.”
“And that’ll be too late,” said one of Knudson’s team.
Mulcahy picked up the chair, broke it in half, and set it aside with the same casual grace his wife had used to drive a man’s face into the floor.
Knudson’s professional blues wrapped around himself as protection. “We did what had to be done,” he said loudly, calling the center of attention away from his men and back to himself. “You’re too powerful to be left uncontrolled. We needed to do this.”
“Sure,” Rachel said. “Absolute power corrupts and all. Definitely does not set a bad precedent to break into a fellow federal organization that hasn’t given you evidence of wrongdoing.”
Knudson pointed to the documents from the safe.
“Hey Mulcahy?” Rachel asked, falsely bright. “If those documents contained compromising information, and I’m not saying they do, have you used it?”
“No,” Mulcahy said.
“Would you use it?”
“Only—” Mulcahy said, as he prodded the pieces of the broken chair with his toe. “—if pushed to the point when it needed to be used.”
“And when would that be?”
“Considering how we’ve been fighting for three years without resorting to its use? Never, I hope.”
“You were played, Knudson,” Rachel said. The shotgun resting on her shoulder was becoming annoyingly heavy, and she was still so tired, but this was so close to being finished… “The politicians who could be ruined by what’s in those files wanted them back, end of story. Everything else was a nice song and dance about patriotism and preserving the American way to get you to fall in line.”
Mulcahy slid the file towards Knudson. “I’m sure you’ve noticed this,” he said.
Knudson swallowed. “Where did you get it?”
“I believe you know her as Agent Johnson? Rachel apprehended her at the Congressional Country Club. Detective Hill spent most of yesterday interrogating her.”
The shotgun lifted from Rachel’s shoulder as Hill stood. “Ethan Fischer’s partner. She slipped OACET once in Maryland, when they tried to arrest her after the meeting with Nicholson. Still, that managed to kill communications between you and Fischer.
“But Johnson wasn’t just the go-between for Fischer. She was also the primary connection between you and six men in Congress.” Hill pointed to the file. “She said this was yours.”
Knudson nodded.
“She’s not saying much,” Hill said. “Enough to convince me she’s not going down alone. She gave up that file as security. It’s got your notes on the kidnapping in it, and some of Fischer’s notes on the same pages.”
“Fischer was good enough to give me a handwriting sample, and tried to kill me to get it back,” Rachel said. “I’m sure those pages would hold up under scrutiny.”
“I’ve read your notes,” Mulcahy said to Knudson. “You seem to be missing some information. Did you know it was always part of the plan to kill Hope, and possibly Avery and the other hostages?”
Knudson didn’t reply, but Hill said: “No.”
“Why do you say that?” Rachel asked Hill.
“These guys are law and order,” Hill said. “They think they’re doing the right thing. They wanted to minimize casualties, not build a plan around them. Tell ’em about the dead agent.”
“Right,” Rachel said. “Did you know the FBI had an agent inside Sugar Hill? And that he was almost certainly murdered by Fischer to convince Nicholson that he was on his side?”
The Homeland agents turned a deep orange gray.
“What are you going to do?” Knudson asked.
In response, Mulcahy took an RFID sticker in the shape of OACET’s new logo out of his pocket, and affixed it to the front of the file. He carried this to the open safe, and set it on the empty top shelf.
“Fill ’er up, boys,” Rachel said, and pointed at the canvas bags.
The Homeland agents stood and started loading.
It was a long five minutes before the safe was full again. Rachel scanned the Homeland agents from head to toe, and they were told they had to leave the bags behind, just in case.
Hope escorted them out, dragging the unconscious man across the floor by his arms.
Knudson was the last to leave. As he reached the door, he stopped and turned to face Rachel. “This can’t be allowed to continue,” he said to her. “OACET can’t be left as its own orga
nization. Not with the kind of power you have—the kind of power we need. You have to come in. There’s too much at risk.”
Rachel took a long look around the War Room before she met Knudson’s eyes. “I’m sure you thought you were doing the right thing,” she said. “But I’d shut up if I were you.”
Storm clouds of black and red anger rolled across him, and he turned to leave.
