Digital Divide

by Spangler, K. B.

  “Be right back,” she told them, and fled.

  She was not naïve. Rachel knew she might as well have autographed some of those burned-out ruins in Afghanistan. But over there she had been one soldier in a war, and it had made all the difference. She would not spend the rest of her life as Death incarnate while locked in a basement five thousand miles away.

  And today, she would not allow Glazer to cut a path out of First District Station.

  No one at the MPD would ever know, she was certain of that, but she couldn’t lie to the others. Sooner or later, a stray thought or emotion would make its way into the link, and they’d realize what she had done to put Hanlon’s name on the record. Josh would never forgive her. Mulcahy would burn her to ash. Phil, Mako, everyone in the Program, nobody would see this as a necessary evil.

  Or maybe they’d understand. Heck, maybe they’d do it in her place. She hadn’t lied to Santino: their goal never changed. Hanlon…Hanlon…Hanlon…

  Think tanks. God, she could not shake this sour taste in her mouth.

  No interrogation was conducted without props. It was part of the psychology; the bad guy who has nothing sits across the table from the good guy who has something. If the interrogator held something that intimidated the suspect, so much the better. Common knowledge, really. No one would think anything of it if she carried a folder of Glazer’s handiwork in with her.

  Rachel raced back to the fishbowl, found a bright blue folder, and started cramming paper into it until it was decently thick. A quick scan of the windowsills and desk drawers, the nooks by the baseboards… nothing. The renovations were too fresh. Rachel started tipping over pen cups while she ran the edges of the room, finally finding what she was searching for in a box at the bottom of a filing cabinet.

  She used the first paperclip to affix a photograph of Maria Griffin to the front of the folder. The girl’s smile was blurry until Rachel flipped her implant to reading mode, and then Griffin was suddenly young and bright and full of promise.

  I’m going to Hell.

  The flat knob to the interrogation room was cold against her hand.

  Glazer recognized her, his conversational colors losing the bored grays and returning to those steely professional blues as she entered. “Out,” he said to his lawyer. The young man scurried from the room.

  Rachel dropped the folder down on the metal table, the paperclip banding Maria Griffin’s smiling photograph to the cover making an audible click. She sat and reached into her handbag, then placed a digital recorder on the table in front of him.

  “We’re going to conduct this interview as though you won’t be here tomorrow,” Rachel told him. She lifted the corner of the folder and let it drop so the paperclip clicked against the table a second time.

  “Hello Agent Peng,” Glazer said in his too-soft voice. Little spots of yellow-white excitement darted through the blue. “Is this my dying declaration?”

  “I’m assuming nothing with you,” she said, and used her thumb to turn on the recorder. “That includes whether you’ll be available to give testimony at trial.”

  Glazer’s eyes flicked to the folder, Griffin’s photograph… He nodded.

  Deal proposed, she thought.

  “This is Agent Rachel Peng of the Office of Adaptive and Complementary Technologies, conducting a formal interview with suspect John Glazer. This name is presumed to be an alias. Actual name of suspect is unknown, but physical and video evidence found at each scene confirms that the suspect is the likely perpetrator. The name Glazer will continue to be used throughout this interview because most of those I would prefer to use are too unsavory to put before a jury.”

  Sturtevant rapped on the inside of the glass. Rachel nodded to let him know she’d tone it down; they had arranged for him to call her if he had any additional questions, and she did not want to hear the Chief of Detectives reprimanding her inside her own head.

  Glazer cocked his head at her like a bird of prey sighting a mouse. “Rachel Phyllis Peng,” he said. “Born in Austin, Texas. Father is a U.S. native, mother immigrated from Beijing in the ‘Eighties. No formal postsecondary education, but has scored in the 99th percentile on general and Psychology GREs. Entered the Army at eighteen. Served four months in basic service, twenty-four months as a MOS 31D, thirty-two months in Criminal Investigation Command as a WO1. Eighteen sanctioned missions during Operation Enduring Freedom, six off of the books. Fourteen confirmed kills.”

