BRUTE FORCE
K.B. Spangler
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2016 K.B. Spangler.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
Brute Force is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are the creations of the author. Settings are either fictional or have been adapted from locations in and around Washington, D.C. for purposes of storytelling. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All characters, places, and events are set in the world of A Girl and Her Fed, found online at agirlandherfed.com
Cover art by Rose Loughran of Red Moon Rising, at redmoonrising.org
This file was sold online via ebook distribution networks using Smashwords.com and its affiliates. If you have received a copy of this file via any source other than the original point of distribution, please visit agirlandherfed.com to learn more.
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Acknowledgements
ONE
Two hours past naptime and all hell had broken loose.
The toddler had reached that transcendent screaming phase of a tantrum, the one that could only be found after fifteen minutes of warmup weeping. The little girl was not quite upside-down in what was not quite a fireman’s carry, but the woman holding her had the determined look of someone who had accepted that reason, begging, and loving threats no longer applied, and that the screaming would only stop once they reached the car.
The second woman, slightly shorter than the first and deliciously curvy, marched a few steps in front of the others, leading the way. She kept turning towards the toddler, then back towards something unseen ahead of them, her attention divided.
His men waited, hidden behind cars and the stony twisting structure of the parking garage itself, their heads down as they pretended to play games on their phones, just in case.
Even so, the woman carrying the little girl paused.
He saw her eyes search the dark corners of the parking garage, knowing there was something wrong but unable to find it.
The little girl also paused, and in that moment of stillness, he saw months of planning fly apart.
He breathed out, slow and relieved, when he saw the girl had been gathering strength for the ultimate stage of a toddler’s meltdown. The screaming returned, but now she also began to pummel the woman holding her with tiny fists.
The girl’s mother—and even if he hadn’t planned this day down to the smallest detail, he still would have known the shorter woman was the girl’s biological mother from the way the child’s face was a smaller, softer clone of her own—spun towards her.
“Avery,” she said, in the universal tone mothers used when they had Had Enough, “you do not hit!”
The child, utterly inconsolable, wailed on.
The taller woman pushed forward, oblivious to the child’s fists banging against her face and shoulders. “It’s okay,” she said. “C’mon, we gotta move. The paparazzi will be here soon, this is like blood in the water for—”
She stopped dead in the center of the lane, and he knew he was caught. He thumbed the button on his phone which sent the text to his men: GO.
“Carlota,” the taller woman said, as she lowered the screaming child into her mother’s arms. “Call for backup, and get yourself and Avery behind those cars. Right now.”
“What’s happening?” The girl’s mother glanced about the parking garage, not seeing anything other than the usual orderly mess of concrete and metal.
“There’s nobody around.” The taller woman pulled her dark hair into a ponytail, and then quickly cracked every knuckle on her hands in order of smallest to largest, like a pianist warming up before a concert. “There’s always somebody around.”
“The security cameras are dead. There are… There are cell phone signals all around us!” The shorter woman glanced around, knowing his men were there but unable to see them. Her daughter caught her mood; the screaming stopped, replaced by frantic sniffles and arms wrapping tight around her mother’s neck.
“Get behind the cars,” the taller woman said again, and pushed the girl and her mother towards a nearby pickup truck. “Hell, break into one and lock it behind you. I’ll keep them away from you until backup gets here.”
The woman moved back towards the center of the lane as she shrugged out of her jacket, leaving her arms bare. “Hey!” she shouted, and her voice ricocheted around the garage. “Wanna get this over with? We’ve got a little girl who needs a nap!”
He stepped out from behind a nearby support pillar, no more than ten feet away from her. He saw her take him in—the camouflage clothing, the enormous hand cannons holstered at his waist, the hunting knife in his boot—and judge him in that same moment.
“Howdy, Try-hard,” she snapped. “Militia men travel in packs. Where’re your buddies?”
There was a sharp cry from behind her; the taller woman’s eyes widened at the sound of a body hitting the pavement, followed by the piercing plea of “Mommy!”
“Shit,” the woman hissed. She turned to find one of his men holding a gun very near the toddler’s temple, her mother crouched beside her, pressing her hands to her head. “Carlota?!”
The first man grinned at her with a movie star’s perfect smile.
“The Agent will be fine,” he said, as he knelt to roll a glass vial towards the woman standing in the road. It bumped into the tangle of her jacket, and she snatched it up before it could spin under the cars.
“Brevital,” she read, the liquid swirling around the vial as she shook it at him. “Holy fuck, did you use this on her? Do you know what too much of this stuff can do?”
“I’m okay,” the other woman said, her voice muffled by her arms. “They didn’t… I didn’t feel an injection...”
“See?” he said. “She’s fine.”
He tossed a baggie after the vial of sedative.
