Empire Games Series, Book 1(102)
“Get those leg-irons off her!” The speaker was outside the door, beyond her field of vision, but the voice belonged to a woman and her tone of authority brooked no argument. Men in uniform moved in and tugged at Rita’s legs. “You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?” the woman asked her. It was a thinly veiled threat. “These nice gentlemen are going to pick you up now. If you don’t fight they won’t hurt you. Then we can have a little chat.” Her accent was half familiar, half strange.
“Who—” Rita cleared her throat and licked her lips. “Who are you?”
“I’m asking the questions. Boys, lift her.” Two uniformed men—cops or jailhouse guards, Rita couldn’t tell—raised her by her arms. After a second or two she managed to steady herself and turned to face the doorway.
The woman was blond, in her thirties, and wore minimal or no makeup; perhaps it wasn’t a thing here. Her hair curled around her shoulders and she wore some sort of uniform, unfamiliar and strange. She held a leather attaché case or folio in one hand. “Bring her,” she told Rita’s guards, then turned and walked away. They nudged her along; after a moment she stumbled into motion, feet numb and head still sore and dizzy.
Rita caught more impressions of the jail as they marched her through whitewashed corridors with scuffed wooden floors. The overhead illumination came from long glowing tubes—old-style fluorescent lights, Rita realized, not LED strips. (She hadn’t seen tube-lights in years. They were banned back home—something to do with mercury.) They came to a metal elevator. The guards crowded her inside, almost nose-to-nose with her would-be interrogator. The woman smelled faintly of rose water and sweat. She spared Rita a dry smile as she pushed a button printed with the digit 8. “I’d take you higher if we had any extra floors,” she said, almost apologetically, as the elevator began to rise.
Rita swallowed. She had a sinking sense in her stomach, an intuition that the woman wasn’t doing this at random. She knew Rita could jaunt. Jaunting at ground level would have been safe. Jaunting from the eighth floor was another matter …
The guards hurried her along another corridor, with windows on one side looking out across an unfamiliar cityscape. Then she found herself inside a barely furnished room with a table and three wooden chairs. The table was bare but for a telephone out of an old movie, a box with pigtail wires and a rotary dial. One of the guards stood close behind her while the other closed the door. “Constable, please remove the cuffs.” A tugging on her arms as the guard unlocked her wrists. “Have a seat,” said the woman. Rita sat, apprehensive. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.” Her interrogator unzipped the folio and removed a sheath of odd-sized documents. “At ease, Jeremiah. Bill, I’m sure our guest would appreciate a cup of coffee.” She raised an unplucked eyebrow. Rita nodded. “Do you take it with milk or sugar?”
“Milk,” Rita said reluctantly, then berated herself: I’m already giving information to the enemy …
“I’m Inspector Alice Morgan,” said the woman. “And in case you hadn’t guessed, this is the district headquarters of the Commonwealth Transport Police.” She didn’t smile. “I have a few questions for you. Starting with, what is your name, and what exactly were you doing in the Irongate South satellite switchyard at four o’clock in the morning last Friday?”
She reached into her folio and removed a small black sphere, then placed it on the table. Rita swallowed, her mouth abruptly dry. It was one of her webcams.
“Before you try to bluff, we found your fingerprints all over this device. Trespassing is one thing, but spying on an armaments factory is something else again. If I were you, I’d think very carefully before telling me any lies: we are willing to be lenient if you cooperate fully.
“So. Which agency of the United States government do you work for?”
IRONGATE CENTRAL POLICE STATION, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020
The time Rita had spent in the FBI leadership course hadn’t been completely wasted: it had given her some insight into how high-flying cops thought. Now, sitting opposite Inspector Morgan in an interrogation room on the upper floor of a police station, she couldn’t fool herself: I am so screwed. In theory, she knew, she should give the appearance of cooperation while keeping her mouth shut and waiting for an opportunity to escape. But Inspector Morgan showed every sign of being one step ahead of her all the way. Commonwealth Transport Police. Did than mean she was in charge of fining fare-dodgers, or was it an antiterrorism role, like the investigative arm of the TSA? Guess right, Rita, she told herself uneasily. She won’t give you a second chance …
“What’s that?” Rita said brightly, and pointed at the webcam.
“I was hoping you could tell me.” The inspector’s expression was mild. “What’s your name again?”
“Rita.” There’s a fine line between disclosing operational intelligence and building rapport, her trainers had told her. Building rapport was good. It looked like cooperation, and evidence of cooperation reduced the probability of beatings.
The door behind her opened and a flimsy aluminum tray landed on the desk. There were two oddly bulbous mugs of coffee on top of it. Ceramic mugs, she saw. Odd.
“Take your coffee,” said the inspector. “Rita who?”
“Rita Douglas.” Rita took the indicated mug, and the cop who’d brought the tray removed it. Thoughts piled up in a train wreck as she raised her mug and took a preliminary sip. It was coffee all right. So they’re going to good-cop me first, huh? (It beat sleep deprivation or waterboarding any day of the week, but was no less an interrogation tactic. For one thing it helped build rapport, loosening the tongue. And when the coffee got to her bladder, a skilled interrogator could use the liminal leg-crossing unease to speed her along for a few minutes, then trade it in for more sympathy by allowing her a toilet trip.)