Omega: The Girl in the Box, Book 5

by Crane, Robert J.

  He waited, listening, though he wanted more than anything to interrupt, to assure the man on the other end of the line that, in fact, he was wrong, but one simply did not do that to one’s boss, not in Omega. The fastest way to the gallows, he thought, and listened to the prattle, waiting for his opportunity to talk. “Yes,” he said at last, when the rhetorical question was asked, “but this is simply a choice. I know you had high hopes that they would step aside after we wiped out their human agents.” He let a smile split his lips. “No, you know I didn’t agree with that operation, and clearly it did not bear the fruit that your advisors told you it would. Because they do not know Erich Winter, his stubborn resolution.”

  There was a pause in the conversation. “Erich Winter lives up to his name. His coldly analytical nature, his refusal to budge, like a frosted hinge...you were never going to receive the results you were looking for by simply doing things the way they told you to. Anyone who was close to the situation would have said so...and this is the problem with your advisors...they are too young, too unfamiliar with the old ways to deal with the old ones, who are more myth and legend to them than real.”

  There was a flat pause and the old man looked up at the greying sky, at the impending approach of winter itself, of the trees, now nearly naked on either side of the boulevard he was driving on. “Stanchion is mine, my operation. I will show you. Tomorrow, we move. Tomorrow, everything falls into place. I will call you after it is done, and we will talk. I will fix this intractable mess that your young minds have created for you.

  “And after that, Erich Winter will no longer be a problem.”

  16.

  Sienna

  “So this is Eleanor Madigan,” Old Man Winter said in a low, rumbling tone, the glass between her in the interrogation room and the eight of us watching feeling far too thin for a woman who could cast lightning. She sat on a metal chair, her legs and those of the chair resting in a children’s wading pool filled halfway with water.

  “I wouldn’t advise using ice on her.” I said, “I don’t think it would end well for you, more like an AC/DC song.”

  “AC/DC?” Reed asked, turning to me.

  “Thunderstruck,” Clary said, mumbling. “Good one, Sienna.”

  “Her talents do not concern me,” Old Man Winter said. “Keeping her in a pool of water should nullify her powers.”

  “Is that an old trick for dealing with Thor-types, sir?” Bastian asked.

  “No,” Old Man Winter replied, a glint of amusement in his eyes. “I saw it on an episode of Heroes.” There was a pause, as though someone had thrown a grenade in the middle of us and we were all waiting for it to explode.

  “Oh, wow,” I said into the tension. “Was that a joke?”

  Old Man Winter’s voice scratched as he replied. “Yes. Do none of you recognize one when you hear it?”

  I looked around; taking the temperature of the room, I felt one thing and one thing only—discomfort. “From you, no.”

  “What’s to stop her from turning the chair over?” Bastian asked.

  “Clary will assist in the interrogation,” Old Man Winter said; whether he was ignoring Bastian or simply felt that was answer enough was anyone’s guess. “While he and I are speaking with Madigan, Parks and Bastian will again have a conversation with Bjorn, and Sienna and Eve will speak to Fries.” Old Man Winter turned from facing Madigan to look at all of us, a wintery glow of blue in his frosty eyes. “They will be moving soon. I will have names. I will have times, locations...whatever they know, I want it.”

  “Did Bjorn talk?” I asked as Old Man Winter began to turn away. “After you broke his arm off, and whatever else you did to him?”

  There was a pause, and I got the sense everyone else was waiting, the same as I was, to see if he answered. “No,” he said finally. “But that does not mean he will not say more now.” He walked out the door, Clary at his heels, and a moment later we saw him enter the chamber that held Madigan.

  “He thinks the clock is winding down,” Ariadne said after Old Man Winter had begun to speak to Eleanor. “He thinks they’ll be getting cocky now, that some unstoppable hammerblow is about to rain down on our heads.”

  “We’ve captured three of them now,” Eve said, a certain lazy, I-don’t-care-ness to her tone. “You’d think they’d be losing some of that arrogance.”

