State Machine

by Spangler, K. B.

  “To form an alliance with OACET, I think,” Rachel said. She wasn’t sure what he had found, but the feeling of being dissected and analyzed had disappeared. “He said he wanted to put Hanlon in prison, but he was clear that he won’t go against the interests of his employers.”

  “How did he read?”

  “He wasn’t lying. Wait!” she added quickly. “Jenna Noura? The woman who stole the artifact? She lied to me yesterday and I didn’t catch it.” The right side of her body was still sore from when Noura had tricked her into slamming herself against the lamp post. “It’s official: I can be tricked. They’re both professional con artists. I wouldn’t trust what Summerville told me.”

  “Show me,” he said, and Rachel queued up the recording of her conversation with Summerville.

  Rachel’s perception of the emotional spectrum could only be captured when she was the source of the recording, and Mulcahy frequently used her to snoop on the mental status of Washington’s various figures when he met with them in public places. She’d follow her boss as a member of his personal security team, close enough to watch but not close enough to hear him speak. After the meeting, he’d review her feed and compare the emotional changes in his opponent to the changes within their conversation. If the topic was especially time-sensitive, he’d have her send her perspective directly to him via a live link. He said knitting her perspective into his own gave him a hell of a headache, but it was often worth it. He was many, many months behind her in terms of reading emotions on the fly, but he had picked up the fundamentals and was able to recognize a basic lie.

  He watched the exchange without comment, then ran it again to catch anything he might have missed. It took a goodly amount of time: Rachel wondered what the Secret Service thought of her, standing around on the lawn of the Rose Garden, doing a suspicious amount of nothing… She was glad she had been the one to have caught Jenna Noura, as that was probably the only reason that a polite man with a gun hadn’t arrived to escort her back to the party.

  “All right,” Mulcahy finally said. “I know Summerville by reputation. He’s said to be a decent person. I don’t think he lied to you.”

  She didn’t need the link to hear his unspoken but…

  “He could have easily brought this to Josh,” he added. “I think he’s trying to recruit you.”

  She slapped a hand over her mouth before she started laughing. No reason to stress out the four nice Secret Service agents lurking in the bushes. “Recruit me?”

  Mulcahy grinned at her. “Spycraft 101. Feed someone a scrap of valuable information, and they’ll begin to trust you. Think of it as investment capital in a relationship.”

  “I thought we were pretending to be politicians, not spies.”

  He sighed. “You’d be surprised at how often those two overlap.”

  “Probably not.”

  “No,” he agreed. “Probably not. So, my take on your conversation is that in the short term, his employers’ interests and Hanlon’s are the same. Over the long term, their interests don’t mesh with Hanlon’s, and he knows this. He’s caught between doing what’s politically advantageous today, while positioning himself and his employers for the future.”

  She gave a small, careful nod. That much she had figured out on her own. “He knows Hanlon is going to fail.”

  “Or he’s not going to let his employers commit themselves to a short-lived strategy. In either case, I want you to consider him a potential ally. Wait a few weeks. If he doesn’t contact you by then, approach him and introduce him to Mako.”

  “Right,” she said, and set a timer for two weeks and six hours.

  “Now,” he said, in that quiet voice he used when he was particularly focused on a problem. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. “Why did you ask him if he was a parent?”

  “It’s—” she began aloud, but caught herself. “It’s not an issue. I was about to take the conversation in one direction, and decided it might cause problems, so I redirected.”

  “Why would it cause problems?” he asked.

  Rachel paused. He was OACET, and he was… Well, he was Patrick Mulcahy. He’d know if she tried to lie. She reclaimed her connection to the concrete and said, “There’s an analogy I use when I try to explain what it’s like to be in the collective. He didn’t need to hear it. It wasn’t appropriate to the conversation.”

  There. One hundred percent truth.

  And he still caught the sense she was hiding something within her words. “You’re getting better at that,” he said.

  Rachel glanced over her shoulder, pretending to look towards the South Portico. “I need to get back to the party.”

