I sighed and did so as he moved out of the way, revealing a woman sitting on a cot at the edge of the room.
“You,” Ariadne said with a hint of surprise, her red hair ratty and knotted as if it hadn’t been washed in a couple days. “I should have known you were behind this.” Her eyes were wild, her face in near disbelief. “It wasn’t enough that you had to kill her, now you get your revenge on me, too? Having me locked away—”
“Don’t get your panties in a twist,” I said, cutting her off. “I didn’t have anything to do with you being imprisoned.” I looked back at Foreman, who was standing at the door, still holding it open, unconcerned about Ariadne taking flight. “What’s this about?”
Foreman raised an eyebrow at me. “We’re effectively picking up the pieces of the Directorate. We need an administrator who can run things—with appropriate legislative oversight, of course.” He smiled disingenuously.
I looked back at Ariadne and avoided saying something untoward. “She’s certainly capable of that.”
“Oh, really?” Ariadne said and stood up from the edge of the cot. Her pants were smudged, and she had an odor about her that told me it had indeed been a few days since she’d had human contact. There was a toilet and a sink in the corner of the room and that was about it. The room was set up for longer-term stays than the interrogation room I’d been in. “I guess that’s high praise coming from you.” Her eyes darted from me to Foreman. “Senator.”
“Miss Fraser,” Foreman replied deferentially.
“What are you doing here?” Ariadne said, looking pointedly at me, “if you’re not responsible for this?”
“That’s a funny answer,” Scott said under his breath. Foreman made a slight noise that sounded like a cross between a cough and a laugh.
“Apparently, I’m here to recruit you because the senator thinks you’ll listen to me,” I said, and felt a sudden sense of discomfort.
Ariadne stared at me, and I caught a flicker of her distaste for me. “I guess he doesn’t know us very well, then.”
“I guess not.”
There was a moment of silence as we all tried to adjust to the atmosphere in the room, and Ariadne looked past me to Foreman, now pensive. “Recruit me for what? To run a new Directorate?”
“Yes,” Foreman said. “Under the direct supervision of the U.S. government.”
Ariadne played it cool. “Because last time it worked out so well.”
Foreman shrugged. “The guy who destroyed the Agency seems hell bent on wiping out the whole meta race, so why refrain from pissing him off now? Seems like his ire is already directed at us as it is.”
I thought about speaking up, about telling them that it wasn’t really Sovereign running the extinction program, but Weissman—that oily, nasty bastard who was Sovereign’s number two in charge of Century. Something stopped me, though, as if I would be speaking out of turn, so I kept it to myself.
“Yeah, well,” Ariadne said and sat back down on her cot, the edge of a threadbare blanket crumpling as she moved it to sit, “I’ve already worked for a metahuman policing outfit once. I think I’d like to take my career in some different directions.”
Scott and I exchanged a look, then I cast my gaze to Senator Foreman. He appeared to give it a moment’s thought. “Fair enough. How about making license plates for the State of Minnesota?”
I’d seen Ariadne cowed before; she was made of relatively stern stuff but she was still human. The threat of jail time took any starch out of her as quickly as anything I’d ever seen. She opened her mouth then closed it quickly, as though she were stammering without any sound coming out. “I ...” she said finally, “I ... don’t think that’s quite the career opportunity I had in mind.”
Foreman shrugged. “You’ve had involvement in running an organization that hasn’t paid taxes for its entire existence and has run an insider trading outfit based on stealing government secrets.” He didn’t smile at her, even though he knew he had her. “I used to be a U.S. Attorney, did you know that? By my reckoning that makes for racketeering charges, tax evasion, fraud, espionage, insider trading ... need I go on?”
Ariadne looked faint and shifted her gaze to me. “And you? You’re part of this?”
I felt a swell of pity for her. “For me, the charges were murder times four, but yeah. I’m motivated to work for the senator to make those go bye bye, same as you.”
She shifted her gaze weakly back to Foreman. “That’s some powerful coercive influence you’re wielding, sir.”
