State Machine

by Spangler, K. B.

  “Yeah,” she said again.

  “Ever since last October...”

  He trailed off, and she took a chance by reaching over and poking him in his short ribs. “Ever since October, what?”

  “You said something that didn’t sit right with me. You implied...”

  She had wondered when this would finally come up. “I implied I would have let the bombers get away with it,” she said. “If if had benefited OACET. It didn’t, so it wasn’t an issue.”

  He didn’t reply, and she was now glad she wasn’t running emotions. “Santino, if you haven’t guessed by now, I’ll do anything I have to if it’ll protect OACET. They’re my family. You protect your family. Tooth and claw, if necessary.”

  “I know,” he said. “I get that. On one level, I understand all of this, but on another level...”

  She nodded, and wished she could crack the window; the longer they aired these things out, the smaller the car became, but it was the breakfast hour and the parking lot was packed. “Which is why we need to start talking about this again. We used to talk about this—we used to spend hours talking about the law.”

  “Would it make a difference? Will talking about the law change how you look at your job?”

  She thought about that. “I don’t know. I’d like to say yes, but I’d need a really good reason to prioritize the law above OACET.”

  Santino huffed, and she felt the car get a little smaller as his anger came back.

  “Hey, I’m being honest,” she said. “I try not to lie to you.”

  “You try?”

  “Like I said,” she sighed. “I wish you were part of the collective.”

  There was silence between them again. Not an uncomfortable silence like before; this one was sad, and more than a little lonely.

  “Where were we?” Rachel finally asked.

  “Stuck,” he said, willing to return to the case to take his mind off of possibilities. “Do we have any proof at all that Hanlon was involved in the theft, or in…”

  He stopped himself, unable to revisit Alimoren’s murder.

  “No,” Rachel said, charging ahead. “We know that Hanlon and Alimoren were on speaking terms, and Summerville hinted that Alimoren helped him learn the schedules of people in the White House, so it’s very possible might have passed Hanlon some information. But we know that he wasn’t Noura’s contact.”

  “Do we?”

  She thought back over last night’s meeting, where Hanlon tried to entrap Alimoren into making a confession. “Yeah,” Rachel said. “What was it that Hanlon said? It’s too convenient to believe Alimoren was responsible? I think that’s true.”

  “We need to go back to the farmers’ market,” Santino said. “Not, you know, physically, but that was where Noura was supposed to hand off the fragment to its buyer. It’s too much to hope that Hanlon would be there to pick it up personally, right?”

  She snorted into her coffee.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “But we’ve been to her motel room. It had one of those dinky safes in it. The fragment is fragile, and Noura wouldn’t have taken it out of her room if she didn’t have a reason, so…”

  “Yeah,” Rachel agreed, as she dabbed at the coffee she had blown all over her shirt. She gave up when her scans hit on some blood left over from her boxing match with Hope. No wonder poor McCrindle hadn’t known what to say to her: she was eight kinds of a mess. “Noura didn’t go to that famers’ market by accident. There was a handoff planned. We find the other person on the end of the handoff, we’re one step closer.”

  “Alimoren was already there,” Santino said, without a moment’s pause. Then, he ran the timeline through his head. “Wait, no. That doesn’t work. Alimoren never planned to be at the market. We brought him there.”

  “Maybe he had planned to be there,” Rachel admitted. “The hotel was close enough to the market so he could sneak out, pick up the fragment, and come right back.”

  “True.”

  Her stomach grumbled, and she found herself fishing her uneaten doughnut out of the bag. “Maybe we should assume it was Alimoren,” she said. “We all know Noura was going to the market to meet someone, but that’s turned into a dead end. The Secret Service has already done all they can to find any possible suspects who were there.”

  “We haven’t,” Santino said. “Maybe we should check Hanlon’s known associates and see if anyone was there to do him a favor.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” she said, and reached into the back seat to get her purse. “Let’s make a call and find out.”

  “Call who?”

  “More of a what,” she muttered, as she passed her tablet to Santino so he could be part of the conversation.

