“Agent Atran?” Sturtevant turned to Jason. “Have you made any additional progress on the video footage?”
Jason shrugged. “Yes. I haven’t found anything that might be useful from the security cameras, but we might be getting somewhere on the facial recognition scans.”
Rachel remembered the thirteen fully-rendered green statues that had greeted her in Jason’s office, the rogues’ gallery of felons who had been present on Gayle Street prior to the bombing. “Did one of the suspects pop?” she asked him.
“No, not them,” Jason said to her. He turned to Sturtevant to explain. “One of the things I noticed when I ran population analytics was that ranking military officers had stopped coming down to Gayle Street. This seemed off to me, so I called around. Turns out that someone made an anonymous donation to a catering company. The last week? Gourmet meals and high-end coffee and desserts, free of charge for almost every military organization in downtown D.C. The company sent me copies of the menus; it was really good stuff. I wouldn’t have gone looking for food, either.”
“Didn’t anyone think that was suspicious?” Santino asked.
Jason shook his head. “Happens all of the time,” he said. “It’s backdoor lobbying. An anonymous party supplies the food, then someone ‘accidentally’ lets the name of the donor slip out, usually before a decision on a grant or a contract. The catering service isn’t usually a five-star affair, but Congress is planning a massive budget overhaul on the military next month. No one questioned it.”
“We’re trying to track down the donor?” Sturtevant asked.
“Of course.”
“Good. And this?” Sturtevant said, moving aside his mug and an old piece of cardboard stained with multiple coffee rings. A newspaper had been under these; Rachel didn’t bother to flip frequencies to check the headline.
“We didn’t have any knowledge of that story,” Santino said.
“I know,” Sturtevant replied. “Neither did I—neither did anybody at MPD—and we should have had some warning. Usually when someone up on Capitol Hill drags us into a situation, there’s someone else ready to block them.”
He drummed his fingers on the newspaper for a few seconds, and then pointed at Santino and Jason. “You two can leave.”
Rachel and her partner exchanged a long look before the two men stood and saw themselves out of the office. Rachel settled herself in Santino’s chair, and watched Sturtevant’s colors weave in and out of each other, a professional blue over and through a mesh made up of yellows and her own turquoise core.
“Is there,” Sturtevant said, “a particular health issue you’d like to tell me about?”
“I was not injured in the fall,” Rachel said, her insides suddenly plummeting as if she were back in Bell’s rickety old elevator. “Other than my hands, and they’re healing well. Thank you for asking.”
“We’re doing this the hard way, then,” Sturtevant said. “Agent Peng, are you blind?”
“Sir, would you like to go down to the shooting range with me?” Rachel said.
“Yes or no, Agent Peng? Are you blind?”
“No,” she fired back. Short of a medical test, which the MPD was not authorized to perform on her, there was no way they could confirm the condition of her eyes. Besides, she was not blind.
“Agent Peng? Are you capable of processing visual data and interpreting it in a manner similar to myself?
“Actually, wait. Let me rephrase so there can be no possible misunderstanding,” Sturtevant said. He leaned forward and wrapped his fingers together, his colors a focused, piercing blue. “Agent Peng, can you process and interpret visual data in a manner similar to the majority of persons within the general sighted population?”
“I don’t know if I can answer that, sir,” she said, almost sadly. “That’s one of those trick questions, isn’t it? How can I know if you and I perceive the same colors? I have no way of knowing what you experience when you see the color blue.
“Sir? Is this a test?” she added, as he glared at her.
Sturtevant closed his eyes. Rachel counted to ten, slowly. When she reached ten Mississippi, Sturtevant took a deep breath, then reopened his eyes and fixed them on her. “I can’t protect you if you won’t let me,” he said.
“With all due respect, sir, I don’t need your protection.”
“If you work for me, you get it, whether you’re on my payroll or not. Somebody out there hates you, Agent Peng, and when he’s ready, he’s going to try to destroy you. I would very much like to do what I can to prevent that from happening.”
