Carbines and Capacitors 8/14
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A/N: Trigger warning for discussion of historical atrocities and things that should not have happened to anyone anywhere ever.
Chapter 8
Inquisition
Collier passed out from pain and loss of blood on the way back to the safe house, but Sloan blindfolded himself and waited patiently in the car while Reese and Cheyenne carried Collier inside and Sam and Miss Carter followed with Root (and Cheyenne’s hat, which Sam wore until they got inside). While Miss Carter tied Root to a chair, Cheyenne brought Sam the first aid and surgery kits and Reese prepared the dining table to serve as an operating table. But Sam, understandably, first drew a quantity of sedative into a syringe and dosed Root with it. Then, while Sam scrubbed her hands in the kitchen, Miss Carter left to take Sloan home and Mr. Finch arrived with food and a small cold-box that held several bags of blood and other fluids Sam would need to help Collier recover from the blood loss.
After Reese and Cheyenne got Collier situated on the table for Sam to work on, Reese went to the kitchen to scrub his own hands. Cheyenne started to follow, but he was stopped by Mr. Finch’s hand on his arm.
“Would you come with me, please?” Mr. Finch murmured when Cheyenne turned to him. “There are some accommodations we need to make immediately.”
Cheyenne glanced around, but none of the things that needed doing there were things Reese and Sam couldn’t handle without him, so he nodded. “Yes, sir.” He retrieved his hat and followed Mr. Finch back down to the parking garage.
“I saved you a couple of hamburgers and an order of French fries,” Mr. Finch said as they got into his car. Once Cheyenne was settled, Mr. Finch gestured to the paper bag on the dashboard and a cup in the cupholder. “Also a lemonade. I had mine on the way over, but I know you haven’t eaten yet, and the task I need your help with may prove somewhat strenuous.”
“What task is that?” Cheyenne asked, taking the bag and opening the first hamburger.
Mr. Finch waited until he’d backed out of the parking space and was driving toward the exit to answer. “Preparing a place to house Root. I’m sure we’ll hear the whole story from Miss Shaw later, but it seems obvious that despite her efforts to save Jason Greenfield, Root remains willing to harm even the people she wants to work with, which means she’s too dangerous to simply release.”
Cheyenne swallowed the bite he’d just taken. “But she’s already escaped from one asylum. She could escape from prison just as easy.”
“Precisely, if the government didn’t send another assassin after her. The one place I can be certain she won’t escape from is the library-but I need not only to construct a cell but also to ensure that it blocks her from communicating with the Machine.”
Cheyenne frowned, confused. “Why do you need the cell to do that? Doesn’t she need a telephone?”
Mr. Finch shot him a brief sidelong look. “Cell phones can be easily stolen, Mr. Bodie. Root is an accomplished pickpocket. But what have you read about Michael Faraday’s experiments with electricity?”
Faraday was a name Cheyenne knew but hadn’t heard in a long time. He drank some lemonade while he tried to remember. “Not a lot that I can recall offhand,” he finally confessed. “I know his work paved the way for Sam Morse to invent the electric telegraph. But we didn’t have the means to be foolin’ around with electricity when I went to school in High Point,” he added with a wry smile. “Besides, Mr. Faraday was still alive an’ workin’ back then, but our textbooks were older’n I was.”
Mr. Finch smiled back. “So you don’t remember hearing of the concept of the Faraday cage.”
“No, sir.”
“Faraday proved that when a hollow object like an ice pail receives an electrical charge, the charge and the electromagnetic field created by the charge remain on the outside of the object, even if the object’s surface isn’t solid. For example, if lightning were to strike this car, it might melt the tires, but you and I would be perfectly safe as long as we stayed inside.”
Cheyenne’s mouth was full, but he nodded his understanding.
“Wireless devices generate electromagnetic signals, but it’s possible to construct a cage using wire mesh that can block those signals from passing from one side to the other.”
“An’ that’s what you want to use for Root’s cell?”
“Yes. It may not be more escape-resistant than mere bars, but it would hold Root incommunicado very effectively, and I have other means for ensuring that she stays there when we’re finished. I can handle the electrical work needed, but it would help me tremendously for you to do what heavy lifting there will be.”
“I’ll be happy to. Kind of a nice change, gettin’ to build somethin’ for once-ain’t had much chance since I’ve been here.”
Mr. Finch smiled, plainly pleased that Cheyenne was pleased.
Cheyenne finished his meal before they reached the library, so he was ready to work as soon as they arrived. Mr. Finch had already picked out a small reading room with its own privy on a lower floor than the command center, and between them, they made short work of setting up the cage and connecting the electrical generator. Then they went upstairs to collect Bear, checked that all was still well at the safe house, and left.
They were almost to the car when the nearest pay telephone began to ring. Mr. Finch hobbled over to answer it, listened briefly, hung up, and started hobbling back inside again.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bodie,” he said as Cheyenne followed with Bear. “This shouldn’t take long, but we have two new numbers, and I need to decode them before we leave. I can do more research at the safe house.”
“You think one might be Collier?” Cheyenne asked once they were inside.
“Possibly. If so, we already have a start on understanding the threat, and he is already in our custody.”
Upstairs, Mr. Finch quickly located six books to take back to his desk, and Cheyenne concentrated on playing with Bear while Mr. Finch worked. As expected, the decoding didn’t take long.
In fact, it was less than a minute before Cheyenne heard Mr. Finch murmur, “Peter Brandt. I wonder….” Mr. Finch typed rapidly for a moment and then said, “Oh, that’s interesting.”
“Sir?” Cheyenne prompted, looking up while still playing tug-o’-war with Bear’s stuffed bone.
“It seems ‘Peter Collier’ is an alias,” Mr. Finch replied at a more conversational volume and stood up. “Both numbers belong to the same man-his real name is Peter Brandt. His digital footprint under that name has been largely erased, but I did find one photo of him, in a crowd at his college graduation in 2003. I can’t tell what it means that the Machine gave us both identities; the most obvious reason for the threat is his capture, but the members of his group seem to know him only as Collier.”
Cheyenne put Bear back on his leash and stood in turn. “Maybe the threat’s from someone who knows both identities, like whoever recruited him into this Vigilance group in the first place.”
“Well, that’s possible. I suppose we’ll simply have to ask him.”
