Omega: The Girl in the Box, Book 5

by Crane, Robert J.

  “Get J.J. in here and then shut the door,” Ariadne said, not even acknowledging my arrival. We waited in silence until a minute later the fuzzy haired hipster walked in, his dark, heavy-rimmed glasses hanging over the edge of his nose, his flannel shirt and skinny jeans putting him at odds with the appearance of everyone else in the room, except Kappler, who habitually wore skinnier jeans than anyone but Kat would be able to squeeze into. The whole room smelled strongly of shaving gel and masculinity, though neither Eve, Ariadne nor I were the most feminine of specimens to offset the boys, nor were any of us the perfume-wearing sort.

  “Good morning, all,” J.J. said by way of greeting, surprisingly chipper.

  “Stow the sunny optimism and get on with the talking,” Eve said, arms folded, drawing an impatient and measured look from Ariadne.

  “Righto,” J.J. said. “So, I told the Director I found some irregularities in the U.S. Customs systems, some people coming through that we flagged for being part of a batch of passports all issued from the same center on the same day, that contained a few familiar faces.” He paused and lifted up the screen of the tablet computer, showing it around to us all in a slow pan. When it came around so I could see it, I bristled. A very familiar face was on the screen—Wolfe. “Oh, yes,” he said, “but just like a bad infomercial, wait—there’s more.” He used his fingers to flip the screen to the next one, revealing another passport photo which he held in position for me to see. A scarred, horrific face was visible on the screen, something that looked familiar, but only slightly so.

  “Henderschott?” I asked, drawing a nod from J.J., who flipped to the next screen, pausing for just a second. “James Fries,” I said and he flipped to the next one, a dark haired man who was trying his best not to smile. The photograph was color, but something about the eyes was off. He flipped to the next picture, a blond-haired man, and once I saw it, I realized who they were. “Spike and Angel, the vampires they sent after me.” I blinked at the pictures. “They didn’t look anywhere near that human when I fought them. They had red eyes...”

  “Contact lenses,” J.J. said. “They were groomed up for the photos.” He stole a look at the screen. “Probably had their hair done before travel, kept their mouths shut to keep the fangs from showing. I’m guessing they did that with Wolfe, too, based on the before and after nature of this passport picture compared to the newsreel stuff I’ve seen from him. But there’s actually more still in this batch.” His fingers slid along the screen again, and another face appeared. “Look familiar?”

  “Bjorn,” I said, recognizing the brown hair and blunt face more than anything else about his bearing. “The guy who’s sitting down in the cells right now,” I said to Reed. “How many of these passports are there?”

  “Hundreds in the batch,” J.J. said. “It was from one specific facility in the UK over the course of a few weeks. Kinda hard to believe they’re all British citizens, but it’s possible. Anyway, so we got this whole batch, and I’m sifting through it with the Director for familiar faces, but that’s kind of a losing proposition because his sight isn’t what it used to be and a lot of these people don’t look anything like metas, and some of them don’t look like...well...anything.”

  “Can you track any of them right now?” Reed asked.

  “Yeah, and that’s kind of the point of this meeting,” J.J. said. “We got a good line on one of them, one of them in the batch that just landed in Minneapolis yesterday, came in from London via New York.” He held up the pad again, this time showing a female face, a dark-haired, serious woman who looked to be in her forties with a short bob haircut. “Eleanor Madigan,” is the name on the passport...but of course Wolfe was in the system under Eugene Dellwood, so...” he looked up and blinked, his twitch magnified by his glasses, “probably an assumed name.”

  “Now in Minneapolis?” I asked. “So if she’s part of this Operation Stanchion, it looks like they’re moving pieces into place in the area now.”

  “Probably more than you think,” J.J. said, and tapped away at his tablet for a minute before pushing it toward me to see again, holding it in the air between us. “This is Des Moines Police Department’s report on what they found in the house after you finished demolishing it.” I cringed, but J.J. paid no mind. “Looks like Bjorn had a Google Map leading him up to a hotel near the airport here in Bloomington.”