Foreman stared back at her, impassive. “I’m a politician. Coercion is part of the job, though I usually don’t have to apply it quite so bluntly.”
Ariadne stood again quietly and stared down at the bare concrete floor, as though trying to make up her mind. “What do you want me to do?” she asked finally, her voice reflective of how broken she truly was.
“Congratulations,” Foreman said, “you are now the chief administrator of the Metahuman Policing and Threat Response Task Force. You’ll be running the entire administrative apparatus—finance, intelligence gathering, liaising with the Department of Homeland Security, everything except ops—but you’ll work directly with the head of operations to support them as they run response during this crisis.”
Ariadne stared blankly at him and then tried to muster her dignity by straightening her worn and dirty clothing. “All right. I’ll need to assemble my department. When do I meet the head of operations?”
“Oh, you already know her quite well,” Foreman said casually, and I felt his heavy hand land on my shoulder. I looked up at him in alarm and saw the smile on his face. “What? I told you I love surprises.”
Chapter 7
“I have to work for her?” Ariadne’s voice was strained, bitter disbelief seeping into it.
“You don’t have to,” Foreman said seriously. “The women’s correctional unit at Shakopee is always an alternative.”
I saw the slightest hint of irritation from Ariadne at his threat; the skin around her jaw got tight and her brow creased. “Fine. I’ll work with her.” She trembled slightly, her lips becoming a thin, straight line. “If you can make her work with me.”
Foreman gave me a sidelong glance, and just beyond him I caught sight of Scott watching the whole thing with a barely disguised look of shock. “I have faith that she’ll gladly work with you,” Foreman said to Ariadne then gripped my shoulder more tightly, “because she’s very motivated to make this partnership work, in order to avoid the consequences of failure. Isn’t that right, Ms. Nealon?”
I couldn’t decide if he was referring to the extinction of the metahuman species or the fact that I could potentially spend the rest of my very long life in a cell in the Arizona desert. Neither of those was very appealing, actually. “Oh, yes,” I said, with only a little sarcasm. “Very motivated.”
“Good,” Foreman said, and stepped out the door, gesturing for the three of us to follow him out into the hallway. Once we did, he pointed at a far distant door at the end of the hall, something that seemed like it was a mile away. “Mr. Byerly, Ms. Fraser, if you’d make your way through that door, one of my aides is waiting with Mr. Li and they’ll start making arrangements for you to put together what you need.” He whipped his gaze to me. “You and I have one last stop.”
“Oh, good,” I said, feigning breathless anticipation. “Is this going to be another one of your surprises?” I shot Scott a supportive look as he broke off to head down the hallway toward the door that Foreman had indicated. He gave me one back, something in the vein of Be careful, though it was mixed with some other emotions that I couldn’t figure out immediately.
“Of course,” Foreman said in his deep timbre. We stopped outside a door that had a number twelve on a placard above it. “What’s life without a little surprise? Boring, right? I mean, if you just have the same thing over and over again, totally expected, it’s kind of like only having one season.”
“The irony being that this is Minnesota,�
� I said. “The only place where the winters are longer than here is Westeros.”
“It’s the change,” Foreman said, not losing his enthusiasm as he went on. “The same season on and on and on is boring, just the same as one note dragging along isn’t music. Surprise is when the change comes and you don’t expect it.” He clicked the lock and nodded, preparing to open the door. “So ... are you ready for your next surprise?”
“Sure,” I said without any of his enthusiasm and stepped in as he opened the door for me.
The fist hit me squarely in the side of the head as I walked in, blindsided by a sucker punch that had a lot of power behind it. I hit the wall with my shoulder, and there was a flashing of lights in my vision that couldn’t be accounted for by the single, spare light source in the room. Something like dancing multicolored fireflies sprinkled all around my vision. I knew enough to throw my left arm up and it blocked the next hit, knocking it aside as I tried to recover and turn my head to catch a glimpse of my would-be attacker.
