Brute Force

by Spangler, K. B.

  Nicholson began to move, the hunting knife she pretended not to see sliding out of its holster.

  She put her weight on her good ankle and pretended to slump to her side, where the ceramic plates of her body armor would catch the knife and (hopefully) turn it aside. Or maybe just hold it inside her liver. Hard to tell with body armor, really.

  “Peng, no!”

  Wyatt’s voice, from waaaaaaay across the room.

  Four gunshots.

  (Wait, real gunshots?)

  Jeremy Nicholson, white in shock, then slowly fading into that twisting blue-black color of life giving way to death as Wyatt’s shots took him in his neck.

  (She was extremely angry about having to watch that process again, as every time someone died in front of her, she needed six months and a case of whiskey to scrub it from her mind’s eye.)

  Then, general pandemonium as Nicholson’s body flopped over the railing and landed on its head.

  “Huh,” Rachel said. She couldn’t hear herself over the shouting on the floor below. She grabbed the weak spot on the railing and yanked once, carefully. When nothing happened, she yanked as hard as she could. More nothing.

  “Yup,” she said, as she sat a safe distance away from Hope to watch the bedlam unfold. She touched her face; it was covered in an unpleasantly sticky liquid that was definitely not sea water. “I’m done.”

  And, just like that, her brain tipped the last piece of the puzzle over.

  It slid into place, and she sent her avatar out, out…out to Washington, to OACET’s headquarters, and the War Room in the basement. Then, she reopened her link with Josh, and asked if his helicopter pilot friend was willing to do them another favor.

  Five minutes later, the FBI brought Wyatt over to her. The psychopath had the hangdog expression of someone who knew he had fucked up, and the triumphant reds and purples of someone who had scored the winning touchdown at the Superbowl. They left him sitting on the stairs beside her.

  “Where’s your earpiece?” she asked.

  “Gee, Peng, I dunno,” he said. “Musta fallen out during the fight.”

  “Too bad you didn’t have it,” she said. “You would have heard me telling everyone to stand down while I took on Nicholson.”

  “Too damn bad,” he agreed. An FBI agent appeared with two cans of soda and a pack of Wet-Naps for Rachel; she ignored the soda while she set to work ridding herself of the last bothersome traces of Nicholson.

  “I refuse to believe,” she said, after the agent had left, “that you had this specific ending planned from the beginning.”

  “Told you I was here to do the things you couldn’t.”

  “Oh, Lord,” she sighed.

  He handed her own service weapon back to her, handle first. She grabbed it from him and scanned the magazine; six shots fired. All accounted for.

  “Thought this was left on the roof.”

  “It was,” he said. “Ami got it for me. We were on our way to give it back to you when I saw him go after you with that knife. Instinct and training took over.”

  “Did the FBI buy that?”

  “Looks like it.”

  She held out her left hand. After a moment, Wyatt slipped a NORINCO pistol out of his body armor and dropped it in her open palm.

  “What would your story have been with this?” she asked, as she tested the weight of the unfamiliar gun.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Guess not,” she said.

  She stood; her ankle screeched like a yard owl, and she took a few wiggly sidesteps to play with her balance before she hopped down the stairs. When she turned around, Wyatt was still sitting where she had left him.

  “I’ve got to go wrap this up,” she said. “If you’re gone when I get back, I won’t look for you.”

  Purple humor exploded throughout his colors. “Why wouldn’t I be here?” he asked. “Agent Glassman offered me a full-time position working security. I start Monday.”

  His scans didn’t show any signs of lying. She checked again, and then again, looking for the dimples or stray colors to show that he was dicking her around.

  “Pick you up for work, neighbor?” he asked.

  She flipped off her scans, counted backwards from ten until she could remove her hand from her gun (negative thirty-six), and limped away from the psychopath laughing silently in purples.

