HERO: OUT OF THE BOX 22
The Girl in the Box, Book 32
ROBERT J. CRANE
Ostiagard Press
HERO
The Girl in the Box, Book 32
(Out of the Box 22)
Robert J. Crane
Copyright © 2018-9 Ostiagard Press
All Rights Reserved.
2nd Edition
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Teaser
Author's Note
Other Works by Robert J. Crane
Acknowledgments
This one is dedicated to my long-standing editor, the great Sarah Barbour, who is no doubt going out a hero after editing over fifty of my books. Happy trails, Sarah, and may you manifest your destiny.
CHAPTER ONE
“If I wanted to get my ass kicked on an airplane, I would have flown United,” I said as I woke to the familiar thrum of engines as we sailed through the sky.
“You were a prisoner up until a few hours ago.” Doctor Helen Slaughter—a name that I knew was total bullshit—was a study in calm, sitting in the seat across from where I lay, bound to a stretcher. “You’re supposed to be sitting in a cell right, now. You weren’t going to be flying anywhere for the rest of your life, remember?”
I tested my bonds. They were … not breakable. Even with my super strength, which I noted, had returned after a long drug-imposed absence. “Actually, I was always destined to come to Revelen.” I looked around the plane, trying to get the lay of the land.
Smooth, white surfaces were everywhere, broken by the occasional upholstered seat with fuzzy cloth. Dark windows looking out into an impenetrable night. Jones, the prison guard who was actually a multi-time felon and probably a mercenary, waved at me from a seat a few feet away.
I’d learned only just before I was rendered unconscious for this flight that she was a metahuman with the ability to rearrange matter at the molecular level via her touch. Once upon a time she’d crashed the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan into a pile of shards. Similarly, she’d killed a prisoner I’d been having a kerfuffle with during my recent stint in the pokey by turning her into glass and then shattering her to pieces.
Hey, that’s a theme. No wonder they called her The Glass Blower.
“How you doin,’ Owens?” I asked. “That’s not your real name, is it?”
“Owens” shook her head. “Why would I use my real name on a job to infiltrate a metahuman prison? That’d be crazy.”
I let my gaze flit on over to “Doctor Helen Slaughter.” “Anyone want to exchange some real names? Maybe some real talk, too? I’m Sienna—”
“We know who you are,” the “doctor” said. See, I used scare quotes there because she was a murderous doctor. Like Harold Shipman.
“I doubt it,” I said. “Though I’m sure you’re aware of my fearsome reputation. I am death, and all that jazz.”
She turned in her seat to face me, still maintaining her icy facade but at least doing me the dignity of turning her full attention my way, as though I were an actual threat. “We’ve gone to the trouble and expense of using our hackers to create entirely new identities in order to place the two of us in your prison … You think we’d do that for someone we don’t know?”
“I think you might do that for someone you truly loathed,” I said, “or maybe someone you’d like to recruit for your cause. Whatever that is.”
She chuckled. It was light. “You were serving a life sentence. A true one, not one of those that results in your parole in eight years. We got you out in three days.”
“You could have done it sooner,” I said. “Do you know how bad the food is there? I mean, of all the traumas I’ve bee
n through the last few years—”
“We weren’t planning to get you out this soon,” she said, looking right at me. “But you had to go and cause a riot that would have almost certainly resulted in your death if we hadn’t intervened.” She shook her head. “You think we don’t know who you are? I know who you are. You’re an idiot, marching into the fires of stupidity without a thought—”
“Actually, I thought very carefully about what I was doing,” I said. I was bound over just about every square inch of my body south of the neck. It wasn’t exactly bungee cords, either, because there was no give in whatever they’d trussed me up with. “I was doing the best I could with a really bad hand. Poker hand. Not actual hand.”
“You’re pure chaos,” the “doctor” said. “You’re the worst—” She cut herself off and turned away.
I waited to see if she was going to finish her thought. “What the hell? Am I not even worth the breath? Go on and say what you need to say there, Sigourney.”
