“Kidnapping is gold,” he said. “People move around. They’re easier to steal than anything else. And they get a damned high return on investment.”
“Right, but why take Hope and Avery? Why not Josh, or Mulcahy himself?”
Wyatt shrugged. “Josh would fight back.”
“And with Mulcahy, it wouldn’t even be a fight,” she said, as a streak of gray the size and shape of a Desert Eagle appeared and disappeared in Wyatt’s colors.
“I would have taken Agent Murphy,” he said. Rachel’s face must have shown murder, because he added, very quickly: “You asked. She’s a soft target, unguarded, but critical to OACET.”
Rachel had to give him that one. “Mare would have been the safest bet,” she said reluctantly. “I can’t figure out why they thought taking Hope was a good idea. Hell, we would have worked just as hard to get anybody in OACET back! But they took a freakin’ wild creature and expected she’d do okay in a cage…
“No,” she corrected herself, as something Fischer had said in passing blinked into her conscious mind. “No… He didn’t expect her to behave.”
Wyatt’s expression of disinterest fell away. “Whatcha chasing?”
“Fischer didn’t know I was listening,” she said, mostly to herself. “I went out-of-body to check on Hope, and he said… He said he couldn’t wait until he got to kill her.”
“Those words?”
“No,” she said, tripping back through three days’ worth of chaotic new memories. “He said, ‘Can’t fuckin’ wait ’til I get to kill you.’”
“You sure? Those words?”
“Yeah,” she said, as the familiar feeling of puzzle pieces coming together toppled into a complete picture. She scooted forward and banged on the cockpit partition. “Hey!” she shouted at the pilot. “Get us back to Washington, now!”
Time… her subconscious reminded her. It’s all about time.
Human beings were conditioned by the idea of clocks and schedules. These imposed order, a sweet routine which let you know that this was when breakfast was supposed to happen, or then was when you went to bed. You expected the workday to begin at nine o’clock sharp, and excitement and impulsivity was reserved for after ten at night.
Giving Nicholson thirty-seven hours to get his shit together was an open declaration of psychological warfare.
Unless someone in his militia had advanced combat training (other than Fischer, who was steadily cooling in a hospital morgue and thus not a reliable source), Nicholson wouldn’t realize that thirty-seven hours was the exact amount of time required to render his brain to mush.
It went like this: Nicholson would expect a raid to come on the first night, once it was safely dark. Around midnight, of course, because that’s the high time for excitement. The militia would amp themselves up into a frenzy, watching for signs of incursion, invasion, intrusion… Every little noise would be the first sounds of a SWAT unit storming the building.
It helped that Josh had shipped an outdoor movie screen to the police camp in front of the factory, and they were playing military siege movies at high volume. Bit of a risk, considering the sounds of gunfire might mask the sounds of gunfire, but that concern worked both ways.
And then came the food.
The first pizza truck arrived last night at dinner time. Fresh pizzas straight out of the oven, and plenty of bottled water and sodas. A volunteer from the local police department knocked on the door, waited for Nicholson to give the go-ahead, and then drove the truck straight up to a loading dock where five men waited with guns. The OACET Agents whose avatars were stationed around the interior of the warehouse said the next hour was spent subjecting the hostages to random slices of pizza and waiting to see if they’d keel over. After the hostages were well-fed and the pizza had gone bone-cold, the militia members began to eat. They stuffed themselves until someone realized that heavy food might make them slow, so they dropped everything and spent the next few hours ready for the attack.
Dawn came, and with it a catering truck overflowing with coffee and pastries, bells ringing to announce the arrival of another day’s worth of calories. Lunch was fresh seafood, with deli sandwiches for those who didn’t enjoy lobster. Dinner was more pizza, with an ice cream truck close behind.
Nobody would be the wiser when the catering truck got close enough to disgorge two dozen FBI agents the next morning.
Everything had been put into motion the moment Nicholson walked out of OACET headquarters. The raid was a go—no matter what Rachel did, that wouldn’t change.
