The men in the dark began to stir at this. Not at the offer itself—Hope was a genius at day trading and was famously wealthy—but at…
At what?
Rachel couldn’t tell, but the conversational colors of Nicholson’s men kept growing brighter as they waited for Nicholson to strike.
“Josh, the natives? Getting restless.”
“Dangerous?”
“Not yet, but wrap it up? Hope’s walking straight into a trap.”
“I’d like to meet Agent Mulcahy before we make any deals,” Nicholson said.
“And I’d like a million dollars and a pony,” Hope snapped back automatically. “Wait. Okay, maybe just the pony.” She paused. “Nah. Too much work, and I’d have to put in a barn. The rezoning alone would—”
Josh placed a hand on her shoulder. Hope made a sound halfway between agreement and a grunt, and dove back into the potatoes.
“This sounds like a viable option, Mr. Nicholson,” Josh said. “If you’re willing to treat this like a business transaction, I can be back here in an hour with a contract.”
Nicholson reached for the bottle of wine. Hope’s fork came up; Josh moved his hand to her own and gently lowered it to the table.
The militia leader refreshed his glass, smiling.
“This isn’t about the factory, is it, Mr. Nicholson?” Josh said quietly.
“The factory is a symptom of a larger problem, Agent Glassman,” Nicholson replied. “OACET is in the unique position of having the power to address that problem.” He settled back in his chair. “I’d like to meet Mulcahy now.”
“You know how this has to go,” Josh said. “You’re not meeting him. Not until we get something first.”
“Doctor Blackwell may leave whenever she wants to, of course.”
Hope’s conversational colors blurred white in shock; Rachel was sure her own colors matched.
Josh merely went orange in annoyance again. “Of course,” he said. “And Avery?”
“She’s having a good time with us,” Nicholson said.
Hope’s colors fell to grays. “You asshole,” she whispered.
“She’s a child,” Josh said. “She can’t consent.”
Nicholson spread his hands, an almost sheepish What, me worry? grin taking over.
Hope stood; the small sounds of metal brushing against metal came from the darkness around them as Nicholson’s men readied their guns. She grabbed the bottle of wine, stomped up the staircase, and into the office.
Then, as if part of an afterthought, the unconscious guard was shoved through the doorway and left to lie facedown on the stairwell’s landing as the door slammed shut behind him.
Nicholson turned to Josh. “I hope you’ll tell Mulcahy that his wife is staying with us willingly?”
“You can be sure I’ll tell him everything,” Josh replied. “Such as how you’ve denied her food.”
Nicholson’s colors shifted and came up in a wall in front of him, a motion that Rachel recognized as part self-defense, part protest, but all he said was, “Oh?”
Josh tapped the now-empty plate in front of him. “Let’s not pretend that you’ve been treating her like a friend instead of a prisoner.”
Anger roared into Nicholson’s colors. “I’ll make sure she’s well-fed from here on out,” he said, his tone as mild as possible.
Shit, Rachel thought to herself.
Josh was there. “What?”
She sent him the memory of the empty plate on the tray in Hope’s office prison cell.
“Oh, that’s just great,” he replied, and stood. “We’ll be in touch,” he said to Nicholson. “Thank you for your time and your hospitality.”
“Leaving so soon?” Nicholson asked.
Rachel pressed her palms against her thighs and sent her mind into the concrete floor beneath them. Do not, she told herself, go after this condescending little shit. Not yet.
“You’ve given us a lot to consider,” Josh said. “I’d like to extend an invitation to visit us at OACET headquarters.”
“I’d be delighted,” Nicholson said. “Shall we say the day after tomorrow? Sometime later in the afternoon? My schedule is quite tight.”
“Ping.”
“He expected this,” Rachel told Josh. “He’s fine with the idea of not playing on his home turf. And he’s stalling—he’s not going to budge on the time. He doesn’t want to rush.”
The men shook hands, all smiles, and Nicholson waved one of his men over to escort them to the front door. The militia man made them walk in front of him, one hand on his flashlight and the other on his assault rifle.
The Agents ignored him. “What did you see?” Josh asked.
Rachel thought back to those brief minutes when she had gone out-of-body. “I think they’ve got enough arms and armor to wage a small war,” she said, and threw her scans into the featureless crates to be sure. And, because she had been in Criminal Investigation Command and such searches were second nature to her, she checked the equipment itself. “Yup. Guns. Lots of them, and their serial numbers have been removed. I could probably dig the numbers out of what’s left of the metal if I had enough time.”
“How close do you have to be?”
Rachel rubbed her temples. Her implant had limitless capabilities; she didn’t. Small, intense scans gave her crippling migraines; add in some distance and she was useless. “I’d have to go into the metal and look for trace impressions,” she said. “Closer than I was tonight.”
“What about this guy’s rifle?”
She sent her scans out and tried to scrape away at the impressions deep within in the steel. “No dice. It’s delicate work. I want to be sitting and able to concentrate.”
“I’ll figure something out,” he said. “What else?”
“They’ve got military rations,” Rachel replied. Her stomach twisted as it readied itself for mutiny. “Same supplier for the meals we had over in Afghanistan. We didn’t eat them unless we were out in the field, but they’re not something you’d ever forget.”
