Brute Force

by Spangler, K. B.

  “FBI says yes.”

  “Since there’s a child involved, I can plead urgency, but you’ll be limited to call histories and contact files on this go-around. No photos, no private files unless you get something more. Send me the details so I can write up the warrant,” Edwards said. “It’s Sunday, so I’ll fax a copy to you. Just have someone drop by my house and pick up the original file.

  “Oh,” he added, as if the thought had just occurred to him, and wasn’t the reason he had answered her call on the first ring. “Should we cancel Wednesday’s game?”

  “Absolutely not,” she said. “But maybe ditch the other members of the foursome? I’ve got the feeling someone will want to catch a round with me between now and then.”

  “Gotcha,” the judge said. Then, because Edwards was a sharp cookie and the two of them spent entire afternoons wandering across well-manicured fairways while talking about every little thing, he asked: “Anything else I should know?”

  “Well…”

  “Rachel?”

  “The militia might be a sovereign citizen organization.”

  “What?! Those guys have it in for judges! Son of a bi—”

  Rachel hung up on him.

  Sovereign citizens. She had heard them described as ants with guns. Alone, a sovereign citizen was one person who had decided to live outside of the law. Tax evasion was their siren song, with members of the movement aligning themselves with the idea that the U.S. government was illegal, and therefore any taxation was likewise illegal.

  Not much of a threat, really. Yes, the movement tended to collect racists, misogynists, and anti-Semites like lint on tape, and yes, there had been the infrequent hyper-violent ant who took up his private arsenal and blew away those who stood in his way. Terry Nichols had been a sovereign citizen, after all. But dangerous lone sovereign citizens tended to be outside the norm: violent actions summoned cops, and cops had guns, and escalation played hell with everybody’s plans for the weekend. (Besides, who didn’t secretly sympathize with those who had the stones to tell the IRS to go fuck itself?) But, together, sovereign citizens could pool their resources, and woe to the idiot who kicked their anthill.

  As she went to the nearest printer to pick up the judge’s warrant, Rachel had the feeling that most of her immediate future was going to be spent stomping around in anthills.

  By the time she returned to the observation room, Santino was back with the suspect’s phone. Rachel made everyone wait while she futzed around with her vision and struggled through the dense language of Edwards’ warrant.

  “All good?” Santino asked when she dropped it on the wooden table.

  “Yeah,” she said, rubbing her eyes in reflex. “All the Ts are dotted and the Is are crossed—”

  Zockinski reached for the warrant. She shot him a Look, but slid it across the table for him to double check. Once done, the five of them gathered around the table.

  The phone lay in one of the ubiquitous small plastic Tupperware boxes that First MPD kept on hand. An evidence bag rested beside it, ready for the phone’s official indoctrination into the judicial system. It was an iPhone, shiny and new, a recent model fresh from the production line.

  “Remind me to join a militia,” Rachel muttered. Her own phone, used for emergencies when she wanted to stay out of the link, was nearly three years old and scratched to hell from swimming in the sea of trash at the bottom of her purse. She thumbed the button, and when the passcode screen popped up, she told the phone to accept her print as its owner’s.

  She grinned as the phone unlocked itself. There was always some minor enjoyment when a locked piece of technology broke open for her. Sidestepping passwords had been her first job at the MPD: for months, she and Santino had done nothing but manage warrants and open password-protected electronics. Small reminders helped keep life in perspective.

  Once unlocked, she turned the phone over to Santino. Her partner’s thumb moved as he scrolled through its call history.

  “Who was he talking to when we busted him?” Zockinski asked.

  “Wasn’t the lawyer. At least, not the number registered to the lawyer,” Santino said. Then, to Rachel, “Run it for us?”

  “Yup.” She did, but… “Whoa.”

  She opened a link with Phil. “Can you double-check this number?”

  “Sure…” he replied, with the press of an unformed question underneath his thoughts. This vanished as his conversational colors changed to a complicated mess of oranges, with stray colors spinning off as he found a new puzzle. There was some royal purple, but none of the red she associated with pride; something had impressed him but he wasn’t happy about it.

