Brute Force

by Spangler, K. B.

  SIX

  Sometimes, when Rachel was feeling especially grumpy, she’d kick herself about how she never realized how Chief Sturtevant had set her up. Set all four of them up, actually—it had seemed a normal course of events when she had begun working with Santino, and then later had picked up Zockinski and Hill, but now she knew that Sturtevant had been steering them all together. Why else would he have given Santino a private office large enough to house four people comfortably?

  Not to mention a pinball game.

  Their office at First District Station changed with their mood. Santino kept it full of plants, all of them thriving despite Rachel’s best efforts to thin them out by leaving the windows open during January. Two recliners were pointed towards an oversized television hanging on the east wall, a small beer fridge serving double duty as a side table between them. The four of them had agreed on long plastic folding tables instead of desks: these were pushed against the bank of windows to the south, their steel legs squeaking at the hinges from the weight of their computers and peripherals, with Santino’s and Hill’s books crammed into milk crate shelving below.

  The wall across from the television was kept bare. Half of it was covered in corkboard, the other half painted in glossy white, with a wire rack holding a prism of dry-erase markers drilled into the cement blocks at waist height.

  That wall got a good, solid glare from Rachel as she stomped into the room. Santino and Zockinski had already tacked up pictures of Hope Blackwell and Avery Hill on one side of the corkboard, with Damian Brady (AKA: “Lobo” and no, she would never stop thinking of that as the dumbest alias, why in the world would someone choose—) on the other. Santino was typing away at his computer, running searches as quickly as he could. Zockinski was on the phone.

  Phil was playing pinball.

  Phil had been to their office on many occasions, but the pinball game was a recent addition. He was shooting metal balls at plastic monkeys, racking up points with each flick of the flippers. She watched the flashes of kinetic energy burst from the machine before she reached out to him through a link.

  He allowed the connection, but took one hand from the pinball paddles to wave her off. “Busy,” he whispered.

  There were others in his head with them; Phil was catching up with the home office. She felt Josh in there, along with a distracted Mako, but pulled herself back before she disrupted their conversation. Phil would catch her up once he was done.

  She headed over to Santino. Her partner nodded to her, but his fingers didn’t pause as they banged away at his fluorescent-green keyboard. He was murder on computer peripherals, and anything less than a keyboard designed for professional-level video gamers tended to break within a month.

  He was also much better with online searches than she’d ever be. Or Phil. Or Hill, or Jason, or…

  Or anyone.

  “Whatcha got?” she asked as she dropped into the desk chair beside him.

  “What do you know about sovereign citizens?” A few extra browser tabs joined those open on his monitors as he chased rabbits through their digital warrens.

  “Magical thinking meets white supremacy,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “They’re wingnuts who’ve convinced themselves that there are multiple layers of government,” Rachel replied. “There’s the surface government, which is laws and taxes and whatever, and then there’s the real government beneath it. Most of their interactions with government are done to try and get access to that shadow government. They think if they use the right pen colors, or write their name in capital letters, or… If they discover the right combination of any one of a billion small details, they can join the secret society of real America.”

  “Wrong,” he replied.

  “Bullshit. OACET knows its fringe groups.”

  “Not very well, apparently,” he said with a sad grin and a nod at the whiteboard. She winced as she marked up a point for her partner in the air between them.

  “No, seriously,” he said, stretching. “That’s the stuff that’s cute and wacky enough to get played up in the press. And yeah, there are some sovereign citizens who’re invested in that myth. But if one person files the same lawsuit several hundred times, making tiny changes to each file, there’re practical repercussions.”

  “Right,” Rachel said, drumming her fingernails on the plastic tabletop. “The fog of bureaucracy.”

  “Exactly. For them, it’s not about gaming the system. It’s about forcing the system to shut down. And since they stand behind their claims that using multicolored pens is a legitimate political belief, any resistance from law enforcement or the courts can be framed as persecution. These guys can turn any single interaction with the government into an endless paperwork nightmare. The best part? Some of it is completely legal. Not all of it, but enough of it so they can say they’re doing their best to comply within their understanding of the law.”

  “Legal system logic bombs,” she said. “Like South Korea airdropping anti-North Korea propaganda that’s been printed on the back of photos of Dear Leader. Must destroy the propaganda! Can’t destroy the propaganda! That’s really pretty brilliant.”

  “Yeah. Honestly, I’m surprised more people aren’t doing it,” he said. “Seems like any defense lawyer worth a damn would advise their clients to claim to be secessionists.”

  “…um…”

  “Well, any defense lawyer with zero ethics. And I haven’t cross-referenced sovereign citizenship against the professional code of conduct for lawyers in Maryland, Delaware, and D.C., so there might be prohibitions against—”

  “What have you found?” she asked quickly. Santino’s rabbits sometimes simply plummeted headlong into endless space, and could take her with them if she wasn’t careful.

  “Lobo’s militia?” He turned the monitor towards her. A series of digitalized mugshots were displayed, with relevant case files attached to each one. “Splinter group from a larger one in rural Pennsylvania. They relocated to Delaware a couple of months ago. Seem to be relatively recent converts to sovereign citizenship, too: before then, they were typical antigovernment isolationists. They started displaying sovereign citizen traits after they relocated.”

