X-Men; X-Men 2

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “I get the job done, that’s true. I’ve followed your career with interest for years, Bobby. As I recall, you were a staunch supporter of the registration act. I must confess though, your ideas on the mutant problem appear to have . . . changed recently.”

  “For the best, I trust.”

  “Myself, I trust in God.”

  “Since Senator Kelly has been at the forefront of both sides of this issue,” the President interjected, “I thought his perspective would be worthwhile.”

  “You’re the commander in chief, sir,” Stryker said.

  “So, what are you proposing, Mr. Stryker?” Kelly asked directly.

  Stryker didn’t answer at first. His pause, and the look he gave the President, made plain that he considered this a need-to-know matter and that Robert Kelly wasn’t on his personal list. The President frankly didn’t care.

  “You spoke about a special operation, William,” prompted McKenna.

  With a curt nod, acknowledging and accepting the President’s authority even when he bitterly disagreed with it, Stryker opened his case and spread a set of glossy surveillance photos on the table, right at the end where the President could see them but Kelly could not.

  “Working with the National Reconnaissance Office, my people have gathered these surveillance photos of a mutant training facility near the town of Salem Center, in Westchester County, right by the Connecticut border.”

  “How did you develop the information?”

  “Discover the installation’s existence, you mean? Primarily through interrogation of one of the terrorist prisoners captured after the Liberty Island incident.”

  “Eric?” Kelly asked sharply. “Eric Lehnsherr?”

  “Code-named Magneto, yes,” Stryker replied.

  “You have access to him?”

  Intrigued by Kelly’s surge of interest, Stryker nodded. “My group developed the technology that built his plastic prison when, I might add, Mr. President, your defense department couldn’t find room for the allocation in their own budget.”

  “At the time,” the President said slowly, “the need didn’t seem pressing.”

  “Priorities, sir, I do understand. Threats are easily identifiable in hindsight. The challenge for a prudent and responsible leader is identifying clear and present dangers to the nation and dealing with them before there’s a disaster.”

  He indicated another set of photographs.

  “It appears,” he said, “I’m not the only one with access to the prisoner. This man”—he pointed to a bald-headed figure in a wheelchair—“we’ve identified as Charles Xavier. The leader of this training facility and a longtime associate of Mr. Lehnsherr. Apparently Xavier has . . . friends in the Justice Department. Since Lehnsherr’s incarceration, he’s paid several visits.”

  Kelly leaned forward for a closer look at the pictures. His tone and manner were discreetly skeptical.

  “What is this place?” he asked.

  “Ostensibly, a school,” responded Stryker with a humorless chuckle. “For ‘gifted’ youngsters.”

  He tossed a fresh set of photos on the table, for both men to see.

  “We retasked a keyhole spy satellite to get these,” he said. “I believe you’ll agree the results are worth the expense.”

  For pictures taken from two hundred fifty miles above Manhattan, with camera lenses powerful enough to read the lettering on a pack of cigarettes and enhancement technology that allowed them to work as effectively at night as during the day, the results were extraordinary, and devastating.

  “What’s that?” asked McKenna.

  “A jet.”

  McKenna gave him a sour look. “What kind of jet?”

  “We don’t know—but as you can see, it comes up out of the basketball court.”

  In a sequence of images, as the President passed the eight by ten sheets across to Kelly, they saw a court behind the main house slide apart to allow an elevator platform to rise to the surface from what had to be an underground hangar. The plane that was revealed was unlike anything the President had ever seen, twin engined and twin tailed with forward-swept wings. It rose into the air on vertical thrusters, shifted to horizontal flight, and was quickly gone from sight, as its flight path and the satellite’s orbital track took the vehicles in opposite directions.

  “I’ve talked to the Air Force,” Stryker said. “I’ve talked to DARPA”—the Defense Advanced Research and Planning Agency. “They don’t even have aircraft with capabilities like this on their drawing boards. And it clearly represents the ultimate in stealth technology as well. We examined every radar record we could find, civil and military, for the time and course indicated. Not a trace.”

