Brute Force

by Spangler, K. B.

  “My contact at True Ally is willing to come public and state that they’re willing to negotiate, too,” Mare said. “All of this is just the worst possible publicity for them. They’ve decided to back off of the waterfront deal.”

  “Call them and see if they’ll put something on the table,” Josh said. “If they’re willing to go on the record, I’ll bundle them into the announcement and put a good spin on it for them.”

  “What about the local government?” Mulcahy asked. “Who’s on that?”

  “Me,” Mare said. “The mayor pleads ignorance; so does his staff. Says that Nicholson filed a mountain of paperwork and most of it was nonsense. Now that the issue’s gone public, they say they had no idea it was this bad, and of course they’re willing to help.”

  “So if Nicholson is being honest about wanting to rebuild the factory, we can almost literally pave the way for him,” Josh said. “Perfect. It’ll be easy to kill any public sympathy for him if we offer him what he says he wants, and he still shoots us down.”

  Mulcahy turned to Rachel. “The investigation?”

  “Right,” Rachel said, and called up the documents that Santino and her team at the MPD had been sending to her all day long. “Check your tablets,” she said. “I haven’t had the time to print these out.”

  “Always print it out,” Mare grumbled. “If it’s not down on paper, we can fuck with it. You wouldn’t believe how many of us think it’s okay to screw around with the time sheets—”

  Mulcahy didn’t say anything, but the silence around the table grew deeper.

  Mare sighed. “It’s a problem.”

  Rachel tapped her tablet. “Santino and my guys have been busy. They’ve tracked down the original militia group in Pennsylvania. Their spokesman said the group’s leader will be happy to sit down and meet with someone from OACET, but we’d have to come to him since he doesn’t travel.

  “They’ve also started to track Nicholson’s movements since he came down to the Maryland area. It’s going to take some time, but if there’s any overlap with the investigations done by the FBI, we can speed it up.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Mare said.

  “All right,” Josh said, with a sideways glance at Mulcahy. “We should probably discuss…”

  “Worst-case scenarios,” Mulcahy said. “What are our options?”

  “Our best option is rapid diplomatic resolution,” Mare said. “We give Nicholson what he wants, retrieve the hostages, and let the lawyers sort everything out once everyone is safe.”

  “We all want Happy Fun Smile Time,” Josh said. “But if we don’t get it, we’ve still got choices. Including, but not limited to, turning this entire catastrophuck over to the MPD’s ERT.”

  “Rachel?” Mulcahy nodded to her.

  “Put a pin in that idea,” she said. “The Emergency Response Team is great, really, just top-notch, but if they get involved in a raid conducted on OACET’s behalf, they’ll probably drag Homeland in after them.”

  “I don’t think we can get away with running a full raid without involving the FBI,” Josh said. “Homeland might try to weasel its way in if that happens.”

  “I know,” Rachel replied, drumming her fingers on the desk. Knudson in his pinks… Smug bastard’s got something planned for us, I just know it. Across the table, Josh glanced up at her. She shook her head, and shoved all thoughts of Knudson aside.

  “I’d prefer to run our own raid,” Mulcahy said. “I take the Hippos in with less-lethal weapons, we take down Nicholson’s team, and we secure the site.”

  “Pat, no.” Mare said. “OACET doesn’t have the authority to act as law enforcement. Not without invoking the charter. And if the raid goes wrong—”

  Mulcahy cut her off. “We’d have to include the FBI,” he said. “OACET doesn’t have enough personnel with the training to run a true large-scale stealth operation; I’d have to join in. It’d be me, the three Hippos, and a handful of ex-special forces.”

  Rachel gave a little wave.

  “And you,” Mulcahy told her.

  “You were special forces?” Mare asked. “I didn’t know that.”

  “She wasn’t, but we’d need her scans,” Mulcahy said. “Rachel’s the best advanced warning system on the planet.”

  “Well, me plus Phil,” Rachel said. “But I’d rather not go into a dangerous situation while in a deep link.”