  “Militias don’t relocate,” she said. “They’re almost pathologically territorial.”

  “These guys did,” Santino said. “Got themselves a lawyer and everything.”

  She threw up her hands. “Militias. Don’t. Have. Lawyers!”

  “These guys do.” He tapped the monitor. “Most of the casework they’ve filed has to do with property ownership. There are thousands of files… I’m still working to find the core case that spawned them.”

  Rachel blinked.

  Santino’s face went blank. She knew that expression: if she had been running emotions, his conversational colors would have glazed over with crystalline irritation. “What I’m looking for is the one case that started—”

  “No, no, I got that,” she said, and turned away so she could hop back into Phil’s link.

  “Guys,” she said by way of greeting. “We’re looking for one man. He’ll be white, educated, between the ages of thirty to fifty, and is currently involved in a property dispute somewhere in Maryland, Delaware, or the D.C. area.”

  “Hello to you, too, Rachel,” said Josh, bemusement crossing from him to Phil to her. “Explain?”

  “Phil told you about the militia angle? Good. This militia got religion a few months back, and the new pastor took his converts south. We’re looking for that pastor. And there’s a cause out there, too, a catalyst which caused that pastor to go looking for a ready-made flock.”

  “Or a general who needed an army.”

  “I’m analogizing off the cuff here, Phil. But yeah, looks like their leader has a legal problem, and he’s gotten astonishingly creative in solving it.”

  “What’s the rationale behind thinking this is all because of a land dispute?” Josh asked. He felt distracted: Rachel pinged his GPS and found h
im standing in the same room as Mulcahy, as well as several cell phone signals that came from a block of numbers used by the FBI. Carrying on two active conversations at once would do that to most Agents. Josh was normally exceptionally good at it, but today was anything but normal.

  “Santino says most of the documents filed by these militia members are in some way related to property ownership. Who wants to bet that if we find that property, we find Hope and Avery?”

  “No bet,” Josh said. “Good work.”

  “Rachel—” Mako began, as a wash of emotions came through their link.

  “Let’s get them back first, big guy,” Rachel told him, and broke away from them before he could feel how his gratitude had brought her close to tears. She reached out through her implant to caress the steel-reinforced cement support posts running beneath her office. Concrete and cement were her touchstones, and these support posts were so familiar that she wondered if her scans might eventually wear them down, like water across stone.

  Once grounded, she stood and went over to the whiteboard.

  The others stopped to watch: since Rachel could read text written with a dry-erase marker without too much effort, most of their best work was done on windows and whiteboards. Her marker squeaked across the board as she drew out the timeline of known events, beginning with, “Leader Arrives at Pennsylvania Militia,” and ending with, “Current Location Unknown”.

  “What am I missing?” she asked Santino.

  You think a single person’s responsible?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Probably a white male under fifty, with more education than the average militia member. It helps to know how the game is played before you jump in and grab the ball.”

  Zockinski came up beside her and tapped on the first point on the timeline. “There’s a story here,” he said. “How did he find that militia, and how did he manage to split it? Those guys are tight. Brothers to the end.”

  Rachel scowled. “Let’s try and get lucky with court records before we decide we’ve got to drive out to Pennsylvania. God, interviewing fundamentalists? That’d be a horror.”

  “Rachel.”

  Josh’s presence was quick and strong, the link much tighter than the communal link they had just shared. She glanced over at Phil to see if Josh was talking to him, too… No. Phil was still head-down in the pinball game, and she couldn’t feel him ride along. Apparently this was a private call.

  “Josh?” There was anger on his end of the link. “What’s happened?”

  “Hope’s regained consciousness.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Maryland. An old warehouse near the ocean.” GPS coordinates suddenly appeared in her mind; she scribbled these on the whiteboard and pointed at Santino. Her partner nodded as his gaming keyboard began to clatter and sing.

  “Safe?” She had to ask. Josh was too angry for something to not have gone wrong…

  “Hope is groggy but otherwise okay. We’re still searching for Avery—they’ve separated them.”

  “Fuck.”

  “And they’ve called us. They don’t want ransom. They want Mulcahy to… Listen, I’m on my way over to pick you up. There’s a news report that you should watch first. It’ll save time. Ping me as soon as it’s done.”

  “Sure,” Rachel agreed, and he vanished from her mind.

  She snapped her fingers a couple of times until the men were looking at her, and then pointed towards the television. It was an older model, and burst on in a cascade of noise and light before the signal stabilized. She flipped channels until she landed on the local news. An Indian woman with shoulder-length hair was talking into an old-fashioned microphone, the channel’s call sign stamped onto a plastic square on its side.

  “—Blackwell, wife of OACET Assistant Director Patrick Mulcahy, has allegedly been kidnapped, along with a two-year-old child who is reported to be the daughter of two OACET Agents.”

  The woman stepped to one side. The camera zoomed in on a gigantic factory, a small wedge of ocean behind it, and all of it beginning to glow pink from the sunset. The building was in the middle stages of chronic decay: the structure appeared to be solid, but most of the windows had been replaced by blue film, and whatever paint had been applied to the exterior was peeling into the wind.

