“What? No.” Rachel made a point of shutting the emotional spectrum down when she and Becca were sharing a personal moment, physical or otherwise. At times like those, reading emotions seemed somehow dishonest. She flipped on scans to find her friend a mix of uncertain oranges. “What’s wrong?”
Mare handed her a bright blue envelope. “This came for you via private courier.”
“Whoa. Whose?”
“One of the cheap companies everybody uses. The kid said someone dropped it off this evening and paid in cash for late-night delivery.”
Rachel slid a thumbnail under the fold, and sliced the envelope open. Inside was a small white card, the block lettering on its face crisp from a laser printer.
486-555-2128
0300J
MAD
“What the actual fuck,” Rachel muttered, before handing the card to Mare.
Mare stared at the card, her colors a perplexed orange. “Why would someone send you this?”
“I don’t know, but I’m military,” she said, as she went to tell Becca she needed to do some work and she’d rejoin her when she could. “MAD is something you never want to hear.”
They hurried towards Mulcahy’s office. It was late; she had about twenty minutes before three in the morning. The party was still going strong, and she had to resort to shouting and elbows to get through some of the tighter places.
This is a major hazard, she thought to herself, suddenly worried that all of OACET’s efforts might be swept away in the proverbial five-alarm fire.
Mare, her hand tight within Rachel’s to keep from getting swept away, replied, “The fire marshal is here. He didn’t seem too worried.”
“The fire marshal has a weakness for brunettes, and I noticed Josh invited a whole bunch of his lingerie model friends.”
They took the back way through the mansion. Rachel’s scans had told her that it was the easiest way upstairs, but they still needed to crawl over partygoers in various stages of sobriety.
Santino met them at the top. “What?” He shook his phone at her. “What kind of emergency?”
A wave of yellow-orange surprise passed from Mare’s hand into hers. “It’s Santino,” Rachel assured her. “He goes where I go.”
She handed the envelope to Santino, and the three of them hurried down the hall.
“Did you run the phone number?” her partner asked her.
“Legally? Of course not,” Rachel replied. “But if someone were to have crawled around in the registry, they probably would have found that this number was part of a block assigned to really cheap phones.”
“Burners?”
“I’m guessing. The phone that number is assigned to is inactive.”
“I bet its battery has been removed,” Santino said. “Or it’s been partly disassembled, depending on the model.”
Rachel stepped on the urge to shoot her partner a Look. “You’re probably right,” she said. “Is there any other way to track it?”
“No,” Santino replied. “Not until it’s got power. If it can’t receive or transmit data, there’s no way to locate it.”
“All right,” she said, and the three of them entered Mulcahy’s office.
Mare had briefed him during their mad sprint upstairs. Mulcahy was waiting in a beaten-down leather club chair, a pitcher of water on the coffee table in front of him; Hope was nowhere to be seen. He glanced towards Santino, then nodded.
“This is from Hanlon,” Rachel said, tossing the card towards him.
Mulcahy snagged it out of the air. “What’s your logic?” he asked, after giving the card a quick once-over. “The message is vague. It could be from anybody with a grudge against us.”
“Unless you take into account how he used military time instead of standard,” Rachel said. “In which case, he’s not angry, he’s offering a stalemate.”
“How so?”
“MAD is military shorthand for mutually assured destruction.”
Mulcahy placed the card on the coffee table and tented his fingers. “You think he wants to talk?”
“No. He knows we can go out-of-body in our avatars, right? A phone number is as good as an address to us, but these days, anyone—oh, say, the NSA—can record a phone conversation while it’s happening. He wants to meet face-to-face, probably in a public place, where any witnesses wouldn’t be able to see us and he’d be able to claim our recordings of the meeting are fakes.”
“Think like a Senator who’s in a battle to the death with three hundred and fifty pissed-off cyborgs,” Santino said. He had picked up on Rachel’s initial idea, and was fleshing out Hanlon’s plan as he spoke. “He wants to meet with you, but he knows you have a technological advantage. Even if he makes sure you can’t show up in person, you’ll still record everything as evidence. How does he strip that advantage from you?”
