State Machine

by Spangler, K. B.

  She was, however, ready to do something—anything!—other than spy on the Secret Service.

  Over pizza the night before, Zockinski had made an excellent point. Yes, it might be common knowledge that gifts of state were kept in the White House basement, and yes, a collector might have spotted an object that he wanted in a database, but how would that collector know the best way to get access to the basement would be through slipping a ringer into a superstar’s entourage? Or that the poonhound with a reputation for sneaking off into the storerooms with the ladies would be working late that night?

  The four of them had poked at that question until a single answer popped up: someone at the White House had told the collector how to break in.

  Then, they played process of elimination. It hadn’t been an archivist, as they could have removed the object from the storeroom themselves. They didn’t think had been a politician because… Well, the four of them didn’t have a good reason to explain that, other than observing the inner operational workings of small organizations didn’t seem to be in the wheelhouse of most politicians, and politicians had bigger crimes to commit, besides.

  Which left the staff and security, and since they were playing a rousing game of Most Likely Suspects, they decided to start with the Secret Service. A staffer, like an archivist, could scoot in and out of a storeroom without raising any questions—hell, they had video footage of the murderer and her victim doing that very thing!—but it’d be harder for a member of the Secret Service to explain their presence in an unused corner of the basement.

  And maybe, as Santino had pointed out, this wasn’t the first time that the storerooms had been robbed. There were multiple items still unaccounted from the stacks. Maybe these thefts had been going on for years, beginning after the archivists had completed the inventory, and this was just the first time there was evidence of a crime. After all, if the staffer hadn’t been murdered…

  They decided to start with the Secret Service. They had no real evidence, just half-formed suspicions, so Rachel and Hill were crowd-watching while Santino and Zockinski went to talk to Alimoren about how well he knew his own people.

  So far, the morning had been a waste of time. She was watching for telltale bursts of color, such as those yellow-white blooms of intense energy that marked excitement, or the reds of something gone wrong. If there was a change in the case, the mood spectrum of the entire room would shift, and she’d be searching for the odd man out. Or, if news came in which meant nothing except to those deeply involved, their colors would give them away. She had seen the normal pops and color changes which marked all social interactions, but for the most part the Secret Service wore the professional blues of work that needed doing.

  She didn’t know what Hill was looking for, but she trusted him to tell her if he saw it.

  In the meantime, they watched and waited, and ate cinnamon buns.

  Her scans…pulsed. She wished there was another word for it, that distinct sensation of movement when her implant wanted her attention and she hadn’t preprogrammed a signal. The closest description she had was when the dental hygienist found a thin spot on the enamel, and not-quite-cold pressure pushed against her mind.

  She followed its prompt, and cast her scans back into the lobby. Through the walls, autumn orange and cobalt blue walked side by side, a step behind worn-out blues: Zockinski and Santino, following Mitch Alimoren. The Secret Service agent was bright red. Apparently, the conversation had gone as expected.

  Rachel dragged her feet off of the table, and gave Jason’s avatar a nod as she headed towards the door. Hill stood and pretended to stretch before following her.

  “One of these days, you’re going to follow me into the bathroom.”

  He grinned at her. “Not likely.”

  They met up with the three men in the lobby. Alimoren was furious; if his conversational colors hadn’t given it away, she could have read his anger in the set of his shoulders.

  “In here,” he said, pointing at the hotel’s courtesy business center. They moved into the empty room. Smartphones and hotel-wide Wi-Fi had rendered the room obsolete; Rachel guessed the last time someone had used the fax machine puttering idly on its dusty table was weeks ago.

  Alimoren turned on them, his anger lashing out like red-tipped whips. “I wanted to say this once we were all together,” he said quietly. “I’m grateful for your help. I appreciate your attention to detail. But if you think I haven’t already considered that my own teammates might be responsible, you are seriously mistaken. I’ve got people I trust conducting an internal review. Don’t make a bad situation worse by throwing accusations around without proof.”

