13.
Jamal
Washington, DC
We hit Bethesda, Maryland, by evening, crossing into McLean, Virginia, and eventually over the Potomac again on Interstate 66 via the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge. The route may have been circuitous, but it offered a pretty commanding view of our nation’s capital, or at least of certain parts. It had a kind of majesty about it, the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial both right there off to the side. Sure, DC lacked an official downtown with the tall buildings I’d come to expect from major cities, but it had its own charms.
“Man, I don’t want to be here,” Augustus muttered under his breath. The traffic going against us was prodigious, and I had a feeling once we got into the actual streets of DC, we’d be stuck in at least some of it.
“You want to help Sienna, though, right?” I asked, keeping one eye on the GPS and the other on my brother.
“Yeah,” he said grudgingly. After a few seconds of silence, he asked, “What’s the move?”
That was his way of saying, “What do we do next?” But of course my brother had to say it the trendiest way possible. “I don’t know, exactly—” I started.
“We just drove seven hours, and you don’t have a plan yet? What the hell you been doing this whole trip?”
“Telling you what to do,” I shot back. “It’s a full-time job. If you don’t believe me, ask Taneshia.”
“Smartass,” he muttered.
“I’m thinking it over,” I said. “Trying to decide how we approach this. If this family are metas like me—and the article suggests they probably are, complete with electrical command of any device you can imagine—coming at them like a hacker is a bad idea, because they outnumber me four to one. They’ll slap down my attempts to bypass their safeguards like Momma knocking the bacon out of your hand when you snatch it off the plate while it cools. But I don’t know that walking up and just introducing myself is the way to go, either.”
“How about we go up to one of them, beat the living shit out of them, and just get the info?” Augustus asked.
“I’m not really keen on getting charged with assault and battery and probably kidnapping, if we end up dragging their ass anywhere to question them,” I said. “Keep in mind these people look like law-abiding citizens—” Augustus snorted, and I frowned at him, “—at least as far as anyone else knows. We can’t just walk up and throw down, you know?”
“Pffft. I can throw down with anyone, anywhere, anytime.”
“Oh, yeah?” I asked, and pointed into Washington ahead. “Why don’t you just stroll on up to Gondry and give him a whack across the cheek, then?”
Augustus had a dark look flash across his face. “You know that isn’t what I meant.”
“This family works for a lot of Congressional people,” I said. “Reps and senators on different sides of the aisle. You want to throw down with them?” He shook his head no, and I went on. “Yeah, neither do I, because you go kicking that wasps’ nest and we’re going to get stung all to hell. We need to think, we need to plan.” I settled back in my seat. “And we need a place to work from, so find us a hotel while I kick some ideas around here?”
“What kind of ideas you thinking about?”
I hesitated, mostly because I was coming up blank thus far and had been for the entire drive. “Well,” I said, “here’s the big one—how do you pry something you want out of the hands of someone more powerful than you—”
“Kick their ass. It’s Sienna 101.”
“—without getting tangled up with the law,” I finished, patience dragging pretty close to annoyance. “Again … these are powerful people. They’re the spearhead of a conspiracy to keep Sienna’s innocence hidden. We try and shake them down like that junkie this morning and it’s going to have a different outcome.” I thought about it for a second. “I mean, walls might still get busted down and my ass might still take a little bit of a beating—”
“Acceptable exchanges, I say.”
“Because your ass was cuddling back with the junkie while mine was chasing after a lady who could just about beat me to death with her pinkie finger.” I shook my head. “We need a solid plan. Something that keeps us on this side of the law.”
Augustus slapped the wheel, smiling. “I got it. We wait till they’re at work, and then break into their house and check things out. No need to do your hacking thing, we just take their computer hard drives and bust into them at our leisure. Mission accomplished.”
I stared at him dully. “You miss that part about us staying on the right side of the law?”
“Hey, man, when you’re dealing with bad guys, they use every means they have to produce the outcome they’re looking for, including sheltering in the shadow of the law,” Augustus said. “That’s probably Sienna 102.”
“I figure the coursework there is similar to Knuckledusting 301,” I cracked. “‘Beating in the Faces of Your Foes.’”
“And Property Damage 501,” Augustus said with a chuckle. “Advanced Destruction of Anything in Your Immediate Vicinity.”
Our humor died, sobriety crashing back in as the reality of what we were dealing with came back to me. “I don’t really want to land our asses in jail by breaking into these peoples’ houses,” I said. “They probably live in a nice suburb where the cops come rolling down the street every five minutes whether someone called them or not, and the grandma next door dials 911 if her cat gets stuck in a tree. And the whole damned department shows up, because what the hell else have they got going on?”
“Pretty different from our upbringing,” Augustus said. “All right. I don’t want to go to jail. What do we do?”
“It’s a good question,” I said, still thinking it over. There wasn’t a lot I could see us managing that didn’t involve some sort of federal felony—hacking if I went straight for their internet footprint, breaking and entering if we tried to get into their house, kidnapping and assault if we went the full Jack Bauer and tried to wring the answers out of one of the meta famiglia. “I think we also have to assume that even if these people don’t know us on sight—”
“Lots of people know me on sight these days,” Augustus said. “I’m getting to be a pretty popular metahuman hero, you know.”
He was no Kat, but there was truth to what he said, so I didn’t argue. “Even if normal folks on the street wouldn’t recognize me,” I said instead, “there’s a good chance that any conspiracy aligned against Sienna is bound to know us on sight. In fact …” And I pulled up my phone and tried to imagine where someone would put a search program that would look for my face or Augustus’s. There were databases for that sort of thing, perfectly legitimate ones, all over the world.
But there should only be one traffic camera system for Metro DC.
I used my phone to weasel in, and it only took about five seconds or so to pass the firewall. I buzzed around in the background code, seeing who was looking at this info regularly. The usual suspects were tied in—federal law enforcement agencies, local PDs in the Washington Metro as well as nearby Baltimore. They were all expected, though, legit with their own doorways in … some of these I followed, on a hunch, back into their own servers. US Secret Service was a predictable one I gave a swift glance to, deciding not to bother cracking their firewall yet. Capitol Police, though …
“Huh,” I said, under my breath, as the electricity danced in small, small voltage amounts between the tip of my index finger and the power connector to my phone.
“What?” Augustus asked.
“I was just browsing to see who all was tapped into the DC traffic camera feeds. And I found all the usual suspects you’d expect, traced ‘em back to their home systems. One of which was the Capitol Police. I decided to follow that one back on a suspicion, and … sure enough, there seems to be a tap in the backdoor of their access, a little barely-there program that’s running facial recognition on all the District’s traffic cameras.”
“That’s … special, I guess?” Augustus asked. “But how does that affect us?”
“Because,” I said, my stomach sinking like it had been lined with lead and tossed into the Potomac, “it means that the Custis family and their friends … probably already know we’re here.”