Shadow Unit 15

© 2014 Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear, Stephen Brust, Sarah Monette, Will Shetterly, Stephen Shipman, Amanda Downum, Leah Bobet, & Holly Black. Cover design and photo @ Kyle Cassidy.

First edition. Published by CatYelling. Smashwords Edition.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Once a traveling magician came to town. He decided to do the "colored sands" effect. Now, this trick involves secreting colored sand about your person, and, it turns out, one of the best ways to do this involves filling condoms with the colored sand. He therefore went out to a pharmacy and purchased a gross of condoms.

He spent the evening in his hotel room filling condoms with colored sand. He discovered that the gross was, in fact, three short. While he didn't need all 144 for the trick, it was still a little annoying.

His show went well. After it was over, he returned to the pharmacy and said, "That gross of condoms you sold me yesterday was three short."

"Sorry," said pharmacist, handing him three more. "I hope I didn't ruin your evening.”

Kentucky, April 2009

Q: What do you call a man who looks like an offensive lineman and has a big black beard and a mop of curly black hair?

A: Bear.

Q: What do you call a bear flying a Gulfstream?

A: A pilot, you sapionormative jerk.

Q: What do you call him as you're disembarking from the Gulfstream that he thinks of as his personal property?

"Well done, Special Agent," said Esther as her foot hit tarmac. Bear nodded and tried to conceal the shakes that were just now starting up. "What I want," she added, "is to find a way to call you unflappable without you turning it into a horrible pun."

"Not gonna happen," said Bear, pleased at how even his voice sounded. "So don't even try."

She was lying, of course. He knew that. What she really wanted was to get down on her knees and kiss the ground; but she wouldn't, so she kept it light, the way they all did after the fact. He knew about this, usually being the first one to see them after the fact. He referred to them as his payload, but only to himself.

"Where are we?" said Esther.

"Kentucky. Middlesboro Bell County Airport."

She looked around. "Are we trapped here forever?"

She still wasn't asking what she wanted to know; he answered what she asked. "There is almost certainly a way to reach civilization. Worst case, they airdrop supplies."

Two minutes before, Bear realized, she'd been thinking,
At least this happened while I was the only one on board.
Now that they were on the ground, she was thinking other things, but not saying them.

"Was it as hard as I think to land like that?"

"Not really," he said. "She makes a pretty good glider. The hard part was stopping in less than 4000 feet." In fact, they had pulled up so close to the end of the runway that the nose was extended over it. A few hundred pounds less fuel, and—don't think about it.

"What now?" she said.

"I make some calls and get us home. Then Julie turns into an obsessive-compulsive little shit who no one can stand to be around, and in two days she tells us if it was sabotage, and if so, how it was done. And two days after that she grudgingly permits us to fly it again."

"And the FAA?"

"If she passes it, they will. They're all afraid of her."

Esther nodded, and finally asked the question. "What if it wasn't sabotage?"

"That's your department," said Bear.

J. Edgar Hoover Federal Building, Washington, D.C., December 2011

Arthur Tan rubbed his eyes and sighed. He seemed to be doing a lot of rubbing his eyes and sighing these days, and this case was seventy-five percent of it.

When he opened those eyes again, though, Stephen Reyes from Down The Hall was standing by his desk.

"Troubles?" Reyes said.

Tan gestured to the piles of twenty-year-old, fusty-smelling paper on his desk. "So I've got this guy in his fifties. Looks good for the recent series near Duluth. But."

"But serial killers don't start at 50." Reyes propped a hip on the desk, brow wrinkling with interest.

Tan waved at the smelly papers. "And I've got some stuff in other parts of the upper midwest back in the 90s that looks like it could be a part of the same series. But somebody's in jail for those. And we have a confession."

Reyes pursed his lips, and took the photocopy Tan handed him. He studied it for a minute, then his eyes closed in concentration. Tan thought about what Celentano had muttered once when he thought nobody was listening, about Stephen Reyes being a God-damned necromancer.

Then Reyes huffed through his nose and put the paper down. "The confession's no good."

"You think?"

"I'll write you a report," he said. "So you've got a paper trail. But no, I don't think this guy's good for it."

"So you think the confession was forced?"

"Forcing a confession is nothing. I could force a confession out of him in an evening."