“Are they common?”
“Hmm?”
“Say I wanted to buy some. How hard would it be?”
“Oh.” She thought about this. “Procurement wasn’t my department. I investigated a lot of MRE thefts, though. They used to be treated as a commodity. It’s probably different back here.”
“All right. Put that on your list, too.”
As they approached the door, the factory began to glow in that unearthly blue light. The militia man stopped walking; Rachel and Josh didn’t.
They reached the door. When they stepped through it, the air was suddenly tight around them, claustrophobia within a wide open parking lot. Behind the barricades, the news crews and cops launched into action at their reappearance.
“We can’t just leave,” she whispered.
“Hope’s safe, Avery’s safe. Now we’re just discussing terms,” Josh whispered back as he waved merrily to the cameras. “You spend the next twenty-four hours tracking down Glazer or Wyatt or whatever he’s calling himself. Find out how he ties in to the kidnapping. Get access to his sources. I’ll work this end with Pat and the others.”
“You saw how Hope was eating,” Rachel said. “And I saw how Nicholson reacted! Her guard ate her meal in front of her, and Nicholson didn’t have a clue. He doesn’t have full control over his own men, Josh! How is that safe?”
He pushed her out of his mind so quickly that she swayed on her feet, and turned to walk away.
Rachel was too quick for him. She snagged his hand; bare skin against bare skin, with Josh’s mind squirming sideways to stay away from hers.
“Level with me,” she said, and pushed against Josh’s mental walls as hard as she dared.
He sighed. “We can get Hope and Avery out any time we want,” he said in a low voice. “Safely. Quickly. They’d be fine in a couple of days. But…” He glanced behind them, towards the dark factory and its cracked windows running along the top floor.
“You can’t get everybody out,” Rachel whispered.
“Not safely,” Josh said. “Not at the same time. We could try to get as many out as possible, but those who would be left behind? They’d be targets. Whatever happens to them? That’d be our fault.
“Nobody else can know about this,” he continued. “Pat’s got it all worked out, just in case the worst happens. But if it does…”
“Yeah,” Rachel said, throwing her scans back over her shoulder to the building behind them. It loomed, dark and brittle, and with it the superstitious fear that it might all come tumbling down around them if they weren’t careful. “Yeah. I know.”
EIGHT
They were not spending the night in Becca’s condo because of Wyatt.
Really.
The building may have been home to bankers, lawyers, and politicians, and had its own four-man security team walking the halls at all hours of the day and night, but that wasn’t why they had decided to sleep there.
Really.
It wasn’t the flash of sickly yellow fear that had nearly knocked Becca to the ground when Rachel had told her that Wyatt was back in town—
—and that he had shown up at her house.
…really…
The first thing Rachel had done when she got to her girlfriend’s home was to walk around the condo and yank the curtains closed. Dinner was a quiet affair, Chinese takeout with a bottle of red wine, usually a mutual favorite except Rachel had insisted they move the table away from the windows before eating, and after that each bite seemed to be made from Szechuan-flavored clay.
They had gone to bed unforgivably early, mostly for something to do, and had made love in the manner of people who couldn’t go to sleep before midnight. It didn’t work: they were still awake and slowly going mad from not acknowledging the psychopathic elephant in the room.
(And doing their best to keep the conversation light and merry. They had been together for over a year, and, like all couples who were testing to see if they were truly in it for the long haul, they knew that bad situations could become worse with very little effort.)
Rachel had found a paperback detective novel in Becca’s study, and was forcing herself through the stilted, self-aware prose. Reading through her implant was awkward. She could make out printed text, but it took conscious effort. Softboiled detective novels were perfect for her: she could never take them seriously enough to get lost in them, and this particular author liked to add taglines about the perils of sexism after every interaction between the woman detective and her male coworkers. There was no other option than to read the choicest passages aloud, and snark as she went along.
“‘Laulinda’—who names a character Laulinda anyway? I mean, you get the choice of any name you can imagine, and you pick Laulinda?—‘Laulinda ignored Paul. He could never understand the perils of girls in the world.’”
“Perilous,” Becca muttered. Her fingers slid around the glass surface of her tablet. “So perilous.”
“Does the author mean the world is full of perils faced by girls, or that girls themselves are perilous? Like frail feminine sharks?”
“There’s a reason I stopped reading that book, you know.”
“You shouldn’t have stopped. This book is a printed atrocity. It should be framed and mounted on a prison wall as an example to other books… Here! ‘Laulinda zipped her jacket tight across her high breasts—’”
“Oooh,” Becca said, as she scrolled through an article. “High breasts. Kinky.”
“—and confronted Paul. ‘How can you not see the dangers these precious girls face?’ she wailed. Wailed? Perfect!”
“You don’t talk like that with Zockinski?”
“If Zockinski decides the best reason to pick a fight with me is because of my gender, I’ve completely failed at pissing him off. Oh God, this one character keeps referring to women as ‘chippies’. Is the author British?”
Becca yanked the book from Rachel’s hands and flung it across the room.
“Way to kill my fun, Dorothy Parker,” Rachel muttered.
