Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (23 page)

She grabbed a chair and scooted in close to Santino. He was playing a puzzle game.

“Hard at work, I see?”

“I think I might stay here a while,” he said. “You guys can borrow my car tonight. I’ll find a ride.” He hadn’t mentioned Zia once, not since his run-in with Jason, but while he had carried some gray with him ever since they had left OACET headquarters, a joyous yellow spun into the same thread as Zia’s violet core was woven into it. The yellow and violet threaded through him meant she was always on his mind, but he had treated her as a taboo subject whenever Rachel had pressed him on it. Now the yellows and violets were fading, and the gray was heavily tinted with drooping oranges and the deep amber that Rachel associated with Santino’s live-in girlfriend.

“Want to talk about it?”

“Why bother? You’re Super Emotions Girl.” Browns rose up around him like the mess in a clogged sink. “You were there. You saw everything.”

“And this is why I didn’t tell you what I can do.” Rachel caught herself and softened her words before she came across as snappish. It had not been an easy day for him and she didn’t need to make it worse.

He hauled himself back out from under his grays. “Sorry,” he muttered.

Sorry.
She hated that word; she lost track of how many times she said it, or heard it said, in a single day.
Sorry, sorry, sorry,
lives punctuated by regret. 

“Don’t be sorry,” she told him. “Just don’t do it. Now,” she said as he lost some of the petulant browns, “want to talk about it?”

“Sure. I’m planning to go home, get in a huge argument, and knock on your door at four in the morning to crash on your couch. This is all your fault, by the way, so I’m staying with you for a few weeks.”

Rachel chewed the inside of her lip to keep herself from calling him names. “Don’t you think that’s a little… extreme?” she asked. “You just met Zia.”

“I’m not breaking up with Maggie.” Santino took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “But I’m not going to be dishonest to a woman I’ve been with for years, and she is going to throw my ass out cold when I tell her about Zia.”

“Good lord, you move fast. I was in that bathroom for all of five minutes.”

He laughed quietly. “Nothing happened, but would you want to spend the rest of your life with someone if they had doubts?”

He paused and reached out with a gentle finger to touch the nearest orchid. “Love at first sight is a joke, Rachel,” he said. “It’s how we whitewash the same pheromone rush we got when we were kids. I’d be so… God! It’d be evil of me if I let my dick call the shots on this. I’ll go home, Maggie’ll be pissed for a while, and then when she gets over it, we can talk it out.”

Santino put his glasses back on and turned back to the computer. Rachel rested a hand on his shoulder in sympathy and then walked back to her files.
Poor guy,
she thought. She didn’t know if this was good or bad timing on Fate’s part, as he had been days away from dragging Rachel with him to help him pick out a ring. Maggie made him happy, and Rachel had liked her those few times Santino had dragged them both to dinner. 

But Santino
—
practical, logical Santino, who no doubt believed every word he had said to the core of his very soul
—
had nonetheless been lying when he said there was no such thing as love at first sight.

(And Rachel, whose only furnished room enshrined that ideal in books she could no longer read, wrapped herself in the unexpected joy at how, for those few lucky people, there might actually be some real magic left in the world.)

There was a quiet knock on the door and Rachel looked up to see Charley Brazee struggle with the knob, arms full of banker’s boxes. His colors were off, his friendly blue-gray core hidden under purples and grays locked in mortal combat. She jumped up to help and he gratefully dropped the uppermost box into her arms.

“Jeez, Charley, is there gold in these?” Rachel’s sore knees throbbed under the new weight.

“Maybe. If they help you, then yes. These are some of our notes on the court proceedings where the MPD has processed video evidence over the last six months. Edwards had me go through them all last night and pick out the ones that might be relevant.”

“Oh, Charley,” Rachel said, wincing. “We’ve got a full team doing that same thing here.”

His colors didn’t change but he rounded his shoulders and started rubbing his hands together.
Stress,
Rachel noted, the kinesthetic message unmistakable. 

“I knew it,” he sighed. “Edwards has me doing busywork. I’m so behind on everything…” He pulled himself straight, as if he had made a difficult decision. “Can you help me get another box out of my car?”

“Yeah, sure,” she said, and kept the conversation light and fluffy as they walked to the parking garage. It didn’t seem to help; Charley went deeper into his shell until even prattling on about OACET couldn’t draw him out.

The city had decided the solution to First MPD’s perennial parking shortage was an adjacent garage, but they hadn’t quite understood the problem when they approved the project. Zoning prevented the garage from being taller than the building itself, and the available surface area was smaller than the lot of a small car dealership. The result was a narrow concrete iceberg, with six floors of the garage hidden beneath the ground and the uppermost two cresting to merge with the back of the school.

A total of two doors connected the old building to the new garage; First District Station was a protected space, and access was tightly controlled. She took Charley on the least-traveled of those two routes, past the break room and down a hallway with paired rooms used for interrogations. This corridor had been designed to facilitate for prisoner transport and ended in a small room with steel doors and bulletproof windows on both sides, a rodeo chute to secure the felons before entering or leaving the building. Both the interior and exterior doors swung open for them as Rachel and Charley walked down the hall: in Rachel’s opinion, one of the major perks of being a cyborg was never having to dither with the digital locks.

Charley, who usually loved it when she showed off for him, didn’t so much as crack a smile. Rachel was unable to get a clean read from him. His movements were tight and he spent too much time picking what he wanted to say, looking at everything from the fluorescent lights to the scuffs on the glossy floor to avoid meeting her eyes. His conversational colors were a swirling blend of happy purples and the gray of stress: the man was his own house divided. 

He had parked three floors down. Rachel didn’t like tight city spaces, especially at night, and Charley kept crowding her towards the cars. She kept the center of the garage on her left as they descended, and every few steps she’d take a breath to remind herself that the void between the levels let in the relative coolness of the August night air.