They sat, staring at each other. Rachel knew she needed to either blink or look away before he did—staring contests with her tended to end when the other person got the squirming sensation that something about her eyes was really, really off—and she wasn’t about to do either of those. Instead, she said, “You remember last August? When I told you we needed to talk?”
“Vividly.”
“Excuse me for a minute.” Rachel stood and yanked the door open; Sturtevant’s secretary was listening by the keyhole. “You are on a coffee break,” she told him. “Starting now. Run.”
As the mousy man raced off, and Rachel closed and locked the office door, she reached out through the link and told the head of OACET to come join her at First District Station. Then, she began wrapping frequencies into an invisible silver sphere around her and Sturtevant. When the weaves were secure, she expanded the sphere to encompass all of Sturtevant’s office, just in case. “Your phones won’t work until we’re done,” she warned him.
He glanced towards his computer monitor, where a notification had popped up to warn him that all network connections had dropped, and nodded.
“You are aware that a certain Senator is biased against my organization in general, and myself in particular,” Rachel said.
“I am extremely aware,” he said. “Did you know that Senator Hanlon has been trying to have me fired? That he has been whispering in certain ears that the MPD is corrupt and needs to go through a good housecleaning?”
She blinked. Sturtevant wasn’t lying. “This is news to me, sir.”
“You’re not the only one who’s got a target painted on them, Agent Peng. Now, what is it I need to know?”
So she told him. How Senator Hanlon’s tech company had discovered the technology to build organic computers that weren’t restricted by current security protocols. How this technology would only work if there was a sentient biological component integrated into its hardware. How Hanlon had recognized not only that donating this technology to Congress was safer than conducting illegal experiments on human beings, but that doing so would make the government eat the costs.
Sturtevant had heard all of this before, so he waited, fingers knit tightly together and hands resting motionless on his desk, until she reached the part of the story that was new to him. How Hanlon would only benefit from this plan if the human test subjects lost their sense, their reason, their ethics and morality…
How Hanlon didn’t want people with consciences who could resist his instructions: he wanted machines who would do what they were told.
How Hanlon needed to purge them of their humanity.
This was the second time she had told this story to an outsider—the first had been Santino—and she was surprised that, yes, the second telling was actually much easier. Sitting there in front of Sturtevant, Rachel found she was able to gloss over the worst parts of those five lost years, from the moment when she received the implant to when it had been fully activated. She didn’t use the word brainwashed; that word always left a bad taste in her mouth. She did say they had been conditioned through an insidious form of cognitive behavioral therapy to avoid introspection, compassion, any form of higher thinking or emotion…
Towards the end of her story, Sturtevant asked one question: “How did you snap out of it?”
She answered, truthfully, “We still don’t know.”
Patrick Mulcahy, who had been just another
near-mindless cyborg back then, had saved them. Mulcahy said he didn’t understand how he had broken free, not exactly, and Rachel knew he wasn’t lying… not exactly.
(And as she heard herself disclose the collective’s secrets to Sturtevant, her lizard brain squeaked and shivered with the knowledge that Mulcahy was going to lop off her head and stick it on a pike in the front yard of the OACET mansion, as the heads of traitors were displayed by the kings of old.)
When she was done, she realized she had unconsciously flipped off the emotional spectrum. She turned it back on, and Sturtevant was the deep wine rose of sympathy and weeping pity, shadowed at the edges with gray stress and a yellow-orange anxiety.
There were a few long moments where he didn’t speak. “No wonder Hanlon wants you all dead,” he finally said.
“Dead, discredited… Hanlon will settle for either. If he doesn’t shut us up before the news of the brainwashing—” (oh, God damn it) “—gets out, he’ll be ruined.”
“I take it you have no hard evidence that he was personally responsible for any of this,” Sturtevant said. “Otherwise he’d already be in jail.”
Rachel stared up at the ceiling, pretending to find patterns in the constellations of dots in the acoustical ceiling tiles.
