Omega: The Girl in the Box, Book 5

by Crane, Robert J.

  I stared at the chair for a beat before turning back to look at him again, his dark hair, overlarge glasses; he looked as though he were trying devilishly hard to be the biggest geek possible. “Do I mind if you...what? Take that chair, turn it upside down and sit on it? Be my guest, but do it elsewhere.” I smiled and took a bite of my eggs.

  “Wow,” he said, and his face didn’t fall from my insult, not even a little bit. “I guess it’s true what they say about you?”

  “Oh, yeah?” I asked, and turned my head to look down at my food. “What do they say about me? Am I a ball buster? A pain in the ass? A personality wrapped in barbed wire and coated in rubbing alcohol?” I looked back up at him and smiled. “If that’s what they say, then yeah, it’s true. I’m not the greatest people person you’ll ever meet.”

  He squinted a little bit through his glasses, adjusting them to look at me. “That’s the gist, I guess. Some less flattering, more succinct ways it’s put, but you captured the common theme there.”

  “You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know,” I said, and took a bite of my bacon.

  He faltered, as though he was going to walk away, but he didn’t. “But you’ve got friends. You’ve got people who seem to enjoy your presence, so I’m guessing you’re not like that all the time, at least not with everybody. I don’t see you act like that with your boyfriend.”

  “You’re rapidly entering the territory of being a creepo,” I said, looking up, taking my coffee and sipping it while I watched him through half-closed eyes. “Why are you watching me?”

  “I’m not stalking you or anything,” he said, unabashed. I was a little put off by his self-assurance; it was annoying. “We eat in the same place every day, so it’s not like it takes a special effort on my part to look across the cafeteria and notice the difference between how you are when your friends are around, and how you are when I run into you elsewhere on campus.” He laughed, mirthless. “I saw you stomp your foot and make a move toward a lower classman a few weeks ago. We all laughed at him, because he almost soiled his pants. People are scared of you, and you want ‘em to be scared. Why?”

  “Maybe I had a rough childhood,” I said, not really believing that was an excuse, but wishing he’d take it and leave me the hell alone.

  “Maybe a lot of people did,” he said, not moving.

  “True,” I said, “but I’m not in charge of their lives.”

  “Do you...” He paused. “Do you really just want to be left alone?”

  “Right now? Yes.” I sipped my coffee.

  “I see.” A nod of the head. “Is it because you genuinely always want to be alone, or is it because I’m asking you questions that are making you really uncomfortable?”

  I sighed and set my coffee down. My appetite was dwindling from annoyance. “Are you some kind of shrink in training? Did Dr. Zollers have a powerful influence on you before he left? Give you direction for your life? Or are you just incredibly nosy and personally grating?”

  “I’m just curious about you,” he said, and didn’t even bother to blush. “Is that wrong? I watch you, I think you’re pretty, the other guys think you’re pretty, but everyone but the upper echelon is scared to death of you—all the underclassmen, hell, even the cafeteria workers.” He waved a hand around. “And you don’t seem to give a damn about your bad reputation.”

  “What can I say? I was inspired by Joan Jett.”

  “Why?” He looked at me, and I caught a hint of something in his eyes, some undying curiosity, and in his mousy face there was something else, something unplaceable and yet familiar. And oddly cute, in a deeply annoying way. “Why are you trying so hard to keep everyone at a distance? You’re the leader of the second generation M-Squad...you’re looked up to and feared by every one of the kids at school here. Why don’t you care? Why do you want everyone at arms length?”

  “Listen, kid...” I put aside my annoyance. “What’s your name?”

  He looked around, as if afraid someone would hear him. “Joshua. Josh. Harding.”