  “He was coming here?” Parks spoke up at last, the voice of wisdom. “If he already had the map, let’s assume that he was going to travel within the next day or so after the attack. That puts it about now. You thinking he might be meeting up with Madigan?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” J.J. said, surprisingly smug for a guy who really had nothing to be smug about, looks-wise, “but an Eleanor Madigan checked into that very hotel just last night. Room 1117.” He smiled wide, and then it vanished. “That’s the eleventh floor, by the way, and it’s one of those hotels where the rooms are all centered around a big open-air courtyard, so you might wanna...” he shrugged, “I dunno, use some discretion or something. Unless you want to do an eleven story plunge in public. Might not hurt you too much—”

  “It would kill most of us,” Parks corrected him.

  “Well, it’d make a hell of a scene for the news, too, y’know.” He nodded at me and Reed. “They’re still talking about the gangland house crashing down in Iowa.”

  “That’s because it’s the most exciting thing to happen in Iowa in six decades,” Parks said.

  “I want caution,” Ariadne said, cutting across all other talk in the room. “Bastian has lead on this, Sienna and Reed, you’ll be answering to him. I want everyone working together, no lone ranger BS—got it, Clary?” She waited until Clary picked his head up, gave her a silent nod, and then she continued. “Whoever this Eleanor Madigan is, I think we can expect she’s trouble if she’s truly with Omega.”

  “You’re going to send all of us?” I asked, throwing looks around the room in return for the ones I got. Questioning orders like this wasn’t done. Eve gave me the nastiest look of all. “That leaves nothing to defend the campus with.”

  “We still have agents,” Ariadne said. “We need a unified front. After Des Moines, I want us to be prepared for anything you might encounter, and I doubt they’re going to hit us here in the hour or two you’re gone.”

  “You call it being prepared for anything,” I said, “but this is Omega we’re dealing with and I call it putting all your Faberge eggs in one basket. And then throwing that basket off the top of the IDS Tower.” I paused, and wondered where that thought had come from before realizing it had been a subconscious suggestion I hadn’t even noticed. “Which I am told is fatal.”

  Ariadne opened her mouth to respond, eyes looking up as she tried to come up with something. “I can’t really do anything with your eggs metaphor, so let’s put it this way—we’re dealing with an A-rated threat, so I’m sending in my A-Team.”

  “Or your M-Squad?” I asked with amusement. “If we’re going to do this, we need to do it fast and quiet and get back here. With whatever Omega is planning, this is not a fortuitous time to be absent from the campus for long.”

  “Agreed,” Ariadne said. “Kid gloves for the pickup on this one. Take care with her.”

  “You asking us to give her the benefit of the doubt that she’s a civilian?” Bastian asked, his expression almost unreadable.

  “Yes,” Ariadne said. “Take her peacefully, if possible.”

  “Omega doesn’t do ‘peacefully,’” Reed spoke up. “They do bloody, violent and destructive, and that’s about it.”

  “We do that pretty well ourselves,” Eve said with a wicked smile.

  “And that’s fine—if she starts it,” Ariadne said, turning to look at Eve. I couldn’t see her face, but her tone shifted. “The last thing we need is a civilian casualty for some poor British nanny who picked the wrong t
ime and place to get her passport done before she took her dream vacation to see the Mall of America.”

  “Wrong season to visit,” Eve said, “Christmas shoppers and all that vileness. Horrible idea.”

  “We will take all precautions not to harm her in any way,” Bastian said, ending any debate. “Eve will be at the fore; her nets are second to none for non-lethal containment. Sienna and Reed will follow up, being effective in-fighters, and Clary and Parks will keep overwatch.” He looked around at each of us until he saw the nod. “With your permission, ma’am?” He looked to Ariadne, who gave him the subtle nod of approval, and with that he opened the door and walked out first.

