“…the questionable mental state of the three ISO-152 test subjects we interviewed is cause for serious concern. These three subjects appeared unwilling, perhaps unable, to participate in routine social interactions. While able to complete all required intelligence testing and cognitive task analyses, they displayed neither humor nor frustration, or emotion of any kind. We have observed nothing other than a steadfast competence in these men, which is deeply disturbing: while we encourage the younger members of our community to follow orders and work as a group, intelligence operatives working alone must be able to apply creative thinking to difficult problems. I have deep reservations of whether the proposed large-scale trial of the ISO implant can deliver on its creators’ promises. The ability to communicate without using a telephone or homing pigeon is not indicative of proficiency in undercover fieldwork.”
It was a good quote, strong and true, but it struck Rachel for personal reasons. She had met with its author a bare handful of hours before she had passed the final OACET qualification exam. General Keith Condon had been reserved but concerned, and had asked her several times if she was sure that she wanted to follow through with her candidacy. At the time, Rachel had thought he was being thorough. She hadn’t imagined that he might have been trying to warn her.
People have known that OACET shouldn’t be allowed to exist since Day One, she thought. It’s a bloody miracle that Hanlon’s been able to get away with this charade for as long as he has.
She returned to Dunstan’s article, skimming the bulk of it, and pausing here and there to digest new information. By the time she reached the end, her head was throbbing, but she knew Mulcahy was right.
We can survive this, too.
After she was done reading, she stayed deep within the collective, bumping into the others when she could and talking in hushed mental voices about the upcoming week. There was less anxiety than she had expected; most of them were relieved that the waiting was finally over.
When she dropped out of the link, she found Becca sitting beside her at the kitchen table. Becca pushed a heavy mug towards her. Fresh hot coffee came up to the lip, dark and just a little sweet. Rachel wrapped her hands around the cup and soaked in its warmth.
“So?”
Rachel flipped on emotions to find Becca a mild gray. This was progress: a few months ago, a mental midnight meeting would have sent her into worrisome reds, but she was getting used to life with an Agent.
“Tomorrow,” she told Becca.
The woman’s gray thickened and knotted like a lump around her heart. “Oh.” Becca said. “Oh, honey.”
“We knew it was coming,” Rachel said, but the much-used phrase sounded hollow.
“That doesn’t make it any better,” Becca said.
“And it’s by Jonathan Dunstan, not the reporter we had hoped would break the story.” She saw confusion move across Becca’s colors, and explained. “Most politicians have a reporter they use when they want to put a specific slant on a story. Dunstan belongs to Hanlon, so…”
Becca winced in reds. “Oh no.”
“I just read the copy. It could be worse,” Rachel admitted. “It could be a lot worse. Dunstan acknowledged that Hanlon was involved in the…” She couldn’t say it, but Becca still reached out to cover Rachel’s hands with her own. “Anyhow. Dunstan paints Hanlon as the owner and CEO of a multinational corporation, and implies that Hanlon had so many projects going at any given moment that he couldn’t have possibly known all of the details. So, yes, Hanlon may have approved the…conditioning, but he didn’t know exactly what would be done, or why.”
“Will that argument stand up?”
“Maybe. Patterson—the reporter we’d hoped would break the story—will release her own version in a couple of days. We’ll see what happens then.”
There was nothing more to say, and Rachel let her girlfriend take her back to bed.
An hour, maybe two, and Rachel gave up trying to sleep. Even with the implant off, there was too much going on in her head. She slid out of bed, found her jogging gear, and kissed Becca goodbye.
Her usual jogging paths were closer to home. On nights like this, when home was a confusing word and the hivemind buzzed in her head to the point of madness, she ran south, away from her comfortable suburban neighborhood, across the confusion of city streets, down to where the woods and the wide grassy spaces cradled the presidential monuments. Down to where the tourists were thick in the day, and, at night, after they had scurried back to their hotels and motels and timeshare condos, the land was open and free.
Rachel ran until her lungs ached, thinking of nothing. Her implant warned her when a camera buzzed or a cellphone came near; sometimes she changed her path to avoid getting tagged by a cop or a camera, but mostly she just forced herself to keep moving.
She was not expecting a half-naked Patrick Mulcahy to walk out in front of her.
Momentum carried her forward even after she told herself to stop. Her palms slapped against his shirtless chest, and she nearly tipped straight into his mind. But she had recognized him in time, and her walls were up, so all that came back to her was a feeling of sweet, impossible peace.
Peace? From Mulcahy?
He was smiling, with restful colors she had never seen within him playing across his body. “Hey, Penguin,” he said.
Granite… Granite… There’s no concrete? Where am I? Rachel thought, scanning the region as quickly as she could. The waterfalls at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial came back to her, greens and golds turning within themselves in liquid light. She assumed they had the place to themselves until she caught a lump of softly-colored dreams sprawled across one of the granite slabs at the base of a waterfall, a woman, deep in sleep and nesting within a pile of discarded clothing…
Rachel’s jaw dropped as she recognized a very naked Hope Blackwell. “Jesus, Mulcahy!” she hissed at her boss. “Here?!”