With that, they left the library again and went back to the safe house, where Reese had brought in a bed like the ones at the hospital-from where, Cheyenne didn’t know-and Collier, now lying on it with his knee and shoulder bandaged and his arm in a sling, hadn’t yet come around after the surgery. Apparently Sam and Reese had just moved him; the bed was still in the dining room, and Sam was scrubbing the table while Reese hooked a half-empty bag of blood onto a pole attached to the head of the bed. Collier was attached to a stand of beeping monitors, too, which prompted a phantom ache in Cheyenne’s chest, even though his ribs had long since healed from the fall that had brought him here.
“Is he stable?” Mr. Finch asked Sam quietly, hobbling over to the table.
“For the moment,” Sam replied at the same volume. “I’ll need to watch his vitals overnight, but I’ve still got one unit of whole blood and two of plasma if he needs them, plus the Ringer’s lactate. Thanks for those, by the way.”
“Do let me know if you need more.”
“If I do, I will, but I shouldn’t as long as he doesn’t do anything stupid like trying to escape. But…” Sam paused and handed a small dish to Mr. Finch. “I found more than a bullet in his shoulder.”
Mr. Finch frowned into the dish. “A microchip?”
“Like someone took off Alicia Corwin’s body,” said Reese, apparently referring to a past case Cheyenne hadn’t heard about. “I’ve disabled it in case there was a GPS transponder in it, but you may still be able to get some data off it.”
Cheyenne came over to get Mr. Finch a chair and glanced into the dish as he passed. The so-called microchip looked to him like a little metal cylinder, maybe an inch and a half long.
“But what connection would Collier have with Alicia Corwin?” Mr. Finch murmured as he sat down in the chair Cheyenne offered him and set the dish back on the table. “She worked on the very project he seems to want to destroy.”
His careful word choice wasn’t lost on Cheyenne. And it was wise, because no sooner had he said that than Collier groaned and stirred.
“Take it easy, Collier,” Reese warned at a normal volume, pressing on Collier’s left shoulder to keep him still. “My colleague won’t be happy if you move too suddenly and undo her handiwork. She might just let you bleed out next time.”
Collier opened his eyes and frowned around in confusion. “Where the hell am I?” he asked weakly.
“A safe place,” Mr. Finch answered. “And I, too, strongly advise you not to attempt to escape. Your current wounds are severe enough as it stands.”
“What is this? First you shoot me, then you save me?”
“We don’t want you dead, Mr. Collier-which I admit is more mercy than you showed to Wayne Kruger and more mercy than your colleagues are willing to show you.”
Collier’s frown deepened. “What are you talking about?”
“We have information that your life is now in danger. It seems only logical that your colleagues plan to do to you what you planned to do to Jason Greenfield.”
“Vigilance? No… no, look, how long was I out?”
“Couple of hours,” answered Reese.
“Long enough for a few panicked phone calls from whoever got away at Cooper Square,” Sam noted.
“And this information reached us within the last hour,” Mr. Finch added, “so it stands to reason that it somehow relates to your capture.”
Collier shook his head. “It can’t be Vigilance. There hasn’t been time.”
“Time for what?” Cheyenne asked.
“For a full debate and a vote. Even if someone already has the poll up on our chat server, our members on the West Coast and in Hawaii and Alaska aren’t even online right now. These things take days, usually.”
“Did you vote on Tim Sloan?” asked Reese.
“Yes. It didn’t go his way. Some of our members were willing to let him live, but the majority were against it.”
“Sounds like the old blood-games in Rome,” Cheyenne observed. “When a gladiator lost, the crowd used to vote on whether the victor should kill him or not.”
“It’s not a game,” Collier snapped. “We have two guiding principles: privacy and democracy. We’re preparing the ground for a new American Revolution, to shut down the people in the government and out of it who spy on Americans and refuse to acknowledge the damage that’s done when the right to privacy is violated as systematically as it is now.”
Sam snorted indelicately, and Cheyenne privately agreed with her. He could understand being upset about the spying-he wasn’t too happy about it himself-but from what little he’d seen, the means Vigilance employed couldn’t be justified even by such high-sounding ends.
Mr. Finch, on the other hand, narrowed his eyes. “Was there a vote taken on whether to kill Jason Greenfield?”
Collier suddenly clammed up.
“There wasn’t, was there? His death was ordered by a higher authority.” Mr. Finch leaned closer. “The message center in the storage unit-where do the messages come from?”
Collier didn’t answer.
“Who tells you to go there? Who monitors the camera?”
Collier remained silent.
“You know,” Reese said casually, “the longest it’s ever taken me to break someone is sixteen hours.”
Collier huffed. “What, now you’re gonna waterboard me?”
Sam rolled her eyes. “Please. Waterboarding is for amateurs.”
“We don’t have to actively torture you when you’re already in pain,” said Reese, which was enough explanation of what waterboarding meant that Cheyenne could keep up. “We could just withhold painkillers until you tell us what we want to know.”
Collier didn’t answer, but he seemed to be thinking hard.
“Of course, if you insist, I’m sure my friend here might have some ideas.” Reese looked at Cheyenne.
“A few,” said Cheyenne, unbuttoning his jacket. “There’s one old trick the Sioux used to use on their prisoners.” He drew his knife, making sure Collier got a good look at the blade. “They’d take a steel knife and heat it in the fire. Once the blade was red-hot, they’d hold the flat against the sole of the prisoner’s foot. If he still wouldn’t talk, they’d insert the tip into the back o’ the ankle, between the tendon an’ the bone.”*
Collier’s eyes widened, and the beep of the monitor sped up. “You… you wouldn’t!”
Cheyenne exchanged a look with Reese, sheathed his knife, and went to the fireplace to start laying a fire. It was mostly a bluff-even if he were willing to go that far for real, which probably wasn’t necessary in this case, he was sure Mr. Finch would put a stop to it before he could in fact burn Collier’s foot-but it was the sort of bluff that worked better when backed with the first steps of action. If nothing else, it would reveal whether Collier were more afraid of Vigilance than he was of Cheyenne.
“I thought you said you didn’t want me dead!” Collier yelped.
“Oh, it won’t kill you,” Cheyenne replied before Mr. Finch could. “Won’t even cripple you-you’ll be off your feet until that knee heals anyway, and that’ll take longer’n a burn.” He put two logs on the grate, then paused and admitted more quietly, “Does hurt like heck, though, havin’ your feet held to the fire.” Then he reached for two more logs and looked around for the kindling and tinder.
Collier gulped audibly. “Look… I don’t know, all right? I swear I don’t know. I just get these anonymous texts telling me to meet my team at the storage unit. We find the message on the wall and decode it.”