  She sent her mind out, across the city, to Jason’s office. “Lulu.”

  The computer’s almost-feminine voice was politely curious, but it didn’t have the capacity to sound surprised. Still, that was the impression Rachel got when she opened their connection. YES, AGENT PENG?

  “Lulu, did the Secret Service send over the videos from the Dupont Circle Farmers’ Market?”

  YES, AGENT PENG.

  “Have you completed the facial imaging scans from that day?”

  YES, AGENT PENG.

  “Was anybody at the farmers’ market involved in the Jenna Noura case?”

  PLEASE REPHRASE, AGENT PENG.

  “Oh hell,” she muttered aloud, and grasped around for a query a computer would understand.

  Santino jumped in. “Lulu, we’re looking for a connection between anyone who was at the farmers’ market and Senator Hanlon. Can you cross-reference all persons who were at the market with known associates of Hanlon?”

  YES, OFFICER SANTINO. Lulu’s disembodied voice came from the tablet.

  Santino glanced at Rachel, and she shrugged to let him know she hadn’t instructed Lulu to switch its operational status and talk directly to him. “Smart computer,” she whispered.

  THANK YOU, AGENT PENG. OFFICER SANTINO?

  “Yes, Lulu?”

  NO PERSONS AT THE MARKET FIT THAT PROFILE.

  Santino wasn’t ready to quit. “What database did you use?”

  OACET’S ROSTER OF HANLON’S KNOWN ASSOCIATES, Lulu said.

  Santino sighed and let himself fall back in his seat. “Thank you, Lulu.”

  YOU’RE WELCOME, AGENT PENG.

  “Will you update us if you find a connection between people at the market and…Hanlon’s…things?” Rachel asked.

  There was a brief pause during which Rachel could have sworn Lulu was judging her. YES, AGENT PENG. WILL THAT BE ALL?

  “Yes. Thank you, Lulu.”

  GOODBYE, AGENT PENG.

  Santino went to flip the cover on her tablet closed, but she stopped him.

  “Hang on,” Rachel said. “I’m sure we’re on to something. What if…”

  “What if what?”

  “What if Lulu used the wrong database?” She reached out to the computer again, speaking aloud for Santino’s benefit this time. “Lulu? Follow-up query.”

  YES, AGENT PENG? came the computer’s voice from the tablet.

  “Are there any…uh…are there connections between any person or persons who were at the farmers’ market, and any person or persons who have been profiled as possible threats by OACET?”

  “Include both past and present threats,” Santino added.

  Rachel had expected Lulu to need some time to process her query, but the computer’s reply was immediate. YES, AGENT PENG.

  Her fingers knit within the fabric of her tee-shirt. “Display name, please.”

  “Summerville…” Santino’s soft gasp came before she could read the name. “Is this the guy who came to our house?”

  “Yes,” she replied. In her mind, the links between Summerville and Alimoren began to fill themselves in.

  “It’s not enough,” Santino said. “This is the textbook definition of circumstantial. We need actual hard evidence to put him at the scene, lik
e DNA or—”

  “It might be enough to get a warrant ,” she said. “OACET’s a federal organization. We conduct threat assessments just like the CIA or the NSA. This would be setting a precedent for our files, though.”

  “No judge is going to give you a warrant based on nothing but a general facial recognition hit from a crowd during a busy day,” Santino said. “Not even Edwards.”

  “Well, we might not be able to get a warrant,” she said. “But we can still get what we need.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Over her brief tenure in OACET, she had visited more mansions than her eight-year-old self would have thought possible—hell, she had been to a party at the White House just this past week—but she had never seen a room like this one. Teak and brass chased each other in thick stripes through the floor and into the ornate wainscoting. The walls were plastered in that one dark maroon that could only be put to proper use by the super-rich, and the paintings were by artists whose names she actually recognized.

  It screamed wealth and privilege, and she felt woefully out of place.

