Brute Force

by Spangler, K. B.

  Rachel decided to go with a nice three-month window between when Wyatt had left the city and when he had returned. There were some excellent plastic surgeons in Europe and in Mexico who could swap out an entire face in that time. And three months was the bare minimum for the reconstructive surgery required to put Daddy Dearest’s legs back together, allowing Wyatt to safely move him into the D.C. area again.

  So. The house would have been purchased at least three months after the raid.

  It wouldn’t be close to her own home, she knew. Too much of a chance that she’d spot them by accident. They might not have known about her scans when they bought the house, but how awkward would it be if she were out for a morning jog and happened to bump into someone with a suspiciously familiar face from her Army days?

  So. Something on the outskirts of her neighborhood and nowhere near a park, or between her house and the city proper, or on any of her familiar well-traveled routes. That still left several dozen houses, so she put on her best fake real estate agent’s voice and started making calls to the agents on record.

  Her fifth call in, and she learned that a charming bungalow in Forest Hills had been sold to a nice young man who had insisted on looking at single-level homes. He had family members with mobility issues, he had told the agent, and needed a place that didn’t have stairs.

  “That psychopath sure loves his daddy,” Rachel muttered as she hung up.

  She walked out of the front door of Becca’s lovely centrally-located building and hailed a cab.

  The cabbie took her to an address in the Goldilocks zone of stalking: not too near her own home, but not too far away, either. Juuuust right. When they were close enough so she could scan the house, she knew—instantly, immediately knew—it belonged to Wyatt. The security system was bonkers. There was video and audio monitoring, alarms on each entry point, some weird plastic wands that might have been used in thermal detection…and that’s just what she spotted from the electronic fields surrounding the equipment.

  She let her scans drop before she went into the system itself.

  So. Rachel told the cabbie to take her back into the city, as she had business at the Bank of America branch on 15th Street. What? No, it couldn’t be any other Bank of America branch, and yes, I know we’re passing one of those right this moment. It’s got to be the big building in the city. Because I’m paying you, that’s why!

  She then spent an hour at one of the largest, heavily-guarded banks in the city, telling the clerks she had seen an advertisement for an impossibly high-yield interest checking account, and allowing too-polite managers to pass her around as she played with the limits of the bank’s security equipment.

  The bank was her dry run on an unfamiliar security system. Rachel had tested her shields against OACET’s own security systems months ago, and poking around the bank’s systems was just to be sure she hadn’t missed anything. She hadn’t: nothing beat a security system devised by Agents (except, perhaps, another Agent), and while the bank’s security system had shown her that she did register on some of their equipment when shielded, she was more of an artifact than a threat. Her shield allowed the light to bend around her, turning her into a blur instead of a person-shaped hole in the world. Managing audio equipment was easier: she usually told it she had the same audio register as a flock of noisy starlings, and it ignored her.

  So. Once satisfied, she hailed another cab, and went to the local big-box hardware store.

  Then, she went home to prepare.

  She had assumed the approach would be the tricky part: the mission usually went as planned once you were safely behind enemy lines. Until she was inside Wyatt’s house, she’d have to contend with the unexpected—nosy neighbors and the like—and she was so well-known around the neighborhood that there was no way she could go incognito.

  So. Three in the afternoon, just before people started coming home from work, and a lovely time for a leisurely afternoon stroll to the local store.

  So.

  A few easy questions, and she had learned the man with the stunning front lawn kept normal business hours, except on those days when he worked a little late. He was rarely around on weekends, but when he was, he was friendly and generous. Over Labor Day Weekend, he had hosted a block party and let the kids play in his pool.

  So.

  Plastic grocery bag swinging from one hand and her oversized purse hanging somewhat lower than usual, Rachel kept to the sidewalk one block over from Wyatt’s property. It was an effort to keep from whistling nonchalantly. She had wrapped her shield tight around her, making sure it hugged her physical form as closely as it could.

