Wyatt answered on the first ring. “Peng.”
“Got a job for you,” she told him, and flipped frequencies to take in Iron Core’s physical details. “I’m chasing a man out of the meeting. White male, early thirties, brown hair, about six feet, two-ten.”
“What’s he wearing?”
“Camo.”
“Ah,” Wyatt chuckled. “What’s the job?”
“I want DNA or clean fingerprints. Make sure he knows you’re just extra security hired by OACET, and not an Agent.”
“Yup,” he said. “Tell your friends with the sniper rifles that I’ve been cleared to leave the grounds.”
“Nope. Do a chump bump when he passes,” she said. “I’ll tail him if he leaves the building.”
The connection closed with a sharp beep.
“Goodbye to you too, asshole,” she muttered, and took stock of the room. The FBI had moved over to Iron Core and were making the kind of threats that could only be made when they were in someone else’s home. But Iron Core was so nice and polite and sorry and it would never happen again—
Oh hell, they’re letting him stay.
She sighed, and bit the inside of her lip until flesh crunched beneath her teeth. She gave herself a few moments to let the blood trickle down her face before she came out from under the desk, groaning. As soon as she appeared, the FBI agents helped her to her feet and hustled her as far away from Iron Core as the room allowed.
“I want him out of here,” she said groggily, running her hand through the blood so it smeared across her cheek. “Just…get him gone…”
“I agree,” Mulcahy said to Nicholson. “Ask your man to leave the room.”
Nicholson was panicking, the sickened yellow in his conversational colors panting like an overheated dog. “He’s—”
“Now!” Rachel cried, her voice tapering up to its breaking point. She pushed away from the FBI and found an empty space near the wide windows.
“This meeting is over,” Mulcahy said.
“No!” Nicholson’s colors twisted over themselves as Mulcahy’s cerulean blue started to slip away. “No,” he said, more calmly. To Iron Core: “Ethan? Would you mind?”
Ethan most certainly did mind: Southwestern turquoise burned within hateful reds. But once he began to move, he walked straight out of the door without stopping.
“Can you control your men?” Mulcahy asked, standing in the hole where the coffee table once was.
“Can you control her?” Nicholson pointed at Rachel. “She provoked him!”
Mulcahy raised an eyebrow. “By flirting?”
“I’ll stay right here,” Rachel all but whimpered, curling into a small ball on the window sill. Pity emerged in deep reds across the FBI agents who had seen her take the hit; with the exception of Mulcahy, everyone from OACET was riotously, uproaringly purple.
As the FBI pressed Mulcahy for permission to stay for the duration of the meeting, Josh watched as she carefully tucked Iron Core’s knife behind a set of thick curtains.
“I probably wrecked any fingerprints on that when I disarmed him,” she said.
“We’ll see what we can do,” Josh replied. “You okay?”
“Bad headache,” she said. “But that’s nothing new.”
“Are you going after him?”
Her scans, tight on Iron Core, watched as a man in sandalwood crashed into him in the hallway. Iron Core, already nothing but red fury, closed in on this convenient target for his rage.
“Definitely,” she told Josh. “He’s so mad he’s making mistakes.”
“Good luck.”
“You too,” she said, as Mulcahy won and the FBI left the office again.
Silence, broken after a moment when Rachel opened the catch on the new windows in their old wooden frames.
“Bye, fuckers,” she said to the militia men, and, with a wink to Nicholson, she jumped.
Mulcahy’s office was on the top floor of what was undeniably a very short building. It was only three floors, and one of those a basement. Still, she was thirty feet up when she leapt into space.
She was twenty-eight feet up when she grabbed the trellises that covered the front of the building. There were no plants to get in her way, not yet: below, OACET’s gardeners were training tangerine crossvines to climb up the side of the building and cover the ironwork. For now, there was just metal—hot metal, she realized, soaking in the full heat of the afternoon sun—bolted to the stone.