“Wait.” She held up her left hand, stretching it open as far as the scar tissues allowed. “A child might have died because you were dumb enough to let yourself get dragged into politics. My boss is letting you walk out of here, but do not confuse that with forgiveness.”
He glared at her until Hill loomed closer with the shotgun.
And then they were gone, and it was just Rachel and Mulcahy left in the War Room.
She collapsed across the table and thought she might spend the rest of the day right there. Or the week. She could probably get pizza delivered, if she tried hard enough. “That was close,” she sighed through the link. “If Josh hadn’t bribed his pilot friend to fly us back here in time, things might have gone sideways.”
“Maybe,” Mulcahy said, as he went to reset the locks on the safe.
She sat up. “What did you do?”
He grinned. It was the old Mulcahy grin, the one a wolf wears when he’s turned a trap on the hunters.
“What did you do?”
“Scan the wall,” he told her.
She did. Cinderblocks over thick unyielding sandstone. But behind that—
Rachel stared at him.
“You didn’t really think I’d keep our best intel in a tiny safe,” he said. “Did you?”
Rachel couldn’t help but laugh.
TWENTY-THREE
She was resting her eyes—not sleeping, thank you very much, she was not so old yet that she’d accidentally fall asleep at a party—but there was Marshall Wyatt, grinning at her over a Texas-sized steak. Young Wyatt. Her friend. Not the phony older version chatting up Zockinski’s wife at the buffet.
“Where’d you get that?” she asked, before she saw a matching plate loaded with steak and accoutrements resting on her lap. “Ah,” she said, and she fell upon the golden ear of corn resting atop a mountain of mashed potatoes. She glanced around with working eyes, and saw they were in Afghanistan again. Well, Afghanistan by way of Hope and Mulcahy’s colossal private greenhouse: she and Wyatt had never been to a catered function in Afghanistan, and there was that jazz band combo playing on a flat fiberglass rock in the middle of a manmade river. “Another dream?”
“Not for me,” he replied. “But the lines blur when you’re dead.”
She waved a waiter over for a refill on her champagne. And got a second glass for Wyatt, because when your friend comes back from the dead for a chat, it was simply good manners to offer him some champagne.
Wyatt’s ghost stared at the fluted crystal as if it were poison. “Beer used to be good enough for you.”
“Still is,” she said. “But if Mulcahy wants to serve expensive champagne, I’m drinking expensive champagne.”
He shrugged, sipped, and his eyes went wide.
“I know, right?” she said, and relaxed against the eucalyptus tree.
“You’ve got a strange life,” Wyatt’s ghost said, as a Caspian cobra twisted around their feet. It hissed at a passing koala, who ignored it.
“You get used to it.”
“You happy?”
“Yeah,” she said, as she watched Becca and Jason on the dance floor. “Most days, I am.”
“Good.” He nodded towards the fake Wyatt: Ami was twisting the psychopath’s arm to get him to dance with her. Literally. “He’s sticking around?”
“Yup,” she said, as she shook her head in absolute bemusement. “Josh offered him a job working with the Hippos, and he accepted. Officially, he’s you, forever.”
Wyatt’s ghost laughed. “Good for him,” he said. “Maybe he can make something out of me.”
Rachel kicked the cobra off of her boots. It turned into a giant flying squirrel and scampered up the nearest tree.
“Not okay with that?” he asked.
“Nope,” she said. “He’s not you. Shouldn’t be wearing your face.”
“Told you, I got no use for it. Let him have it.” When she didn’t reply, he added, “Thought you didn’t notice faces any more, anyhow.”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” she said, and stabbed at her steak with her knife.
“But you think this is the best place for him,” Wyatt’s ghost said.
She’d been trying to convince herself of this for days. It was getting easier: they couldn’t turn him over to the cops without dangerous explanations, and this way the Hippos could keep an eye on him.
And…maybe…she had finally realized what he had been trying to tell her on the factory’s roof. It took her longer than it should have: the poets she loved so much always spoke of a sense of morality, a sense of ethics, a sense of fair play. There was always more truth to be found in words, if you went digging.
Not that she had any sympathy for a murderous psychopath. Really.