  I thought for a moment about Eleanor, when we were talking during the fight in the hotel. “Hmm,” I said aloud, drawing Reed’s eye, and then Ariadne’s.

  “What?” Ariadne asked.

  “When I fought Eleanor,” I said, “she didn’t seem all that concerned about being blindsided by four Directorate agents. She even sat there and monologued until I attacked her. That’s either some deep arrogance or—”

  “Or they’re playing at something else, something that would instill a serious overconfidence,” Reed said. A beep came from his pocket and he pulled his cell phone, looking at the screen. “‘Call home.’ Be back in a few.” He made a move toward the exit and disappeared into the hall.

  I watched as Old Man Winter asked Eleanor why she was in Minnesota. The English woman did not answer, did not even deign to acknowledge him, and I watched him gesture for Clary. Clary’s skin turned black as rubber, and he stepped into the wading pool and positioned himself behind her, his wrist across her neck, holding her face in place and forcing her to look up at Old Man Winter.

  “Enough of these childish games,” Eve said, tapping me on the shoulder. “Let us speak with your incubus.”

  “Excuse me?” I said icily. “He’s not ‘mine’.”

  Eve rolled her eyes to the side, as though annoyed at my daring to speak back to her. “Let us speak with this little man whom you almost let into your scheide and drag the truth from his lips, all right?”

  “Well, when you put it that way...”

  As we left, Ariadne was activating the monitor for Fries’ chamber. Bastian and Parks followed a few paces behind us, entering the room across the hall from Ariadne’s. As near as I could tell, Ariadne was going to be watching three interrogations at once, which I did not envy, especially considering the one involving Clary and Old Man Winter was fairly certain to degenerate into something I wouldn’t care to watch.

  The door slid open with Eve’s key card and we found Fries sitting at a table in the middle of the room. He went from sullen to all smiles, as cheerful a transformation as I’d ever seen a person make in two seconds.

  “Who just shot a ray of sunshine up your ass?” I asked as Eve slid into the chair across from him.

  “You are such a colorful person,” he said. “It makes me glad I didn’t kill you in Eagle River.”

  “Not for lack of trying.” I said, “The only reason you didn’t is because you got your ass kicked by girls. Twice.”

  “Yeah, well,” he shrugged. “One of them is dead, and the other might as well be. I’d tell you that your aunt is a real piece of work, but you already know that.” He laughed, an empty one. “She is seriously damaged goods.”

  “Said the black hole to the kettle.” I folded my arms. “Got anything to tell us, James? Because, otherwise, I’ve got better things to do, like filing my nails.”

  “You should try doing your hair,” he said with a nod that almost caused me to subconsciously reach up; I’d forgotten that Eleanor had run ten thousand volts through me. I probably looked like Lady Frankenstein.

  “Can I beat him unconscious now?” Eve asked me, ignoring Fries completely.

  “I have no objection.” I really didn’t.

  “Your hospitality is lacking around here,” Fries said as Eve stood and circled around the table toward him.

  “Gloves,” Eve said to me, and I puzzled at what she meant for a second before nodding, taking off my gloves, and placing them into her outstretched hand. She slid t
hem on, one by one, and I heard the sound of leather stretching. “You have small, girlish hands,” she said, but I didn’t really hear any judgment in the way she said it.

  “Isn’t that the way you like them?” Fries asked, smiling sweetly at Eve.

  “It is,” she said, smiling back, from just over him. “It really is.” The first punch didn’t so much knock him over as flatten him like a wrecking ball hitting a small building. His chair skittered across the floor and hit the wall, making a gawdawful racket. Fries hit the ground sideways, head bouncing of the tile floor with a terrible crack, his hands still cuffed behind him.

  “Oh my,” Fries said, his head turning as though he were woozy. “I shouldn’t be surprised you’re a man-hater, really.”