  Stryker waved his arm to encompass the Oval Office, with a pointed look at one wall where the bullet holes from the attack hadn’t yet been patched.

  “You gentlemen ask yourselves: How could this have happened?” he snorted in disgust. “How could it not have?”

  Kelly held up another photo. “These are children.”

  “Being trained, being indoctrinated, for what purpose, Senator?” retorted Stryker. “How many miles of news footage are there from the Middle East, showing children dressed up as terrorists?”

  “These are American citizens, none of whom—that I’m aware of—have committed any crime.”

  Stryker turned to the President: “Sir, if we had been allowed to do our jobs before this attack—”

  “What would you need?” McKenna asked.

  “Just your authorization.”

  “To do what precisely?” Kelly demanded, because he knew the President would not.

  Again Stryker ignored him, concentrating solely on McKenna. “Don’t misunderstand my goals, Mr. President. I just want to go in there—to see precisely what they’re up to. If they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear.”

  “It’s illegal,” snapped Kelly.

  “Not if they’re terrorists,” replied Stryker calmly. “For over a year now, we’ve been tracking this mutant in particular. His origins are European, but we believe there is a possible affiliation with this institution.”

  He pulled a last photo from his case and held it out to the President.

  “This was taken three months ago,” Stryker finished, but there was no more need for him to make his case. The moment McKenna saw the picture, his decision was made.

  The figure in the picture was humanoid—that is, two arms, two legs, central trunk, bilateral symmetry. Two big digits on hands and feet, skin of indigo blue, hair a slight shade darker. Gleaming yellow eyes, fangs, pointed ears, and a long, pointed tail all combined to give him the look of a modish gargoyle come to life. He was snarling.

  He was the assassin who’d almost killed this President.

  “Listen to me, William,” said McKenna, in the same still tone of absolute command he used with the joint chiefs. “You enter. You detain. You question.” His voice took on a faint but unmistakable edge. “But the last thing I want to hear is that we’ve spilled the blood of an innocent child, mutant or otherwise. You understand?”

  “Absolutely, Mr. President,” Stryker replied.

  The meeting over, Stryker had already reached the hallway outside the President’s suite of offices by the time Kelly caught up with him. Repairs were much more evident here, as were armed guards.

  “You made a powerful argument, William,” he said.

  “The evidence made the case, Bobby.” Stryker indicated a lovely Asian woman who’d obviously been waiting for him. She wore a discreet but attractive business suit and carried herself in a way that made Kelly think, Bodyguard. She wore light sunglasses that allowed a view of her eyes but not of their color. “Please allow me to introduce Yuriko Oyama. She’s my director of . . . special projects.”

  They shook hands. But when Kelly relaxed his grip, she tightened hers, just for a moment, enough to mean business.

  Kelly obliged her with a wince, and once his hand was free he shook it a few times, wrigglin
g his fingers to make sure they still worked.

  “That’s quite a handshake,” he told her.

  As Stryker and his assistant started for the exit, Kelly matched their pace. After a couple of steps, Stryker—eager and determined to be rid of him—stopped and confronted the younger man.

  “What can I do for you, Senator?” he asked.

  “Eric Lehnsherr’s prison” was Kelly’s quick reply. “If possible, I’d like to arrange a visit.”

  Stryker snorted. “It isn’t a petting zoo, Senator. In this conflict, he’s the enemy. You’re just a spectator. Do us both a favor, and sit this one out, all right?”

  “Are you trying to turn this into some kind of war?”

  Outside the Oval Office, Stryker didn’t bother to hide his deep contempt. “Senator”—and the way he said it turned that title into a profound insult—“I was piloting black-ops missions into the jungles of North Vietnam while you were suckling your momma’s titties at Woodstock.”

  “Am I supposed to be impressed? We lost that one—Billy.”

