AGENT O’NEILL: She took down one goon and ran for it. Then because she got through to the real 911 service, the state police dogpiled the scene. Which made goon two lose his shit and light up one of their drones. And it all went downhill from there.
DR. SCRANTON: So we can point to the goon going off-script by taking her bag, and her unusual degree of preparedness in having an emergency kit in her trunk. So my next question is, did she swallow the narrative? Have we spoiled her by accident? It’d be a real shame if all this mess was for nothing.
COL. SMITH: That’s a good question. I don’t think we’re going to learn the answer to it until I’ve had a chance to talk to her myself, tomor—later today.
AGENT O’NEILL: I make it 50/50. If she buys it, we might be able to recover and acquire a useful asset; I mean, she showed initiative and courage under pressure—that’s got to be a plus. But if she doesn’t buy the scenario …
DR. SCRANTON: We’ll worry about how deep to bury her if and when that eventuates. Hopefully it won’t. Meanwhile, I call this a wrap. Let’s go and get some sleep. Tomorrow morning I’ll brief the folks upstairs. In the meantime, when Rita’s had a bit of time to think about things Sonia and Patrick can take her in and Eric can pitch her the offer. We’ll take it from there.
END TRANSCRIPT
BOSTON, MARCH 2020
The helicopter spirited her away into night and mist. After a flight lasting less than thirty minutes, it landed in a distant corner of an airfield where the gray shadows of military transport aircraft lined the runway. Jack led her to a van with blacked-out windows, and it took them to a hangar. Then he led her inside, to a corner where a stack of modular prefab offices formed a multistory complex, completely invisible to the outside world. One of these was tricked out with another bland motel-style room with no windows and no handle on the inside of the door. Rita was unsure whether or not to feel grateful for the locks and the dog-sized six-legged robots with grenade launchers patrolling the darkness outside. She was beginning to suspect that perhaps the only foolproof way to tell the difference between a fortress and a jail was by the attitude of the guards to the inmates.
She held herself together while she showered and unpacked enough of her personal effects to pretend that this room was yet another hotel suite rather than a fancy prison. But then the day’s events hit home. Curling up beneath the comforter, she clutched her phone, her traitorous link to the world, and hit up the local news sites, mindful that everything she surfed would be as transparent as glass to her custodians. There was, she discovered, absolutely no word of a lethal shoot-out near the interstate south of Boston. Nothing. She hadn’t been expecting to be the talk of the town, but the totality of the media blackout was chilling. Everybody understood that this sort of thing happened, that the First Amendment had to take a backseat to the requirements of national security from time to time. But witnessing the thoroughness with which everything from street cams through Twitter feeds fell silent before the demands of the Dark State gave her an eerie sense of detachment. It was as if she was coming adrift from her life, and all that was solid was melting into air. She began to shake; then the tears came.
Catharsis and sleep brought her to a better place by the time she woke early the next morning. The lack of manacles and orange jumpsuits was a positive sign. Her absent relatives might be enemies of the state, but the state had decided that she was not one of them. She forced herself to message her parents, flatmates, and a handful of friends, telling them she’d been delayed out west but was okay. She kept it to the sort of content-free fluff that would tell a censor nothing about her, and that might even be viewed as evidence of cooperation.
By the time there was a knock on the door, she thought she’d managed to compose herself. But she learned she was wrong the hard way, as her heart pounded wildly. “Come in,” she said, as if her consent meant anything.
The door opened. It was Gomez, her gaze as judgmental as before. “Get your stuff together; you’re coming with me,” she said. “Five minutes.” Then she stood just inside the entrance at parade rest, watching as Rita hastily flung her toothbrush and spare clothes into her bag.
“Where are we going?” Rita asked.
“Breakfast. Then an interview.” Gomez spoke as if words came at a price. She led Rita along a narrow corridor, then into a windowless ready room equipped with a metal sink and bare tables. A couple of bagged McDonald’s breakfast muffins and oily, bitter cups of coffee awaited. Rita managed to eat under Gomez’s stern gaze; is it the world-walker thing that bugs her so much? she wondered. Or is it my skin? Maybe the two were too deeply intertwined for Gomez to suspend her prejudice: Rita could have passed for Middle Eastern, and if Gomez saw her as a wanted terrorist’s left-behind baggage …
Gomez drove her out of the prefab into the overcast morning light, steering an unmarked SUV under manual control. Her manner robotic, she scanned the rearview display constantly; perhaps she expected to be tailed by terrorists or attacked by world-walkers at any moment. She drove past a taxiway and a ramp studded with parked blue-gray drones, then hung a right into a tightly spiraling underpass leading to an underground parking lot. At the bottom, a security booth and barrier blocked her path. She halted, wound the window down, and presented an ID card to a uniformed security guard.
The guard peered at the badge, then at Gomez—then stared at Rita, huddling in the passenger seat. “ID, please,” he said.
“Agent Gomez with Candidate Red,” she told him. “Candidate has no ID but should be on your list. I’m signing for her on my cognizance.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He eyeballed Rita again, comparing her with an image on his glasses. “Look directly at me, ma’am.”
Rita looked. Saw a Homeland Security uniform, a sidearm, warning notices, and thumbprint locks on the kiosk behind him.
“Spit here,” he ordered, proffering a glass tube.
Rita spat on demand, then she and Gomez waited for a couple of minutes as the guard processed the sample.
“You’re cleared to proceed.” The barrier rose and the tire-height caltrops retracted into the concrete beneath it. “Have a good trip, y’all.”
“A good—?”
“Later.” Gomez’s tone was sharp. Another sharply spiraling ramp took them down another level: then another barrier retracted into the ground. Ahead, the ramp funneled them into something like a truck-sized freight elevator. Gomez inched forward, following directions on a large screen at the far side of the elevator car, then switched off the SUV’s motor. “You may need to swallow a couple of times to clear your ears,” she told Rita as the elevator door rose behind them.
“Swallow?” Something flickered behind Rita’s eyes and her inner ears tightened painfully, as if she was in a rapidly descending airliner. “Uh, what was that?”