Try across the hall first. One hand out, four paces forward.
—a man’s smell? Is there someone watching—
Fuck ’em if they are.
Outstretched hand hits the sandstone wall, maybe a little too hard. Calm down, calm down. Turn left, count six blocks…doorway. Office doorway. Turn right, count thirteen blocks…doorway. Another office doorway.
It’s a doughnut layout, then: the restrooms share a central wall on opposite sides of a circular hallway. Back across the hallway. Men’s room. Turn left. Thirteen blocks, door. Thirteen blocks, door. Thirteen blocks…
Corner? That’s new.
Thirteen blocks, door. Over and over and—
—that smell again there is somebody watching me and I swear to Christ I will fucking punch them in their goddamned throat—
Corner.
If symmetry and basic math are her friends, it’s two offices before she hits the women’s room. And if not, there’s always the men’s room and an extremely thorough shower once she gets home.
Thirteen blocks, door. Thirteen blocks, door. Thirteen blocks…
Door frame. Handle instead of knob, and the braille says—
Oh, thank God.
She’s inside the women’s room with its comforting scents of industrial cleaners and basic sanitation, and it feels blessedly, mercifully empty. She whistles; the acoustics of bathrooms bounce the noise back to her. It’s louder on her right side; the stalls are on the left.
Walk slowly; the floor might be wet.
Both hands out, and close together; bathroom stalls are nothing but edges and they have a way of jumping out at you.
Surface. Flat and cold, too cold to be plastic; probably a marble slab left over from the building’s old post office days. Mare would have kept those, too. One hand along the marble until it ends, then a space of open air, then another flat surface (plastic?) that moves when she touches it, then more stone…
A bathroom stall.
Toilet paper is almost always on the right, with clearance between the edge of the door and the holder. Check to make sure the holder is full, or at least full enough for practical purposes. Take a bunch, wad it up, and slowly! find the toilet.
Flush first. Then, wipe down the seat, because failure to do so is a mistake you will make only once in your lifetime and the nascent germaphobe in you gets near-terminal heebie-jeebies when you think about That One Time At Burger King.
Shut the door. Slide the bolt home.
The rest is easy. In federal buildings, toilets are positioned in the dead center of stalls, with a minimum of seven inches of clearance on all sides. God bless standardization and regulations.
And then, of course, just as she’s finally about to pee, her fucking owl shows up.
There’s no visual barrier between her and her own avatar; it taps into her optic nerves, circumventing her eyeballs entirely. The enormous green bird flaps around (what Rachel assumes to be) the bathroom stall until it finds a perch on top of (what Rachel assumes to be) the left-hand marble slab.
It peers down at her and cocks its head in that owlish way, and opens its beak as if to hoot.
Instead, a very familiar human voice comes out.
“Rachel? You can reactivate now.”
Josh’s voice.
“Fuck you,” she mutters to nobody in the absolute dark, and resumes her business.
The owl vanishes.
A few minutes later, while she’s washing her hands in the sink, there’s a quiet tapping on the door to the restroom.
“Rachel?” Josh’s voice again, but this time there’s a body attached.
“C’mon in.”
The bathroom door opens, followed by footsteps against a hard floor.
She’s found the towel dispenser by the time Josh arrives (Not beside the sink, but over it? What the hell?) and is drying her hands. There’s a wall-mounted trash can, and it’s an easy drop into it; she hears the paper towel hit the bottom of the nearly empty plastic bag.
“Did you get my message?” he asked.
“Yup,” she said, a little too harshly. “Didn’t want to reactivate without knowing what I’m walking into.”
He waited before replying; her heart sank a little lower. “You’ve spent all of this time in the bathroom?”
“Nope,” she said, turning to face him.
“Rachel—”
“Just tell me.”
Sounds of shuffling feet.
(Did they even stop to consider what it meant to her, to cut her off from not just the collective but from her fucking fake eyes—)
“Damn,” she whispered, and wondered how long it would take her to get used to the absolute dark.
“No,” Josh said, “No, Rachel, you’re… We took a vote. You’re fine. We decided you did the right thing in how you handled the fallout from the Glazer incident.”
He was too quiet. “But?” she asked.
“A majority isn’t…comfortable…with how he’s still hanging around.”
She laughed. It wasn’t the nicest laugh, and its echoes ricocheted around the bathroom like bullets. “They’re not comfortable?!”
“Just reactivate,” he said. “But you might have to, you know, say something.”
“Right,” she said, and activated her implant.
She kept her scans off, so the flood of other-same-self washed over her, into her, through her within the black… Gratitude? Yes, mostly gratitude, but anger, too, and deep within that was enough fear to chill her down to her bones.
—the risk you took—
“I know,” she told them. “Believe me, I know. The only thing that’s kept us safe is that we’ve convinced the entire world we can be trusted. If I got caught—”
Terror, now, instead of fear. The gasp of four hundred people brought to the edge of a cliff and thrown into thin air, followed by the crashing fall to the rocks below.
“I know. And I’ve beaten myself up over it a million times, but I’d still do it again.”