  So.

  Wyatt’s house.

  From here, with her scans fully active, the psychopath’s house looked like a portal to Hell, all glowing reds from the early warning systems that blanketed it, and pulsating in a cold white light from the alarm systems within.

  “Great,” she muttered to herself. “The cyborg’s version of a haunted house. Lucky me.”

  She turned the corner and began the long walk towards Wyatt’s house.

  Wyatt had a landscape company, she decided. He must have had a landscape company—she refused to believe someone like Wyatt could have maintained such a perfectly manicured lawn. Even after a hard winter, the grass looked crisp and green.

  Too green. She prodded it with her scans and found it fluoresced at a rate consistent with paint.

  “What kind of psychopath gets his lawn dyed green?” she muttered as she turned into his driveway. “I am dealing with a shitty psychopath. I demand a better class of psychopath…” And so on, until she was right there at the end of his driveway and couldn’t pretend any longer.

  The property was fenced on all four sides, with the front of the house filling the gap. It was a newish fence—she assumed Wyatt had installed it when he had bought the house—fancy-looking in tall white wooden slats. She ran her scans through it and found the wood was an engineered plastic, and went more than three feet down into the earth.

  Wonder how they explained that to the fence company? she thought. The world’s biggest Digging-est Dog?

  She went straight to the gate and popped the handle.

  There was a cold moment in which the sound of the gate latch coming open sounded an awful lot like the click of a landmine, but no, not here, not in suburbia, there was no way Wyatt would booby-trap the grounds around his own home and her scans were too thorough, besides.

  Still.

  She closed the gate behind her, every one of her weird and augmented senses ready for a trick, a trap, something. Anything. A homing pigeon to zoom out of the bushes and shoot towards Wyatt to warn him, maybe.

  Nothing.

  So.

  The back yard was as diligently landscaped as the front: a series of boxwoods in a straight hedge provided excellent cover. Rachel scanned the area one last time before she scurried behind the bushes and allowed herself to breathe.

  Once safe, she took out the circular saw she had bought at the hardware store.

  Houses are like mollusks, she reminded herself as she slapped a fresh battery into the saw’s handle. Phil had taught her this: it was a rule of any good bomb squad. Get though the hard shell, and there’s nothing but soft, chewy innards.

  She had picked a spot well away from the windows and doors; the contact points on the motion sensors wouldn’t trip to minor vibrations. The saw’s metallic rasp seemed louder than it had when she had tested it in the privacy of her own garage, but it ran through the masonite board like a knife through butter. Frozen butter, admittedly, but it was just a matter of making a pair of foot-long cuts straight up, then another two cuts at the top and bottom, square between the studs. The entire process took less than a minute.

  She had been worried about the next part—one mistake, and the masonite boards might fly off the plywood backing—but the carpenter who had nailed on the siding had done a thorough job of it and the whole thing popped off the house in a single piece. A littl
e work with a short-handled crowbar, and she was through the layer of pink insulation. She sat, surrounded by fluffy clouds of spun fiberglass, as she cut through the drywall on the far side with a contractor’s blade. Then, she rapped on the drywall until it popped loose and fell on the carpeted floor of the living room.

  Three minutes, eighteen seconds… She stopped her internal timer before it began to slice time into incomprehensible fractions, concentrating instead on using her new electric screwdriver to put an overlong screw into each corner of the plywood backing of the piece she had removed. She hurled her power tools into the bag, followed by handfuls of fiberglass, and scuffed up the mulch to hide the sawdust before she tossed the bag through the small square opening she had made.

  Rachel slithered headfirst into Wyatt’s house.

  Not yet, she reminded herself, as she gasped for breath, propping herself up against the wall of Wyatt’s dining room. Not yet.

  She reached through the hole, took up the plywood square by the screws, and yanked it back into position.

