by Nick Svolos
Still, the persistent nagging presence of that bag ate at me. I didn’t dare leave it at home or in my car. The FBI was on the warpath, and I wouldn’t put it past them to just break in and make off with my only hope of getting to the bottom of this. I kept it with me, but that only gave me a compulsion to nervously glance at the elevator every minute or two, expecting LaBlanc and Forney to step off and harass me again. Well, harass might not be the right word. I’d be under those orange lights for the rest of my miserable existence.
This whole thing was making me paranoid as all get-out.
Eventually, and with considerable relief, quitting time rolled around. I made a beeline for the parking lot.
When you’re under surveillance, your established routine is your best defense. The people watching you are just that: people. People doing a boring job. They get tired. Their minds begin to wander. As long as you don’t do anything to draw their attention—by which I mean something different—you can actually get away with quite a bit.
My routine of late had me driving to the Angel Tower several nights a week. Whether I had patrol duty or a training session with Three Dollar Bill, it seemed like I spent a lot of my evenings there. I always drove because I wanted to avoid the habit of Captain Stand-In commuting between Santa Monica and Downtown LA. I’d discovered a few secret identities because of little slip-ups like that.
Now, that routine both trapped and protected me. The best way to keep my precious cargo safe was also the slowest way to do it.
Once I got to the Tower, I stopped by Herculene’s quarters and suited up. I had duty that night, working with Mentalia, which fit right into my plans. She liked to patrol, which left me with the briefing room all to myself. I settled in at one of the consoles and got to work.
There were elements of the plan that I needed help with. I muted the communicator in my ear, activated the country-singer-voice gizmo, picked up a phone and dialed an internal number.
“IT. Higgins speaking.”
“Hey, Steve. Captain Stand-In here. Got a minute?”
“Sure. Want me to come up?”
I told him I did, and a few moments later, a heavyset guy in his mid-twenties emerged from the elevators. He smiled and took a look around. “Cool. I don’t get to come up here very often.”
I waved him over. “I know. I get the same feeling every time.”
“I woulda thought it’d be old hat for you by now. So, what can I do for ya?”
“First, I need to make sure we’re secure. When’s the last time you ran a diagnostic on Archangel?”
His face took on a suspicious mien. “Last night. I can look up the exact time, if you need it.”
“No. Can you run it again?”
“Sure.” He sat down at one of the other consoles and logged into the system. “Is this something you can tell me about?”
“Not yet.”
He nodded and went about his task. After a few minutes, he pronounced the artificial intelligence clean.
“Well, I could have told you that,” Archangel chimed in.
I spoke into the air. “Sorry, ma’am, I had to be sure.” In truth, I still had misgivings with trusting her. When Schadenfreude told me there was a mole in the team, the AI popped up to the top of my list. She’d been subverted before. Even though Higgins’ diagnostics cleared her, I knew nothing was for certain in this business. Still, I had to trust someone—someone who could crack the laptop’s encryption. This was as good as I was going to get.
“Alright, I need to ask you two to keep this secret. I’ve received information that there may be a mole on the team. I don’t believe it, but until I can prove it, I have to play this by the book.”
“Yes. Activating protocol two-ninety-seven-alpha,” Archangel confirmed.
Ultiman had a protocol for everything, and we had to memorize them all. That went for the civilian staff, too. Steve gulped, but nodded his head in confirmation.
“Okay. I need your help with this.” I pulled the laptop out of the bag. “This belonged to Backdraft. The cops say it’s encrypted. Can you two break into this thing and get the data out?”
“We can try,” Steve said, taking the device.
“A wise Muppet once said, ‘There is no try,’” Archangel corrected. “We’ll get it done, Captain. Are we looking for anything specific?”
“I think Backdraft’s crimes were misdirection for some other goal. I need to find out what he was really up to. With any luck, there’ll also be a clue as to who he was working for.”
“We’re on it,” Steve said. “Can I take this down to my floor?”
“No. I’d rather keep that thing in sight. Can you do what you need to do here? Do you need any specialized equipment?”
“Yeah. I suppose I can bring it up, though.”
“Captain, if I may,” Archangel interrupted. “I can protect the laptop, should it come to that.”
I nodded. “Yeah, sorry. I’m letting paranoia get to me. Do what you gotta do, Steve.”
The IT guy left the floor, and I turned back to the console, checking the data on the screen. The crime scanner showed a city at peace. It was a pretty neat program, gathering data from every local police and fire department, sifting and sorting and running it through some sort of threat-assessment algorithm. It allowed us to get the jump on any serious problem before it got out of hand. So far, it was a quiet night.
I keyed my communicator. “How’s it going, Mentalia?”
“All clear, Cap. Just doing a few lazy circles over the marina.” I glanced at the map. Mentalia’s position showed up as a bright blip above Burton Chase Park. “There’s a forty-footer out here that’s just gorgeous.”
“Thinking of buying?”
“Ha! I wish. Just dreaming. I might be able to afford a rowboat when I retire.”
“It’s nice to have something to look forward to, ain’t it?”
“You know it, hon. How’s things back at the ranch? You’ve been awfully quiet tonight.”