Cheyenne placed a fifth log, then found the kindling and began adding it to the fire.
“Is that also how you were recruited to join Vigilance?” Mr. Finch asked.
“Yes,” said Collier. “They told me I was a leader, but I’ve never had any idea who ‘they’ are.”
“You’re an intelligent man, Mr. Collier. Why would you choose to go along with all this?”
“Jesse Brandt,” answered a groggy female voice Cheyenne hadn’t heard before. It must have belonged to Root.
Sam swore under her breath and reached for the first aid kit, which probably meant that the sedative shouldn’t have worn off yet. Reese held up a hand to stop her.
At the same time, Mr. Finch exchanged a wary look with Cheyenne before saying, “Please continue, Miss Groves.”
Root didn’t move but said in the tone of someone reciting a memorized speech, “Jesse Brandt was arrested in 2010, classified as an illegal combatant, and held for three months without trial or counsel, until he committed suicide in despair. The official government line was that Jesse had been recruited into a terrorist cell by Aziz al-Ibrahim, whose cousin was a member of a terrorist organization back in Egypt that had bombed a US embassy. The trouble is that Aziz went to Jesse’s funeral and told Jesse’s brother Peter that he had nothing to do with his cousin’s terror cell and that Jesse was his AA sponsor.”
Cheyenne stole a glance at Collier, who was staring ashen-faced at Root.
“If that were true, Brandt should never have been on the government’s radar,” Sam noted.
“It was true, but it wasn’t the whole story,” said Root.** “Jesse had learned one thing from Aziz: that his cousin was a truck driver named Asif. Asif had been under government surveillance because of his terrorist activities, but even more because certain people in the government wanted to use those terrorist activities for their own ends. It was several months after Jesse’s death when those plans finally came to fruition, but the people involved were so ruthless, I guess they decided the risk of Jesse even mentioning Asif to someone at the aircraft plant where he worked was too great for him to be allowed to live.”
“And what was that plan?” Reese asked in a tone that meant he already suspected the answer.
“Officially, Asif was the driver and the detonator of the truck bomb that sank the Libertas Ferry that September. In reality, the government had captured Asif, questioned him for the details of the bombing plan, and then kept him unconscious until he was placed in the truck with the bomb, which was intended to kill someone on board the ferry who had knowledge of one of those deep dark secrets that Jesse’s brother here is so determined to uncover.”
“How the hell do you know all that?” Collier demanded.
Root gave a condescending little chuckle. “A little bird told me.”
“How?” Sam pressed. “I took your earwig.”
“She has her methods.”
Cheyenne suddenly understood the need for the Faraday cage. He glanced at Mr. Finch-but Mr. Finch looked ready to faint, and Cheyenne was glad he was already sitting down. Evidently the talk of the bombing meant something to him… was that how he’d been injured?
“But to answer the larger question,” Root continued, “no, Peter doesn’t know who recruited him. He doesn’t even know about the microchip.”
Collier’s eyes widened in alarm. “What microchip?”
“Pulled this out of your arm,” Sam said with her usual lack of feeling and handed the dish to Collier, who stared into it.
“We know for sure it’s an RFID tracker,” said Reese. “We don’t know whether it also has a GPS transponder in it, but we fried it with a stun gun just in case.”
Collier let out a shaky breath. “What… how… who….”
“Decima Technologies,” Root answered.
Reese, Sam, and Mr. Finch all looked sharply at her. Collier just looked as confused as Cheyenne felt.
“It’s news to me, too,” Root admitted. “Vigilance is searching for a man named Arthur Claypool.”
Mr. Finch paled further. Cheyenne took that to mean that he knew who Claypool was, maybe even knew him personally.
“That’s true,” said Collier. “He worked for the NSA developing a program called Samaritan, a super AI meant to monitor all surveillance and identify terrorists. I’m sure you’re all aware of how such a thing could be abused.”
“Yes, well aware,” Mr. Finch agreed in a low voice, not looking at anyone.
“The program was shut down before Samaritan was brought online, but rumor has it that the drives that contain Samaritan’s coding still exist. Claypool hid them somewhere, but now supposedly he’s in a hospital somewhere with a brain tumor. Vigilance is trying to locate him to have him take us to the drives so we can destroy them.”
Mr. Finch finally looked Collier in the eye again. “And after that, what will you do with him? Will you kill him, too?”
Collier’s face hardened. “In the name of the people-”
“A sick old man who has committed no crime?!”
“It may not have been against the law, so the government won’t prosecute, but we will bring him to justice.”
“Justice?!” Cheyenne exploded, leaping to his feet and abandoning the fire unlit. “You’re not talking about justice-that’s the logic of the lynch mob!”
Collier flinched. “What the hell would a white man know about it?”
“You think blacks were the only people ever to be lynched? Fill a crowd up with liquor and hate, and all they’ll want is murder. Black, white, red, brown-they don’t care who it is, as long as somebody dies. I’ve had a rope around my own neck more’n once and been threatened with it more times than that. I even watched my foster father hang when a mob thought he’d stolen cattle he’d found on his land and was returning to their rightful owner. His wife tried to plead for his life, get ’em to agree to a jury trial, and do you know what the leader of that mob said? ‘We don’t want law, we want justice.’”***
Collier looked away from him.
“Maybe you don’t plan to hang Claypool,” Cheyenne went on, striding over to the bed, “but no matter how hard you try to call it justice, without due process of law, it’d still be murder.”
Collier looked back at him, eyes blazing. “Due process of law?! You heard what they did to my brother! You heard what happened to that ferry! Do you think we can just sit back and watch while the government spies on us and kills Americans to protect its secrets?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“You’ve got a thing for the Sioux. Well, the Sioux stood up for their rights at the Little Bighorn. Are you going to argue they shouldn’t have killed George Custer?”
That set Cheyenne’s blood boiling. “The Sioux and the Cheyenne had every right to hate Custer. All he cared about, by his own admission, were promotion, glory, and gold, and he built his legend with the blood of old men, women, and children at places like Sand Creek and the Washita River. He surrounded himself with like-minded men-Fred Benteen was all right, but Marcus Reno used to speak of the Sioux as if they were a cancer, something to be eradicated, not even human.”
A surprised, wary look came into Collier’s eyes. Either he’d never heard such things, or he was shocked that Cheyenne knew them so well.