“Or,” Sturtevant corrected himself, catching on. “You have plenty of evidence, but you can’t use it without also incriminating Congress.”
“They weren’t happy with us, up on Capitol Hill,” Rachel said. “OACET couldn’t go public without suggesting there was a conspiracy to keep us hidden. We lost almost—ah, more than, actually—one out of five Agents to the cover-up. But it’s better to be a dupe than a villain, and we’re happy to let Congress claim they were innocent. Most of them were innocent, really; only a couple of them were directly involved with the... the culling. As long as Hanlon is held responsible, the others who helped him? They get a pass.”
“And there is evidence of brainwashing?”
“Plenty,” Rachel said, trying not to wince at that word. “Different set of doctors, different set of notes. Hanlon’s fingerprints are all over those, metaphorically speaking. We’ve got proof he was directly involved in the development of the therapy program.”
“You’re going to leverage Congress,” Sturtevant said. He reached into a desk drawer and removed a bottle of Scotch and two small glasses. He poured a thin finger into each glass, and pushed one towards Rachel.
She nodded, and took a sip of Sturtevant’s bargain-basement Scotch. “They aren’t stupid. They know we’ve got enough on their role in the cover-up to do some real damage. We choose to keep it to ourselves as a gesture of goodwill? Well, from that point on, they owe us. They know all we want is Hanlon.”
“Was Hanlon the source of both sets of information?
“Yes.”
Sturtevant’s conversational colors went solidly gray as the pieces clicked. “If OACET can’t use this evidence without incriminating Congress, Hanlon can use it as leverage against Congress. So they can’t just sacrifice him or turn him over to you. It’s a holding pattern.”
“You got it.” Rachel pushed her glass back towards Sturtevant for a refill. He obliged; work hours or not, this was a conversation in need of lubrication. “But this,” she said, tapping a fingernail on the newspaper, “might resolve these problems for us.”
His colors shifted to a curious yellow.
“How long have you lived in D.C.?” she asked him.
“Twenty years, give or take.”
“I’m betting you’ve seen a lot of odd coincidences over the years. Like, oh, how unpopular politicians seem prone to dying in their sleep.”
His colors were a sudden deep red, offset with his usual direct professional blue. “There are certain attitudes I don’t sanction, Agent Peng.”
She spread her hands, pure innocence. “Us, too. Hanlon is not in any physical danger from any member of OACET.” Sturtevant didn’t need to know about the fights, the screaming battles between those Agents who wanted immediate satisfaction versus those who wanted Hanlon to pay, and pay, and pay… Josh and Mulcahy had been very busy, that first month, keeping certain Agents from going for their guns.
Sturtevant stared at her over the rim of his glass. “But if… If someone else were to take care of Hanlon…”
“Kill him, you mean,” she said. Sturtevant’s colors blanched. “A rose by any other name still smells. Yeah, if someone else decided they were fed up with Hanlon and his baggage? We wouldn’t shed a tear.
“But,” she added, “OACET will only—only!—survive if we can prove we act within the confines of the law. Every Agent agreed to that before we went public. We have the capacity to do great, unbelievable harm, and the only way we won’t be… How did you put it? ‘Taken care of’? Since we don’t want that to happen, we police ourselves.”
Sturtevant grinned. “Who watches the watchmen?”
“The watchmen, obviously. Unless they can’t be trusted, and if they can’t, they shouldn’t have been made watchmen in the first place.”
“Point taken. So, how does this news article break the holding pattern?”
“It was utterly irresponsible of Hanlon to release that information,” she said. “I don’t have to tell you how the public has been demanding information. This is a national crisis, in a nation already on the edge, and Hanlon just dumped gasoline on the fire. Personally, I see no motivation for that, other than to shift attention from himself. Congress won’t approve.”
“Or he’s playing to the public,” Sturtevant said.
“Hm?”
