“But you couldn’t, could you? It itched. All of this power, right there, waiting... You could win yourself the world, if you got the timing right.
“Did Rothbauer know why you started pushing him to set Gayle Street off?” Hill asked. “Or did he still think you wanted justice for your sons? From what we’ve learned about him, it seems like he’d be pissed if he found out you’d profit from the bombing.
“See, Congress and the military are about to throw down over budget,” Hill explained to Templeton’s attorney. “There’s a big problem with the current state of the military, where it’s become so institutionalized it might as well be a force of nature. Certain people—politicians, defense contractors, traditionalist officers... you get the idea—these people love their tanks and battleships. Problem is, we don’t fight tank-and-battleship wars these days. Congress and the military both say they need to align how the military spends its money with these new wars, but that’s like changing the course of a river.”
“Which can be done,” Sturtevant added. “But you either need a million years, or dynamite.”
“Blow Gayle Street, convince the public the military is behind it, then make sure the public turns against the military,” Hill said. “And there’s the excuse needed to gut the existing system and make major reforms.
“One of those being a major shift from a military-industrial complex to a military-digital complex,” Sturtevant said. “With Templeton Industries poised to provide the hardware for everything from drones to new surveillance devices.”
“We need more time to find your lobbyists,” Hill said to Templeton. “When we find them, they’ll probably have plenty of interesting things to say about what you’ve promised you can deliver.”
“One thing I don’t understand,” Sturtevant said. “How did you convince Rothbauer to kill my officers? I know why; I don’t think I’ll ever understand how.”
“Am I under arrest?” Templeton asked.
Sturtevant and Hill said nothing.
Templeton finished his coffee, stood, and walked out of the room.
No one followed him except for Rachel, who sent her mind down the hallway after him. Templeton was staggering on weak legs towards the entrance. She rather hoped he’d have a heart attack and drop dead on the spot, but no such luck; Templeton left the building and vanished into the autumn sunlight.
“I didn’t know.” The attorney was all but pleading with Sturtevant and Hill. “I swear, I didn’t know!”
Rachel pulled herself back into the Annex, and felt Josh reach out and snap off the television. The attorney’s voice cut out in mid-protest. The other Agent turned Dunstan and Patterson, and said, “I hope you both enjoyed your tour of First District Station.”
“Very much so. Thank you, Agent Glassman,” Patterson said. They were her first words since she had arrived, and her voice was as warm and rich as expensive chocolate. Patterson nodded at the others, and left.
Dunstan seemed rooted in place. He was staring through the one-way glass, his colors weighing OACET’s greens and golds against a complicated, tangled mess of emotions.
Josh tapped Dunstan on the shoulder. “Would you like to continue our conversation?”
Dunstan didn’t reply, but he let Josh steer him away. The Agent tipped his head over his shoulder, and shot Rachel a wink as the door closed behind them.
“Remind me to never, ever get on OACET’s bad side,” Santino said.
“What did I miss?” Zockinski asked.
“There’s not enough evidence to go after Templeton,” Rachel said. “There never will be—he used Rothbauer to keep his own hands clean.”
“That part I knew,” Zockinski said. “And how those reporters can go digging where we can’t.”
“Well, Dunstan’s got a decision to make,” Rachel said. “He can use this tip to help him break the biggest story of his career, and owe OACET forever, or he can let it slide and stay allied to Hanlon.”
“It’s nice and all, telling Dunstan he’d benefit from ditching Hanlon and siding with OACET, but it’s better to prove it,” Santino finished for her.
There was a tapping on the one-way glass. Hill stood there with one eyebrow raised. Zockinski walked over and knocked out a quick “Shave and a Haircut”, and his partner vanished. A moment later, the doorknob rattled, and Sturtevant and Hill entered the Annex.
“That went better than I had hoped,” Sturtevant said to the room.
“The meeting, or the entire Gayle Street investigation?” Rachel asked.
He ignored her. “As of now, your jobs have changed,” he said to the room at large. To Zockinski and Hill, he added, “Officially, you’re still Detectives, but you’re no longer with Homicide.”
“Sir! We—”
“In case I wasn’t clear, Zockinski, this is a promotion, not a punishment, with titles, duties, and wages to be adjusted accordingly. Santino, same for you. Congratulations.” Sturtevant paused. “Agent Peng, I wish I could reward you...”
“I know,” she assured him. “I’m good, but thanks.”
“Sir?” Zockinski asked, angry in reds at losing Homicide. “Why?”
“Because this is going to keep happening,” Santino said.
Sturtevant pointed at him.
“Sir?” Zockinski wasn’t going down without a fight. “With all due respect, Gayle Street was a once-in-a-lifetime event.”
“Probably,” Sturtevant said. “But tell me this: could it happen again? If you can promise me the bombs aren’t already out there, I’ll take back the raise and the promotion.”
“Hey now—”
“Did you ever think you’d be working with a cyborg?” Sturtevant asked Zockinski. “Or involved in a case as completely off the rails as Gayle Street, or Glazer before that? Hell, fifteen years ago, I wouldn’t have believed a fucking smartphone could even exist, and now I can’t live without one. We’ve got to get ahead of new problems—we’re going to adapt before change kicks us in the ass! Not after.
