Rachel thought that probably wasn’t the case, that it was more likely Nicholson had been born into the rarified socio-economic strata which thought anything less than fifty thousand dollars was pocket change, and that he had never needed to outgrow that mindset. But she was a government employee who grew up in a nice middle-class suburban household, so what did she know?
“The FBI thinks someone made contact with Nicholson,” Santino continued. “Purpose of contact unknown, obviously, but it made him change his behaviors.”
“This would have been long before OACET went public, though,” Phil said. “So why’s he targeting us?”
“He’s not,” Hill said.
“Yup,” Rachel agreed. Above her, the steel underbelly of the pinball machine hung like a heavy metal sky. She reached up to poke it; her head stayed in one piece as she moved her arm. Progress. Maybe the suit coat was helping to hold her head together. “Whatever he’s doing, we’re a means to an end.”
Zockinski moved to the whiteboard and uncapped a fresh marker. “Ideas, people. The crazier, the better.”
Santino and Hill began to outline the tinfoiliest of tinfoil-hat concepts. Some of them were familiar. Movie plots, mainly, but Rachel recognized a couple of themes from their previous cases.
Phil recognized them, too. “You guys handle the craziest shit,” he said quietly.
“Yup,” she replied. “The world’s gone weird.”
“Can you link yet?”
She groaned, gritted her teeth, and reached out to him.
Much of the previous night was a blur. Rachel remembered going with Mulcahy to settle the matter of Wyatt, and then nothing at all until she woke up this morning in Josh’s office bed with the shampoo-sweet smell of Mare’s long red hair all around her. Beside her, Mare had stirred ever so slightly, and had told Rachel to go back to sleep until one of OACET’s doctors could examine her.
Rachel had obliged.
Later, after her physician had put her through the usual battery of tests to prove her brain hadn’t melted, Jenny Davis told her that, no, there seemed to be no viable health reason to prevent her from doing any of her usual activities, but yes, if it still hurt, maybe don’t do them until your head feels better? Idiot.
But, idiot or not, today was a day when staying out of the link wasn’t an option.
Joining a close link hurt, but the touch of Phil’s mind was gentle. Too gentle, actually…
“Jason told you,” she said.
“Last night.” She felt Phil nod. “You didn’t give him up.”
“No reason to.” Jason had kept her secrets; why shouldn’t she keep his? And since his secrets boiled down to crap she had dragged him into against his better judgement…
“It matters to us,” he said. “Thanks.”
—an image, half-seen and half-felt, of Jason and Phil and a young woman who wasn’t part of the collective sitting at a kitchen table together, the two of them pleading with Jason to keep his damned mouth shut—
“You told Bell?”
Curiosity and chastisement flavored his side of their link, a quiet rebuke over her objection to including the third member of their partnership. “She’s not going anywhere, Rachel.”
Her scans pulled themselves back towards Santino. He was ranting about the Chinese scattering thumb drives laced with viruses in coffee shops near government buildings, and what happened when nature took its course and the government employees found all of these free thumb drives lying around.
“Yeah,” she said. “I get it.”
“He promised to stay quiet,” Phil said. “But if the vote had gone differently, he would have spoken out on your behalf.”
Rachel grinned. “Tell him this,” she said, and showed Phil the color of teal, cut through with soft warm threads of deep maroon.
Confusion came back across their link: Phil’s, growing deeper as he showed her Jason’s reply of the same teal and red sitting across from gray and OACET green, with Rachel’s Southwestern turquoise balanced in the center.
“What does this mean?” When they were joined in a deep link, Phil became semi-fluent in the language of her overly color-coded world, but this fluency didn’t seem to stick.
“Ask Jason,” she said.
“Where’s Glazer now?” he asked instead.
“Wyatt,” she corrected him. “Marshall Wyatt. He’s in a very safe place.”
That was something of a lie. Maybe. Or maybe not. Mulcahy had turned Wyatt over to the Cuddly Hippos.
Which made perfect sense: who better to watch a murderous psychopath than a team of professional assassins? They had left Wyatt in the Hippos’ care, and Rachel had chuckled on her way out the door.
(She had made it clear to Wyatt that she would be extremely—nay, extraordinarily—displeased if anything unsavory should befall the Hippos. Then, she had made it clear to the Hippos that she would be perfectly okay if Wyatt should accidentally vanish from the face of the earth forever. She was sure that the four of them would work something out.)
“What’s Mulcahy going to do with him?”
“Hell if I know,” she replied. “I’m just glad it’s no longer my call.”
“Rachel?”
She waved to Santino.
“You ready to go?”
“No,” she said, and reached down and out for the familiar concrete lining the old elementary school. The strength of manmade stone came back, steady and resolute, to her scans, and she slithered out from beneath the pinball machine. “Yes.”
“Can’t believe you’re making the Quantico run,” Phil said aloud.
“Yeah, well,” she said, her hands pressed against both sides of her head to keep her brain in place. “They’ve got the nearest gun.”
“Technically, the factory in Maryland is closer—”
“Don’t,” she said to her partner as she found her feet. “Just don’t.”