“He creates doubt within the public theater,” said Mulcahy. “The meeting will be under conditions in which recordings have reduced credibility. But Hanlon doesn’t have an implant—he can hear us through a phone line, but how will he be able to see us?”
Horrified greens slowly pulled themselves into Santino’s conversational colors. “I’m going to fucking murder Zockinski,” he said.
“A couple of pairs of Santino’s glasses have gone missing,” Rachel explained, and watched as her boss began to turn red. “We didn’t think it was worth mentioning.”
“Ah,” Mulcahy said. His reds began to subside, wrestled under control by professional blues, and he turned back to Santino. “What do we need to make this work?”
“Monitors,” Santino said. “Recording equipment on multiple hard drives. Someone to go with Rachel to make sure that the conversation is recorded from different perspectives, to make it harder for Hanlon to argue it’s been faked. And get some of those big-name law enforcement professionals who are drunk off their asses in your living room to get up here and serve as witnesses.”
Mulcahy’s colors rolled over on themselves, and forged themselves into armor. “I wish we could,” he said quietly.
Santino looked towards Rachel, who shrugged. “Risk assessment,” she said. “We don’t know what Hanlon wants to talk about.”
“If it’s Hanlon,” Mare added.
Rachel said nothing, but there wasn’t much doubt in her mind about who was on the other end of that phone number. Not too many people knew about the Agents’ out-of-body abilities, and nobody except Hanlon would call her out.
Within minutes, Mulcahy’s office had been converted to a rough facsimile of a media center. Rachel had just enough time to take a few deep breaths, to try and locate her game face beneath the happy buzz from the party.
Fuck Hanlon, she thought. We’re all here, trying to recover from a shitty day—aw hell, that’s why he wants to do this tonight—and he’s figured out another way to come after us. I bet he would bomb this place to the ground if he thought he could get away with it… Could he get away with it? Would he try? Oh, that son of a bitch, I bet he’s tried to buy a missile…
Her version of a game face had sharp edges. When she was good and thoroughly angry, she glanced towards Mulcahy, and opened a private link. His own share of anger roared into hers, his cold blue fury steaming over her red-hot rage, and together they merged into steel.
“We are gonna feel really dumb if this isn’t actually Hanlon,” she admitted, and he smiled within her head.
The phone attached to the number activated.
Mulcahy noticed, too. “We’re on,” he said.
“Give me sixty seconds alone,” she said, and managed to hide her fear that Hanlon might have found a way to murder them through their avatars.
She cast her mind into the aether and located the phone. It was nearby: she pinged it among the monuments at the southwest side of the Tidal Basin.
“Ready?” she asked.
Mulcahy agreed, and Rachel nodded at her partner before she put her head within the quiet nest of her arms. Santino flipped the power switch on
the nearby monitor as she stepped from her body to her avatar.
Senator Hanlon was staring back at her.
Rachel stepped backwards before she could catch herself, and found her avatar walking on water.
She took a quick look around to orient herself. Water cascaded down from massive granite blocks. Rough stone was everywhere; green and yellow light floated up from beneath the waterfalls and cast moving shadows against the walls.
Oh. This place again. Hanlon hadn’t picked the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial by accident. He was sitting on the flat rock where Hope Blackwell had been napping. It was as clear a message as he could send without erecting YOU CAN KEEP NOTHING FROM ME in giant letters across the Hollywood Hills.
She turned back towards Hanlon. In her avatar, her vision was nearly normal: she easily spotted the Bluetooth headset and the pair of glasses perched on his nose.
Rachel blinked as she recognized the glasses—one of Santino’s more recent prototypes.
We owe Zockinski an apology, she thought, and hoped the faulty battery pack was burning the shit out of the Senator’s ear.
“Not going to smile and ask if I want to sit down for a friendly conversation?” she asked.
Hanlon ignored her, and adjusted the glasses.
