“I’m Jamie,” he added.
She gave him a weak smile. “Phyllis.”
“Really?”
“Really.” Rachel didn’t have to feign her sigh: Phyllis was her much-hated middle name. “Why is this different?”
The angry reds in Jamie’s conversational colors returned; he began to blend in with the rest of the crowd again. “We’re sick of it! Aren’t you?”
“Sick of what?”
“The lies! Don’t you watch the news? Homeland bombed Gayle Street! We need to do something. We can’t let them manipulate us like this!”
And now he’s decided he’s part of the general American public again. This guy’s a mental mess, and I think he could represent the entire freakin’ status quo.
As Jamie rambled on, Rachel pretended to inspect her hands. Behind her, the crowd was reaching a fever pitch; she wished she was capable of splitting her attention between the speaker and dear Jamie, but she was one of those Agents who had to pick her target. Her cop’s brain was telling her to stick with Jamie, who was spewing public opinion like he was hooked up to a garden hose.
“What do you think we should do?”
She had spoken so softly that Jamie nearly missed it. When he realized what she had said, he replied, “Anything! Don’t you think that anything is better than this?”
Spoken like an asshole who’s never seen war outside of a screen, she thought, but said nothing.
“Listen,” Jamie said, leaning towards her. “Aren’t you sick of this shit? Every week, we learn how they’re fucking us over in new and exciting ways. They’re spying on us, they built fucking cyborgs that can take control of any machine we own… That was bad. That was really bad. But now… You were on Gayle Street. They did that. They did that to you. They tried to kill you, Phyllis! Don’t you understand? We have to draw the line, ‘cause if we don’t, they’ll know they can get away with anything.
“You see these people?” Jamie pointed. “Someone sent out a tweet three hours ago and said we should flash the Mall. And how many people showed up? A thousand? Five thousand? We let it go on too long. Gayle Street was our fault. You got hurt because we didn’t care enough to fight back.”
“This was a triumph… I’m making a note here: Huge success…” The sweet electronic voice of a mostly-dead computer chimed in her mind: Santino was calling.
She opened the connection, but before she could greet him, she heard her partner shouting: “Where are you?!?”
“By the Pool. What’s—”
“Southeast, near the World War II Memorial.”
Rachel stood and threw her scans out. She didn’t have to go far; a tidal wave of red was cresting as it rolled towards her.
“Oh hell,” she said quietly. “Santino? Tell me you’re gone.”
“I’m safe. Zockinski’s with me. We’re joining up with the uniformed MPD, but we can’t find Hill.”
“I’ll get him,” she promised.
“Stay safe,” Santino said before he hung up.
Beside her, Jamie was on his feet, his posture mimicking hers as they both looked towards the Memorial. “What’s up?” he asked her. “Do you see something?”
“Jamie?” She tossed her Phyllis persona aside, as she moved her right hand under the back of her stained windbreaker to make sure she had ready access to her gun. “Get into the Pool and stay there until the danger’s over.”
An ugly orange scorn moved into his conversational colors: Jamie did not take kindly to being ordered around. He started to protest, and Rachel hit him with a full-on cyborg stare.
Jamie was knee-deep in the Pool before Rachel allowed him to look away.
When he recovered enough to glance up at her again, she gave him a quick wink, then walked into the crowd as the riot broke over her.
Elbows, torsos, shouting, red. She bobbed and weaved like a boxer who wouldn’t throw a punch. No one cared about her, a small woman among thousands, as they pushed to reach the podium. As long as she kept her head together and stayed on her feet, she’d be fine.
Bodies flew past her, nearly crashing into her; once, Rachel used a man’s bent knee as leverage to push herself up and over him to land on the far side. Damn, she thought, as she dropped lightly to the ground. I didn’t think that could happen outside of the movies. “I don’t know if that was you, or me, or both of us,” she muttered to her implant as she dodged a group of men roaring like Scottish warriors, “but thanks for the save—”
There was a white-hot surge of pain in her lower back and she went down, face-first, the man who had hit her falling on top of her. Someone stepped on her calf, and she snarled as muscle twisted between rubber and hard-packed earth. Rachel pulled her hands under the shelter of her body as more feet beat past.
Never take out your gun, a little voice reminded her: it sounded an awful lot like Mulcahy’s. Never in public. Never, never…
The man on top of her squirmed, his elbows gouging into her back as he tried to stand. He was knocked down once, twice, a third time… Rachel tipped her body so he rolled off of her, forcing him towards the stampeding feet. She didn’t feel even slightly guilty as she turned him into her human shield: he was twice her size and could take the hits.
When she was finally free of his weight, she flipped over to face him. He was turtled up in a ball, all yellow terror and red pain. “Hey!” she shouted, then bashed her fist against the top of his head as hard as she could when he didn’t respond. “Hey! Asshole! We stand up together or we don’t stand up!”
He poked his head out, eyes wide. She grabbed his exposed shoulder with one hand and shouted at him to do the same: green comprehension finally dawned in his conversational colors, and he joined his strength to hers.
They made it to their knees, then pushed against each other until they were standing. She grabbed her former human shield by the front of his jacket, and pulled him back into the rush of bodies.
