Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (43 page)

He looked back up at her, not quite meeting her eyes. “Bill me.”

Deal struck.

“Gladly,” she said. “Just give me that name.”

He pushed himself back in his chair and stared directly at the mirrored glass and the black ball of the video camera beside it, and said: “Joseph P. Hanlon. Four-term Senator from the state of California. Sits on almost every defense or science and technology committee out there.”

Rachel hadn’t realized she had been holding her breath. “And his purpose for hiring you?”

“To frame OACET for crimes that appeared to be committed by a rogue cyborg.”

“Why did he want to do this?”

“Because he needs to discredit OACET before his involvement in the creation of the Program is exposed.”

“How was he involved?”

“His company was one of those which collaborated on the implant. Hanlon recognized its potential but didn’t have the resources to develop it on a large scale. By turning the technology over to the U.S. government, he manipulated them into funding it and supplying five hundred test subjects. He planned to reclaim control of the Program after the government declared it a loss, but OACET gained autonomy before he could do this.”

Whispers of color through the glass as the humans turned to stare at the cyborgs; bright white knives of shock as they realized that Santino already knew; anger from Sturtevant and Gallagher towards Rachel as they realized they had been used.

“Do you have evidence?” she asked.

“Payments. They came through the Cayman Islands but you can backtrack to a subsidiary of Hanlon Industries. Checking account routing number starting with Four, Eight, Three, Three. You’ll get the rest of the number and the dates of the transactions after my lawyer establishes terms with the District Attorney.”

He stared directly ahead and refused to meet her eyes. 

“I need the rest,” she said. “I need proof. If I don’t have that, I’m assuming you’re lying to cover your ass.”

“Terms first.”

“Numbers first.”

There was another knock on the glass. Sturtevant was furious instead of suspicious, but Rachel knew she shouldn’t push it.

“Have it your way,” she snapped. She stood and slapped the folder on the desk, hard. “I’ll send your childlike attorney back in. Don’t eat him.”

The man is a monster,
she thought as she gathered up her papers and stormed out of the room.
Him and Witcham both.
Not in Mulcahy’s domesticated version of evolving societal persecution, but in the original sense of the word. Stories had draped men like them in fangs; it was easier to understand them when they matched your idea of what slunk out of the dark.

And she was no better.

She slipped the second paperclip from where she had hidden it inside of her sleeve, and used it to replace the one that had secured Maria Griffin’s photograph to the folder.

TWENTY

Rachel was raw. The moment she had stepped out of the interview room, Sturtevant had dragged her into the same vacant office she had used to contact Mulcahy. The Chief of Detectives had been livid and demanded to know how much of what Glazer had said about Hanlon was true.

“All of it,” she had replied.

He had paused at the significance of this, then decided to go after those problems he could actually solve. “And you knew this before you went in there?”

She had nodded.

“You should never have spoken to him… Nobody from OACET should have gone anywhere near him! Everything you recorded is worthless.”

Rachel had tilted her head and glanced back towards the interview room to remind him how difficult she was to fool. She could see Gallagher conducting an official version of her interview with Glazer. He was answering the SAC’s questions but not deviating from the same content he had given to either Rachel or Hill. Gallagher would get nothing new out of him except an irreproachable official record. Glazer’s attorney was long gone, the digital hardware swapped out, the old files erased. Nothing that had happened between Rachel and Glazer (or between Hill and Glazer, for that matter) would ever be known outside of Interrogation.

Sturtevant had followed her gaze but it didn’t shake him. “We’re going to reevaluate your position,” he had told her coldly. “You’ll probably be leaving us. I don’t like to be used.”

Rachel had nodded. “The feeling is mutual, sir.”

His anger had softened slightly around its edges. “I’m sorry for what happened to your people,” he said. “Go.”

“Can I say something, sir?”

“I’m not in the mood, Peng,” Sturtevant had said. “Start packing up your stuff.” 

Santino had met her back at the fishbowl. He was madder than Sturtevant, enraged at how she had allowed Glazer to prove OACET had an axe to grind against Hanlon. 

“What the hell were you thinking?” he had said, slapping the side of the box she was using for those few belongings of hers that wouldn’t fit into her purse. “You knew Sturtevant wouldn’t let you run your own agenda on his watch!”

“We needed Glazer’s confession.” Rachel had found the last of her books under a stack of papers. Across the room, Madeline waited under the orchid. She decided to leave the owl in its new home, something for First District Station to remember her by.

“There were other ways to get it!” Santino had shouted. “But you decided the best way was to sacrifice yourself?”

Rachel had shrugged. She’d go to her grave before she let Santino know about the paperclip. “It doesn’t matter what happens to me.”

Santino had gaped at her. “I hope someday soon you realize how stupid you sound,” he finally said, and had slammed the door as he left.

When his anger had moved down the hall, she had reached out to Phil to make sure he stuck to Santino like glue.
“Something’s about to happen,”
she had told Phil.
“Keep him with you at all times. Things get rough, you knock him out, lock him up. I don’t care! He’s not a fighter. Your only job is to keep him out of harm’s way, understand?”

Phil did. Whatever he had felt through their link had scared him; he didn’t bother to ask questions.

Then she had put Jason on Glazer.
“Watch him,”
she had ordered.
“Have your gun ready. Try and keep some distance from him, but do not let him out of your sight.”

“They’re telling me to leave,”
he had said. 

“So? Pull rank. You’re an Agent.”

“Why don’t you do it?”

“This building is huge. Lots of exits. I need to stay where I can cover any of them if necessary.”

