“You’re a fucking headache,” he muttered, his hand moving to explore the lump on the back of his head.
“Thanks!”
He stood; her gun moved towards him again. “Calm down, Peng, I’m just getting my car keys.”
“Put myself in a moving metal box, with you? No.”
“Scared?” Wyatt squared himself in front of her.
“Smart,” she replied, as she sent a text message to her usual taxi service. “Now, let’s have another beer and you can tell me all about the nice company who paints your lawn while we wait.”
NINE
Of all the places Rachel had thought that Wyatt might bring her, the Capitol Building hadn’t made the list.
She had expected a chase across the city, maybe, or a tour of the seediest areas of town before he tried to lose her by sneaking out a back door and down a secret tunnel. She was ready for such shenanigans: the moment she had jumped in the back seat of her cab, she had flashed her badge at the driver and had hinted ominously about tax audits if the man in the new Honda Civic managed to slip away.
But there had been no such nonsense. Wyatt had driven along familiar streets, and had left his car in a parking lot she had been to many times before, usually when OACET business had required her to stand in front of a sea of angry faces to tell them no, you have neither cause nor reason to take control of our agency, but thank you for playing. Rachel had instructed the cab driver to follow Wyatt as he walked the two blocks to the Capitol, the taxi holding up traffic and blocking a good portion of the bike lane, and she grinned at Wyatt over the sounds of horns and cursing.
The Capitol… The back of Rachel’s brain was churning through the options. Posing as a Congressman’s aide, and getting information by snooping through his files… Pretending to be a security specialist, and eavesdropping in the halls, or in meetings, or in bathrooms…
When Wyatt reached the first security barrier, he bowed low, one hand extended like an usher’s to show her into the building.
“Remember this,” she told the cabbie as she shoved a fifty at him. “In case my corpse shows up on the news.”
The cabbie fled, tires squealing.
Wyatt held out his arm for her; she walked past him towards the first security checkpoint, scans fixed on him so she’d know if he was about to cut and run.
Nothing. His conversational colors were steady, with gray resignation resting against blue professionalism.
The entrance to the Capitol was layer upon layer of kill zones, spots where bystanders needed to gather in convenient clumps for processing before they were allowed to proceed deeper into the building. Her scans bounced off of the security guards: there were fewer guards than usual as the Capitol began to wind down for the night. Rachel was held up at the first checkpoint for the traditional OACET song-and-dance which allowed her to keep her gun, and wondered how she’d explain the fallout to Mulcahy when Wyatt used the delay to escape…
Again, nothing. Wyatt chatted with a guard on the far side of the security checkpoints until she rejoined him. He took her past the meeting rooms, the House and Senate Chambers, the offices of various staff members and persons of varying importance, each time waiting patiently when she had to pass through security.
(It did not escape her attention that not only was Wyatt familiar with the Capitol’s security protocols, but the guards and staffers were familiar with him. They greeted him by his alias and, on one occasion, asked him about his father’s health. And, when Rachel got hung up with a guard who recognized her from a previous visit in which several Congresspersons had threatened to defund OACET and she might have mentioned something about the status of their own campaign finances and a Congressman might have tried to have her arrested and she might have mentioned something about spotting that Congressman at a local club which might have caused the nearby reporters to scurry off in search of information about an extramarital affair… Wyatt intervened.)
After the last checkpoint, he led them down a deserted hallway and opened the door to a dark stairwell.
“Is this when you murder me and leave my body as an example to your enemies?” Rachel muttered as she scanned the space.
“These days, Peng, you’re the only enemy I’ve got,” he said, and paused before adding, “Left.”
“Cute. Real cute,” she said, but she made him lead the way down the stairs.
The back of her brain kept churning.
Despite her many visits to the building, she had never stopped to consider what might be in the Capitol’s basement. She knew, in that abstract way in which facts were turned into mental scaffolding for reality, that there was a basement after she had overheard a tour guide say that there used to be a spa down there for Congressmen and their guests. And nothing the size of the Capitol Building could function without utility rooms, furnaces, and the like. But she had never bothered to toss a scan below the main floor.
The deeper they went, the fewer the opportunities. Is he in housekeeping or maintenance? No, not while wearing a suit and tie… Security? No, we passed their office already…
And the little voice in the back of her mind that never truly shut up was saying: I’ve been looking for him for nearly two years, but I never thought to look in the cellar. Or did he know when I’d be in the Capitol, and he called in sick? Was he here? What if he sat in some of those public hearings? Did I just never bother to notice him?
Is it better for us that I didn’t notice him?
These thoughts smashed around her head, stopping only when Wyatt did, right beside a metal security door with lettering large enough for her to read:
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
And beneath that, a few printouts of cartoon robots. One was carrying a lightsaber.
“Oh Lord,” she sighed. “You’re on the Congressional Geek Squad.”
“I was,” he said, as he typed his security code on the electronic access pad. “Took me a long time to set up this alias, too. You’re fucking welcome, by the way.”
The lock released with a metallic zwink! Wyatt opened the door, and too-cold air poured from the room.