  “Public record,” she said. “Mostly.”

  “Lapsed Catholic, last time in confession was right before you were deployed. Scared of dogs. And…” Glazer leaned forward and smiled, sitting on his secret.

  For an instant, she panicked. You can’t know! There’s no possible way you could know… Then she realized what he was implying and laughed.

  “If you’re trying to out me, you’re about a decade too late,” Rachel said as she winked at him. “Just because I don’t talk about it doesn’t mean it’s an issue. Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t care.”

  He flickered yellow.

  “Oh, don’t tell me that was your trump card,” she said. “That’s really sad.”

  Glazer settled back in his chair. “I know what they did to you.”

  “Who? What they did to OACET?”

  When he nodded, she pressed her fingers to her mouth. “You poor thing,” she sighed. “You actually think you’ve got something on us.”

  His conversational colors blurred: he had not expected that.

  “You want to know our master plan?” Rachel whispered. She said it just loud enough to be picked up by the camera, the recorder, and those watching from behind the glass: Spoiler alert, guys! “The thing about going public is you accept how one day, everybody will know. We already know it’ll get out. We want it to get out! We just don’t want to host our own pity party. The world might tolerate a cyborg, but nobody has any time for a whiner.

  “You want to tell these guys here?” She waved at the mirrored wall. “I’m fine with that. I could even get a news crew if you want, but I gotta warn you, your fifteen minutes of fame are gonna get eaten up by ours, real quick.”

  By their colors, the First MPD officers and the FBI in the observation room thought this was standard interrogation banter. They were barely yellow, maybe slightly curious, but she could confess to Kennedy’s assassination and they’d think she was only trying to draw Glazer out. But Santino, Phil, and Jason were dumbfounded, and the cyborgs clattered in her mind until she told them that the others had no reason to suspect she was telling the truth unless they gave them a reason.

  “Are you done?” Rachel asked Glazer. “Or would you like to keep playing?

  “Good,” Rachel said when he didn’t answer. “I was the one who spoke to Witcham, and he indicated that you both specialize in manipulation. With that in mind, I am assuming you will not be here to go to trial.” She drummed her fingernails on the folder. “I’m assuming you’ve got some fourth-quarter strategy where you try to escape, and you’ll either manage it or get killed in the attempt. Either way, you’re going on record with the name of the person who hired you, as well as your motives for murder, kidnapping, building bombs, and so forth. It might not hold up in court, but if something were to happen to you, we have a place to start.”

  Terms stated.

  “Escape?” Glazer pulled his hands up so the chain pointed down at the welded ring.

  “Or be killed,” Rachel clarified. “Let’s be blunt: escape is what I think is going to happen, but the smart money is that you’ll be shanked, poisoned, or any one of the many possible outcomes for a dude who accused a senator.”

  “Sounds like the smart money should be on me not talking at all.”

  “Yeah! You’d think so!” Rachel nodded. “Except you already let it slip that you could be bought, so whoever belongs to that name you’re trying to use as your bargaining chip probably won’t let you get to trial. But if you’re willing to bet that the news won’t make its merry little
way back to your senator while you’re sitting in our holding cell, you could take the house for some serious cash. If you live. Fingers crossed, right?”

  Glazer was so pleased with how this was going he was practically purple. She had taken the bait he had dangled in front of Hill; Glazer had willingly trapped himself, but he needed her to spring it so it would seem authentic.

  “Your call. If you think you’ll still be here at trial, then you don’t need to say a damned word to me. But if you think you won’t be around, then you lose nothing by talking.”

  “Revenge from beyond the grave?”

  “Sure,” she shrugged. “That’s a little melodramatic, but I suppose the phrasing is the prerogative of the dead man.”

  “If I give him up, I want a walk. No charges.”

  “I’m sure your mewling infant of a lawyer has explained why that’s not going to happen. Assault. Kidnapping. Murder.”