  “I’m not crazy?” she asked.

  “Nope,” he said. “I’m still following the signal. It’s…bouncing?”

  “Yeah.” Rachel nodded. “I’ve tracked it all over Maryland and Delaware. I can’t—”

  Hill pounded on the window again.

  “Sorry,” she said automatically. “We can’t track it. It’s got a…thing…happening....”

  Phil hopped in. “We can’t get a fix on it. Its GPS is bouncing all over the place.”

  “What happens if you call it?” Zockinski asked.

  “The signal will probably settle down, but the guy on the other end will know something’s happened to his buddy,” Santino answered. “This is a one-shot deal.”

  Zockinski looked from Rachel to Phil, his colors an uncertain orange with the sickly greens and yellows of someone who wants to be polite but needs to ask an impolite question.

  “We’ll have someone else at OACET look at it,” she said, and Zockinski’s colors changed to blue relief.

  “Too much time,” Hill said from the other side of the room. “That’ll take…”

  She was too focused on the phone, and didn’t see Hill’s colors snap into the hard stony blues of resolution until it was too late. The detective turned and snatched the phone in its Tupperware box away from them on his way out of the room.

  The other men tried to rush him; Rachel held them back. The whipping fury of reds that had defined Hill for the past two hours was gone. Clear bright white purpose, shining like a lance and aimed straight at the man at the suit, was coming through his usual professional blues.

  They watched through the one-way mirror as Hill—calmly, so calmly—entered the interrogation room.

  He didn’t bother to sit. Instead, he stood, arms crossed, and stared at the man in the suit until Lobo’s colors began to twist and run.

  Then, Hill began to talk.

  “I got burned pretty bad a few years back,” he said, as he slid out of his jacket. He pushed up the sleeves of his shirt to show Lobo the pale wrinkled skin where the flashbang grenades had hit him during Wyatt’s escape. “Needed some surgery, couple of skin grafts. Hurt like hell.

  “Not as bad as when I served in Afghanistan,” he continued. He stood and put his left leg on the steel chair. He tugged on his pants cuff, and the man in the suit blanched white at the sight of the holes that dotted Hill’s shin and calf muscle. “Could have been worse, but it was bad enough.”

  Hill smoothed down his pants again, then sat. “You’ve got my cousin’s kid,” he said. “That’s a whole different kind of pain for me. It hurts. I can’t push it down, I can’t take drugs to shut it off. It’s there in my head and my heart, like I’ve been shot and left to die.

  “If it’s this bad for me,” he said, leaning forward, “I don’t know what it’s like for my cousin. His kid is gone. He doesn’t know where, or why, or if he’s gonna get her back. But you do.”

  Hill tapped the Tupperware box on the table. “The Agents say that whoever’s on the other end of this phone? They know how to duck a trace. All the usual shit we do when a kid goes missing? We can’t do it. Not here.

  “There’s pain, and then there’s pain.” He rolled down his shirt sleeves, the white scars disappearing beneath the cloth. “You know this—it’s why you took her. To get results. So, you’ve g
ot them. We’ll help you out, okay? Just…help us get started. Point us in the right direction. Give us something that’ll help us get her back. You don’t have to give up the person on the other end of that phone, but you can tell us what they want. Maybe we can give it to them, maybe we can’t, but we won’t know unless you give us something.

  “You’ve got to,” he said. “’cause if it’s this bad for me? This pain of not knowing what comes next? I can’t imagine what it’s like for a kid who’s not even three years old.”

  Rachel knew that was as close to begging as Hill would ever come in his entire lifetime. She also knew it couldn’t work, not with a member of a militia. Threats worked. Coercion worked. Reason and empathy didn’t—men who branded themselves with stupid-ass nicknames such as “Lobo” couldn’t be reached by pleas for basic humanity.

  And yet…

  Well, fuck me sideways, she thought to herself, as the man in the suit’s colors slowly turned a sympathetic wine red. What did Hill see in this guy that I missed?