“Welcome to my home away from home,” he said, as the fluorescent lights noticed there was a human being beneath them and flickered to life.
“Where’s your home away from home away from home?” Rachel asked, her scans crawling over the edges and into the holes of the IT room.
“Let me have some secrets,” Wyatt said, as he shrugged out of his suit coat.
“Nah.” Rachel shut the door behind her and leaned against it, arms crossed and shoulders slumped with all of the boredom in the world weighing her down. Her mind raced: her scans kept searching the room, looking for guns or other surprises.
It wasn’t a private office. Going by the sit-stand desks covered in the debris of different personalities, Wyatt shared the room with at least five other people. Around those—all around, in towering heaps that threatened to avalanche and crush them at the slightest sound—were electronics. Except for the empty hulls of desktop computers, she didn’t recognize any of the equipment, knowing only that the stuff around her pulsed in wave after wave of data. God, I wish Phil were here. Or Jason. They’d know what this stuff is.
“Guns are at your twelve and eight,” Wyatt said, pointing.
Rachel had already caught the gun at eight o’clock, a gigantic .45 taped behind a wall-mounted monitor. The second was its twin, buried beneath what appeared to be roughly sixteen million inert laptops and tablets.
Wyatt noticed the look of revulsion on her face. “Yes, Desert Eagles,” he said. “It’s called an alias, Peng.”
“They’re shitty overpriced hand cannons!”
“Ask if I’ve wanted to spend the last seven months here,” he said, his colors freezing into cold dead blues.
“Then you should be thanking me for blowing your cover. After this, you can get out of this shithole.”
The blues brightened, running straight up the spectrum to that eager yellow-white of e
xcitement as Wyatt’s mood changed.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
He glanced at her, his colors darkening to professional blues which weighed her Southwestern turquoise against itself.
“Forget it. Just go ahead and tell me why we’re here,” she said. “Did you set up camp in the Capitol Building to help OACET?”
Red scorn flicked across his colors like a whip. “World doesn’t revolve around you, Peng.”
“Why, then?”
He gave a familiar tug to a nearby office chair. It was an ancient device from the Seventies which squeaked across the stone floor on plastic rollers, and complained by losing some stuffing as he sat down. “Adam and I got bored, chasing the money—”
“Who’s Adam?”
“My partner. Your creator,” Wyatt said. “You blew his old alias, and he needed a new one. He thought Adam was…appropriate, considering how much of his programming went into building OACET’s implants.”
Rachel sighed. “Lemme guess—you’re not calling yourself Eve.”
He grinned and leaned towards her, his colors a rich, bloody red as the office chair let out a small plastic scream beneath him.
“Your code names are shit, Cain,” she said. “If Daddy Dearest sent you here to help OACET, maybe naming yourself after the son who murders his brother wasn’t a smart choice.”
“Cain had plenty of siblings,” Wyatt said, still grinning in reds. “He just killed that one asshole who wouldn’t leave him alone.”
“Good luck trying to sneak up behind me to bean me with a rock,” she said, and regretted the words as she spoke them.
“So are you really blind, or what?”
She pointed at the computers. “Didn’t you want to get out of here? Permanently?”
Wyatt watched her for a few moments to see if she’d give in; when she didn’t, he turned and started typing. “Sort of,” he said.
“Hmm?”
“This place is a tomb,” he admitted, “but it’s a good spot to gather intel.”
“Why? Not to help OACET.”
“As I said, we got bored.” He reached beneath the desk to plug something in, pressed a key on the keyboard, and she felt a new piece of equipment in the back of the room come online. “Setting complicated traps for rich guys at the request of other rich guys? Adam thought there were better things to do with our skills.”
“Such as?”
He turned from the computer and leaned back in the ancient chair, his arms crossed behind his head. “You like the way the world works, Peng?”
“Most days, no. Not particularly.”
“Nobody does,” he said. “So Adam and me, we’re making the world a better place.”
Rachel laughed so hard she began to cough.
“No, no!” She waved him on. “Please. I want to hear how this plays out.”
Wyatt’s colors sank back into those cold blues. He turned back towards the monitor. “Come look at this,” he said.
“Show me from here,” she said, her butt still firmly planted against Wyatt’s office door.
“Right.” He grunted as sage green and red embarrassment appeared in his conversational colors as he remembered what she was. “So, nobody in this office works for Congress. Technically, I work for the Infrastructures Services Group at the Office of Management and Administration.”
“You’re a federal tech guy?”
“A heavily vetted federal tech guy who’s got access to anything that goes through these servers.”
She nodded. Pulling bytes from the data that was freed into the wild would have been child’s play for Wyatt, but Congress’s own interdepartmental emails were another story. After the Great Benghazi Email Hunt, the government had cracked down on how email could be processed and stored. Working in the Capitol Building itself was probably the only way he could have gotten access to protected data.
“What else do you have?” she asked.
“Any time somebody loads data from an external source, I get a copy,” he replied, typing. “Thumb drives, phones, hard drives… If I’ve serviced it, I’ve bugged it. It sends new data directly to my own personal servers.”