She picked it up: a fresh plastic hypodermic syringe.
A large sedan pulled up beside her. Its trunk opened, slowly, on silent hydraulics.
The woman looked from the baggie to the terrified toddler to the dark recesses of the trunk. “Ah,” she said in a quiet voice.
“You’re a doctor,” he said to her. “I’m sure you know the dosage. So do I. Show me before you inject yourself.”
In reply, she tore the package open with her teeth.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” she said, as she filled the syringe and tapped the air bubbles out. “Leave the kid and her mom here, and I’ll be the best-behaved hostage ever.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “I bring the kid as insurance, and anything you do to me or my men? We’ll take it out on her.”
He nodded to the man holding the gun on the child. The gun vanished as he lifted her into the back seat of the sedan. The toddler couldn’t quite remember how to cry: fear was layered over the old tantrum tears on her face, and then the door shut her away from her mother.
“Avery?” The girl’s mother tried to stand on unsteady legs. “Avery?!”
“I’ll keep her safe,” the woman promised her friend. “It’ll be okay.”
She held up the syringe. The liquid pressed against the plunger; a small amount, but still enough to put her out. He nodded at her to p
roceed, and she tapped her own arm until she found a vein.
He didn’t let himself blink as she injected herself, just to be sure.
Once done, she threw the vial and the syringe at his feet. The glass vial broke, spraying droplets of surgical anesthetic across the parking garage floor.
“If you please,” he told her, gesturing towards the black hole of the sedan’s trunk.
She snatched up her jacket and climbed into the trunk. When she vanished from view, the other woman’s face went blank, her gaze distant, as if lost in a critical conversation.
He gave the Brevital another ten seconds to work before he looked in the trunk.
The woman’s resiliency was amazing. She was still conscious, and her eyes managed to focus on him.
“You better pray I’m the one who kicks your ass,” she said softly. “Because if I don’t, my husband is coming for you.”
“I’m counting on it, Doctor Blackwell,” he told her, and he slammed the trunk closed.
TWO
Rachel Peng was doing yardwork.
Resentfully, yes, but she was fairly certain nobody in the history of the civilized world had ever done yardwork without some resentment. She would not call a landscape company and spend good money to get out of doing her household chores. She would not call Santino and roar about how he had turned her backyard into a veritable Garden of Eden and then all but moved out. She would not reach up into space and see if a top-secret defense satellite was in the right place at the right time, because she would not nuke her own home from orbit because it was not the only way to be sure…
“And I will not shoot you to shut you up!” she shouted at the neighbor’s bulldog on the other side of the fence.
The bulldog blinked at her before it resumed snarling and throwing itself against the chain-link mesh.
She tore great armfuls of winter-dry honeysuckle down from the fence and hurled them aside. The fence, hidden under layers of vines, began to appear. It was old, but sturdy and well-suited to keep the bulldog out, at least until those vines really got some summer into them and their weight would start to bring the whole thing down—
A man’s silhouette emerged from behind the vines.
“Aw hell,” Rachel muttered to herself, flipping frequencies to see which of her neighbors was creeping up on her today. She expected the washed-out reds of the bulldog’s owner, or maybe the bright urine yellow of his brother. Both of them liked to poke at the neighborhood’s favorite freak, and they tended to make an appearance whenever she was outside.
A rich light brown came back to her.
Sandalwood!
Her gun was in the house. She knelt, her scans never leaving the center of the man’s chest, as she picked up the garden shears lying beside the mountain of honeysuckle.
Her scans locked into the frequencies she used to see facial features, and her heart stopped pounding in her ears as she saw a stranger on the other side of the fence.
“Hey there!” she said, forcing a smile as she lifted the shears like a sword.
The man nodded at her, and knelt to scratch the bulldog’s ears. “Mornin’,” he said. The bulldog leaned against the man’s legs, tongue lolling out the side of its mouth.
Rachel waited.
And watched.
The man was perfectly calm, his conversational colors looping across themselves in slow, peaceful waves. A strong streak of her Southwestern turquoise ran within these, but that wasn’t unexpected—everyone knew who she was.
She saw nothing else. None of the dangerous reds or professional blues that accompanied that particular color of brown within her memory. He was the right height, the right weight, and had the muscle tone of a professional athlete, but…
Sometimes sandalwood is just sandalwood, she decided, and began to apply the shears to a large clump of wisteria that was competing with the honeysuckle for possession of the fence.
She didn’t bother to ask if he was friends with the bulldog’s owner. The same beast that attacked the fence if she so much as dared step into her own backyard was lost in the joys of a belly rub, squirming on the ground like a wiggly puppy.
“New to the neighborhood?” she asked.
“Got a place about five blocks over,” he replied in a heavy Southern drawl that reminded her of home. “I’ve been here about two years.”
