Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (45 page)

“Don’t be countin’ on it,” she muttered to herself in a mock Irish brogue. 

There was screaming. Glazer grabbed Witcham in a fireman’s carry, then threw him over the back seat of the scooter and swung it around so it was pointed towards the bottom of the parking garage. They took off in a sputter, Witcham’s howls gradually fading as they drove down the ramp.

Rachel collapsed on the pavement. She stared at the four fresh burrs she had stamped in the concrete and idly wondered how many months of practice she would need to put in with solid rounds before she could double-bank her shots. Then she reached out through the link.
“Phil?”

“Rachel! Thank God.”

“They’re on an old scooter, believe it or not. Witcham’s seriously injured; he’ll slow them down. Tell me you’ve got the ramps to the parking garage blocked off.”

“They’re working on it,”
he said.
“I think they’re almost done.”
 

Rachel closed her eyes as she felt the cool metal of a door handle underneath Phil’s fingers: her walls were weak.
“How long does it take to set up a road block at a police station? My people would have had that done in ninety seconds.”

He grinned.
“These are your people. Check your clock,”
he said.
“That’s about how long you’ve been out of contact.”

She did: her conversation with Witcham had taken less than two minutes.
“Time flies,”
she said, and her knees throbbed as Phil knelt to help someone inside.
“I’m closing myself out until I get my reserves back. I can feel everything you’re doing.”

“I know, you’re open both ways. Get up off of the cold, hard ground.”

“Hold my calls?”

“Done. Mulcahy’s on his way,”
he said, and blinked out.

She heard soft-soled rubber scuff the pavement beside her and realized she had turned off visuals. “Where have you been?” she asked Santino without opening her eyes.

“Someone left a mess inside,” he said. “Must have been a hell of a party.”

“Yup. You missed it. There were fireworks.”

“Aw.” He paused. “I think you’re lying in dried vomit.” 

“That sounds about right,” she sighed, and held up her hand. Santino, the clean freak, didn’t hesitate before he took it and helped her up, but she was glad she couldn’t see his face when he did. 

Rachel winced as her weight came down. “My knees are pooched,” she said, and remembered. She turned visuals back on. Objects came first. On the lowest level of the garage, Witcham and Glazer were trapped in a corner as officers closed in from both sides. Then she added emotions: the officers and Witcham glowed red, but theirs was from anger and his was from pain; to the side, Glazer was the calm steely-blue of professional purpose.

“They’re not worried,” she muttered.

“What?” Santino asked.

“Witcham and Glazer…” she answered, then reached out to Phil again.
“You still have a lock on Witcham’s bomb?”

“Of course,”
the other Agent replied.
“Why?”

He would have ditched it if it were useless,
she thought to herself.

Her walls were still down: Phil heard her.
“Get out of the garage!”

He was broadcasting through the MPD’s headsets. Far below, the officers turned and ran.

“Go!” She pushed Santino. “Move!”

He looped an arm under her and half-dragged, half-carried Rachel the hundred yards back to the station. He pushed them through the door and slammed it behind them, then fell face-first over one of the MPD’s tactical medics. When Rachel picked herself up, she saw why there was no backup in the garage. The hallway was anarchy, with anyone in the building who had the smallest scrap of training in first aid attending to those who had been injured. There was a lot more blood than she remembered and it all smelled vaguely of cooked pork. Stun grenades weren’t meant to come in contact with skin.

“How did you get through this?” Rachel asked.

“Kicking,” he said. “Plenty of kicking.”

The station shook ever so slightly and everyone in the hall went orange as they froze and waited to see what would come next.

“What just happened?” Santino asked as the wave of apprehension passed and normal conversational colors came back up in the crowd, curious yellows pushing out the orange. 

“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “I’ve got an idea, but we need to find Phil.” Two floors down, a surge of kinetic energy and a massive cloud of dust were messing with her scans, and she didn’t have the time or the composure to pick through it until she found the bodies. All she knew for sure was that there was no longer anything alive in that corner of the parking garage, and that was good enough for her.

She searched for the other Agents and found Phil in the interrogation room at the end of the hallway. Jason was still offline. She and Santino tripped and pushed themselves through the crowd, then dropped into the relative calm of a room with only six people in it. Rachel tried to shut the door behind them but its knob had been broken off at the shaft, so she nudged a chair in front of the door to hold it closed.

The ambulances were still minutes away. Zockinski and Hill were keeping Phil and another self-appointed medic busy. Hill’s dress shirt was gone, the charred fabric tossed into the waste can in the corner. His arms were a mass of burns and blistered skin; at least two of the flash-bangs had fallen on him when he was prone. Phil was applying ointment to him with a sterile swab. Zockinski had a light bandage across his lower face and neck, and a thick one stuck to his back where she had knocked away the grenade canister. Both glanced up when she and Santino entered, and their colors brightened to see she was safe.

Jason was sitting up, one of the men from Andrews’ bomb unit checking his vitals. The other Agent peered out at her from under the layers of gauze wrapped at his hairline. “What’d he hit you with?” she asked. She reached out to ping him as lightly as she could, but he wasn’t in the link. It felt vacant without him.

“The table,” he said. She raised an eyebrow and used her toe to tap the bolted plate which fixed the metal table to the floor. He shrugged. “Or, he used me to hit the table.”

She found herself hugging him. “Asshole,” she whispered, not sure if she meant him or Glazer.

“Yup.”

The bomb unit technician detangled them and tried to give her a fast checkup. She shrugged him off and badgered him into giving her a couple of ice packs for her knees, then claimed a spot on the polished linoleum floor as far away from Phil as she could get. Her reserves were still low and she didn’t want to touch someone with an active implant until she had a few minutes to recover.