In a different time and place, Rachel would have asked one of the Hippos—hell, even Wyatt!—to slip into the factory and bring her one of those guns from the featureless crates. With the legal system looming over her like an iceberg, the next best option was to gamble on the chance that AKA: Lobo’s handgun had been part of the same arms shipment. The handgun they had seized from him at the time of his arrest had been sent to the FBI’s Laboratory at Quantico for processing. Their contact at the lab said there wasn’t much evidence to get off of the gun using conventional methods, but if Rachel wanted to come down and check for herself…?
She and Santino had gone back and forth on whether using her scans on AKA: Lobo’s handgun would be admitted in court. Two years out, and the legal system had finally begun to address the cyborgs in their midst. The most significant case thus far had ruled that Agents in law enforcement could register and track the cell signals of a person, or persons, who were suspects in an active crime. The precedent had been established by a ticking bomb scenario, something-something suspects fleeing the scene, and an FBI unit that had been lucky enough to have an Agent liaison ready to pull numbers out of thin air. The ruling had determined that the Agent had performed the same role as a standard IMSI-catcher… In other words, the Agent was just a pretty face stuck on a piece of technology that was already in widespread use among law enforcement agencies.
Professionally, Rachel agreed with that ruling. Personally, she thought it was bullshit, mainly because she was against imposing any legislation on Agents that categorized them as machines. But, since a large part of the legal system in general was bullshit anyhow, she kept her mouth shut and let the laws fall where they may. Whatever happened as the result of using her scans on AKA: Lobo’s gun might be used by a defense attorney as grounds for a mistrial. It might further push the legal system to categorize Agents as “tools” instead of “persons”. And it might also help put pieces of Nicholson’s past in perspective, and help bring Hope and Avery home that much sooner. The tiny details that made up the ice and loose gravel covering the slippery slopes were hardest to see during
the downward slide.
Getting to the parking garage was a long, slow walk. When they reached Santino’s car, a compact blue hybrid, he allowed her to curl up in the backseat without offering his usual harassment. They were well past the Virginia border when he finally asked: “What happened?”
“You have a rock tumbler when you were a kid?”
“I’ve got one now. It’s in the garage.”
“Shoulda guessed.” Rachel winced as the car bumped across a pothole. “Well, I went through one of those last night. Metaphorically speaking. The others stripped me raw.”
“Why?”
She gritted her teeth and flipped on her scans. Santino was swimming through yellow curiosity; short of cramming an implant into his head, she wasn’t sure what she could do that would blunt his fascination with the collective.
“You remember Jenna Noura? I told them about how I hacked into her cell phone.”
“Oh,” he said. “Whoa. Why now?”
“It…came up,” she said quietly. “I needed to do some penance.”
“Oh.” He paused. “You finally told them that you helped Glazer escape?”
“How the fuck did you—” Rachel slammed her head against the rubber armrest as she tried to sit up.
Santino started laughing. Hard.
“Pull over, asshole!” she shouted as the hybrid swerved into the travel lane and their fellow commuters turned red in fury.
He took the nearest exit and parked on a small patch of windburnt gravel. They were out of the car and running across the nearby field, Rachel swearing obscenities as they pounded through the scrub grass. Her partner’s legs were longer and he was faster in a sprint; he finally stopped after she threatened to take out her gun and shoot him.
“How long have you known?” she shouted across the field.
Santino was still laughing, nearly bent double in purples with tears streaming down his face. “A year,” he gasped. “An entire year!”
“Why—how!?”
He fell over, howling.
When she reached him, she couldn’t help kicking him. Just a little.
“Not in the kidneys!” he managed.
“Get up, you…you asshole!”
“You used that one already.” Santino rolled over onto his back. As he caught sight of her face, he started laughing again. “Oh God, totally worth it…a whole year…”
She gave up. “How?”
The gray of expensive overcoats floated through the purples.
“Oh, fuck Jason!” she shouted, and stormed off towards the car. She reclaimed her spot in the back seat, decided that made her look like a pouting child, and got out to walk around to the passenger’s seat.
This process made Santino laugh all the more.
Fifteen minutes later, he opened the driver’s side door and slid behind the wheel, weak and wheezing.
“Okay,” he gasped, as he grabbed the steering wheel for support. “Okay. I can explain.”
“Please,” she said, and hoped the word came out as a lofty, Well, I really don’t care, instead of the petulant, Well, no, I really do care, quite a lot actually.
“Did you talk to Jason yet?”
She crossed her arms instead of answering.
“All right,” he said. “You know how you told me you hacked Noura’s phone?”
“I remember you crawled straight up my ass and laid spider eggs when I told you, so I’m wondering why you’re suddenly fine with Glazer—”
He slumped over laughing again.
Rachel dug around in her purse until she found a black marker. She popped the cap with a loud click! and held the marker over his immaculate dashboard.
Santino froze in whites.
“Sorry for the drastic measures,” she said, as she recapped the marker and slid it back into her purse. “You were saying?”
“Not cool,” he muttered, his colors gradually recovering from the mild shock. “Jason didn’t out you, by the way. Or, when I guessed that you had something to do with Glazer’s escape, he tried to take the blame.”