He chuckled.
Okay, then, she thought to herself. I’ve learned the secret to ultimate stress relief. Now, all I have to do is convince Becca.
“You’d set me on fire if I did anything like this,” she said.
“I’d set you on fire if you got caught doing anything like this,” he told her. “Nobody’s around. I’ve got an arrangement with the local security. You out for a run?”
When she nodded, his grin turned wicked, and they were off.
It wasn’t anything like jogging: jogging was sensible. They ran.
Even her mad chase after Jenna Noura had been nothing compared to this. She felt like a kid again. Up and down, over rocks and tree roots, sometimes shouting out loud from the joy of it. She was fast, but Mulcahy was nothing but legs and muscle. If he wasn’t in bare feet, and hadn’t just finished a hard workout (so to speak), Rachel wouldn’t have had a chance in hell at catching him. The two of them kept pace as they raced through the woods surrounding the memorial, looping over and across their paths in wide circles to keep Mulcahy’s snoring wife within easy reach.
She lost track of time, burning thought to ash under the pounding of her sneakers on the earth. When she checked Mulcahy’s colors, he was wrapped within relaxed blues and the steady, strong red of belonging, and she let herself join the rhythm of her feet to his until the tension of the last few days fell from her.
They returned to the waterfalls. Mulcahy dove straight into the shallow basin, racing style, and Rachel caught a wave of emotion from him as he moved through the rapids—free!
She opened a link. “How did you go from being an adrenaline junkie to a politician?”
“I told you,” he replied. “Spycraft and politics are very similar. I do miss the explosions, though,” he added, almost wistfully.
“Bet you could get rid of some Congressional gridlock with some well-placed dynamite,” she said.
“Oh, don’t tempt me,” he said. “That might be the only way I’ll ever get those idiots to start moving.”
She nodded through the link as she dunked her ar
ms in the water to cool down. That was as far as she’d go: she didn’t know how Mulcahy could swim in this water. Things peed in it.
(Apparently, things also had sex in it, too, which she should have assumed, but the threat of a hideous staph infection was slightly more real when otherwise sensible people—people she knew!—were splashing around in the water as if it were their own private bathtub.)
“It’s chlorinated,” her boss replied. He did another couple of laps, and then hauled himself out of the water onto the rocks beside her.
The two of them panted like beached whales on the granite slabs, far enough apart so they wouldn’t accidentally dive into each other’s psyches.
“I’m not looking forward to tomorrow,” she admitted aloud.
“I am,” he said. His wicked grin reappeared, and steel gray came into his conversational colors. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this domino to fall. Once it does, it’ll start to take others with it. Tomorrow’s the beginning of a certain someone’s cascade failure.”
“Yeah,” she replied. “But on a personal level? I’m not looking forward to tomorrow.”
“Oh,” he said. His colors turned in on themselves as the vivid greens of OACET gave way for his own cerulean blue core to shine through. “Me neither.”
He rolled over on his back. “It’ll be worth it, though. More press conferences, more public scrutiny… It’s nothing we aren’t used to by now.”
“I’m not used to my friends thinking I’ve kept things from them,” she said, thinking of Zockinski. Hill probably already knew; Zockinski wouldn’t be happy at being the last one within their small group to learn what had happened to the Agents.
Mulcahy rolled over to look at her. “I wish things could be different,” he said, his colors taking on her Southwestern turquoise. “It’d be easier if we didn’t have to prioritize the endgame.”
He started to spin a digital barrier around the fountain so they could talk freely. Mulcahy’s version of a shield was made from rigid slabs of frequencies, banged into place. Rachel waited to see if he had improved his skills before she reached out and took the slabs from him. Then, she spun them out as fine as she could, and wove them into a dome around them: she despised shoddy craftsmanship.
He watched her shield go up around them, thinner than molecules and stronger than steel. “Very nice.”
“Thanks.” She sent her scans up, past the new barrier and into the open sky above them. The black of tree branches and new leaves came back, and she realized she missed having stars overhead.
Even if I still had my eyes, I couldn’t see them. Not here. This isn’t Texas. In Texas, the sky spread for a million years…
“I should call my family,” he said. “I know I should—I just don’t know if I can.”
“Uh-huh.” Rachel had had the same thought. She hadn’t told her parents what had happened during those five years. She had vanished from their lives except for the obligatory phone calls on birthdays and holidays, and then reappeared five years later as a semi-stranger in their daughter’s body. A morning talk show was a bad way to learn the truth.
I should go home, she told herself. Make the time to put things right, maybe try to see the stars…
“He’s getting desperate,” Mulcahy said.
“Who?” she asked, before catching the woody browns of Hanlon’s core within Mulcahy’s colors. “Oh. Sorry. I was drifting. Why do you say that?”
“He has to be. He wouldn’t have made a play at that fragment of the Mechanism if he wasn’t.”
“What?!” Rachel sat up in shock, and Mulcahy gave her shoulder a little tap, just hard enough to knock her off-balance and tip her into the fountain.
“Sonofa—!” She came up sputtering, then grabbed Mulcahy’s ankle and hauled. He was purple with laughter, his humor racing through her; she didn’t have the mass to move him, and he tapped her with his other foot to send her falling backwards into the water again.