Tan felt the matter of fact statement like a belly punch. "You're not saying—"

Reyes raised his eyebrows and smiled gently. "No. What I'm saying is that people are suggestible. Getting someone to say what you want them to say—that's easy. Getting them to believe what you want them to believe, just as easy. So easy you can do it by accident. You will do it by accident. You almost can't avoid it. Getting them to tell you what really happened—that is almost impossibly hard. Hey, do you think there's coffee?"

"Doc made a pot a while back, but it might be burnt. So how do you avoid suggesting, then?"

"Hang on, I'm going to get something to drink—no, wait, we'll do this first. What you do is try not to make up your mind in advance of the evidence. Keep your interviews open-ended. Your subjects can pick up what you want them to say from the questions you don't ask as easily as the questions you do. Special Agent, where are you going?"

Tan paused, half-risen from his chair. "I'm going to start a fresh pot...." He realized what had happened only as a slow grin dawned acros Reyes' face. "Wait. Since when do you drink coffee?"

Reyes tipped his head.

Tan sighed and sat back down. "Sometimes you're a little creepy."

"You think so? You should get Sol Todd to discourse on the notorious accuracy of eyewitness accounts."

"I thank my lucky stars you didn't go into advertising."

Reyes laughed. He tapped the paper on Tan's desk and made it rattle. "You got a miscarriage of justice here, Tan. What are you going to do about it?"

"Fix it," Tan said tiredly. "Just as soon as I get some coffee."

"Sit," Reyes told him. "I'll bring you one."

Only after the senior agent was gone did Tan realize that Reyes hadn't had to ask him how he took it.

J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, D.C., April 20, 2013

And that, for now, was that.

It wasn't over; the FBI would be involved in the work of building the prosecution's case, providing and consulting on evidence and offering context for the arguments. But the immediate, terrible consciousness of fragile human bodies at risk could be set aside for a while.

"Aside" was never very far. And "a while" was sometimes a matter of hours or minutes.

Esther Falkner stood in a streak of sunlight in what was a mere widening of a corridor, a nameless, functionless connecting link between areas with names and functions. It was out of the path of anyone who might have come looking for her in particular.

She closed her eyes and saw the light through her eyelids, through skin and blood. She imagined it traveling to the center of her body as if it could be carried on hemoglobin cells.
I grieve,
she thought.
I rejoice. I grieve.
Tonight she would go home to her husband and daughters. She could take a little time now to ache for those who would never go home again.

She heard heavy steps approaching on her right and opened her eyes.

"Esther," Victor Celentano said with a nod. He meant to walk past; she saw him change his mind and stop uncertainly beside her, just outside her band of sun. His suit was wrinkled, his collar limp, and his tie loosened, and she noted they were the same ones she'd seen him in on Thursday afternoon.

The local field office hadn't had to officially call in the BAU, but there'd been ways to help. Plenty of people in the building hadn't seen much of their own beds since the fifteenth.

"Victor. Just letting the spring unwind."

He took that to mean what she'd intended: he was welcome to stay. He shifted more of his weight into his heels, sighed, and scrubbed his face with his fingertips. "Time was we'd be doing that with a cigarette and a glass of scotch."

"At this time of the morning."

"We were a hardy bunch."

She raised one corner of her mouth. "Since those were the days before you were at Quantico, and when no way in hell would they have let a broad do my job, what 'we' do you mean?"

Celentano snorted. "Yeah, well. And that last was the Bureau's loss. Any asshole who hasn't figured that out shouldn't get a government check."

The silence was companionable, but Falkner broke it anyway. "Will they push for the death penalty, do you think?"

"Somebody will. They may even get it."

"God, I hope not."

"Not our problem."

"Of course it's our problem. We'll help them make their case, won't we?"

Celentano thrust his head a little forward on his neck. She knew his body language; he was prepared to engage. "I grew up in the North End. You know that, right?"

"And I'm a Jew. But this isn't like deciding whether to root for the Patriots or the Redskins, and
you
know
that
."

"Emotionless isn't in our job description. Poker face, sure. But you can't separate what people feel and what they do. Terrorism is about doing maximum emotional damage. If this idiot gets more fire rained down on his head because he freaked out everyone who saw the news footage, that's pretty much what he asked for."

