“Yes, you are,” Foreman said. “You are absolutely indifferent to their plight because it doesn’t fit your single-minded obsession.” His voice was crackling at the other end of the phone now. “You’re waiting for an attack from what you suppose is the greater threat, and I agree, Sovereign is. I wouldn’t have put this together if I didn’t, and I wouldn’t have put you in charge if I didn’t believe you were truly obsessed with stopping this extinction. But I’m telling you now, my distinguished colleague from Oregon,” he said every word of that with disgust, “who is a prominent member of our committee, is currently back in his home state mourning the loss of two of his constituents, and he wants this solved so he can tell his voters that it’s handled.” Foreman’s voice rose in pitch. “So if you value your mission, get this done and get back to work!”
There wasn’t a click like in the old books I read when someone hung up on someone else, but the faint beep-beep that told me he’d cut the connection was dramatic enough. I put my cell phone in my pocket and opened the door to exit the staircase. My mother was waiting in the lobby, arms folded, looking like she was lost in thought. “Ideas?” I asked her as I passed, and she fell in beside me as I headed toward the dorm.
My mother seemed to deflate a little. “Foreman put you on it, huh? No wiggle room to get out?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Politics got involved in this one; he seems to think it’ll be the end of our little group if we can’t convince one of the Oregon senators we’re doing everything we can to actually be a meta policing unit.”
“I have some experience tracking metas,” she suggested.
“So do I,” I said. “But I don’t really want to waste time on this.” I stopped, cursing under my breath. She gave me an amused look. “We’re facing the extinction of our entire species, and I’ve got to go play this small-ball bullshit to keep the government off our backs.”
Her eyes flashed and she almost shrugged. “Once you’re in deep with these people, you’re always in deep with them. They won’t let you get away voluntarily.”
I laughed. “You make them sound like the mob.”
She cocked her head. “The mob would just kill you when they’re done. More merciful, I think.”
I felt a grimness settle over me. “As opposed to what? The jail time that I’ve been threatened with?”
She watched me carefully. “You don’t think you’re getting out of that, do you?”
I turned my gaze to the horizon, and thought about Clyde Clary, about how much blood had bubbled to the surface of the water when he’d died. “I don’t know that I deserve to.” I turned back to her. “But that’s irrelevant. I have a job to do.” I smiled, also grimly. “Whatever my final destination ends up being, I’ve got penance to pay first.”
She nodded humorlessly. “Let me go to Portland, then.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Let’s give it a day while we plan a response.”
“She could kill more in the meantime,” my mother said. “You sure you want that on your head?”
I leaned my head back, letting it loll as I stared up into a cloudless sky. “I don’t want any of this on my head, but that has nothing to do with what I’ll actually get. This whole thing with Hildegarde is off focus. I thought maybe she could be a help to us. Hell, maybe she still could be, but the appearances are she’s in a fighting mood and is looking for—” I paused in the middle of a sentence. “Wait, why was it four FBI agents?”
My mother looked at me, deep in thought, and after a moment, she nodded. “I didn’t catch that either, the first time. It’s not like FBI agents respond to local crimes, so even if Hildegarde was robbing a bank, she would have ended up killing some locals in with those agents.”
“Right,” I said. “So the question becomes, what the hell was the FBI doing to run into her?” I reversed course, my feet crunching on the grass as I turned around and started heading back to the HQ building. Something was not right.
“Could have been the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team,” my mother said. “They deploy them for crises, and a meta group on the loose might qualify. Or it could be that Hildegarde and her group hit the FBI field office, though I can’t see why they’d provoke Century one week and the U.S. government the next. Seems like you’d want to maybe stick to one fight at a time.”
“Or none, if I had it my way,” I said, opening the front door of HQ and allowing my mother to precede me, “but Hildegarde is clearly in the midst of something entirely different.”