“How’d you guess?” Her partner was one clever son of a bitch, but she had thought she’d kept this from him.
“It was after the hacking incident with Noura. You were a little too shaken up by that. I mean, it was serious, yeah, but you’ve admitted you’d let the city burn to the ground to protect OACET. Wasn’t much of a jump to connect that to Glazer giving you evidence to use against Senator Hanlon in exchange for an escape. I never could understand how he managed to get out of the building.”
“Je-sus,” Rachel whispered. “You could have told me! Or Jason could have, or…” As the purple in his colors faded to grays and uncertain oranges, she realized what he had done. “This was an experiment?!”
Burning fury, quick and hot, surged until she heard her pulse pounding in her ears. Not because of the experiment itself—Rachel was well used to being her partner’s guinea pig. Santino was an academic above all else, and she had been the subject of various tests and observations as long as they had worked together. When she had first been assigned to the MPD, Santino had kept a little notebook. Each time she had done something especially cyborgish, the details had gone into the notebook, the end goal being some high-level academic paper depicting what it meant to fight crime alongside an Agent. The notebook had disappeared around the same time she had confessed to Santino that she had lost five years of her life to an experiment gone bad. The two of them had never mentioned it again, and all subsequent experiments had been done with her consent.
Except for this one.
“Not really,” he said, scrambling. “Not at all. It’s…well, you’re always worried about how much the others can pick out of your head, right? I just thought this was the safest way to test whether you could tell if someone in the link could keep a secret from you.”
“How does that work when you aren’t in the link, idiot?”
“Not me,” he said. “Jason. It’s a secret the two of you share, so if you could pick that out of his head—”
“This is fucked up,” she said. “You realize this is fucked up, right? Keeping this from me to test if I can keep it from others? And now it doesn’t matter anyhow!”
“It’ll always matter,” he said. “Unless you’re going to share everything with the collective from now on.”
“Fuck!”
She slumped down in her seat and pressed her hands over her eyes.
They were fifteen miles down the highway before she had worked out what was bothering her. “Mulcahy and Josh are keeping something from me,” she admitted. “They say they know how to get Hope and Avery out of there, but they won’t say how.”
“You running emotions?” he asked.
“No.” Her head was a knot of competing drumlines, and half of them were keeping time on eggbeaters. She had gone dark in the hopes that some of them would get bored and go home. “Why?”
“Just that secrets aren’t necessarily evil,” he said. “Sometimes, they’re just about personal things. Things that those who keep them aren’t ready for others to know.”
“Yeah, well…” Rachel sighed. She thumbed the release lever and pushed her seat back as far as it would go. “If they’ve got something that could end this, then… I dunno. I feel like they should just go ahead and do it! But they’re bright guys, so if they aren’t, it’s probably yet another ticking time-bomb solution that’ll blow up later. If I knew what they were thinking, maybe I could help. Find a different way to use it…or… I dunno.”
Secrets.
Traffic in the Quantico area was always a bear. The roads leading into the city were in a perpetual state of construction, and the roads out hadn’t been expanded to allow for congestion. Quantico was a bottleneck of bumpers as far as the eye could see; Rachel threw her scans down the highway and found that the traffic was nearly at a standstill for the next half-mile.
Santino glanced at her in curious yellows.
“We’re screwed,” she said. “To
tally screwed. Stop-and-go for the rest of forever.”
“There’s no way you’re getting back in time for that meeting.”
“They don’t need me,” she said. “The only reason Josh wanted me along on that factory run was to watch his back. If Nicholson is coming to the Batcave, they’ll be safe as…as a…”
She gave up and flipped off visuals again.
“How’s the head?” Santino asked.
“Not getting better,” she admitted.
He sighed, and Rachel felt the car begin to turn. She turned on visuals to find Santino moving off of the main road and into the parking lot of a local sandwich shop.
“This isn’t going to get us to Quantico any faster,” she said, as five cars went to war over the space they had just created.
“When was the last time you ate?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Eating hadn’t been a priority since Wyatt had shown up, although Josh had crammed a heaping plate of spaghetti in her last night to help offset any energy loss from the link. “This morning, I guess? I had a bagel.”
“Wait here,” he said, and disappeared inside the restaurant. He returned fifteen minutes later with drinks and two greasy paper bags. Before she could stop herself, Rachel had grabbed the nearest one and was tearing into the first of three sandwiches.
“That’s what I thought,” Santino said, slightly smug in pinks.
“Shut up,” she muttered, as she dove into the second sandwich.
“How much energy do you think you burned last night?”
“No idea,” she said. Chicken salad? Usually not her favorite, but this one tasted like it had honey and spices mixed in. “It was exhausting, I know that.”
“You know the brain burns more energy than any other organ in the body?”
“You’ve mentioned,” she said. The third sandwich was a meatball sub, the bread and meat nearly lost under a slab of toasted provolone. “Mako has mentioned. Jenny Davis has mentioned. All of you, probably a hundred million times or more. Damn, this is good!”
“You know what housekeeping is?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Especially since my roommate has all but moved out because he’s shacking up with his girlfriend, and now I’m stuck doing all of the chores.”
Brute Force Page 17