It was up to her to make sure it was the right kind of raid.
Rachel leapt out of the taxi and barreled through OACET headquarters as fast as the ever-present hordes of FBI would allow. She spared the passing disparaging glare at the agents from Homeland who were starting to sneak in—a few of them noticed her, and flashed Southwestern turquoise and yellow concern—but most everyone else was brushed aside as she raced upstairs to Mulcahy’s office.
Wyatt followed her, ever obedient.
The clock was running out.
Get him off the road.
She burst into Mulcahy’s office and shouted: “It’s about you, you son of a bitch!”
Mulcahy glanced up from the architectural blueprints spread flat across a folding table. He nodded towards the raid coordinator from the FBI and said, “Would you give us a moment?”
The FBI agent blushed in secondhand embarrassment, and left the room.
Josh poked his head inside. “What’s up?”
“Get in here!” she snapped at him. “And ping Mare. She needs to hear this.
“And you!” Rachel pointed at Wyatt. “Stand guard outside! Nobody outside of OACET comes near this room.”
As soon as the door clicked shut behind Wyatt, Rachel spun back to Mulcahy. “They want Hope dead,” she said, “because they want to push you over the edge.”
He stared at her, conversational colors blank.
“Oh, fuck this,” she muttered. She grabbed him by the hands and hurled herself into his mind.
Rachel had been deep inside Mulcahy’s mind once before. He had gone robot then, too, when she got too close to learning a secret he had promised to protect and he had to throw her out. She hadn’t realized what his cold emotionless state had meant at the time. Today, it was easy to get around his walls: he was unyielding stone, impenetrable metal; she was water and light. He was inflexible, unable to respond; she flowed around his walls as if they didn’t exist.
She dumped the relevant details straight into his memory.
Congressional hearings, so many they blurred together: Politicians, shouting about how OACET should be under the direct control of This Agency, or That Department; Agents, fighting back, telling them No!, that No, No, No! You have no legitimate reason to come in and take us over!
The timeline: Nicholson at Sugar Camp Christmas Trees. Fischer’s arrival. Vanning’s disappearance. Nicholson’s move south to reclaim his factory.
The notes: politicians and their strange holiday shopping lists. The back-and-forth of acceptable losses. Consensus on the need to take down the Comptroller before they could buy what they wanted.
Campbell and Gallagher: both worried about how OACET might be pulled apart, but in very different ways.
Homeland Security, skulking through their own halls.
And a man— Fischer—sneering at Hope as he promised to kill her.
“They want you to break,” she told Mulcahy. “They want you to break in a big public way! They need you to snap and go nuts, so they can come in and take over OACET!”
Rachel released his hands.
For the first time in days, a spark of real emotion flamed within him. It was small but it was there, a bloody, furious red.
“You’re leading the raid, right?” she said aloud. “There’s never been any real doubt that you’d lead the raid, right? Even if it means invoking the charter and forcing the FBI to run backup?”
Mulcahy nodded, slowly, a
s the spark began to burn.
“What happens if they kill Hope and Avery in front of you? Everybody who’s anybody knows what you used to do! Can you think of a better way to get you to snap and make a lot of really bad decisions in a high-pressure situation? When you’re holding a freakin’ gun?!”
The red spark burst apart, so fast and bright that Rachel thought Mulcahy had caught fire and exploded.
She was half-right.
Well, she though, as Josh grabbed her around the waist and pulled her behind the couch. Maybe this wasn’t the best way to break him out of his trance, but it sure was effective.
Mulcahy threw the couch across the room and came at them.
Rachel kicked at Mulcahy’s left leg, Josh went at his right. Mulcahy leapt up and came down, both feet just missing Rachel and Josh.
“Oh goody,” she said, as she scrambled sideways and hid behind a bookcase. “He’s not actually trying to kill us.”
“Let him burn it off,” Josh said, as Mulcahy reduced one of the club chairs to scrap. “He’ll be fine in a minute.”
Knobby chair legs flew at her like shotputs. “Do we have a minute?”
