“Everybody thinks they know how to build bombs,” Rachel said around a mouthful of pizza. “Nobody does. Not the kind of bombs that can cause the damage we saw today. You can’t even get the materials to do something like this, let alone get access to set those bombs in place unnoticed.”
Santino shook his head. “You’d be surprised,” he told her. “I know some people who could pull this off, no question. They wouldn’t do it—they wouldn’t even think about doing it—but they’ve got the skills, and they don’t need much in the way of resources.”
The rest of the table shrugged him off in a reddish-purple sigh. Outside of work and OACET, Santino’s friends were usually nerds, and always functionally harmless. Her partner’s colors dipped towards orange-yellow irritation, and she sent a quick text to his phone: “Tell me more about them later.”
His phone buzzed and he slipped it beneath the table to surreptitiously check the message, then glared at her as his irritation darkened into red anger. Apparently, he was not in the mood for a sop.
“You two done?” Sturtevant asked them. “Okay. So. As of today, your cases have been reassigned or tabled. Yes,” he said to Zockinski and Hill, “even that messy one. Sorry.
“You see what’s out there?” he asked them, pointing out the window. “It’s the biggest, friendliest law enforcement team-up we’ve had since September 11th. Bigger, probably, since we’ve been preparing for something like this for years.”
“What do you want us to do?” Rachel asked.
“Nothing,” Sturtevant said. “If the preparedness scenarios work as planned? You do absolutely nothing.”
“What if things don’t go as planned?” Zockinski asked.
Sturtevant pointed at him.
“You’re worried about groupthink,” Santino said.
“There’re a lot of good things happening,” Sturtevant said. “Law enforcement coming together, everybody focused on bringing the bad guys to justice. Should be perfect, right? We should be an efficient machine, each department playing its own part. We’ve got the resources, we’ve done the training. So, Agent Peng, tell me what’s wrong with this picture.”
She almost laughed. “That’s the same reason Congress created OACET.”
OACET was the bastard child of good intentions. It was sold to Congress by one of their own, a certain Senator Richard Hanlon, who claimed the technology finally existed to bridge those persistent territorial gaps between the different branches of government. They had good reason to believe him: Hanlon had come to office via the private sector and his company had developed the prototype of the cyborgs’ implant. Congress had allocated hundreds of millions for the new Office of Adaptive and Complementary Enhancement Technologies, recruited five hundred young federal employees as test subjects, and tucked the whole thing away behind innocuous code words until the fledgling cyborgs were ready to return to their jobs. If things had gone as planned, Rachel would have been back in the Army by now, earning those General’s stars as she coordinated military operations with the other members of OACET.
But things so rarely go as planned.
“Do I have to tell you why I’m worried something might go wrong?” Sturtevant asked her.
She shook her head and reached for the last slice of pizza.
“I know you can’t serve two masters, Peng,” Sturtevant said to her. “Tell me right now if this is a conflict of interest for you.”
“What is it you want us to do?” she asked.
Sturtevant said nothing.
“Ah,” she said, nodding. “No, I don’t see why that should be a problem.”
“Good,” Sturtevant said as he stood to leave. “As of this moment on, you’re working this bombing as part the MPD. I’ll put your names on the clearance lists. If anyone tries to cut you out, have them call me.”
Sturtevant stalked away from the table, his colors still lashing out in reds and blacks. The four of them watched him go.
“Yay, purpose,” Rachel said once the door has shut behind him. She began to slowly unweave her barrier; the feedback gave her a hell of a headache if she let the frequencies crash in on themselves.
“Love it—love it!—when he gives us orders without giving us orders,” complained Zockinski.
“I get the feeling he wants a team,” Santino said. “You know. Guys he can rely on to get the hard stuff done.”
“Hard? You have any idea how hard you have to work to make Detective?” Zockinski retorted, reds flaring over his core of autumn orange. “If I’d wanted to be somebody’s hired goon, there are easier ways.”