“Seems rude, to go to all of this trouble to speak to me, and not even a hello?” Rachel didn’t like this at all. She pushed a burst of static into the Bluetooth receiver. It squawked loud enough to make Hanlon flinch.
“Sorry,” she said, smiling. “I thought you couldn’t hear me.”
He glanced at his watch, and removed a small box from inside his jacket. The box was made of a sleek dark metal, about three times as thick as a smartphone and with a digital screen. It was almost too stylish to be useful, like a prop from a science fiction film whose only purpose was to impress the audience.
Rachel tried to ping it, and found the device couldn’t reply. There was no substance to it, nothing other than a fancy screen powered by a battery. This isn’t good, she thought to herself. Not good at all.
There was a pop, and Mulcahy’s avatar stepped into the air beside her.
“Senator,” he said.
Hanlon ignored him, too.
“He’s pretending he can’t see us,” Rachel said to Mulcahy. “I’ve already told him it’s extremely rude.”
Mulcahy’s avatar began to walk around Hanlon’s rock, like a wolf circling a treed animal. He leaned in, close enough to Hanlon to kiss…or bite.
Mulcahy’s smile was sharp. “Interesting,” he said.
Hanlon pretended to check his watch again, and then picked up his fancy hollow box. He stepped across the rocks to reach dry land, and began to head towards the Tidal Basin. Mulcahy walked in circles around Hanlon the entire time.
Rachel joined them on the granite pavers of the pavilion. The three of them went east, finally stopping in a secluded area just to the side of the Basin walkway.
She moved deeper into the tight, private link she was sharing with Mulcahy, and found nothing but sorrow and guilt.
“What?” she asked through their link.
“He’s not here to talk to us,” Mulcahy told her. His avatar’s eyes never left Hanlon, but she got the impression he was frantically searching for something else, something not in plain sight. “This is being staged for our benefit, and for anybody watching this recording.”
Then, Mulcahy’s avatar turned to look towards the lights of the city. “The distance isn’t a problem, but there’s thick tree cover… I couldn’t make this shot.”
If Rachel’s body hadn’t already been sitting quietly on a couch in Mulcahy’s office, her knees would have given way beneath her.
“I could,” she said. She was surprised to find her mental voice was strong. “Ami could.”
“Most very good snipers could,” he agreed. “But it’d be much easier for an Agent.”
Mulcahy’s avatar turned towards Hanlon. “Stop this,” he said. “I’ve got my people hunting. They’ll find your man.”
Hanlon tilted his head upwards, as if he wanted to gaze at the stars. Rachel could have screamed at his self-satisfied smirk.
It was a beautiful plan. If they had known the meeting spot in advance, Mulcahy could have had every combat-trained Agent stationed throughout the area. As it was, every Agent, combat-trained or not, within a mile’s radius of the Tidal Basin had dropped what they were doing to search for Hanlon’s sniper.
There weren’t many of them. Those few Agents who weren’t still at the mansion had gone home to their beds.
Barring a miracle, they’d never find the sniper in time.
“Should I call the police?” Rachel asked Mulcahy. She expected him to say no, that Hanlon’s trap was crafted to catch OACET, that bringing in outsiders would leave them vulnerable to—
“Absolutely,” he said, and turned towards the path to wait.
“I’ll get Santino to make the call, but we need help now. There are always MPD and security guards around the Basin,” Rachel said to Mulcahy. “Let me do a sweep and find—”
His avatar looked at hers, and she stilled her thoughts as she realized that there’d be no help coming. Hanlon had covered that angle, too.
“Can we shut him down through the Bluetooth? Distract him, maybe? Kill his glasses?” Rachel didn’t know what else they could do. She reached out to learn what she could do about the glasses, but Mulcahy stopped her.
“Watch,” he said.
A velociraptor—an honest-to-God dinosaur!—appeared in front of Hanlon. It was movie-sized, and the instant it took form in green light, it opened its mouth in a violent roar and lunged at the Senator’s face.
Hanlon shivered, but said nothing, and smiled in Mulcahy’s general direction as he stepped through the body of the snarling raptor.