  “So, yeah,” J.J. said as Parks left next, “go get ‘em, guys.” He looked at me and his cheeks burned crimson. “And girls.” He turned and caught an icy glare from Eve (which was probably just her normal expression). “And women.” He nodded his head, bobbing it like a jack-in-the-box. “Yeah.”

  I filed past J.J. Clary didn’t even try to rush ahead of me like he normally did, for which I...didn’t care, for once. Reed trailed behind me, then spoke as we walked through the cubicle rows. “Good play, you think?”

  “Going on the offensive against an Omega agent?” I asked. “Yeah. Leaving the campus stripped of its best guardians? Not so much.”

  “Scott and Kat are still here,” Reed said.

  “One’s got a hole in her memory the size of the loop on the rollercoaster at Valley Fair and the other is broken into more pieces than that porcelain angel of Ariadne’s that Eve stuck under Clary’s ass at the Halloween party as a joke.” I shook my head. “We just need to hurry, that’s all.”

  “You think they’re coming here?” Reed said, and for once he was hard to read.

  “I think they’re coming for Old Man Winter,” I said. “Take him out, you think the Directorate keeps rolling along?”

  “Ariadne can keep it going,” Reed said. “Why are you worried about this now? He’s been around for a good long while, a few millennia. You think he can’t take care of himself?”

  “No,” I said quietly. “I know he can’t. He’s worried about it, thinks he’s at the top of Omega’s target list. He’s pushing me to step up because...it’s like he can feel the axe descending, like he can feel its shadow on the back of his neck. I’ve never seen him like he is now, and I’ve known him for almost a year now.”

  “That’s not a very long time to know somebody.” Reed kept impassive, casual. “That’s about how long you’ve known me, after all, and I’m way more of an open book than Winter.”

  “We’ve had long conversations because we’re related,” I said, shooting him a half-assed sneer. “Because I wanted to know about our father, and what he was like, and all the things I missed with him being, you know—dead for my entire life. I’ve worked with Old Man Winter, though, and you get kind of a bead on him after a while. There’s emotion under the surface, and for the first time, I’m seeing worry. He knows bad things are coming, even though he doesn’t know exactly what all they are. There are things going on in the meta world that too many people have been warning us about, things we need to take seriously.”

  “I wonder about that sometimes,” Reed said as we walked across the lobby, Parks and Bastian in front of us and Kappler and Clary about twenty paces behind. “Your mom told you something big was coming, and then Zollers said basically the same thing.

  Now, it’s true Zollers was a psychic—”

  “Telepath,” I corrected gently.

  “Right, a mind reader,” Reed said, “so maybe he just fed back to you what your mom said just to mess with you?”

  I felt a certain clenching pain in my jaw at the memory of my last conversation with Dr. Zollers. He hadn’t just told me that a storm was coming to the world of metas; he’d specifically warned me that no one was looking out for me, which seemed blatantly untrue. If he’d lied about one... “Maybe. Let’s put it this way—I wouldn’t mind being a telepath myself and being able to dig into Zollers mind to see what was real and what wasn’t, because,” I blanched as the breath of the cold outside air hit me in the face while Reed held the door open for me and I transitioned to the outside, “he deceived me for six months when he was playing my psychiatrist, so it’s kinda hard to tell if he might have slipped a truth in there somewhere.”

  Reed nodded, and didn’t say anything else. We reached the garage and loaded into one of the smaller white utility vans in silence, almost exactly like the one we’d taken down to Iowa.

  “No visible powers in the hotel,” Bastian said. “The last thing we need is attention on this run. No guns unless the situation gets dire.” Bastian’s inflection became slightly accented. “If you hear gunfire, you are weapons-free at that point, but keep the bullets contained. No civilian casualties, verdad?”

  “Righto,” I heard Clary say quietly, buried under the verbal affirmations of everyone else on the team.