  There was a flicker of amusement across their link. “Good night, Penguin. Thank you for contacting me.”

  She nodded, and he vanished.

  She stared at the empty air and moved the newly vacant space in her mind around, testing its qualities. Then, when she accepted anew that she’d never figure out what her boss really wanted from her, she picked up her shoes and walked back towards the light and music.

  ELEVEN

  “Don’t come here hungover. It throws off my results.”

  Rachel glared at the small bald man in front of her. “I’m not hung over,” she said. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  Her dreams were about shipwrecks. Even the autoscript designed to put her in a sedated sleep state didn’t help; it kept her in a deep sleep where she was lost, not quite dreaming but still tumbling around the bottom of the ocean like a broken bag of bones…

  “Then don’t come here when you’re sleep-deprived,” the man muttered, as he typed another series of commands into the computer. “Now, turn it off, and look straight at the light.”

  “Pick one or the other,” she said. “I can turn off my implant, or I can look at the light. I can’t do both.”

  Dr. Gillion was usually deep within the angry reds, but today he was especially furious with her. “What?”

  “Obviously you have problems understanding what it means to be blind,” she said. “Which is strange, considering your line of work.”

  There was a not-subtle cough from a nearby chair. Bradley, a large man who worked as Gillion’s secretary except when Rachel was in the office, was accustomed to reminding the two of them that they had a witness.

  The world’s foremost neuro-ophthalmologist gritted his teeth. “Look at the light, focus on it, and then turn off your implant,” Gillion growled. “Your muscle memory can hold your left eye steady long enough for me to get a reading.”

  “Fine,” she said. She fixed her scans on the red light in front of her left eye, and then flipped off her implant. The light and the examination room vanished.

  She had contacted Dr. Gillion and his organization, Visual Cybernetics Incorporated, after an especially difficult case in which a bombing victim had lost the use of his eyes. Rachel had decided that since the world at large was hell-bent on careening wildly out of her control, she’d do what she could to fix it. If that meant outing herself as blind to a scientist who specialized in studying the connections between eyesight and the human brain, she could live with that decision.

  If she had known that Gillion was a cut of prime Grade-A asshole, she wouldn’t have bothered.

  Gillion styled himself as a living, breathing Albert Einstein, and his colleagues let him get away with it. He was an unparalleled genius in his field, yes, but he was also conceited and more than a little misogynistic.

  That attitude hadn’t gotten much traction with Rachel.

  After their initial meeting, Gillion had called Bradley into the exam room and had told him to assume sentry duty. Both Rachel and Gillion had agreed to this arrangement: Gillion didn’t want to get sued for punching a patient, and Rachel didn’t want to go to jail for murder.

  (And she had made sure Bradley was properly terrified of her. Not that she had wanted to traumatize the poor bug-eyed man, but it was either that or risk seeing her name in the tabloids u
nder a headline using some version of the words Reputable Source, OACET Agent, and Blind! Thanks, but no thanks.)

  “Now,” the odious little doctor said, “turn it back on.”

  She did: the red light was where she had left it.

  “Again.”

  They repeated the process several times, both of them silent except for Gillion barking the occasional order. Then, once he had his readings, they repeated the process with the other eye, and then moved on to a different battery of tests.

  For all of his faults, Gillion was thorough. It took several hours to complete the testing regime, and by the end, Rachel felt as hungry and as mentally exhausted as if she had spent the entire time out-of-body.

  “I’ll call you the next time I need you,” Gillion said, and left the room.

  “Two days’ notice!” she shouted after him. “Give me at least two days’ notice before you expect me to show up!”

  Gillion didn’t answer her. She rounded on Bradley. “How can you work for him?”

  Gillion’s assistant blinked his overlarge eyes at her before fleeing.

  She ripped the electrodes from her scalp, and stormed out of the office.

  She was standing on the sidewalk, staring straight up at the sun, when Santino pulled up to the curb in his tiny hybrid. They were three blocks from Visual Cybernetics Incorporated when she was finally calm enough to turn thoughts into coherent words.

