Rachel gave her a jolly smile and a wave on her way to the restroom.
When she popped back into the party, the first thing she spotted were two thick ropes of her Southwestern turquoise, the first wrapped around a core of citrus orange, the second around a core of purple velvet that had faded in the sun. She had seen both colors recently, but didn’t know who they belonged to until she flipped frequencies to take in the owners’ faces. The citrus belonged to a balding, jovial man with a thick sandy beard: she recognized Randy Summerville, one of D.C.’s more formidable telecommunications lobbyists, from his photograph in OACET’s dossier. The purple belonged to a younger man whom Rachel didn’t know, but the color was so familiar...
She wracked her brain trying to place them—Where have I seen those two hues before?—before she remembered that she had spotted them at the Botanic Gardens gala.
Summerville had been one of the lobbyists talking to Senator Hanlon.
Once, Rachel sighed to herself. Just once I’d like to go to a nice party and not have to swim with the sharks.
She started a timer. Based on her past experiences with lobbyists, those who had a specific bone to pick with her would take a half hour or more to casually circle the room before cornering her for a long, long chat. She assumed the delay had something to do the ratio of alcohol consumption to pliability, and resolved to keep herself to a single glass of champagne.
Hmm...
She opened a link with the other Agents in the room.
“Guys? Best behavior tonight,” she told them. “There are some big-name lobbyists here, and they’re thinking about OACET.”
It was a very slight exaggeration, and Rachel held on to the feel of concrete as hard as she could so they wouldn’t catch it. Straight-up lying couldn’t be done through a link, but she needed them on their toes. Better to think that everyone they spoke with could be a threat, than take one drink too many and say something that could turn around and bite them.
“Shit.” Phil and Zia both started peeking around the room before Jason yelled at them to keep their heads down. The other three Agents dropped back into their conversations, their party colors weighed down by professional blues.
Sorry, guys, Rachel thought to herself after she broke the link. This should have been an enjoyable night for everyone. They weren’t ever fully free to be themselves, not around outsiders, but there were enough friends here to make it comfortable.
She returned to Phil’s side, and laughed at the appropriate moments until the timer went off in her head. Then, she excused herself, gathered her coat from the Secret Service agents by the door, and slipped out to wait on the South Portico porch.
It took Summerville a few minutes to find her. When he turned the corner to find her nestled in the darkest corner of the Portico, she was smiling at him, two fresh glasses of champagne waiting on the stone railing beside her, a third held lightly in her hand.
“Hope you don’t mind, but I’ve exhausted my spycraft quota for this week,” she told him.
The man started laughing. “You’re getting a well-deserved reputation, Agent Peng.”
“Who, me?” she said, gesturing towards the extra glasses of champagne with her own. “Surely not.”
“Randy Summerville,” he said, as he picked up the glass and parked himself against the shadowed wall.
“The telecommunications lobbyist,” she said. “I’m aware. Where’s your friend?”
A flicker of surprise ran over him. “Who? My assistant?”
Ah. That cleared things up; she had thought the second man was awfully young to be active in politics. She threw her scans back towards the party, and found the core of purple velvet waiting by the buffet table. The young man’s face was red from pain, as if someone had punched him in the mouth. Now that his boss had left him alone, his conversational colors had changed: he was still wearing her Southwestern turquoise, but also the barbed reds and yellows of hate and fear.
That man, Rachel thought, does not like me at all.
“Would he like to join us?” Rachel asked. As long as her evening was ruined anyhow, she might as well start collecting data for OACET’s ever-growing collection of dossiers.
Summerville shook his head. “Thank you, but he’d get in the way.”
“Just for the record, I’m not the Agent you want to speak to about alliances or strategy.”
“I’m aware,” he said with a slight grin. “But you are the one I want to talk to if someone needs to be put in prison.”
Oho? She ran his conversational colors. He was enjoying this, with purple humor and the same yellow-white energy that dominated the personalities of those who loved a good verbal sparring match, but there was also a serious and strong professional blue beneath these.
There was some worn denim in that blue, too much of it to be a coincidence… “You told Mitch Alimoren to get me to come to this party,” she guessed, remembering how earnest Alimoren had been when he pressed the invitation into her hands.
“Alimoren’s an old acquaintance,” Summerville said, his surface colors retreating slightly from her Southwestern turquoise. “I’m at the White House about once a week, and he handles my scheduling.”
“That wasn’t exactly an answer,” Rachel said, but the way his colors had flinched away from her question had given him away.
“Let’s see how this conversation goes before I drag others into it.”
“Fair enough,” she admitted. “Who needs to go to jail?”
“Senator Richard Hanlon.”
She had choked on her champagne when Hanlon’s core of water-darkened brown swelled within Summerville’s thoughts, so she was coughing, hard, before he got the words out. “Sorry,” she said. “Wrong pipe. What were you saying?”
The purple humor dropped away from him. “Agent Peng? We’re both busy people.”
Realization struck. “You know what he did to us.”