“Stop calling me that,” she said but did not look at me.
“Give me your real name, and I won’t call you Sigourney anymore.”
“You can call me Sophie,” she said.
“That’s not your real name.”
“How would you know?” she asked, turning irritated eyes upon me. “You don’t even remember that we met before this.”
“I remember in January that you pulled my ass out of the fire,” I said, thinking carefully about what she’d just said.
“That was not the first time we met.”
I stayed silent, maybe for the first time in my life. I’d lost a number of memories last year in Scotland to a very angry succubus named Rose. At the time, I’d thought the souls she’d taken from me had been the worst of her thefts.
I was beginning to wonder if that was true. Over a period of months, she’d leached … dozens? Hundreds? Of memories from me.
I didn’t even know. It was a lot, as evidenced by this encounter with “Sophie.” Whose actual name I was no closer to unearthing.
“When did we meet before?” I asked. I let my gaze wander over to “Owens,” whom I was never going to get used to thinking of as the Glass Blower.
“If you don’t know, I’m not telling you,” she said.
“Hey, man, I didn’t just slip up and forget you,” I said, struggling against the bonds again. “It’s not like I’m trying to be rude—”
“I know your memories were stolen by Rose.” She was dead calm as she said this. Still didn’t look at me.
“How did you know that?” I stopped struggling.
“Word gets around.” Her smile was both faint and fake. And she still didn’t look at me.
A female voice came on the speaker, a little husky. “We’re twenty minutes out.” English. Not the primary language of Revelen, as far as I knew. Accented, too, like it wasn’t her native tongue. It lacked the crisp precision of a commercial pilot, along with the friendliness.
But it was also very, very familiar.
“I know that voice,” I said under my breath.
“You know lots of people,” “Sophie” said.
“Am I just going to stay this way?” I asked, nodding at my trussed-up self. “Straight out of the plane and into the dungeon?”
“We’ll let you out when we land,” Owens said, sounding surprisingly reassuring. She’d clearly been given the good cop role to Sophie’s very, very annoying one. “Can’t have you tearing up the plane mid-flight.”
“I generally don’t cause massive havoc when my life is on the line,” I said.
“That’s a lie,” “Sophie” said. “You always cause massive havoc, especially when your life is on the line.”
Okay, that was a reasonable point. “Nuh-uh,” I said anyway. Because hell if I was going to admit I was wrong.
“Just shut up for a few minutes until we land,” she said, concentrating on the carpeted floor. “And we’ll see what he says when we get there.”
I didn’t gulp, but only from long practice.
He was Vlad. As in, “the Impaler.” Of Dracula fame.
And it appeared … I was going to meet him very soon.
CHAPTER TWO
Passerini
Situation Room
The White House
Washington, DC
“They came over the border in the night,” Secretary of Defense Bruno “Hammer” Passerini said, using a laser pointer to draw the red dot across the map projected onto the biggest screen in the Situation Room. “On trains, for the most part, though trucks brought in some of the smaller components—”
“What am I even looking at here?” President Richard Gondry asked, his glasses catching the glare of the projection and making his eyes look like puddles of white light. “I don’t need a geography lesson. You said this was important—sum it up.”
“I’m trying to explain, sir,” Passerini said. Five nights of this, of watching and waiting as the nation of Revelen did their thing with Russia. Now this, and he was lecturing to a college professor who was maybe the biggest idiot he’d ever met. Proving once again that education didn’t equal intelligence. “Last night, Russia trans-shipped their SH-08 Gazelle missiles over the border—”
“I don’t know what the hell any of that means,” Gondry thumped a sheaf of briefing papers onto the table in front of him. “Do you even realize what troubles we have domestically at the moment? Wildfires in California. A hurricane churning toward the east coast. And this—this—Minnesota prison nonsense—” The president gritted his teeth together at the last.