  “How did the media learn where they are before OACET?” Zockinski asked, as he ran a hand beneath the minifridge.

  Rachel shot him a Look.

  Zockinski wasn’t mollified. “Shoulda told us, then,” he said, as he shook lint balls from his personal notepad. “I thought they were still missing.”

  “I can find the three of you whenever I need to,” Rachel said. “You better believe that as long as she’s awake to tell him where she is, Mulcahy can find his wife.”

  The sound of knuckles cracking; she looked towards Hill. “Hope just woke up,” she added quickly. “They’re still looking for Avery.”

  On screen, the reporter was walking towards the factory. “We’ve been granted an exclusive interview with the man who claims to be responsible for these alleged abductions—”

  “Exclusive?” Santino said quietly, as the white noise from several competing news crews reached the reporter’s microphone. “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

  “—and he’s promised to address these rumors. Stay with us for more—”

  Rachel muted the reporter as the channel cut to commercial. “Fuck,” she said, as she fell into one of the natty armchairs. “Fuck fuck fuuuuuck.”

  Phil poked the back of her head, and she glanced up at him.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I asked you a question.” Curiosity came through their link. “You’re not running emotions?”

  “Oh. No, I don’t do that when I’m in the office. The guys think it’s invasive.”

  “They’re getting a guided tour of part of the kidnappers’ lair,” she explained aloud. “Which means… I don’t know what it means. Nothing good.”

  “Could be overconfidence,” Zockinski said.

  “Which’s better?” she asked. “An overconfident kidnapper or a paranoid one?”

  “Paranoid,” Hill said.

  “Agreed.” Santino nodded. “A paranoid kidnapper knows things will go wrong. An overconfident one thinks they won’t, and when they do…”

  He held off on finishing that thought, but there was the quiet shriek of metal on linoleum as Hill leaned too heavily on a filing cabinet.

  Rachel waved the television back to normal volume as the dancing slices of pizza faded to black and were replaced by a shot of the abandoned factory. The reporter had resumed walking towards the main doors, repeating her earlier comments about the kidnapping and an exclusive interview.

  “We’re about to meet the man responsible for the events of this morning. While OACET has confirmed that Hope Blackwell and a minor in her care were abducted from a parking garage, the man claiming responsibility has said that no abductions have occurred—”

  “Anyone else starting to hate parking garages?” Rachel asked aloud. Three of the men raised their hands; Hill didn’t move.

  On the screen, the reporter had reached a loading dock. Chattering away in the near-meaningless babble of time fill, she walked up a readied ramp and into the belly of the factory. Her cameraman was good at his job. The scene was straight out of a movie, crystal-clear and panoramic. A factory, old and rusty, full of gears and gigantic machines that Rachel couldn’t put a name to. Dusty light streamed down through windows covered in blue film, giving the scene an unearthly blue glow, and spray paint covered every inch of the walls within arm’s reach.

  “No trash,” she murmured aloud, noticing the generally clean floors. Santino nodded; they had been in enough abandoned buildings to know that most of them collected teenagers, junkies, and their castoffs.

  The camera pulled back to focus on a youngish man with perfect teeth. He was wearing military camouflage, well-worn and patched, but clean. The man smiled for the camera,
a wistful smile; Rachel thought he looked like Clark Gable in his more outdoorsy roles.

  “I’m Jeremy Nicholson, and welcome to my home,” he said. “This factory has been in my family for generations. If you’re over thirty and you grew up on the East Coast, you’ve probably used metals that were smelted in this very plant.”

  He turned slightly, and began to walk towards the center of the factory. The camera followed. “The government forced us to close in 1986,” he said, placing a paternal hand on a monstrous piece of equipment. “They claimed we hadn’t done enough to meet environmental regulations. They lied; my father had complied with every code on the books. I’ll make a long story short and say that if you look up a man named Arthur Bennett, you’ll find that he was an inspector who went to jail in the late ’90s for accepting bribes.”

  Hill stood and walked over to the white board, and the names Jeremy Nicholson and Arthur Bennett went up in green marker.

  “Is that true?” Zockinski asked the room at large.

  Santino, fingers still clattering away at his keyboard, nodded. “Bennett’s name turns up in multiple news stories about bribery and corruption. Looks like some of the good folks in the regional EPA were living large for a couple of decades before they got caught.”

  On the screen, Nicholson resumed his slow tour of his family’s factory. “My father refused to pay Bennett, and tried to go through legal channels to keep the factory open and get Bennett investigated for corruption. The system failed him. Twice. By the time Bennett was convicted of bribery, my father had spent most of our family fortune just trying to hold on to the factory.

  “Ironically…” Nicholson paused for effect before he continued. “My father wasn’t able to reopen the factory because environmental codes had changed during the time it was closed. It would have cost millions to bring the facility up-to-date.”

  He pressed on, one arm sweeping out to take in the factory. “He filed a civil suit against Maryland. He filed another against Bennett. My father lost those cases. But through it all, he paid his taxes on this factory, and never gave up the dream of reopening it.”