  “Nice,” I said. “Listen, Josh, Joshua, Mr. Harding, whatever. I’m a prickly person, okay? I’ve had a few...shall we say...incidents here at the Directorate, some things that might have turned a few people against me. Now, maybe I reacted poorly to those setbacks, maybe I could have used more social skills to smooth things over. But no, I went in a different direction and embraced it. I’ve got a circle of friends, people I trust. There’s only enough room for a few on that ship at any point in time. Understand...it’s nothing personal. Forgive me for my limitations, and I’ll forgive you for imposing on my personal time and space.”

  He looked at me, then surveyed the area around us. “Personal space? I’m like ten feet away from you.”

  “To a succubus,” I said, taking another slow, casual sip of my coffee, “that’s like an inch. I could take your soul from here.”

  He cracked a smile. “Now you’re just lying. You have to touch a person to use your power.”

  “Damn. And I was hoping the rumor mill would spread one about me that I could take souls with a look. It’d keep people out of my way.”

  He shrugged. “You really want people out of your way bad enough that you’re okay with them thinking things that aren’t true about you?”

  I felt my coffee grow cold in front of me, and I struggled to fake a smile. “Look, I’m a soul-taker...being a succubus is kind of a metaphor for my personality, too. It makes my life easier, having everyone think I’m a badass who just doesn’t care.”

  “Huh,” he said, and he didn’t really let off with the eye contact, which was annoying in a vaguely Old-Man-Winter-Jr. sort of way, “I just thought it made you kind of lonely. But hey,” he said, and smiled under the glasses and bushy hair, “I get it. Your boat is full. I’ll leave you alone. But...” he smiled. “If you ever maybe get a space open on that limited engagement boat of yours...I might know someone that would clamor to get on it.”

  “Purely out of concern for my loneliness and well-being, I’m sure.”

  “Hell, no,” he said. “I kinda got a crush on you. Are you blind or something?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Kid, my touch kills people. I’ve been trying politely to tell you to ‘spin off’ this whole time—”

  “That was ‘politely’? You need to read How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

  “I’ve never read that one. But I have seen the movie Die Hard a good dozen times,” I said with a little sarcasm, “and it strikes me that it might be more useful in my line of work.” I waved my hand for him to scram. “I appreciate your well meaning attempts to ingratiate yourself with me, but people who get close to me do so at their own risk. And, as mentioned, I do have a boyfriend. And he is...considerably older than you. No offense. So...yeah.” I smiled at him. “Thank you, Josh Harding.”

  He shrugged like he didn’t care. “Don’t be a stranger, Sienna Nealon.” He walked away, and disappeared out the doors of the cafeteria. I hadn’t met a lot of adults who carried themselves with his level of swagger, let alone seen it in someone younger than myself.

  I finished my coffee in two swallows and made my way out of the cafeteria a few minutes later, tracing a path across the grounds, ignoring the blustery wind that fought me the whole way. I entered the lobby of the headquarters building to find it quiet, the usual hum of workers absent. I stood by the elevator bank alone, and rode up in the car by myself. When the doors opened on the cubicle farm on the fourth floor, I saw no one; I half expected a lone tumbleweed to blow by as I stepped out. The overhead fluorescent lights weren’t even on.

  I walked to Ariadne’s office, where the door stood open. I saw Ariadne through the viewing window, Eve standing just behind her, Kappler’s hands on her shoulders in a familiar way, pushing aside Ariadne’s red hair. Eve massaged her neck while Ariadne worked
on the computer, her reading glasses perched on her nose.

  “Hey, Sienna,” I heard a voice call from behind me. I turned to see J.J. cutting through the main aisle of cubicles, heading toward me.

  “J.J.,” I said calmly. “What, are you too important to be allowed some shore leave?”

  “Yeah. This is the problem with being the linchpin of the Directorate’s electronic intelligence efforts...no time off.”

  “At least you’re fully appreciated for your efforts,” I said, trying to reassure him.

  “I think I’d rather have the time off.”

  I shrugged. “Going to Ariadne’s office?”

  “I am. I have news,” he said, nodding his head, but keeping an even keel, detached under those damned hipster glasses.

  “Of the life-shaking and earth-quaking variety or just run-of-the-mill?”