Jason had reached out and pushed, trying to go deep. She pushed back, but he had found the guilt.
“What did you do?”
Jason had demanded.
“Tell me what you did!”

“I got Hanlon’s name!”
Rachel had roared.

Jason had retreated and severed their link.

The break room was centrally located and was as good a place as any to hide in plain sight. Rachel had walked in and sat at the table closest to the door, ignoring the three officers already there. The room had cleared, the officers quietly filing out so as to not attract her attention. She had kept her back to the door and pretended to read a magazine while she watched First District Station tick on behind her.

And then she had waited. 

After an hour, Rachel had hurriedly walked a nervous ten feet to the vending machines and back to her table. She was still nursing her soda when Zockinski and Hill found her. They sat across from her, mostly greens and gray, with her own turquoise core moving through their surface colors.

“Well?” Rachel finally said.

“Is it true?” Zockinski asked her.

“That I’m getting kicked out?”

“That you knew about Glazer.”

“No. Sturtevant thinks I used him, maybe used everyone here at First MPD,” she said. “That’s not what happened. I didn’t know about Witcham or Glazer until a few days ago. Everything we’ve gone through is as new to me as it has been to you.”

“But you knew about Hanlon?”

“Yeah.” There was no reason to lie. She toyed with the water droplets running down her soda can. “We knew, but there was nothing we could do. Smoking guns big enough to bring down senators are hard to come by.”

“So?” Hill asked. “What made you guys stop playing along?”

“Before we went public, you mean? The short-short version is we learned we had been set up,” she said. “We never did ‘play along’ with Hanlon. We didn’t even realize he was involved until months after we found out that Congress was trying to cover up the program, and that cover-up was a big part of what drove us to go public in the first place.

“Glazer’s connection to Hanlon clicked into place during your interview,” she said to Hill. It was as good an explanation as any. “Once he said a senator was involved, I had a hunch it was Hanlon. Turns out I was right.”

“Was that what you were trying to tell Sturtevant before you went in?” Hill asked.

She shrugged and half-nodded so Hill would think he had guessed correctly.

“Sturtevant shouldn’t throw you out of the MPD because he didn’t listen,” Zockinski said.

“Yeah, well,” Rachel said. “Few things are fair.”

“Come on,” Zockinski stood. “We’re gonna talk to him.”

“Who? Sturtevant?”

“Yes,” Zockinski replied.

She looked over her shoulder at the door. “I already tried. He doesn’t want to see me,” she said. “It’ll be better if I keep out of his way, maybe give him a chance to cool off.”

“You want to stay at First District Station?” Hill asked her.

“Yeah.” Rachel grinned up at him. “Yeah, I do.”

“Atran and Netz, too?”

Jason would prefer the FBI, but she knew Phil had his heart set on the bomb squad. “Yes.”

“Okay,” Hill nodded and left. 

“Where’s he going?” Rachel asked Zockinski.

“He told you,” Zockinski said. He got up and went to the coffee pot. “To talk to Sturtevant.”

“Oh,” Rachel didn’t know what else to say other than offer a weak: “He doesn’t have to do that.”

“Shut up, Peng,” Zockinski said, and sat back down with a full mug. He scowled at the taste.

She was up and cleaning out the coffee maker before she remembered she had to keep her hands free. 

“It’s fresh,” Zockinski said as he stole her magazine.

“No, it’s not. And it’s disgusting. I want coffee,” Rachel said. She hadn’t, but she was getting jittery and needed to move. “If you don’t have the sense to clean the machine first, that’s your own damn fault.”

He shrugged and began turning pages.

Rachel poured water into the glass carafe, then started to swirl it around and around as the dish soap foamed. Water was a problem for her, moving water especially. It ran in and out of itself, twisting back and forth in patterns she could almost but not quite understand…

Her subconscious twitched.

She rested the pot on the bottom of the sink and ran a quick scan through Glazer. He was still securely bound to table and floor in the interview room. Jason, Hill, and Sturtevant were with him; as she watched, Sturtevant left, leaving Jason and Hill alone with Glazer.

Rachel returned to her scrubbing. She knew this feeling: she was staring at something important but it hadn’t yet crossed the barrier between hindbrain and conscious thought. She poured more soap in the carafe and worked at the burned-on stains, hoping the task would cause her subconscious to get bored and do something useful.

“Peng, quit humming,” Zockinski said.

“Shh,” she shushed him and flipped her implant to reading mode, then back to full spectrum while her subconscious started to scream. 

“Snuglet the Seal?” Zockinski asked. 

Rachel glanced over at the detective, her raised eyebrow asking him if he had lost his darned mind.

“My kids watch the reruns,” he said, and shrugged. “Don’t give me that look. You’re the one humming the theme song.”

Her mind slammed shut on his words like a trap. Rachel stepped back into the middle of the room and spun her sixth sense out to the edge of the building and beyond, searching through a thousand different core colors like she was trying to pick out one voice in a crowd.

There.

Eric Witcham,
né
Charley Brazee, with his distinctively bland core of Snuglet’s blues and grays, bobbed and weaved through the routine activities of First District Station as he made his way towards the interrogation room.

“He’s here,” she whispered. Then: “He’s here! Witcham’s in the building!”

She was running out of the break room before she had finished shouting, Zockinski at her heels. 

“Jason!”
Rachel called through the link as she shook the suds off her hands.
“Put Glazer into lockdown. Witcham’s coming for him.”

“Get me his cell,”
he said.
“A tablet, a computer… Get me something he’s carrying so I can use it to track him.”