“What happened downstairs?” Rachel asked him.

“That bomb went off.” Phil shook his head. “I had a lock on it, and then it was gone.”

“Not your fault,” she said. “Not with those two. They probably had an analog trigger as backup. Definitely not your fault.”

An officer pushed the door open and ordered them to evacuate the building. Zockinski told him to fuck off. This had all of the markings of a good fight until Sturtevant followed the officer into the room.

“Sit,” Sturtevant said as Rachel and Hill tried to stand for him. 

“Sir?” Zockinski, his head resting against the wall, asked: “Did we get them?”

“No.” Sturtevant replied. “We think they went out through the main air shaft for the ventilation system in the parking garage. It looks as though they prepped the tunnel during construction. We can’t get into it yet; they detonated a bomb behind them. Took down a good part of the lowest level and sealed off the tunnel. Wherever that tunnel went, they’re outside the perimeter now.”

“Was anyone hurt?” Phil asked.

“We don’t know,” Sturtevant replied. “I left before the head count was done. But until my phone rings, I’ll assume the best.

“Now. Agent Peng? Tell me what happened in the garage.”

Rachel gave him the short version. She had decided Sturtevant needed to see the video for himself, so she asked him to watch that before they did a full briefing. “It won’t look like normal film,” she warned. “I was scanning through concrete to see Witcham and Glazer. But the audio is good, and the visuals should be enough to hold up at a hearing.”

“You shot Witcham.”

“Only to wound, and none in the back,” she added, remembering that the police and the military had different standards for when and how it was appropriate to send a bad guy to the ground. She was suddenly glad the layout of the garage had prevented a kill shot. 

“You shot him four times while standing one floor above him… Peng, I’m looking for a polite way to call you a liar.”

“You can call me whatever you like, sir, but it’ll be easier to explain the ballistics if you watch the video first.”

Her tablet made the rounds, starting with Sturtevant and moving down the chain of command. Even the bomb unit technician took a turn. As the tablet was passed down the roster, Sturtevant contemplated her through a rolling storm of blues, reds, and oranges; Rachel couldn’t spend the energy to puzzle those out, so she flipped off the emotional spectrum and turned to the man sitting on the ground beside her. “What happened in here?” she whispered to Hill.

The large man shook his head gingerly, wincing as his raw skin twisted ever so slightly under the gauze. “He was watching Jason,” he said. “Your eyes change when you talk to each other. One of you said something to Jason, and Glazer just knew. I don’t know how he picked his cuffs, but he took me down, then Jason. He was up and gone before I could move.”

She didn’t quite believe it; she would have put Hill up against Glazer in a fight. “He’s that fast?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry,” she said, and meant it.

“Not your fault.” Hill grinned at her. 

She could only meet his eyes because of a technicality.

There was some shouting from outside of the door, smoothed over by Josh’s steady tenor. Mulcahy opened the door and walked into the room, an MPD officer dangling from each arm as they tried to restrain him. Mulcahy shrugged them off and went straight to Jason, while Josh headed towards Rachel.

“Penguin!” Josh grabbed her and pulled her into a hug before she could stop him. He was careful to avoid touching her skin; Phil must have warned him. “Are you okay?”

“Penguin?” Zockinski lifted his head from the wall and smirked at her.

“I
was
okay,” she sighed. This was how it started. First your nickname got out, then your squad mates started leaving little items in your gear as a joke, and before you know it you’re packing a bag full of toy penguins all over the Middle East. “You have problems getting in here?”

“Me? No. Pat did. I just walked behind him while he cleared a path. The place is on lockdown,” Josh said, and pulled out a notepad. “I need a full report while everything is still fresh. This is about to hit the news cycle in a big way and I’m looking at a long night of interviews.” 

Rachel told her side of the story first, and mostly out loud for Hill’s benefit, then showed Josh the video of her confrontation with Witcham in the parking garage. When she was finished, Hill filled in what had come before. Glazer was in Interrogation when Rachel had warned them to put him in lockdown. Hill and Jason had barely dropped the blinds over the windows before Glazer hit them. He had been chained to the table one instant and was loose the next. Glazer kicked Hill hard enough to knock the wind out of him, smashed Jason’s head against the table, then broke the locked knob off of the door and was gone.

“Penguin?”
Mulcahy, physically occupied with Jason and the arrival of the paramedics, reached out to her.

Rachel reactivated the emotional spectrum to read him.
“I’m fine,”
she assured Mulcahy.
“You can debrief me later. Just know that I gave Sturtevant the tape.”

“What’s on it that shouldn’t be?”

“Nothing of substance about OACET. I was running emotions while recording but those could be… I don’t know, body temperature as seen through concrete, I suppose.

“Oh, and one more thing,”
she continued, hiding her mouth as she pretended to scratch her nose.
“He all but confessed that Hanlon hired him.”

Mulcahy shone in purple and gold.
“On tape.”

“Yes.”

“You got that on tape.”

She smiled like an angel. Across from her, Phil noticed and chuckled softly.

“What are the odds it ends up online?”
Mulcahy asked.

“One hundred percent,”
she replied, watching Sturtevant.
“I’ll keep passing out the file until someone cashes it in with a network for a payout. It ends with the shooting so it’ll go viral.”

Mulcahy went blue so quickly it was as though he had dipped himself in paint.
“Thanks, Penguin.”

Even if she couldn’t have seen his relief, she would have felt it through the link.
“No problem,”
she replied. He looked towards the destruction in the hallway and silently laughed.