Brute Force

by Spangler, K. B.

  Once safely past the first checkpoint, Rachel shoved Wyatt into the same secluded niche where she and Hill had discussed the kidnapping.

  “Here’s the deal,” she told him. “We both know there’s no way in hell you’re going back to the Capitol, ever. I’m going to make sure you’re on camera when you leave this building. After you disappear, my story is that an old Army buddy of mine came to me with some suspicious information. I went to his place of business to check it out, and then brought him here to report to my superiors. If he vanishes on his way home? Well, that information must have been pretty important, right?”

  “Except you cut your way into my house,” he reminded her.

  “My old Army buddy and I have some crazy prank wars,” she said, before she realized the purple was back. “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said, smirking.

  That purple smirk persisted all the way up the stairs and into Josh’s office.

  If Mulcahy’s office had been designed as the crown jewel of OACET, Josh’s office had been modeled after the offspring of a filing cabinet and a bordello. Nobody outside of OACET ever visited his office (at least, not without a very specific invitation), so Josh hadn’t bothered to decorate. There were no windows, but light came through a skylight; after dark, the room was lit by a wall covered in mismatched sconces holding remote-controlled LED candles. His desk was an IKEA knockoff, pressboard in a faux-Swedish design, and leaning gently to one side under the weight of the computer peripherals and stacks of color-coded paperwork. The shelves circling the room were buried beneath law books and legal files. There was a floor—the logic of human residences required some form of floor—but a paper avalanche had come crashing down and hidden it a few months ago, and Josh had yet to dig his way out.

  The only horizontal surface clear of this administerial debris was the queen-sized bed in the corner, with clean sheets turned down in welcome.

  “Package for you,” Rachel said, as she shoved Wyatt through the open door.

  Josh glanced up from his keyboard, saw Wyatt, and just knew.

  “Please tell me you didn’t bring Jonathan Glazer here,” he said through a new link, his conversational colors a sickly gray.

  “I didn’t,” Rachel said aloud. “I brought Marshall Wyatt here. He’s an old friend from the Army who reached out to me with a hot tip about the kidnapping.

  “Here you go,” she added, as she tossed the crumpled stack of papers on top of his keyboard. “Fresh from Congress’s printers, and given to me by an employee dutifully hired and vetted by the…”

  She looked at Wyatt.

  “The Office of Management and Administration,” he said.

  “Them.”

  Josh’s attention moved from the papers to Wyatt to Rachel before returning to the papers. He sighed and started reading. Wyatt stared at Josh for a long moment, then turned and began to explore the office.

  Josh’s colors went chameleon, shifting through excitement and anger as he flipped through the pages.

  Her curiosity got the better of her. “What is it about? I couldn’t read it while watching Wyatt.”

  “One sec… Okay. It’s email communications between four people, and texts between those same four people and two numbers I’ve traced to a block of numbers sold to cell phones. The phones in question are inactive now.”

  “Burners?”

  “Probably. The email accounts are under anonymous usernames. Looks like six people who are discussing a single holiday shopping list. It’s definitely coded; there are different categories of what they want to buy, and discussion of a ‘Comptroller’ who controls access to the mall and who won’t let them buy what they want.”

  “Is the Comptroller also named Mulcahy?”

  A brief tremor of purple humor came and went through their link. “That’d defeat the purpose of a secret code,” he replied. “There’s also a long thread about friends in their holiday shopping network who’re relocating to ‘Steel City’.”

  “Please tell me they’re talking about Detroit.”

  “I doubt it,” Josh said. “The most recent message said that ‘moving day’ was a go. That message was sent mid-morning on Sunday. That’s when Wyatt showed up at your house?”

  “Noonish, but yes.”

  “Okay. Is this all he gave you?”

  “Yeah. Why?” she asked.

  “There’re no names, IDs, or other tracking data. These are just plain-text conversations with time stamps.”

  “Hey, murder machine?” Rachel called aloud. Wyatt looked up from perusing Josh’s law books. “What are the names that go with these accounts?”

