Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (8 page)

Everything slowed back to normal speed. The mother was sobbing. The boy stared up at her. He couldn’t have been more than six and had a fresh bloody nose.

“Sorry,” she said, releasing them. The boy scuttled backwards on all fours.

Rachel knelt, wincing at the pain in her knees, then looked over towards her partner. Santino’s Taser was out, a puff of confetti still falling. The man with the Heckler & Koch was on the ground, his gun several feet away where Santino had kicked it away from his hand. The last man standing from Edwards’ little impromptu militia had rushed to the mother and her son, and had gathered them together in a warm familial hug.

Oh for fuck’s sake.

Santino helped her up. He was thoroughly shaken, his colors washed out like old clothes. It took Rachel a moment to remember that the last time her partner had committed violence against another human being was in the seventh grade. 

“It’s okay,” she said. “Trust me, he had it coming.”

The other man, the one who had thrown the first punch, was on his feet and wobbling towards the door. He ran straight into their backup, two local cops in uniform, who made him stumble back inside and sit down until they could sort out the mess.

“I got here as fast as I could,” Santino said, “but Edwards was spitting bile about the police so I had to run around and find the back entrance.”

“Smart. Real smart,” she said. The arrival of an officer at the moment when the rhetoric was flying hot would have made things worse. 

Rachel limped towards the closest upright chair, knees throbbing.
Every damned time.

She threw a quick glance at Edwards that was full of all of the venom she could produce, then carefully eased herself down into the chair to put him behind her. He looked at her, deep and probing and only slightly curious, and she cursed herself for jumping before the gun was fully out. Rachel and Santino had gone back and forth on the constitutionality of her scanning abilities, what it meant for her to be an officer who could search anyone with a casual glance. They had decided their best course of action was for her to refrain from using all but the most superficial surface scans on private citizens unless she had due cause. From her point of view, scanning the men tonight fell safely within that category, but she could not have a reasonable discussion about self-policing or the nature of her sixth sense with someone like Edwards. Rachel dropped her head into the cradle of her own arms and tried to not think about how she had just given Edwards and his supporters a firsthand example of how OACET blurred the lines of the law.

The cops came over and the evening dissolved into statements. Rachel had dreaded this part, knowing it would end with a call from someone down at First District Station who would use the incident as an excuse to dump her with clean hands. They separated her from her partner, and as they took him aside, Santino gave her the sad
fun while it lasted!
half-smile of lost opportunities. 

She had two advantages: everything that had happened in the coffee shop had been filmed in no fewer than five different angles, and the cops had heard about the bank and the magic tunnel. They borrowed a copy of the film from a reporter and she walked them through the scene, changing the timeline slightly but otherwise being as honest as words allowed.
This
was when she tried to leave to keep the situation from escalating.
Here
is when the first man jumped her;
then
she noticed they had guns.
There
was the guy with the Heckler & Koch, reaching inside his suit for his PDW…

The officers were wary, but with less of that flurry of harsh color she had come to expect when talking with the MPD. As she answered their questions, she tried to place what she was feeling. Not belonging, not acceptance but…

Legitimacy? Is legitimate a real emotion?

Eventually her mind circled around the word “credible” and stuck. It might not be her preferred adjective of choice, but she’d take it. 

The phone call from headquarters came. Rachel sat, eyes closed, as the senior officer went outside and shut the door behind him to escape the noise. She read his colors through the wall and felt relief.

“There’ll be some more questions tomorrow,” he warned her when he came back to her table. “But you’re cleared to go home tonight.”

“Am I still with the MPD?” she asked.

He flashed surprise at her and looked towards the reporters, the guns laid out on a table in plastic bags, the woman and her son.

“Yeah,” he said, and walked away.

She gave a quick thumbs-up to Santino a couple of tables over. His surface colors kindled and he jumped back into his debriefing with renewed purpose.

Rachel moved towards the baristas and ordered for herself and her partner. A pretty barista in a starched shirt and dangling silver jewelry shyly thanked Rachel as she slid the china saucers across the old stone counter, charms shaped like hollow stars clinking against the mugs.

She went back to her table and sat alone until Santino joined her. She pushed his coffee towards him and they raised the mugs in toast.

“Tomorrow will suck,” he said.

“Like a vacuum,” she agreed. The cappuccino was delicious.

The baristas did the math on the upcoming week of free publicity, then declared an open bar and kept the coffee flowing. Lowly news crews called their contacts at the networks and brokered deals big enough to pay a few months’ rent. Certain men who had made poor choices were led off in handcuffs. Even Judge Edwards, sitting all the way on the other side of the room where he could ignore Rachel at his convenience, was cracking jokes about the perils of fame.

It was a surprisingly happy atmosphere, Rachel and Santino agreed, and then Josh Glassman swept into the room and everything was brighter. 

If Patrick Mulcahy was the professional face of OACET, Josh Glassman was the other side of that coin. Where Mulcahy was aggressively competent, Josh was personable, lovable, everybody’s friend. Josh hadn’t been appointed the head of OACET’s public relations division as much as he had decided the position needed to exist so he could justify his paycheck. The quintessential charmer, he spent his evenings partying with Washington’s elite and dated a string of women so flawlessly perfect they seemed unreal. Many a commentator had questioned whether he was a cyborg at all or just a ringer brought in to beguile the public; he played this up to his advantage in interviews, leading the hosts along and then snapping their assumptions with digital pranks.

He was also one of her dearest friends. There was an unbreakable bond with the Agent who had set you free.