  His rough fingertip flicked against the table, striking the metal surface directly across from Rachel’s blue folder.

  Deal negotiated.

  “You see this?” Rachel ripped Maria Griffin’s photograph off of the folder and held it out at arm’s length. Glazer’s colors didn’t change; there was no remorse. “You need to hear me, Glazer. This was a very nice woman, and she is dead. I’m sure you knew everything about her, too, and you still killed her. You owe her, and you will pay,” she said. “I will make sure of that.

  “And anything you might do in the future?” Rachel locked eyes with Glazer and held his with her own. He was a psychopath—a charismatic psychopath, to be sure—but after several long moments her cyborg stare caused his conversational colors to blanch. He broke first, his gaze shying down and away. “Anything you do, any harm you cause to another living person, I will make you pay for that, too.”

  He looked back up at her, not quite meeting her eyes. “Bill me.”

  Deal struck.

  “Gladly,” she said. “Just give me that name.”

  He pushed himself back in his chair and stared directly at the mirrored glass and the black ball of the video camera beside it, and said: “Joseph P. Hanlon. Four-term Senator from the state of California. Sits on almost every defense or science and technology committee out there.”

  Rachel hadn’t realized she had been holding her breath. “And his purpose for hiring you?”

  “To frame OACET for crimes that appeared to be committed by a rogue cyborg.”

  “Why did he want to do this?”

  “Because he needs to discredit OACET before his involvement in the creation of the Program is exposed.”

  “How was he involved?”

  “His company was one of those which collaborated on the implant. Hanlon recognized its potential but didn’t have the resources to develop it on a large scale. By turning the technology over to the U.S. government, he manipulated them into funding it and supplying five hundred test subjects. He planned to reclaim control of the Program after the government declared it a loss, but OACET gained autonomy before he could do this.”

  Whispers of color through the glass as the humans turned to stare at the cyborgs; bright white knives of shock as they realized that Santino already knew; anger from Sturtevant and Gallagher towards Rachel as they realized they had been used.

  “Do you have evidence?” she asked.

  “Payments. They came through the Cayman Islands but you can backtrack to a subsidiary of Hanlon Industries. Checking account routing number starting with Four, Eight, Three, Three. You’ll get the rest of the number and the dates of the transactions after my lawyer establishes terms with the District Attorney.”

  He stared directly ahead and refused to meet her eyes.

  “I need the rest,” she said. “I need proof. If I don’t have that, I’m assuming you’re lying to cover your ass.”

  “Terms first.”

  “Numbers first.”

  There was another knock on the glass. Sturtevant was furious instead of suspicious, but Rachel knew she shouldn’t push it.

  “Have it your way,” she snapped. She stood and slapped the folder on the desk, hard. “I’ll send your childlike attorney back in. Don’t eat him.”

  The man is a monster, she thought as she gathered up her papers and stormed out of the room. Him and Witcham both. Not in Mulcahy’s domesticated version of evolving societal persecution, but in the original sense of the word. Stories had draped men like them in fangs; it was easier to understand them when they matched your idea of what slunk out of the dark.

  And she was no better.

  She slipped the second paperclip from where she had hidden it inside of her sleeve, and used it to replace the one that had secured Maria Griffin’s photograph to the folder.

  TWENTY

  Rachel was raw. The moment she had stepped out of the interview room, Sturtevant had dragged her into the same vacant office she had used to contact Mulcahy. The Chief of Detectives had been livid and demanded to know how much of what Glazer had said about Hanlon was true.

  “All of it,” she had replied.

  He had paused at the significance of this, then decided to go after those problems he could actually solve. “And you knew this before you went in there?”

  She had nodded.

  “You should never have spoken to him. Nobody from OACET should have gone anywhere near him! Everything you recorded is worthless.”

