It had been a very near miss, and she had already taken Jason out to dinner to thank him for being a very good teacher. It hadn’t been his fault that she had sprung Hanlon’s trap, but he was the reason she had escaped it without having to gnaw off a leg.
“Agent Peng?” Hanlon was waiting, a tiny grin twisting the edges of his mouth. “There was something you wanted to say?”
“Yup,” she said. “You tried to get Jordan Summerville to kill himself, and to blame me for that before he went.”
She spun out the story about Hill’s interrogation, in which Jordan had said Hanlon had warned him that he should never allow Agent Rachel Peng to put her hands on him. “Worse than death” had been the phrase of the hour. There was a suicide note already mocked up on his computer, just in case. Unfortunately for Hanlon, the kid wasn’t on board with that idea.
(Really, learning the toxicity of the poison that Hanlon had dripped in the kid’s ear had infuriated Rachel. Nowhere near as much as nearly getting caught in Hanlon’s technology trap, but still. Trying to frame her for driving a kid to suicide… New low.)
Hanlon gave a little sigh as he realized that whether she knew what he had done or not, she wouldn’t spill it on tape.
“It’s hard,” she said consolingly. “You were so close. I don’t know who would have believed that I was responsible for the kid’s death, but if someone had filmed it happening…
“Oh wait!” she said. “They did! Not his death, though. More like me saving his life. Did you see that one video that’s got a close-up on my hand, and it’s sort of turning blue because I chained myself to Jordan to make sure he couldn’t fall and get smushed into goo on the interstate?”
He didn’t reply, but a few books hit the bottom of an empty box with a loud bang!
“Well, we can’t always predict which stories will play on the news,” she said. “I can’t, anyhow. You must have been furious when you learned I was the driver in that car chase. You had the news cycles so tightly mapped out, you couldn’t have taken advantage of that without shifting your schedule.”
She took a breath, and moved her avatar to the office’s single window. Outside, the spring rain was drenching the city in a sheet of sodden gray. The weather was too on the nose, so she turned back to Hanlon.
He was watching her, his head cocked. It reminded her of a big cat that hadn’t decided whether to pounce or to play. “Did you have a point?” he asked.
“I know, I know,” she said. “You’re a busy man—oh! Sorry. You were a busy man.”
“That’s getting old.”
“Not for me. How am I doing?”
The former Senator crossed the room to stand beside her at the window. He saw her shy away, and he began to smile. With each step he took towards her, his tiger’s smile grew, that same smile he had worn when he first offered her the opportunity to join OACET...
Rachel felt goosebumps crawl over her skin as he approached.
You’re not here, woman. Keep it together! shouted her own voice. It was empty and echoed over a great distance as the monster from her nightmares came close enough to kiss her.
She shoved her arm straight into his chest.
He flinched. He couldn’t not flinch. Her arm looked so real.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” she said, swirling her arm around the general vicinity of his heart and lungs. She fixed her eyes on his. Her avatar’s eyes didn’t carry the same chilling effect of her real ones, and his fear came from somewhere more visceral. “Now, I know the Program was supposed to last our lifetimes, so I’m sure your scientists gave some thought to the long-term health implications of the implant.”
She kept moving her arm in slow circles. Hanlon was a statue, unable to move, unable to take a single step backwards and pull himself away.
“We spend a lot of time trying to understand what we are. What we’re made of. Whether these frequencies we’ve found just allow us to put on a pretty light show, or if they could have other side effects… One of the smartest guys I know is worried that we might cause cancer—”
Hanlon stumbled and fell as he tried to yank her green arm out of his chest. Rachel gave a wicked cackle, and stood over the former Senator like an avenging warrior.
“Not your day, is it?” Rachel said, and then retreated a few paces, her own heart pounding.
“Is this why you’re here?” he asked, as he tried to recover his composure. “You want to kick an old man while he’s down?”
“You’re forty-seven, and a billionaire,” Rachel said. “I think you’ll be okay.”
“Perhaps,” Hanlon said. He grabbed the side of his desk and used it to haul himself up. His knee gave an arthritic pop; Rachel thought that was the most honest thing she’d ever hear from him. “Perhaps not.”
“You poor thing,” she said, as she glanced around for the best place to sit. She’d have loved to have taken over Hanlon’s own chair, but it was shoved tight beneath his desk and she had no way to maneuver it. She decided her second-best option was to settle her avatar in the same spot on Hanlon’s desk where he had been sitting. It put Hanlon at something of an angle to her, but that was acceptable: the sound of his bad knee would sing her to sleep for months to come.
“One question before I leave,” she said. “All of this hinged on Jenna Noura making a mistake. But we checked her background. Noura was one of the best, and incredibly expensive. There were easier ways for you to set up this domino effect than to hire her to break into the White House and hope that she failed.
“You wanted her to succeed,” Rachel continued, watching Hanlon’s face out of the corner of her eye for small changes. “But since you also wanted to get out of Dodge, I’m guessing that means breaking into the White House isn’t the only scheme you’ve been running.”