  “Golly, Peng,” Wyatt licked his middle finger and used it to turn a page. “How would I know that?”

  “Oh, fuck you!” she snapped.

  “You didn’t check to make sure he included the names?”

  “He’s a goddamned psychopath, Josh! I could either read or make sure he didn’t try to kill me. Not both.”

  Josh didn’t move, but that shivery sensation of feeling someone else nod came through their link again. “I’d have done the same thing,” he admitted, distracted, as he began highlighting text on the pages. “I’ll give this to our analysts. If their authors have any media presence, they might be able to track them through phrasing or content.

  “But…” His mental voice trailed off as his thoughts turned to the hidden safe down in the War Room.

  Rachel agreed. The list of politicians who had been involved in the original OACET conspiracy was short. Mulcahy, Josh, and Mare had decided not to expose them, mainly because doing so would have destroyed the leverage the Agents held over them. These politicians were fish on the line, living with the knowledge that if they tried to come after the Agents, they’d be smacked with an oar and left in a cooler to rot. As threats went, it was a pretty good one: OACET had already taken down one of the most powerful senators in Washington. But this didn’t mean those politicians were happy to leave things the way they were.

  “Send somebody over to the U.S. Capitol, too,” she said, as she showed him the location of the small server in the basement.

  “Nice!” Josh brightened. “If there’s anything to be salvaged on it, we’ll dig it out.”

  Rachel had her doubts: Wyatt had a history of using thermal charges to nuke his computer equipment. But the tech side of OACET operations was, thankfully, none of her business.

  “Neat,” she said. “Now, what do you want me to do with Wyatt?”

  Josh froze in mid-stroke and glanced up at her, yellow curiosity the same hue as his highlighter moving across him.

  “He’s your problem now,” she said. “I just burned him as a source, so he’s of no use to us any more. You’re my superior officer. It’s up to you to decide what I do with him.”

  “What?!” Josh exclaimed aloud, then: “Come on, Rachel. I’ve got a million other things to deal with today. Handle him yourself.”

  “Sure,” she said, settling against an overflowing filing cabinet. “Just tell me what I should do. Call the cops and turn him in? That’d be a fun confession. Or maybe we should wall him up in the basement. We’re good at hiding people that might embarrass OACET, right?”

  “I…” Josh’s conversational colors were at war, professional blues in a pitched battle with OACET green, Wyatt’s sandalwood caught between them.

  “The ethics aren’t so fucking easy when you aren’t a Monday Morning quarterback, are they?”

  “Jesus, Rachel!” Josh was nearly shouting, his professionalism gone and his colors turning red.

  Wyatt coughed. It was a delicate sound, and existed for no other purpose than to remind them that he was in the room.

  The Agents turned and glared at him.

  “Don’t let me interrupt you,” he said.

  Josh’s eyes went towards the ceiling, as if evoking a higher power. Their link was tight enough for Rachel to feel the shape of his request, and she shivered.

  He turned to Wyatt. “Where’s yo
ur partner?”

  “Around.”

  “We’re calling him Adam now,” Rachel said brightly. “And Wyatt is Cain!”

  Josh stared at them until his colors ran gray and orange. He stood, and climbed over a stack of bankers’ boxes to reach a nearby wine rack. An opened bottle of whiskey waited beneath the Chardonnays and the Bordeaux; he unscrewed the cap and took a good, long drink.

  “Let’s go over this again,” he said, once he had come up for air and his professional blues had reasserted themselves. “You’re here to help us?”

  “Mostly,” Wyatt replied.

  “Why?”

  The psychopath shrugged.

  “He says they’re the good guys now,” Rachel added. “They’re making the world a better place, one stupidly complex caper at a time.”

  Josh took another lion-sized drink of whiskey before returning the bottle to its place on the rack. “What’s it going to take to get the names associated with these files?” he asked.

  “I’d like to walk out of here,” Wyatt said.

  “Why?” Josh asked again, professional blues wrapping around himself.

  Wyatt’s colors froze in mild shock before they sped up to normal. “Seems the smart thing to do. For me.”

