“What’s up?” Rachel asked Phil as she dropped to the ground beside him.
“Check this out,” he said, using the probe to carefully nudge a scrap of melted plastic aside. Beneath this were two sections of small bronze rings, a scorched face plate sandwiched between these. The rings were still bolted to a badly damaged segment of pipe. Rachel scanned the bronze rings and found a layer of broken glass above the face plate, like the protective glass bubble which shielded the face of a clock.
“What was this?” she asked.
“We’ve seen pieces of these at a couple of the other sites, but this one is the best example so far,” he said. “We think it was part of a velocity water meter.”
“And?”
“Gayle Street uses external displacement water meters at utility junctions. This type of meter is designed for a private residence. There’s no reason for something like this to have been inside of a building.”
Rachel stood up so quickly she heard the blood rush in her ears. Behind her, she heard Santino say, “Whoa.”
“Yeah,” Phil said. “And if we’re right and this was part of the bomb, it was probably the arming device. Take a peek inside,” he said to Rachel.
She did. Her scans found traces of copper and gold, with the residue of plastic and solder burned to a coarse residue around the interior of the bronze ring. “Electronics?”
Phil nodded. “There was something digital in here. I don’t think we’ll be able to reconstruct it—there’s not enough of it left—but it could have been a receiver, maybe an old cell phone… Something simple, with a power supply. It released the gas in the line, primed the reservoir, and sparked the explosion.”
“All of that with this?” Rachel tapped the tarp next to the bronze rings with the toe of her boot. The rings were small enough to vanish under her foot.
Santino shrugged. “The largest component would be the power supply. The rest of the mechanism would take up practically no room at all.”
“Batteries aren’t that big,” Rachel said.
“Batteries are too unreliable,” Santino said. “Two-plus years in an active device might drain them dry. They’d need a long-term power source, and those would take up space.”
“Right,” Phil agreed. “Rachel, when we found the murder scene last night, did you notice anything that looked like a water meter?”
“No,” she said, thinking back to the smooth dusting of drywall and ash which had covered the floor. “All I found was the blood and those footprints.”
“That’s it?” Phil sounded surprised. “No drag marks, no impressions to show where a canister had been set down?”
“No, nothing,” Rachel said.
“That’s weird,” Phil said. “You’d think he would have put the canister on the floor when the cops interrupted him.”
“I might have missed it,” Rachel admitted. “Hope and I didn’t stay there too long.”
Phil stifled a yawn. “That, and it was really late.”
“I miss all of the good stuff,” Santino said, half-joking.
Rachel wasn’t sure if there was a proper name for the glare that your friends gave you when you reminded them in an offhand way that you were sleeping with the most beautiful woman on the planet—the Germans might have had one, she didn’t know—but this was probably one of those times when words weren’t needed anyhow. Santino took a step backwards and pretended to fend them off with an open hand.
“Hey, Rachel?”
Rachel tossed a quick scan over to the Hardware section. Joie Young, one of the Agents on loan to the FBI, waved to her. Joie’s conversational colors were slowly churning in antagonistic reds and oranges across her core of rich scarlet. “Bad news?” Rachel asked her.
“A friend of mine over at the NSA just let me know that Homeland’s sending Bryce Knudson.”
Exhilaration and adrenaline swept through Rachel. Five hundred feet away, Joie burst out laughing. “I thought you hated that guy,” Joie said.
“I do,” Rachel replied. “Oh, I do. This’ll be fun.”
Like most things in her professional life, antagonizing Homeland Security had been a calculated risk. OACET came first—OACET always came first—little else mattered except the welfare of the collective. Rachel’s duties at First MPD had been to make alliances, to bind the police to OACET as closely as she could. She had made rapid progress within that community, and now she was slowly expanding her reach outward to encompass the other law enforcement organizations which worked with the MPD.
The Department of Homeland Security didn’t fall within her scope. Not yet, at least. In August, Rachel had fallen deep in the stink over at Homeland, and she hadn’t found a good opportunity to pull herself out of it. Today, she had decided to go with the odds: since Homeland had alienated its brethren, she’d use that to OACET’s advantage. And, hell, if throwing OACET’s weight around could help solve Gayle Street before the country burned itself down? So much the better. They would all remember that, even Homeland.
Especially Homeland. If she could get the Gayle Street investigation rolling again, Homeland would have to realize that OACET made a better friend than an enemy.
(No matter the outcome, she did not expect to smooth things over with Bryce Knudson. Even if Rachel and Homeland resolved their bumpy patches, she was sure Knudson would keep her on his personal shit list. She was fine with this; she’d never forgive him, either. That one time they had worked together, Knudson had tried to coerce her into breaking the law in a way that would have most likely cracked OACET wide open, and when she refused to take the bait, he had told the press that she and the rest of OACET were child-killing machines. After things had settled down, Santino had asked her if she was going to have Knudson fired, and she had laughed and said she was looking forward to working with Knudson for years and years and years.)
