“She says you tell good stories,” Santino said. “And she says she needs a story, not another lecture, to put all of this into perspective.”
“Oh,” McCrindle gazed wistfully towards the hole in his store, a purple-gray sigh blowing over him. “Well, I’ll do what I can. Coffee?”
“Please,” Rachel said. The sun was up, and the sleepless hours were dragging on her.
McCrindle took them to the comfortable nook at the back of his store. “What did the inscription say?” he asked, as he plugged a canister into his coffee maker. “You don’t happen to have it on you, by chance?”
“No, it’s on its way back to Greece,” Santino said, and McCrindle’s shoulders and colors both sank. “But we’ve scanned the fragment, and the inscription is being translated. What we’ve got thus far makes it sound as though the Mechanism could also be applied to astrology.”
“Ah,” McCrindle said. “That makes perfect sense. Astrology was a significant aspect of astronomy during that era.”
“Astronomy?” Rachel asked. “I was told that astrology was religious, not scientific.”
“In a way, but our definition of religion is somewhat different than the ancient Greeks. We think of it as a form of worship. The Greeks thought of it as a way of understanding their world. Zeus explained the thunder, Apollo’s chariot explained the cycle of day and night, that sort of thing. Gods created a context through which natural phenomena made sense.”
McCrindle gave her the first mug. The coffee had an unpleasant chemical undertone, no doubt something left over from the effort of removing the dead raccoons, but she pushed through it to find the caffeine.
“At the time the Mechanism was crafted,” McCrindle continued, “astrology was most closely related to fortune-telling, but a good astrologer needed to understand how the planets worked. Both astrology and astronomy were derived from the study of celestial phenomena, and both were used to define our place within the universe. Greek astronomy was very rough, of course—I think they only knew of four planets in the solar system? Five?—but we all have to start somewhere.
“If I remember correctly, the Mechanism could be used to plot how the planets moved, and to predict eclipses and other celestial events? And it worked backwards, where it could be used to observe celestial alignments on the date of a person’s birth?”
“Yes,” Santino replied. He took the second mug from McCrindle, and grimaced at the taste.
McCrindle didn’t notice, lost in his story. “Then the Mechanism would have been invaluable to astrologers. A skilled astrologer needed to have an accurate understanding of celestial events, so he could accurately interpret the forces that governed human lives. This made astrologers somewhat of a cross between a scientist and a magician, you understand? If the heavens were a divine language of past, present, and future, then astrologers interpreted the word of the gods for humankind. They were a bridge between the worlds.
“I suppose,” McCrindle said with a chuckle, “if you think about it from that point of view, the Mechanism was just another form of communications technology.”
Rachel blinked.
And then, as easily as squeezing a silver juice pouch, the angles on the problem changed.
Hanlon, spinning the science of the implant out of data that nobody else seemed to have.
Mako, his old classroom blackboards holding a handful of known facts, and a hundred times that in unknown questions.
Santino’s insistence that mathematics was made of constants that were governed by rules, and that understanding those rules changed how and why those constants functioned…
And Mulcahy, who knew why Hanlon wanted the Mechanism, but was unable to tell her.
The Mechanism isn’t the only out-of-place technology in this case, she thought to herself. I’m carrying around the other one in my head.
She stood, and said in a voice that didn’t sound like hers: “I need to make a call.”
Rachel ran out to the alley behind the shop, and pinged Mulcahy.
He hadn’t slept either, but where she was starting to waver around her edges, Mulcahy was simply not allowing himself to feel exhaustion. His presence in her mind was the same familiar steel. “Penguin?”
“I need information,” she said. “I’m going to ask you a series of questions about a possible connection between our implants and the Mechanism.”
Shock cut through their link. “Rachel—”
“No!” she shouted. “No hedging, no wordplay. I need answers.”
He didn’t reply. She wondered if she’d overstepped, if he’d break their connection and ignore her pings for the rest of the day.
“I’m considering it,” he finally said, his double meaning carrying the slightest suggestion of humor. “Ask. I’ve promised to protect this information, so I’m limited in what I can tell you.”
“I can work with that,” she said. “I don’t need to know exactly how Hanlon intended to use the inscription on the Mechanism. I just need to know why he wanted it.”
“All right.”
“Is there a connection between our implants and the Mechanism?”
More silence, until he answered, “Probably.”
I was right, she thought to herself. Or Mako was right… Throw a couple of millennia between technologies, and it’s dinosaurs all the way down.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” he said. This time, his humor was easier to feel. “We’re not completely sure there’s a connection between them yet, but that’s what Hope is going to Greece to learn.”
“Is Hanlon sure there’s a connection?”
“Sure enough to try to rob the White House.”
“Do our implants and the Mechanism operate on the same frequencies?”
“What?” Mulcahy’s confusion bubbled up at her question. “No. The Mechanism was clockwork—What does that even mean?”
“Talk to Mako. Did Hanlon think the Mechanism could be used to help him understand how our implant works?”