  “How long were you working at the Capitol?”

  “Seven months,” Wyatt said, some curious yellows beginning to appear as the conversation went wide.

  “So you can hold down a job,” Josh murmured, as if thinking aloud.

  Wyatt laughed. “As part of a cover, yeah. You see me filling out a 401k?”

  “I manage two trained assassins and a covert demolitions specialist,” Josh said. “None of them seem to have problems obeying the tax code. We don’t allow them to kill, but their lives are anything but boring.”

  Josh and Wyatt kept talking; Rachel stopped listening. She was trying to twist this new idea around in her head—Is he actually trying to recruit Wyatt?—and, like a cat held over a sink full of soapy water, it refused to let itself be placed anywhere of use. That idea kept bouncing between It would solve the problem of what to do with him, and He’d officially be Josh’s responsibility, before spiraling down the hole and landing solidly on But Josh might make me Wyatt’s permanent babysitter.

  “Gentlemen,” she said quickly. “Can we focus? Is there anything in that file that will tell us who’s behind the kidnapping?”

  Annoyed oranges pulled themselves over Josh’s professional blues, but as he opened his mouth, Patrick Mulcahy entered the room.

  Rachel jumped. She hadn’t been scanning the halls, and the head of OACET was still missing his usual layer of conversational colors. He was nothing but a streak of man-shaped cerulean blue in the air, with a thick curtain of emotionless gray exhaustion around him.

  He stared at Wyatt.

  Rachel nudged a few files aside so she could make a seat from a stack of boxes, and curled up to watch the show.

  “Wow, are you—” Wyatt went into charming mode, sticking on a good ol’ boy smile and slumping slightly to blunt his edges. “Mulcahy! Wow! I’ve wanted to meet you for forev—”

  Mulcahy didn’t move as Wyatt came closer, hand extended, as friendly and as harmless as a big floppy puppy. When the psychopath was an arm’s length away, Mulcahy said: “Stop.”

  The air went dead. Not cold; cold would have implied some sort of sensation. Just…dead.

  “Why is this person here?” Mulcahy asked.

  “You want the long version or the longer one?” Rachel asked.

  “As short as possible.”

  “Josh asked me to find a source, and I did, and it happens to be attached to this dude.”

  “And you brought him here,” Mulcahy said, an unspoken “Where he could hurt our family” lodged in the lifeless air around them.

  “Long story,” Rachel said. “Extremely long.”

  “Marshall Wyatt, Army CID,” Mulcahy said, his facial recognition autoscript finally pulling the information out of the Army’s database. “Except you’re not, are you.”

  Not a question.

  Wyatt straightened up and began to walk in a slow circle around Mulcahy. “I’m here with Peng,” he said.

  “No.” Mulcahy turned as Wyatt did, slow and smooth. “She might have brought you here, but you aren’t with her.”

  “You think so?” Wyatt asked. “You don’t know her as well as you think you do.” And he flipped open his suit coat to show the butt of his overlarge gun.

  In a blur of motion, Mulcahy slipped a hand into Wyatt’s coat. He stepped back, the Desert Eagle seemingly shrinking to fit comfortably in his palm, its barrel aimed square between the psychopath’s eyes.

  Wyatt went very still; Rachel grinned at him.

  “Rachel?” Mulcahy asked.

  “Now he’s Marshall Wyatt,” she replied. She took a deep breath, then added, “Before that, he was Jonathan Glazer.”

  Two heartbeats of silence, followed by: “Why is he here?”

  Josh, who had been wholly orange until Mulcahy had taken control of the gun, began to get some color back. “It’s complicated,” he said. “He’s—”

  “You were sent to help us,” Mulcahy said to Wyatt.

  Wyatt nodded; Mulcahy lowered the gun.

  “Can I get that back?” Wyatt asked.

  The gun disappeared beneath Mulcahy’s own suit coat.

  “Or not,” the psychopath muttered. He put some distance between himself and the Agents, and tucked himself against a bookshelf in the corner of the room.

  “Don’t. That was a gift,” Josh said.

