State Machine

by Spangler, K. B.

  Rachel dropped back behind the food trucks to keep out of the suspect’s line of sight. “Her colors, yeah.”

  “How sure you are that you’ve got the right person?”

  “Sure enough to ping Jason and thank him.”

  Rachel followed the woman from the other side of the food carts. The suspect’s face was thinner, her eyebrows altered to look further apart. Her hair was a different color and cut after she had lost the red wig, and she now sported a longish brown bob. She was wearing a trendy but loose jacket, and a pair of Armani jeans that looked painted to her body but moved easily when she walked. A stylish pair of sneakers finished the outfit: she was ready to run if she needed to.

  “She knows she could be caught,” Rachel mused through the phone line. “She’s definitely here for a reason.”

  “Maybe a handoff?” Santino asked. “Is she carrying the object?”

  Rachel started to protest. She always tried to avoid prodding around clothing and what lay beneath. Larger devices, like guns and most knives, she could pick out no problem, but they were chasing a piece of metal the size of her palm and that involved a slower, more…thorough set of scans.

  “Just do it,” Santino muttered. They’d had this discussion many times before. “You heard Alimoren. We’ve got a warrant for her so it’s legal, and if you asked someone if they’d rather have you stare at their naked bodies or pry into their minds, I bet nine times out of ten they’d rather be naked.”

  “Reading emotions is not the same as reading minds,” she said, as she fine-tuned her scans to go through pockets and purses and all manner of private places. “And who’s part of a hivemind here anyway, you or me? I’d much rather have someone in my head than staring at my body.”

  “Yeah, right. Ask Zockinski which he’d rather… Y’know, this might be a gendered issue.”

  “Jesus, Santino. Go write a paper on it.”

  “Good idea!”

  “Shut up,” she muttered. The connection with her partner fell silent as he placed a call to Alimoren to bring the Secret Service up to speed.

  Rachel reached the end of the chain of food trucks. Rather than loop back and overlap with the Secret Service agents coming towards her, she opted to park her butt against a convenient lamppost. An awning had come loose and hung from its metal frame; Rachel figured that if she kept her face behind the printed vinyl, she’d be as well-concealed as if she was still hiding behind the trucks. She took her tablet out of her purse for an excuse to stand against the post, while a hundred feet and a row of farm stands away, Miss Armani pretended to shop for tomatoes.

  “Well? Anything?” Santino was back on the phone line.

  “Give me a minute. I’m being as careful as I can. I don’t think the warrant covers learning if she’s got an IUD.”

  The mystery object wasn’t in the suspect’s purse or pockets. Rachel took a breath, and went deeper.

  “Cleavage,” she reported to Santino.

  “I’m a big fan.”

  “No, asshole, there’s a travel wallet stuck between—”

  Her partner was laughing at her. “I know. I’ll tell Alimoren.”

  Their connection fell silent again.

  Rachel forced herself to relax, and shifted her butt around to try and get comfortable. It was a pleasant morning; there were worse ways to spend her time than waiting for the bust to happen. She flipped around in the contents of her tablet. Josh had archived an entire file of baby animal pictures for her, a fallback for those days when she needed an Emergency Kitten, stat.

  She had her face firmly planted in her tablet: anybody watching her would have seen just another nobody at the farmers’ market, killing time online as she waited for her friends to finish shopping.

  Except for Miss Armani, who had made the turn around the farm stands just as a chill spring breeze tossed the awning around, and whose conversational colors suddenly changed from professional blues to an unmistakable Southwestern turquoise.

  SEVEN

  “Santino!”

  “What?”

  Rachel kept her head down and her scans fixed to Miss Armani. “She recognized me!”

  “She made you?”

  “No! She knows my core color! She recognized me!”

  The suspect knelt to pet a passing puppy, laughing. There was no orange within her colors, but the professional blue had hardened around the turquoise.

  “I’m joining the Secret Service’s party line. She’s not nervous. She’s got something planned.”

  She heard Santino talking in a low voice, and then Alimoren asked: “Peng?”

