Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (42 page)

She waited until the hall was clear before vacating the office, then rejoined the others in the observation room. Phil and Jason were gone. She searched for them and found them in the break room. Excellent. Less chance of accidental contact, of needing to explain why she had left the room with good news and had come back shaken.

She peered through the glass into the interrogation room. The public defender was terrified and shied away from Glazer if his client so much as twitched. He looked the way she felt.

“Oh, the poor thing,” Rachel said to Santino.

“We’ve got a pool going,” he said. “You want in on how long before he needs a bathroom break?”

“Nah. Wait, yeah,” she caught herself. They’d know something was wrong if she didn’t bet. “Seven to ten minutes.”

“Peng’s in under the spread,” he announced to the room. 

Rachel turned back to the one-way glass as the others renegotiated the pool. Glazer was answering his attorney’s questions but was still professionally blue; this was part of his job.

On a whim, she flipped off the emotional spectrum and tried to view him with her old Army CID eyes. Afghanistan had been nothing but a hairy mess of Special Forces, and her job had been to sort them out when they got too tangled. Glazer had that steady confidence that she associated with Special Forces operatives, a perverted form of inner peace attainable only by those who knew how to kill everyone else in the building.

Back in her old life, interrogating these operatives had been a complicated process. The United States did not hold a monopoly on tactical bad-assery. Those who reached her holding cells were usually part of an allied military division, and knew they would be leaving as soon as the paperwork cleared. They were great fun and glad to be in American hands; Americans always had pizza and beer. 

But once and a while, an orphan would show up. They claimed they didn’t belong to a country, or the phone calls to their alleged homeland went unanswered. These orphans had nothing to gain by staying, and once they were sure they had been abandoned, they would simply wait for the right moment and then try to leave. 

There was usually quite a lot of cleanup required after someone with Special Forces training had decided it was time to leave.

Glazer had been Special Forces, she was absolutely sure about that, but he wasn’t an orphan. He and Witcham were still working this together. The only thing that Glazer had in common with those orphans was that as soon as he was done with his job, he would try to leave First District Station.

The cleanup would be atrocious.

Oh, God,
she thought.
How much of this is inevitable?

“I think he’ll talk to me,” she heard herself say.

“Hm?” Sturtevant, stubby pencil in hand, looked up from a Chinese takeout menu. 

“I think he’ll talk to me,” she said, the plan coalescing in her mind like ice crystals forming. “He’s got a bug up his butt about OACET. Why not see if I can get anything else out of him before he tells his lawyer what to ask for in negotiations?”

“Conflict of interest,” Sturtevant said as he passed the menu to Santino.

“You let him talk to Hill,” Rachel retorted. “Let me try. Maybe I can get him to give up that senator.”

“Really.” It wasn’t a question. Sturtevant was pushing reds in irritation, with flecks of Hill’s forest green core; Sturtevant thought she couldn’t do any better than his own man. “Fine.”

“Can I speak to you privately?” she asked him, mostly out of habit. Rachel had always discussed strategy with her CO before an interview.

Sturtevant shook his head and took the menu back from Santino. “Peng, just do what you need to do.”

“Be right back,” she told them, and fled.

She was not naïve. Rachel knew she might as well have autographed some of those burned-out ruins in Afghanistan. But over there she had been one soldier in a war, and it had made all the difference. She would not spend the rest of her life as Death incarnate while locked in a basement five thousand miles away. 

And today, she would not allow Glazer to cut a path out of First District Station.

No one at the MPD would ever know, she was certain of that, but she couldn’t lie to the others. Sooner or later, a stray thought or emotion would make its way into the link, and they’d realize what she had done to put Hanlon’s name on the record. Josh would never forgive her. Mulcahy would burn her to ash. Phil, Mako, everyone in the Program, nobody would see this as a necessary evil.