  Wyatt paused, then removed a slim silver letter opener from his sleeve. He replaced it on its wooden stand, and resumed going through Josh’s files.

  Mulcahy turned to Rachel. When he opened a direct link, she felt her knees go weak. “Start talking,” he said.

  TEN

  “Rachel, I’d like you to stop running emotions,” Mulcahy said. “I’d rather not be picked apart during this meeting.”

  “And let’s do all of this on the verbal, please, Pat,” Josh said. “None of us enjoy being anywhere near your head right now.”

  As Rachel turned off emotions and pulled herself out of the link she shared with Josh, the anxiety of those in the room seemed to fade away. It actually made her feel a little better: if she couldn’t sense it, she could pretend everything was going to be okay.

  OACET’s in-house briefing room was as casual as they could make it. There was a kitchenette with a full-sized fridge on one side, and a fifteen-foot drop that ended with a basketball court on the other. The four members of OACET’s administrative team were spread out along the table, with Rachel putting maybe a little too much space between herself and Mulcahy.

  The old wooden conference table in the middle was a remnant from the building’s past life as a post office. It had taken Pat and Mako the better part of an afternoon to move it from its former station in the letter-sorting room to the new conference room, and that was after the two of them had gotten so fed up with trying to move the colossal thing that they had torn its legs off.

  Marshall Wyatt was handcuffed to a desk in an office down the hall. And the desk had been chained to a steam pipe. And, mostly for fun, Rachel had located a standard 60-meter coil of climbing rope in the gym and had wrapped it around Wyatt until his legs and torso had vanished beneath a cocoon of thick pink floss.

  “Recap,” Pat said. “Last twenty-four hours, starting after Josh and Rachel left the factory.”

  “I’m convinced Nicholson is somebody’s puppet,” Josh said. “Even if he doesn’t know it. I’ve spoken to him half a dozen times today, and his story changes each time, like he’s getting advice from a third party.”

  “Any calls into or out of the building?” Rachel asked.

  “No,” Mulcahy replied. “No emails, either. But the factory is so large that somebody might be able to sneak messages in and out without us noticing.”

  “Or they’re using something archaic a
nd dumb, like homing pigeons,” Rachel muttered. Mulcahy and Josh exchanged a glance. “You did check for homing pigeons, right?”

  Josh scribbled something on his notepad.

  Rachel changed the subject. “How are his men holding up? I haven’t gotten a chance to drop in and look around today.”

  “Things are calm, but the first few days of a siege are the easiest,” Mulcahy said. “I’ve kept a roster of Agents rotating through the factory to make sure that Hope and Avery aren’t mistreated. The militia seems to be in good spirits; there’ve been no casualties.”

  “If we can wrap this up before the novelty wears off, we might be able to pull everybody out without a scratch,” Josh said.

  “That might be another problem.” Mare Murphy, the fourth member of OACET’s administrative team, was shuffling through her copious notes. Their organizational specialist trusted paper documentation and nothing else: Mare swore that the cyborgs playing with her data had managed to singlehandedly undermine the paperless revolution. (She had been the one to insist on adding the hidden safe to the War Room in the basement, saying that it was all fine and good that Josh and Mulcahy had a secret trove of documents somewhere, but that trove would be absolutely useless to OACET if, God forbid, the two of them were both shot in the head or something on the same day.) She tossed handfuls of paper and her own long red hair around until she found the page she was looking for. “Here we go—our analysts say that Nicholson is most likely operating on a timetable.”

  “Why?” Josh asked.

  “Why do they think that, or why is he… Well, same answer to both questions,” Mare said. “The incentives we’ve offered haven’t made him budge. So, either we’re offering the wrong incentives, or we’re offering the right ones and it’s not yet time to accept.”

  “Pat, I’d like to go to the media and tell them that Hope offered to buy the factory,” Josh said, a pencil rolling across the backs of his fingers like a magician who was about to pull off a trick. “If I do this about an hour before tomorrow’s meeting with Nicholson, it’ll ramp up the pressure to negotiate.”