—yes— came the reply from nearly four hundred mental voices, with all of the emotions behind it. Then: —but—
“I know,” she said again.
“We shouldn’t have this power,” she added. The words were suddenly there, heavy and ready to be used, like a hammer that had always been waiting in her hand. “But what I did, that had nothing to do with what we can do. That time, I didn’t mess around with data. I just tossed the man a goddamned paperclip and let him see himself out. That was all me. My choice. It would have hurt all of us, but it was my choice.
“I didn’t learn from it.
“Last year, I went into a suspect’s cell phone and tampered with data.”
Shock. A fresh surge of terror and anger. Outrage pounding against her mind in profanities and pleas and prayers.
“I thought it was necessary,” she said, holding up the mental version of her hands so the collective would let her finish. She poured her own emotions—honesty, integrity, good intentions—through the link until the others relented. With all thoughts of Jason buried behind a blanket of thick charcoal gray wool, she added, “I thought that if I didn’t, we’d get hit, hard. It was a set-up to catch one of us in an abuse of power, and I nearly walked right into it.
“I’ve done everything by the book since then. Not because it’s the right thing to do—Christ, guys, we all know nothing is black and white in our world!—but because it’s…easier. The law needs to determine how we act, what we do. Not us.
“That’s how it should be. The law protects us from ourselves. I almost learned that the hard way—the fallout probably would have killed me. It’ll be the last time I ever do something that selfish and stupid again. If we need an object lesson about risks and dumb-ass decisions, let it be me.”
A moment for a deep breath, which spilled out throughout the collective.
“I was hoping it’d all go away, but I guess I’m not that lucky. Yesterday, when Jonathan Glazer showed up, I went straight to Josh and t
old him what I had done. And then I tracked Glazer down, and brought him here. He’s ours, now, and I have no idea what to do with him. He says he’s here to help us get Avery back and…I believe him.
“And…” Here, the words that had come out like a flood began to fail. Instead, she reached out, into the link, and shone a light on fifty distinct minds. These grew brighter in return, and she felt the others acknowledge the complexity of the wrong actions for the right reasons. That sometimes, lying and hiding and ignoring the law? Those were the right actions.
Just as long as they didn’t get caught.
—aren’t we all just the biggest hypocrites—
Rachel let her role in the link ease; as she pulled back, the others came forward.
More discussion. More questions. And she couldn’t ignore the anger coming from Josh…poor Josh, who had probably stood up for her and had then learned about her tampering with the cell phone at the same time as everybody else.
The collective picked her up and rolled her around their shared consciousness. She floated, adrift within their minds, as they weighed her actions anew. She moved from mind to mind, called by their will before another grabbed her and pulled her to them.
It’s a dance, she realized, and felt a brief flash of amusement as someone pulled her identity against their own before spinning her away. Someone else took her into themselves; ideas, brief, here and then gone. Another seized her, weighed her… And another… Another… Another…
How long can this last?
Not a loss of identity, this dance. No, that would have been easier, to cast off her sense of self and just float around as nothing. Here, the relentless pounding of Judgement! Judgement! Judgement! came hard and fast against her mind. This was an entire universe which contained her, weighed her, found right and wrong and confusion and hopelessness and fed all of this straight back into her soul—
Hands around her, holding her up, touching only fabric and no skin contact at all.
“Rachel!” A name—her own? Of course. “Rachel! Drop out!”
“Nobody,” she said, and realized she was laughing. “Nobody knows what’s right! Nobody! Nobody knows!”
Someone slapped her.
The arms which kept her standing hadn’t moved: the slap came through the link and hurt all the more for that, bypassing flesh and bone and going straight for her nervous system. She rocked backwards, and the arms around her tightened.
“Penguin?” Josh’s voice, eighty kinds of worried. “Drop out of the link. Please.”
She did. It took a scream and every ounce of her willpower, but she broke away from the dance.
“Jesus,” she whispered, her throat raw. “That was new.”
“What just happened?”
Rachel rubbed the side of her face; the sore spot was huge. Whoever had slapped her thought of themselves as having hands as large as dinner plates. Probably even large enough to hold a Desert Eagle and not make it seem like a joke—
“Rachel?”
She opened her mouth to crack her jaw, carefully; it wouldn’t surprise her if her bones had snapped in sympathy from the force of that imagined slap.
“Has everybody ever thought about you at the same time?” she asked. Her head was pounding. “And I mean everybody.”
“Yeah,” he said. She felt the rumble of his voice through his chest as he talked. “When I’m holding a linkwide session.”
“Have we ever…judged you?” she asked as she thought back to all of the group meetings over the past three years. “I mean, have these sessions happened while we thought about you? What you’ve done, what we think you should do? How it could affect the rest of us?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
“You’d remember if we did.” Rachel got her feet under her and pushed away from her friend. “Let me know when they’ve calmed down.”
“They already have,” Josh said. “Pat told everybody to go out, get drunk, and get laid.”
Rachel glared at the space where she felt he was standing.