  TWENTY-TWO

  It had taken a couple of years, but the Agents had finally settled on their new logo. Not their official government seal—seals were easy, all add-an-eagle-and-done. But logos? A logo had to be quick, recognizable, an all-purpose image for those many occasions when the formality of an eagle just wouldn’t do. None of them had been trained in graphic design, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t have Passionate Opinions about typefaces, color selection, layout… There had been wars fought over kerning alone, with entire rooms back at their old headquarters turned into a digital battleground over text alignment.

  The result was something that Rachel thought looked like a bastardized version of the London Underground logo, but she didn’t much care. It was green, it said OACET, the background elements were ripe with technobabble, and it looked less garish on her running shorts than their official seal.

  It was also easier to insert RFID chips into a design that already looked digitized.

  The War Room’s door was ajar. Pretty cartoon ponies glared at her with glassy eyes from over stacks of black canvas backpacks, as the RFID chips yelped at her from within. A haze of dust from disturbed papers poured, slowly, from the doorway into the hallway; it had all but settled, and Rachel doubted anyone could see it but her.

  Inside was a splash of raspberry, along with an assorted six-pack of colors she didn’t recognize.

  “Idiots,” Rachel muttered.

  Beside her, Mulcahy tensed; this already long morning wasn’t over yet.

  Rachel laid a hand on his bare arm and pushed iron calm across to him.

  “Let me go first,” she told him. “I know how to rattle this guy.”

  Her boss nodded.

  Rachel took a breath, and limped her way into the War Room.

  “Good morning!” she said, as brightly as if she were the cheeriest diner waitress in the history of strong coffee.

  Bryce Knudson froze. Around him, several other Homeland Security agents glanced at him, fingers twitching in yellow-white energy as they thought about going for their guns—

  “Don’t,” said Detective Hill in his best cop’s voice. Rachel felt the butt of his tactical shotgun rest against her shoulder as he took aim at Knudson’s center mass. As long as she didn’t move, Hill wouldn’t have to worry about Knudson seeing his stance waver. (And as long as Hill didn’t shoot, she didn’t have to worry about permanently losing the hearing in her right ear.) “Metropolitan Police Department. You’re trespassing on government property.”

  “They’re stealing government property,” Mulcahy said as he entered the room.

  Knudson’s colors snapped and twisted in reds—Caught!

  She scanned the mess against the far wall. The filing cabinets had been removed, and a new hole had been opened in the wall, roughly the size of a gun cabinet. Behind it was an old-fashioned metal safe, with an external layer of modern digital locks. The door to the safe had been opened, with bare shelves where the files had rested.

  “Man,” Rachel said, shaking her head. “You guys prepped for everything. Did you bring paint in case you scratched something? I bet you brought paint.”

  Knudson’s team stayed silent, but their yellow caution and orange anxiety twisted over each other and pointed directly towards one of the canvas bags on the floor. Her scans dipped into the canvas bags…

  “Yup,” she said, as she used her mind to poke around the contents of the cans. “Federal institution beige, green, and cream. Those are about as basic as colors get, trust me.”

  “Come in, extract, and get out,” Mulcahy said. “Leave no trace.”

  “Leave no leve
rage,” Rachel clarified. “We knew they were down here as soon as they tripped the locks on that safe.

  “And yes,” she said, “we could have trusted the FBI to arrest you, or called the cops. But right now, it’s just us, Knudson. Just OACET and Homeland, having a nice discussion. Plus one cop, who is currently not on duty and decided to come down to the Batcave to see if his friends wanted to get some breakfast, and has found something very odd in the basement.”

  “You’re on their side?” Knudson asked Hill, very quietly.

  “I’m on the side of the people who didn’t kidnap my niece.”

  Knudson’s colors blanched, and the gunmetal gray that had been swirling around the edges of his attention jumped straight to the middle of his chest.

  “Yeah,” Rachel said. “You should have done more research.

  “Oh,” she added, as his attention swung wide as he continued to search for an opening. “Those dudes you had at the top of the stairs standing guard? They’re on their way over to Sibley Memorial Hospital.”