  Eve knelt down and got astride him, balancing on one knee, cracking her knuckles. “It isn’t that I hate men. I work with some very decent ones.” She pulled back her fingers, exposing her leather-covered palm, and then reformed her fist and smashed Fries in the side of the head with it, rattling his head against the floor again. “Bastian, Parks, even Old Man Winter. Decent sorts. Clary...has some rough edges.” She hit him again, and I watched him spit out blood. “You, on the other hand, I find no redeeming value in.” She pulled back her fist into a palmhand and ran it into his nose, causing it to break. Blood dripped down the sides of his face and, I presume, into the back of his throat, because he started to gag.

  “You,” she said, rolling him over and placing her weight on his back, “are the worst sort. I know of you, James Fries, and I know what you do to women. How many bodies have you left in dumpsters in the last year? In your lifetime?” She took his face and rammed it into the cold, black floor tiles. “I’ve been begging Ariadne for months to let me have a shot at you—just one shot, as a personal chance to thank you for how you treat women. It sets me—how do you say?—on edge?”

  Fries took a moment to answer, his eyes rolling in and out of focus. He smiled, a terrible, bloody smile. “Yeah. On edge. And I’ve left some bodies by the wayside, it’s true. In alleys, in dumpsters. Tons of them.” She snapped him hard in the nose and he gagged, making a glottal-stop noise as he spit blood out. “You gonna beat me to death for them? You didn’t even know them.”

  “I bet,” Eve said, wearing the thinnest, most lethal smile, “if I told you that I would kill you if you didn’t correctly write down the names of the last five girls you slept with, you’d not only die, you wouldn’t remember a single one of them.”

  Fries smiled again, and I could see the bloody lines tracing between his teeth. “You got me there. I don’t even remember one of them. Sandy, maybe? Cindy? Ah, who cares.”

  Eve nodded slightly, her face tight, then she unloaded another three punches on his face in rapid succession. “You’re going to choke on your own blood,” she said, turning his head to the side to let him gag it out onto the floor, a slow, steady red spill of liquid rolling its way across the black tile, an ocean of death washing toward me.

  I watched, paralyzed, not sure what to say, not sure if I should stop her. My head spun, I felt a pounding sense of guilt, even though it was Fries—the worm—and a murderer of women, and nearly of me. Part of me raged internally and called myself too stupid to live for any remorse I might feel; the other part tried to play up my guilt for not stopping Eve, just as I hadn’t stopped Old Man Winter.

  “If I tell you something, will you stop beating the hell outta me?” Fries said, causing my head to snap up. His teeth were broken now, and Eve had another fist cocked and ready to unload on him.

  “Trying to save your own life now?” Eve asked, and hit him again, snapping his head back. “I think your pleading may be falling on the deafest ears you could have found in the Directorate, Fries.” She hit him again, and I saw his eyes unfocus, one of them starting to swell shut, the purpling on his cheek obvious and growing.

  “Wait,” I said, only just louder than a whisper, but enough for Eve to hear me and halt before her next punch. “What do you think you could say that would convince Eve to stop?” I asked, and Fries turned his head, letting his neck hang slack, looking at me out of his one good eye.

  “I’ll tell you...” His words came out slurred, his lip split open and bleeding down his neck, “who’s running...Operation Stanchion.”

  “You’ll tell us who’s running it,” I said, taking the two steps to carry me to Fries’ side, and kneeling to get closer to him, “and what it’s all about, what’s happening.”

  “Don’t know...what’s happening,” Fries said, his head lolling. “Don’t even know the objective...they...thought I was a high risk for Directorate capture so they didn’t...tell me.” His pupil was dilated, he was concussed, and he sounded like he was drunk.

  “Give me a name,” Eve said, readying her fist. “Give me a name, or so help me, my next punch will sever your serial killing head and end your little perverted reign of impotence forever.”