As quickly as her too-hot hands would allow, Rachel spider-walked around the corner and hid beneath a convenient cornice. Above, several members of the militia had reached the window and were looking for her broken body in the street below.
She let Mulcahy call them to order before she began the climb down.
The trellises were solid. They were new, installed at Mulcahy’s request during the recent renovations. Rachel was sure that if they could hold his weight, they’d hold hers, easy. The hand that Bryce Knudson had shredded kept complaining, pain surging across the scar tissue as she lowered herself from bar to bar, but she pushed on.
She got within nine feet of the ground before anyone noticed her—the trellises ended there, and she had to pause and dangle before she let herself fall. By the time her boots hit the pavement, a swarm of reporters had moved from covering the front doors over to where Rachel stood, questions locked and loaded. She ignored them and walked across the street, hailed a cab, and let it take her away.
“Stop here,” she said, after the cabbie had turned the first corner and had removed itself from the reporters’ blast zone. The cabbie, accustomed to the habits of politicians on the run, didn’t even bother to nod before dropping her on the curb.
There was a coffee shop, doors open to let in the breeze of the warm early spring afternoon. Rachel bought a cup of iced tea for the price of admission, and tucked herself on a stool by the window.
Her scans, still fixed on Iron Core’s distinctive colors, watched as he pushed his way out of OACET headquarters and into the bustle of city traffic.
Now, buddy-o-mine, Rachel asked herself, where do you go from here?
There was nothing she could do if he took a car. If that happened, she’d grab the number off of the license plate and turn the tail over to Zockinski. But if he was on foot…
Nope, he’d be on foot, no question. A guy like him knew that in a city, a car was basically a slow-moving prison that could turn right on red.
Iron Core didn’t disappoint. He set out on 5th Street, heading north, his surface colors dead-set on orange annoyance beneath a layer of mottled grays and greens; he must have known, in this era of mass shootings, that he stuck out maybe just a little too much in his camouflage onesie. Anywhere else but downtown D.C. and he would have blended in fine, maybe gotten a free coffee or two out of it besides, but the locals knew the difference between a soldier’s uniform and off-the-rack hunter’s gear.
Rachel left the coffee shop, the plastic cup full of iced tea pressed flat against the palm of her (mildly) burned hand.
She was whistling: this was the part of the job she loved.
Running tails as a cyborg was like an adult playing hide-and-go-seek with a toddler, lots of “Wherever could he be?” and “Surely those feet sticking out from under the curtains mean nothing,” with a dose of “Why is that closet giggling?” besides. Rachel put herself one street over from Iron Core and watched him through the buildings. She turned when he turned, as if they were connected by a string the length of a city block.
There was purpose in his colors, professional blues with a white center of bright attention. Her own Southwestern turquoise was in there, along with a fading dose of sandalwood: Wyatt had gotten under his skin.
North and east, through the city, towards Columbia Heights and the ruckus of the rougher neighborhoods. He was leading her towards an edge, she realized, a place where the different sides of the city came together. She was a recent arrival to D.C. and had heard the city was greatly changed from its Ma
yor Barry days, but the smooth roads still gave way to cracked pavement, and the faces of the buildings began to blur beneath a patina of graffiti.
He turned down an alleyway and kicked open the door to an abandoned storefront. Rachel flipped frequencies until she could read the signage: an old tire dealership, long gone to ruin. She watched from the relative safety of a bodega as Iron Core chased two people out of the building, then sat down on the skeleton of an upholstered chair.
“Buying anything?”
“What?” Rachel blinked, her scans moving away from Iron Core to the bodega’s owner. A slight woman with an unknowable accent was staring at her in suspicious oranges. “Yes,” Rachel said. “Got anything for a bad headache?”
The oranges eased into wine red. “Aisle Three,” the woman said, pointing.