  “It’s actually working?”

  Rachel jumped: she had forgotten she was still linked with Phil. “Yeah,” she replied. “The guy’s starting to…”

  Starting to…what? Not crack. Not cave. Just…

  He’s thinking about Hill, she realized. Hill’s become a real person to him.

  The man in the suit nodded, very slowly.

  “Can I ask you where she is?”

  The man in the suit didn’t reply. To Rachel, his conversational colors showed strands of a careful, cautious orange-yellow, each strand working to turn Hill’s core of forest green around and around in his head.

  “Why OACET?” Hill tried a different approach. “Is that why you took Hope Blackwell?”

  “We didn’t take anybody.” A moment later, Lobo added, “But if Blackwell went with us willingly, Mulcahy’d be more… He’d listen. Help us out.”

  “Help you do what?”

  The man in the suit sat, silent.

  Hill wasn’t done with the OACET angle. “Why would Mulcahy help you?”

  Lobo stared at Hill, not fully understanding the question. “Guy’s a hero.”

  On the other side of the glass, there was a rush of emotion between Rachel and Phil. Confusion (Mulcahy’s a hero to these assholes?) turned to clarity (Oh. Yeah, I guess that makes sense.), followed by teeth-grinding frustration. There had been rumors that Mulcahy was the new patron saint of wingnuts, but OACET’s research team had said they should focus on how that played in Washington rather than profiling how those outside the political sphere might respond.

  “Fuck,” whispered Rachel.

  It did make sense, in a crazed roundabout way. Rather than participate in an ongoing cover-up, Mulcahy had taken OACET public. He had said the world had the right to know that the U.S. government had funded a weapons-grade cybernetics program. Going public had made OACET some powerful enemies, yes, but now, two years after the fact, they had more allies than enemies. Most politicians now admitted that what Mulcahy had done was better than if the world had learned about cyborgs who could control everything from refrigerators to nuclear weapons from a WikiLeaks article.

  If you were antigovernment, if you wanted to lionize a powerful man who had successfully stood against a system you saw as inherently flawed, you could do worse than Patrick Mulcahy.

  “You think he’ll help you?” Hill asked the man in the suit.

  “Can’t,” Lobo shook his head. “Not publicly. Got his image to protect.”

  “But if his wife and godchild are on the line…”

  “They’re not. They went with us—”

  “Willingly. Yes.” Hill’s bright patience was beginning to dull around its edges. “If they’re with you, you think he’ll use that as an excuse to start fighting for you.”

  Lobo started smiling. “We know how the game is played,” he said. “All about image. All about how strong you are. He’s too good at it, too careful. Helping us won’t help his image. Not like taking down a Senator. We get on his radar, let him know we’re here, give him a good reason to fight for us? Then he’ll help.”

  On the other side of the glass, Phil tapped Rachel on her shoulder, then nodded towards her clenched fists. Let it go, she reminded herself as she shook out her fingers. Assholes be assholes.

  “You did this for him?” Hill asked. “Took Blackwell and the girl to…protect Mulcahy?”

  Lobo was starting to glow with red pride. “Think I’m done talkin’,” he said. “But now you know, that girl of yours is as safe as if she was in her own bed. Nobody’ll do nothin’ to hurt her, promise, even if they wanted to.”

  “Why would they want to?” The detective’s voice was quiet.

  “You know, the kid’s a—” The man in the suit remembered where he was and who he was talking to just in time, but the word he didn’t say still hung in the air between them. “She’s black,” he said instead.

  —Rachel was sure the whole world had stopped, waiting, wondering if Hill would lash out and choke the man in the suit to death—

  “Thank you for telling me all of this,” Hill said, ever so politely. He gathered up the Tupperware box and left the room.

  Hill didn’t stop at the observation room. He dropped the box outside the door and kept going, moving as fast as he could without running, moving down the corridor and…away.

  “Rachel?” Zockinski asked.

  “On it,” she sighed, and broke her link with Phil as she left the room.