This time, she came up splashing.
It was a quick water fight, Rachel winning through sheer determination and Mulcahy’s insistence that they shouldn’t wake his wife. They ended up back on the same granite slabs, Rachel complaining bitterly about giardia.
When she was finished coughing, she asked, “You were kidding, right?”
“No,” he said, grinning. “The Hippos have been going through Hanlon’s contacts. They stumbled over a reference to the broker who hired Jenna Noura. Seems like Hanlon was researching professional art thieves a few months before the robbery.”
The thrill of a new lead fell apart as quickly as it had appeared. “Circumstantial, at best,”
“Yeah. Also, Hanlon didn’t approach the broker himself. They’re still trying to locate the intermediary who did it for him. They must have met in person, as there’s no data trail to connect them.”
“And you tell me this now?”
“Priorities,” he said. “The Hippos gave me their report yesterday morning, but it came in right after I learned the news story was about to break. And…” A trace of green guilt appeared as he chose his next words.
“You’re not sure what the Hippos gave you was obtained legally,” she guessed.
“I’ve put Mare on it,” he admitted. “She’s checking their sources. I made sure the Hippos had a warrant before I turned them loose on his records—if they followed due process, she’ll give you what they found, and you can turn it over to either the MPD or the Secret Service.”
“God,” Rachel groaned. She belly-flopped onto the slab, her wet clothing sucking at the rough surface. “So close!”
She didn’t ask him why he had set the Hippos on Hanlon if he knew they might not return anything viable in a court of law. Mulcahy wasn’t using the Hippos to bring Hanlon to justice, he was using them to retrieve material for OACET’s risk management strategies. The Hippos had been trained to get results under conditions in which law was a secondary consideration. They’d follow Mulcahy’s orders as best they could, but the legal process was complex. For an Agent who had worked as a government-sanctioned killer, it would be easy to stumble over data without fully appreciating the steps through which they had found it.
Hell, Mulcahy was probably glad they hadn’t outright shot Hanlon in the head and claimed it was an accident.
“It might still work out,” he said. “There was a large cash withdrawal from one of Hanlon’s offshore accounts around that time. It would have been enough to hire Noura.”
“It won’t work out.” Rachel knew the words were fact as she spoke. “He’s too good at this. Did the Hippos tell you why he wanted the piece of the Mechanism in the first place?”
Colors flashed across Mulcahy in wild combinations; within these was the same unforgettably vivid blue that Rachel saw when a life was snuffed out. “They didn’t find any mention of the fragment,” he said.
Rachel sat up and started at her boss. “Do you know why Hanlon wanted that fragment?”
“I can only guess that he needed the information in the inscription for a project.” Mulcahy’s comment was reasonable, his tone of voice perfectly measured. It was only by the voids in his surface colors that she knew he was hiding something from her.
“I learned how to recognize lies of omission the other day,” she told him. “Just so you know.”
A pop of color in a very distinctive brown came and went across his chest, the visual equivalent of someone saying, Shit!
Rachel covered her mouth to keep from laughing.
“It’s okay,” she assured him, and reached out to touch his bare shoulder. She made sure he understood—belonging, acceptance—before she pulled her hand away. “It drives me stark raving insane when you can’t tell me everything, but that’s okay. You’ve got a hard job. I don’t want it.”
They didn’t speak for a few minutes. She watched his colors churn, weaving and weighing outcomes, that vivid blue moving around as if he was trying to decide where it fit within their conversation.
“I d
on’t just want Hanlon to go to jail,” he said, his colors snapping into place, steely with the grays of stone and iron and edged weapons. “I want him to ruin himself.”
“Hmm?”
“It’d be one thing if he could look at us and blame us for his downfall. I don’t want that. When he finally breaks, I want it to be because the choices he made to save himself pushed him towards that end.
“I want him to hurt. I want him to burn. I want him to know that he put himself in a hell of his own making.
“I want him to go to prison knowing that he ruined himself. I want him to sit there and rot, forever, wondering what might have happened if he had made one decision differently.”
“Or braid the bedsheets into a noose,” Rachel said, voicing one of her own private fantasies.
That vivid blue flared like lightning. “Oh, he won’t kill himself,” Mulcahy said. “He’s too scared to die. He’ll survive as long as he can, and he’ll suffer the entire time.”
“Little single-minded of you, Señor Dantès.”
“Yeah.” He knotted his hands behind his head as he looked skyward. “I just have to make sure that I’m not so single-minded that I put us at risk. The best way to do that is to take OACET out of the equation entirely, so we set up scenarios that seem like good opportunities for Hanlon, but are designed to backfire on him.”
She nodded. OACET’s administrative meetings often turned into If-Then assessments, where if they allowed Hanlon to take certain steps, then these outcomes were most likely to occur…
They usually played with scenarios firmly rooted in reality; taxes and fees, political alliances, and so on. But sometimes they got bored and cruel, and on those days they played with possibilities that were only open to those whose minds could exist within cameras, or who could bend security systems to their will.
State Machine Page 25