“Sorry. I’ve been multitasking. Got a little side project. I’m gonna go quiet and get back to it. Just wanted to check in and let you know I’m still awake.”
She chuckled. “Glad to hear it. Have fun with your project.”
“Roger that.” I muted the comm and got back to work. I pulled the LAPD files out and laid them on a side table. Something rattled around in the bottom of the shopping bag. I reached in and came out with a thumb drive. It was beefier than the ones I was familiar with, with a sticker that announced it as the property of the LAPD. Fine print covered the rest of the label, detailing the severe penalties in store for unauthorized users. It was an extensive list, and the print had to be so small to fit it all in that it was impossible to read without a magnifying glass. I guess you couldn’t say they didn’t warn you, but damn, they really didn’t warn you.
I shrugged and slotted it into a USB port on the console. A window popped up on the screen, and I moved it so it didn’t block the crime scanner. The window displayed a set of folders. A file system, I figured. It looked a bit like my own computer, but the top-level items had different names. Bin, root, dev, and so forth, each preceded by a forward slash.
“Archangel, can you tell me what I’m looking at?”
“It appears to be a backup of a computer system. The top-level directories match those of a Unix-based operating system. Would you like me to perform an analysis?”
“Only if you have the spare processing power. Decrypting the laptop takes priority.”
“Don’t even trip, bro. I got this.”
I rubbed my forehead. I was still unsure whether the AI might be compromised, and here she was, talking like a street kid. “SpeedDamon’s been making more ‘improvements,’ I see.”
“Yep” came her cheerful reply. “He’s been teaching me the proper use of the vernacular.”
“Lovely.”
“I take it you disapprove?”
“Call me old-fashioned.”
“Understood.”
She sounded sad.
The folders on the screen opened and closed faster than I could track, and I leaned back, leaving Archangel to her work. I had my own to do, and figured it was time to get to it. I had one more party to bring into my little counter-conspiracy. “Archangel, is Herculene still in the Tower?”
“Yes. She’s in her quarters now. Would you like to speak with her?”
“Please. Put it through to the phone.” I picked up the receiver and waited a few seconds for her to join me on the line. “Hey, beautiful, you got anything going on right now?”
“No.” she said, “I just finished up with Patty. Whatcha need?”
Patty had been doing pretty well over the last couple of days. We’d even started to leave the containment field in her quarters off for a few hours in the evening. It helped to build her confidence and let her body do the things superhuman bodies do at that stage of development. There wasn’t a lot of data on what Kunai radiation might do to a kid her age and we didn’t want her to be the guinea pig.
“I need to bounce something off that lovely brain of yours. Mind coming up? I don’t want to talk about this over the phone.”
“Color me intrigued. I’ll be right there.”
I turned off Archangel’s local microphones, just in case. My trust in Higgins’ diagnostics only went so far.
A couple of minutes later, Herculene was perched on a seat next to me, watching with amusement as I struggled to find the right words to explain that I’d been holding out on her.
“So, you know how Doughboy was a time-traveler, right?”
“Of course.”
“Cool. Then what I’m about to tell you falls into the category of ‘spoilers’. Doughboy said I had to be careful not to spill the beans about the future. It could cause problems. Mess stuff up. After all the crap we went through to fix things, the last thing we needed was for me to come back and mess them up again with my big mouth.”
“That seems reasonable, but it doesn’t tell me anything. You’re taking an uncharacteristically long time to get to the point.”
“I’m getting to it. Doughboy took me to the end of the world to convince me to go along with his plan. Once we got there, he showed me a copy of The Beacon. The last edition. It had one article, written by me.”
She grinned. “Leave it to you. The world ends, and you’re still at the keyboard.”
“I guess so. Well, I wrote some things I haven’t talked about. After we foiled Schadenfreude’s scheme, I wasn’t sure they’d happen, anyway, so I just kept quiet.” I looked into her eyes. “I'm sorry, babe. I know how you feel about secrets.”
She touched my hand. “It’s alright. You get a pass on this one.”
“I appreciate that.” I sat up a little straighter. The hard part was done. “Okay, so there were three things that led to the apocalypse. The first was Schadenfreude. His plan worked. Anyone with superpowers lost them. That opened the door for the second thing. Something called ‘Bedlam’. Sounded like some kind of secret organization.”
“So that’s what it is.”
“Huh?”
“Sometimes you talk in your sleep.” She shook it off. “Sorry. Please go on.”
“Uh, okay. So, without any heroes to stop them, they just took over. World domination. It sounded pretty bad. That led to number three: Terminus.”
“Terminus?”
“Some kind of hero that rose up and put an end to Bedlam. The article didn’t say how, just that he had unimaginable power.”
“But you said Dr. S’ stuff worked.”
“It did, but he didn’t understand how people like you come by your powers. He thought it was something passed down through the generations. An aberration brought on by fallen angels mating with humans back in the book of Genesis.”
“What?” Her look said it all. Yeah, it was a pretty crazy story.
“I’m not making this up. They were called the Nephilim. They’re mentioned in the scriptures just before Noah builds his ark. Anyhow, Doc believed his nanobots would eliminate any trace of their DNA from our gene pool.”