Foreman beat me to the punch. The senator unleashed an uppercut that knocked my assailant back, catching her - and it took me a moment to process that it was a her - on the chin and causing long brown hair to flash between the fireflies in my vision. I couldn’t help but feel that if I could have seen the person who’d attacked me, I might have known her. I watched her roll back from Foreman’s blow, springing to her feet in a move that was all too familiar—something I did all the time when I got knocked down.
I had my hands up in a defensive posture, ready for another attack, my head clearing as I looked at my assailant while Foreman stood just slightly to my left, helping me form a defensive line between our opponent and the door. I wanted to be shocked at the realization of who it was, but I was still clearing the cobwebs out of my head from nearly getting my skull caved in.
“Oh, God,” came her voice, annoyingly familiar, staring back at me over raised fists, defensively placed in almost a mirror image of my own. Which was unsurprising, considering that she’d taught me almost everything I knew about fighting. “They got you too?”
“Hi, Mom,” I said, still feeling the unpleasant sharpness of her punch to the side of my head.
I turned my head just slightly to look at Foreman, and he gave me a sympathetic shrug. “Surprise?” he offered weakly.
“Your surprises suck,” I said.
Chapter 8
“I’m not really interested in working for the government again,” my mother said a few minutes later, after Foreman had explained what he had in mind. I had stood quiet the entire time, next to the door, ready to bail. “I’ve trod that path before. I left and got into radiology so I could do something safer.”
“While training your daughter to be a street brawler on your nights and weekends,” Foreman added.
My mother’s already severe expression became more stern. “It’s dangerous out there, Senator. Surely a man as worldly as yourself must realize that by now.”
“Indeed it is,” Foreman replied. “Which is why I’m looking for some help to make it less dangerous.”
My mother laughed lightly. “Good luck with that.”
“I’ll take luck,” Foreman said, reminding me of how he’d gotten reserved every time before he’d sprung an unpleasant threat on me. “But I could use some more help.”
My mother rolled her eyes. “I don’t know what kind of help you think you’re going to need, but it isn’t enough. Whoever your enemy is, they’ve got a Hades-type at their disposal.”
“No, they don’t,” I said. “Your Uncle Raymond is dead.”
She looked at me like I’d grown a second head. “My uncle who?”
“Their Hades-type was your uncle,” I said. “Your mother’s brother, Raymond. He died in London a couple days ago.”
My mother actually looked a little dumbstruck for once, like I’d caught her off-balance. “Wait ... their Hades was my uncle? How do you know this?”
“I was there when he died,” I said. “He told me he’d met you once, a long time ago, when you were a kid.”
My mother frowned. “I think ... maybe I vaguely remember him. Kind of a big guy?” She frowned, as though trying to recall. “When I met him, he had this pompadour hairdo, though of course that’s long ago out of style—” She stopped at my pained expression. “Still had it, huh?” I nodded. “Sorry, Uncle Raymond,” she muttered under her breath.
“As lovely as this familial introspectionis,” Foreman said, sounding more patient than he probably was, “I have a specific purpose for this conversation and sharing can wait until later.” He looked back at my mother. “You have a variety of criminal charges leveled against you, and there’s a hell of a threat coming our way from a man named Sovereign.” Foreman looked at my mother, whose eyes became very wide, very suddenly. “I believe you might be passingly familiar with him.”
She hissed like a snake, mad as I’d ever seen her. “I’m familiar with him, yes. What the hell does he want? Other than hearing rumors about a Hades making its way through Europe, I’m a bit ... out in the cold.” She looked a little chagrined, and I caught her gaze and it revealed something I had rarely seen from her—a kind of desperation that made her willing to ask questions that revealed her weakness, her ignorance.
“He’s formed an organization called Century that’s dedicated to wiping out every meta on the planet,” Foreman said.
She frowned then looked at me. “No, really. What’s he up to?”