“I don’t know what else to do with him,” she said. “But is this the best option? No. We’re letting him walk around free. No punishment for what he’s done in the past. Even if we keep him honest from here on out, that’s on me.”
“You still think he’s running a long con?”
No, she thought, but she didn’t answer him.
“Well,” Wyatt’s ghost said, as he finished his champagne, “I’ll catch you around, Penguin.”
“What, you got plans?” she chuckled.
The ghost grinned. “You’d be surprised,” he said, and faded into the tree.
The giant squirrel hung upside-down from a nearby branch and chittered at her.
“Quiet,” she told it, and the squirrel disappeared.
Let there be peace, she told herself, as the band played a tune by Miles Davis and the children chased the koala through a field of wildflowers. Or something like it.
Across the greenhouse, Hope and Mulcahy sat close beside each other, legs entwined. Hope’s bruises would take time to fade. Healing—for both of them—would take longer. They carried reds and grays on their shoulders, and it was only when they were close enough to touch that some of that weight was lifted. They watched the room like wary predators, and when one rose to get a new plate of food or make conversation with friends, the other followed close behind.
Avery’s protector during the kidnapping had turned out to be an unemployed single mother of three. The woman with the core of copper had children who weren’t much older than Avery, and she had brought them to the party. None of those children, Avery included, seemed to have been affected by the kidnapping: they all screamed in glee as they romped with the koala and splashed in the stream. The woman with the core of copper sat beside Mako and Carlota, the three of them not talking. All three of them wore their heavy cloaks of reds and grays, but while Mako and Carlota shared theirs between them, the woman with the core of copper carried hers alone.
Josh was—
Oh!
Rachel yanked her scans out of the coat closet and made herself wake all of the way up, as quickly as she could, because she had just learned something new about human anatomy and where on earth did Josh find women who could bend like that?!
A half-eaten plate of food slid off of her lap.
She nudged it aside with a sigh, and resigned herself to another year in a starring role in the annual OACET holiday bloopers reel. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had filmed her while she was talking under the influence of drowsy.
The greenhouse was much smaller now that she was awake. It held only a small fraction of the party, although the jazz band was real. Everything else was located through the open doors, which led to Hope and Mulcahy’s mini-mansion, or to the lawn and the dance floor outside
It was tight quarters all over. Parties with more than two hundred p
eople used to be the norm for OACET in their mansion out on the Potomac River. There was nowhere to hold large events these days, and she felt the loss.
She touched the stone in her necklace. It was a pink sapphire set in gold, and she only wore it for special occasions, or endings, or both.
She knew it was selfish, but she was so tired of the constant loss of small things.
The bone-weary exhaustion that had swallowed her at Nicholson’s factory hadn’t faded with time. It was hard to move. Hard to pull herself forward. Hard to think about anything but blue and black, and Nicholson tipping over into—
How long are you going to allow yourself to sit here like a useless shit on the floor?
She stood and tested her ankle. Five days after Nicholson’s death, and she was able to limp around without crutches if she wore an ACE bandage under heavy leather boots. Becca’s core of jade green was out on the lawn, moving beneath a galaxy of twinkling string lights as she swayed to the music, and Rachel wanted nothing more than to steal her away and go home and curl up in her arms—
“Hey.”
Santino was standing a few feet away, uncertain in oranges. He was holding a small potted begonia.
“Got a minute?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, and used the tree to lower herself back down to the ground. She had a feeling she knew what was coming, and a few more minutes of being a useless shit on the floor seemed appropriate.
“Can I sit?”
“What is with you lately?” she snapped. “Of course you can sit.”
Her partner folded his long legs up and dropped to the ground, several feet away. The orange grew deeper, and it started to push the Southwestern turquoise away—
Santino thrust the begonia at her. “Here,” he said. “I think this belongs to you.”
She didn’t move. After a moment, he set the begonia on the ground between them.
“Could you stop running emotions?” he said, almost sadly.
“Yeah,” she said, and snapped off her scans altogether. Whatever was coming, she didn’t need to see it.
“I’m moving in with Zia,” he said.
“Yeah.” She nodded; no surprise there. “Is it because of Wyatt?”
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