“And it didn’t.”
“Whatever it is that makes you super, well, it didn’t come from some supernatural being in your family tree. My guess is it’s in all of us. Part of the design. Your body just figured out how to use it.”
“Lucky me. So, Schadenfreude wipes out the current generation of supers, but this Terminus guy shows up later on?”
“Yep. I guess he was born after the nanobots left the scene.” The writer in me balked at what I’d just said. Should I have said “Will be born”? Gah! Whatever. I decided to stick with past tense. Time travel is stupid. “Anyway, after destroying Bedlam, people started holding him up as some kind of god, worshiping him.”
“Oh, for cryin’ out loud.”
“I’m hip, but I guess things were pretty bad in that future. They traded one global dictator for another. Eventually, there was a rebellion, Terminus lost control of his powers, and that’s what ruined the planet.”
“Come on, Reuben, nobody’s that powerful.”
“Not yet. But maybe nobody’s ever needed to be that powerful.”
“Could it really work that way?”
I shrugged. “Heck if I know. You’re the historian. How powerful were those mythological gods you teach about?”
“Those are just myths. Legends.”
“Are they? Maybe in a couple thousand years, folks will teach their kids about this Tower and the amazing people who lived here.”
She giggled. “Mount Olympus on Fifth Street.”
“Yeah. Anyway, when I investigated Backdraft, I came across a fake ID that looked a lot like the one Shirley Richardson had.”
A dark look took over her features. “Jezebel.”
“Who worked for her dad. According to my article, he worked for…” I gave her a moment to work it through.
She finished my sentence. “Bedlam.”
“Bingo. So, yesterday, I decided to pay the good doctor a visit.”
I told her about my visit with Schadenfreude. I left nothing out. She deserved that much. Besides, Ultiman’s protocol called for complete disclosure to a trusted second party if one could be found. Checks and balances. There was nobody I trusted more than Helen, so I laid it all out as best I could.
“So, you think one of us has turned?”
I shook my head. “I think he’s trying to get inside my head. I think he wanted me to come back here and touch off a mole hunt, get everyone turned around, maybe even break up the team.”
She mulled it over for a bit. “Yeah, I can see that. Still, you have to run it down. Two-ninety-seven-alpha. I take it I’m your trusted partner?”
“Now and always.”
She smiled. “Aww. Who else have you brought in?”
“Archangel and Steve in IT, although neither know as much as you do. They’re working on decrypting Backdraft’s laptop.”
She nodded at the police files on the side table. “And this?”
“Everything the LAPD has on Backdraft. The FBI muscled Dawson off the case, and he smuggled this out, hoping I can run this thing down.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Dawson? Arnold Dawson? Why wouldn’t he just cooperate with the feds?”
“Because we think they might be in on it somehow.” I took off my mask so I could rub some sweat off my face. Besides, the damned thing drove me nuts. “I don’t know, babe. I’m starting to think I should get fitted for a tinfoil hat.”
She placed a hand on my shoulder. It was soft and comforting. It was amazing what a little gesture like that could do. Especially when it came from her.
“Easy, there. A world-spanning conspiracy and a non-linear timeline is a bit much for anyone to walk around with. Besides a tin hat would never go with that sexy costume.” She got up and started kneading the tension out of my neck and shoulders. God, I loved this girl. “So, where do we start?”
I let my head loll while her super-strong fingers worked their ma
gic on a knotted muscle. “Backdraft’s burglaries were a smokescreen. If we can figure out his real goal, it might lead us one step up the chain. It’s a long shot, but it’s all I—”
An alarm, red and urgent, sounded through the briefing room, interrupting us, jolting us back to the real world.
“Herculene, Patty’s having an episode,” Archangel’s voice cut through the din.
Herculene was already headed for the stairwell. “Where is she now?”
“She’s phased through the deck of her floor and is now in Mentalia’s room. I’m trying to slow her progress with a stasis field, but the effect has been minimal. Recalibrating.”
I hit a button on the control panel to recall Mentalia to the Tower and locked the terminal. After shoving the police files back into the shopping bag, I stuffed the package into a lock box and flew after Herculene.
XI
The briefing room was on the forty-second floor of the Angel Tower, and Patty’s quarters were on the thirty-sixth. Using the emergency stairwell, we made it in seconds. For people with superpowers, the stairwell was a heck of a lot faster than any elevator. The only thing that slowed us down was when we passed the thirty-ninth floor security center. The team’s civilian security staff were doing what people of their caliber do in a situation like that—racing toward danger.
Herculene shouted, “Make a hole!” and bounded past them. My own flight path was a little more clear-cut. I slalomed between the landings and ended up ahead of her.
I heard screams coming from the Blackburn’s floor. Wails of terror and loss. I opened the fire door a little too hard. In my haste, I failed to account for my strength and velocity, and the darn thing came off its hinges and slammed into the far wall. Damn. Another lecture from Ultiman was probably already on its way. At least my noisy entrance came with one beneficial side-effect: Florence Blackburn stopped panicking and pressing the elevator-bank’s down button. I took advantage of the momentary break in her hysteria.
“Mrs. Blackburn, what happened?”