  Alimoren’s brief speech left her properly chastised. The others, too: shame was a thin, watery red, and it began to seep into their conversational colors.

  Zockinski took point. “Would you like us to leave?”

  “No.” Alimoren ran a hand over his face. Exhaustion seeped from him like a wet gray cloud. “Of course not. You’re doing your jobs, and it’s a question I’m going to have to get used to. Just…”

  “…let you pursue this part of the investigation?” Santino asked, when Alimoren seemed unable to find the right words.

  The Secret Service agent nodded. His anger hadn’t vanished, but it was pulling back as he worked his way through it. “Yes.”

  Poor guy, Rachel thought. Someone at the Secret Service was going to lose their job after the story finally broke. Alimoren was too close to this, and he must have known he’d be considered a good candidate for public sacrifice. Deep beneath his angry reds was a sickly nervous yellow.

  They were turning to leave when Jason pinged her.

  “Rachel?”

  “One sec,” she said to the group. Then, she joined Jason in the link. “What’s up?”

  “I’ve got a hit with a sixty percent positive.” He felt her confusion, so he added more words. “Facial recognition? Remember?”

  “Oh!” She waved at Alimoren, then grabbed the nearest computer screen. “Mitch Alimoren, the lead from the Secret Service, is here,” she said aloud for Alimoren’s benefit. “I’m touching a monitor. Access it and talk to him directly.”

  The screen hummed into an image of Jason’s face. “Jason Atran, OACET,” Jason said. The image of his face jumped, and Rachel goosed the connection to keep the signal steady. “The MPD and I are monitoring eight locations with high foot traffic throughout downtown D.C. We just got our first possible positive.”

  “Possible or probable?” Alimoren asked. His conversational colors had paused, as if he was holding his breath, the professional blues pushing against an eager yellow-white.

  “Possible,” Jason said. “Sixty percent.”

  Alimoren nodded, his colors unsticking themselves as the blues washed his excitement away. “That’s pretty low.”

  “It’s the highest we’ve gotten so far,” Jason replied. “Here.”

  Rachel felt Jason take the signal from her as he moved data around. A new face appeared on the screen, a woman with short brown hair. “This is a composite we created from images taken from three different camera angles,” he said. “I wouldn’t mention this information to a lawyer. Composites are easy to pick apart in court.”

  Alimoren studied the image, bright strands of blue and a thin thread of yellow-white weaving into each other as he tried to decide the right course of action. The blue swallowed the yellow-white into itself a second time, and Rachel guessed that the composite didn’t look enough like the suspect to get his hopes up. “Okay,” Alimoren said. “I’ll send a team to check it out. When and where was this taken?”

  “Two minutes ago, at the Dupont Circle Metro Station.”

  Alimoren’s yellow-white flashed, a mirror of everyone else’s conversational colors. Dupont Circle was less than three blocks away. “What?”

  “I work fast,” Jason said with a smirk.

  “Still got her on camera?” Rachel asked him.

  “No. I’m searching f
or her now. I’ll keep you posted.”

  Jason’s signal vanished, and the group rushed back to the conference room. Once there, she watched Alimoren pick and choose from among his own men. Santino nudged her, and she sighed and stepped forward to make sure they weren’t overlooked.

  Most Sundays, Dupont Circle was transformed from a city park to a busy farmers’ market. Men and women walked by in shirts with too little fabric, pretending the early spring sun was enough to keep them warm. Some of the nearby roads were closed to thru traffic, allowing food trucks and produce stands to spring up like organic mushrooms and fill the air with the heavenly smells of ripe vegetables and Korean BBQ. The stores along the streets leading to Dupont Circle were open for business, with sidewalk sales and smiling bakers offering fresh-baked pastries. The backdrop to this cheerful chaos was modern office buildings competing for space with embassies, with bankers and hairdressers sharing counter space with ambassadors at their local coffee houses.