Nothing. The man’s poker face rivaled Mulcahy’s. She was tempted to shove her fist through his head, just to wipe that bemused half-grin from it.
She pushed on. “Jonathan Dunstan could have launched his story at any time, as long as he put it out before Kathleen Patterson’s. This gave you…what? About three weeks where you could commit batshit-crazy crimes all over Washington?”
“Serious charges, Agent Peng. Do you have any evidence?”
“Of course not,” she said. “Like with Noura and her theft—if she had pulled it off, we’d have never known it had happened. But I’ll be cleaning up after you for the next five years, won’t I?”
Hanlon resumed packing boxes.
“Nothing?” Rachel asked. When he didn’t reply, she stood and pretended to straighten her pants. “All right, then. I’ll guess I’ll see you in Hell.”
“The Mechanism, Agent Peng,” Hanlon said. He hadn’t stopped packing, but there was an odd set to his shoulders, as if he was preparing to strike. “If I did all of these terrible things, the fragment from the Mechanism must have been important to me. Have you learned why it would hold such value?”
“Nah,” she said.
He put the stack of books in his hands down, and leaned towards her, as if he could read her avatar like he could her real face. His tiger’s smile came out again. “Mulcahy’s told you nothing.”
“He told me enough to send your ass packing.”
The smile slipped around the edges.
“Nice try, thinking you can drive a wedge between us as you leave, but I don’t think you understand what you made. You didn’t just create new technology—you created a community that happens to use that tech. OACET’s been a real learning experience. We all figured out pretty damn quick that nobody has to be good at everything, or know everything, to still contribute. We’re our own puzzle: the pieces might overlap sometimes, and there might be gaps in what we know, but we still manage to fit together.
“I don’t think you’ve ever quite understood that,” she said. “I don’t know if someone like you is capable of understanding that together, you’re more than you were separately. It’s like, oh, I don’t know…all of fucking human civilization.
”
“No, I understand,” Hanlon said. “All too well, believe me. I think most people in positions of power recognize that OACET is not only a failed experiment, but a serious threat. A small insular group with its own agenda is incredibly dangerous.”
He left that thought unfinished, the idea that Congress still considered them a threat, maybe now more than ever as they kept proving themselves to be not only useful, but a functioning federal organization...
Rachel shivered.
“What you claim I did to you was clumsy,” he continued, as he reached for a little statuette of a horse. He started to wrap this in tissue paper, carefully winding it between each leg. “The next generation of mind control would have to be much more subtle. They’re learning wonderful things about parasites these days,” he sighed. “Have you heard of Toxoplasma gondii? Mice infected by this parasite will fail to see a cat as a threat. The implications…”
He trailed off, as if thinking about possibilities.
“Well,” he finally said, as he slipped the statuette into a box. “Thanks to you, I’ll have a lot more time to work on new projects.”
He left that idea hanging between them. She felt the shape of it. It was round and ripe, and Hanlon had been waiting to sink his teeth into it for a long, long time.
Rachel couldn’t help but laugh. “You moron,” she said, knowing somewhere miles away, her fingernails had shredded the paper towels and were cutting into the skin on her palms. “If I didn’t hate you, I’d pity you.”
Anyone else would have reacted to that comment. A gasp, maybe, or at least a little frown. Hanlon stared at her, utterly impassive.
She ran her avatar’s finger across one of the framed photographs on Hanlon’s desk, recently removed from the wall and waiting for its turn to be wrapped and packed. A much younger Hanlon, an arm draped around Bill Clinton, grinned back at her with that familiar tiger’s smile. She lifted her finger from the frame and pretended to check it for dust.
“You already blew the best opportunity you’ll ever have,” she continued. “You develop this amazing, world-changing technology, and what do you do with it? You decide to uphold the status quo. Instead of using it to shake up the system, you try to make yourself richer, more powerful… That’s pathetic.”
“I suppose that would depend on your point of view,” Hanlon replied.
“Fair enough,” she said. “To me, money and power seem like lifetime achievement awards. You can’t really do much with them once you’re dead. Me? I like poetry.”
“Good,” Hanlon said. “With your salary, you can afford poetry.”
“Ooh, poetry zing! And spoken by someone who doesn’t understand it. See, money never really belongs to one person, and power disappears once you’re dead. But poetry? That’s humanity’s permanent record. There’re poems out there that’re older than entire civilizations.”
Hanlon reached across her and snatched the photograph of Clinton off the desk. She was sure the edge of the frame cut through her neck, but whatever. She had heard Hanlon’s clunky knee fail on him.
He was mortal.
“You know what gets written into poems?” she continued. “Heroes. Epic deeds. The occasional monster, but those always get beheaded. Admittedly, we don’t have that many heroes running around these days, but you could have been one of them.”
That got his attention. For the first time since she had plunged her fist into his chest, that half-amused smirk vanished, and he turned to face her with empty hands.
“I don’t know if you realize this,” she said, “but the implant? With that technology, you could have changed the entire fucking world. Forever. All you had to do was work out the bugs and make it available to everybody, and you could have been a legend. Leonardo da Vinci? Thomas Edison? What did they ever do to unite the entire planet? You had the chance to redefine—and let me reiterate here—all of fucking civilization. And you would’ve been its architect.”
