Not this time. Today, her first order of action was to find out how Jenna Noura had recognized her at the farmers’ market.
The easiest answer was that Noura had recognized her from the very few press conferences she had given after the Glazer case, but Rachel had grown up in Texas. A stereotypically southern part of Texas. There had been one other Chinese girl in her high school, and despite being separated by two grades and different haircuts, Rachel couldn’t remember a single week when the two of them hadn’t been confused by everyone from students to teachers to cafeteria workers.
Rachel didn’t give too many people the benefit of the doubt, and saw no reason to make an exception for Noura. If she was wrong, and Noura had had an exceptional memory, there’d be nothing to find.
If she was right, she wanted to get to the evidence before anyone else.
Then, she wanted to learn how Noura had been connected to Jonathan Glazer.
And, if there was any time left, Rachel planned to nuke any potentially incriminating evidence into digital dust.
She sent her scans through the wall. It was a pleasant enough room: she had expected Noura to have rented the motel’s best suite, but instead she found a clean, practical layout. A small kitchenette, a large bathroom, and a workspace next to a double bed. A professional makeup kit was open in the bathroom, its contents spread out across the vanity. On the bathroom floor, a pile of pajamas and a towel.
Nothing was packed; empty bags were still tucked neatly in the nearby closet. Jenna Noura had expected to return to her hotel after a quick stop at Dupont Circle, and Rachel felt a small pang at plans forever interrupted.
She moved around the room, searching for anything paper or digital. The usual guide to local eateries was on the counter, and a paperback book with a broken spine lay on the bedstand. Rachel pored through these as best as she could, looking for photographs, scraps of loose text, anything that would suggest content had been added or changed…
Nothing. Noura had packed up everything on paper and mailed it to herself as insurance. Rachel figured she hadn’t wanted everything in the same place, in case she were caught and needed a bargaining chip.
Rachel turned her attention to the only digital devices in the room: the cell phone on the small work desk and the portable printer beside it.
She reached out through her implant into the guts of the phone. It had an incredible amount of battery life left, and she poked around to find that it had been modded out to survive for full weeks on a single charge. She suppressed the command to activate the screen as she searched through its drive. There, tucked within a bunch of innocuous puzzle games, were a series of files.
One of them had her name on it.
She opened that file. A standard dossier, with nothing about her that wasn’t already in the MPD’s record. A fast text search for Glazer returned a single paragraph:
If caught, find a way to talk privately with Peng. Give her this message: “Glazer says hello.” She will then work with you to help you escape. Agree with her requests.
Rachel swore at herself, then returned to the text. She quickly changed it to:
If caught, your best chance of escape is to manipulate Peng. She is an idiot who is easily tricked.
She exited the folder, and began to apply the skills she had made Jason teach her.
It was like layering a fresh coat of paint over a bumpy wall. Changes to code left traces deep within themselves, and anyone with the knowledge could look at the surface and see that something had been changed beneath. Jason had shown her that changes to code couldn’t be superficial—she couldn’t just alter a time stamp and call it done. Instead, she worked within layer after layer of code, making sure that rewriting that one small paragraph didn’t leave marks.
When she was sure everything was as smooth as possible, she poked and prodded the contents of the other files, just to be sure. Nothing stood out as incriminating to her or OACET. She fixed the time stamps on these to hide when they were last accessed, and had nearly decided to call it good when her implant did its twitching thing.
Something deep within the data was calling to her.
More damned puppies, she thought to herself, and grinned.
Despite a couple hours’ of intense practice, she still lacked Jason’s skill at moving from point to point within a computer; the raw code was still meaningless to her. Maybe over time, she’d develop the ability to consciously recognize a significant chunk of data. As it was, she could do nothing but command—Take me there—and let go.
And then she was there.
Files layered within files, hidden under passwords and programs and…
All of it was about OACET.
Well, fuck, she thought to herself, as she felt cold dread claw its way into her stomach.
“Peng? Everything okay?”
It was Zockinski’s voice, and she didn’t have to move her scans to him to know he was getting annoyed. She usually walked a room in half the time.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, and muttered something about checking the contents of the cosmetics case for poison.
Rachel called Jason, briefed him as quickly as she could, and turned control of the phone over to him with the order to back the whole thing up on OACET’s private server before he scrubbed it.
“Make sure it’s perfect,” she said. “This is getting curiouser and curiouser—from what I’ve read, those files are pure bullshit. It makes it look as though we’ve worked with Jenna Noura on other crimes.”
“How did you find this?” he asked her. “It’s buried really deep. Nobody would have found these files unless they had a reason to go into the phone’s source code.”
“The puppies were barking,” she said. “I need to go. The boys are getting restless.”
“Gotcha. I’ll let you know what I find.”
“Thanks,” she said, and stepped back into her own mind.
“What didja find?” asked Zockinski, as her head came up.
“Efficiency suite. She’d been here a while, and nothing is packed. There’s a phone and a portable printer on the work desk, and no other documentation,” she replied.
“Room tossed?” Hill asked.