  Knudson went extremely still, traces of red anger starting to work its way into his colors. “What did you do to them?”

  “Me? Nothing. OACET? Nothing. The MPD? Nothing. How-ev-er…”

  Hope Blackwell flowed around Rachel like a wave.

  The weird woman had lost weight during her time in captivity, and her cheekbones stood out beneath furious dark eyes. Or maybe that was just the streaks of blood across her face—some were smeared and drying, while others were stark, fresh red. She was wearing what must have been one of her husband’s white dress shirts. It hung around her like a smock, untucked and draped over a pair of athletic shorts, with more fresh blood across its front and sleeves.

  She was also barefoot, which somehow drove home the fact that she was there for no other reason than to commit unspeakable violence.

  “We can either do this on the books, or…” Mulcahy let the offer hang.

  Knudson’s colors twisted between professional blues and sickly greens.

  “Both options have their good points,” Rachel said. “If Hill arrests you right now for breaking and entering, Hope can’t touch you. But if we do this all casual-like, then we can keep this quiet. Our reporter friends are waiting for an exclusive about the reasons for the kidnapping.”

  He didn’t have to think about it. “Off the books.”

  “Good,” Hope hissed as she moved, sliding to the side of the room. She kept away from the shotgun, stopping just far enough away so she could bring down Knudson if the gun went off. Her fingers knotted and cracked as she stretched them, readied them—

  “Off the books means no one will ever know what happens here,” Mulcahy said. “Just us, and whomever we choose to tell.”

  He took a step forward; the men from Homeland began to move. Hope grabbed the nearest by his arm, turned him upside-down, and put his head straight into the floor. The others stopped, and looked to Knudson again as he held up a hand for patience.

  Mulcahy took one of the chairs from around the table and handed it to Rachel.

  “Thanks,” she said, and sat so her screaming ankle was finally able to rest. Hill moved the shotgun accordingly; it dropped a little lower than dead center on Knudson, and the Homeland agent’s colors solidified themselves as he accepted the inevitable.

  “What do you want from us?” he asked.

  “Me?” Rachel lifted her hands. “I’d like you all to go tell your superiors how you fucked up. Hell, I’d like to do this official, myself. Make an example of you. Press charges, drag you out in front of the media. Tell the entire fucking world how you kidnapped a child to get control of OACET.”

  “But then I wouldn’t get the chance to beat the shit out of you,” Hope said, her voice ragged and dry. The man lying on the ground before her groaned quietly; Hope lifted one foot and stomped.

  Knudson glanced at his man, and then back to Hope. “Let us sit down,” he said. “We’ll answer your questions, and then we’ll go. No tricks.” Hope lifted her foot again, and he added: “Please.”

  Mulcahy agreed; the Homeland agents were disarmed and were placed around the War Room’s small wooden table, hands laid out flat and empty.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” Knudson said.

  “We’re OACET,” Rachel said. “We cause more chaos before sunrise than most civil servants do all day.”

  “I’m aware,” Knudson said. Streaks of angry red ran across his colors at her words.

  “We’re cyborgs, Knudson dear,” Rachel said, with a nod towards the files and their RFID tags. “Our security system is the best in the world. We’ve known you’ve been snooping around the building since we allowed the FBI full access. We just weren’t sure when you were planning to make your move, not until you tried to get into that safe.”

  “At first, we thought you were trying to get into our databases,” Mulcahy said. “But we don’t keep anything of critical intelligence in our databases.”

  “Agent Murphy is just fanatical about paper documentation,” Rachel said. “You must have known that—she’s monologued for hours about the importance of paper trails. And after that fake break-in where you raided the offices, looking for our intelligence caches? We realized you didn’t want any ol’ run-of-the-mill documents. You were here for the good stuff. Our rumored Grade-A blackmail materials.”

  “You waited until our entire security team was at the raid,” Mulcahy said. “And then you spent the last hour trying to bypass our codes.”