  “Here. Suspect recognized me. She’s unarmed but confident, and carrying the object.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. It’s a thing I can—” Rachel caught herself before she went on the defensive, and redirected the conversation to take herself out of it. “I scanned her to locate the object. She’s got it strapped under her bra, but she’s not carrying a gun.”

  “What about poison?”

  Shit, Rachel swore to herself, and heard Santino chuckle nervously as her private thoughts were broadcast to the Secret Service. “She’s wearing another huge watch, but I can’t check her for poison. Not unless you buy me more time to run frequencies.”

  “We don’t have it,” Alimoren said to Rachel. Then, to the others: “She’s not carrying a gun, but proceed as if suspect is armed and dangerous. Somebody find a set of gloves. Work gloves, heavy-duty ones.”

  Miss Armani had left the dog and its owner, and was walking back towards the food carts.

  “Agent Peng?” Alimoren’s voice came on the line. “Does she know you spotted her?”

  “She’s not acting spooked, but…” Rachel mulled it over. “Yeah, probably. If she knows about me, she knows I can see through walls. She’ll figure you put me here to keep an eye on her.”

  “I should’ve kept you back at the van,” Alimoren said. “Okay, we’re coming in. Peng, don’t move.”

  “Gotcha.” Rachel said, resolved to scroll through an entire gigabyte of cuddly animal pictures before getting involved.

  At the end of the row of farmers’ carts, two men in casual clothing and hard professional blues turned towards Miss Armani. Rachel watched as the suspect made them, her colors weaving as she weighed her options. Then, her colors reclaimed Rachel’s turquoise core, and she turned back towards the Agent.

  “Shit. Alimoren, she made your guys. She’s coming back towards me.”

  “Hang on, Peng.” Hill’s voice was calm and steady. She pinged his signal and found him flanking the suspect.

  Miss Armani noticed him, too. She was close enough to wink at Rachel as she tapped the face of her watch with two fingers.

  “Hill, back off!”

  The big man did, passing Miss Armani at a safe distance. She watched him leave, then nodded to Rachel.

  “There are too many people here, Peng,” Alimoren said. “Pull out. We’ll get her when she tries to leave.”

  “What if she takes a hostage?”

  “Then we’ll deal with it, but I don’t want to force her hand.”

  “Right,” Rachel said, and pretended to finish up her business before dropping her tablet into her purse. Miss Armani was closing fast, her conversational colors rich with Southwestern turquoise. “Alimoren, she’s coming up on me.”

  “You’re covered.” Alimoren was all business. “She draws anything on you, we’ll put her on the ground.”

  Rachel wondered if maybe that’s what Miss Armani had planned: the Secret Service and the MPD were trained for chest shots. That metal fragment would be reduced to so much dust by the time they were through with her. Then again, nothing about the suspect suggested she was suicidal—not her colors, not her posture, and definitely not her confident smile.

  “Don’t,” Rachel said. “She’s not armed, and I won’t let her touch me. Connecting to Santino’s phone and all lines within one meter of his in 3…2…1…”

  She heard
Santino telling those around him to gather around him and take out their phones, and she looped her perspective through his device and those nearest to him.

  (She hoped all of those signals were associated with the MPD or the Secret Service. She didn’t have time to be selective, and there was a decent chance some family type couldn’t figure out why his phone was suddenly showing an attractive brunette bearing down on him. Not to mention that if she got caught hijacking a protected phone line, she’d find herself in crazy-hot water with the FCC, the FBI, the NSA, and every other acronym with a vested interest in secure communications.)

  “Agent Peng.” Miss Armani’s voice was strong, an accent placing her as French. Rachel would have bet a large sum of money on it being fake.

  “Didn’t catch your name,” Rachel said.

  Miss Armani waved a hand, as if her name wasn’t of concern. “How many guns are on me now?”

  “Enough. They’re worried about poison. They’ll shoot you if you try to touch me.”

  “Of course,” the woman said, keeping herself a clean five feet away from Rachel. “Please tell them I know I’m caught. I’ll come quietly.”