Josh entered like a rock star. Dark sunglasses and brown hair too wild for any government employee framed long features and a smile that promised an excellent night. With the clink of the door against the metal jam, the crowd swung from irritated reds to astonished happy purples, the cops forgiven for not letting them leave. A college kid ran up to ask him for a photo and the floodgates opened in a torrent of patrons waving smartphones.

“Bad Penguin,”
Josh said when he joined her in the link.
“No anchovy.”

She covered her mouth and smiled.
“Make this all better, O Mighty Manwhore.”

He paused in signing autographs to read the room. Josh didn’t get bogged down in her nonsense of colors. Like all true athletes, he took the measure of his opponents and adjusted his performance accordingly.
“It already looks good to me,”
he said.

“Yeah, now it does. Where have you been?”
she asked.
“I sent for backup ages ago.”

He shrugged through the link and Rachel cringed. She’d never get used to feeling another Agent’s physical gestures in her mind.
“We’ve got to teach you how to use autoscripts,”
he replied.
“I got here right after Santino zapped the nasty gunman, but I’ve been waiting to see how things played out without me.”

“Well, it’s all been up and down since I first got here,”
she said.
“And Edwards could shift them again in a heartbeat.”

“As you wish,”
Josh said.
“Take Santino and leave as soon as you can. How am I reading?”

“Crayola pack. Mostly purple, lots of happy yellow, some green, a little gray. Sorry for the stress,”
she added, noting the gray.

“Stress?”
He snorted and it resonated uncomfortably in her mind.
“What you’ve got here isn’t stress. This is a good book and a hot toddy after a long day.”

Josh’s core was the rich, honest blue of fresh tattoos as he moved through the crowd, shaking hands and laughing. There was none of the frantic scramble for avoidance that defined her waking hours; you were either made of raw charisma or you weren’t, and she wasn’t.

Edwards and his small entourage had taken a seat at the other end of the coffee store and Josh moved towards them, arms open. He greeted Edwards with all of the warmth reserved for a long-lost brother and pulled a chair up to the judge’s table. The two bowed their heads for a quiet conversation, then Josh scooted his chair back. 

“Who wants sound bites?” he shouted. “Everybody is sorry for everything!”

“C’mon, let’s go,” she whispered to Santino as the reporters stampeded towards the other side of the store. They had nearly reached the door when Edwards called out to her.

“Agent Peng!” The judge’s booming shout caused everyone in the room to turn and notice her failed escape. 

Rachel promoted the door from inanimate object to criminal mastermind; she had spent far too much time staring at it with some threat or another standing in her way for it to be uninvolved in this disaster of a night. She felt compelled to sneak back in here after hours with the appropriate power tools and lay waste to its painted glass and antique hardware, not for the joy of vandalism but to remind the door of its place in the grand order of things. 

And she would steal that owl for good measure.

“Wait here?” she asked Santino, who made the universal gesture for choking the life out of someone. 

“Your buddy noticed you were leaving,”
Josh told her. She glanced back towards their group where Josh was halfway through a joke, the cute barista with the bracelets on his lap and a bottle of excellent champagne making its way around the table.

“Trust me, Edwards is not my buddy,”
she replied.

“Not him,”
Josh said.
“The dopey one.”

She looked around his table to notice Charley waving goodbye.

Charley, what the hell?
she thought to herself. She could have sworn the man had more sense.

She moved towards the crowd around Edwards’ table, and they parted for her like the sea for Moses. Edwards stood and smiled, and walked towards her up the void. 

“Thank you so much for what you did here tonight, Agent Peng,” the judge said to the reporters. 

“You’re welcome,” she said to the ceiling.
Oooh, pressed tin.
 

“Such a world we live in,” he said, shaking his head sadly, making eye contact with the good voters watching live from the comfort of their kitchens and bedrooms. “Let’s all hope something like this will never happen again.”

“From what I experienced tonight, Your Honor, that seems to be entirely up to you.”

He laughed her off but flushed an angry red. Ten feet away, so did Santino, although his anger was weak and was overlayed with a strong horrified green.

“For God’s sake, Rachel, don’t poke the damned bear,”
Josh nagged through the link.

“But…” she backpedaled, “you’re right. We certainly live in interesting times.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Edwards said, smiling warmly.  “And I’d love to hear how you knew that man was reaching for a weapon.”

“Well, when you’ve been cornered like an animal,” she said as she smiled back, “if someone goes to grab something from inside of their jacket, you naturally assume the worst.”

“Even when he was standing directly behind you?” the judge said, and she saw Josh mirror her silent sigh. “The police said you told them you scanned those men for weapons, Agent Peng. I think we’d all like to hear more about that.”

“Considering how Agent Peng has very recently missed injury, she has no comment at this time.” Josh was there, flirting with the folks at home as he pulled the judge back to the table. “Except that she is glad she could prevent anyone from being hurt.”

“As are we all.” Edwards had to have the last word; Rachel supposed she was lucky he hadn’t brought up the boy’s bloody nose as his closer.

“Scoot, Penguin,”
Josh said.
“Get out of here. You’ve done your job, let me do mine.”

She grabbed her partner’s arm and they fell into the street.

Santino said he wanted to go home but he was lying through layers of gray, so she said it was only fitting to end the busiest (and perhaps final) day of their partnership over liquor. The search for a good bar became a quest. They were uncomfortable in any place that catered to white-collar professionals, and in that part of town that left a Mexican restaurant staffed exclusively by Koreans. The room was dark, lit only by passing traffic and small potlights stationed over ancient blown-up photographs of Chinese pagodas, black velvet paintings of Pancho Villa, and pyramids made from empty Budweiser cans. The food was delicious and the restaurant was packed.