  This was the tricky part. She projected herself out-of-body, her avatar positioned outside the house and staring at the hole. A seemingly endless amount of fiddling and jiggling later, and she had aligned the panel to hide the seams as best she could. A little caulk and paint, and nobody would be the wiser.

  Now, safe inside Wyatt’s wards, she relaxed.

  She moved into the kitchen, and stayed there. Wyatt might not have layered his lawn in landmines on the chance of curious neighbors, but he could have booby-trapped other areas of his house. No reason to run that gauntlet unless she had to, and she was pretty sure that Wyatt’s nice, normal suburban home didn’t hold any useful secrets other than himself.

  Rachel crept across the wide white floor tiles to the fridge, and gave it a good, solid staring. Once she was satisfied it wasn’t a sinister fridge in disguise, she opened it and helped herself to a beer.

  The psychopath drank his beer in cans, because of course he did. Still, it was either that or the open carton of orange juice beside it. Nope, beer it was: she trusted nothing in this house, including the tap water.

  She carefully chose a kitchen chair, and settled in to wait.

  Rush hour came and went.

  Sometime after the sun had set, the noise of a car pulled her scans towards the road. A late-model coupe, gray and low to the ground, purred into Wyatt’s driveway. A new thread was stitched into the local digital ecosystem, and the garage door began to climb.

  Rachel took a deep breath and made one last scan of the kitchen.

  Everything she had brought was tucked tight behind the angle of a wall. The breakfast nook showed from both entrances to the kitchen, but the chair closest to the garage was also the only one out of the line of sight. She made herself slump into it as if she couldn’t care less about this insanity, her gun resting on the table and pointing at the door. A second beer, unopened, rested beside her own.

  In the garage, an engine cut off, followed by the solid thump of a car door.

  Through the wall, she saw Wyatt in dull, cloudy colors. Whatever job he was working as his cover story was boring him to tears, and perhaps normalcy.

  He was carrying a briefcase. Rachel threw a light scan inside; it held papers, plus a .22 caliber automatic pistol. A matching gun rode in a nylon harness on his lower back, concealed beneath the folds of his almost-cheap suit. Business casual for psychopaths.

  Wyatt paused at the door, his hand stalled above the keypad that deactivated his security system.

  Rachel held her breath.

  His fingers punched in a code, then tumbled two locks and a deadbolt using three different keys. Once done, Wyatt walked into his own home, no trace of Southwestern turquoise or OACET green in his emotions.

  “Howdy,” she greeted him, as she tapped one finger on the barrel of her gun.

  Wyatt’s colors exploded in yellow surprise. He froze for all of a full heartbeat before his colors relaxed into wary oranges.

  “Peng.” He nodded to her.

  “Disarm,” she said.

  He took off the gun riding against his lower back, slowly.

  “Put it on the briefcase and kick them both over here,” she said.

  Once he had done this, she used her gun to nudge the unopened beer towards him. He took it and circled away to a chair on the far side of the breakfast nook, keeping the wide belly of the round table between them.

  “Where’s Marshall Wyatt?” she asked. “The real one. My friend.”

  “Dead,” the fake Wyatt replied.

  Her world shrank around its edges. Just because you already know the answer doesn’t mean it won’t hurt when you hear it.

  “You?”

  “No,” he said. “Not me. He died a few years ago. I didn’t even know he existed until I went looking to become someone from your military days.”

  “How?”

  He shrugged and popped the tab on his beer. “Homeless. Meth addict. Froze to death under an overpass in Chicago.”

  “You’re lying.” He’s lying, he must be lying, Marshall couldn’t go out like that—

  “I can show you the files,” he said. “The original copies. They’re different now, of course.”

  “What’s in them?”

  “DNA verified by military record, the cemetery where his cremains were sent, and so on.”

  “Cremated? Nobody came to claim his body?”

  “Shit, Peng, I don’t know. I just took his identity.”

  She watched for any trace of dimpling or weaving, and her world got smaller still when she realized he was being honest with her.