The crowd had thinned. They had been on the ground for thirty seconds at most, but it had been long enough for the densest parts of the crowd to move past them. Now, instead of fighting against a stampede, it was more like swimming upstream. Rachel threw her free hand—her gun hand—up to protect her face, and hauled the man behind her with the other. The signal from Hill’s cell phone put him at thirty yards to the southeast, deep in the thick of things. There was no way to know what had finally started the riot (it could have been Hill himself, for all she knew), and it would take too long to reach him…
And then she was suddenly clear of the press of bodies, just long enough to see Hill with his back against a tree, his gun drawn, before she lost him in another surge.
Rachel reached beneath her windbreaker and drew her service weapon. Her imaginary Mulcahy started shouting again, but she boxed him back up. Coming to Hill’s defense was a reason good enough to carry her through any argument. Behind her, the man she was towing stiffened and tried to pull away at the sight of her gun. Rachel gave him one last extra-hard tug to yank him the last few feet forward, and they were finally free.
They came out in a small clearing of trees in the shadow of the World War II Memorial. Hill pulsed red; he was bleeding into his eyes from a head wound, his gun trained on a man holding a woman against his chest.
Hostage situation, Rachel realized, noting the terror in the woman’s colors, the hidden knife jammed against her lower ribs.
“Hey, Hill,” she called. “Who’s your friend?”
“Hey, Peng,” he replied, his voice eerily calm. “Same question.”
“Right.” She turned to the man who had trampled her. “Sit down,” she told him. “You’re probably going into shock, and you definitely need medical attention.” When he didn’t react, she kicked one leg out from under him to put him on the ground, then pinned him down with one foot on his chest to keep him from squirming off.
“Smooth,” Hill said.
“I try.”
The man with the knife was yellow-orange, completely confused as to
why the cop had started ignoring him to banter with a strange woman. “What the fuck?”
“Hang on, Chuckles, you’ll get your turn,” Rachel snapped. “Hill, what happened here?”
“Little bit of this and that. Some men don’t like to be told to be nicer to their wives. By the time he realized I was MPD…”
“Little bit of escalation?”
“Little bit.”
“He try and stab you before he saw your badge?”
“Little bit.”
The adrenaline was starting to wear off, and Rachel’s mind began to climb her way out of its tunnel vision. They had an audience, she realized, a huge audience, all rapt on the scene playing out in front of them.
With their phones out and recording it, of course.
Damn, she thought. Well, at least Mulcahy would have proof she had a legitimate reason to wave her gun around.
From across the Mall, a scream cut through the air. The man with the knife tensed, and the woman gasped as the edge pierced her skin. Damn, Rachel thought again. Bantering with Hill wasn’t working: eighty percent of the time, an unplanned hostage situation could be resolved when the hostage-taker realized the cops were ordinary people doing their jobs. Sometimes she hated beating the odds.
“Put it down,” Hill said to the hostage-taker. His tone was world-weary, but his colors never lost their red-tipped focus.
“Tired of repeating yourself?” she asked him.
“Little bit.”
“Who the hell are you?” the man with the knife finally snapped.
“I’m Agent Rachel Peng, the OACET liaison to the MPD,” she said, pitching her voice so it would carry. “My skill with a gun is abso-fucking-lutely legendary, so if you’re stupid enough to think a hostage will protect you from me? Please, by all means, continue.”
She swept her thumb around her neck and hauled out her badge on its chain, all bright golds and unmistakable eye-searing greens.
Across the clearing, Hill’s surface colors blanched as Rachel outed herself.
Rachel shared his sudden surge of panic, but if she had read the crowd right (oh God, please please please let me have read the crowd right!), then they were the best friends she would ever have.
“Shoot him!”
The hostage-taker’s head whipped around to see the speaker, but he couldn’t spot them—others had taken up the chant.
“Yeah, shoot him!”
“Take him down!”
Just like that, the mob response was back. Rachel breathed a silent sigh of relief: they might not recognize her on sight, but they sure as hell remembered how she could shoot.
The man with the knife went pale yellow in shock and fear, and kicked his wife away from him. He turned towards the mob, brandishing the knife, threatening to cut his way past them. They pushed back, knocked him down, and swarmed over him.
“Oh crap,” Rachel whispered. She hoped she wouldn’t have to do that stupid movie thing where the hero shot into the air to bring the crowd to order: what went up always came down, and D.C. was so densely populated it might come down in someone’s cranium.
Suddenly, Hill was there. He pushed one long arm down into the mob, and came out with the hostage-taker.
When they saw Hill lock the man in handcuffs, the deep reds of the mob began to fade, pushed out by self-satisfied blues. They had all come to the Mall in search of villains, and it didn’t get more villainous than a man threatening his young wife. They had seen the cops bring him down. Justice was done. The mob was feeling pretty darned good about itself.
And they weren’t leaving.
Great, Rachel growled to herself, wondering how she’d manage to scare them off now that her gun was back in its holster.
Hill solved the problem. “Thanks for your help,” he told them. “Stick around. We’ll need your names, addresses, witness statements… oh, and your phones. We’ll keep them for a few weeks, so if you need any information off of them, get it now.”