  “Maybe somewhere in between?” He held up his hands, either unknowing or uncaring, as we reached Ariadne’s office and he rapped his knuckles against the doorframe, causing Ariadne to jump in surprise and knock Eve’s hands off her shoulders.

  “What can I do for you two?” Ariadne said, trying to casually shuffle papers on her desk, as though she needed some sort of cover for Eve giving her a shoulder rub. J.J. and I exchanged a look, mostly amused, while Eve seemed to glow with a sort of annoying superiority.

  “He’s here with news of some variety,” I said. “I’m just here because I’m wandering aimlessly, not really sure what to do with myself while everyone else is battening down the hatches.”

  “Oh?” She looked at me over her reading glasses. “You seem much more relaxed than yesterday. Different, somehow.”

  I stiffened. “Um. No. Same me.”

  “You sure?” She cocked her head at me, peering at me, squinting her eyes. “You seem different.”

  “Nope.” I shook my head. Gulp.

  She shook her head as though trying to clear it. “Okay. J.J.?”

  “Got some minor discrepancies I found here,” he said, holding up his tablet computer.

  “With the passports?” I asked, before Ariadne could.

  “Yeah,” he said with a downer tone and looking at the tablet. “We tracked the three coming in, but there’s not really been any movement on the others in that batch from the UK. A few of them look like they’ve been used in the last six months, but not anywhere local. One in Mombasa two weeks ago, one in Kolkata three months ago, another in Shenzen about nine months ago...” He shrugged. “No pattern I can detect.”

  “Shenzen is in China, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” J.J. said, looking up from the tablet. “Just across the harbor from Hong Kong, I think.”

  “So it’s in China, nine months ago,” I said. “Wasn’t that when...?”

  “When the compound, the meta compound—” Ariadne spoke up, “the one that was run by their government, got destroyed.”

  “Right,” I said. “And Kolkata—err...sorry, the books I’ve read call it Calcutta—”

  “And what fine ethnocentric volumes they must be,” J.J. said.

  “Wasn’t India, three months ago, the site of another massacre?” I watched Eve turn to stone as Ariadne looked thoughtful. “Another few hundred metas killed?”

  “Yeah,” J.J. murmured. “Hm. Weird pattern, then, huh? You think Omega had anything to do with...?”

  “The Director says that extermination is not their game,” Ariadne said, a pen in her mouth.

  “So why else would they be there at those times?” I asked. “Coincidence?”

  “Weird coincidence,” J.J. said. “Timing is kinda off, since they don’t have anyone there any other times, just during the approximate time when the massacres occurred.”

  “It could have been an investigator,” I said, wondering why I was defending Omega. “They could have been checking things out.”

  “And I could have been born in Louisville, Kentucky, but strangely enough, I was born in Stuttgart.” Eve was all sarcasm. “If it seems unlikely, it probably is.”

  “Let me see the passport photos,” I said to J.J. and he held up his tablet, revealing a face of an older man, in his sixties, grey-haired and with steel-rimmed glasses. He wore the look of a caring grandfather like an old blanket over the shoulders of a bum. “Janos Dichtmann.” I looked up at Ariadne and Eve. “Janos sounds awfully close to Janus.”

  “You think someone decided to get cute with the passport office?” Ariadne looked at me. “Kind of an on-the-nose thing to do, don’t you think?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “But that doesn’t make it any less likely to be accurate.”

  “If true,” Eve said, “and this is the Janus we’ve been told about, then he’s either not in the country or traveling under a different passport batch—since you said this passport hasn’t been cleared through U.S. customs?”

  “No,” J.J. said, flipping back to the data. “This one went to Shenzen, and that’s it. I don’t even see a return trip, so theoretically he’s still in China.”

  “I don’t take that as a positive sign, since he would have been there for about nine months now,” Ariadne said. “I think we can assume that he’s probably using multiple identities and has at least made it back to the UK by now, if that is in fact where their home base is.”