  One of the Homeland agents had been flailing in impotent orange confusion. The cell phone in his hand continued to broadcast the supposedly live feed from the factory down in Maryland. According to the reporter, the Agents were still in the factory, Nicholson was down but his militia wasn’t, there would be a press conference as soon as the details were wrapped up—

  “No tricks, honey,” Rachel said to him. “Reporters are willing to bend over backwards for you when you promise them a really juicy story.

  “So,” she continued. “What type of story are they going to get?”

  “We’re not giving anybody up, if that’s what you want,” Knudson said. “This was all us.”

  Hope laughed, a harsh, choking sound. “Even I know that’s a load of crap,” she said, as she pointed to the files.

  “It’s plausible, though,” Rachel said. “I suppose Knudson and his men could have planned this alone. They could be after these files to ensure that certain politicians would support them when they move to bundle OACET into Homeland. They let the militia do the dirty work, and come in behind them to clean up.

  “Pretty clever,” she said. The urge to scurry over to Knudson and scream right in his face was slightly—so very slightly!—outweighed by the pressure of the shotgun resting on her shoulder. “I’m not even sure if we’ve got any evidence against y’all.”

  “Except for…” Behind her, Hill’s conversational colors moved in an arrow, pointing towards the safe and the canvas bags full of papers.

  “And…” Mulcahy said, as he unslung his shoulder bag and removed a file. He placed it on the War Room’s table. “We have this.”

  To Rachel, it looked like any other standard government-issue file; a little past its prime, a little worse for wear. Maybe a few too many handwritten notes on the cover, but scratch paper was never around when needed.

  Knudson’s eyes widened as if they had threatened him with a bomb.

  “Now,” Mulcahy said, his fingers resting lightly on the file’s cover. “I’m going to speak in hypotheticals, so as not to place the blame on any one person or organization. Besides, I’m sure that those who orchestrated this scheme left little evidence of their own involvement, and it’s not fair to punish those who work under them while letting those responsible slip away.”

  “I think it’s fair,” Rachel said, grinning at Knudson. “I really do, but Mulcahy says different. And that’s the heart of this whole mess, right? Where Mulcahy goes, so goes control of OACET.

&n
bsp; “Now, the only reason I’m not hauling off and beating you until you’re nothing but trace evidence?” Rachel said. “You’ve been used almost as much as we have. Because—and here’s the heart and soul of this cockup—it’s impossible to get Congress to pay for an unstoppable cyborg army when the country’s already got one.”

  “One that’s proven they obey the law,” Mulcahy said as he stepped forward, his huge hands wrapping around the back of the nearest unoccupied chair.

  Knudson seemed hypnotized by those hands; Mulcahy was grasping the chair like it was mere moments away from becoming two halves of a chair. Two very sharp and pointy halves.

  “You can’t go after OACET,” Rachel said. “Not directly. Senator Hanlon tried that, and we spanked the shit out of him. We’re an unimpeachable organization. We’ve defined ourselves as such. We’re aware that any slipup will be an opportunity to take us down, and we behave accordingly.

  “So if somebody wanted to take control of OACET, it’d require a two-stage attack. First, you get Mulcahy to make a mistake. An incredibly public blowup that he can’t recover from. Then, you get control of the documents that nobody has ever seen but everyone in Congress somehow knows we have. With Mulcahy disgraced and our leverage gone, we’d be unable to defend ourselves.

  “You knew Mulcahy’s history, how he could break in and rescue Hope and Avery whenever he damned well felt like it. But it’s all about public perception, right? Nicholson made sure the standoff was national news. If Mulcahy rescued his wife and godchild, he’d have to leave behind those other hostages while he got them out, and I bet they’d all be in very poor condition by the time he got back to make a second trip.”

  “Bad press for OACET,” Mulcahy said. “Worse for me—I’d probably have to resign.”

  “Alternatively, the standoff lasts long enough for Hope Blackwell to come down from her meds. Or they give her something else which amps her up beyond what she can manage. She’s already in a high-stress situation, and she’s the kind of person who fights back.