  Rachel had tilted her head and glanced back towards the interview room to remind him how difficult she was to fool. She could see Gallagher conducting an official version of her interview with Glazer. He was answering the SAC’s questions but not deviating from the same content he had given to either Rachel or Hill. Gallagher would get nothing new out of him except an irreproachable official record. Glazer’s attorney was long gone, the digital hardware swapped out, the old files erased. Nothing that had happened between Rachel and Glazer (or between Hill and Glazer, for that matter) would ever be known outside of Interrogation.

  Sturtevant had followed her gaze but it didn’t shake him. “We’re going to reevaluate your position,” he had told her coldly. “You’ll probably be leaving us. I don’t like to be used.”

  Rachel had nodded. “The feeling is mutual, sir.”

  His anger had softened slightly around its edges. “I’m sorry for what happened to your people,” he said. “Go.”

  “Can I say something, sir?”

  “I’m not in the mood, Peng,” Sturtevant had said. “Start packing up your stuff.”

  Santino had met her back at the fishbowl. He was madder than Sturtevant, enraged at how she had allowed Glazer to prove OACET had an axe to grind against Hanlon.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” he had said, slapping the side of the box she was using for those few belongings of hers that wouldn’t fit into her purse. “You knew Sturtevant wouldn’t let you run your own agenda on his watch!”

  “We needed Glazer’s confession.” Rachel had found the last of her books under a stack of papers. Across the room, Madeline waited under the orchid. She decided to leave the owl in its new home, something for First District Station to remember her by.

  “There were other ways to get it!” Santino had shouted. “But you decided the best way was to sacrifice yourself?”

  Rachel had shrugged. She’d go to her grave before she let Santino know about the paperclip. “It doesn’t matter what happens to me.”

  Santino had gaped at her. “I hope someday soon you realize how stupid you sound,” he finally said, and had slammed the door as he left.

  When his anger had moved down the hall, she had reached out to Phil to make sure he stuck to Santino like glue. “Something’s about to happen,” she had told Phil. “Keep him with you at all times. Things get rough, you knock him out, lock him up. I don’t care! He’s not a fighter. Your only job is to keep him out of harm’s way, understand?”

  Phil did. Whatever he had felt through their link had scared him; he didn’t bother to ask questions.

>   Then she had put Jason on Glazer. “Watch him,” she had ordered. “Have your gun ready. Try and keep some distance from him, but do not let him out of your sight.”

  “They’re telling me to leave,” he had said.

  “So? Pull rank. You’re an Agent.”

  “Why don’t you do it?”

  “This building is huge. Lots of exits. I need to stay where I can cover any of them if necessary.”

  Jason had reached out and pushed, trying to go deep. She pushed back, but he had found the guilt. “What did you do?” Jason had demanded. “Tell me what you did!”

  “I got Hanlon’s name!” Rachel had roared.

  Jason had retreated and severed their link.

  The break room was centrally located and was as good a place as any to hide in plain sight. Rachel had walked in and sat at the table closest to the door, ignoring the three officers already there. The room had cleared, the officers quietly filing out so as to not attract her attention. She had kept her back to the door and pretended to read a magazine while she watched First District Station tick on behind her.

  And then she had waited.

  After an hour, Rachel had hurriedly walked a nervous ten feet to the vending machines and back to her table. She was still nursing her soda when Zockinski and Hill found her. They sat across from her, mostly greens and gray, with her own turquoise core moving through their surface colors.

  “Well?” Rachel finally said.

  “Is it true?” Zockinski asked her.

  “That I’m getting kicked out?”

  “That you knew about Glazer.”

  “No. Sturtevant thinks I used him, maybe used everyone here at First MPD,” she said. “That’s not what happened. I didn’t know about Witcham or Glazer until a few days ago. Everything we’ve gone through is as new to me as it has been to you.”

  “But you knew about Hanlon?”

  “Yeah.” There was no reason to lie. She toyed with the water droplets running down her soda can. “We knew, but there was nothing we could do. Smoking guns big enough to bring down senators are hard to come by.”