  Sometimes Rachel loved living in D.C.

  Alimoren had managed to secure a handicapped spot on the east corner of Dupont Circle for the surveillance van. Rachel and Santino had ridden along with him and his team, Secret Service agents dressed for undercover work. Alimoren’s team was fiddling with micro-fitted earpieces, tiny two-way devices that picked up not only Alimoren’s radio commands, but also the vibrations from speech so the team members could talk to one another. Their communications expert offered one to Santino, who declined in favor of his phone and Bluetooth headset, and then Rachel, who had to quickly hide her grin behind her hand.

  “I’m good,” she assured him. “Just let me observe your frequencies.”

  The man blinked in curious yellows before leaning towards the van’s microphone. “Testing?”

  “Received,” Rachel replied. The Secret Service agent’s colors lit up, and she grinned back at him. “You never see my lips move or nuthin’!” she said aloud.

  “We should always be so lucky,” Santino said. Her partner was coated in the sallow green that he often wore when the cyborgs showed off their abilities. It was part jealousy, part misery, and part knowing that he was, by OACET’s standards, less capable.

  “All right,” Alimoren said, and the chatter in the van broke off. “I’m going to allow some leeway today. If you see anyone matching the description on the warrant, bring her in for questioning. If you find anyone who almost matches the description on the warrant, bring her in for questioning. We’re here to do due diligence, so be duly diligent.”

  His team nodded, and they began to file out the passenger’s side door. Surveillance tactics and common sense dictated that an entire van full of people not leap out from the back all at once, but Rachel considered it just as suspicious to have a dozen men and women step out of the car in ones and twos, like the van was chock-full of clowns in their street clothes.

  Rachel let them leave before turning to Alimoren. “What does the warrant cover?”

  He turned from the console, his colors a blend of annoyed and confused oranges. “What?”

  “You know Agents can scan for concealed firearms, right?” she said, and some of the annoyed orange fell away. “So, if I locate someone who might qualify as a suspect, will the warrant cover me if I search them at a distance?”

  Alimoren’s uncertainty grew. “I don’t know. It’s not something I’ve thought about.”

  That was a half-truth: he had thought about it, but not to the extent where he had decided it impacted him.

  “It’s better if I obey the letter of the law at all times, rather than risk your case getting tossed in court. If I can’t do that, I’ll stay in the truck and help Jason with the cameras,” Rachel said.

  “No, go ahead and join my team,” Alimoren said. “A dead body in the White House gets you a really friendly judge. The warrant permits full-person searches, and doesn’t get too specific about the details.”

  “All right,” she said. “I won’t be on the radio line unless something happens. Having a bunch of voices in my head isn’t good for me during surveillance duty.”

  And with that, she hopped out the passenger door of the van to join her partner on the sidewalk.

  Rachel had realized early on in working with the detectives that there was a high possibility she’d be turned into the team’s portable intercom system, so she had squashed that notion as quickly as Zockinski had brought it up. Yes, she could run a four-way phone call, but so could the phone company, and they didn’t have to worry about accidentally shooting a bystander because they were distracted by the chatter in their heads. She insisted on limiting her conversations to one other person, and that was usually Santino. If the four of them absolutely had to talk to each other? Well, that’s why the MPD had a contract with Motorola. It was easy for her to pass this same message to Alimoren, and let him know that it was her duty as a responsible Agent to stay off of the party line until such time as she was needed.

  (In respect to Zockinski and Hill, it helped that they had been partners long before she had come to the MPD. She located them through their cell phone signals, and then watched their conversational colors as they moved through the crowd, pacing each other like wolves selecting a deer for dinner. There was a good twenty feet between them; they appeared to ignore each other, but their colors shifted in unison as they examined one suspicious-seeming person, then another, and so on as they walked back and forth across the square. The two men were already so deep in each other’s heads that they had no need for Rachel.)