  Fries’ once-handsome face was twisted, an eye already swollen shut. The strong smell of iron filled the air, and he seemed to have no strength in his neck. Eve had him suspended by the front of his shirt, which she had torn while pounding him into hamburger. He was missing at least eight teeth by my count, and his lips were split in three places, his face swelling so rapidly it looked like he had fallen into a bees’ nest. “Okay,” he said, now barely audible. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you. I just saw him the other day...Janus. It’s Janus. Janus is running Operation Stanchion.”

  17.

  “Who the hell is Janice?” Bastian asked as Eve and I re-entered the observation room to find him waiting with Ariadne and Parks.

  “Janus,” I said, drawing every eye in the room to me. “Roman god of doorways and transitions. Had two faces, supposedly. Not really sure how that would translate in non-mythological terms.”

  “He is a liar,” Old Man Winter said, squeezing into the room behind us, Clary following him, “so the colloquialism fits for him being two-faced.”

  “Did no one else manage to return any further information?” Eve asked, slipping off my gloves and handing them casually back to me. They were slick with blood, and I held them at a distance from my body, as though I were too good for them.

  “No one got quite as...persuasive,” Ariadne said, “as you did. At least not for as long, or as close to the...uh...edge.”

  “No one else came as close to beating their subject to death is what she means,” Parks said with more than a little acrimony.

  “My only regret was that I didn’t finish,” Eve said. “He’s slime. He rapes women and kills them with his power, and finishes with their corpses. I bet he couldn’t even get it up if a woman wasn’t screaming in pain for him. I have never encountered a more loathsome creature in my life, and I wish I could beat him to death over and over.”

  “This is to the damned edge of the line, Director,” Parks said in a low growl that reminded me of the wolf within him. “We don’t do this sort of thing, sir. Beating people in interrogations? Freezing someone’s arm and breaking it off?” He drew himself up. “We’re better than that.”

  “Not the biggest fan of these aggressive tactics myself, sir,” Bastian said. “We let ‘em stew, we break ‘em traditionally, without laying a finger on them. Not one of them is tough enough to take the isolation forever.”

  “We do not have forever,” Old Man Winter said. “We may not even have a day. Omega is coming, make no mistake. They have marked us as a threat, they desire to eliminate us, and they are operating on a timetable so aggressive we are left with few options.” He ran a cold, surveying set of eyes over us, not flinching away from looking anyone in the eyes. I blinked away from his first, though. “This is certain: the damage could be greater than anyone of us can calculate.”

  “Should we evacuate the campus, sir?” Bastian said, cutting through the air that had suddenly gotten thick in the
room. “Get the younger metas out of here, maybe give the admin staff some time off and keep a skeleton crew here for the next couple weeks while we wait for the anvil to drop?”

  “Who knows how long it could be?” Ariadne said. “I mean, the Director says soon,” she favored him with a submissive nod, “but they’ve known where we are—where Sienna is—for quite some time. They could have moved against us at any point. It could be tomorrow, it could be the day after, it could be six months from now. Just because they’re putting their people into the country doesn’t mean it’s happening now. For all we know, we just took out their entire strike force.”

  “You didn’t,” came Reed’s voice from behind Old Man Winter. He shouldered his way into the room. “It’s coming, soon. Like...next week or sooner.” He looked around at each of us, his long, dark hair disheveled from the wind outside. “My bosses say they’re just ratcheting it down right now, dragging the last few pieces into place.”

  There was a stark silence, one that I finally broke. “Oh, good. Because I hate a long wait before I die.”

  Reed shook his head. “They don’t want you dead. Anything but is the word. They want you alive, just like always.”

  I let a little scratchiness enter my voice, probably from the fatigue and the fact my head was whirling. “Do your bosses know why Omega is so keen on having me alive that they’d start a war with the Directorate?” I caught a flash from Old Man Winter’s eyes as I asked, something that was both subtle and yet obvious; no one else reacted to my question but to turn to Reed to listen for his answer.

  “If they do, they’re not sharing,” he said, “but they barely tell me a fraction of what they know over open lines. I only got this much out of them before they dropped a hammer of their own on me.”