I waited just a second for it to sink in and spoke. “Really. That’s what he’s up to. He’s making a pretty good show of it, too, down to just North and South America.”
Her nostrils flared. “This is a little more ambitious than I would have given him credit for.”
I stared back at her. “He wiped out the Agency, didn’t he?” I waited for my mother to answer, but she said nothing, steel-eyed and sullen.
“Yes, well,” Foreman said, “past history aside, you have a decision to make. Are you in or are you out? If you’re in, I’ll cut you loose right now.” He narrowed his eyes and leaned forward, pointing at her with one finger. “But if you betray me, I will send everything I have at you with an order to bring you in dead. Not alive, just dead.”
My mother gave me a look out of the corner of her eye. “Did he offer you this same charming deal?”
Foreman leaned back and folded his arms. “I didn’t have to. She’s not as much of a flight risk as you are and doesn’t have connections everywhere in the country that would allow her to go underground for months or years.”
She wavered just a little. I saw it in the shape of her mouth as she came close to chewing her bottom lip, a dead giveaway that she was experiencing a moment of doubt. I saw it on those precious few occasions when she had started to punish me, to put me in the box, but I managed to talk her out of it. They were few indeed. “Did they offer you the same deal?” she asked me.
I looked to Foreman, who nodded at me as if to give me the go-ahead to talk about it. I cleared my throat. “I dunno. What crimes did they threaten to charge you with?”
A brief look of surprise crossed her face. “Crimes? I got thrown in here without any idea of who I was even dealing with, though I guessed government after I saw the place. Too big to be a private concern. So ... what ‘crimes’ did he get you on?”
“I bet the surprise is going to be good on this one,” Foreman murmured quietly.
“Murder,” I’d had to admit to being accused of murder on three separate occasions in the last half hour, and as I watched my mother’s face deteriorate into shock, I realized that she was the only one of the three of us who even seemed surprised by it.
“Who did you kill?” she asked when she found her voice again. “Erich Winter?”
I looked to Foreman before I spoke. “We’ve got you dead to rights,” he said, as if he sensed my hesitation. “Fingerprints, physical evidence, traffic camera photos. It’d be a slam dunk to convict you, so you might as well tell her, because yo
u’ve already incriminated yourself enough for me.”
I tried to be cool. “No, I didn’t kill Erich Winter. That would fall under attempted murder, though. I was accused,” I said, putting the emphasis on the word, “of killing the four members of M-Squad.” I smiled sarcastically at Foreman, and he nodded his head at me.
“Did you now?” Mother didn’t seem impressed. “M-Squad was that group of metas who were Erich Winter’s personal lapdogs, weren’t they?”
“Yes,” I said quietly.
“Uh huh,” she said, and I could see the wheels turning. She looked up at Foreman. “Your terms are acceptable. I give you my word that I won’t run, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that Sovereign is the most dangerous son of a bitch I’ve ever met in my life and if he’s plotting something involving wiping out our species ... he’ll probably succeed unless you have someone with some brains and skill to stop him.”
“Well, we have your daughter,” Foreman said.
“I said brains and skill, Senator,” my mother said, “not a girl who follows her genitals in whatever direction they lead like a bitch in heat.”
“Oh, screw you,” I said and turned to Foreman. “Can we just leave her in here?”
“She’s a valuable resource, having seen your enemy face to face,” Foreman said. He wagged a finger at my mother. “You’ll be answering to your daughter as she’s running the operations side of our new agency.”
“What?” Her shock was palpable. “Who have you got running the finance department? An infant with a sliding abacus in their crib?”
“I considered an aging radiologist I know for that job,” I said. “But I’m not sure she could hack it, since I overtook her level of learning in math when I turned thirteen.”
My mother seethed a little then tried to put on a polite face. “Fine. I will ... deal with you placing my daughter in a superior position in order to secure my freedom. That doesn’t seem to be totally unreasonable. You have to suffer to get what you want, after all.”
Legacy: The Girl in the Box #8 Page 4