“Consider it your daily workout.”
“We’ve got to keep the FBI out of here,” she said, glancing towards the nervous person-sized shapes on the other side of the door. Wyatt didn’t have the authority to hold them back, and if he went for a weapon—
“Mare’s on it,” Josh said, as he dodged a flying guillotine made of elegant woods and leathers. “Why was this a good idea, again?”
“Do you think he’ll stay in robot mode if they kill Hope in front of him?” Rachel replied, and rolled sideways as Mulcahy seized the bookshelf and began using it as a club. “I want to snap him back to reality here, where it’s safe!”
“Yeah, right,” Josh said, as glass from the antique light fixtures rained down on him. “Safe.”
Mulcahy abandoned the bookshelf and seized his computer monitor, and began swinging it around his head by its cord. Rachel jumped sideways as the monitor slammed into the floor, then fell backwards in self-defense as the cord broke and the monitor bounced once and flew at her head.
Stupid thirty-two-inch screen, she thought, and Josh laughed. “Stop enjoying this!” she shouted aloud at him, as Mulcahy roared and threw his desk chair so hard that it cracked the plaster walls.
Mulcahy turned, and the desk was in his way.
That fucking desk.
He stopped moving, just for a moment, and stared down at the desk. The red inferno that raged across his surface colors turned inside out—she got a glimpse of what was under it, a blue-black core entwined around his own, with the unmistakable red of heart’s blood connecting them—and then the red became a sharpened blade.
He seized the mahogany desk by one end, and pushed.
The carved feet on the old desk slid across the smooth floor. When the edge of the desk met the wall, Mulcahy tipped the desk on one end and lifted it over the sill.
“Don’t!” Rachel shouted, out of instinct more than protest.
There was a moment in balance, and then he pushed again.
Breaking glass, followed by an almost-soft crash.
“Shit!” Josh sprinted to the window and looked down.
“It’s fine,” Rachel said, her scans turned on Mulcahy as if he were a rabid dog who might come at her again. “There’re crowd control barriers up. Nobody’s close enough to the building to get hurt.”
“No! I mean, good, but that goddamned desk is famous!” Josh trailed off, and began smiling and waving at someone down on the street below. “How do I explain this?”
Rachel was watching Mulcahy. He was standing in place, his anger finally ebbing. Apparently, launching a four-hundred-pound weight from the third story of a building was enough to take the edge off.
The door opened. Mare stormed into the office, long red hair ticking like a pendulum behind her with each step. The waiflike woman walked up to Mulcahy and jabbed him in the sternum with her clipboard. “Sign these.”
“What?” Mulcahy asked, his voice scraped down to the bones from roaring.
“You remember how you said you’d have to be out of your mind to open negotiations with Senator McKillip? This is about as close as you’re going to get. Sign these.”
He chuckled. It started small, barely a chuffing sound in the back of his throat. Purples and grays rolled out from his core and covered him, repressed dark humor swallowing him like a fog.
As Mare kept poking Mulcahy with the clipboard, Rachel righted the couch and checked the cushions for broken glass. Mulcahy shied away from the papers, real laughter beginning to spill from him. “No, Mare,” he said. “Not even now.”
Mare poked him over to the couch and managed to get him seated. “Lie down,” she said, still poking away. “You haven’t slept in days. You’re worthless until you get some sleep.”
“Oh, God, what did I do?” he said.
“Nothing you shouldn’t have already done,” Mare said. “We’re all pretty relieved, to be honest. Now, sign these.”
Mulcahy pushed the clipboard away, still laughing, but weakly now.
Mare sighed and went to find something to use as a blanket.
“I’m leading the raid,” Mulcahy said.
“Sleep,” Rachel ordered him.
His hand closed around her arm like a vise. Anger, frustration, and weary relief rose from his skin into her own. “Promise me,” he said, as his mental voice began to fall away.
“Nope,” she said. “Not unless it’s what benefits OACET.”
She wasn’t sure if he heard her before he dropped out of the link, but she thought he might have still been laughing in his head.