  “Next idea,” Mulcahy said.

  “Jeez, Pat, I don’t know,” Josh replied. “Diplomacy first and foremost, followed by a stealth raid if that fails… Then what? Magically teleporting—”

  “Josh.” Mulcahy stared at his friend. “We’re wasting time.”

  “Right,” Josh said, dropping his eyes to his notepad. “Right. Must stay within the realm of realistic outcomes. Okay… A full-out frontal assault isn’t even on the table, I assume. That would go bad for everybody involved.”

  “We should block an assault option if any other agency begins to push for it,” Mare added.

  “Agreed,” Mulcahy said. “Next idea.”

  Nobody said anything. Rachel moved her pen around her notepad in (what she assumed were) long aggressive loops.

  “Can we talk about the real problem?” Mare asked after the silence began to stretch.

  “My wife,” Mulcahy said.

  “Yes. Pat, she’s not really… I mean…”

  “Hope tends to treat all problems like nails that need to be hammered back into place,” Mulcahy cut her off. “In this situation, she could easily become a serious liability. If she decides that she’s done waiting—that she’s taking Avery and leaving—it’ll be a slaughter.”

  He wasn’t cold, just impassive, as he spoke of his wife and godchild as if they were chess pieces to be managed on the board, and Rachel shivered.

  Josh paused, then exhaled. “Exactly,” he said slowly. “I’d want Hope at my back in any combat situation, but this can’t become one.”

  “What about Hope’s meds?” Rachel asked. “If this turns into a standoff that lasts a couple of days or more…”

  “Non-issue,” Mulcahy said.

  “But if this lasts—”

  “Non-issue.”

  Mucahy wasn’t budging: there was no other course of action than to let it go.

  “What about walking her and Avery out?” Josh said. “Both of them can see our projections, so we can communicate with them. That’s a hell of a tactical advantage.”

  “Same problem as before. Hope’s a warrior, not a commando,” Rachel said. “Very different skill sets. I’d love to have her around in a bar fight, but she’s likely to get me killed in anything that requires tactics or covert movements.

  “Sorry,” she added to Mulcahy.

  “I agree,” he replied. “It’s too much a risk to rely on Hope to get herself and Avery out. Maybe if it was just the two of them, yes, but we can’t forget the other hostages.”

  “Why did they take more hostages?”

  They all turned towards Mare.

  “Hope and Avery are the ones they wanted, right?” she asked. “Their abduction was intentional. The other hostages were picked up at random. Since they already had their key bargaining chips, wouldn’t more hostages be a greater liability once all of this is over?”

  Josh and Mulcahy exchanged a glance: Rachel had no idea what to make of that, and grumbled to herself about men and their insistence that she stay out of their heads.

  “What do you mean, Mare?” Josh asked.

  The tiny woman ran a pen across her notes. “Once this is over, the hostages would be free to talk,” she said. “They’ll say they were kidnapped against their will. More of them means that Nicholson won’t be able to claim that everyone came along willingly.”

  “Shit,” Josh said quietly. “I don’t like what that implies.”

  “Okay, guys?” Rachel said. “Let’s not freak out just yet. My team has been going through the literature on sovereign citizens—conventional logic doesn’t even begin
to apply to these people.”

  “Explain,” Mulcahy said.

  “Okay…” Rachel flipped around her tablet to locate one of the files Santino had prepared. Like everything else her partner wrote, it was a work of heavily cited and properly annotated art. She skimmed the digital text to refresh her memory, and mentioned the relevant details as she went. “Militias are usually groups of like-minded folks. They’re almost always formed from volunteers who join up to train or to run missions—they call them ‘ops’—and once the op is done, they go back to their homes. Almost like the National Guard. Most militias think they’re performing a public service with these ops, like the Arizona Minutemen patrolling the Mexican border back in the mid-2000s.

