No one noticed except for Mare, who watched the owl soar away with a smile. Mare opened a new link and said, “Beautiful.”
“Thanks,” Rachel replied, gathering up her purse as if she was headed for the restroom. “I had to watch about a zillion nature videos to get the takeoff right.”
She scanned the room to make sure her contact had seen her, and found Senator Hanlon had positioned himself in the open door to the tent, her core still prominent within his conversational colors. The blacks and reds of extreme loathing whipped at her turquoise; the combination would have been quite pretty if she hadn’t known what it meant. Rachel didn’t know whether he had intended to block her or not, but there he was, and he didn’t look ready to move any time soon.
Oh dear, Rachel thought to herself. And here I am without my rocket launcher.
There were emergency exits that could take her out of the room, but she wasn’t going to slink through a side door. Rachel tipped her chin up and walked straight towards Hanlon, high heels clicking on the flagstone floor.
The sound of her shoes swelled as the white noise of the room receded, the crowd pausing in their own conversations to watch the confrontation. Hanlon’s colors brightened, and a trace of brilliant yellow-white excitement appeared. He was casually chatting up some lobbyists from the telecommunications industry, and turned to look at Rachel only when she was too close to ignore.
She almost never bothered to look at a person’s face—these days, faces were nothing but masks to her—but she made an exception for Richard Hanlon.
Rachel flipped frequencies until she could see him standing in front of her. Dark hair streaked with silver, kept close to his head in a classic businessman’s cut. Brown eyes, West Coast bronze skin, and a smattering of freckles high on his cheeks.
Those freckles offended her. Villains should never have freckles. There should be a law.
He was still smiling at her, and this smile grew wider as she approached. She felt her cheeks crack as she met it with one of her own. When she was close enough, he greeted her with a smooth, “Agent Peng.”
She dipped her head, ever courteous. “Senator Hanlon,” she said, and swept past him.
And that was all.
Behind her, a swell of disappointment rose and fell within the crowd, bitter orange tinted with her turquoise and Hanlon’s core of water-hardened wood. Rachel quickly brought a hand up to hide her smile. Did they really expect her to take a swing at Hanlon in the middle of a Congressional gala?
“Yes.” Mare’s mental tone left no room for doubt.
“Quiet, you.”
Mare sighed, and Rachel felt her friend’s presence withdraw a second time. “Good luck,” Mare said before she broke their link.
The function had been set up beneath a tent covering the outdoor rose garden. (Why, Rachel couldn’t say: it was too early in the spring for roses, and those blooming in planters must have been trucked in from hothouses.) She headed into the building and down a long corridor that was lined with spring willows, their fronds braided together to form an arch. The lighting was dim, the everyday fluorescents turned off in favor of muted spotlights positioned at the base of each willow.
A woman appeared beside her.
Rachel jumped before she realized she had forgotten to drop the parts of the EM spectrum she used to enhance facial recognition. It had been well over a year since she had seen her own face without making the effort, and she hadn’t recognized herself. She paused to look at her reflection in the mirrors tucked behind the trees.
Not bad, she thought. People sometimes asked her in that offensively inoffensive way how a Chinese woman could be so tall, and she usually told them her mother had been a product of Chairmen Mao’s eugenics program. Considering how little her parents talked about her mother’s past, this might actually be true, but it was much more likely she had inherited her height from her Scottish giant of a father. Her pixy cut all but styled itself, and keeping her hair short let her show off her brown eyes. The borrowed sheath dress was a rich scarlet with modest lines; congressional events were not an appropriate venue for flashing one’s naughties. A gold lace necklace as simple as the dress hung low on her neck, a single sapphire teardrop in the center hinting at her well-covered cleavage.
The combination was…
She was classy.
When on earth did that happen? Rachel grinned at her reflection before she flipped off facial recognition, and resumed her walk beneath the willows.
Classy.
Well, it wasn’t part of her usual mental image of herself, but there it was, and it was a hell of a lot better than learning she was the alternative. Besides, bare-knuckled brawlers didn’t take down Senators—classy federal Agents did.
She had to keep herself from humming.
Her heels tapped along the tiled floors as she moved towards the bathrooms. Two women were inside, gossiping by the standing sinks. They froze as she entered, and Rachel caught the edges of her and Hanlon’s names bouncing within the echoes.
“Ladies,” she said to them, as she pretended to check her makeup in the old mercury mirror.
They fled.
She grinned. Classy or not, she was still OACET. Congressmen might have to pretend she was a peer, but their wives were under no such obligation.
She killed a reasonable amount of time in the bathroom, then stepped back into the willowed hallway. She peered through layer after layer of concrete and marble veneer, only to find her target still standing at attention in the tent.
Rachel sighed. It was beginning to look like tonight would be a wash. Mare would never let her forget it, and since Mare was in charge of OACET’s duty roster… She groaned at a future of scrubbing stains off of the carpet after each communal dinner.
I should have come with Josh, she muttered to herself. But no, the moment Josh had given himself the night off, he had grabbed the nearest supermodel and left for a long weekend down in Key Largo.