  “Why Wyatt?” she asked. “I served with a lot of men who never made it home. Why not one of them?”

  “Right age, right body type. But,” he said, as he crushed his empty beer can in one big hand, “You were close to him. That’s the big thing. You’ve probably mentioned Wyatt to your friends in OACET, and that gives me some extra credibility.”

  “Joke’s on you,” she said, almost a whisper. She had never mentioned Wyatt. Not to anyone.

  “How’d you break into my house?”

  She pointed towards his dining room.

  The false Wyatt shuffled around in his chair until he could see the hole cut through the drywall, and began to laugh. “Knew we needed internal security,” he chuckled. “The best defenses don’t matter once they’re already inside. How’d you get past the perimeter?”

  She glared at him.

  “C’mon,” he said. “We built this place to respond to anything you could throw at it.”

  “I’ll give you a hint,” she said. “I didn’t need to throw anything at it.”

  The perplexed mess of yellow-oranges that sprouted up from his conversational colors like sickly sunflowers was delightful.

  “So,” she said, after a lengthy pretend sip, “who’s your source?”

  The confusion bled away in the greens of comprehension, and maybe a little too much smug pink.

  “I’m not leaving,” she said. “This is endgame for you. What happens next depends on how well you convince me that you’re of some use.”

  Wyatt laughed. He laughed. “Been spending too much time in the interview room, Peng?”

  “Hard to improve on the truth, Wyatt. Your source.”

  “No.”

  “I’ve got all night. And a gun.”

  “All night?” he asked, slowly, running his eyes up and down what he could see of her body.

  “Cute,” she said.

  “Yeah, you are,” Wyatt said. He leaned towards her, grinning like a hungry animal. “I think we’d get along damned fine after a good solid fuck—”

  She punched him.

  She didn’t hold back, and he didn’t see it coming until the instant before her fist crashed into his jaw. Wyatt fell out of his chair, his head making the most delicious sound as it bounced against the white tile floor, a few flecks of blood falling soon after.

  Rachel stood over his body, run
ning her medical diagnostic autoscript over him as he sank into an unconscious stupor. Then, half-disappointed as the autoscript assured her he’d be fine, she walked over to his freezer and stuck her hand into the icebox.

  Wyatt was out cold for nearly an hour. When his conversational colors began to crawl over themselves again in slow, unsteady loops, she pulled a fresh can of beer out of the fridge and dragged her chair into easy kicking distance.

  He groaned as his eyes fluttered open. Rachel leaned forward, making sure that the first thing he saw was her looming over him, her gun resting on a knee.

  Wyatt closed his eyes again. “Point taken,” he said.

  “Good boy.”

  He stayed flat on the floor, one hand exploring the new tender spot on the back of his skull, the other prodding his jawline.

  “So,” Rachel said. “Who’s your source?”

  He rolled to his knees, a smooth movement that made Rachel’s finger jerk towards the trigger. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Try again.”

  “No,” he said, coming up on his toes and sliding into his chair as if he had never left it. As if she hadn’t hit him hard enough to make him lose an hour. “You don’t want to know. It took me too long to get into position. If I blow this, it’s gone.”

  “I love how you think you’ve got room to negotiate,” Rachel said.

  Wyatt turned away and stared through the kitchen window. His conversational colors blurred to a sad gray, then shook off the sadness in a burst of professional blues and the burning white of excitement. “All right, you win,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

  “Tell, don’t show.”

  “You won’t believe me if I do,” he said, straightening his suit. “I’ll need my briefcase.”

  Rachel knelt and retrieved it, with her scans and gun aimed straight at Wyatt’s center mass. The briefcase was locked. She sent her mind into the cheap combination lock until she found the grooves in the tumblers, and flipped the case open to retrieve the small handgun.

  “Here you go,” she said, as she shoved the sans-gun briefcase across the table.