  Contempt turned instantly and completely to fury, but Stryker kept it confined to his eyes and his voice. He moved in close to Kelly, speaking in a clipped, parade-ground cadence that no one else would hear, jabbing his thumb right to the base of the other man’s breastbone hard enough to hurt. If looks could kill, the man facing him would have been burned to ash. Kelly, though, paid no attention to either.

  “Don’t you dare presume to lecture me about war, Senator. You don’t want this to turn into a war? Sonny boy, we’re already there. The trouble is bleeding hearts like you who are too damn dumb to realize it!”

  “I appreciate your concerns. I’m simply suggesting that perhaps your operation deserves a second thought.”

  “And I’m saying that you have no idea at all what’s going on around you. I really do hate to break this off, but I’m afraid you’re making me late for a rather pressing appointment. Good day, Senator.”

  He and Yuriko strode quickly away. As Kelly watched them go, his expression darkening with every step, a cloud seemed to pass across his eyes. Iris and pupil disappeared as the whole substance of his eyes suddenly, and momentarily, turned chrome yellow, the same shade as the assassin’s.

  Then, with a blink, they were back to normal. No one around him had noticed.

  His own steps were hurried and purposeful as the senator took his leave. He had some pretty urgent appointments himself.

  Chapter

  Four

  In the 1950s, with the world perpetually poised on the brink of Armageddon, strategic planners had to devise a means for the government of the nation to survive a global thermonuclear war. The presumption was that Washington and its environs, which included the Pentagon and a whole host of major military installations, would be prime targets. What was required, therefore, was a location sufficiently far away to escape the brutal impact of multimegaton hydrogen bombs, yet convenient enough for the President and senior members of the civilian and military hierarchy to get there before the region was destroyed.

  The choice was the Appalachian Mountains, due west of the capital, along a stretch of peaks that formed one wall of the Shenandoah Valley and also demarcated the border between Virginia and its neighbor West Virginia. The installation was built using the same principals employed in the construction of the headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command, inside the heart of Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. A couple of mountains were hollowed out at the base, so that the ancient stone itself would provide the bulk of the protection for the people sheltering within. The compartments that filled this newly emptied space rested on gigantic shock absorbers. It was guaranteed by the designers and builders that only a direct hit would do any substantial damage. It was outfitted with state-of-the-art technology and hardware, together with resources to sustain the survivors for years if necessary.

  Thankfully, it was never used.

  With the ongoing collapse of the Soviet Union, and the consequent lessening of the traditional nuclear threat, this secret haven became gradually less important in the strategic scheme of things. It was considered an icon of a bygone age, like the battleship. Most in government simply forgot about it.

  Not William Stryker.

  As it became increasingly clear in recent years that the mutant situation, which he’d been addressing with increasing passion and vehemence, was something that had to be taken seriously, the question then arose: What to do with the mutants if things went bad? Where could the government possibly incarcerate a mutant criminal?

  Mount Haven was Stryker’s answer.

  And Eric Lehnsherr became its first inmate.

  As befit a man who styled himself the “master of magnetism,” his cell was plastic, suspended by pliable plastic cables and beams in one of the chambers of the mountain that had been hollowed out but never fully converted. What had been left was a monumental box of a space, easily a thousand feet square, buried more than a thousand beneath the surface. The stone of the mountain itself was nonferrous, and the chamber’s walls had been lined with molded plastic that was as strong as steel. The cell was transparent, as was all the furniture. The only opaque items were the inmate’s clothes and the sheets and blankets on his bed, as well as the few items of reading material allowed him.

  He was under constant surveillance, scanned by a vast array of cameras and electronic sensors and a full complement of guards. Their orders were strict and absolute. No metal of any kind was to be permitted into the stone chamber, much less the cell itself. No significant amount of metal—whether furniture or vehicles or even weapons—was to be permitted within a half mile of his cell. One positive surprise effect of his incarceration was a quantum leap in the practical design and technology applications of plastics.

  The prisoner’s clothes were a form of wearable paper, fastened with Velcro. As a condition of employment, guards had to have their metal fillings replaced by porcelain. You violated the rules, you got fired. No exceptions.