Rachel and Santino walked to the front of the store, where a catering company had set up a few coffee machines on a folding table. There were some mismatched chairs nearby, but judging by their condition they predated the occupation; when Rachel suggested they should have a seat and wait for Knudson, Santino shivered and his colors ran a sickly green. Instead, they stood around and chatted with the various officers and agents who found their way to the coffee.
The automatic doors squealed open a few minutes later, and Bryce Knudson pushed his way towards her.
If she could still see, Rachel was sure that her conversations with Knudson would have been especially awkward. His head was shaved to the scalp, and Santino assured her that light reflected off of it in a truly spectacular fashion. Her encounters with Knudson usually occurred when he had reached the point of rage, and to her, his head glowed as though it was lit from within. Had she the use of her eyes, she would have surely lost control of their arguments by trying to make his bald dome pop like a tick.
He was bright red now, and shining as though he had been polished. Rachel covered her mouth to hide a smile.
“Agent Peng!” Knudson’s low bellow made her think of a bull who had learned to talk.
“Hello, Knudson,” she said as she topped off her Styrofoam cup of coffee, her voice all syrupy sweetness. “Can I help you with something?”
Laughter rolled towards them from all corners of the room. Knudson’s head snapped around, his conversational colors whipping with reds and blacks, as he realized he was in the center of a group of heavily-armed people who did not think kindly of him.
“Come with me,” he snapped, and then turned and walked away from her, heading towards an empty doorway cut in the nearest wall.
“You coming?” she whispered to Santino.
He shook his head. “If I do, I drag the MPD into a federal fight.”
“Yeah,” she sighed. “I’ll try and keep you out of it.”
She went after Knudson, the sound of their feet the only noise within the suddenly silent building. Rachel passed a quick scan through the doorway and found a flight of stairs that led to what must have been a
manager’s office. The stairwell was dark, the lights busted out years ago. Knudson might have been hoping she’d trip and fall, but the joke was on him.
(Or maybe it was on her—sometimes it was hard to tell.)
At the top was a wreck of a room. Graffiti covered the walls and ceiling. A one-way mirrored window had been smashed out years before Homeland had taken control of the building. It took Rachel a moment to realize why Knudson had brought her up here, until she realized that the pile of trash which covered the floor had been swept aside to make a small clearing near the missing window. In that clearing was a folding table and a matching chair set up like a desk, a desktop computer surrounded by fast food wrappers, a portable clip lamp gripping the edge of the table like a miserable bird… This was Homeland’s on-site office.
Beneath them was the whole of the store with its audience of more than a hundred law enforcement officers, all of whom were pretending they couldn’t see Rachel and Knudson on what was, for all practical purposes, a balcony.
This idiot wants to feel like he’s in control of the situation, so he goes and puts us on a stage? Rachel thought. How delightful.
Knudson rounded on her, black and red rolling within a dark storm-cloud gray. “Agent Peng, you had no—”
“Let me stop you there,” she said, putting herself into an unmovable parade rest as he came at her and tried to use his size to force her backwards. “I had every right to come here and bring my team and our support staff to assist. We’ve already made some terrific progress—members of the MPD’s bomb unit think they found part of a detonator—and we will share this information with you.
“Because that,” she said as she took a fast step towards him, “is what we are all supposed to be doing. Collaborating to find those responsible and bring them to justice. Or am I misquoting the rhetoric?”
“You want rhetoric?” Knudson snapped. “Try watching the nightly news. The last few days, Homeland’s been tried in the media. They’ve decided we’re responsible for Gayle Street.”
“And you think this is going to help?” Rachel gestured towards the floor below. “How is shutting the rest of us out supposed to improve anything? The purpose of Homeland was supposed to promote collaboration, not more territoriality and infighting.”
“I don’t know most of these people,” Knudson said. “I can’t keep track of what they’re bringing in or taking out. Homeland is vulnerable, Peng. The public doesn’t understand what we’re supposed to do, and the only time we make the news is when they’re screaming about how we’ve fucked up. If Homeland doesn’t control who has access to our information, it could be used against us.”
She suppressed the sudden urge to smack her forehead: at least when she had this argument with Mulcahy, her frustration was usually offset by the novelty of riding in a classic sports car. “If you do control access—especially like this, like you’ve got something to hide!—the media, the general public, they’re going to assume the worst. If you collaborate, you’ve shown how the police and the other federal agencies will back you up. If the media is dumping on you, Knudson, spread the blame around!”
“Because that’s worked so well for the NSA,” Knudson said, the sarcasm so thick within his conversational colors that the reds and blacks literally dripped. “Let’s all thank Edward Snowden for this brave new world of transparency and accountability, and the NSA is finally the super-villain we all knew it was.”
“Snowden is full of shit,” Rachel heard herself say.
“Don’t you fucking dare!” Knudson snapped. “OACET is worse than Snowden! Every single one of you should be tried for treason!”