But Cheyenne was on a roll now, speaking from personal experience of things he’d never forget. “You are talking the same way Dull Knife and Crazy Horse did before the Little Bighorn. Sitting Bull might have agreed to surrender if they hadn’t talked him into going through with the ambush. Yes, they killed Custer, and maybe he did deserve it. They killed a lot of other men that day. Not all of them deserved to die. Most of ’em wouldn’t have if Custer hadn’t let his pride get the better of him. Dull Knife called it a great victory, but it was a senseless waste of life that could have been avoided if white men had been willing to honor their word.”
Collier rallied with, “The Sioux were still willing to fight, and so are we.”
“But the road from the Little Bighorn led straight to Wounded Knee!”
Collier blinked rapidly, whether at Cheyenne’s vehemence or at the connection he’d never made before, Cheyenne couldn’t tell. Cheyenne himself knew of the massacre at Wounded Knee only from the books he’d read since his arrival in this year, since it had happened ten years after he’d left; but having lived through the events that led to the Little Bighorn, as well as the battle itself, he could see the path between the two clearly enough. He didn’t know whether he’d be able to prevent Wounded Knee if and when he went home-even if he tried, it might happen anyway, like the Little Bighorn-but he stood a better chance of stopping worse slaughter here and now.
“I can’t let it happen again, Collier,” he said quietly. “I won’t.”
Collier didn’t reply.
“That’s what Decima wants,” Root murmured. “A massacre.”
“How’s that?” Reese prompted.
When Cheyenne turned, Root was frowning slightly and looking in the vague direction of the sofa, but her eyes were glazed and unfocused. She seemed to be listening intently to whatever signal she was getting from the Machine (and he was not going to ask how).
“Decima wants Vigilance to find Samaritan for them,” Root relayed slowly in a low voice. “But not to be destroyed. They plan to convince the government to let them bring Samaritan online, first for a test, then permanently. The reason for the permanent grant is to be some major act of violence against Control and other members of the government, either actually perpetrated by Vigilance or for which they can readily be framed. It is for this reason Peter Brandt was recruited. He is charismatic and persuasive but also easily goaded into increasingly bold acts of violence.”
Cheyenne looked back at Collier, who was avoiding eye contact with everyone.
“So Vigilance is the Sturmabteilung, the Brownshirts,” Reese realized. “The bad boys who cause all the chaos-and the first to be purged once the new order takes power.”
Collier sighed. “We love our country. We would never support someone like Hitler.”
“You don’t have to. He’s using you without your knowledge. Every time you go after someone like Kruger or Claypool, you play right into Decima’s hands.”
The muscle in Collier’s jaw worked as he considered that.
“I think that’s enough for tonight,” Mr. Finch interrupted softly. “Mr. Collier has just undergone major surgery. He needs to rest, and so do we. We can continue this conversation another time.”
Sam and Reese exchanged a look at that and nodded to each other. Sam came around the bed to the monitor stand while Reese took hold of the handrail at the head of the bed, and together they rolled Collier and his monitors away toward the bedroom. For his part, Cheyenne looked inquiringly at Mr. Finch and nodded toward Root, who was still lolling listlessly in the armchair. Mr. Finch nodded back, so Cheyenne went to untie her while Mr. Finch stood and picked up the end of Bear’s leash.
Root looked up when Cheyenne reached her. “Cheyenne. She has a message for you.”
“Oh?” Cheyenne asked and went to work on the knots.
“I apologize for scaring you,” she said in the same low, slow voice she’d used before when speaking for the Machine. “I did not know how else to assist you. But now I must ask you to do one thing for me.”
“What might that be?”
Root responded with a string of nine words that made no sense to Cheyenne at all.
Mr. Finch, on the other hand, inhaled sharply. “Det. Carter.”
“Is she in danger?” Cheyenne asked.
“Not imminent,” Root relayed, “but she will be if she continues her pursuit of HR. She is right to do so, but I….” She paused, then continued with tears in her eyes, “I must allow Admin to take my analog interface offline for maintenance, and my other available assets will not be enough to save her. Without her, Samaritan will rise, and many will die. Please, Cheyenne Bodie… please save Jocelyn Carter.”
Cheyenne swallowed hard. “I’ll do my best-but not because you asked me to. I’ll do it because… well, even if she weren’t my friend, it’s the right thing to do.”
“Thank you,” Root whispered, then started crying silently as Cheyenne removed the ropes and gathered her into his arms. Whatever the Machine had meant about letting Mr. Finch take my analog interface offline for maintenance, it had clearly upset Root, and the sedative was apparently preventing her from hiding that fact.
“Go back to sleep now, Miss Groves,” Mr. Finch ordered softly.
“You’re not my boss, Harold,” Root murmured grouchily even as her eyes closed, but she was asleep again before they even reached the stairs.
They were almost to the door when Reese came back around the corner to the dining room. “Finch?”
“We’re taking Root on to more permanent quarters,” Finch stage-whispered. “I think it’s best to keep her away from Collier from now on.”
Reese nodded his understanding. “Want me to stay here with Shaw?”
“Probably best. I’ll keep Bear with me for tonight. Call if you need anything.”
“We will. Good night.”
“Night,” Cheyenne returned with a nod. Then Mr. Finch opened the door for him, and together they left with Bear at their heels.
Mr. Finch made one stop on the way back to the library to retrieve a package. Once they had arrived and Cheyenne had carried Root into the Faraday cage and laid her on the window seat, Mr. Finch opened the package and took two devices out of it. One he stuck under the table that stood in the center of the room; the other, after some beeping and booping, he strapped securely to Root’s ankle.
“It’s called an ankle monitor,” he whispered as the two men left. “Normally, it’s used to enforce house arrest, but I’ve modified this one to also deliver an electric shock if she goes beyond the proximity radius programmed into the monitor.”
Cheyenne’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “This payback for her usin’ that taser on Sam?”
“Merely the most efficient tool for the job,” Mr. Finch said mildly. “I’ll drive you home.”
Next
* Whether this was a real thing the Sioux did in our world, I don’t know, but Cheyenne threatens a prisoner with it in 2.14 “Big Ghost Basin.”
** What follows is my own headcanon (at least for this AU), since we’re never given the true explanation for Jesse’s arrest in canon.
*** Among the Cheyenne episodes referenced here are 1.8 “The Storm Riders,” 2.4 “The Bounty Killers,” 5.1 “The Long Rope,” 5.8 “The Return of Mr. Grimm,” and 6.5 “Day’s Pay.”