“No, it’s clean. Unless it was searched by pros, we’re the first ones here since Noura locked it up. I took my time looking for poison, but it looks clean.”
“What’s on the phone?” Santino asked.
“It’s password protected,” she said, not exactly lying in case Hill caught it. “I’d like to wait until the warrant gets here.”
And there’s the slippery slope again, Rachel thought to herself, as they all headed downstairs towards the motel’s public coffee maker. She could justify anything—up to and including murder—if it protected OACET. Letting Glazer escape had been for the good of OACET and to protect her friends at the MPD, both, but now…
Well. Except for that one small change, she had left that one file with her information in it intact. Nothing in that file had struck her as dangerous to either her or OACET. It had been enough information for Noura to pick her out of a crowd. And purging the phone of those rampant red herring files didn’t bother her at all.
Rachel tossed those ideas around as they sat, mostly silent, waiting for Alimoren and his team to arrive so they could enter the room itself. She took out her new tablet and pretended to play a puzzle game, the others around her also busy on their phones.
It gave her time to think.
She didn’t like how things were starting to play out. It didn’t have the feel of a long con, not like the Glazer case, but there was just enough evidence to suggest that OACET was somehow involved. Whoever had hired Noura had given her enough information to recognize Rachel on sight, and had told their hit men to avoid shooting the Agent…
Why did Alimoren ask us to get involved? Sure, the four of them were getting a good reputation for handling weird cases, but they were a fairly new team. A more seasoned team from the MPD, or a federal agency, should have
been brought in to handle an incident at the White House.
And who knew enough about the Glazer incident to make an educated guess about her involvement in his escape?
She was flailing in questions.
She couldn’t help but think of Mulcahy, setting traps left and right. Most of those traps would never be tripped, but they were there all the same, waiting for someone to stagger into it, unknowingly putting themselves right where someone wanted them…
“Got your data backed up.”
Rachel was strung too tight; she barely managed to keep from shouting aloud when Jason opened a new link. She took a deep breath to steady herself. “Could you please remember to ping me before you barge in?”
“Yeah. Just wanted you to know the phone is clean. I left the relevant case files, but I took out the hidden content. I did some overwrites, too, and dated them back to the last restore a few months ago. If anyone goes that deep, they won’t find anything.”
“Did you…” She didn’t know how to ask, not through a link. Private link or not, anyone within the collective might drift by, keeping a respectful distance from their walls but close enough to hear what they were talking about on the other side.
To her astonishment, Jason pushed Glazer’s core color of sandalwood towards her. “Him?”
“Yes!”
“There was some bullshit in there about the two of you,” Jason admitted. “Total bullshit, but it was good stuff. Anybody who had access to a timeline could put a plausible scenario together.” He paused, then added, “That information doesn’t exist anymore.”
She showed him the distinctive green of OACET’s projections, with the yellow she associated with curiosity.
“I know what the green means. I don’t get the yellow,” he said.
“It’s a question.”
“Oh. No. Not on…” the OACET green was turned from his mind back to hers. “…that server, either. It’s gone. Gone-gone.”
She took another breath, and thought of a lovely blue.
“Uh…relief?”
“Yes! And, Jason…”
“At this point, I’m in this hole as deep as you are,” he said, a little harshly, but then added, “You’re welcome.”
She sent him the feeling of a friendly hug as he broke their link.
Rachel got up for another cup of the motel’s awful coffee, and by the time she returned her seat, Alimoren and two of his agents were walking through the glass double doors of the hotel lobby.
Let the games begin, she thought.
Alimoren got as far as the front desk before he caught sight of them in the lobby. There was a muffled moment as he asked the other agents with him to work with the desk clerk and find the room on the passkey, and then he turned towards the group from the MPD in a sickly orange-gray resignation.
The four of them stared up at Alimoren with their best cop faces.
“I wondered why you left the post office,” he said.
“Matilda the Hun knew her job,” Rachel said. “It was in safe hands until you got there.”
Alimoren nodded. “So…”
“Room 228,” Hill said.
“Hasn’t been opened,” Zockinski said.
“I performed a remote digital search,” Rachel said. “Her belongings appear untouched.”
Alimoren stared at her.
“Hill and I are fine, by the way,” Rachel added. “Except for his shoulder, of course. I’m sure you were wondering.”
Alimoren’s orange-gray resignation bloomed, green guilt within its center. It was an ugly combination. “Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “After Noura’s death, my supervisors decided you were a liability.”
“Not even a phone call,” Santino said with a sigh.
“You tore up half of downtown D.C. I said I’d take the blame for that, and I did. There were diplomats and members of Congress in some of those vehicles. It was a security nightmare.”
“Found the murder weapon, found the suspect, caught the suspect…” Rachel began, ticking points off on her fingers.
“Noura is dead.” Alimoren wasn’t budging. “The hit team was hired through an intermediary. We don’t have any further leads to who hired her, and she didn’t die under my care, so she’s a literal dead end.”