“Well,” he admitted, “I might have been the one to tell them to get drunk and laid. What happened?”
“No idea,” she said. The urge to find that anonymous office and curl up on the couch was almost overwhelming. “But if you’re still looking for a good punishment for me, that was probably it.”
He sighed. “We’re not going to punish you,” he said. “The majority agree with what you did. It’s just…you shouldn’t have made those decisions on your own.”
She grabbed for the image of wool overcoats before she remembered they weren’t linked. “Right.”
“We’ll have to talk about additional security precautions, though. After things calm down.”
“Right,” she said again. “Let’s go see what we can do to make sure that happens.”
ELEVEN
Her head was still throbbing.
No. ‘Throbbing’ suggested the pain came and went, however briefly. This was more along the lines of what happened when a sledgehammer was applied to the back of her skull at the same time an eggbeater was shoved into the semisolid goo in her cerebrum. Aspirin, coffee, coffee, and more coffee had done little other than turn her migraine down to a level where she could stand to be around other human beings.
But not when they were arguing.
“Nicholson is your all-American trust fund kid. There’s nothing in his background to suggest he’s radical, or radicalized, or militant. Not until he gets back from China.”
“You don’t go to China to become radicalized!” Santino said to Zockinski. “It’s an authoritarian state!”
China again, she thought from her spot on the linoleum floor beneath the pinball machine. How does that line up?
At Mare’s request, the FBI had sent copies of their case files and investigation notes over to Rachel’s team at the MPD. Santino had fallen upon these and devoured them, and had managed to piece together a timeline which showed that Nicholson had been a good upstanding manchild before he went on a month-long sightseeing tour of China two years ago.
Once Nicholson had come back to the States, he had gone feral, so to speak. He had dropped off the grid for a time, resurfacing now and then in gun stores or to make sure the service fees on his various investments, holdings, and other properties were kept up-to-date.
(None of this made sense to Rachel, who was beginning to wonder if Nicholson was an alien hybrid of sovereign citizen and lawyer. Someone who had gone to law school and learned how the legal system worked, just so he could bend it over a judge’s bench and give it a jolly good porking.)
Arthur Bennett, the regional EPA official who had been instrumental in tipping Nicholson’s father towards the breaking point, was dead. Quite dead, dead from kidney cancer, dead and buried almost seven years ago. Records showed that after he had been released from jail in 2001, he had been living quite comfortably, financially speaking, up until the time of his death. Bribery had certainly been a viable retirement plan. Bennett still had family in the area, but he was so far down on their list of priorities that Rachel thought they could avoid searching the usual forgotten storage units for mildewed boxes of tax returns.
But then there was China.
“Guys?” Rachel said, more to cut through her team’s proto-shouting than because she had anything to say. Talking amped up the eggbeater. “Where did he go in China, exactly?”
“Beijing,” Santino said, as he flipped through a file. “The Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Yungang Grottoes… Tourist spots.”
“You got connections over there, Peng?”
“I’ve got family over there, Zockinski. Not the same thing.” She tried to sit up… Nope. The sledgehammer was having none of that. “China is diligent about tracking its tourists. Especially American tourists. Might want to see if we can get their version of Nicholson’s travel itinerary.”
“The FBI thinks the odds of Nicholson picking up a sovereign citizens’ mentality while in China are—”
“Except he did pick up something in China!”
And then they were fighting, Santino and Zockinski, at a decibel which sent Rachel to stick her head beneath her suit coat and tug it tight around her ears.
Fighting is good, she reminded herself. Different is good. Different is priceless.
It was a familiar mantra, one that was often repeated when her team at First District Station was trying to close in on answers to especially sticky problems. The fights were annoying (definitely) and time-consuming (certainly), but they also forced the members of her team to change how they thought. For Rachel, that was priceless. Falling into the repetitive patterns of groupthink was a real possibility for members of a hive mind. Each Agent was still learning how to develop their own unique talents, but they all knew there could come a day when they all had the same autoscripts, the same abilities…and shared the same broad opinions about how OACET should be run. She was sure one of the reasons that Mulcahy had stuck her over at First District Station was to guarantee that she got constant exposure to strong-willed jerks who weren’t part of the collective, to fight and learn and fight some more, and, above all, to avoid falling into the rut of sameness.
But oh, how her head hurt.
“Guys?” she said through her jacket’s sleeve, just loud enough to be heard over the din. “Please. I’m dying.”
She wasn’t running emotions, so the brief glance shared between the two men was reduced to head shaking and eye rolling.
“I can see that,” she reminded them.
Santino sighed. “Here’s the FBI’s working hypothesis,” he said quietly. “Nicholson goes to China on a tourist visa. He’s profiled before he gets there, tagged as a possible malcontent because of his father’s financial problems, which he’s inherited—”
“But he’s still rich enough to take an extended overseas vacation?” Phil asked from his spot on the floor beside Rachel.
“I don’t think anybody has ever accused Nicholson of having an abundance of common sense,” Santino replied.
Brute Force Page 16