Falkner rolled the words around in her head. She knew the shape of the argument already. She also knew where the raveled end of it lay. "No, you can't separate what people feel and what they do. What he asked for was his big brother's approval. That's in the news footage, too, for anyone who knows where to look."

Celentano narrowed his eyes, as if squinting into the near future for her next attack. "It's called the Justice Department." But he said it as if he knew he was parrying with the foible.

"It's also called the Department of Homeland Security. I'm not sure there's any such thing as justice or security without knowledge. In this case, knowledge leads to compassion."

"I never thought you were the sentimental type."

"It's not sentiment at my pay grade. It's basic human physiology. We treat nineteen-year-olds as adults in the justice system. But the brain doesn't develop a reliable capacity to judge consequences until closer to twenty-five. If you suck at weighing consequences, what do you use to decide whether to rob a gas station, or plant bombs on a crowded street?"

Celentano gave a little snort, which under the circumstances could pass for a raised hand. "Oh, sure. Use behavioral science against me."

Falkner let both corners of her mouth twitch upward. "We
are
on the clock."

"And since when do you say things like 'suck at'?"

"Pernicious influence of two teenage daughters. Do you have kids, Vic?"

"Son in grad school, daughter in management in the private sector."

"You might not have seen the dynamic up close and personal, then." Intermittently over the past few days she'd felt the same spasm of sick, helpless fear she felt now. She set it aside, as she had every time before; but this time she gave voice to the thought that caused it. "If Bekk embraced some kind of fanaticism, some violent ideology... Deb might follow her into it. They're about the same distance apart in age."

Celentano did even more damage to the state of his suit by shoving his hands in his trouser pockets and crumpling the jacket between his ribs and his tight-pinched elbows. His closed lips worked, and Falkner suspected he was sucking on his dental work. "So you're saying they already put down the guy responsible."

"More that the guy in custody isn't exactly responsible." She drew a long breath of conditioned air, the smell of floor polish, the sunlight's heat. "Let's do what we do best. Let's get inside this kid's head."

He gave her a go-ahead nod, the same gesture he might make if they were briefing a police detective who'd brought them a case.

So she did what she would do in those circumstances. She curled her toes in her shoes to grip the floor, and pulled her spine a little straighter, feeling the strength of her body in a firm line from legs to hips to shoulders to level jaw. Daphne Worth had once referred to it as "raising aspect." She'd looked it up later and laughed.

"A teenage boy in college," she said. "He wants to fit in, he wants to be popular. He's a little fuzzy about who he wants to be when he grows up. He idolizes his older brother, who's seen more of the world, and who has a cause, an identity, a set of goals.

"When the older brother recruits him to work for that cause, he feels accepted. Grown up. Worthy. His brother is taking him seriously. He's not thinking about killing. He's thinking about his brother's approval.

"The explosions are frightening, but exhilarating, too. He's accomplished something big. He's proved he deserved his brother's confidence. This cause that he's never really been a part of has been the means of proving his manhood to his brother and the world.

"But the shootout with the police is not about the cause. Everything he knows about guns comes from TV and movies. His brother is shot. He's shot. Glass from the windows of the SUV is flying everywhere. He can't hear anything except the gunfire. His brother falls.

"His brother, who was the reason and the reward,
falls
. And he's just a teenage boy who doesn't know what to do anymore.

"He feels the thump as the tires of the SUV run over his brother's body. He's too deafened by gunfire to hear it dragging from the undercarriage. When it finally pulls free, he sees it in the rear-view mirror.

"From that moment, he ceased to be a threat. When he was taken, he wasn't even carrying a weapon. The weapons were his brother's, just like the cause and the plan. Without his brother, he reverted to the college kid his friends described, who would never do a thing like that."

She let out the rest of her breath slowly. It was like an exorcism. She could stop imagining her daughters in those roles because she'd invoked and released the real actors.

"The way you describe it," Celentano said, his voice rusty, "we could never do anything worse to that kid than he's already done to himself."

But that's not what the trial and the sentence are for, are they?
she wanted to say. She'd harrowed Celentano's sensibilities enough for one day, however. "Go home, Vic. We get to start all over again tomorrow morning."

Celentano nodded and continued down the hall to wherever he was going. She pulled out her phone to call Ben. By the time she reached home, there'd be lunch.