“He knows our abilities,” he said. “He’s ready for us. All we can do is collect information and bear witness.”
Her avatar moved to stand beside Mulcahy’s, and they kept vigil as they waited for Hanlon’s victim.
(The Rachel back at the mansion blurted everything she and Mulcahy had shared in their link to Santino, begging him to find help, to get someone down there, to stop this before it happened...)
Then, through her avatar’s eyes, she saw Mitch Alimoren emerge from the bushes.
Oh, she thought. I could’ve sworn it’d be Summerville.
Miles away, Rachel yelled something to Santino, something about calling Alimoren and telling him to run, but she could already tell Alimoren wasn’t wearing anything digital. Hanlon must have told him to leave anything that could be tracked by an Agent in his car.
“Don’t do this,” Mulcahy’s avatar said to Hanlon. “You’re digging your own grave.”
Mulcahy’s guilt surged again, and Rachel picked a thought out of his mind. The image of a sniper’s rifle in a lockbox, two crazy men playing video games ten feet from it…
The force of the mystery crashed down on her as it all came together: the Hippos, drawn to the right place at the right time to save her; Ami’s missing rifle, which wasn’t missing, just locked away in the mansion’s saferoom; Mulcahy’s guilt at setting one particular trap…
I set something up for him, something irresistible, and he took the bait.
She wasn’t sure if Mulcahy’s voice in her mind was a memory or whether he was repeating himself—everything was taking on the thin, hazy quality of nightmares.
“Hanlon,” Rachel said. “Mulcahy’s telling the truth. The gun you took off of the roof? It can’t be traced back to OACET.”
Alimoren had come close enough for a proper greeting, and Hanlon walked the last few steps towards him.
Rachel’s avatar swooped in front of Hanlon, blocking Alimoren from Hanlon’s view. “You stupid shit!” she swore at Hanlon. “Mulcahy switched the rifles!”
“Agent Peng?” Mulcahy’s avatar said. “There’s no reason for him to believe us.”
Hanlon winked at her avatar before he walk
ed through it to reach Alimoren; Rachel didn’t feel a thing, but she still gasped in impotent rage.
Her link with Mulcahy was uncomfortably tight. It felt as if they were holding each other as they waited for the unthinkable. Guilt and frustration moved between them: they had never hated Hanlon as much as they did that moment.
“Should we be meeting in public?” Alimoren said. His words were slightly slurred; he was a good ways down the road towards drunk. He must have come straight from the party at the mansion.
Hanlon held up his fancy stage prop. “I’ve had people working on this for months,” he said. “It emits a frequency that prevents all electronic eavesdropping.”
Alimoren glanced at it. “Agent Peng can do something similar.”
“All Agents can,” the Senator said. “And now we can, too. This device not only blocks standard surveillance equipment, but it can prevent Agents from observing or recording anything within a ten-meter radius.”
You fucking liar, Rachel thought. It’s nothing but a beeping box of social engineering that’ll put reasonable doubt in a juror’s mind when they watch our recordings of Alimoren’s murder.
Alimoren, all unwitting, tried to help her. He glanced down at the device as he said, “Nice! Why haven’t you put those into production?”
“It’s a one-off,” Hanlon answered smoothly. “Each machine has to be calibrated to the Agents. I was able to make this one before they caught on. It works, but I can’t make more without their help, and they won’t help me.”
“You sure?” Alimoren said. “Agent Peng—”
“I’m sure,” Hanlon cut him off. “I’ve asked. Many times.”
“You might want to have someone else approach Agent Peng. She was extremely helpful with the White House break-in.”
“I thought they would be,” Hanlon said. “That’s why I told you to bring Agent Peng and her team on board for the investigation.”
Miles away, Rachel’s heart missed a beat. She felt Santino’s hand grab hers as they both tried to keep themselves from screaming.
Hanlon pretended to read something in Alimoren’s face. “You don’t believe what they’re saying about me, that I developed the conditioning technologies?”
State Machine Page 31