  No one knew the true extent of Lehnsherr’s power. No one wanted to find out the hard way. Better to conceive of the worst-case scenario and take all precautions from there.

  Thing was, the man himself didn’t look so fearsome. In person, the face possessed a dignity and a humanity that the holographic image Scott beheld at Xavier’s lacked. His intelligence and his commitment were immediately clear. He was a man whose soul had been tempered by the most inhuman furnace, the great kilns of Auschwitz that had claimed his parents, his family, the life he knew and the one he’d dreamed of. He had survived there. He would survive here. Of that, plainly he had no doubt.

  Access to his cell came through an umbilical walkway, a plastic tube that extended like an airport’s jetway from the nearer wall. He didn’t set down the book he was reading, T. H. White’s masterwork about the life of King Arthur, The Once and Future King, until he heard the bolts cycle and the docking port at his end slide open.

  Close up, the bruises on Lehnsherr’s face were evident. The look on the face of the man entering the cell made it plain that he was the one who had inflicted them and was looking forward to delivering more. Mitchell Laurio had been chosen specifically to look after the prisoner at a time when it appeared certain his next visit to a prison would be as an inmate rather than a guard. Two felony indictments had been quashed to bring him here—for brutality, of course—and the day he started he was told the recorders would be turned off whenever he was in Lehnsherr’s cell. He wasn’t allowed to break any bones, he couldn’t kill the old man.

  Outside of that, he was told, anything goes.

  This was nothing new to the prisoner. He wasn’t yet even a teenager when he received his first beating from an SS guard. He also remembered what he’d done to that guard, years later, to repay him.

  He met Laurio with a level gaze, eyes as deep and unreadable as an ocean abyss.

  “Mr. Laurio,” he said almost pleasantly, in his rounded, cultured voice that had its own distinct touch
of England. “How long can we keep this up?”

  Laurio cracked his knuckles. “How long you in for?”

  “Forever.”

  “Not necessarily forever,” Stryker said pleasantly from the walkway as he followed Laurio into the cell. “Just until I have what I need.”

  “Mr. Stryker,” Lehnsherr said, his tone giving no sense of how he felt, his body language almost relaxed. “How kind of you to visit. Have you come back to make sure the taxpayer’s dollars are keeping me . . . comfortable?”

  “Simply a case of the punishment fitting the crime. Heads of state don’t take kindly to being attacked. Quite a few of them wanted you killed. Without, I might add, benefit of a trial.”

  “How fortunate for you that, merely by labeling me a terrorist combatant, the government removed all need for such legal niceties.”

  “The ACLU is still filing briefs on your behalf. You never know, they may find the right judge, he may accept their writ of habeas corpus.”

  Both men knew that day would never come. Lehnsherr was here until he died, or found another way. The same rules as Auschwitz.

  “In the meantime . . .”

  Lehnsherr’s eyes narrowed fractionally as Stryker withdrew a plastic case from an inside pocket of his suit jacket, and from that a small pipette of glowing yellow liquid. The prisoner started up from his chair, a reflexive gesture of resistance, which was just what Laurio was waiting for.

  A swift, sharp application of his billy club to the back of the legs collapsed Lehnsherr’s knees out from under him; an equally cruel jab to the side made the prisoner gasp. Laurio grabbed Lehnsherr’s right arm in a brutal hammerlock, forcing the trapped hand almost all the way up to the other man’s neck, clearly disappointed not to hear even a whimper of pain as he did. With his free hand he forced Lehnsherr’s face flat against the table and held it there as if gripped in a vise, turned so that the base of his skull was exposed to reveal a scar right at the brain stem, in the shape of a perfect circle.

  Lehnsherr bared his teeth, ever so slightly, his sole gesture of defiance as Stryker leaned forward and delicately, carefully, placed two drops directly on the scar. They bubbled, like hydrogen peroxide foaming away bacteria on a wound, and were absorbed.