Rachel chased down the connection to the piece of equipment she had felt come online. There it was: a server, a small one, with less data stored than she had anticipated, but Wyatt was talking directly to it and ignoring the other servers in the room.
Fooled you, Bert, she thought. You just told me where you hide your gold.
“You’ve got personal servers down here?” she asked. “That’s risky.”
“And two guns,” he reminded her. “Which are more likely to get me caught than just another purloined letter in the stack.”
“Why risk the guns?”
“Because Marshall Wyatt was a soldier in Afghanistan,” he said. “He’s got gunlust. Most of the guys in the office share it.”
She flipped frequencies and gave a careful once-over to the personal effects on the desks. There were the usual plastic toys, mostly robots with a smattering of heavily articulated men in camouflage with guns stamped into their thighs.
“That’s why you went with Desert Eagles,” she muttered.
“Conversation pieces,” he said. “They’re what civilians expect to see in a gun. But they’re functional, and I wanted to have something ready to go, just in case. The guys think I’m worried about another Weston incident.”
A printer spun up and papers began to spool into a plastic tray.
“Those are for you,” Wyatt said, with a nod towards the printer.
Rachel kept her butt against the door, and raised an eyebrow at the psychopath.
His colors turned over to show an annoyed orange, and he went to gather up the papers. “Here,” he said, holding them out as if they were laced with smallpox.
She stared at him, eyes hard, as she took the papers and wadded them into her purse.
“Not going to read them?”
“No,” she said. “What are they?”
“Text messages, emails… It’s the data trail that led Adam to believe that something involving OACET was about to go down, and was worth me breaking cover.”
The stack of papers had been no more than ten pages thick. Her other eyebrow went up.
“If you were going after a tribe of technomancers,” he said, “would you trust digital communications? It’s mostly references to what was discussed at private meetings. That’s the best evidence I’ve got for you, but none of it is enough to hang anyone.”
“Makes sense,” she said. “I got the feeling that Nicholson was somebody’s puppet. Dude might have the charisma to hold a militia together, but the tactical know-how to run a long game on OACET? Nope.”
Wyatt’s colors flared in yellow curiosity at this; she took the opportunity to introduce Wyatt’s private server to the server they kept at OACET for files labeled: “Suspicious, possibly swimming in viruses, might burn the whole place down.”
His watch began vibrating. “Thanks for reminding me,” he said, and pushed a button on the watch. A power supply across the room blew; the small server vanished from her mind.
Rachel shrugged. “Can’t blame a girl for trying.”
He waited, his conversational colors hovering patiently in stasis around him. She opened the door and pulled it with her as she stepped aside, keeping a goodly distance from him as he passed. He headed down the musty hallway, happy blues and yellows in his colors, a small balloon of purple inflating as he thought of a good joke—
Rachel gave a sharp whistle.
Wyatt paused.
“Get your briefcase and put on your coat,” she said. “I’ve got better things to do than be called into questioning as a witness in your disappearance.”
The purple burst.
“Now that I think about it,” she said, “you should come into work tomorrow. Normal business hours.”
Grays rose up and sank their claws into the blues and yellows. “Peng—”
“And probably the da
y after,” she added. “Just to be safe.”
“Don’t think so,” Wyatt said, as he returned to the office to gather up his gear. “Don’t much like the idea of you trapping me here.”
“What are the odds that arresting you while you’re at work will turn the Capitol into a bloodbath?”
“Point.”
They retraced their path, except this time they managed to dance around the security checkpoints. Rachel watched the surface colors of everyone they passed, checking to see if Wyatt was signaling distress… No. So far, so good. The two of them left through the main entrance and walked down the steps, just another couple of federal grunts putting in some overtime.
When they reached the curb, Rachel hailed a fresh cab.
“Get in,” she told him.
He touched his lapel, fingers resting near the bulge of the Desert Eagle he had slipped beneath his coat.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” she said. “Ask yourself why I let you pick it up. Now, get in the car.”
She took them straight to OACET headquarters.
A gauntlet of reporters had entrenched themselves on the front lawn. Rachel plastered her best No Comment expression to her face and plowed through the thorny hedge of microphones and cameras. Wyatt followed, silent and glowering in reds and oranges. They paused at the old bronze front doors. Wyatt’s sour mood had gotten its teeth in him, and he glared at the reporters as if he was thinking about doing damage.
“What’s wrong?” she asked him. “I thought serial killers loved publicity.”
“Only the dabblers,” he said. “The craftsmen do it out of love.”
Rachel stared up at him. “You are so fucking creepy.”
He gave her that predator’s smile again, and opened the doors for her.
The ground floor of the building was lousy with FBI and (Rachel noticed with some trepidation) the odd official from Homeland Security. Most of these were standing ready by the doors to keep the media at bay, but others had set up checkpoints throughout the building. Rachel asked the FBI agent who checked her badge why security had gone up: the agent told her that people kept sneaking in through the fire exits.
Brute Force Page 13