Or maybe they’d understand. Heck, maybe they’d do it in her place. She hadn’t lied to Santino: their goal never changed.
Hanlon… Hanlon… Hanlon…

Think tanks.
God, she could not shake this sour taste in her mouth.

No interrogation was conducted without props. It was part of the psychology; the bad guy who has nothing sits across the table from the good guy who has something. If the interrogator held something that intimidated the suspect, so much the better. Common knowledge, really. No one would think anything of it if she carried a folder of Glazer’s handiwork in with her.

Rachel raced back to the fishbowl, found a bright blue folder, and started cramming paper into it until it was decently thick. A quick scan of the windowsills and desk drawers, the nooks by the baseboards… nothing. The renovations were too fresh. Rachel started tipping over pen cups while she ran the edges of the room, finally finding what she was searching for in a box at the bottom of a filing cabinet.

She used the first paperclip to affix a photograph of Maria Griffin to the front of the folder. The girl’s smile was blurry until Rachel flipped her implant to reading mode, and then Griffin was suddenly young and bright and full of promise.

I’m going to Hell.

The flat knob to the interrogation room was cold against her hand.

Glazer recognized her, his conversational colors losing the bored grays and returning to those steely professional blues as she entered. “Out,” he said to his lawyer. The young man scurried from the room.

Rachel dropped the folder down on the metal table, the paperclip banding Maria Griffin’s smiling photograph to the cover making an audible click. She sat and reached into her handbag, then placed a digital recorder on the table in front of him.

“We’re going to conduct this interview as though you won’t be here tomorrow,” Rachel told him. She lifted the corner of the folder and let it drop so the paperclip clicked against the table a second time.

“Hello Agent Peng,” Glazer said in his too-soft voice. Little spots of yellow-white excitement darted through the blue. “Is this my dying declaration?”

“I’m assuming nothing with you,” she said, and used her thumb to turn on the recorder. “That includes whether you’ll be available to give testimony at trial.”

Glazer’s eyes flicked to the folder, Griffin’s photograph… He nodded.

Deal proposed,
she thought.

“This is Agent Rachel Peng of the Office of Adaptive and Complementary Technologies, conducting a formal interview with suspect John Glazer. This name is presumed to be an alias. Actual name of suspect is unknown, but physical and video evidence found at each scene confirms that the suspect is the likely perpetrator. The name Glazer will continue to be used throughout this interview because most of those I would prefer to use are too unsavory to put before a jury.”

Sturtevant rapped on the inside of the glass. Rachel nodded to let him know she’d tone it down; they had arranged for him to call her if he had any additional questions, and she did not want to hear the Chief of Detectives reprimanding her inside her own head.

Glazer cocked his head at her like a bird of prey sighting a mouse. “Rachel Phyllis Peng,” he said. “Born in Austin, Texas. Father is a U.S. native, mother immigrated from Beijing in the ‘Eighties. No formal postsecondary education, but has scored in the 99th percentile on general and Psychology GREs. Entered the Army at eighteen. Served four months in basic service, twenty-four months as a MOS 31D, thirty-two months in Criminal Investigation Command as a WO1. Eighteen sanctioned missions during Operation Enduring Freedom, six off of the books. Fourteen confirmed kills.”

“Public record,” she said. “Mostly.”

“Lapsed Catholic, last time in confession was right before you were deployed. Scared of dogs. And…” Glazer leaned forward and smiled, sitting on his secret.

For an instant, she panicked.
You can’t know! There’s no possible way you could know…
Then she realized what he was implying and laughed.

“If you’re trying to out me, you’re about a decade too late,” Rachel said as she winked at him. “Just because I don’t talk about it doesn’t mean it’s an issue. Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t care.”

He flickered yellow. 

“Oh, don’t tell me that was your trump card,” she said. “That’s really sad.”

Glazer settled back in his chair. “I know what they did to you.”

“Who? What they did to OACET?”