Rachel turned down a second hallway and pushed through a set of double doors. The conservatory was peaceful compared to the ruckus under the tent. There were crickets, and the huffing grunts of a toad who had snuck in and made himself a home, but these fell silent as she wandered within the exhibit. She dragged her fingertips across the water running the course of a long, low fountain set in the center of the room, and caught herself before she could wipe the slightly oily feel of the treated water off on her dress. Classy women don’t return stained clothing to their friends, she reminded herself. Life as a classy woman would take some getting used to, it seemed.
There was a spiral staircase in the corner. She popped the clip on the velvet rope draped across the entry, and started to climb. The catwalk at the top was wrought iron and old brass, and sturdy enough to take her weight without so much as a creak.
It was peaceful up here. She was far enough from the party that the conversational colors of the politicians blended together into a tapestry of reds and greens, held together by the mingled grays and blues of professional business attire.
In Rachel’s new visual world, core colors had replaced faces. Each person had a unique static hue at the center of their body, and Rachel used these cores as an identifier, a HELLO, MY NAME IS sticker blazing in rainbows across the walls of her mind. Wrapped around this core color came layer after layer of surface colors, a continuously changing aura which reflected their mood. With time and practice, she had learned to pick out those elements of emotion which shaped these surface colors, and could now follow the subtext of entire conversations based on nothing but the speakers’ auras.
She picked out Mare’s pale creamy orange core, then bounced around the room until she found Hanlon’s core of deep brown. He had pushed all thoughts of her aside: Rachel’s own core of Southwestern turquoise was gone, and he wore the same reds and greens of his fellows. The reds tended towards different flavors of need; the greens, those of greed. The colors of Hanlon’s companions, the telecommunications lobbyists, ebbed and flowed wit
h the same, but she noticed that long streaks of her turquoise remained within their colors.
Well, Rachel sighed to herself, at least I left an impression on somebody.
Those Christmas colors were depressing. Before moving to Washington, she had assumed that anyone who struggled and fought and bought their way into politics was answering a higher calling. The idea of politicians as a different class of human being was somehow… comforting? Maybe that was the wrong way to look at it, but Rachel didn’t know how else to describe the idea that there were people out there who would willingly suffer a job that was, in her opinion, slightly less appealing than working the complaints desk at an international airport. You couldn’t be a politician and also be normal. Those two concepts didn’t mesh in her idea of a rational world. Better if a politician was more than merely human. Maybe.
Then, after she had started spending time with politicians, she chucked her idea of a rational world straight out the window. Once she had moved from California to a run-down bungalow in Cleveland Park, she had learned that politicians were like everyone else. They enjoyed their creature comforts, their vacation time, money, fame, and the odd night on the town. As far as she could tell, the only difference between a politician and your average schmuck was motivation.
And so few of them were motivated by anything other than bright green greed.
It was sad in its way, learning that politics was just another job. Sure, the parties were nicer, and there were tax loopholes galore, but…
She didn’t think she could ever forgive politicians for being ordinary people.
Screw it, Rachel thought, banging her hands down on the iron rail so hard she felt the vibrations through her toes. She decided to grab Mare and leave. They had signed on to serve their country, not to walk the thin line between political intrigue and codependent arm candy. If her target wanted to talk to her, he could visit her during office hours like everybody else.
She looped one last scan through the building, just to be sure, and saw the workaday blues of her target heading towards her.
Of course, she thought, and resigned herself to another fifteen minutes.
He skirted the twisting reds and greens. None of the politicians picked up on his core as he passed. He was an unobtrusive nobody, someone there to make sure their own lives functioned properly.
When he reached the hall, he paused. Rachel tossed a quick scan around, and located a baseball-sized rock in the crook of a nearby tree. This, she lobbed at the door with the precision of a former pitcher from Bagram Air Base’s pick-up team.
The rock hit the metal door with a heavy clang. The man on the other side didn’t jump; his colors didn’t flicker. Instead, he pushed open the door and came in, casually kicking the rock off of the path as he walked.
“Up here,” she called in a soft voice.
He shifted smoothly towards the iron staircase, and climbed up to join her on the walkway.
“Are we alone?” the man said by way of introduction.
“Yes.”
“Sturtevant said you can make sure no one overhears us,”
Rachel nodded. Chief Sturtevant was her supervisor at the Metropolitan Police Department; that this stranger could pronounce his name was enough credentials for her to spin some cyborg trickery. She reached out and began to draw different electromagnetic frequencies into a sphere around them, weaving these into a shield which could buffer out electronic snooping devices. “Don’t move around, or you’ll walk out of range,” she said. “And keep your voice low. I can block surveillance equipment, but anyone within earshot can still hear us.”
He glanced up, towards the open windows at the highest point of the conservatory.
“We’re good,” she told him. “I’ll warn you before anyone comes into the room.”
He nodded. “Mitch Alimoren, Secret Service,” he said, offering his hand.