  The lie was so smooth that Rachel didn’t see the distinctive dimples in the other woman’s colors. Pain rang through her like a bell before she realized what had happened: the suspect had kept her talking until she was on the other side of the lamppost and could take advantage of her arm’s-length head start. Rachel had instinctively charged after her, turning so quickly that she had slammed the entire right side of her body against the metal post.

  Rachel snarled and dove forward. The brunette had a lot of muscle and was dressed to run; Rachel was in a business suit, weighed down with an extra five pounds of gear, and today (of course) had been the day she went to work in that one pair of boots that had too much heel.

  Miss Armani sprinted towards the door of a nearby coffee shop.

  “Alimoren!” Rachel shouted in her mind, as she threw her purse to the ground and charged the door. “Tell me you have somebody covering the rear exits!”

  “I pulled them off to cover you!”

  Damn it! Miss Armani was too clever by far. Her confrontation with Rachel had been a feint used to draw Alimoren’s backup into the marketplace.

  Miss Armani raced through the open door of the coffee shop and yanked the handle as she passed. The door began to close, and it bought her a few more seconds as Rachel had to stop to haul it open. The store was a straight shot from front to back, and Miss Armani won another few precious seconds from Rachel by tipping a table and chairs to the ground behind her.

  Alimoren shouted in Rachel’s head until she yelled at him to shut him up, and then took herself off of the party line. She began sending her location to the map of D.C. on Santino’s phone. Her partner could track their progress more efficiently than she could deliver a running commentary of street names.

  And running it was—Miss Armani could move.

  She was across the street before Rachel could clear the alley. Rachel jumped out of the way of an oncoming sedan, and found herself on the far sidewalk in the middle of the lunchtime mob.

  The two of them raced through the crowd, Rachel hollering at anyone in earshot to trip the fleeing suspect. No good. They were over another street and within a public park before she could convince someone to stick a leg out. A uniformed MPD officer Rachel didn’t recognize tried to intercept by boxing the suspect within one of D.C.’s ubiquitous memorials, but Miss Armani was quicker. She was up and over the eight-foot fence like a monkey.

  Right, Rachel thought, darting around the memorial and onto the straightaway of the road behind it. Someday I need to hunt down the person who invented Parkour and break his knees.

  Miss Armani had put a couple of hundred feet between them and was trying to push the distance. She wasn’t wearing anything digital. Shocking, really: these days, everyone beeped. If Rachel had been any other Agent, she might have lost her in the maze of D.C.’s parks and alleyways due to the lack of any signal to track. But she had a fix on Miss Armani’s core of poppy-seed gray, and Miss Armani couldn’t shake her short of dropping into a bucket of paint.

  Miss Armani was starting to flag. She might have been able to get a head start through trickery and keep it through sheer speed, but Rachel relaxed with fifteen-mile jogs. Miss Armani didn’t have the endurance to outlast her.

  (Between now and then, Rachel was sure the blister on her ankle would swell up to the size of a small melon. She wished she could just shoot this woman and be done with it.)

  The opening notes to N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” chimed in her mind. Only God and Hill knew why Hill had told Rachel to use that as his ring tone.

  “Busy,” she told him.

  “Where is she?”

  “Check your map,” Rachel replied, and then sent her location to Hill’s phone. “Corner of 18th and Riggs. Looks like she’s trying to throw me off before she doubles back to the Dupont Circle Metro Station.”

  Hill laughed. “Idiot,” he said. “I’ll call the Metro cops and have them waiting.”

  “I owe you a beer.”

  “Yup.” He broke the connection without saying goodbye.

  Rachel settled her stride into a decent rhythm and ignored the tugging at her ankle. Blisters she could live with; she was just thankful she hadn’t bought those boots with the four-inch heels.

  Miss Armani took two turns, back to back; the second turn took her across a busy street. She threw another hasty glance over her shoulder at Rachel, and saw the Agent closing the distance as she weaved through the moving hazards of the four-lane road.