“This isn’t exacly an anonymous source; everybody knows who Dunstan really works for. If Hanlon’s about to be shown as a lying, manipulative bastard, wouldn’t he want to do something to pump up his credibility? And if he’s already on Congress’ naughty list, it seems like he won’t do any additional harm to himself by bolstering that credibility with the general public.”
Rachel snapped upright. Nailed it, she thought.
“And if anything happens to Hanlon after he—”
“He’s just sealed himself in a nuclear bunker,” she interrupted him. “Shit. Shit. Nobody can touch him now without turning him into a martyr. I bet Dunstan and Hanlon’s lawyers have sealed copies of a letter that begins with the line, ‘Should something happen to me…’”
She felt her palm burning and opened her left hand; she had clenched the shot glass so tightly she had popped a few stitches.
“Here,” Sturtevant said, handing her a box of tissues.
“Shit,” she said again, crushing the tissues in her fist to sop up the blood. “I thought we finally had him.”
“Do you think Hanlon is behind Gayle Street? We already know he’s not above that sort of thing, and we also know he can call the kind of people who can pull off something as complex as Gayle Street.”
She was not yet ready to go all-in with Sturtevant—there was no reason for him to know the wheels-within-wheels of what had really happened in August—but there were other ways around that answer. “No,” she said. “I don’t think Hanlon would do this. He knows he won’t bounce back from something like Gayle Street if he gets caught. He’d capitalize on the opportunity, but it’s not worth the risk to set it up.”
Sturtevant nodded slowly. “Not sure you’re right,” he said. “Sounds good, but I’m not sure you’re right.”
“Look at it this way: our job is easier if he’s not a suspect.”
He almost laughed. “You can’t be serious.”
“Chief? If I thought Hanlon was responsible for Gayle Street, I would move heaven and earth to bring him down. But I don’t, and that’s hard for me to admit.”
“All right,” Sturtevant agreed. “So. What do we do now?”
“I go back to work, and you stay here and have a conversation with Patrick Mulcahy.”
“Hm?” His tone was easy, but professional blues snapped shut around him like armor.
Rachel wrapped the bloody shot glass in a
tissue, and stuffed it in her handbag to wash it later. “What I’ve told you is confidential, but if it’s to be of any use to you, or if you’re going to be of any use to us, you need to talk to someone higher up in OACET’s Administration than I am. That’s either Josh Glassman or Mulcahy, and Mulcahy was available.”
There was a knock at the door, and the head of OACET let himself in.
Rachel stood as he entered.
Patrick Mulcahy was a smaller man than Mako, but not by much; the top of his head barely cleared the lintel. He was built like a linebacker, but was light on his feet, and the only sound he made when entering the room was when he greeted Chief Sturtevant like an old acquaintance. His core of cerulean blue was covered by a curiously-pleasing combination of pink, purple, and orange; if Rachel didn’t know better, she would have assumed the head of OACET was bemused by the whole thing.
Rachel noticed that Sturtevant was standing, too. “Agent Mulcahy,” the Chief said. “Have a seat.”
“Thank you. How are your kids?”
“They’re doing well. Molly’s just started her sophomore year at Brown. She’s thinking law.”
The small talk continued until Rachel wondered how the two men could stand it. Mulcahy played politics better than anyone she had ever met, while Sturtevant didn’t play politics at all, yet they both managed to seem enthralled with the minutiae of each other’s personal lives.
When the pleasantries were finally over, Mulcahy said, “Agent Peng tells me she disclosed some sensitive information.”
Sturtevant nodded. “I’m sorry about what happened to you and your people. I understand why you need to keep something like that quiet.”
Translated as: You can trust me. Don’t worry about me spilling the beans, Rachel thought.
“Thank you,” Mulcahy replied. “We know it will come out sooner rather than later, but it’s best to control it before that happens.”
Oh, nice one! A mild threat to Sturtevant, with a concise, “My Agent opened her big mouth ahead of schedule but this is the closest I’ll come to shouting at her in public” in the same sentence. Well done!
Maker Space Page 16