  “Sovereign citizens are different. They’re more of an ideology than an organization. Most sovereign citizens aren’t big into killing. What they want is to…okay, Santino says that the layperson thinks that sovereign citizens are all about chaos. They aren’t. If they believe—sincerely believe!—in their movement, all they want is for the rules that they believe apply to people in power to apply to them, too.

  “They can be dangerous. Not all of them, obviously, but sovereign citizens will kill.” Rachel paused, her heart heavy with the next words. “And when they do, they almost always go after cops. The majority of assaults and murders committed by sovereign citizens happen during confrontations with law enforcement.

  “Then we get into militias. Sovereign citizen militias tend to be less common than traditional militias. They’re new. They’re different and scary, and nobody has a solid handle on what they’re capable of. They rarely run ops: when they do, they tend to be more confrontational, especially since their enemies aren’t illegal aliens but the U.S. government itself. You remember the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge? Some of those guys were sovereign citizens.

  “Folks, this is important.” Rachel tapped her finger on the tablet. “Santino cites authorities who claim that the more contact a sovereign citizen has with law enforcement, the more likely they are to snap—if they are militarized, the odds increase. Which means we all benefit if we keep contact between Nicholson’s group and ours to an absolute minimum. Or, if we have to do it, we send Josh in and he doubles down on the goofy.”

  “We’ve got to work on Nicholson’s background,” Mare said. “Figure out if he’s a true believer or just using the movement to work the system.”

  They all agreed, and then—

  “All right,” Josh said, trailing off. The pencil flitting across his fingers stuttered and fell. “Rachel—”

  “Go ahead,” Rachel said, as she realized her body had gone numb. She reactivated emotions and Southwestern turquoise sprung up in Josh and Mare, shadowed by guilt, sorrow, and more than a little depression.

  Mulcahy was still a blank canvas.

  “Rachel, I’d like you to drop out of the link,” Mulcahy said.

  Rachel stared at him. “You realize what you’re asking,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “Right,” she said, and stood.

  “You don’t have to leave—”

  “I do,” she told Josh. “I honestly do.”

  She left them behind her and started walking.

  She was shaking. Not a lot, just a little, hands trembling to the point where she had to stuff them deep in her pockets.

  Karmic debt was such a bitch.

  She didn’t know this building. If this were the old OACET mansion, she would have known where to go (hide) to wait for the (trial to end) others to come to a decision. There was pressure building in her head; the others were starting to talk. About her. She felt their minds turn towards (against?) her own; she had to remind herself that they were thinking about her, not calling to her (they might never call to her again—)

  She kicked open the nearest door and found herself in someone’s office. Empty, slightly stale. Nothing interesting in the way of furniture or decorations. Probably the office of an Agent who, like her, who was out of the building more than they were in.

  Rachel locked the door behind her and slumped down.

  She searched (not for the last time, oh, please…) for concrete. When she couldn’t find any within the range of her close scans, her fingers found the stainless steel leg of the desk instead.

  She seized it with her fingers; it would have to do.

  A flicker of thought to deactivate her implant.

  The world went black.

  The pressure of others’ thoughts against her own mind disappeared.

  (alone in the absolute dark)

  The table leg was cold comfort. The part of her that didn’t bother with things as trivial as panic wondered if the hammer and the anvil had been involved in its making, or if those tools were just relics, or if they were still a hammer and an anvil, technically, what with the pounding and the breaking, but had taken different forms for a different world.

  (…the absolute dark…)

  It had only been a matter of time, really. They all knew their collective wasn’t a utopia comprised of perfect, flawless beings. They were just human. Imperfect, awful, miserable humans who stumbled and fell and sometimes let serial killers go free…

  (…alone…)

  It was inevitable that a member of the collective would fuck up. Fuck up bad. Fuck up in a way that not only required punishment, but deserved it.

  Rachel had always figured it’d be her.

  It didn’t hurt any less to know she had been right.