A/N: Trigger warning for discussion of historical atrocities and things that should not have happened to anyone anywhere ever.
Chapter 8
Inquisition
Collier passed out from pain and loss of blood on the way back to the safe house, but Sloan blindfolded himself and waited patiently in the car while Reese and Cheyenne carried Collier inside and Sam and Miss Carter followed with Root (and Cheyenne’s hat, which Sam wore until they got inside). While Miss Carter tied Root to a chair, Cheyenne brought Sam the first aid and surgery kits and Reese prepared the dining table to serve as an operating table. But Sam, understandably, first drew a quantity of sedative into a syringe and dosed Root with it. Then, while Sam scrubbed her hands in the kitchen, Miss Carter left to take Sloan home and Mr. Finch arrived with food and a small cold-box that held several bags of blood and other fluids Sam would need to help Collier recover from the blood loss.
After Reese and Cheyenne got Collier situated on the table for Sam to work on, Reese went to the kitchen to scrub his own hands. Cheyenne started to follow, but he was stopped by Mr. Finch’s hand on his arm.
“Would you come with me, please?” Mr. Finch murmured when Cheyenne turned to him. “There are some accommodations we need to make immediately.”
Cheyenne glanced around, but none of the things that needed doing there were things Reese and Sam couldn’t handle without him, so he nodded. “Yes, sir.” He retrieved his hat and followed Mr. Finch back down to the parking garage.
“I saved you a couple of hamburgers and an order of French fries,” Mr. Finch said as they got into his car. Once Cheyenne was settled, Mr. Finch gestured to the paper bag on the dashboard and a cup in the cupholder. “Also a lemonade. I had mine on the way over, but I know you haven’t eaten yet, and the task I need your help with may prove somewhat strenuous.”
“What task is that?” Cheyenne asked, taking the bag and opening the first hamburger.
Mr. Finch waited until he’d backed out of the parking space and was driving toward the exit to answer. “Preparing a place to house Root. I’m sure we’ll hear the whole story from Miss Shaw later, but it seems obvious that despite her efforts to save Jason Greenfield, Root remains willing to harm even the people she wants to work with, which means she’s too dangerous to simply release.”
Cheyenne swallowed the bite he’d just taken. “But she’s already escaped from one asylum. She could escape from prison just as easy.”
“Precisely, if the government didn’t send another assassin after her. The one place I can be certain she won’t escape from is the library-but I need not only to construct a cell but also to ensure that it blocks her from communicating with the Machine.”
Cheyenne frowned, confused. “Why do you need the cell to do that? Doesn’t she need a telephone?”
Mr. Finch shot him a brief sidelong look. “Cell phones can be easily stolen, Mr. Bodie. Root is an accomplished pickpocket. But what have you read about Michael Faraday’s experiments with electricity?”
Faraday was a name Cheyenne knew but hadn’t heard in a long time. He drank some lemonade while he tried to remember. “Not a lot that I can recall offhand,” he finally confessed. “I know his work paved the way for Sam Morse to invent the electric telegraph. But we didn’t have the means to be foolin’ around with electricity when I went to school in High Point,” he added with a wry smile. “Besides, Mr. Faraday was still alive an’ workin’ back then, but our textbooks were older’n I was.”
Mr. Finch smiled back. “So you don’t remember hearing of the concept of the Faraday cage.”
“No, sir.”
“Faraday proved that when a hollow object like an ice pail receives an electrical charge, the charge and the electromagnetic field created by the charge remain on the outside of the object, even if the object’s surface isn’t solid. For example, if lightning were to strike this car, it might melt the tires, but you and I would be perfectly safe as long as we stayed inside.”
Cheyenne’s mouth was full, but he nodded his understanding.
“Wireless devices generate electromagnetic signals, but it’s possible to construct a cage using wire mesh that can block those signals from passing from one side to the other.”
“An’ that’s what you want to use for Root’s cell?”
“Yes. It may not be more escape-resistant than mere bars, but it would hold Root incommunicado very effectively, and I have other means for ensuring that she stays there when we’re finished. I can handle the electrical work needed, but it would help me tremendously for you to do what heavy lifting there will be.”
“I’ll be happy to. Kind of a nice change, gettin’ to build somethin’ for once-ain’t had much chance since I’ve been here.”
Mr. Finch smiled, plainly pleased that Cheyenne was pleased.
Cheyenne finished his meal before they reached the library, so he was ready to work as soon as they arrived. Mr. Finch had already picked out a small reading room with its own privy on a lower floor than the command center, and between them, they made short work of setting up the cage and connecting the electrical generator. Then they went upstairs to collect Bear, checked that all was still well at the safe house, and left.
They were almost to the car when the nearest pay telephone began to ring. Mr. Finch hobbled over to answer it, listened briefly, hung up, and started hobbling back inside again.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bodie,” he said as Cheyenne followed with Bear. “This shouldn’t take long, but we have two new numbers, and I need to decode them before we leave. I can do more research at the safe house.”
“You think one might be Collier?” Cheyenne asked once they were inside.
“Possibly. If so, we already have a start on understanding the threat, and he is already in our custody.”
Upstairs, Mr. Finch quickly located six books to take back to his desk, and Cheyenne concentrated on playing with Bear while Mr. Finch worked. As expected, the decoding didn’t take long.
In fact, it was less than a minute before Cheyenne heard Mr. Finch murmur, “Peter Brandt. I wonder….” Mr. Finch typed rapidly for a moment and then said, “Oh, that’s interesting.”
“Sir?” Cheyenne prompted, looking up while still playing tug-o’-war with Bear’s stuffed bone.
“It seems ‘Peter Collier’ is an alias,” Mr. Finch replied at a more conversational volume and stood up. “Both numbers belong to the same man-his real name is Peter Brandt. His digital footprint under that name has been largely erased, but I did find one photo of him, in a crowd at his college graduation in 2003. I can’t tell what it means that the Machine gave us both identities; the most obvious reason for the threat is his capture, but the members of his group seem to know him only as Collier.”
Cheyenne put Bear back on his leash and stood in turn. “Maybe the threat’s from someone who knows both identities, like whoever recruited him into this Vigilance group in the first place.”
“Well, that’s possible. I suppose we’ll simply have to ask him.”