  The ride to Bloomington went quickly; the traffic was minimal at this time of day, and the freeways were clear as we cruised past tall glass buildings and retail spaces. We took an exit a mile from the Mall of America and got off on a frontage road that cut into a parking lot surrounded by small shrubbery and next to a vacant lot. The van doors swung wide and we deployed out the back, probably not looking terribly inconspicuous as we filed toward the hotel entrance. The building was tall, at least fifteen stories, boxy, square with cream-peach coloring that looked vaguely like stucco. The windows separated out every few feet with ornate shutters that added to the effect of making it look like a throwback, or something that might fit better in Italy than in Bloomington, Minnesota.

  The lobby doors swung wide, and Clary held one open for me without meeting my eyes. I tried to ignore this, but good manners got the better of me. “Thank you,” I said as I passed, and he nodded without looking up.

  Eve and Bastian led the way, Parks and Clary trailing behind. There was an open staircase in the corner of the building, and the setup was exactly as J.J. had mentioned. An enormous courtyard lay in the middle of the hotel, the front lobby on one side, kiosks for coffee and muffins and such were scattered around the center of the building. Fifteen floors above us, an enormous skylight ran the length and breadth of the roof, shining daylight down on us through translucent glass that, just for a flash, reminded me of how mother had painted the basement windows in our house.

  “Break formation,” Bastian said so quietly that no one but a meta would have been able to hear him. “Sienna and Reed, take the far stairwell, Clary and Parks, keep overwatch down here after you tell management what’s about to go down. Parks, you do the talking. Clary,” Bastian’s voice got tight, “don’t say a word while he’s talking to them.”

  “And as for exit?” Eve said under her breath.

  “We have an escape route,” Bastian said, slowing his pace for just a tick. “Hold up our FBI IDs and walk her out the front.”

  “This is not gonna be subtle,” Parks said in a gravelly whisper.

  “More subtle than having Eve fly her out a window,” Bastian replied. “Let’s go.”

  Reed and I split from them, Clary and Parks making their way to the front desk while Eve and Bastian made for the nearest staircase. I cut across the courtyard, making my way toward open-air stairs built into the far corner.

  “Couldn’t he have assigned us the elevator?” Reed asked.

  “Precautionary,” I said. “What if today is the day the elevator breaks down while we’re in it? Control is the name of the game, and you want to retain all the control over the situation you can at a moment like this, even if it’s avoiding an astronomically small risk like elevator failure.”

  “What about spraining an ankle taking eleven flights of stairs?” Reed asked with a smile. “What’s the risk on that?”

  “You know, that’s probably not a bad point
, if you were a clutz. We’re metas. We make Olympic gymnasts look clumsy by comparison.”

  We took a couple rounds of stairs without speaking. Reed broke the silence. “How come I’ve never seen Bastian use his power?”

  “You see him use his meta strength,” I said, trying to outpace my brother but not make it look like I was.

  “Yeah, I didn’t mean the passive powers,” Reed said, “I meant his main one. I don’t even know what he is.”

  “He doesn’t use it at all, that I’ve seen.” I let my hand ride the rail as we made our way up, enjoying the tactile feeling of support and the gentle slap of the leather on the metal to coincide with each step. “I’ve heard the whispers though, that he’s a Quetzalcoatl-type, whatever that is.”

  “Oh,” Reed said. “Well, that would explain it.”

  “Why?” I asked. “I mean, the rumors don’t exactly cover that, since I don’t think anyone’s ever seen it.”

  “You know who Quetzalcoatl was?”

  “Sure,” I said, “the feathered serpent. Mesoamerican god.”

  “Right,” Reed said. “Walk among the beasts of the ground, fly among the birds of the air. He can transform.”

  “Kinda like Parks and his animal forms?”

  “No,” Reed said with a smile. “I’ve seen pictures. Think demon-from-hell type stuff. The Mesoamericans who named them feathered serpents might have a talent for understatement.”