  The fresh green of a forest in springtime was out of place with the reds raging across it, and became her beacon through the halls of First District Station. Once she had figured out where Hill was going, she stopped at the nearest vending machine and grabbed two cans of soda before she resumed the chase.

  She found him in his usual spot on the roof. There was a corner between two ventilation shafts and a wall, a three-sided hole that Hill sometimes used as a retreat when he was exhausted of having to deal with other people. From within the nook, Hill had a clear shot of the stairwell door leading to the roof and an eagle’s-eye view of the street below.

  Rachel had never asked what Hill had done when he was stationed in Afghanistan. Before she had found his nest, it had never come up; after she had found it, she hadn’t needed to ask.

  She came out of the stairwell, shaking one of the soda cans as vigorously as she could.

  Hill pointed at the other can. She lobbed it at him, slow and easy.

  “Watch this. Saw it on YouTube.” Rachel began tapping her own can with her fingernails. She turned the can around, tapping its metal skin the entire time, then sat it down on the roof and pulled the tab.

  Soda bubbled out and ran across the roof in tiny streams.

  Hill smiled, a little purple humor edging through the reds.

  “Shut up,” she said. “Mister Wizard said it would work.”

  She carefully picked up the can to avoid the stickiness, and moved to stand just outside Hill’s nest. The two of them watched the traffic below: him, the cars and pedestrians in the street; her, the half-organized muddle of those who worked within First District Station.

  “They think Mulcahy took down Senator Hanlon,” he said.

  “Let ’em,” she said. It didn’t sting, Mulcahy getting the credit for something she had nearly broken her neck to accomplish. Nope, it didn’t sting at all.

  “No.” Hill shook his head. “It’s important to them, to think Mulcahy’s fighting the system.”

  “Yeah. At least we know this means Hope and Avery are safe,” she said. “They want to stay on Mulcahy’s good side.”

  The strange two-toned blues and blacks of Hope Blackwell’s core appeared in Hill’s surface colors, weighed against orange uncertainty.

  “Hell if I know,” Rachel replied. “Hope’s hard to predict. She might fight back—she might sit quietly and wait for rescue. She won’t do anything to endanger Avery, though.”

  “Not intentionally.”

  Rachel
shrugged.

  He glared at her.

  “No, I’m not worried,” she told him. “OACET’s got ways to talk to Hope, even if she doesn’t have her cell phone. Whatever she does, it won’t spill over on Avery. Promise.”

  Hill went back to watching the street below.

  “Guess the next step is learning what they want Mulcahy to do,” she said, almost idly. “Got to be something big. If they’re sovereign citizens, they probably want him to step in and solve a legal problem of theirs.”

  Hill’s colors took on a pigheaded iron gray with red gilding its edges; Rachel filed that unfamiliar combination under: “I will go downstairs and resume being a detective when I am good and ready and no longer a danger to others, thank you.”

  “Nope,” she told him. “This is a big-boy-pants day. Time to buckle up and ride.”

  An ember of red anger caught fire, just a little bit, before Hill stomped it out in a surge of professional blue. He stood and stretched in the manner of all athletes, his body coming fully on-line and readying itself for action.

  They were most of the way to their office when Hill finally said, “Scary as fuck.”

  Rachel double-checked his conversational colors. The reds of sadness and anger and sympathy, the grays of hopelessness and depression, the oranges and yellows of anxiety and an inability to comprehend… All of these were bundled into an enormous tight knot that rode on his shoulders and chest like a weight, and trailed behind him until it dissipated into colorless energy.

  “I can’t read that,” she admitted. “There’s too much going on in your head right now.”

  Hill didn’t reply. It wasn’t until they reached their office door that he said, “They think they’re doing the right thing.”

  “Most people do.”

  “Think they believe it?”

  “Like, committed to the cause?” She paused, one hand on the cool metal of their office door. “Probably. This wasn’t an impulse kidnapping.”

  Hill’s grays grew deeper.

  “I need some words, man. I’m not a real psychic.”

  “Martyrs,” he said, as he pushed past her. “Scary as fuck.”