With that, they left the library again and went back to the safe house, where Reese had brought in a bed like the ones at the hospital-from where, Cheyenne didn’t know-and Collier, now lying on it with his knee and shoulder bandaged and his arm in a sling, hadn’t yet come around after the surgery. Apparently Sam and Reese had just moved him; the bed was still in the dining room, and Sam was scrubbing the table while Reese hooked a half-empty bag of blood onto a pole attached to the head of the bed. Collier was attached to a stand of beeping monitors, too, which prompted a phantom ache in Cheyenne’s chest, even though his ribs had long since healed from the fall that had brought him here.
“Is he stable?” Mr. Finch asked Sam quietly, hobbling over to the table.
“For the moment,” Sam replied at the same volume. “I’ll need to watch his vitals overnight, but I’ve still got one unit of whole blood and two of plasma if he needs them, plus the Ringer’s lactate. Thanks for those, by the way.”
“Do let me know if you need more.”
“If I do, I will, but I shouldn’t as long as he doesn’t do anything stupid like trying to escape. But…” Sam paused and handed a small dish to Mr. Finch. “I found more than a bullet in his shoulder.”
Mr. Finch frowned into the dish. “A microchip?”
“Like someone took off Alicia Corwin’s body,” said Reese, apparently referring to a past case Cheyenne hadn’t heard about. “I’ve disabled it in case there was a GPS transponder in it, but you may still be able to get some data off it.”
Cheyenne came over to get Mr. Finch a chair and glanced into the dish as he passed. The so-called microchip looked to him like a little metal cylinder, maybe an inch and a half long.
“But what connection would Collier have with Alicia Corwin?” Mr. Finch murmured as he sat down in the chair Cheyenne offered him and set the dish back on the table. “She worked on the very project he seems to want to destroy.”
His careful word choice wasn’t lost on Cheyenne. And it was wise, because no sooner had he said that than Collier groaned and stirred.
“Take it easy, Collier,” Reese warned at a normal volume, pressing on Collier’s left shoulder to keep him still. “My colleague won’t be happy if you move too suddenly and undo her handiwork. She might just let you bleed out next time.”
Collier opened his eyes and frowned around in confusion. “Where the hell am I?” he asked weakly.
“A safe place,” Mr. Finch answered. “And I, too, strongly advise you not to attempt to escape. Your current wounds are severe enough as it stands.”
“What is this? First you shoot me, then you save me?”
“We don’t want you dead, Mr. Collier-which I admit is more mercy than you showed to Wayne Kruger and more mercy than your colleagues are willing to show you.”
Collier’s frown deepened. “What are you talking about?”
“We have information that your life is now in danger. It seems only logical that your colleagues plan to do to you what you planned to do to Jason Greenfield.”
“Vigilance? No… no, look, how long was I out?”
“Couple of hours,” answered Reese.
“Long enough for a few panicked phone calls from whoever got away at Cooper Square,” Sam noted.
“And this information reached us within the last hour,” Mr. Finch added, “so it stands to reason that it somehow relates to your capture.”
Collier shook his head. “It can’t be Vigilance. There hasn’t been time.”
“Time for what?” Cheyenne asked.
“For a full debate and a vote. Even if someone already has the poll up on our chat server, our members on the West Coast and in Hawaii and Alaska aren’t even online right now. These things take days, usually.”
“Did you vote on Tim Sloan?” asked Reese.
“Yes. It didn’t go his way. Some of our members were willing to let him live, but the majority were against it.”
“Sounds like the old blood-games in Rome,” Cheyenne observed. “When a gladiator lost, the crowd used to vote on whether the victor should kill him or not.”
“It’s not a game,” Collier snapped. “We have two guiding principles: privacy and democracy. We’re preparing the ground for a new American Revolution, to shut down the people in the government and out of it who spy on Americans and refuse to acknowledge the damage that’s done when the right to privacy is violated as systematically as it is now.”
Sam snorted indelicately, and Cheyenne privately agreed with her. He could understand being upset about the spying-he wasn’t too happy about it himself-but from what little he’d seen, the means Vigilance employed couldn’t be justified even by such high-sounding ends.
Mr. Finch, on the other hand, narrowed his eyes. “Was there a vote taken on whether to kill Jason Greenfield?”
Collier suddenly clammed up.
“There wasn’t, was there? His death was ordered by a higher authority.” Mr. Finch leaned closer. “The message center in the storage unit-where do the messages come from?”
Collier didn’t answer.
“Who tells you to go there? Who monitors the camera?”
Collier remained silent.
“You know,” Reese said casually, “the longest it’s ever taken me to break someone is sixteen hours.”
Collier huffed. “What, now you’re gonna waterboard me?”
Sam rolled her eyes. “Please. Waterboarding is for amateurs.”
“We don’t have to actively torture you when you’re already in pain,” said Reese, which was enough explanation of what waterboarding meant that Cheyenne could keep up. “We could just withhold painkillers until you tell us what we want to know.”
Collier didn’t answer, but he seemed to be thinking hard.
“Of course, if you insist, I’m sure my friend here might have some ideas.” Reese looked at Cheyenne.
“A few,” said Cheyenne, unbuttoning his jacket. “There’s one old trick the Sioux used to use on their prisoners.” He drew his knife, making sure Collier got a good look at the blade. “They’d take a steel knife and heat it in the fire. Once the blade was red-hot, they’d hold the flat against the sole of the prisoner’s foot. If he still wouldn’t talk, they’d insert the tip into the back o’ the ankle, between the tendon an’ the bone.”*
Collier’s eyes widened, and the beep of the monitor sped up. “You… you wouldn’t!”
Cheyenne exchanged a look with Reese, sheathed his knife, and went to the fireplace to start laying a fire. It was mostly a bluff-even if he were willing to go that far for real, which probably wasn’t necessary in this case, he was sure Mr. Finch would put a stop to it before he could in fact burn Collier’s foot-but it was the sort of bluff that worked better when backed with the first steps of action. If nothing else, it would reveal whether Collier were more afraid of Vigilance than he was of Cheyenne.
“I thought you said you didn’t want me dead!” Collier yelped.
“Oh, it won’t kill you,” Cheyenne replied before Mr. Finch could. “Won’t even cripple you-you’ll be off your feet until that knee heals anyway, and that’ll take longer’n a burn.” He put two logs on the grate, then paused and admitted more quietly, “Does hurt like heck, though, havin’ your feet held to the fire.” Then he reached for two more logs and looked around for the kindling and tinder.
Collier gulped audibly. “Look… I don’t know, all right? I swear I don’t know. I just get these anonymous texts telling me to meet my team at the storage unit. We find the message on the wall and decode it.”