She leaned in, inches away from his face, and this time she was the one to grin. “You could have been an Achilles-level, capital-L Legend!”
His face fell, as if realization had struck like a bolt of lightning. She didn’t mind at all.
“But no,” she said, waving her fingertips in idle circles. “You decided to throw that away and focus on money and power.
“And you left OACET in charge,” she said. “And we, at least, are aware that we could either royally ruin everything, or try and leave a legacy our kids will be proud of. So we’re trying to do the latter. Thanks for giving us that opportunity.”
He stared at her, silent and motionless. Rachel wished she could read his colors. She had a brief, fleeting impulse to hop back to her body and throw her scans out as far as they could possibly go, to maybe catch the reds and oranges of distress…
“That’s what I came here to say,” she said. She pointed to the burner phone, and overloaded its battery. “Never call me again.”
With that, she crisped the circuits in Santino’s stolen prototype, and left Hanlon standing in his office, blinking at the empty air.
TWENTY-FOUR
The cherry blossom festival was something of a misnomer. The trees were blooming, yes, but mostly it was an excuse for tourists and locals alike to lounge around in the sun and drink excellent strawberry lemonade.
Everything is flowers again, Rachel thought, as she slurped up the fruit slurry at the bottom of her plastic cup. Avery, squirreled up in her lap, giggled at the sound before she squirmed free and waddled off to where her parents were sitting.
They had the park to themselves, at least for a little while. Not many people visited the Floral Library before the tulips were up. There were plenty of flowers, though: the old women who maintained this miniature park on the east side of the Tidal Basin had trucked in pansies, and a bed full of miniature purple and yellow faces bobbed in the breeze.
They were all here, Becca and Santino, Jason and Phil and Bell, Mako and his family... Even Hill and Ami were blissfully entwined on a nearby picnic blanket. Zockinski, busy coaching his twin daughters’ first Little League game of the season, said he’d drop by afterward. It was a party, of sorts: it was one year to the day from when Mulcahy had told the world there were cyborgs among them.
Rachel stood to stretch her legs. Avery was growing up to be her father’s daughter, and was already big enough to have cut off all circulation to Rachel’s lower body. She excused herself, and staggered across a parking lot and down to the water’s edge.
Nobody was around, which was fine by her. Hill had reset her nose and it was healing straight, but the rest of her face had turned into one of McCrindle’s long-dead bloated raccoons. Every time a stranger caught sight of her, they flashed a bright alarm-red, and she had been staying out of public places after an especially loud fellow made comments about women who needed rescuing from their abusers. He had been trying to be kind, and she was glad she had made it to the bathroom before she broke down laughing.
She kept her scans close, seeing the fish begging her for crumbs and not much else. She spotted a goldfish mixed in with the perch: someone’s pet, dropped into the Basin when it outgrew its bowl.
“It’s a myth,” Santino said from behind her. “The one where goldfish only grow to fit the size of their tanks.”
Rachel nodded. Her maternal grandmother raised goldfish, big ones that put this foot-long baby to shame. She watched as her partner flicked a handful of crackers into the water, turning it into a mess of mouths and churning fins.
She ran her scans through the concrete wall beneath her feet, and forced herself to look across the water.
Directly across the Basin was the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial.
“Yeah,” Santino said.
They didn’t speak for a very long while. Their fight in the alley behind the Trout and Badger had sprained things between them. Their friendship wasn’t broken, but it hadn’t been comfortable for almost a week, and neither of them had wanted to put any weight o
n it in fear that they might make it worse.
“I wonder if we can get him on the beetle-frogs,” Rachel finally said. She had taken the 3D-printed replica of the fragment from the Mechanism out of her pocket, and was turning it over in her hands as she spoke.
“Hmm?”
“Those weird beetle-frogs,” she said, as she started to spin her EM barrier around them so they could talk privately. “The ones that Jenna Noura used as her murder weapon. We never did figure out where the poison came from. Maybe Hanlon imported a bunch of beetle-frogs.”
“Okay, first, those are two different animals. Beetles and frogs,” Santino said. “The beetles generate the poison, and they pass this to the frogs when they’re eaten. Second, both the beetles and frogs are really common, so we’d have to start the search at the genetic level—”
He realized she was grinning at him, and punched her lightly in her arm.
“Do you think Alimoren was involved?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think we’ll ever really know. If he was innocent, he was the perfect pawn—Hanlon chose him well. Throw a couple of files on his laptop, and everyone would think the worst.”
“I’d like to clear his name, if he was.”
“Me, too,” Rachel said, thinking of a coffee cup hidden behind a plastic plant. “The FBI is working on it. They might be able to piece together what happened, what his role was in all of this. But even if we do clear his name...”
Santino nodded to show he understood. Alimoren’s memory already bore an indelible brand. Alimoren had been killed by an unknown professional, in much the same way as Noura had been killed by professional hit men, and the public had already decided he had been a conspirator. Efforts to clear his name might just feed the rumors about government cover-ups.
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