Beckett spent the next few days with McCord in the car canvassing neighborhoods and checking up on leads along with the other teams. Right now they were on their way back from Arlington, after following up another lead in Crystal City that brought them nowhere.
Kate sighed in frustration. She'd need to call Castle and cancel their weekend plans. Unless they caught whoever was behind the security leak in the next two days, she'd have no day off. As of now, they'd been only told the bare minimum of information. A red flag at NSA headquarters was triggered over the past few days when journalists started making inquiries about some top secret government programs. Neither Kate nor Rachel or any other team for that matter were told which programs or what they were for, as this information was above their pay grade, but it started to look more and more like an inside job.
Right now, the members of the AG's task force teams were cross-referencing employee records and verifying their whereabouts, one by one. Rachel and Kate had been following up on Mark Bennett, who worked for a DoD contractor but a quick knock on the neighbor's door revealed that Mark Bennett had rushed home to Iowa to be with his wife while she gave birth to their first child.
The silence in the SUV was interrupted by McCord's phone.
"Go ahead Matt, you're on speaker."
"Have you seen the news?"
"Nope, we're in the car on our way back to the office." Rachel replied.
"The secret's out. It's all over the news." Matt explained, "Apparently the Guardian broke the story about how the American government spies on its own citizens."
"Shut the front door!" Kate shouted and exchanged equally stupefied looks with Rachel.
"Are you serious?" Rachel asked.
"Dead serious! It's like a beehive here. Get back as fast as you can. It's all hands on deck until we catch this guy. Meanwhile, Rookie's gonna send Kate a summary to brief you on what we've been able to piece together from media outlets and our own research."
"Ok. We should be there in about twenty."
"See you when you get here. Bye." Hendricks hung up and Kate's phone vibrated indicating the arrival of a new mail. She swiped her thumb across the screen to access her mail program and quickly opened the message from Richmond.
"Okay, we've still got no name but Hollister's team seems to have narrowed down the list of suspects to employees from Booz Allen Hamilton, a contractor at the NSA. They're still checking all their employee records but there are thousands of them and it's quite impossible to pick out a needle from the haystack. Provided, it even was someone from Booz Allen Hamilton. I'm not sure I buy into Hollister's reasoning but we've got to start somewhere." Kate relayed the information to her new partner.
"Does it say anything about the information leaked?"
"Yep, nothing concrete on the rumored government program, but the Guardian printed a story about a court order, which revealed how the government cracked down on Verizon to release confidential phone records of customers."
"Shit, this is… bigger than we thought." McCord cast Kate a glance.
"Yep, there goes our weekend." Kate huffed. She'd definitely have to call Castle now and tell him he could stay in New York. "At least it's not a terrorist attack."
"Big plans with your fiancé?" Rachel raised her eyebrows in question.
"What?" Kate looked at her confused.
Rachel tipped her ring finger, "Weekend plans with your man?"
"No, I mean yes. But not like that. We were supposed to look at apartments on Saturday. We're still looking for a place."
"You know that the department can help you with that? We've got such a high turnover of government employees, they're leasing apartments to new employees temporarily."
"I know but I want to avoid moving a lot and he wants to own the place. We've got our stuff pretty much packed up in NYC and we're living in a hotel suite right now, but I'd just like to find a place and settle down again. I hate living out of suitcases."
McCord raised her eyebrows, when Kate mentioned the suite but judging from the engagement ring the other woman was wearing, her fiancé could probably afford to foot the bill.
"Do you have your eyes set on a particular neighborhood?" Rachel asked.
"We thought buying a townhouse in Georgetown might be nice. That's close enough for a short commute to work."
"Sure, if you can afford it."
"Where do you live?"
"Near Alexandria. I took advantage of the housing offered by the agency. It's fairly cheap for the location and only a short drive to work."
"But you're renting."
"Leasing but yeah. Are you sure you wanna buy? In this economy?"
Kate shrugged her shoulders.
"You'll spend five years in DC at best before you get reassigned, assuming you want to be promoted and not remain the lowest man on the totem pole for the rest of your life?"
"I thought we work directly for the AG? Doesn't that require us to be stationed in DC?"
Rachel shrugged her shoulders, "Politics. People tend to get tired of it and eager to move on to greener pastures."
"How long have you been doing this job?"
"About a year, little over a year."
"What did you do before?"
"I worked WIT-SEC as a US Marshall in Arizona a couple years and then for the bureau here in the Metro area, before they recruited me for this job." Rachel explained.
"Do you like it?"