We kept quiet all the way to Agent Li’s office, up on the fourth floor across the main room from mine. I opened his door without knocking, and he looked up at me, phone in his hand, the receiver up to his ear, completely unsurprised. He waved for us to take a seat across from his desk and I looked over his Spartan office. There were no pictures on the wall, which was pretty standard for our setup. The office furniture was nice enough; we’d had to do a little mixing and matching to get the place filled, taking on remaindered stuff that a local school district hadn’t wanted anymore, combined with the finest offerings from some local stores. We could have gone a little more elaborate considering the funding we had to spread around, but I’d kiboshed that idea because I didn’t want anyone to be thinking about decor. Their minds were needed elsewhere.
There was a lone spot of color in the room, a potted plant sitting on the corner of Li’s desk. He was nodding along with whatever was being said on the phone, and finally he spoke. “Got it. Understood. I’ll make sure I pass that along once you send me the file.” With that, he hung up, and leaned back in his chair. “What took you so long?”
“What took me so long what?” I asked, frowning at him.
“What took you so long to get here? I expected you minutes ago.” He picked up a fresh sheaf of papers from his desk and slid them across to me. “Here.”
“What is this?” I asked, picking it up. My eyes scanned the page quickly and I realized it was an FBI report. “This is from Portland? From where Hildegarde—”
“I figured you’d want the details,” he said, “since you didn’t ask for them in the meeting.”
“Long story short it for me,” I said, putting the paper aside. “Why was the FBI in contact with Hildegarde?”
“Local investigation,” Li said, keeping a straight face. “Portland Field Office was poking into OC—that’s our shorthand for organized crime—and they’d flagged Hildegarde, thinking she was some kind of kind of mob enforcer. They were going to bring her in for questioning relating to a string of racketeering charges.”
“Organized crime is Omega’s MO,” I said, and looked at the paper. “I take it she tore through the agents?”
He shrugged, as if he was trying to be indifferent, but I caught a hint of tension. “Seems like the situation might have escalated when she tried to run and found out she was boxed in. Apparently she has at least one accomplice who can project energy of some sort.”
“What type?” My mother asked.
“Don’t know,” Li responded. “It didn’t leave a mark, so it could be anything. Two of the agents had been flung through the air unexpectedly.”
“That could have been a straight up hit,” I said. “Metas hit pretty hard.”
“I suppose,” he said. “I don’t know much about metas or their capabilities, just the basics. You’ll find the crime scene details in there. They didn’t get off a shot first, which to me suggested that the assailant did not close on them but hit them at a distance.”
I racked my brain, but there was just too much going on for me to process it. “I’ll take a look.” I shot a sidelong look at my mom. “Is the FBI going to go balls-out crazy for Hildegarde and her gang now that they’ve killed some of your own?”
Li’s reaction was measured, and I still had a hard time getting a sense of what he was really thinking. “Maybe. Maybe not. The head of the local field office has been apprised of what they’re up against, and he doesn’t seem too eager to cowboy up, so mayb
e you’ll get lucky. When are you leaving for Portland?”
I looked at my mother. “She’s going tomorrow. Do they have any leads out there or am I just sending her to chase her tail around and sit in the office doing nothing?”
Li’s skin flushed. “They have some leads, yes, but aren’t pursuing them because if they were to get in another fight with Hildegarde, the outcome would be just about the same. The Special Agent in Charge—they call them SACs—is waiting for you. The investigation cannot proceed without our assistance.”
“And we’ll be giving it,” I said coolly,
Li stood in a rapid hurry, his face red. “You’re gonna wait on this? After all the FBI has done for you?”
“I’m trying to balance the fact that someone is going to kill all the metas with the fact that someone might, maybe, kill a few humans,” I said. “Not to sound like a dick, but if I’m weighing on the scales, I find one side a little lacking.”
“How many bodies does it take before your scales start tipping?” Li said, hot anger bubbling out. “A hundred? Two hundred?”
I kept my cool. “You really think Hildegarde is going to cut loose and start wiping out humans by the hundreds?”
“Probably not,” he conceded. “But—”
“But nothing,” I said. “Keep this in mind; whenever Sovereign is done killing us, whatever he’s got planned for the human race gets rolled out, and I have a feeling it’s going to involve some deaths of its own. So I guess you could say I’m trying really hard to take the global view on this one.”