Calling it an aisle was generous: cough drops and other mild pharmaceuticals drooped in cellophane packets from a wobbly wire rack. Rachel searched the rack until she found an assortment of headache medications, and, after admitting to herself that her doctor’s advice hadn’t gotten rid of her headache, decided to go with a powder endorsed by a prominent race car driver. She poured this into a cup of coffee so old that its surface shone like an oil slick, and went to pay.
“Not healthy,” the woman said, nodding towards the coffee.
“It hasn’t been a healthy day,” Rachel replied. She flipped up the tail of her coat to give the bodega’s owner a glimpse of her badge. “Can I stay here for a few minutes? I promise I won’t make trouble.”
The woman nodded, giving Rachel the shy smile of someone who was grateful that she was no longer responsible for anything bad that might happen, even if was just for the length of time that the cop was in her store.
Iron Core still hadn’t moved. He seemed to be waiting. She stood by the window and watched as the clock in her head counted the minutes, while strangers came and went around her.
Half an hour later, he began sorting through the piles of trash around his feet, his colors sharpened into a point as he searched for something. He came up with a loose piece of paper, and reached into his pocket for a pen.
(She was somewhat offended that Iron Core would think to carry a pen, but placated herself with the knowledge that whatever he was, he wasn’t really a member of a militia.)
He wrote for what seemed an eternity, and, from the Southwestern turquoise and OACET green in his colors, she had a pretty good idea what he was writing about.
“Thanks,” Rachel said to the woman behind the counter, and dashed out the door.
The tire dealership was worse than abandoned—it had become a trash dump, with black plastic bags piled up against the broken windows as a wind block. Some of the local homeless community had carved out a large space on the other side of the building where the walls came together and the wind couldn’t reach. Iron Core stood in that hollow, still writing.
He set his pen down and moved to the wall. There was a hole in the cinderblocks, and he shoved the paper into it, so deep that Rachel was sure he’d come out with a rat where his hand had been. Then, he left the way he had come, moving up the street towards the heart of D.C.
What to do, what to do… Follow Iron Core, or stop and read the letter?
Not much of a choice, really. Either option started with grabbing that letter for safety’s sake—no telling what might happen to it after she picked up Iron Core’s tail.
She gave him a whole block’s lead time before she snuck into the building. It was…ripe. Overly ripe, to the point where her scans started to pulse with the airborne signals of decomposition.
Phil wouldn’t be able to scan in here, she thought to herself. Too many different chemical signals.
It was a stray thought. A nothing thought, the kind that usually came and went without leaving its mark. But her mind snatched at it and caught it, and suddenly she was down a rabbit hole of her own.
—maybe he could, maybe he’s worked out which chemical signals go with bombs, and which go with this amazing bouquet of liquefied foods and dirty diapers and God knows what else—
Rachel’s scans hit on the dead body of a pigeon and she froze, nauseated at the thought that she and Phil could probably find corpses by the chemical traces of decomposition alone. The MPD had used her scans on cadaver searches before, but it was one thing to run a scan through clean soil and find a skeleton, quite another to know that the silent signs of the dead hung in the air. The urge to run home and scrub her skin until it bled rose up and she started to move—
No! She forced her feet to anchor themselves to the floor. Stop. You’re no stranger to dead bodies. You’ve seen, smelled, touched, and even caused them, so just stop and get your shit together, okay?
That didn’t work. Apparently, reminding herself that she was a killer on occasion wasn’t much of a comfort. She started chasing logic instead.
It’s a trash heap. It’s unsanitary, yeah, but you’ve been in worse. The latrine outside of Ghazni? Remember that? You’ve got a job to do, and the faster you get it done, the faster you can get out of here.
The overwhelming urge to flee and scrub herself raw dissipated into the stinking air, and Rachel allowed herself a cautious first step.
Her legs went where she wanted them to go. Good.