When he nodded, she pressed her fingers to her mouth. “You poor thing,” she sighed. “You actually think you’ve got something on us.”

His conversational colors blurred: he had not expected that.

“You want to know our master plan?” Rachel whispered. She said it just loud enough to be picked up by the camera, the recorder, and those watching from behind the glass:
Spoiler alert, guys!
“The thing about going public is you accept how one day, everybody will know. We already know it’ll get out. We want it to get out! We just don’t want to host our own pity party. The world might tolerate a cyborg, but nobody has any time for a whiner.

“You want to tell these guys here?” She waved at the mirrored wall. “I’m fine with that. I could even get a news crew if you want, but I gotta warn you, your fifteen minutes of fame are gonna get eaten up by ours, real quick.”

By their colors, the First MPD officers and the FBI in the observation room thought this was standard interrogation banter. They were barely yellow, maybe slightly curious, but she could confess to Kennedy’s assassination and they’d think she was only trying to draw Glazer out. But Santino, Phil, and Jason were dumbfounded, and the cyborgs clattered in her mind until she told them that the others had no reason to suspect she was telling the truth unless they gave them a reason. 

“Are you done?” Rachel asked Glazer. “Or would you like to keep playing?

“Good,” Rachel said when he didn’t answer. “I was the one who spoke to Witcham, and he indicated that you both specialize in manipulation. With that in mind, I am assuming you will not be here to go to trial.” She drummed her fingernails on the folder. “I’m assuming you’ve got some fourth-quarter strategy where you try to escape, and you’ll either manage it or get killed in the attempt. Either way, you’re going on record with the name of the person who hired you, as well as your motives for murder, kidnapping, building bombs, and so forth. It might not hold up in court, but if something were to happen to you, we have a place to start.”

Terms stated.

“Escape?” Glazer pulled his hands up so the chain pointed down at the welded ring.

“Or be killed,” Rachel clarified. “Let’s be blunt: escape is what I think is going to happen, but the smart money is that you’ll be shanked, poisoned, or any one of the many possible outcomes for a dude who accused a senator.”

“Sounds like the smart money should be on me not talking at all.”

“Yeah! You’d think so!” Rachel nodded. “Except you already let it slip that you could be bought, so whoever belongs to that name you’re trying to use as your bargaining chip probably won’t let you get to trial.  But if you’re willing to bet that the news won’t make its merry little way back to your senator while you’re sitting in our holding cell, you could take the house for some serious cash. If you live. Fingers crossed, right?” 

Glazer was so pleased with how this was going he was practically purple. She had taken the bait he had dangled in front of Hill; Glazer had willingly trapped himself, but he needed her to spring it so it would seem authentic.

“Your call. If you think you’ll still be here at trial, then you don’t need to say a damned word to me. But if you think you won’t be around, then you lose nothing by talking.”

“Revenge from beyond the grave?”

“Sure,” she shrugged. “That’s a little melodramatic, but I suppose the phrasing is the prerogative of the dead man.”

“If I give him up, I want a walk. No charges.”

“I’m sure your mewling infant of a lawyer has explained why that’s not going to happen. Assault. Kidnapping. Murder.”

His rough fingertip flicked against the table, striking the metal surface directly across from Rachel’s blue folder.

Deal negotiated.

“You see this?” Rachel ripped Maria Griffin’s photograph off of the folder and held it out at arm’s length. Glazer’s colors didn’t change; there was no remorse. “You need to hear me, Glazer. This was a very nice woman, and she is dead. I’m sure you knew everything about her, too, and you still killed her. You owe her, and you will pay,” she said. “I will make sure of that.

“And anything you might do in the future?” Rachel locked eyes with Glazer and held his with her own. He was a psychopath
—
a charismatic psychopath, to be sure
—
but after several long moments her cyborg stare caused his conversational colors to blanch. He broke first, his gaze shying down and away. “Anything you do, any harm you cause to another living person, I will make you pay for that, too.”