“We didn’t—” Rachel started, but caught herself even before she saw the burst of anxiety from both Phil and Joie, fifteen feet below. She quickly sent her argument down a safer path. “We came out with as much information as we thought the public could bear at one time, and we were open about what we chose to share, and why. The way Snowden disclosed information, like he was teasing the highlights of a movie? It turned the issues, intent, and methods into the same shitty mess.”
“He was one employee. No, not even that. Snowden was a contractor.” Knudson barked a laugh. “OACET is a federal agency. At least one of you things should have remembered your oaths.”
“You’ve got to be joking,” Rachel said. “When we volunteered to join OACET, we didn’t know what they would do to us. Before they stuck all kinds of ungodly crap in our heads, each of us swore to uphold the Constitution. After we learned what they wanted us to be, we realized there was no way to keep our oaths without going public.”
“I’ve heard that story before,” Knudson said. “And Manning gave a better press conference.”
“Okay, try this: when you have a misinformed public, you get a misinformed response. Can you imagine what might have happened if the press found out what Homeland’s been doing here?”
Knudson leaned towards her. “Is that a threat?”
“No, Knudson, but you should ask yourself why you think it could be one.” Rachel decided to give him one last chance. “Listen,” she said, as calmly as she could manage. “Try and see what’s going on here from my perspective. What do you think would have happened if the public found out about OACET through a news site? If they learned about OACET any other way, it could have destroyed the country—it would have destroyed America’s reputation. Once we found out that we had been lied to about our purpose, we came out to put the record straight. Not because we couldn’t have stayed in hiding, but because the consequences of being caught were too high.
“I’m saying the same type of thing is happening here, now. In this building. By suppressing information, you’re creating conditions where the outcome will be a hundred times worse than if you were open from the start.”
“If that information gets out, maybe,” Knudson snapped. “But if it’s locked down, then everybody benefits. The atomic age is over. A bomb is just a fucking bomb—nuke Manhattan and maybe twenty million people get sick and die—but in the digital age, information is power.
“You don’t get it,” he said, and now his underlying rant was beginning to emerge. “OACET was supposed to be the next generation of weaponry. We could have had decades to establish a competitive edge. But thanks to you, every enemy we have is trying to develop their own versions of OACET, and you know they aren’t going follow your false moral code.”
“False?” Rachel arched an eyebrow. She had wondered why Knudson hated the Agents, and now she knew. “I am the living embodiment of the surveillance state, and I’m sick of hearing how that means I should have no say in how I use my own technology. Ask any Agent—we’re scared shitless of what we could do, so we all make sure we don’t do it! It’s pretty fucking simple!”
“Don’t you dare pretend to take the high ground with me!” Knudson shouted, all cold blue ice. “If OACET had stayed undercover, we could have monitored you. But you know how this works—you know that once the technology is out there, we start getting sloppy about how we use it. OACET may pretend to be all moral today, but it’s just a matter of time before you lose that fake edge of yours. Come back in a couple of years, Peng, once everybody is used to you and you think you can get away with doing whatever you want. Then tell me how you’ve never once abused your powers.”
“Thank you,” she said to him.
“What?” His colors froze; he hadn’t expected that.
“I couldn’t figure out why you had forced Homeland to close the others out of the evidence,” Rachel said. “That was you, right? You were the one who made that decision? I couldn’t understand why you’d force Homeland to do something that stupidly self-involved. But what you just said told me more about your personal philosophy than anything else.”
The anger flared within his colors, so bright she nearly recoiled. Instead, she stepped forward, coming up on her toes to break through his personal space. She lowered her voice so the crowd below couldn’t hear her as she pushed him. “You’re a coward, Kn
udson. Worse, you’re a coward who’s got power, and you’re incapable of seeing that other people with power aren’t afraid to do the hard thing—the right thing!—and reach out and help... Not hiding in a hole and covering their own asses.”
When she could think again, the first word in her mind was centiseconds. That must have been all of the time she needed for her conscious and unconscious selves to go to war, because she very clearly remembered making the tactical decision to take the hit. Instead, she found herself rolling away so Knudson’s heavy fist grazed her right shoulder instead of landing on her face.
And that extra momentum tipped her straight through the open hole where the windows should have been.
Rachel reached behind her and grabbed the metal sill with her left hand. Distantly, she heard two separate cries of pain: Phil and Joie were riding her body, and they felt the edge of the broken glass stuck in the sill pierce her palm.
Knudson was standing over her, red and orange and yellow as he tried to decide what to do.
“I am not a problem that will go away because of a fifteen-foot drop,” she hissed at him.
He grabbed her arm and hauled her up.
They stared at each other for several long seconds; Knudson looked away first, the professional blue in his colors slowly fading as he realized what he had done. This was a career-ender. They both knew it. You did not attack another federal agent, no matter how she provoked you, no matter if the agency she represented was unpopular. No matter if she wasn’t technically human.
Rachel used her good hand to unbutton her suit coat, and then pressed her other hand against her hip to keep her blood from pooling on the floor. Jenny Davies would never stop shouting at her.
“I used to be a soldier,” she said, when she had finally decided what to do with Knudson.
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