Everyone in the Office of Adaptive and Complementary Enhancement Technologies struggled against obsessive-compulsive urges; it was a natural side effect of having a quantum-organic computer chip grafted into their brains. Rachel had been assured that their implants lacked the capacity to learn, but they did adapt and evolve through a feedback process—as the user experienced their environment, the implant acquired data that could be used to enhance the user’s performance within that environment.
Rachel was fine with having an improved sense of balance, or completing the daily Sudoku puzzle a little more quickly than she could have before she had been recruited to OACET. It was the gestating germaphobe in her skull that worried her. Thanks to her scans, she was aggressively aware of the microbial world around her. The kicker was that she couldn’t tell if she was being overly cautious, or if her implant was warning her about environmental risks her conscious mind didn’t recognize. All assurances that the implant wasn’t a tiny sentient mind lurking within her own didn’t help when some part of her was shrieking about danger. Instinct was a bitch, augmented instinct doubly so. Not being able to tell which of those was in control at any given time was infuriating.
She knelt beside the hole in the wall, gave it a meticulous scanning, and went after the letter.
It wasn’t just a hole: it connected to a pipe, which sloped downward. Iron Core’s arm was longer than hers; her fingertips brushed the paper, but it was in too deep and there was a risk of pushing the paper further down the pipe. She sat back on her heels and sighed.
Hurry it up, she reminded herself. Iron Core was at the edge of comfort for her scans, still retracing his steps to OACET headquarters. She had to lose track of him now for the sake of her aching head, but she didn’t want to let him go for longer than absolutely necessary. Instead, she turned her scans to the trash pile around her.
Something long. Something sturdy…
There wasn’t much left of the old tire dealership. The car lifts were gone, either removed when the shop had closed, or stolen for scrap. All that was left were blocks of concrete, crumbling from age. There was a pile of old tires that had been picked over, with mostly shredded rubber scraps left behind. The tools were long gone.
Something long. Something sturdy… Bingo!
A crowbar, long forgotten between a wall and crack in the floor. Easy to retrieve, too—she moved a few trash bags and was able to pry the crowbar out of the crack without needing, oh, say, a smaller crowbar.
Back to the hole again. Careful work, this… The paper was thin with age and misuse. She used the crowbar to pull it a couple of inches forward, then shoved her hand back into the hole.
“Vic-toh-reh,” she said in a dreadful Schwarzenegger
, and carefully unfolded the paper. She flipped frequencies until the handwriting showed her name in prominent block letters at the top of the page. Rachel Peng is on to us…
“Oh boy,” she said quietly. She smoothed out the letter so the creases wouldn’t register as text artifacts, and began to read.
Rachel Peng is on to us. You were right to try and stay away from her. She says she reads microexpressions. I don’t know if it’s true but she got me thrown out of the meeting. Nicholson can hold his own without me there.
“Hello, active self-delusion,” she muttered. Nicholson had as much chance of holding his own against the mouth of a loaded cannon as going one-on-one against Mulcahy. She pulled the letter flat again, and tried to make out the next lines.
It’s time to move up the schedule. Catch the train to the third rail. The flowers will be waiting. The bagels are on the counter. Repeat: the bagels are on the counter.
“What the hell is this supposed to—” she began, and then a slip of cold metallic gray was her only warning before Iron Core crashed into her like a runaway truck.
FOURTEEN
Rachel was flying again, but in her own body for once, and only briefly before her head struck the wall. The nonsense thoughts of surprise and shock stopped as she landed, face-down, in the pile of rubber castoffs from stripped tires.
Get up. The icy part of herself that navigated through a crisis took over. Move or you’re done.
She tried to get her hands on her gun, tried to roll to the side, but her body wasn’t listening, the rubber kicked out beneath her as she tried to find a purchase—
“Bitch.” Iron Core glowed above her, haloed in red rage. He had her crowbar and was holding it over his head, a pause in her murder while he took aim.
The crowbar came down.
Halfway through its arc, the crowbar jerked sideways as Marshall Wyatt tackled Iron Core around his waist.
Brute Force Page 21