“Me, too,” she said, as she hacked through the wisteria. It wasn’t yet full spring, and the wisteria was still dry and woody from the winter freeze. “What brings you by?”
He didn’t reply as he rubbed the bulldog’s belly.
The silence began to itch.
She dropped her shears and turned her back on him as she dragged the vines off to the compost heap in the corner of her property, her scans fixed on him the entire time. He was calm, his mind at rest; there was no hint of red lust chasing her turquoise around in his emotions, or an awkward orange as he searched for something to say, or any of the other colors she had come to associate with too-long silences.
Rachel took a quiet breath before running her scans along the deep contours of the skin on his face. She didn’t entirely know what she was looking for—would she recognize the signs of plastic surgery if she saw it?—but her mind tripped over unfamiliar bumps that might have been scar tissues.
She marched straight from the compost heap into the house to get her gun.
When she came out, the man with the core the color of warm sandalwood was still waiting by the fence.
Rachel walked back to where she had left him, the cold grip of her gun warming in her hand.
He glanced up at her, and they stared at each other through the metal diamonds.
“Why are you here, Glazer?” she finally asked.
“That’s not my name any more,” he said. His normal voice was steady, all trace of Southern drawl gone. The bulldog came alive at the sound of it, lunging to its feet and scrambling across the grass to hide beneath its owner’s porch.
The man who used to be Jonathan Glazer stood, slowly and carefully, and brushed off the knees of his jeans.
“Who have you called?” he asked. He placed both hands on the fence, fingers curling through the chain link. He gave the fence a quick jerk, as if testing its strength, as if he hadn’t expected her to do yardwork today and the loss of a layer of vegetation meant she might be able to get over the six-foot fence faster than he had planned.
“For backup? Everybody,” she lied. “Better start running.”
“You’ll just shoot me,” he said, nodding towards her gun.
“No one would blame me,” she said, grinning.
The psychopath on the other side of the fence returned the grin. “Maybe not at first,” he said. “But give it a week, and you’ll kick yourself for it.”
“I really don’t feel too much guilt when I kill murderers, Glazer. My conscience has convenient blind spots.”
It was an intentional turn of phrase, and his grin grew slightly honest.
Fuck, she thought. He knows. Or, at least suspects...
“That’s not what I meant. I’m here on loan,” he said, and then reapplied his slow drawl to his speech, easier than she ever could, even when she was thoroughly saturated with the South after visiting her hometown back in Texas. “I’m your new best friend.”
“Sorry, I’ve already got a couple hundred best friends. I don’t need another one. It’s already too crowded in here,” she said, tapping her skull. “But don’t worry—you’ll get to meet them soon. They’ve been watching us chat.”
“No,” he said, “they haven’t.”
He leaned towards her and the chain link squealed beneath his weight; she planted her work boots against the earth and moved her index finger to her gun’s trigger.
“Do they know you helped me escape?” he asked. “Do they know you let a mass murderer blow up a police department? Don’t think so.”
“Mass murderer?” she asked, cocking her head like a curious sparrow. “You getting braggy on me, Jonny
-boy? I only caught you for that one.”
“Don’t play dumb. You knew what I was. And I,” he said, moving close to the fence so his eyes cut through to hers, “know that this conversation is between you and me.”
Rachel stared straight back at him.
In her brief but ongoing experience as a blind woman, she had yet to meet someone who could match her in a staring contest. Glazer was no exception: his conversational colors began to quiver around their edges, but instead of dropping his gaze and backing away, he lunged forward, rocking the fence until metal sang up and down the line.
She had her gun out and as close as she could get it to the center of his forehead before the chattering song of the fence had faded.
It took her a few moments to convince herself her voice would be steady before she said, “Are you finished?”
The conversational colors of the man who had been Glazer changed, becoming a wild ruby red made from crazy edges. He responded by pushing his head against the barrel of her gun, hard, twisting it just a little bit, just enough so she felt his force run from his skin, up through her gun, into her own body—
Rachel made her gun vanish under her hoodie. “Why are you here?”
“I’m on loan,” he said again, the jagged red madness leaving his colors as quickly as it had appeared. A dark blue the color of a business suit replaced it, wrapping around him as he set himself to work. “I’m yours for the week. Maybe ten days, if things get complicated.”
She blinked. “What?”
“I’m your new assistant, Agent Peng,” he said, his false Southern drawl crawling all over her title. “I’m here to do the things you can’t be caught doing.” The man who used to be Jonathan Glazer leaned against the fence again, spreading arms and legs wide, turning himself into a large, convenient target. “Things are about to get bad for OACET, and he sent me here to help you.”
“He? Who’s he?”
Brute Force Page 1