  They had talked about what they would do when it finally happened. They were both the watchmen and those who watched the watchmen, and there must be accountability. (She had been one of the loudest at those meetings, demanding policies that would go into effect as soon as an Agent’s wrongdoing became known. You could take the Catholic out of the church, and even the Catholic out of the Catholic, but the guilt was born within the bones and it knew that payment would come due.) Somewhere off in the periphery, she was on trial, where nearly four hundred of her peers came together in that nebulous realm where thought met cyberspace, and discussed what must be done.

  (Alone.)

  How did time used to pass for her? She had spent most of her life without a clock in her head that blipped off the hours and the minutes and the seconds and the centiseconds. It shouldn’t be that hard to remember how she lived without it.

  The metal under her fingers had warmed, become familiar. So had the old stone floor beneath her.

  How long did it take stone to pull that much heat from her?

  How long are you going to allow yourself to sit like a useless shit on the floor?

  Right.

  She knew how to do this. She had taught herself how to do this. There had been months spent in this absolute dark. Months of living by feel and sound and smell, and trying to settle her mind on the fact that she either needed to start carrying a cane or get over her fear of dogs. She had learned how to use her implant as her adaptive device before that, but adaptation hadn’t come quick or easy—she knew how to do this.

  Rachel stretched out her other hand—carefully—and found a wall. Desk on one side, wall on the other… On the ground in front of her was a cheap area rug with a knotty polyester weave. There’d be a couch in here somewhere; all OACET offices had a couch for when the occupant needed to attend out-of-body meetings. She remembered it being near the far wall…

  Three slow steps, arms outstretched.

  A shin bumped against a padded surface.

  The couch. Cheap bonded leather around an industrial-grade wood frame. A few papers on it; she piled these together and moved them aside before she nested.

  Okay, said the part of her mind that dealt with homeostasis and didn’t give one single whit for collectives or trials or psychopaths. This is a good first step, but you better pick it up. Because you need to pee and that situation’s not going to get any better on its own.

  The door was to her left. Up. Four steps to the far wall, so the door would be about thr
ee… One hand out to find the wall. One hand low, just in case.

  The wall hand does its job. Follow the wall, the low hand turning into the door hand…

  Door. Metal, good quality. Door hand turns into knob hand; the knob is solid and turns easily. Mare put this place together and she’s good at her job—

  Don’t think about Mare. Or Josh, or Phil, or Jason—

  —Jason! Jesus! Jason, please have the sense God gave a gopher and keep your mouth shut—

  The hallway is cold. It’s long after normal work hours and the heat is turned down at night. No jacket. Nothing but a short-sleeved polo shirt because today was supposed to be about getting the drop on a psychopath, and that’s the dictionary definition of Casual Monday.

  If only you had spent more time in this building—

  She hadn’t.

  If only you hadn’t chosen a room at random—

  What’s done is done. Move on.

  One hand along the sandstone walls. Mason lines between the blocks of stone at regular intervals. Thirteen of those lines between door frames.

  Door frames are easy. It’s a federal building; federal buildings require braille labels on anything more public than an office. And Mare got a nice package deal on door plaques with raised type, so she can navigate by names.

  If only you knew where anyone’s office was beside Mulcahy’s and Josh’s—

  Move on.

  Footsteps. Someone else, a long way down the hall; they stop walking when they notice you. Male, by the sounds and smells of them. You face them, nod, and move on.

  Water fountain. Ceramic, a vintage piece left over from before the building’s rehab. Water fountains are almost always next to bathrooms, since the plumbing can be tied into the same lines.

  Door frame. The handle is different; offices have knobs, but this one has a bar. Slide a hand up and down the sandstone wall to find the bathroom signage with its braille—

  Men’s room.

  Fuck.

  There’s no privacy in a men’s room. Just urinals and splash and stink, and that one sad doorless stall that might as well spend its entire life crying over abuse.

  Right.

  There’s a symmetry to bathroom placement due to the water lines. Except there wasn’t one on the other side of the fountain. That means the women’s restroom is probably nearby. Might be directly across the hall, might be around the corner and butted up against the men’s room.