“The brainwashing? Yes.” Summerville nodded. He tugged his suitcoat closed as the evening air reached him. “Nearly everybody in Washington knows. What he did to OACET was beyond criminal. If Congress had any balls, they’d hang him out to die. I’ve been pushing my employers to move ahead and sever ties with him on principle.”
She was stunned, and kept checking his colors to see if he was lying. She had assumed the telecommunications industry had accepted Hanlon wholesale, warts and all, but Summerville meant what he said.
“Surprised?” He grinned at her. “Not everyone in Washington is out to destroy you. A few of us are still decent human beings.”
“Maybe a few of you,” she admitted. “But what about your employers?”
Summerville’s colors fell towards gray, and she read volumes in that shade of storm-churned sky.
“Right,” she said.
“My employers have a vested interest in Hanlon,” he said. “He’s promised them he can find a way to block you.”
A brief memory of her visit to Mako’s office flickered in her head. “Your employers have been working on a way to keep us out of machines since we went public.”
“Can you blame them?”
No, she couldn’t. The Agents didn’t require a subscription service or peripheral equipment to maintain their links. If the technology ever worked its way into the general population, every telecommunications carrier from digital satellites to old-fashioned land lines would go bankrupt. Preventing the Agents from accessing machines was a solid step towards regulation.
“My employers weren’t making any progress on their own,” Summerville said. “They decided to change their strategy. Since Hanlon’s company invented the implant, they decided to throw their support behind him, and see what he might come up with.”
She turned those ideas around, and found that no matter which way she looked at them, they made sense.
That might be a major reason Congress won’t touch Hanlon. If he’s promised Big Communications that he’ll find a way to keep us out of their phone lines, they’ll buy him some
time…
There’s also the money angle. He ceded the rights for the implant over to the government, but if he gives the patent rights for blocking the implant over to the telecommunications industry, they’ll make a crazy return on their investment…
But Mako’s the only thing out there that can block us. If Hanlon fails…
Hanlon would be a scapegoat twice over, for causing the problem in the first place, and then by failing to fix it.
He’s got to be scared shitless.
“Did I say something funny?”
“No,” Rachel said, pulling on the feeling of concrete until she could wipe the smile from her face. She set her mostly full glass of champagne down with a sharp, Focus, woman! “Is he making any progress? We’ve been working on the same problem, and thus far we’ve hit a wall.”
“Really?” Summerville blinked at her in surprised orange. “I thought you’d want to keep your abilities.”
She shrugged. “We don’t like being society’s monsters. It’d be easier for us if people didn’t automatically assume we’re screwing around with machines.”
“Ah,” he said, sage green beginning to show.
“We’ve been working on security protocols that’ll keep us out of closed systems,” she said, and then took something of a risk. “Maybe your employers would like to collaborate with us instead of Hanlon. They might make more progress if they have test subjects.”
The sage green dropped a shade deeper, and snapped tight across the lobbyist’s torso. “I think we might not be on the same page,” he said. “I don’t think I fully explained what Hanlon’s trying to do.”
She suddenly felt the cold. “Oh?” she asked, her head tilted as if he had said something almost, but not quite, of interest.
“Hanlon’s not working to develop firewalls to keep you out of machines,” Summerville said. “He’s working on a way to block your access to the entire EM spectrum.”
She knew it was coming, but it still hit her like a punch, and in her head, the room went dark around her. She had her hands locked at the small of her back before realizing that cocktail dresses clashed horribly with parade rest. “Interesting approach,” she said, as she pretended she had been reaching for her glass of champagne.
“It would solve everything,” Summerville said. “My employers can’t permit OACET’s abilities to be made available to the public, and you’d…”
He trailed off, unable to find a polite way to end that particular thought. Rachel did it for him. “We’d go back to being normal people.”
“They can’t take the implant out,” he said. “Not without causing irreparable damage to you. The best solution is for Hanlon to find a way to block your access to the EMF.”
Rachel made a noncommittal sigh, convinced that Summerville could hear her pulse hammering in her head. She was suddenly very aware of Phil and Jason and Zia, all shouting at her via the link as they pushed their way through the partygoers to reach her. She mentally waved the other Agents off, promising to tell them the cause of her distress after she was done with the lobbyist.
Rachel reconnected with the concrete foundation, and grounded herself, hard. I’m tired of Hanlon, she realized. I’m tired of him throwing a new threat at me every fucking time I turn around.
It was a credible threat, too. Hanlon’s company developed the implant, so it stood to reason that they could find a way to turn it off. One day, maybe not too far in the future, there might come a knock at her door and men in white coats to take her away. It wasn’t too hard to imagine a second round of surgery in which a new implant was wrapped around the old, shielding it from the EMF.
Killing it.
Killing her, and the rest of OACET.
“Tell me,” she said, as she met Summerville’s eyes. “If you could stop Hanlon while protecting your employers’ interests, would you?”
“Yes,” he said. Yellow surprise moved into his conversational colors at the question, but she didn’t spot any signs of lying.
“Do you have children?”