  The receptionist was in the middle of her early morning chores when Rachel and Hill barged through the last set of doors. Rachel was wearing her best suit, the one she wore when she knew there would be at least one press conference at the end of the day, but it was still far below the pay grade of those who usually came this far into Summerville’s inner sanctum. She thought her suit was the reason the receptionist was gaping at her, until she remembered her face looked like a half-made sausage.

  “Agent Peng?” Randy Summerville, going over the day’s tasks with his receptionist, was bright yellow in surprise at finding her in his office. He took in her face, Hill’s arm in its sling… The yellow surprise turned into red concern. “What happened to you? This wasn’t from the car chase, was it? I saw you right after that happened!”

  “Detective Hill’s injuries were from the chase. Mine were received in an unrelated incident,” she said, as she managed the twinned thoughts that Summerville’s information network needed an overhaul, and also that ‘A Series of Unrelated Incidents’ might be an excellent name for Hope Blackwell’s fists. “May we talk in private?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “Danielle, we’ll take coffee on the patio.”

  Patio? We’re four stories up, how could there be a…

  But Summerville’s office had a wall made of windows and a set of ornate French doors, and these opened onto a patio with a glorious view of the monuments. There were enough container plants to make Santino weep in envy, and a set of furniture made from the same rich teak as was found in Summerville’s office.

  There was even a rug. Not one of those tacky indoor-outdoor affairs, but an authentic Persian antique carpet. Rachel’s heart went out to the poor maintenance man whose job it was to roll it up every night, and wondered what Summerville did when it started to rain.

  Her scans hit on Jordan Summerville puttering about the patio, grooming the ground around the plants for dead leaves before today’s schedule began, and realized the kid’s job probably included carpet duties. His uncle tried to chase him off, but Rachel stopped him—Jordan needed to hear what she had to say.

  “This isn’t a personal call,” she said, taking a seat on a nearby couch. “It’s related to the White House break-in.”

  Both uncle and nephew went a little red at that. “What do you mean?” Randy Summerville asked.

  She had dreaded this meeting. One misstep, and the possibility of an alliance between OACET and the telecommunication industry might vanish.

  And, God help her, she actually liked Randy Summerville.

  “As you know, OACET is a federal agency,” she began. “We conduct our own threat assessments, as do the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, and numerous other agencies. One of our analysts checked for possible connections between OACET and the White House murder.” Technically true: she supposed Lulu qualified as an OACET analyst, even though the computer itself had been bought and paid for by the MPD. “We took the security footage from the Dupont Circle Farmers’ Market, and we ran it through our own threat models. We were surprised when facial recognition got a hit.”

  Yup. There’s the flash of red.

  “Why are you here, Agent Peng?” Summerville asked, his conversational colors beginning to shutter themselves.

  “I’d like to state for the record that we don’t have a warrant,” she said. “Your compliance is completely voluntary—”

  “My compliance?”

  “Sorry,” Rachel said, holding up her hands for peace. “I didn’t mean to be vague. That wasn’t directed towards you… We’re here for your nephew.”

  Summerville’s colors locked themselves down. Behind him, Jordan’s panicked red flared, fire-bright.

  Hill touched Rachel’s shoulder in warning; whatever he had spotted in Jordan was as accurate as watching his conversational colors was for her.

  “As I said, we don’t have a warrant,” Rachel said. “We’re merely eliminating potential suspects. We’ve recovered DNA from a victim. It’s saliva trace—it looks like she hit her assailant in the mouth before he killed her.”

  Jordan’s hand twitched, as if he was keeping himself from touching a half-remembered injury. Rachel remembered the first time she had seen him, during the reception at the White House, when his colors showed he had taken a solid punch to the face.

  “We’re collecting samples.” She reached into her jacket pocket, and took out a laboratory-grade mouth swab in its sealed container. “This is only to eliminate possible—”

  “No!” Rachel thought this was the first time she had ever heard Jordan speak. His voice was deeper than she had expected, and hoarse from stress. “Hell no!”

  His uncle’s colors fell to grays.