“Ways that pay better,” added Hill.
“You ever play chess against Sturtevant?” Santino asked them. “Try it sometime. Cyborgs aren’t the only ones who play a good long game.” He shot another hard look at Rachel as he tossed a few bucks on the table and went outside to cool off.
“What’s up with your work wife?” Zockinski asked her once Santino was gone.
“You know why Sturtevant came down here?” Rachel opened her purse and fumbled around for her wallet. It was usually on the top layer of strata, but had somehow sunk deep enough for her to root around at the bottom of the bag. “Because he’s worried that everybody involved is going to jump to the wrong conclusion. Anything the four of us find? It’s not going to make a difference. It’s not like we’re going to trip over that one little piece of evidence the bomb squad missed, or that one bad guy the FBI didn’t find… We’re supposed to bear witness on the impending shitstorm. We’re spectators, and when this is over, we’re going to write some nice anonymous hundred-page report about what happened, and why everybody suddenly decided to gang up on, oh, let’s say, Serbia. And if we do our jobs right, what we put in that report will let Sturtevant and the MPD prevent a repeat of mistakes in the future. So Sturtevant is counting on us to think outside the box, and the first thing we do is shoot Santino down because his idea didn’t fit into what we already expect.
“Plus, he’s tired of us thinking that nerds are as harmless as wet kittens,” she added, finally locating some money for a tip. “Doesn’t matter if they are or not,” she said, interrupting Zockinski. “They’re his people, and when we bust on them, we bust on him.”
With that, they went outside. Santino had a classic Italian temper, quick to boil over but even quicker to cool off, and they found him talking on his cell. He hung up and rejoined them.
“Jason’s got access to the video,” he said. “Figured we can start there while we wait for Forensics to process the street.”
“Which video?” Zockinski asked. “Security feeds, personal phones…?”
Santino grinned. “All of it.”
Jason Atran was the other Agent working with the MPD. He was the one she didn’t like. He didn’t like her either, but that was to be expected: Jason didn’t like anybody. Rachel reached out through the link and found him in his office.
She tried to keep the contact feather-light, but he still felt her ping him. “Rachel.”
“Hey Jason,” she said. They all had tricks to wipe themselves of emotion. Hers was to think of concrete. She didn’t know why it worked; it just did. When things got really hairy, she thought of Madison Square Garden and it cleared her mind right up. Fortunately (or not), she had an entire ruined street less than a few blocks away which offered her plenty of distractions, and she held on to the image of a nearby broken building as he chitter-chattered in her head.
“Wait, what?” Jason had said something which yanked her attention back into his monologue. “Say that again.”
He sighed in her mind, and she felt him roll his eyes. “I said, I’ve got the facial recognition scans going and nobody has popped.”
“Bullshit,” Rachel retorted. “It’s downtown Washington-freakin’-D.C. There’s always a hit.”
“I’ve already run my scripts to analyze the past forty-eight hours. I’ve got the usual rogues’ gallery of thugs and assholes, but there’s nothing special about them. No terrorists. But the
re’s no military brass, either.”
Okay, now that’s weird, Rachel though to herself.
Jason heard her. “Yeah, thanks, that’s why I mentioned it. There are the usual number of grunts and lower-ranking officers, but anyone with a Colonel’s commission or higher? Normal population analytics put an average of thirty-one ranking officers per day on that street, but the last two days? Pas du tout.”
“Have you gone back any further?”
“No. The MPD’s system can’t keep up with my scripts. I’m only as fast as the processing power they give me.”
“All right, thanks. See what you can complete by the time we get there.” Rachel broke the connection before he could add another complaint, maybe one about how if his data analysis was so very important to this project, maybe they’d finally give him some better computers? Really, she didn’t even have to hear what he said any more. She was already well-versed in his litany of complaints and criticisms.