“Hard to see the little people from orbit, I suppose,” Li said, spitting venom at me.
“I can see the problem clearly enough,” I said, still letting the ice in my veins keep me from decking him. “I have eight metas I can send on field operations. Versus one hundred of our enemy. I simply do not have the people to chase down everything that’s on our radar right now, because if I did, I wouldn’t have had to let a wildfire meta run its course in Nevada two weeks ago.” That was true. Some ass had come into his own powers and robbed a jewelry store, killing one of the patrons in the process. He was waiting in the wings to strike again, but I had nothing to root him out with right now unless I wanted to take the focus off of Sovereign.
“Every resource you’ve been given is at the behest of Senator Foreman,” Li said, his voice rising, “including the immunity from prosecution that’s enabled you to walk away from five different murders here in the U.S. that we know about—”
I felt my face heat up. “I had nothing to do with murdering Zack.”
“What about Wolfe?” Li said. “Your first victim.”
“And he was a real prize, too,” I said snottily. “I’m sure the FBI would be totally fine with him continuing to walk the streets, since he killed two hundred and fifty-four people in Minneapolis in a string of murders that is still to this day marked ‘Unsolved’ in your case files—”
“You’re still a murderer when it comes to him,” Li fired back.
“Prove it,” I said with a smirk. “Where’s the body?”
“Maybe we could just take a step back from the precipice here—” my mother started to speak, but was cut off.
“I don’t need to prove that you killed Wolfe—” Li started.
“Even though it was self-defense,” I said, “his hands were wrapped around my throat—”
“—I can prove that you killed Glen Parks and Clyde Clary,” Li said, “that you shot up Eve Kappler, left a bloody mess in her apartment. You didn’t even bother to try and cover your tracks, you were so arrogant—”
“Maybe I was worried about other things,” I said, and I could feel myself shake from some combination of rage, fear and guilt, in proportions I couldn’t even put numbers to. “Is that what this is really about?” I looked Li down over the desk.
“Yeah, that’s what this is about,” Li said hotly. “It’s about the fact that Foreman—the senator—took the keys to our last line of defense against the single greatest threat of our time and he put them in the hands of murderer who has zero remorse for what she’s done.”
His words sent my mind reeling. “You ... have no idea whether I have remorse or not.”
“You were almost gleeful about killing Wolfe,” Li said, almost spitting his disdain at me.
“If it had been one of your buddies in the FBI that had brought down a multiple murderer, you’re telling me he wouldn’t have been at least a little proud about it?” I tossed that one back at him. “He wouldn’t have gotten a few beers bought for his achievement?”
“You’re not one of us,” Li said tightly.
“I AM!” I roared back at him. “I have been all along! I’ve been training to police metas for the last year, pouring my life into it. I did what I was supposed to do, the responsible thing, by learning how to make sure that no meta ever got out of control again like Wolfe did. I trained to stop maniacs like him, like Gavrikov, like Omega, and I’ll be the first to own up to my mistakes, but you can’t possibly think I was in the wrong before that.” My voice almost crossed to imploring. “I saved the city from Gavrikov. He wanted to give people peace by blowing everything up and I drained him to stop it from happening. I did everything I could to do things right, to avoid killing.” My voice grew hoarse. “And it cost me everything.”
Li stared at me, and I saw a burning anger behind his eyes. “You killed Zack.”
“I did not,” I said, feeling the stinging feeling of pain inside me. “I was used. He meant more to me than anything, and I would never have hurt him voluntarily.”
I saw a glassy sheet come over Li’s eyes. “You’re still a murderer. Nothing changes that. You’ve got blood on your hands. Whatever you thought you were, it changed the day you crossed that line, just as surely as it has with any number of people who set out to do good and let power ruin them.” He folded his arms. “You’ve got nothing to keep your power in check. You think you can just do whatever you want. It’s why you didn’t worry about cleaning up your crime scenes, it’s why you didn’t care. You’re not as bad as Sovereign, but you’re getting there.”