  “Maybe you should call your family’s lawyer,” Rachel told him.

  The lobbyist nodded. “Please leave, Agent Peng. If you’re able to get a warrant, feel free to contact us.”

  “Right,” Rachel said. “Thank you for your time.”

  Beside her, Hill took out his phone and hit a single button. There was a pause, and then he said, “Lawyered up. Go ahead and process it.”

  “We’ll see you in a few hours,” Rachel said to Jordan. “It’ll take about that long to run the other sample.”

  “What sample?” The kid’s panicked yellows started to whip around him. “I didn’t give you permission to take a sample!”

  “Officer Santino followed you to work this morning. You threw your Starbucks cup in the gutter. He’s got the cup in evidence, so—”

  Jordan Summerville took off.

  Rachel knew from those whipping yellows that Jordan had been looking for an escape route. She had expected him to cut around her and Hill towards the French doors, and then run straight into Zockinski who was standing guard by the receptionist’s desk. Or, if Jordan was clever, he’d find Santino waiting for him in the side stairwell.

  She didn’t think he’d jump over the edge of the patio.

  “Fuck!” Hill shouted.

  “It’s okay!” she said, as she spotted Jordan on the fire escape six feet below. “It’s not a suicide! C’mon!”

  Rachel threw off her suit coat, and scouted around for a place to store her gun before she noticed Hill. The big man was still seated on his chair by the doors, statue-still.

  He pointed at his injured shoulder.

  “Aw!” Rachel groaned, and handed her gun to Hill. His colors changed to curious yellows.

  “There’s no way in hell I’m going to chase down this kid when armed,” she said, looking at Summerville as she spoke.

  “It’s policy,” Hill said.

  “MPD policy, maybe,” she said. “I’ll bring him back unharmed,” she promised Summerville.

  The lobbyist didn’t reply, his colors angry reds and mournful grays, and she couldn’t help but wonder if a possible future had gone up in smoke.

  And then she was gone.

  A clean jump over the sid
e of the balcony, and six feet down to where her feet clanged on the top landing of the fire escape. She had decided to be good to her much-abused body today, and was wearing her most comfortable work shoes, the ones where the sides and the soles were made from the same buttery-soft leather. These were perfect for her controlled fall down the side of the building, letting her grip each stair and every rung of the ladder as she descended from floor to floor. By the time she reached the ground, she had nearly caught up to Jordan.

  As soon as she began running, she realized they were the worst shoes she could have worn. The alley was covered in broken glass and pieces of metal, and she felt each of these press through the thin soles. She slowed her pace and picked her way across the mouth of the alley, and spotted Jordan as he raced across the busy street.

  “I am not doing this again,” she muttered, and hailed a passing cab.

  The cabdriver was a good sport. For twenty bucks and a story about a lover’s quarrel, he was happy to follow Jordan at a discreet distance. It gave Rachel plenty of time to send the signal on Jordan’s phone to Santino, and she watched in relative comfort as the kid’s colors began to ease from fiery panic to the ruddy grays of stress. She watched as Jordan ducked into a coffee shop, and told the cabdriver to let her off at the next block.

  Rachel looped around to the rear entrance of the coffee house, her implant firmly fixed on the signal from Jordan’s phone. She flashed her badge to the startled barista, a finger pressed against her lips while she pointed towards the busy main room of the café.

  He’s not here… she thought, scanning the crowd for Jordan’s core of sun-drenched purple velvet. But the signal from his phone was bright and strong, and she chased it down to where it lay beneath a nearby table: Jordan had ditched it so he couldn’t be tracked.

  “Fuckin’ perfect,” she muttered, as she sent her scans out in all directions.

  She chased core colors up and down the nearby streets, as far as she could push herself without bringing on a headache, and when that didn’t hit on Jordan, she expanded her range. So many people within these four city blocks, not just running wild on the ground, but all stacked on top of one another in rooms within rooms within buildings, or down along the highway a few streets away, an anthill of color, and so many of them were purple…