  She and Santino strolled down Massachusetts Avenue. Santino stopped for a corndog, claiming that he needed a prop to help them blend in with the tourists and the local foodies. When Rachel said he looked nothing like a tourist and no self-respecting foodie would touch a corndog, he added a side of chili.

  “Why didn’t you take an earpiece?” she asked him. The button-sized devices seemed like the type of technology Santino would love to add to his roster.

  He tapped his glasses. “Bell and I’ve already played around with them. We thought we could integrate them into the design so we can hear OACET’s projections, too. There’s a feedback problem we can’t figure out. I’ll stick with Bluetooth until we fix it.”

  “But you look like a dork. Authentic Vincent Vega in a Banana Slug tee-shirt dork.”

  He shrugged, purple humor running across the simple red pleasure of his chili corndog.

  They were walking through a cluster of Japanese tourists when Jason stepped into her mind without so much as a courtesy ping. “Rachel?”

  “Jesus, Jason! Knock first!”

  He ignored her, and pushed an image into her head. “This is live from the traffic camera on Q Street.”

  Rachel staggered out of the foot traffic, and found a convenient niche against a building. Jason’s link was so strong it made it hard for her to think, and she couldn’t see anything other than the live feed of a brunette crossing a busy road he had dumped straight into her head.

  She pushed, hard, until he backed off and she could inspect the feed. “This is the same woman from your composite?”

  “Yeah,” he replied.

  Rachel watched her move, and thought: Nope. No way it’s her. The woman at the White House had been confident, measured. This woman was dressed like a well-kept soccer mom, and moved as if her mind was somewhere else.

  Jason heard her. “She’s a block away and heading towards the farmers’ market. Go check her out.”

  “My eyes don’t work, Jason. I don’t see faces. I see the people under them. It’s not her.”

  He paused. “And you think I’m arrogant.”

  “Fine.” She snapped the word and their link at the same moment so he wouldn’t realize he had struck home.

  Santino was pretending to check his phone as he used his body to shelter hers from the sidewalk traffic. “Everything okay?”

  “Yup,” she replied. “Jason says the suspect is one block north.” She turned and started walking back the way they came, tow
ards the bustle of the farmers’ market. “I figure we can get to the market ahead of her, then wait and watch as she makes the rounds.”

  “Sounds good,” Santino said. He placed a quick call to Alimoren to update him. By the time he was done, they had crossed back into the marketplace. “Separate or stick together?”

  “Separate,” she said. The average person tended to notice mixed-race couples more quickly than they would notice either her or Santino if they were alone. She scanned the market, and saw that Zockinski’s autumn orange and Hill’s forest green were still working the crowd. “I’ll go west.”

  Her partner nodded, and touched his Bluetooth headset.

  “Test.”

  “Loud and clear,” he told her, and then turned to lose himself in the marketplace.

  Rachel meandered towards the food trucks. They hadn’t had them in California, not during those five lost years, and they were something of a novelty to her. She nodded towards an older Middle Eastern man selling cheese and dumplings out of a brand-new truck, and wondered if she could scratch up enough spare change from the bottom of her purse to get herself a couple of potato knishes for dinner.

  Then, her scans caught on a core of bluish gray, and she nearly gave herself whiplash in her mad rush to track it to its source.

  No, she though. It can’t be him! The color’s off. More of a poppy-seed gray than a cartoonish seal gray… Besides, that’s a woman. That’s…

  …oh hell no!

  The woman still looked and moved like a stylish soccer mom, but it was likely as carefully constructed a persona as the one she had worn to the White House. Rachel’s scans met a thick layer of makeup that changed her complexion and the finer contours of her face. Professional blues dominated her conversational colors, and these lashed out and pried apart each person she passed as she searched for someone within the crowd.

  She reached out to Santino’s phone. “Positive ID,” she told him. “How do I spin this for Alimoren?”

  She heard him fumble with the headset. “You made her by her…y’knows?” he whispered.