Elara rubbed her left wrist, where a faint red mark was beginning to bloom. She adjusted the sleeves of her sweatshirt and took a deep, centering breath. "I'm fine, Marcus. Your timing is, as always, dramatic but impeccable."
"We were tracking your phone's biometrics, Ma'am. Your heart rate spiked, and the audio feed triggered. We were two blocks away picking up the secure files you requested." Thorne turned his head slightly to glare at Briggs. "What are your orders, Director?"
The word hung in the air. Director.
Briggs felt his knees go weak. "Director?" he squeaked, his voice cracking.
Elara finally stepped forward, moving past Thorne. The quiet, unassuming woman in the sweatshirt was gone. In her place stood Elara Vance, the newly confirmed Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the second most powerful law enforcement officer in the United States of America.
She looked at Briggs, her eyes cold and calculating. "Officer Briggs, is it?" she asked, glancing at his nameplate. "Tell me, Briggs, in your academy training, did they cover the Fourth Amendment? The right of the people to be secure in their persons and houses against unreasonable searches and seizures?"
Briggs opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He looked like a fish suffocating on dry land.
"Did they teach you that you cannot physically assault a citizen on their own property simply because they exercise their constitutional right to refuse an unlawful demand?" Elara continued, her voice never raising, yet cutting through the air like a scalpel.
"I... I didn't know who you were," Briggs finally managed to whisper.
"That is exactly the problem," Elara said, her voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. "You thought I was just someone you could bully. You thought I was someone without power, without a voice. If I had been anyone else, I would be in the back of your car right now with a broken wrist and a fabricated charge."
Elara turned to Kowalski, who was trembling on the lawn. "Officer Kowalski, you stood by and watched your partner violate federal civil rights laws. Complicity is not an excuse."
She turned back to Thorne. "Marcus, disarm them."
"Yes, Ma'am," Thorne said. He snapped his fingers. Two of the other agents immediately stepped forward. Before Briggs or Kowalski could even process the command, the agents expertly stripped them of their service weapons, tasers, and radios.
"Hey, you can't do this! You have no jurisdiction here!" Briggs yelled, finding a desperate, panicked spark of defiance. "I'm a local officer!"
"You were a local officer," Elara corrected him. "And under 18 U.S.C. Section 242, Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law, the FBI has absolute jurisdiction. You assaulted a federal official and violated my civil rights."
She pointed a finger at Briggs. "You wanted to make an arrest today, Officer Briggs? You're going to get one."