  “Tell me why I suffer through that… that…”

  “You called him a ‘prick of mountainous proportions’ last time.”

  “That prick of mountainous proportions and his ego!”

  He sighed as he turned into the parking lot of a convenient fast food restaurant. “Because Gillion will use this data to develop a version of your implant that can help process various EM frequencies, and turn those frequencies into stimuli for the optic nerves,” he said. “It’ll be analogous to how the cochlear implant functions for the deaf. It’ll transform the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. You can suffer through a couple of hours of Gillion and his ego for that.”

  “Right,” she snarled. “Right.”

  “And when he wins the Nobel Prize for Medicine—”

  “Oh, I’ll be damned if that fuckin’ jackass wins the Nobel thanks to me—” she started, and lapsed into a nasty sulk when she realized Santino was laughing at her in purples.

  She was most of the way through her cheeseburger when Zockinski’s ringtone (Los del Rio’s “Macarena”—when he made that request, she had realized that he and Hill were just messing with her) sang out in her head. “One sec,” she said to her partner. Then, to Zockinski, “What’s up?”

  “How’s your day off?” the detective asked her.

  “Over, I assume?”

  Zockinski laughed. “Yup. Come to Indiana Avenue. Jenna Noura wants to talk to you.”

  “‘You’ as in me and Santino, or ‘you’ as in me, myself, and I?”

  “Just you,” he said. “She says you know why.”

  Zockinski disconnected, and Rachel was left wondering what the hell Noura had meant by that.

  They drove up and down the streets near Indiana Avenue until they finally found a parking spot, and then headed towards Zockinski’s cell phone. The detective was waiting for them in the prisoner holding area, Hill standing silently beside him. Off to the side were several uniformed officers, and a man in a shabby tee-shirt fiddling with the monitoring equipment.

  “He’s already talked to Noura,” Zockinski said, pointing at Hill.

  “How’d it go?” Santino asked.

  “I think he’s in love,” Zockinski said. “She made him smile.”

  Rachel pressed the back of her hand to her forehead and fell into Santino’s arms in a full Southern Belle swoon.

  “Funny,” Hill said.

  “So what does she want?” Santino asked, as he propped Rachel on her feet.

  “She wants to talk to Peng,” Hill said, pointing at Rachel. “Didn’t say why.”

  “Maybe she likes you,” Zockinski said with a wink.

  “Her timing’s bad,” Rachel said with a dry laugh. “Becca gets home tonight.”

  “What’s the setup here?” Santino was looking around the prisoner holding area. The MPD’s station on Indiana Ave was more of an administrative showpiece than their own station, its location in the center of the city placing it decidedly in the “law” side of the “law and order” equation. It was adjacent to the city’s courthouses, and allowed a certain amount of comfort for those persons working with the police.

  “Like ours,” said Zockinski. “Normal one-way mirror that lets us see into the interview room. Everything is recorded.”

  The guy in the tee-shirt waved.

  “Nifty,” Rachel said. She borrowed Noura’s dossier from Hill, and went to talk to a master thief.

  Jenna Noura was sitting quietly, a paper cup of coffee beside her. The officers must have decided she was enough of a risk to leave her handcuffed to the table, and the cuffs looked overlarge on her wrists. She brightened as Rachel entered the room, strands of hope held up by Rachel’s Southwestern turquoise: whatever it was she wanted, she was sure Rachel could deliver.

  “Bored?” Rachel asked her.

  “A little,” Noura replied. “I’m highly susceptible to cabin fever.”

  “Prison’s going to be rough for you, then.” Rachel opened the manila folder and flipped frequencies to examine Noura’s file. “You’re thirty-one. That’s awfully young to be looking at a life sentence.”

  “Maybe there’s something I can do for you,” Noura said. She spoke slowly, the words something of a caress.