He turned towards Rachel, leaning down as if whispering something to her.
“Nicely done,” she said, as the onlookers quickly melted away behind him.
“Thanks. Anyone left?”
“A few do-gooders, but their friends are dragging them away.”
“Yippee.”
Hill called Zockinski; Rachel remembered she was standing on a human being, and let him up on the condition that he would sit quietly on a nearby park bench until the EMTs arrived. He had gradually come to the realization that Rachel had saved his life, and by the time the ambulance pulled up, he was telling anyone who would listen about how he and the Agent had fought their way through the mob to rescue a damsel in distress. She was relieved to find her new friend didn’t understand that she had used him, and as long as she kept her mouth shut, his version made the better story. She even signed a few autographs before the ambulance took him away.
The man with the knife went away, too. Hill booked the man over the phone, passed him off to a uniformed officer for the drive to the holding cell, and said he’d get to the paperwork after the events of the riot had time to shake themselves out.
When they were done and alone, the two of them staggered over to the World War II Memorial, and collapsed against a low concrete wall facing the fountain.
“Hungry?” Hill asked.
Starving. “No,” she replied. She inspected her hands: the injuries on her right palm were no worse, and the cast had protected her left. She hadn’t even remembered she was wearing the cast during the trampling and its aftermath. Jenny did quality work.
They didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Then she asked, “Did you start it?”
“The riot?”
“Yeah.”
His conversational colors were an exhausted grayish-orange, and these picked up a hint of yellow as he said, “Maybe.”
“It looked like the crowd was rushing the podium.”
“The podium was in the opposite direction of a black man with a gun.”
Rachel laughed. There was no humor in it, but it was either laugh or cry, and laughing was close enough to let her ward off the imminent giggling. Hill, ever the stoic, sighed and stretched out to bask in the afternoon sun until she was done.
“That was a hell of a thing you did,” he said, once she could breathe again. “How’d you know they wouldn’t turn on you instead of him?”
“Calculated risk,” she said. “Besides, if they had gone after me, you could have used that as a distraction to take Knifeman down.”
Hill shrugged. “Fair enough.”
After a few more minutes, he asked, “Did anyone die?”
She had been watching his colors move slowly through oranges and grays as he built up the courage to find out if he had accidentally killed anyone by starting the riot. “No,” she assured him. “The news feeds say that there were several dozen major injuries, but nothing severe or critical. Broken bones, mostly.”
Hill exhaled slowly as he sank into a relieved blue.
“Don’t worry,” she assured him. “It doesn’t matter if you caused it or not. It would have happened anyway. They were looking for an excuse.”
“Yeah.”
More silence. The grays returned to Hill’s conversational colors, but he didn’t offer any reason why.
Sometimes Rachel wished Hill was more like Mako. His cousin never shut up, but getting the detective to talk was like dragging words out of a dead man. She finally gave up. “What are you thinking?”
“You remember Glazer?” Hill asked her, his thumb rubbing across the new bandage at his hairline. “What he said in that interrogation room, about how OACET was created?”
Rachel nodded. She cut Hill some slack for the stupid questions; he took time to build up steam.
“So you know government conspiracies exist.”
“Personally. Intimately.” Rachel replied. “The wool-pullings and backdoor shenanigans that they used for funding OACET make Watergate look like preschool kids on the playground.”<
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“Say someone came to you and told you they were part of a government cover-up,” Hill said. “Would you believe them?”
“Depends on the person,” Rachel said. “If that person was someone like you? Yeah, I’d believe them.”
Hill nodded. His conversational colors were motionless, uncertain oranges and yellows sitting on top of each other, her own turquoise core lacquered between them. Not a nice combination, all things considered.
He tapped a long index finger against the glass face of his watch.
Rachel waited.
“What do you know about Copper Green?” he finally asked.
“Patina or code name?”
Hill’s lips twitched as he fought a grin; he was probably remembering her kitchen. “Code name.”
“Assume I’ve been out of touch for a couple of years,” Rachel said.
“Right,” he said, still tapping that finger. “The story broke in early ‘04. Journalist named Seymour Hersh? He claimed the Pentagon and the CIA had a program in the Middle East, one which sanctioned torture.”
“‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want’,” Rachel said, remembering. Copper Green’s motto stuck with you, like a virus in your cells.
“That’s the one,” Hill said. “Based on the idea that Afghanis don’t respond to anything other than shame and pain. The Pentagon denied it, swore they wouldn’t let a program like that exist.”
“Of course not. We’re the good guys.”
“Right,” he said, as his finger tap-tap-tapped and his yellows took on a dark gray film.
“But,” she said, leaning over to pick up a small stone from the ground, “if they did have a program like that, somebody would have to do the grunt work. The real… hands-on shit.”
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“I thought you said you were with the 7th.”
“The 7th goes a lot of places,” he said.
“Right.” She whipped the stone out from her hip. It skipped twice before she lost its frequency in the spray of the fountain. “Maybe it’s better if some of those places are forgotten.”
Maker Space Page 27
