“Wait, she’s a suspect pending identification, we caught her hanging around—”
“Yeah, right; who do you think phoned in the incident?” He slid his badge away before Rita could read it. The cop ducked his head, unusually compliant, and stepped behind her. Jack moved to face her. “Unless you object, I’m going to take you into protective custody. We can start you on witness security tomorrow; right now it’s probably too dangerous for you to go home.”
Rita finally found her voice as her wrists came free: “What the fuck is this about?” Her voice rose: “You set me up, didn’t you? You and Gomez!”
“Hey, calm down.” Jack stepped close, lowering his voice. “We didn’t know they’d move this fast. Just plain lucky I was on a direct flight right after you. We didn’t expect anything like this. Not so soon.”
“Like what?” Rita pointed to the taped-off area, now crawling with cops—both the uniformed kind and crime scene officers in overalls. “Who are they and what are they doing?”
“I’m not sure.” Jack looked uncomfortable. “Walk with me.” He turned toward the helicopter and Rita followed, uncertainly. One of the cops trailed after them with her handbag and suitcase. “If I had to guess, I’d say they work for a faction opposed to your, uh, DNA donor. Your birth mother.”
“My … why…”
“Isn’t it obvious? The world-walkers want you dead, Ms. Douglas. We got a lead on them, chatter on some of their channels, and ran ahead of it. Luckily for you, as it turns out. If you’re asking why they want you dead, well, I’m sorry but we don’t read minds. On the other hand, we’re not in the business of letting terrorists murder our people, and you’re our best lead on them: this just confirmed they’re serious about you. So we’re going to try and keep you alive, and try to catch the bad guys and discover where they’re coming from. Then we’re going to deal with them.”
It was all too fast and too slick, moving like a Hollywood production on well-greased runners. Rita was tired and hungry and shaking with cold-sweat fear, and still she didn’t believe him. “But they—” She stopped, her inner censor clamping down. Could have grabbed me and carried me to another world then cut my throat, she realized. Why didn’t they do that?
“They employ ordinary criminals to do their legwork,” Jack continued. “Those guys were just hired muscle. You managed to bail before they made it to their handover point. But we’d better get you to a safe house before they try again. What do you say?”
“I, uh, I…” She trailed off, nodding. “Yeah. Yeah, whatever you say.” What she really wanted to do was to phone Mom and Dad, reassure them that she was okay, then go and hide under the bed or take a long bath and not leave her home for a week. But her comfort zone seemed as far away as Pluto. “Whatever you think,” she said, surrendering to the inevitable. “Just get me out of here.”
“Deal,” said Jack. He held the helicopter door open for her; it felt curiously flimsy after the trunk lid of her car. “Let’s fly. My boss wants to talk to you tomorrow: I think you’ll find what he has to say interesting.”
BALTIMORE, MARCH 2020
FEDERAL EMPLOYEE 004930391 CLASSIFIED VOICE TRANSCRIPT
DR. SCRANTON: Well. What a mess.
AGENT GOMEZ: I knew we should have fridged her adopters instead.
COL. SMITH: And I remind you we don’t do that sort of thing these days.
DR. SCRANTON: Please don’t squabble; it’s giving me a headache. I’ve got to work out what kind of spin to put on this. It’s not a matter of shoving it under the carpet … there isn’t enough carpet in Persia to cover up this mess.
AGENT GOMEZ: The hired help were deniable assets.
DR. SCRANTON: And may I remind you, the Massachusetts State Highway Patrol, the Boston PD, the local branch of the FBI, a bunch of hick security goons from Dorchester, and probably the MIT Campus Police and the Marching Band of the Massachusetts Rotary Club all got a slice of this cake? The folks upstairs are going to have a fit trying to keep the lid on it tomorrow. And guess who’s going to have to brief them? So you people are going to help me assemble a story, a narrative that holds water and explains just what we were trying to achieve and why this happened. And you’d better hope I can spin it convincingly, because it’s not just my job that’s on the line if we get it wrong.
COL. SMITH: Right. So how about we run through the facts one more time?
AGENT GOMEZ: Go for it.
COL. SMITH: I’ll start. Subject: Rita Douglas. It was decided—
AGENT GOMEZ: By this team collectively, let’s get that clear—
COL. SMITH: Shut up. It was decided by this team that in order to expedite the voluntary recruitment of the candidate we should subject Rita Douglas to a motivational scenario. Frightening but basically harmless.
DR. SCRANTON: Only it turned out she had bigger balls than expected.
COL. SMITH: A pair of stringers were commissioned via a blind cutout to conduct the exercise. Small-time thugs. There’s no back-trail to us that doesn’t equally plausibly point at the adversaries.
AGENT GOMEZ: Hell, it’s the sort of thing they do. We just stole a leaf from their playbook. If they’d identified her themselves they’d probably have done it for us—
COL. SMITH: Don’t interrupt. Your concerns are noted and will be taken into account. Let me remind everyone who we’re dealing with here: Miriam Beckstein’s daughter.
AGENT O’NEILL: Who was raised by total strangers, is an inactive carrier of the world-walking trait, and who is a Generation Z underachiever who works as a booth babe at trade shows.
COL. SMITH: But who, despite being tased and shoved in a trunk, correctly evaluated her situation and turned the tables on her kidnappers. She did serious physical damage to one of them: subdural hematoma and major abdominal bruising. His condition is listed as critical by Mass General, by the way.
DR. SCRANTON: Where did she get the blackjack?
AGENT GOMEZ: It wasn’t a blackjack, it was a tire iron. And she had it in her car trunk. Under the carpet, where the muscle didn’t spot it.
DR. SCRANTON: Lovely. Do please continue, Colonel.
COL. SMITH: She called the cops. Why did it get through? I thought we had a divert on her phone?
AGENT O’NEILL: We did indeed have a divert: it didn’t work. Turns out the hired goons took her handbag and phone off her—they weren’t idiots, and somebody forgot to hand them that part of the script. Turns out she had a survival kit in the trunk—blankets, first aid kit, tire iron, and a prepaid phone for emergencies—and nobody thought to search her car before she got to it, so we never found it.
AGENT GOMEZ: If we’re parceling out the blame, I’d just like to note …
DR. SCRANTON: Don’t bother. I’m not going to let this turn into a scapegoating exercise. Just stick to the story so that I know what I’m covering for.