There was one box on the passenger’s seat of his car. It was the size of a shoebox, much smaller than the two he had lugged into her temporary office. Rachel knew a setup when she saw one. “What’s on your mind, Charley?”

He paused and leaned against the car, but his happy purple popped. “If I give you some information,” he said, “can you promise it won’t get back to me?”

She reached out to the OACET community server and began recording.

“I don’t know how that would work,” she said, glancing up at First District Station. “I think you need to talk to an officer. Let me get Santino out here.”

“I’d rather you handle it,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about this and… If I don’t do it, people could get hurt. I
have
to do this.

“But I can’t lose my job, Rachel,” he said in a rush. “It’s a bad economy, and if I’m burned as a law clerk, I’m too old to start all over again.”

Lie,
she noted as the dimples emerged.
That’s not what’s bothering you.

“Charley, are you in trouble?”

The dimples disappeared and reappeared as he spoke, truth and lies blended together. “No, not right now. But if things keep going the way they are… Listen,” he said, fumbling inside of his suit, “Please. Your case? This was in Edwards’ office. I need you to handle it, or people could get hurt.”

He handed her a wrinkled sheet of paper. Rachel flipped her implant to reading mode and made out the name of a bank and the first few digits of a routing number before she hastily crumpled it up.

Charley went red. “Hey!”

“It’s okay, I’ll keep it safe,” she said, digging around in her purse for a plastic evidence bag. “But I can’t look at it until I have a warrant.” She wasn’t one of those Agents who found themselves performing unconscious data retrieval searches, but there was a first time for everything. She didn’t want to read Charley’s note and suddenly find herself squirreled up in a bank’s database, her grubby little synapse-fingers ripping through its files.

He looked towards the stationhouse. “Don’t get a warrant, even if you use a different judge. Edwards will be watching… He says he’s scared of OACET.” Charley pointed to the crumpled wad in its little plastic baggie. “I’ve seen your suspect. And that account? It’s a payoff from…” Charley’s voice trailed off as he noticed the security cameras above his head.

“Tell me about the money, Charley.”
Shades of early Shawn,
she thought as she worked with calm words and stressed Charley’s name to ground him. “If it’s so important, tell me. Then I’ll find a way to do this legally, okay?”

He tried to pull her into the shadow of a minivan, but she stood firm. “I don’t know if you can. There’s someone high up in the government involved in this,” he said, relenting. Before, the dimples in his colors came and went as he spoke; now, they were gone. Charley was finally telling the absolute truth. “But that’s all I’ll—“

“Senator Hanlon,” she cut him off. “It’s Senator Hanlon.”

Charley went white in shock, then replaced it with a happy yellow. “How did you know?” he whispered.

“Get out here now,”
she sent to Phil and Jason.

“Come back inside with me. Fill out a report with Santino,” she said, knowing it was a lost cause. “You’ll be treated as a whistleblower, you’ll be protected. You have my word,” she lied. She felt terrible about misleading him but there was no such thing as a confidential informant. Like chupacabras, they existed purely in fiction and in human interest stories on the evening news.

He was shaking his head before she had finished. “You know that never works,” he said, and pushed himself off of the minivan. “I need to go. Don’t tell anybody I gave you that, okay? Promise me you’ll look into it yourself.”

“You realize you’re asking me to break the law,” she said.

“I know,” he said, nodding nervously. “Check out those numbers and you’ll see why. But you didn’t get them from me, remember? Anywhere else. Just not from me.”

“Charley…” Rachel closed her eyes tight, but he still stared at her, pleading. “I can’t. And I won’t. You have to file a report or give me something I can use to get a warrant.”

“Listen to me!” He grabbed her lower arm with a doughy hand, then looked past her to where Phil and Jason were sprinting down the pavement towards them. “Forget it,” he said, dropping her arm as though it had burned him. “I tried.”

“Charley,” she said, dodging his car door as he slid into the driver’s seat, “if it’s important, you know you have to talk to me. That’s why you came here tonight!” 

“Lots of things are important, Rachel,” he said. “Right now, it’s important I don’t get caught with you.”

He threw the shoebox at her and ended with a hard: “Good luck.” He pulled out into the travel lane as the other Agents arrived, shading his face with his hand to hide his profile from two men he saw as strangers.

“Who’s that?”
Phil asked.

“A law clerk in Edward’s office. He’s sort of a friend. He gave me this,”
she said, and held up the baggie.
“He claims it’s information that incriminates Edwards, and…”

She paused and crushed the paper tight in her fist.
“And he told me that Senator Hanlon is involved.”

The two men dropped into reds and blacks. Jason grabbed at her, but she saw it coming and his hand closed on empty air.

“Give it to me.”

“I need your lighter,”
she told him.

“Rachel, wait,”
Phil said.
“Think about this.”

She pressed the wad tight between both hands.
“No. If I do, I’ll talk myself into doing something we’ll all regret. This isn’t evidence, it’s hearsay.”

Jason came straight at her like a prizefighter.
“Give it to me.”

“He was lying, Jason. Our entire conversation, right up until I mentioned Hanlon, he was lying.”

“What did he say?” Phil asked, putting a hand on Jason’s shoulder. Jason shrugged it off and started pacing. 

“Here,” she said, and passed them the location of the file. “I taped it.”

The rule was that emotions couldn’t be captured on film; the exception was when she was the one doing the filming. As they watched the video, she talked them through Charley’s moods, how he shifted between truth and lie. “He was showing a lot of stress, and most of his lines seemed scripted,” she explained. “My best guess is that he was coerced to try and set me up. Whoever’s twisting his arm wants me to incriminate myself.