“He’s got a grip like a freakin’ pit bull,” she muttered, as she pried his fingers from her arm. “Anybody got any bacon?”
“I’ll stay with him,” Mare said. She shook out Mulcahy’s suit coat and tossed it over his torso. “Josh, honey, go do what you do and make the normals think this is normal.”
Josh smiled at her in sweet rose pinks, and left with a smile and a song for the FBI.
“This is good,” Mare said, dimples running deep across her shoulders. She tugged up the edge of the rug and rolled it away from her, broken glass and all. She sat on the floor, and her long red hair puddled around her. “Maybe he’ll wake up delusional and I can get his signature then.”
“Good luck with that,” Rachel said, and Mare sighed.
Rachel scanned the new room-sized garbage bin, and began to pick up papers. “I need Ami and Phil,” she said. “Can you ping and pull them?”
“Why?”
“’cause until Mulcahy is good to go, I just got a major field promotion. Now,” she said, as she rolled up the blueprints and tucked them under her arm, “I’m off to plan a raid.”
TWENTY
The relief boat chopped across the surface of the water as a woman shouted at her about neoprene.
“The dry suits will keep you warm, but only if you don’t breach the seals!” The FBI’s diving instructor checked the cuffs on Rachel’s suit; the seals sucked at her wrists and ankles, and the one around her neck was slowly suffocating her. “The suits use a layer of air as insulation. You get water in there, the water’ll act as insulation, but once that suit comes off, you’re cold and wet!”
Wyatt’s black drysuit was worn beneath bemused oranges. Apparently, the original Marshall Wyatt never had any dive training, and this new version had forgotten to write it into his revised history. He feigned intense concentration as the dive instructor talked him through suiting up, and complimented him on how quickly he seemed to catch on.
(For her own part, Rachel was glad that her girlfriend was rich and enjoyed doing the dumb things that rich people pretended to enjoy, such as exploring old shipwrecks off the rocky coast of northern Oregon. But she hoped the FBI instructor would hurry up so they could get in the water—the extra heat that her cyborg metabolism threw off as a waste pro
duct was starting to cook her alive.)
“Rebreathers,” the dive instructor said, as she handed Rachel what appeared to be a reverse backpack. Rachel slipped her arms through the holes in the rebreather vest so the instructor could cinch her in, and then stood so the rebreather could be settled over her chest and shoulders. The pack was uncomfortably bulky against her breasts, and the dive instructor gave her the usual Sorry! shrug she had come to associate among female professionals who didn’t design their own gear.
“Never used a rebreather before,” she said to the instructor. “Anything I need to know?”
“Try to leave it someplace safe, so we can recover it,” the instructor said. “They’re expensive.”
“Um—”
“You’ve got a quarter-mile swim to shore in a calm sea,” the instructor said. “Stay just below the surface of the water, and come up early if you need to. You’ll be fine.”
“Right.” The relief boat began to slow as it pulled aside one of the cruisers. Ropes were exchanged; FBI and police from the cruisers began to move back and forth between the boats. Rachel nodded to Wyatt, and the psychopath joined her on the far side of the boat.
She opened a connection with his earpiece. “Check.”
“Received. How do I talk to you?”
“Think at me. Really hard,” she said. His colors blanched to yellow. “I’m serious. And stay as close as you can—I’ve never done this in the water.”
As the dive instructor did a final equipment check and positioned their mouthpieces, Rachel began to spin her shield around the two of them.
In theory, there shouldn’t be any difference between air and water in respect to her shield. In practice…
Well. Too late to worry about it now. Either they’d make land without tripping the cameras and motion detectors, or they wouldn’t.
The factory was a long, dark spread of black and blue on the horizon as she and Wyatt tipped backwards off the boat.
Bright light, all around her, as the kinetic energy of the ocean took her in. She reached out and tapped Wyatt on his shoulder, and the two of them sank beneath the boats. They gave the propellers a wide berth and set out for shore.
Brute Force Page 30