“What?”
“Do you?” He did, four of them, but strangers seemed to take offense when she recounted the details of their dossiers without prompting.
“Yes, but—”
She very nearly followed that up with her story. Her mouth was open, she was drawing breath, and then the sum of her intelligence rose up to remind her that she was talking to a man who manipulated powerful people for a living.
Hey! she roared at herself. Get the fuck away from Summerville—right now!—before you say something that’ll pull us all under the ground, you stupid, stupid woman!
“Good. I find I trust parents more than other people,” she lied, as she turned from him. It took a moment to move her thoughts from one path to another. “Let your employers know that if they choose to work with us, we can develop the security protocols they need. Hanlon has started something he can’t finish.”
She downed the last of her champagne in a quick, hard sip. “Even if he does develop some method to block our access to the EM spectrum—which is unlikely—we’ll never let Hanlon touch us. Never again. His version of a solution would be worse than the problem.
“Don’t let your employers trap themselves,” she finished. “If you’re serious about helping us put Hanlon in prison, you need to cut him out of the equation. He’s all talk. Working with him is just a time sink for your employers. OACET’s here, and if we are going away, it’ll be because we worked with someone other than Hanlon to find the exit. It’ll benefit everybody if Hanlon’s out of the picture entirely.”
Summerville’s colors rolled in and out of themselves. It was a unique motion: she saw none of the ins-and-outs of weaving that accompanied a man trying to make a hard decision. Instead, there were the greens of what he wanted, and there were the reds of what he felt others wanted, and these couldn’t blend together. She felt as if she was watching oil and water try to mix.
“I’ll do my best to convince them,” he finally said. “That’s all I can promise.”
They shook hands, and Summerville walked back into the White House. His assistant was at the door, waiting. The young man shot Rachel a red-hot glare before he took Summerville back into the party.
Rachel took a deep breath. Then another, and another, drawing on the feeling of concrete beneath her. When her usual meditation strategies failed to calm her, she walked down the stairs of the South Portico, turned the corner, and followed the path to the Rose Garden.
The garden’s title was a misnomer. It was more of a manicured lawn than a garden, with the flowers and shrubbery relegated to beds lining its edges. At this time of year, there were no roses to be seen. It was a space intended for the day; the early spring bulbs had closed for the night, and the new leaves on the trees were nothing but black streaks against the sky. Rachel slipped out of her heels and walked into the center of the grassy lawn, and reached out to Patrick Mulcahy.
The head of OACET appeared almost instantly.
His avatar was tall and broad, and wearing sunglasses and an impeccably tailored suit. Neither glasses nor suit were necessary, but Mulcahy would never choose to appear at the White House as anything less than his best self. If his green avatar were made flesh, his hair would be a sandy blond, his skin a dark Irish tan, but his features wouldn’t change one whit.
“Rachel,” he said.
She nodded at her boss. “Sorry to get you out of bed.”
His avatar didn’t smile, but she felt a chuckle roll across their link, and realized he was probably still tucked under the covers some five miles away in his home out in Kent. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “What’s happened?”
“Randy Summerville approached me. He let me know that Hanlon is actively trying to find a way to block our access to the EM spectrum.”
He didn’t reply. It took her a moment to realize this wasn’t news to him.
“Did I sleep through a meeting or something?” she asked, annoyed.
“N
o,” he said. “I put the Hippos on Hanlon. They report back to Josh, and he reports to me. Nobody else knows.”
“What do the Hippos think?” The Cuddly Hippos were former members of the armed forces. Like Rachel, they had been recruited into OACET under the assumption that their skillsets would contribute to the overall value of the organization.
Unlike Rachel, they had been professional killers.
There were only three of them—two assassins and one traps expert—and Mulcahy didn’t let them apply their skills to their fullest extent. The Hippos resented this; Mulcahy kept them from putting a bullet through Hanlon’s skull through sheer dominance of will.
My God, what was he thinking, to put them right on Hanlon’s tail…
He heard her. “It keeps them busy,” he said. “And I trust them to follow orders. They’re professionals, not sociopaths.”
Rachel took a breath and steadied her walls. Her conversation with Summerville had shaken her. Mulcahy shouldn’t have been able to pick up on her stray thoughts. Fucking rookie mistake, as Jason would say.
“To answer your question, they now think Hanlon is better left alive than dead,” he told her. “They’ve been watching him long enough to realize that he’s so far in over his head that he’ll never recover. It’s turned into a game for them. They have a pool going on how long he’ll be able to fool Congress and the telecommunications companies.”
She swung her mind back towards the White House, where Jason, Phil, and Zia were waiting by the door. One word from her, and the three of them would be down the stairs and running through the garden to learn how Summerville had spooked her to the point of panic…
“Hanlon might be able to hold on long enough to do us damage,” she said, trying to keep the image of men in white coats from her thoughts.
Mulcahy’s avatar stared at her impassively. She had the sensation that he was studying her emotions in the link, looking for cracks in her composure. “What did Summerville want?” he finally asked.
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