"Hell yeah!" McCord grinned at her, "I thrive on the adrenaline when we get cases like this. Makes you feel kind of important protecting a whole nation and not just one lousy witness."
Kate nodded slowly.
"What about you? Like it here so far?"
Kate shrugged her shoulders, "Haven't been here long enough to form an opinion, honestly."
"Fair enough," McCord replied, "you'll like it, you'll see. When I started a year ago in another team, it took me a while to get used to being part of a team and not leading it." Beckett raised her eyebrows in surprise but let the other woman continue. "It's weird I know, so really the way I've been handling our team is as far as I'm concerned we're all equals. Well except for Rookie, he's well… you know. But you and Matt have all put in considerable time as team leaders yourself, so don't hold back."
"Ok."
"I mean it. You got a theory, you share it with the team. You turn up a lead, it's yours and you run it down. There's only one rule: you don't go rogue. If you've got something, you share it with a partner. You never go anywhere without back up. I've read your file, Beckett, and you have a tendency to bend the rules and investigate on your own. Your previous captains wrote you up for going rogue a couple of times."
"Those were special circumstances." Kate interjected.
"Doesn't matter, Kate. I don't care much for who gets the credit at the end of the day, but someone on my team gets hurt, my head rolls. This is not the NYPD, this is no longer a playground. And I like my pretty head just where it is. Do you understand me?"
"Yessir." Beckett replied instinctively, which cracked McCord up.
"Oh we've got to train that out of you."
"Sorry, reflex." Damn you, Gates!
"It's alright, as long as we're clear."
"No running around with scissors unsupervised, got it." Kate joked.
"I'm not kidding, Beckett. The stakes in DC are higher. Here you don't just get written up for insubordination and suspended for a few months without pay. You screw up, they fire you. End of story. And let me tell you, you get fired by the AG, your career is basically over. If you're lucky, you'll find a job as some sheriff somewhere in Montana. At best."
"I'll keep that in mind."
"Good, because as long as you're on my team, you're my responsibility. If I catch you investigating on your own, you're off the team. So whatever little investigation you've been running out of your old precinct regarding your mother's murder, it's got to stop. I can't have that."
Beckett gasped and looked at McCord shocked.
"What?" Rachel turned her head and glanced at Kate, "You think I'm stupid? You may have been able to smuggle your little secret past your previous captains but I can read and I can put two and two together. I may not know who it is, but I know you've gotten yourself in way over your head."
"It's over." Kate sighed. "I know who did it and why, that's all I ever wanted."
"Don't lie to me, Beckett." McCord stopped at a red light and glared at Kate. "We both know all you ever wanted was take his life in exchange for your mother's." There was a glint smoldering in Rachel's eyes that startled Beckett. She recognized the slow burning ember of vengeance from years looking into the mirror. Kate wondered if she'd just inadvertently uncovered the first peel of the McCord onion. What she found was not what she'd expected. From the looks of it, and especially the way she'd said it, Rachel McCord experienced something similar as she had that put her on her own personal vendetta.
"He's untouchable. There's nothing I can do about it anyway, so you don't have to worry."
"Is he still coming after you?" McCord glanced at Kate, "I need to know that to keep my team safe."
"No, we've reached… an agreement of sorts." Kate explained. "And FYI, you're wrong. I had the chance to kill him twice, and he's still running around very much alive."
"That is… commendable and probably not what I would have done in your place but it doesn't change facts. In reality, it probably makes you want to see him behind bars even more. But I'm warning you, if I catch you using federal resources for your personal vendetta, I'll have your ass for dinner, Beckett. Are we clear?"
Beckett nodded. Damn, why hadn't she thought about that before? In all her deliberating of whether to take the job or not, she'd not once thought about the possibility of going after Bracken. She'd been so caught up in the mess she'd made with Castle, it hadn't occurred to her that a job with the AG meant new resources like free access to federal databases and leverage to finally take down her mother's killer. "Crystal clear. Anything else?"
"Yes, lose those heels!"
"What?!" Kate looked horrified.
"I don't care how well you can run in those heels across the streets of New York, they're a liability. I don't want to lose my suspect because you sprained your ankle."
Kate almost scowled, "I've been chasing suspects for years in those heels and not once I lost one because of them. I need those heels, they ground me as a cop. They're who I am!"
"Ah, but you're no longer a detective, are you?" McCord looked at her pointedly, before she turned off the street to pull into the garage of their office building. Kate grumbled something about technicalities and Montana being a nice place around this time of the year.