“Yes.”
They don’t operate the same way, she thought. They don’t use the same information, or serve the same function. McCrindle was basically pulling that comparison about communication technologies out of his ass…
And then she had it. “Was it something about how the Mechanism was made?”
Another long pause, and then, “Yes.”
“Last question. It’s a big one.”
“All right.”
“Do I need to actually understand any of this bullshit to solve this case?”
She felt him grin. “No.”
“Thank fuck-all goodness for that small blessing. Never drop a case like this on me again. Bye.”
“Happy hunting, Penguin.”
She waved her arms frantically through the window, then rapped on the glass, and then finally had to run back into the Trout and Badger to drag Santino away from the antiques dealer.
“I was too close to it,” Rachel said, pulling her partner over to the dumpsters. “I thought Hanlon was trying to frame OACET for something—he’s tried that before—but this isn’t a frame job! This is his fucking exit strategy, and he’s doing as much damage to us as he can on the way out!”
Rachel began to pace in circles, moving the pieces around in her head until the picture began to make sense to her.
“He wanted the Mechanism,” she said. “That was his goal. That was why he hired Jenna Noura—she was the best thief-for-hire out there. He expected Noura to pull it off! If she did, none of the rest of this would have happened. But stealing an object from the White House is a long shot to begin with, so he put a backup plan into place in case Noura got caught.”
“What did you say in Mulcahy’s office?” she asked him, and kept going before he could reply. “Put yourself in Hanlon’s position. He’s losing. He knows he’s losing his support with Congress, and Big Telecommunications is shifting their alliance to back us, not him. He knows there’s a huge news story coming—the big one, the one that OACET’s b
een waiting for, to drive the final nail in his coffin. When that news broke, it’d go badly for him, no matter what he did to try and get ahead of it.
“He’s wealthy, famous, and politically connected. Which of those would you give up if you had to?”
“Politics,” Santino said. He didn’t need to think about his answer. “All you need to succeed in politics are the right connections. Fame and money will help you get those back, even if you burned yourself before.”
“Exactly!” she said. “So, what do you do if you’re rich, famous, and hold political office, and someone’s about to yank all of that away from you?
“You make a sacrifice. Maybe you decide to give up the source of power you’re least likely to miss. The easiest one to recover after the scandal blows over and the general public forgets the rumors about you. You start to set plans into motion that will allow you to bow out of politics.
“But do you say you want to spend more time with your family? No. That’s what guilty people say. You want to make sure that there’s so much confusion over what really happened that the media and the general public will never really know the conditions that caused you to leave. And you time it so the big career-ending revelation that OACET’s been waiting for will break at the same time the public is focused on a murder in the White House. Because White House!”
Rachel realized that her circles had taken her over to the part of the alley where a single beam of sunlight managed to trickle down. She turned her head up to the sun and faced it. “And then,” she said, “immediately after the news story that OACET’s been waiting for hits the news cycle, the Secret Service agent who leads the investigation is murdered. Three major news stories—bang! bang! bang!—and the first and third are part of the same story. Oh gosh, a murder at the White House! Oh gosh, look at what Senator Hanlon did to those poor kids! Oh gosh, the Secret Service agent in charge of the White House murder investigation was assassinated!
“Now, given the limited space in the news cycle, and the abysmal attention span of the average American, which of those stories do you think the media would drop first?”
“I’ll do you one better,” Santino said. “What if the gun used to kill the Secret Service agent was the personal weapon of an OACET assassin?”
She froze as another piece of the puzzle clicked into place. “Jason’s theory,” she breathed. “Where it’d only take one big mistake to cause Congress and the public to turn on us, forever.”
Santino nodded. “If Ami’s gun were used in the murder, and the news of the brainwashing is still so fresh in everybody’s minds, they’ll assume Ami snapped.”
“Not only that, but they’ll assume OACET was involved in the break-in,” Rachel said. “Those files on Noura’s phone would incriminate—”
“What files?”
She knew the words were a mistake as soon as she had said them. Her partner’s conversational colors froze, and then began to change into a furious red sunset against an icy winter sky.
“You went snooping around Noura’s phone?” he asked. “You told me—”
He turned towards his car and left her standing in the alley.
Rachel flipped off her implant and counted to fifty in the dark, then went back into the Trout and Badger to retrieve her purse and to bid goodbye to McCrindle. A few minutes later, she tapped on the window of Santino’s car before she let herself in.
“Did you tamper with the evidence?”
“Yes. Can we talk about this later? It isn’t the time—”
“No!” He slammed a fist into the steering wheel so hard that Rachel thought the air bag might deploy on him. “It’s always the time! That’s the problem! These issues don’t just stop when it’s convenient!”
Rachel quickly slapped a heavy-duty shield around the car.
“Why the hell would you go and tamper with evidence?” he asked. “You and the rest of OACET walk around shouting that the law is this great shining object to be worshiped like a god, but it’s… What? A selective god? An opt-in god?