Cheyenne placed a fifth log, then found the kindling and began adding it to the fire.
“Is that also how you were recruited to join Vigilance?” Mr. Finch asked.
“Yes,” said Collier. “They told me I was a leader, but I’ve never had any idea who ‘they’ are.”
“You’re an intelligent man, Mr. Collier. Why would you choose to go along with all this?”
“Jesse Brandt,” answered a groggy female voice Cheyenne hadn’t heard before. It must have belonged to Root.
Sam swore under her breath and reached for the first aid kit, which probably meant that the sedative shouldn’t have worn off yet. Reese held up a hand to stop her.
At the same time, Mr. Finch exchanged a wary look with Cheyenne before saying, “Please continue, Miss Groves.”
Root didn’t move but said in the tone of someone reciting a memorized speech, “Jesse Brandt was arrested in 2010, classified as an illegal combatant, and held for three months without trial or counsel, until he committed suicide in despair. The official government line was that Jesse had been recruited into a terrorist cell by Aziz al-Ibrahim, whose cousin was a member of a terrorist organization back in Egypt that had bombed a US embassy. The trouble is that Aziz went to Jesse’s funeral and told Jesse’s brother Peter that he had nothing to do with his cousin’s terror cell and that Jesse was his AA sponsor.”
Cheyenne stole a glance at Collier, who was staring ashen-faced at Root.
“If that were true, Brandt should never have been on the government’s radar,” Sam noted.
“It was true, but it wasn’t the whole story,” said Root.** “Jesse had learned one thing from Aziz: that his cousin was a truck driver named Asif. Asif had been under government surveillance because of his terrorist activities, but even more because certain people in the government wanted to use those terrorist activities for their own ends. It was several months after Jesse’s death when those plans finally came to fruition, but the people involved were so ruthless, I guess they decided the risk of Jesse even mentioning Asif to someone at the aircraft plant where he worked was too great for him to be allowed to live.”
“And what was that plan?” Reese asked in a tone that meant he already suspected the answer.
“Officially, Asif was the driver and the detonator of the truck bomb that sank the Libertas Ferry that September. In reality, the government had captured Asif, questioned him for the details of the bombing plan, and then kept him unconscious until he was placed in the truck with the bomb, which was intended to kill someone on board the ferry who had knowledge of one of those deep dark secrets that Jesse’s brother here is so determined to uncover.”
“How the hell do you know all that?” Collier demanded.
Root gave a condescending little chuckle. “A little bird told me.”
“How?” Sam pressed. “I took your earwig.”
“She has her methods.”
Cheyenne suddenly understood the need for the Faraday cage. He glanced at Mr. Finch-but Mr. Finch looked ready to faint, and Cheyenne was glad he was already sitting down. Evidently the talk of the bombing meant something to him… was that how he’d been injured?
“But to answer the larger question,” Root continued, “no, Peter doesn’t know who recruited him. He doesn’t even know about the microchip.”
Collier’s eyes widened in alarm. “What microchip?”
“Pulled this out of your arm,” Sam said with her usual lack of feeling and handed the dish to Collier, who stared into it.
“We know for sure it’s an RFID tracker,” said Reese. “We don’t know whether it also has a GPS transponder in it, but we fried it with a stun gun just in case.”
Collier let out a shaky breath. “What… how… who….”
“Decima Technologies,” Root answered.
Reese, Sam, and Mr. Finch all looked sharply at her. Collier just looked as confused as Cheyenne felt.
“It’s news to me, too,” Root admitted. “Vigilance is searching for a man named Arthur Claypool.”
Mr. Finch paled further. Cheyenne took that to mean that he knew who Claypool was, maybe even knew him personally.
“That’s true,” said Collier. “He worked for the NSA developing a program called Samaritan, a super AI meant to monitor all surveillance and identify terrorists. I’m sure you’re all aware of how such a thing could be abused.”
“Yes, well aware,” Mr. Finch agreed in a low voice, not looking at anyone.
“The program was shut down before Samaritan was brought online, but rumor has it that the drives that contain Samaritan’s coding still exist. Claypool hid them somewhere, but now supposedly he’s in a hospital somewhere with a brain tumor. Vigilance is trying to locate him to have him take us to the drives so we can destroy them.”
Mr. Finch finally looked Collier in the eye again. “And after that, what will you do with him? Will you kill him, too?”
Collier’s face hardened. “In the name of the people-”
“A sick old man who has committed no crime?!”
“It may not have been against the law, so the government won’t prosecute, but we will bring him to justice.”
“Justice?!” Cheyenne exploded, leaping to his feet and abandoning the fire unlit. “You’re not talking about justice-that’s the logic of the lynch mob!”
Collier flinched. “What the hell would a white man know about it?”
“You think blacks were the only people ever to be lynched? Fill a crowd up with liquor and hate, and all they’ll want is murder. Black, white, red, brown-they don’t care who it is, as long as somebody dies. I’ve had a rope around my own neck more’n once and been threatened with it more times than that. I even watched my foster father hang when a mob thought he’d stolen cattle he’d found on his land and was returning to their rightful owner. His wife tried to plead for his life, get ’em to agree to a jury trial, and do you know what the leader of that mob said? ‘We don’t want law, we want justice.’”***
Collier looked away from him.
“Maybe you don’t plan to hang Claypool,” Cheyenne went on, striding over to the bed, “but no matter how hard you try to call it justice, without due process of law, it’d still be murder.”
Collier looked back at him, eyes blazing. “Due process of law?! You heard what they did to my brother! You heard what happened to that ferry! Do you think we can just sit back and watch while the government spies on us and kills Americans to protect its secrets?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“You’ve got a thing for the Sioux. Well, the Sioux stood up for their rights at the Little Bighorn. Are you going to argue they shouldn’t have killed George Custer?”
That set Cheyenne’s blood boiling. “The Sioux and the Cheyenne had every right to hate Custer. All he cared about, by his own admission, were promotion, glory, and gold, and he built his legend with the blood of old men, women, and children at places like Sand Creek and the Washita River. He surrounded himself with like-minded men-Fred Benteen was all right, but Marcus Reno used to speak of the Sioux as if they were a cancer, something to be eradicated, not even human.”
A surprised, wary look came into Collier’s eyes. Either he’d never heard such things, or he was shocked that Cheyenne knew them so well.
