*
On Saturday, Rita went to a ball game with Dad and River. On Sunday morning, she declined an invitation to go to church with her mom. Instead she went for a long walk with her fatphone and a geocaching Web site for company. She found and logged two caches, collected a travel bug from one of them (“Help me get to New Zealand!” it declared: having started in Anchorage, she figured a ride to Maryland wouldn’t hurt), reported another cache as muggled (removed by noncachers), and went home. In the afternoon she hung out with Kurt at the thrift store he volunteered at, which was hosting some kind of local artists’ event in support of their mission. She didn’t apologize for lying to him and he didn’t let her off the hook, but by tacit assent they avoided the subject and instead kept the conversation to anodyne matters like the game, a dumb sitcom, and Dad’s work. It kicked the ball down the road a way, but it wasn’t like she had to tell Kurt anything, was it?
The art display struck her as naive and a bit tacky, but the thrift store had a bunch of other stuff, ranging from ancient laptops and tablets through souvenirs and a couple of bookcases stuffed with musty-smelling old paper books. Kurt paused beside one, ran his hand along a shelf, then presented her with a dog-eared paperback, its cover missing. “You should read this,” he said, handing it to her.
Rita held it between finger and thumb. “It’s probably moldy,” she said, nose wrinkling. “Why should I? What’s so special about”—she checked the title page—“The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, by, uh—”
“It’s out of print; you won’t find it on Amazon,” said Kurt. “Which is odd, because the author also wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the book behind Blade Runner. You have seen Blade Runner?” He sighed when she shook her head. “Read this anyway—it is an excellent allegory for the totalitarian mind, and also nobody can examine your online annotations or page-turning habits on paper.”
“Gramps, you’re being paranoid! Anyway, it can’t be any good if it’s gone out of print, can it?”
Kurt merely turned away, his sardonic smile fading. Stung, Rita hovered for a moment, then took the yellowing block of paper to the front desk. “Oh, just take it,” Allie the clerk told her. “They’ve been clogging up the back for years. Nobody buys those things anymore.”
After lunch, Rita loaded up her rental and said her goodbyes, hugging Mom and Dad and promising to write more often. Kurt saw her out to the car. “Your birth mother’s mother was a good woman,” he said gravely. “Not one of the mad bombers. Remember that. Remember, too, you may work for the Stasi, but you do not need to be of the Stasi.”
“Oh, Gramps.” Rita shook her head. “Spare me the riddles?” She hugged him, but his attention seemed to be focused elsewhere, inward. So she closed her car door and became Anna Mittal again for the drive back to the airport, and the DHS highway checkpoint that nearly made her miss her flight.
CAMP GRACELAND, TIME LINE FOUR; QUANTICO, TIME LINE TWO, MAY-JULY 2020
The next ten weeks passed too fast for Rita to write to her folks, let alone take another weekend off work. The National Academy course was physically exhausting. While the Department of Homeland Security trainers at Camp Graceland had put her in the gym daily and begun working on her self-defense, most of the people attending the FBI course had military or police backgrounds, and everyone was expected to keep up. It was also mentally grueling, if not demoralizing. Some of her classmates had antediluvian attitudes toward women and people of Indian appearance, especially slightly built women of Indian appearance. It wasn’t what they said to her, exactly, but what they didn’t say.
She was on her own, without any of the peer support her classmates gave each other. There were lectures on law, behavioral science, forensics, and terrorism and terrorist mind-sets. The stuff about leadership development made her head spin. Rita did not do well in these classes, especially the areas that emphasized policing skills. “Not to worry about it,” Patrick told her when he visited during week three: “You’re not going to be a cop, and even if you were, this stuff isn’t about basic entry-level police work that you could expect to pick up. Just go with the flow and try to get a handle on how senior cops think, because if you get to go out in the field these are the people who’ll be looking for you.”
“I guess.” Her eyes narrowed involuntarily. “But about that: I don’t think my cover’s holding.”
“What, has anyone accused you of being an impostor?”
“No, it’s just that—I can tell—they know I’m not really one of them. Some of them are playing along deliberately, and a couple have cut me dead, but I’m really not fitting in. Not sure whether I’m being given the cold shoulder because I’m not a … not a typical cop,” she said weakly.
Patrick’s face hardened. “Any overt racism?”
“No, but—”
“Has anybody called you out, to your face…?”
“No, I think it’s more that they think I’m some kind of fake.”
“Then it’s not a problem. Drop it.” O’Neill’s tone was hard. “You’re not expected to graduate top of your course. Or even in the upper half. You’re here to learn how detectives think, what makes them tick.” He thought for a moment. “We’ll give you a second-level story. They already know you’re DHS. If anyone challenges you, tell them the truth: you’re undergoing deep-cover training. The spin is that you’ll be infiltrating activist groups as a long-term informer. If you don’t mention the world-walkers, nobody’s going to look for that angle; it’s too weird. If they think the DHS is running spies into activist groups, that’ll keep them happy.” He paused. “Racism is another thing. Official policy is zero tolerance, but you know what that’s worth. If you get any trouble, call me and I’ll get the Colonel to drop the hammer on them. That is all.”
“What’s…?” Rita paused. “Yeah, I can do that.” Pretend to be exactly what I am. Tell Patrick if I get any of the other shit. Maybe they’re not all assholes. Maybe that’s why I got a non-Anglo supervisor.
“Just don’t volunteer any information unless you’re directly challenged and you’ll be fine.”
“Apart from the bruises and the Marine assault course they expect me to pass!”