Rachel took it. He smelled of meek aftershave, something watered-down to keep the politicians from noticing him. “Rachel Peng, OACET,” she said. “But you knew that.”
He nodded. “Sturtevant recommended I get in touch with you. We’re already working with the MPD, but he said your team has a history of getting the hard jobs done.”
“I’m assuming this is off the record?” Rachel asked.
His colors wavered slightly in mild yellow surprise. “No. We want to keep it quiet as long as we can. That’s why I asked to meet here,” he said, as he gestured at the gala below them. “But this is official—it has to be official,” he corrected himself. “Once this hits the media, it’ll be everywhere.
“Read this,” he said, and passed Rachel his phone. “There’s a file that’ll explain everything.”
She took the phone from him and poked the screen. “Is this a test?” she asked, as the passcode screen came up. “I’m not hacking a Secret Service agent’s work phone.”
The colors across Alimoren’s shoulders dimpled. “No,” he lied. “It’s not a test. I just didn’t think it through. Go ahead and unlock it.”
Rachel passed the phone back to him without a word.
He peered closely at her, his conversational colors braiding blue, orange, and Southwestern turquoise into a solid strand as he weighed her personality against his preconceptions. The weaving stopped, and he nodded. He tapped out a passcode, then held the phone out to her again.
This time, Rachel ran her thumb across the screen until she saw the icon OACET’s marketing team had developed for computer applications. She poked the tiny green eagle on a gold liberty’s crown, and the file opened. Text, yes, but digitized text, which meant she could read it without any—
“Shit,” she breathed.
THREE
“How was it?”
Raul Santino had waited up for her. He was pretending to watch basketball, but was literally glowing green with jealousy.
Rachel decided to poke him. “It was all right,” she sighed, as she slipped out of her party shoes. She knocked the soles against her palms, and two wads of toilet paper hit the floor. “Nice place. Lots of flowers. Ever been there?”
Her partner glared daggers at her.
“Oh, right. You said you had a membership.”
“That would be a lifetime membership.”
She covered her mouth to hide her smile. Santino collected plants in the same way that he breathed: unrelentingly and without conscious thought, and if he ever stopped, Rachel would check for a pulse. The first thing he had done when he had moved in was turn her yard into a botanical garden; the second, to convert her house to an arboretum. She wasn’t exactly happy about it, but he paid his rent on time and she was never without a ride to work.
(Not to mention how she had become an expert in plants through nothing but immersion and osmosis. She figured if this cyborg stuff didn’t pan out, she could always become the world’s foremost resentful horticulturist.)
“It was really beautiful,” she said, scooping the sweaty wads of paper into her hand and tossing them into the nearby bin in one smooth motion. “Each table had a different flower as a theme. Mare and I were at the one with… What are those white flowers, the ones that look like roses but have a stronger scent?”
A strangled moan came from the direction of the couch. “Don’t do this.”
“Gardenias, right. And they left the main building open so you could walk around and check out the exhibits. It was great. Zero tourists. I had the conservatory all to myself.”
“I will destroy you.”
“And the liquor! Seriously, Santino, the champagne was—” She dodged the thrown pillow, and headed to the kitchen, laughing.
He followed her, grumbling under his breath. Her partner was tall and lanky, with a core of cobalt blue, and dark hair which he kept swept back from his face. The only other feature that registered with Rachel were his glasses. The wire frames were thicker than fashionable, and the right earpiece dead-ended in what appeared to be an overlarge hearing aid. They gave him a somewhat bookish appearance, but S
antino, nerd through and through, loved it.
Rachel went straight to the fridge. It was, for all practical purposes, a cooler; there was nothing in there but beer, hard cider, and a bag of baby carrots that had devolved from orange to white to a dim fuzzy gray. She opened the crisper drawer and pulled out two bottles of spring lager, cracked their tops, and passed one to her partner before he hopped up to his usual perch on the counter.
“So,” he said.
“So.”
“Josh said the game was afoot? Are we a-footing?”
“And then some,” she sighed, as she chose a kitchen chair. “Murder.” He nodded, and she waited until he was drinking before adding, “At the White House.”
“What?!” Santino coughed and sputtered. “The White… The White House?!”
“Yup.” Rachel reached into the oversized handbag dangling from her chair, and found her tablet. “Here, take a look at this.”
Santino caught it on the fly, and blinked at the dead man on the tablet’s screen. “Whoa,” he said, his fingers tapping to resize the image. “This happened at the White House?”
Rachel nodded. “They even know who killed him,” she said, and called up a still frame from an overhead camera. A fiery redhead, tall and stunning in a low-cut blazer and matching skirt, walked beside her future victim. They had their heads close together, as if they were sharing secrets.
“Uh-oh. Someone got played.”
“Like the world’s stupidest violin. His name was Casper Ceara, and he had a reputation for hitting on anything that moved.”
“Good-looking guy,” Santino acknowledged. “That, plus working in the White House…”
“Yup,” Rachel said. “Nobody thought anything of it when he took our mystery woman out for a midnight tour of his penis.
State Machine Page 2