I bit my lip and didn’t tell him that the reason I didn’t care was because I'd been planning to kill myself after killing Winter. That was nobody’s business but my own. “Well,” I said, “let me quote an old movie for you that was one of Zack’s favorites—‘Send a maniac to catch a maniac.’”
Li’s face went hard. “Get out.”
I started to say something else, something wise-ass, something totally me, the girl who didn’t know when to shut up nor how to do it, but I watched his red face, watched his chest heave up and down with emotion and fury, and I just canned it. I turned and walked out, holding the door for my mother, who followed wordlessly. I shut it quietly behind me, taking care not to even rattle it on its hinges.
Chapter 26
“I’m sending you to Portland tonight,” I told my mother as we walked across the top floor bullpen of the agency.
“Why?” my mother replied as we walked into my office. I looked at the bare walls and suddenly I hated them; they were even more sparse than the walls of Old Man Winter’s old office, but at least I had a wooden desk instead of rocks on top of other rocks.
“Because it’s the right thing to do,” I said, throwing myself back onto my leather chair. I leaned my head against the plush leather. I hadn’t picked it out; Ariadne or someone else in admin had, but I had to admit it was a damned good choice. Between it and the couch against the far wall that I slept on at least one night in four, I felt pretty fortunate in the office furniture department, like I’d won some sort of internal Agency lottery. “Li’s right, the FBI has been feeding us intel all along, Foreman’s gone out on a limb for us. We owe them.”
“It’s politics,” my mother said. “You were right when you said it takes us off mission for dubious benefit.”
“No, I was wrong,” I said. “It’s a certain benefit; it keeps the other government agencies we’re relying on for
intelligence happy with us, shows we’re willing to do the bidding of our congressional overseers, and builds some good will.” Hopefully, I didn’t bother to add.
She frowned at me, her long, dark hair hanging over her shoulders as she leaned over the chair in front of my desk. It reminded me of me when I looked into the mirror in the mornings. “You can’t tell me you changed your mind because of anything besides the way Li just made you feel.”
I felt the pressure of the leather against the back of my head, and the scent of it, still new, filled my nose. “Is that such a bad thing?”
“Playing politics?” She snorted. “It’s a fast way to forget your mission, to lose yourself in useless trivia and bureaucracy.”
“People died,” I said quietly. “We need all the leads we can get. Hildegarde seems to at least have some sense of how to hit Century, and we need that or we’re just continuing to operate blind, striking out into the darkness until they come for us.”
“You let him get to you,” she said. “About what you’ve done.”
“I didn’t let him do anything,” I said, tired. “I didn’t let him do anything I haven’t already done to myself.”
“You shouldn’t feel guilty about Wolfe,” she said. “That was a righteous kill. Same with Gavrikov. They were both murderers.”
“It’s not Wolfe and Gavrikov that I feel guilty about,” I said. “Nor Bjorn, though I had about as much to do with him getting killed as I did Zack.” I let my voice fall. “I murdered Glen Parks. He taught me so much about fighting, about shooting, tracking. He filled in a lot of the cracks that you couldn’t. He was a mentor, and what he did to me that night with Zack tore him up inside. He was drinking his life away, and I murdered him. I killed Clyde Clary, too. Big, dumb Clyde. He was an asshole, every inch of him, but he didn’t want to do what Winter told him to do. I knew that, and I killed him anyway. Eve wasn’t even around when Zack was killed; she dragged Ariadne off to get her out of the way because she was fighting Old Man Winter on it, screaming at him. And Bastian ... he said his piece, followed his orders, and he died for it, ultimately.” I looked at her, and she wouldn’t meet my gaze, hands white-knuckling the back of the chair, staring down at the black pleather. “I killed them all. Plus Rick, the Primus of Omega, and one of the ministers, Eris. I killed them all, killed all those people.” I felt the energy drain from my voice, what was left of it. “I don’t need Li’s judgmental eyes to feel guilty. I am guilty.”
Legacy: The Girl in the Box #8 Page 16
