The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(86)
Everyone glanced up as a pair of ash-gray aerovans appeared above the treetops. The doors of each vehicle were garnished with the familiar golden logo of a spread-winged eagle, perched behind a large number 9. With a pair of steamy hisses, the vans unfolded their rubber tires and descended to the pavement.
Just as the chief expected, the Deps had come out to play.
The Bureau of Domestic Protections was formed in 1961, at the peak of the New Simplicity. The government’s goal was basic: to consolidate their national law enforcement agencies under one umbrella, with clear delineations of purpose between each of the eight new divisions.
In 1988, the Bureau created a ninth department to tackle the growing crimes of high technology. In addition to chasing down the new and savvy breeds of cracker (hacker), jacker (pirate), ripper (scammer), and creeper (pervert), DP-9 was tasked with curbing the felonious misuse of temporis. Each new method of bending time created at least a dozen new ways to break the law. The most common infractions involved swifting (causing mayhem in a speedsuit), rifting (accelerating only part of a victim’s body), clouding (vandalizing the sky with lumic projections), and tooping (using rejuvenators to create illegal copies of objects).
When the preliminary report of the morning’s altercation reached the federal wire, two words—weaponized tempis—raised eyebrows at DP-9 headquarters in Washington. A team was quickly dispatched from the Los Angeles office.
The policemen watched with cynical interest as eight agents emerged from the vans. Six of them were merely boys in suits, technicians with badges. Their leader was a gray-haired shellback with an Old West mustache and enough leathery experience on his face to ease the chief’s mind.
The final Dep was something else entirely.
While her companions were pasty, her skin was a smooth cocoa brown. She wore a short red skirt over stockings and a sleeveless white blouse that flaunted every curve of her sculpted arms. Intricate brass earrings dangled from her lobes like chandeliers. Most intriguing of all were her twelve-inch dreadlocks, finger-thick and scattered like fern leaves. It was an alien hairstyle in this country, even among the odd folk.
A dozen stares followed the woman as she surveyed the scene. She was certainly easy to look at, but between her strange hair and features—her overpronounced cheekbones and near-Asian eyes—she seemed far too exotic to be an agent of the Eagle.
The seasoned Dep-in-charge noticed the chief and approached him. They traded a firm handshake.
“Andy Cahill. Supervising Special Agent, DP-9.”
“James Bond. Poe-Chief, Terra Vista.”
“We hear six of your men came across some interesting sinners.”
“Four of my men,” the chief corrected. “The cycle jocks are State Patrol.”
“They get hurt too?”
“A few broken fingers each. Apparently some queer-looking swifter knocked the guns right out of their hands.”
“Queer-looking how?”
“She moved too fast to get a full eyeball, but the men say her speedsuit was torked to look like normal clothes.”
Cahill stoked his jaw. “Huh. That is strange. What prompted the chase in the first place?”
“My men noticed a bloodstain on the driver’s side of the vehicle. They attempted—”
“Sir, I apologize for cutting you off,” said the female Dep, “but it takes time to set up our drills. If you could point us to the location of the tempic attack, that would facilitate our work here.”
The chief blinked at her, befuddled. The woman spoke with a scholarly foreign accent, a quasi-British twang he’d never heard before. Hell and wonders. She’s not even American.
Cahill smirked. “This is Melissa Masaad. Don’t let the skirt fool you. She’s smarter than us.”
Offering the friendliest smile she could muster, Melissa gave the chief a handshake that rivaled Cahill’s in pure ferocity. It was one of the first customs she learned here.
“Masaad,” said the chief, as if her name were all asterisks and ampersands. “That’s quite unique. What part of the world—”
“I’m sorry, sir. Where did you say this attack occurred?”
Melissa was born in British North Sudan. At seventeen, she moved to the motherland to attend Oxford, where she earned advanced degrees in mechanical science and criminology. She spent the next six years in London as an analyst for Military Intelligence, specializing in the study of temporal weaponry. Ten months into her tenure, she received a Royal Commendation for tracking the perpetrators of a deadly rift attack at a Cambridge aerport.
Two years ago, at age thirty, she was offered one of the four hundred immigration slots that the United States extended annually to exceptional applicants. She didn’t hesitate to renounce her British and Sudanese citizenship, one of the chief requirements of naturalization. America demanded sole allegiance from its adopted children. Melissa was prepared to give it.
“You’re making a terrible mistake,” Sir Edgar Ballott had warned her. He was an old British manatee, an Assistant Director-General of the Security Service. More than her mentor, he considered himself her father figure, albeit one who often imagined her naked.
“The United States may be a peaceful nation, my dear, but it’s teeming with racists, isolationists, and every other breed of regressive bigot. If you believe they’ll embrace a foreigner and a negress as their equal, then I fear you’re in for an abrupt education.”