(It’s not as though she didn’t like Jason. He was OACET: she couldn’t not like Jason. It was just that, as of August, she had to like Jason, and Rachel really would have appreciated the option to hate him, or, at the very least, think of him as that one brother who knew better than to sit next to her at family meals.)
She came up out of her conversation with Jason and found they had been retracing their path back to the cars. The others were nearly a block ahead of her. The men from the MPD had learned to leave her alone when she started chatting with another Agent; she had an unfortunate tendency to walk into the path of moving vehicles when she tried to carry on multiple conversations at once.
She had nearly caught up to them when Jonathan Dunstan fell into step beside her.
“No comment,” she snapped at him.
Since she had moved to Washington, Rachel had been inundated with interesting trivia. She had learned that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was not actually a branch of government, and that the summer squash at the Palisades Farmers Market was so astonishingly good that it was worth getting up before the sun to hold your place in line. And she had learned that every politician had a reporter to call upon: like a witch commanding their familiar, a senator could point their reporter towards a target and watch as their pet did their bidding.
Jonathan Dunstan belonged to Senator Hanlon. Rachel often fantasized about punching Dunstan dead in the center of his face.
“Agent Peng?” Dunstan wore a weasel’s smile cut across his core of sky-dark aquamarine. She couldn’t read his colors without thinking of a thunderstorm over a tropical island; the guy could ruin anything just by showing up. Dunstan was holding a notepad and a stubby pencil; his digital media was suspiciously error-prone around her. “Why were you and Officer Santino were allowed on the scene before the FBI?”
“No comment,” she said again. She scanned the block and saw Santino had turned around, and was shouting to the others as he hurried back to join her.
“Is it true you found one of the victims?” Dunstan stepped in front of her and stopped to block her path. She darted around him, holding the arm nearest to Dunstan out as though she were offering him to grab it…
He didn’t. The weasel had been well-trained.
“Agent Peng, is there any truth to the rumor that OACET is behind the bombings?”
“That is a patent lie designed to get me to stop walking and talk to you,” she said as she caught up to Santino and the detectives. “Agent Glassman is OACET’s media representative. Please direct all potential slander and libel to him.”
That smile stayed plastered on Dunstan’s face, but his surface colors blanched. He couldn’t hold his own against handsome, charismatic Josh Glassman, and Dunstan knew it. Josh tended to end all interviews with Dunstan by offering the weasel a quiet place for a nap and a sippy cup full of apple juice.
“Also? No comment,” Rachel told Dunstan. “Just in case you forgot.”
“Agent Peng, are you blind?”
She should have kept walking, but her feet had carried her back to Dunstan before conscious thought intervened. “Am I what?” she hissed.
“Blind,” he said.
“To what? Gender inequality? The overseas sweatshop industry responsible for my cheap polo shirts?” The part of her brain that handled these situations had finally caught up to her mouth. Santino grabbed her by the shoulder, but she shrugged him off. She lowered her voice and stood on her toes so she could stare directly into Dunstan’s eyes. “Or if you’re asking whether I’m blind to what Hanlon has done to OACET, please. You already know we’re on to him.”
Dunstan recoiled from her, then tried to recover by stepping so close their noses practically touched. It was a lovely dramatic gesture, except he was so scared he was awash in sick yellows. “Physically blind,” he said. “We have a source which puts you as sustaining irreparable damage to both eyes almost a year ago.”
“Oh, that,” Rachel said, rocking back on the flats of her feet. “Yes, of course I’m blind. I have an invisible guide dog named Boo who helps me load and aim my gun.
“What’s that, Boo?” She cocked her head and pretended to listen to a voice coming from three feet above the ground. “No, we don’t have to shoot him. He’s just an unforgivably stupid excuse for a human being. Letting him live will be punishment enough.
“Boo says you are free to quote me on that,” she said to Dunstan before she turned away.
Dunstan had lost the yellows when she was no longer close enough to slug him. Now, he was smug pink and determined to have the last word. “You can see through walls, Agent Peng. You used to be the only cyborg who could. Not too much of a stretch to think you taught yourself that trick to compensate for your loss of sight.”