But Cheyenne was on a roll now, speaking from personal experience of things he’d never forget. “You are talking the same way Dull Knife and Crazy Horse did before the Little Bighorn. Sitting Bull might have agreed to surrender if they hadn’t talked him into going through with the ambush. Yes, they killed Custer, and maybe he did deserve it. They killed a lot of other men that day. Not all of them deserved to die. Most of ’em wouldn’t have if Custer hadn’t let his pride get the better of him. Dull Knife called it a great victory, but it was a senseless waste of life that could have been avoided if white men had been willing to honor their word.”
Collier rallied with, “The Sioux were still willing to fight, and so are we.”
“But the road from the Little Bighorn led straight to Wounded Knee!”
Collier blinked rapidly, whether at Cheyenne’s vehemence or at the connection he’d never made before, Cheyenne couldn’t tell. Cheyenne himself knew of the massacre at Wounded Knee only from the books he’d read since his arrival in this year, since it had happened ten years after he’d left; but having lived through the events that led to the Little Bighorn, as well as the battle itself, he could see the path between the two clearly enough. He didn’t know whether he’d be able to prevent Wounded Knee if and when he went home-even if he tried, it might happen anyway, like the Little Bighorn-but he stood a better chance of stopping worse slaughter here and now.
“I can’t let it happen again, Collier,” he said quietly. “I won’t.”
Collier didn’t reply.
“That’s what Decima wants,” Root murmured. “A massacre.”
“How’s that?” Reese prompted.
When Cheyenne turned, Root was frowning slightly and looking in the vague direction of the sofa, but her eyes were glazed and unfocused. She seemed to be listening intently to whatever signal she was getting from the Machine (and he was not going to ask how).
“Decima wants Vigilance to find Samaritan for them,” Root relayed slowly in a low voice. “But not to be destroyed. They plan to convince the government to let them bring Samaritan online, first for a test, then permanently. The reason for the permanent grant is to be some major act of violence against Control and other members of the government, either actually perpetrated by Vigilance or for which they can readily be framed. It is for this reason Peter Brandt was recruited. He is charismatic and persuasive but also easily goaded into increasingly bold acts of violence.”
Cheyenne looked back at Collier, who was avoiding eye contact with everyone.
“So Vigilance is the Sturmabteilung, the Brownshirts,” Reese realized. “The bad boys who cause all the chaos-and the first to be purged once the new order takes power.”
Collier sighed. “We love our country. We would never support someone like Hitler.”
“You don’t have to. He’s using you without your knowledge. Every time you go after someone like Kruger or Claypool, you play right into Decima’s hands.”
The muscle in Collier’s jaw worked as he considered that.
“I think that’s enough for tonight,” Mr. Finch interrupted softly. “Mr. Collier has just undergone major surgery. He needs to rest, and so do we. We can continue this conversation another time.”
Sam and Reese exchanged a look at that and nodded to each other. Sam came around the bed to the monitor stand while Reese took hold of the handrail at the head of the bed, and together they rolled Collier and his monitors away toward the bedroom. For his part, Cheyenne looked inquiringly at Mr. Finch and nodded toward Root, who was still lolling listlessly in the armchair. Mr. Finch nodded back, so Cheyenne went to untie her while Mr. Finch stood and picked up the end of Bear’s leash.
Root looked up when Cheyenne reached her. “Cheyenne. She has a message for you.”
“Oh?” Cheyenne asked and went to work on the knots.
“I apologize for scaring you,” she said in the same low, slow voice she’d used before when speaking for the Machine. “I did not know how else to assist you. But now I must ask you to do one thing for me.”
“What might that be?”
Root responded with a string of nine words that made no sense to Cheyenne at all.
Mr. Finch, on the other hand, inhaled sharply. “Det. Carter.”
“Is she in danger?” Cheyenne asked.
“Not imminent,” Root relayed, “but she will be if she continues her pursuit of HR. She is right to do so, but I….” She paused, then continued with tears in her eyes, “I must allow Admin to take my analog interface offline for maintenance, and my other available assets will not be enough to save her. Without her, Samaritan will rise, and many will die. Please, Cheyenne Bodie… please save Jocelyn Carter.”
Cheyenne swallowed hard. “I’ll do my best-but not because you asked me to. I’ll do it because… well, even if she weren’t my friend, it’s the right thing to do.”
“Thank you,” Root whispered, then started crying silently as Cheyenne removed the ropes and gathered her into his arms. Whatever the Machine had meant about letting Mr. Finch take my analog interface offline for maintenance, it had clearly upset Root, and the sedative was apparently preventing her from hiding that fact.
“Go back to sleep now, Miss Groves,” Mr. Finch ordered softly.
“You’re not my boss, Harold,” Root murmured grouchily even as her eyes closed, but she was asleep again before they even reached the stairs.
They were almost to the door when Reese came back around the corner to the dining room. “Finch?”
“We’re taking Root on to more permanent quarters,” Finch stage-whispered. “I think it’s best to keep her away from Collier from now on.”
Reese nodded his understanding. “Want me to stay here with Shaw?”
“Probably best. I’ll keep Bear with me for tonight. Call if you need anything.”
“We will. Good night.”
“Night,” Cheyenne returned with a nod. Then Mr. Finch opened the door for him, and together they left with Bear at their heels.
Mr. Finch made one stop on the way back to the library to retrieve a package. Once they had arrived and Cheyenne had carried Root into the Faraday cage and laid her on the window seat, Mr. Finch opened the package and took two devices out of it. One he stuck under the table that stood in the center of the room; the other, after some beeping and booping, he strapped securely to Root’s ankle.
“It’s called an ankle monitor,” he whispered as the two men left. “Normally, it’s used to enforce house arrest, but I’ve modified this one to also deliver an electric shock if she goes beyond the proximity radius programmed into the monitor.”
Cheyenne’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “This payback for her usin’ that taser on Sam?”
“Merely the most efficient tool for the job,” Mr. Finch said mildly. “I’ll drive you home.”
Next
* Whether this was a real thing the Sioux did in our world, I don’t know, but Cheyenne threatens a prisoner with it in 2.14 “Big Ghost Basin.”
** What follows is my own headcanon (at least for this AU), since we’re never given the true explanation for Jesse’s arrest in canon.
*** Among the Cheyenne episodes referenced here are 1.8 “The Storm Riders,” 2.4 “The Bounty Killers,” 5.1 “The Long Rope,” 5.8 “The Return of Mr. Grimm,” and 6.5 “Day’s Pay.”