  Oh, please. Rachel was used to innuendo in interviews, but she hadn’t expected it from Noura. “There is something you can do,” she said. “We need to know who hired you. Would you like me to get you a lawyer?”

  “No,” Noura said. “Just you and me.”

  “Okay.” Rachel waited. When Noura didn’t offer any new information, Rachel started writing out her shopping list on the folder. Beer, hard cider… Becca’s coming back, so buy that bread she likes… Throw out those old carrots before she notices…

  “I don’t know who hired me,” Noura finally said.

  “Sorry, then,” Rachel said, as she added a few more items to her list. “You’re useless. Enjoy prison.”

  “I’ve got other things to offer,” Noura said in that same sensual voice.

  Rachel kept writing. Flowers… I should buy some flowers, but Santino gets so pissed when I buy hothouse roses…

  “I’m one of the world’s best art thieves,” Noura said. She leaned towards Rachel, like a cat settling in for a long stretch. If the jumpsuit had a low neckline, and if Rachel had been limited by a set of working eyeballs, the view would have been deep and smooth.

  As it was, Rachel rolled those eyes as hard as she could. “Knock knock,” she said, as she pushed her grocery list aside.

  “What?”

  “No, who. As in, ‘Who’s there?’”

  Noura’s conversational colors changed to an annoyed orange. “Don’t waste my time with jokes.”

  “Damn!” Rachel slammed her palm on the table. It was a swift, unexpected motion, and Noura leapt backwards at the loud pop! “You already knew the punchline.”

  Noura wrapped her colors around her, and they settled into professional blues.

  “Does that ever work?” Rachel asked.

  “More often than it should,” Noura replied. She scooted her chair back and sat up primly, handcuffs and all, changing from seductress to schoolmarm as easily as slipping off a sweater.

  “You were saying? World’s best art thief?”

  “One of them,” Noura said. “Do you know how we work?”

  “A broker, I assume.”

  The woman nodded. “The client approaches the broker, and I get my jobs through the broker’s intermediaries. There’s never any fewer than two degrees of separation between me and a client.”

&nb
sp; Rachel pretended to make a tick in Noura’s folder. “Good news for the client when you get caught.”

  “Right. And if I were a stupid woman…” Smug pink started to show within Noura’s professional blues.

  Rachel took that pink and ran with it. That first day, back in her holding cell… She knew what the fragment was before we did. “You might not have information about your client, but you did get information about the item.”

  “Of course,” Noura said. “I’ve got an excellent reputation. My clients know to treat me with respect. They’ll tell me exactly what it is I’m stealing, so I can make sure they’re paying me a fair price commensurate with the item and the risk involved.”

  “And breaking into the White House…”

  “Huge risk,” Noura said, raising one hand. The other came up to meet it. “Huge payout.”

  “Tell me this also came with a huge stack of information to help you plan your getaway.”

  “That, and…” Noura looked at Rachel, her conversational colors sharpening to a point as she waited.

  On the other side of the mirrored glass, Santino turned yellow-white with excitement, but neither of the detectives seemed to pull anything significant from Noura’s last statement.

  Something science-y then… Rachel leaned forward. “Tell me they weren’t stupid enough to give you a backup wristwatch.”

  Noura inspected her fingernails. “I’m not about to kill my own frogs.”

  “Mhmm,” Rachel said. “Just White House staffers trying to get lucky.”

  “I was careless,” Noura said. Mournful gray and sickly green guilt pushed aside the professional blues. “He paid the price.”

  “Technically, you’ll still be the one who pays the price,” Rachel told her. She wished Noura didn’t feel guilty about killing Casper Ceara; it was easier to deal with the bad guys when they were simply bad. “That’s what our justice system is for.

  “If you cooperate, the justice system can be lenient. That’s why they invented plea bargains. As you murdered someone in the White House,” Rachel said, fingers tapping on her notepad for emphasis, “you’re completely screwed unless you can give us something good. Extremely good. Names. Account information. That wristwatch. Hard data we can use to track down your client, and patch some of the holes in our security.”