“The next time?” Sturtevant said, pressing a hand against the closed door. “We will be ready. They don’t get to rip our city apart and walk away free. Not again. Never again.
“The four of you are all going to increase your training, your education—yes, Zockinski, the city will pay for it—and your experience in whatever ways you see necessary. Santino? Draw up a curriculum. I want it on my desk tomorrow morning.
“Do I think this bullshit cartoon supervillainy will happen all of the time? No. We’re going to handle the tech crimes that show up every day, the ones that fall through the cracks in our usual methods. But if something like Gayle Street does happen again, we’ll be ready.”
And with that, Sturtevant left the room and slammed the door behind him.
There was a moment of stunned silence while the four of them processed what Sturtevant had said. Rachel was the first to shake herself out of it. “He must have been preparing for this since OACET went public. Maybe before.”
“Man plays a mean game of chess,” Santino said.
TWENTY-FOUR
A SIGN HAD BEEN TAPED over what was left of the elevator, a heavy black CONDEMNED notice printed on top of a poorly photocopied seal of the city.
They took the stairs.
The mural was ruined, the journey from the center of the earth to the crown of the sky spray-painted over in bloody threats. At the top, the fire door had been staved in, its steel face cratered by multiple blows. It was no longer capable of closing, the handle and latch pounded until they had failed. Plastic police tape had been roped across the gap. Rachel started to weave her way through the tape; Santino reached over her and ripped the whole thing down, then used his shoulder to bash the door wide open.
“Vandalism” was such a tame word. The officer on the other end of the phone had used it a couple of times when he let them know the loft had been broken into—vandalized, actually—but no one had been there so no harm done.
That was a matter of opinion.
The loft had been turned into a landfill. The massive front door had been ruined by heat and pressure, and groaned inward on a single surviving hinge. The solar system was gone, pieces of frayed wire twisted over the empty space where each planet had hung. The small projects, those personal works which had dotted each desktop, had been smashed beyond recognition.
Someone had taken a sledgehammer to the clean room’s glass walls. The room was silent; there was no happy hum. Bell’s equipment lay dead on the floor.
All of that beauty, gone.
She swept her foot through the nearest pile, and the soft glint of mother-of-pearl caught her scans. Rachel ignored her aching ribs and knelt, gently brushing aside the debris until she found what had once been a piece of a wooden box. She flipped her implant off and cradled the scrap in her good hand.
When she turned her implant back on, she found Santino leaning against the only upright table in the room, staring at the pile of glass where fragments of his and Zia’s equations could be seen, twined around each other to the end.
“This wasn’t our fault,” she said.
“I know,” he replied. His voice was flat in the air.
“These kids were—are—good people. They got used by someone who wasn’t.”
“I know.”
It had been a week since Templeton had walked out of First District Station. They had learned he had left the country for a vacation in Morocco, claiming he needed to distance himself from Washington until those terrible unfounded rumors about his role in the Gayle Street tragedy had died down. Morocco didn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States.
The repercussions of an American citizen bombing his own capital were starting to emerge. The rage-smashing of the loft was but one outcome; some of the pundits had already declared Howard Rothbauer to be the perfect example of why domestic surveillance needed to be increased. When the objection was made that Rothbauer’s actions couldn’t have been prevented via traditional monitoring methods? Well, the pundits said, maybe this was proof that domestic surveillance needed to be applied using different strategies. More innovative strategies.
This last week had been one of those times when she was glad OACET had decided to go public.
Santino bent over and picked up a piece of glass. He turned it over in his palm, uncaring of the edges.
“I’ll call Hope Blackwell,” Rachel offered. “She’s got more money than she knows what to do with. I bet she’ll be happy to rebuild this place.”
“It won’t be the same,” Santino said.
“I know.” The makers could rebuild, but the spirit that had defined the loft—that unbreakable optimism, the drive to create, to improve—might never return. “But it’s worth trying.”
He nodded, but the grays within his conversational colors didn’t change.
She went to find a broom.
Her ribs throbbed as she cleaned, one-handed, but it could have been worse. After Templeton’s interrogation, Jenny had used the biofeedback autoscript to keep Rachel under sedation for three days. (Not three days straight, mind. Jenny had allowed Rachel to wake up every six hours for food, fluids, and a trip to the bathroom. Towards the end, Rachel had felt so well-rested she could have fought a tiger during those breaks.) By the time Jenny finally let Rachel leave, her ribs and wrist had taken on that dull ache she associated with month-old injuries. There was no longer any doubt that Agents healed faster than normals. They just didn’t heal fast enough that Rachel could talk Jenny into removing the cast.
It was several minutes before Rachel had cleared a space large enough to turn a second table upright. Santino, who had been watching her clean without realizing it, moved to help. When the table was standing, they both climbed on top, sitting within the small sanctuary she had made.
Rachel ran the thumb of her good hand over the edge of the table. The slate had chipped along one corner, but the table was otherwise undamaged; she took a large measure of comfort from that.
“We can rebuild,” she promised him. “We can always rebuild.”