Passerini didn’t want to touch that one. He’d heard the rumors that Sienna Nealon, the metahuman criminal and apparent full-time bee in Gondry’s bonnet, had somehow escaped the metahuman prison complex outside Minneapolis last night. “Sir,” Passerini said, trying to manage up, “I assure you, I wouldn’t be wasting your very valuable time if this weren’t incredibly important and urgent. Revelen has installed missile batteries to protect against—”
“This is an allied country, yes?” Gondry asked, pushing his glasses down the bridge of his nose. In the semi-dark, Passerini could see the president’s eyes. They looked like beads of black.
“Sir,” Secretary of State Lisa Ngo spoke up from down the table, “we have a few nominal treaties with Revelen—the usual boilerplate—but that’s all. They’re not what we would consider an ally. And as Secretary Passerini is trying to inform you, they’re presently making moves, along with Russia, that suggest that they are anything but friendly.”
“We’ve been at peace with Russia for years,” Gondry said. “The Cold War is over, people.” He chortled. “I swear, the military is always looking to fight the last war again.”
Passerini suppressed the urge to sigh through long practice. “Sir, I wasn’t in the Cold War for the most part. I joined up in the last decade of it, and my experience is mostly in fighting the War on Terror. So while you think that I’m just looking to pick a fight that I understand … believe me when I tell you, sir, this is not a fight I would go looking for. Russia possesses more nuclear weapons than any other country on the planet. Getting into any sort of conflict with them is not on my priority list on any given day—”
“Now that’s just blatantly false.” Gondry chuckled. “You’re the military. Of course you’re looking for a war to fight. It’s the reason for your existence.”
Passerini’s blood ran surprisingly cool. Normally in moments of insult, it tended hot, the Italian in him rising to the surface along with the desire to throw a choice expletive at top volume, the way his father did at times of stress and challenge. He didn’t do that now, though, because he was standing in front of his boss, the Commander in Chief.
And the man had just told him, in the midst of what looked like a terrible geopolitical conflict on the rise, that he thought Passerini’s job and disposition was to make war.
“Sir,” Passerini said, voice falling to a low register that it seldom hit, “my job is not to mak
e war. I’m the Secretary of Defense. My job is to defend the United States. If that means prosecuting a war, so be it. But I’d be a lot happier if I could do my job and never fire a shot.”
“Sure you would,” Gondry snorted. Good God, the man was an arrogant prick.
Passerini gathered himself and turned the laser pointer back on the new emplacements around Revelen’s capital, Bredoccia. “They’ve also taken these Russian anti-missile systems, which normally take months or years to install, and they’ve emplaced them overnight.”
Gondry might have been looking at him, or he might not have been. His glasses were back up, the glare preventing Passerini from gauging where the president’s attention was.
“How did they do that?” National Security Advisor Bethany Cantrell asked. Passerini had seldom had contact with the National Security Advisor, which was a pretty decent indicator of how importantly Gondry viewed that role. Cantrell was a cheerleader for the administration, her national security bona fides about as serious as Passerini’s interest in gardening, i.e., not remotely.
“They appear to have used metahumans to move the earth and lift the emplacements,” SecState Ngo answered for him. He gave her a nod, and she nodded back. In his opinion, she was the only competent one at the table.
“Good for them,” the president said. “Using metahuman labor to simplify things is the wave of the future. Too long these people have stood in the shadows, afraid to show their faces—”
“Sir—” Passerini knew full well he was risking incurring the wrath of this former academic, who, he knew by experience, hated to be interrupted mid-lecture, “they may be slave labor, for all we know.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gondry said, eyes flaring to life as the glasses slipped down his nose again. “This is Eastern Europe. There’s no slavery remaining there.”
The fragment of some old quote about trying to be the coolest head in the room floated through Passerini’s mind, somewhat dousing the heat of his rising temper. “The point remains, sir, that in one night, Revelen has emplaced anti-ballistic missile defenses. They are now prepared in the event that someone launches on them.” He debated whether to whack Gondry over the head with the facts, then realized if ever there was a person who needed whacking with facts, it was the academic Gondry, with his massive, arrogance-driven blind spots. “Sir … they’re preparing for war with us.”
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