  Rachel waved to her.

  Miss Armani put on as much speed as she could, but she was nearly spent. Threads of gray exhaustion were starting to wind their way out of her lungs to drag the blues down.

  Rachel reached out to Hill’s phone. “I was wrong. She’s not headed for the subway,” she said when Hill answered. “Can you keep tracking my signal? She’s getting punchy and I don’t know what she’s going to try next.”

  “Yeah.” Hill hung up on her a second time.

  Miss Armani was starting to panic. She kept checking on Rachel as she ran, quick peeks which happened more and more frequently as her colors shifted towards a frantic reddish-orange. A group of teenagers, heads buried in their smartphones and oblivious to the world, blocked a goodly part of the sidewalk; rather than push through them, Miss Armani made a hard right and tried to cut back across the four-lane road.

  This time, the two of them weren’t as lucky. Miss Armani narrowly missed being run down by a city taxi. The cab braked hard, its rear end bucking slightly to the side, as the driver leaned on the horn and swore out of his window. A curiosity slowdown on Rachel’s side of the road followed, the drivers focused on Miss Armani as she staggered towards the sidewalk. They didn’t notice Rachel, and she was left trying to avoid death and injury and their front bumpers. There was a tense moment when she realized it was either jump or lose her shins, and her feet landed on the hood of an old Mercedes before she was off and running again.

  Thanks, she whispered to that little piece of Other living in her head. I’m going to assume that was you, she thought, as she dodged a flatbed truck (no acrobatics were needed this time, just a quick twist of her hips to skirt the chrome). I know I could never jump on top of a moving car before you started messing around with my reflexes. I promise I’m getting us cookies when this is over.

  She hit the sidewalk, and noticed that Miss Armani was at the edge of her endurance and had begun to stumble. Rachel put on a fresh burst of speed and then, finally, was within shouting range.

  “Hey! Braintrust!” she called out. “Want to stop? I can do this all day!”

  Miss Armani tripped and fell, but caught herself before she hit the ground.

  “Is that a yes?” Rachel jogged up to grab Miss Armani’s arm before she realized it was another trick. The other woman was tired, yes, but she had taken those few moments to recove
r. She swung around to face Rachel, a quick fist leading. Rachel ducked and slipped under the woman’s arm, then came up fast with a right hook. The woman took it across her jaw while swinging wide with her other fist. Rachel avoided this easily, throwing her weight to the side and smashing her opponent with a left cross in a perfect Dempsey roll.

  It was a hard fact of Rachel’s life that she was rarely able to cold-cock a man twice her size. She simply lacked the mass. The same went for when her opponent was another woman; less mass didn’t necessarily mean less resilient, and the woman in Armani jeans knew how to take a punch. There was also the issue of poison: Rachel wasn’t willing to risk anything other than rabbit punches, in and out before Miss Armani could tag her back.

  The other woman stared at her, stunned but still fully conscious, and her colors crisped into firm blue resolution as she realized Rachel outclassed her in a drawn-out fight. Her eyes slid around Rachel towards the busy street.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Rachel warned her, and moved across her path. No way was she running across that miniature highway again, not three times in the same day.

  The competing reds of anger and panic flashed over and within themselves as Miss Armani tried to decide what to do. These snapped tight in a weave as she made a tight turn on the sidewalk. She cut left, sprinted down a utility alley, and tried to run across the gardens behind a row of high-end townhouses.

  Rachel threw her scans down the street to get her bearings, and started chuckling to herself. This close to the center of Washington, almost every townhouse was either an embassy or the private residence of someone important enough to employ bodyguards. She counted to sixty as she smoothed down her suit coat. When the minute was up, she rang the bell of the third townhouse, a bright yellow mess covered in ivy and a flag she didn’t recognize on the pole beside the door.

  A man with the core color of a granite quarry appeared in the door’s beveled window.

  “MPD for pickup,” she said.

  He disappeared without a word. A few moments later, the door opened and two more large men hustled Miss Armani into Rachel’s waiting handcuffs.