“Do you know about Italy and Operation Gladio?” Santino’s voice was still flat and lifeless.
The name sounded familiar, like a lecture that had droned on in the background of a class spent daydreaming. “Some of it,” she said, as she ran the term through Google.
“So... It’s the end of World War Two. Everyone hates the Nazis, right? But now the Nazis are gone and everyone’s scared of Communists. NATO decides the best way to deal with the Red Menace is to embed a bunch of covert government operatives and paramilitary groups within different European countries. Back when it started, the plan was that if the Soviets tried to come to power, NATO would already have an infrastructure in place to deal with it.
“But what actually happened,” Santino continued in that same dead voice, “was that NATO entrenched their forces, gave them a doctrine to protect the country, and then basically left them unsupervised except for the annual meeting with a CIA spook and his suitcase full of money. So? The longer the NATO embeds hung around, the more they assimilated into domestic politics, or were subverted through infiltration. In some countries—Italy, especially—whenever it was time for a vote or a political decision, someone would conduct a large-scale attack. Shootings. Assassinations. Bombings.
“The Soviets had almost nothing to do with these attacks. Most of them were done to motivate public support. After a while, it was common for someone... say, a right-wing organization, to bomb another right-wing organization, and then blame the left, or vice-versa.
“Italy got the worst of this—the country was stuck in internal conflict for decades, because each time the government was supposed to decide something significant, there’d be another shooting or bombing. It got so bad, the Italians called it the Years of Lead.”
“I’d heard Operation Gladio was overblown. Almost a conspiracy theory,” Rachel said.
“My dad’s parents lived through it,” Santino replied. “They believe what they believe.”
“What are you saying?” Rachel asked him. The loft was cold; the broken windows funneled the November wind inside in dusty gusts. She was in her heaviest coat and starting to shiver. “If we don’t learn from history, we’re doomed to repeat it?”
“Are you kidding? Nobody ever learns from history.” Santino gave a bitter laugh. “History’s just an after-action report to show where we fucked up.”
“How did it end?” she asked.
“The Years of Lead? You already read its Wikipedia page.”
“No,” she lied. “I’d rather hear it from you.”
He gave a raw chuckle; he wasn’t fooled. “Revolution, of course. Same way it always happens... the middle class got fed up and finally snapped.”
He paused. “I don’t know if we should make the effort to rebuild.”
“Of course we should.”
“Why? Does it matter if we do? I mean, does it really matter if we’re already on the path where everything’s going to be torn down anyhow? This case, and the one from last August?” Santino asked. “Our two big cases, Rachel. Our only two big cases so far? Both of them were frame jobs. Neither of them should have happened, but we’ve got no trust left.”
“Learned response,” she said, turning the piece of wood over and over again in her hand. She thought of her conversation with Jason, whispering aloud so the collective wouldn’t hear them, Keith Rothbauer’s body lying on the bed... “Every time we do put our trust in someone, we get fucked.”
“Not always,” he said. “Almost never, really, if you think about it. We just remember those few times when we did get fucked, and that’s how we react. You’re right: it’s a learned response. We’ve turned ourselves into dogs who cringe every time we see a rolled-up magazine.”
He stopped talking. Outside, the angry sound of traffic rose and fell with the wind.
“We can’t live like this,” he finally said.
“I know.”
“We can’t let ourselves
be used like this. This lack of trust? Anyone can manipulate us—it’s death by a thousand imagined cuts.”
“Sturtevant thinks it’s only going to get worse,” she said, and then realized something important. “But Mulcahy thinks it’ll get better. Those’re two of the smartest guys we know, and they put us together for a reason. They know we can still turn this around.”
“Maybe.”
“Hey,” she said, bumping his shoulder with her own. “We’ll get through this.”
He didn’t answer for a moment, and stared at where the copper octopus had once nestled in its sink. When he did reply, she almost couldn’t hear him. “I know we can’t just lie down and do nothing,” he said softly. “But do you ever get tired of knowing that everything we do—or make, or think!—can be twisted to make a bad situation worse?”
“All the damn time.”
“Call Hope,” he said. His voice had come alive again, but now it was shaking with hard red fury. “Tell her if she wants to pay to rebuild the loft, I’ll do what I can to bring the others back.”
He jumped off of the table, and walked away to see what he could salvage from the pile of glass.
Rachel left him to mourn.
She went downstairs and sat on the same landing where Bell and LaPonsie had hidden from the sight of Rothbauer’s body. A light scan of the floor showed the MPD’s cleaning service had been thorough; the only blood left was what had seeped between the cracks in the old linoleum floor.
She had told herself that Rothbauer didn’t realize what he was doing when had he kicked her out of the way, but that thought didn’t quite fit. Suicide by sacrifice was more likely, with Rothbauer driven past the point where he could justify the outcomes of Gayle Street with what had happened to his son.
Or maybe he had finally realized he’d been used, and thought he had one last chance to put it right.
She’d never know.
She did know she was tired of living like a beaten dog. Of thinking of everyone outside of OACET as enemies. Too scared to fully trust herself, to take a chance...
Maker Space Page 36