Ouch. That one hurt. “You don’t have any additional leads yet,” Rachel said, pointing in the direction of Noura’s room. “You better believe that if Noura sent herself a second package, she knew things could go pear-shaped. She left you enough crumbs to track down the person who hired her.”
“Lucky you got here before someone else did,” Santino said.
“Really lucky nobody bothered to call the press and give them a hot tip on where the White House Murderess was staying,” Zockinski added.
“We would have gotten here,” Alimoren said.
“Some people might actually say thank you,” Zockinski said to Santino, who nodded as he put on a small scowl.
“We had one loose end,” Alimoren said. “Thank you for tracking it down for us.”
“We live to serve,” Zockinski said.
“What do you want?”
“To be treated as though we’ve been of use to you,” Rachel said. “One little car chase shouldn’t erase that.”
The Secret Service agent’s colors began to smolder in slow red rage.
“One big car chase,” she amended. “One big…career-ending car chase?”
Alimoren gave in, a small breeze of purple humor blowing away the red. “Not that bad,” he admitted. “Just do me the courtesy of remembering that I have been protecting you,” he said. It was a general you, but there was OACET green and Southwestern turquoise in there. “My superiors thought it’d be better if someone else took responsibility for the chase.”
Ouch, again. “Thanks,” she said to Alimoren.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said with a shrug. “I’m the one who made the call, and I promised to protect you.”
“Any progress?” Hill asked.
“No,” Alimoren said. “Not really. The hit team who chased you are mercenaries. Foreign nationals who entered the country illegally, most of them. It’s turned into a jurisdictional nightmare, and we haven’t gotten any leads on who hired them, or why. They’re willing to talk, but all they’ve said was they were supposed to eliminate Noura and recover the package, while not harming the Agent.”
“Why bother to leave Peng alive?” asked Zockinski. She gave him a soul-withering look, and he quickly added, “Not that we mind, but for them, that’s just an extra complication.”
“I don’t know,” Alimoren said. “I imagine nobody wants three hundred and fifty Agents pissed at them.”
“Three hundred and forty-nine,” Rachel corrected him. “Y’know. If I were dead.”
“Have you at least run facial recognition scans of the crowd at the farmers’ market?” Santino asked. “Noura was there to meet someone.”
“Of course.” Alimoren’s conversational colors were beginning to go red again; he didn’t like Santino questioning his performance. “Not too many hits, and we followed up on those that popped. Nobody rated as a suspect.”
“Mind if we take a second look at the tapes?” Santino asked. “The same digital specialist from OACET who helped identify Noura might be able to find something new.”
That red anger shot up and over Alimoren, but he gave a mild, “Sure thing. I’ll have the files sent to Agent Atran within the hour.”
Alimoren’s team had finished their own brush with bureaucracy at the front desk, and were walking towards the elevators, the motel manager in tow. The men from the MPD stood, ready to follow them so as not to be accidentally-on-purpose cut out of the investigation a second time.
Santino glanced towards Rachel. “Coming?”
“Reload,” Rachel said, holding up the motel’s flimsy paper cup. “Meet you in Noura’s room.”
Nobody else wanted a refill; the coffee had the taste and consistency of watered-down motor oil. Two cu
ps had been all that Rachel could stomach. She planned to drop the third in a convenient trash can on the way upstairs.
What she needed was a moment to herself. Something Alimoren had said was rattling around in her brain. He had said that his superiors wanted someone to blame. A car chase, a hit team in hot pursuit, Jenna Noura dying in the back seat… If anybody else had been driving, it was unlikely that the blame would have been pinned on the driver. But she had been driving—an Agent had been driving—and she would have made a great scapegoat.
And nobody seemed to care.
Rachel had assumed that’s what Mulcahy had meant when he had said he was doing damage control. She had thought he had knocked this one out of the park: yes, the news coverage did name “OACET Agent Rachel Peng” as the driver, but so far the blame seemed to fall on that mysterious someone who had hired the hit team.
It wasn’t what she had expected. When she had gone to bed last night, she was sure she’d wake up to another round of alarmist headlines—OACET AGENT HATES AMERICAN FLAG, GOES ON RAMPAGE AT HISTORIC HOSPITAL—or some such. Sure, the news of what Hanlon had done to them broke this morning, but it only broke within one specific media body. The others were now playing catchup, but yesterday they had had plenty of time to explore this next chapter of the White House murder scandal.
What was going on here?
She felt sure she was on to something. Something about the media, and news cycles, and…
“Agent Peng?”
Her train of thought derailed straight into Alimoren’s conversational colors, where he offered her the deep wine red of sympathy.
Oh, dammit.
Well, she should have expected this.
“I heard the news. Are you—”
“I’ve been thoroughly vetted, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she said, as she went through the motions of making her new cup of coffee fit for consumption. “My involvement with your case won’t hurt your chances in court.”
“That’s not what I was about to say.” Alimoren’s sympathy strengthened.
She nodded. Sugar, sugar, more sugar…something that may, or may not, be cream…
State Machine Page 28