She spun back to face him. “Do your homework, Dunstan. Every Agent can do what I can. Hell, Agent Netz is working with the bomb squad right up the street.”
“And Agent Atran said you were the one who taught the rest of them,” Dunstan replied.
God damn it, Jason. She might never stop kicking him.
“You’re fishing, Dunstan,” she said. “You’ve got nothing, because there’s nothing to it. Anyone who would buy this bullshit is the type of person who’d believe anything you threw at them. You want a good story? Look into the man who signs your paychecks. You know what he did to us, so…”
Rachel bit down on her next line, the one where Dunstan should leave Hanlon or plan to be taken down with him. It was a good line, but there was no reason for her to say it aloud; Dunstan already knew. Instead, she gave him a wide, toothy smile before she stalked off, the men from the MPD following in her wake.
She was so angry she could barely see. Her mind felt like it had been stuffed in a sock, and her scans couldn’t penetrate. It was one firmly-placed foot in front of the other, all the way back to the car.
Medical records. It had to have been my medical records. So much for HIPAA, she snarled to herself. Somehow—honestly, it probably hadn’t been that hard—Hanlon had gotten her information. She thought she had purged the details of that event from her medical history, but she must have left a trace somewhere. A pharmacist’s note, maybe, or Hanlon could have tracked down the physicians who had treated her when Josh brought her to the hospital. Short of murdering everyone involved, there was no way she could have completely erased her stay in the intensive care unit.
Dunstan was wrong about one thing. It had been much less than a year since Josh had found her, lying flat on her back and staring straight up at the sun, awake but unaware of anything around her. When he finally slapped her back to sense, he had taken her straight to the hospital to treat the seeping blisters that covered her body. Those two days she had spent on her balcony were followed by two more days in the ICU, where she had fluids pumped into her while a dialysis unit took some of the load for her kidneys, just in case. The doctors said her body would be fine; even her skin wouldn’t scar.
Her eyes… Well. One does not look at the sun for two days without consequences. The doctors had di
re things to say about her eyes.
She had never bothered to ask Josh what he had told those doctors, what lie he had crafted to explain why or how she had suffered exposure on a balcony in southern California. Once she had gotten all of the good she could get from the hospital, he had talked the physicians into releasing her and had taken her home. She had never gone back to those doctors for a follow-up. By the time she needed treatment for her failing eyesight, the Agents had started to get their shit together and she was under the care of Jenny Davies.
But that last time they had examined her? She still had her vision, but her eyes had already started to die. She was sure that’s what Hanlon had found, someone who would testify that patients did not bounce back from the type of progressive macular degeneration she had at the time she left the hospital.
Rachel aimed a kick at a chunk of brick, just to prove to herself that she could. The brick skittered across the pavement and slammed into the curb, then bounced over and down the sidewalk until it plonged off of a dumpster.
Blind. Fuck Hanlon. She was not blind. Her eyes might not work, but she could see better than anyone else alive.
“Rachel?” The fury-fog was starting to lift. Rachel found Santino a few steps behind her. “Slow down. You’re practically running.”
She stopped. Zockinski and Hill had done the same, but a couple dozen feet out of earshot to give them time to talk. All partners had secrets; Hill probably knew things about Zockinski that even Zockinski’s wife would never learn. They had probably guessed that Santino was privy to some of the inner workings of OACET, and they kept their distance.
“It’s bullshit.” She said it loud enough for Zockinski and Hill to overhear. “He’s just fishing.”
“Obviously.” Santino was playing along. “But why would he ask if you were blind?”
She gave a forced sigh, and then walked back to rejoin Zockinski and Hill.
“I was in an accident, a few months before OACET went public,” she told them. “There was a chance—a small chance—that I could lose my eyesight. Looks like a certain Senator got his hands on my medical records.”
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