  “Which means that your theory of tracking passports is not going to give us a complete picture,” I said.

  J.J. froze, as though he were running the calculation in his head. “Okay, wait, I got it. We have facial recognition software, right? I’ll run it like this—everyone who’s gone through customs in the last twenty-four hours, then work backward to a week, then a month, looking for a match to this face.” He held up Janos Dichtmann’s passport photo. “If I can establish a match, then I’ve got his current passport, and can trace that; they may have gotten sloppy and done another batch, in which case we’ve got him, you know?”

  “You think they’ll have done batches like this more than once?” Ariadne asked, skeptical.

  “This isn’t the sort of thing most people are going to pick up on,” J.J. said. “The Department of Homeland Security doesn’t even have the resources to come up with this unless they knew specifically what they were looking for, and this is...it’s too good. These are legit passports, and they’ve probably got legit I.D. to go along with them. They’ve got people in the UK government getting them into the system the same way we have access to the U.S. systems, and because of it, they’re invisible to anyone who’s not looking specifically for them.”

  “Which is pretty much us and no one else,” I said, feeling glum again.

  “To work, J.J.,” Ariadne said with about as much enthusiasm as I had for it. “How long will this take?”

  “Depends on how long he’s been in the country,” J.J. said. “If he’s entered in the last twenty-four hours, it’ll be fast. If he’s been in the country a week or less, I can have this done in a couple hours. Two weeks will take the rest of the day. Longer than a month...” He cringed. “Could be a while.”

  Ariadne waved her hand. “Get to it.” She hesitated. “Can you set it to run and do your work from off-site?”

  “Yes ma’am,” he said, nodding. “Our servers are pretty much set up for me to do just that, so I can push data wherever it needs to be. I usually use it to work late from the computer in my apartment. Why?”

  “Because I want you to do this from the computer in your apartment,” Ariadne said, taking off her reading glasses. “Can you do that?”

  “Yessum,” he said, mostly serious. “And you want me back here when?”

  “I’ll let you know,” she said.

  “Shore leave approved,” he whispered to me, then turned and vanished out the door. I watched him go and I didn’t feel bad about it at all. The campus was no plac
e for humans right now. I felt the tension in my stomach pick up as I pondered that.

  Ariadne leaned back in her chair, studiously ignoring Eve, and then looked back to me. “I’m glad you’re here. I had something to tell you, anyway.”

  “Oh?” I said with exaggerated brightness. “You’re approving my vacation to Bora Bora, all expenses paid?”

  “Hah,” she said with no mirth, head resting on the back of her chair as she tossed her glasses onto her desk. “I’d pay for your trip myself right now if I thought you’d go to Bora Bora. No, I wanted you to know I had Scott Byerly sent home.”

  I felt a tingle of loss I couldn’t define. “Yeah, I know. I caught him on his way out.”

  “Wait, you let the waterboy leave?” Eve looked down at her. “Why?”

  “Dr. Perugini said he couldn’t form enough water pressure to wet an envelope,” Ariadne said. “He’s emotionally distressed and completely wrecked at present. Per her recommendation, he is to take two weeks of emotional leave.”

  “For a breakup?” Eve said with obvious disdain. “If only my employers had been so generous with paid time off every time I had a difficult relationship.”

  “If only,” Ariadne said. “He’ll be out until further notice. He’s back to his parents’ house in Minnetonka. And you,” she said, looking to Eve, “could show a little sensitivity to his plight.”

  Eve snorted. “Teenage romance and heartbreak. He has the emotions of a baby. He doesn’t know heartbreak, and even if he did, a real man would continue to work, ignoring the pain. This is courting weakness, inviting it into your sitting room and giving it tea—”

  “Noted,” Ariadne said, cutting Eve off. “But he still has the time off.”

  “He’s useless to us right now,” I said. “Better to get him out of the way.”

  Ariadne smiled weakly. “That was the idea.”