“That wasn’t hurled with great force. I don’t have the time to wait around for a guy to come in and replaster.”
“You have a maid.”
“I’m not going to ask—” Becca began, then shut her mouth tight. Rachel was sure that if she had the emotional spectrum turned on, she’d see Becca wrestling with orange frustration.
Rachel sighed and moved closer, wrapping her arms around her girlfriend as best she could with a bed and a stack of pillows in the way. Becca relented, her legs stretching out beneath the blankets as she snuggled tight against Rachel.
“What are you going to do?” Becca whispered.
“I don’t know,” Rachel whispered back.
“How dangerous is he? Be honest.”
“I don’t know that, either,” she admitted. “He’s a mystery. He came out of nowhere, and… All I know is he’s a killer.”
“Who’s wearing your friend’s face.”
Rachel shuddered.
“Why would he do that?” Becca asked. “That’s so…”
“Manipulative? Calculating? Completely fucked up?”
“Yes.” Becca nodded. “Those.”
“That’s probably why he did it. That, and he couldn’t show up wearing his old face. My team would have recognized him on sight.”
“You’re sure he’s here to help? This isn’t a…double-play or a set-up or…?”
“Could be,” Rachel agreed. “I don’t know. But Wyatt and his Daddy Dearest helped OACET once before, big-time, and he wasn’t lying when he said he was here to help today.”
“I don’t know,” Becca said, shaking her head. Her long brown hair fell in Rachel’s face, and Rachel had a few moments of surreptitious tugging to get it all out of her mouth. “I don’t like it. It feels wrong, and I hate that you’re in the middle of it.”
“Yeah.”
Words felt wrong, too; they stopped talking. Rachel let her scans roam up and down the building, checking security points, running through air ducts and ventilation shafts, just in case.
“Is he here?” Becca asked quietly.
“I don’t think so. Do you want me to leave?”
Becca’s arms tightened around her in reply.
“If Daddy told him to help OACET, then he’ll help. Wyatt’s loyal to him,” Rachel said. “I just don’t get that. If he’s a psycho, why should that matter?”
“Here.” Becca rolled out of Rachel’s arms to reclaim her tablet from the other side of the bed. “I’ve been doing some reading on psychopaths,” she said, flicking a fingertip across the screen to call up recent articles. “Everyone assumes that they’re cold, unfeeling monsters. But they’re not—they’ve just got the ability to choose what emotions they experience. A lack of conscience doesn’t mean an absence of humanity.”
“I kind of think that’s exactly what it means,” Rachel muttered.
“Well, no. It means it’s easier to avoid being human.”
Rachel sighed. “Which means…?”
“There are a lot of psychopaths who say they’ve been hurt,” her girlfriend continued. “Emotional abuse, psychological damage… They’ve made a conscious choice to avoid being hurt again. And they do. Like magic.
“Others? They choose to feel love or commitment. They want to be close to someone, but it has to be on their terms. That’s why a lot of relationships with psychopaths go south—the other party turns out to have opinions of their own.”
“Say you’ve got a really smart psychopath,” Rachel said slowly. “One who knows he’s a psychopath. He’s got expert military training on top of exceptional impulse control. Could someone like that form relationships?”
“Absolutely,” Becca said. “They don’t have to have the training, either. I know a lot of psychopaths who’ve been married for years.”
“Wait, what?!”
“Come on, dear,” Becca said, leaning over to kiss her. “Everybody knows it’s only
the dumb ones who go to prison. Smart sociopaths and psychopaths go into business or politics.”
An older memory: Mulcahy, pacing in his office, worried to death.
A newer one: Mulcahy, stone-cold and unblinking to get the job done—
Nope, she told herself, as she pulled her thoughts away from that black hole. That way, there be tigers.
“Wyatt isn’t crazy,” she muttered.
“Oh no,” her girlfriend said. “He’s definitely nuts. He’s just…a very stable kind of nuts?”
“I’ll take that over the alternative.”
“Me too,” Becca said. “You know. If I absolutely have to choose between an ax-crazy psychopath and a congressman.”
After that came the usual ruminations over which politicians were most likely well-disguised psychopaths (consensus: all of them), and then they found they were able to sleep after all.
The next morning, Rachel awoke in a cold fury. Not at Wyatt. She was furious with herself, because sometime during the night, her subconscious had finally gotten through to her—the psychopath hadn’t been lying when he said he had owned a house in the same neighborhood as hers.
Once she had finally realized that, it took her all of fifteen minutes to locate it.
She started with online property records. She had bought her own home when she had relocated from OACET’s office in California, six months before the Agents went public. To pull off his scheme at the police station, Wyatt needed to have been in the area for some time, but Rachel had found his original lair. Only one man had lived in Wyatt’s apartment; his partner had kept his own place across the city. Both had been thoroughly searched by the FBI and the MPD after the raid on First District Station.
So. The house would have been purchased after the raid.
How long did plastic surgery take? Rachel wasn’t sure. The Internet was of no help: reconstructing a man’s face could take weeks to months to years, depending on the surgeon and where the surgery was performed.
Brute Force Page 11