“Shut the fuck up,” she snapped. They both knew they were too tired to have this conversation. “You’re as bad as I am. Five hours ago, I’m running an illegal search for the information for Hanlon’s unlisted burner phone, and you have zero problems with it.”
“There’s a huge difference between retrieving information and tampering with evidence—”
“Not when both will get your case thrown out in court,” she said.
“Yes, there is a difference!” Santino shouted. “Don’t you think the general public would be more okay with a peek at a secure database instead of wiping information?”
Would you rather have someone prying into your emotions or spying on your naked body… Rachel shook herself to get rid of that thought.
“No!” she said. She ran her fingers through her short hair, feeling the bumps and bruises on her skin from the night before. “No, I don’t! I think the general public’ll be willing to believe the worst of us no matter what we get caught doing! Which is why I wiped those files, Santino! I’m trying my fuck-all hardest to make sure we’re trusted, and those files would have ruined us! And they were all lies! I’m not going to feel like shit for erasing false information!”
He took a deep breath, then another, and he wrestled his reds down beneath professional blues. “Tell me what happened,” he said, in a more normal tone of voice.
Rachel sighed, and gave him the version that wouldn’t turn the morning into a full-on confessional. “I found her phone, and wanted to know why she recognized me at the farmers’ market. I poked around and did a brief search for my name. I found my name in one file, and when I went deeper, I found a whole bunch of data buried within the code. It was false information designed to make OACET look complicit in the White House robbery, and—”
“You wiped code?” Yellow-white panic erupted within his surface colors, and the professional blues bubbled away. “You can’t just erase a file—”
“I know!” she shouted back. “I know! Jason taught me the basics, and I turned it over to him when I knew I was out of my depth. He’s the one who wiped the false files, not me.”
Relief moved up within him, choking out his panic.
“It’s okay,” she assured him. “I’m a terrible cyborg. I leave all of the tech stuff to the good ones.”
“Jesus,” he said. “Give me a heart attack, why don’t you?”
“I know my limits,” she said, and fought the urge to pout.
“Huh,” he said, staring out the window. “Where was the first file stored?”
“It was hidden. Noura put it in her games applications.”
“That’s not hidden,” Santino said. “That’s just a superficial layer of camouflage. There’s something I don’t like about that, like…”
“Like what?”
“Let me play with that idea a little,” he said. “Did you make a copy? I’d like to look at it.”
“Jason backed up what he could to the OACET servers.”
“What he could?”
“Some of it’s gone,” she said. “Permanently erased.”
He glared at her, his anger sharpening to a point. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“What I can’t!” She was shouting again, eight inches from his face, and livid. “I wish you were part of the collective so I could tell you this shit! I really do! I wish I didn’t have to use Jason as a runaround and I could just work with you! But I can’t, so we both have to deal with that, okay?!”
He pounded the steering wheel again.
Then they just sat there.
“You running emotions?” Santino finally asked.
“Yeah.”
“Turn them off,” he said. And added, after a moment, “Please.”
She did, and he went from furious reds to a man sitting in a too-small vehicle, his head propped on his hand as he rested his arms on the window ledge. It was about as far away as he could get from her while still remaining in the car, and she
realized her own posture was mirroring his. She took her arm off of the ledge, and slumped down in her seat.
“What would you have done?” she asked. “If you found a bunch of lies that would have done serious damage to you and your…uh…”
“My community?”
“That works, I guess. I’d also go with ‘family’.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I do know if this gets out, your reputation is ruined. Not OACET’s—yours.”
“OACET’s too, probably,” she said. “Jason’s one big thing, the excuse they need to pull us all down.”
“Yeah,” Santino said. He started the car, and pulled into the morning traffic.
“I’m sorry I told you to shut up,” she said, as she dropped her shield.
“You do that all the time.” He made a meaningless gesture with one hand. “Sorry I jumped to conclusions.”
They went a few miles down the road without speaking. Santino found a drive-thru. They got coffee and doughnuts, and sat in the parking lot as they ate. The caffeine and calories brought them back to their senses, and they both felt the last five hours settle in their stomachs. Rachel wrapped up her third doughnut and dropped it back in the paper sack.
“I’m not okay with you wiping evidence,” Santino said.
“I’m not okay with it either,” she replied. “But when you see it, you’ll understand why I did it.”
“I understand now,” he sighed. “That’s the problem.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t know if it helps, but it was buried deep. So deep, anyone searching the phone might not have found it.”
“That’s not how it works. The FBI would have hooked it up to a data processor…” he started to say, and she gave him a mild glare.
He laughed. A little. But it was enough.
“We need to have another conversation about the slippery slope,” Rachel said. “If we don’t, you won’t stop wondering what’s going on behind the scenes with me.”
Santino shrugged. “I don’t think I’ll ever stop wondering,” he said. “That’s part of the problem, too.”
State Machine Page 33
