Jean was a competent pilot, but Scott and Storm were the ones who loved to fly. It was a toss-up which of them could handle the plane best. Scott had the knack for teasing the best out of the machine, but Storm’s elemental powers gave her an awareness of the atmosphere the others could only imagine, allowing her to instinctively find the ideal path through the air.
She was in the left-hand pilot’s seat as Jean climbed aboard, pulling the hatch closed behind her.
“Where we at?” Jean asked, taking the copilot’s seat and locking her four-point harness closed. They’d both changed for the flight, into their X-Men uniforms, snug-fitting suits of what looked and felt like designer leather but which also served as highly effective body armor. For some reason, Storm had chosen to accessorize hers with a cloak that Jean had to concede looked pretty damn good on her and didn’t seem to hinder her movements in the slightest. Jean had left her own outfit as is. It made her smile to recall that Logan had hated his on sight, though he didn’t look half bad in it, either.
She caught Storm staring and blushed, realizing she hadn’t heard a word the other woman had just said to her, or sensed a thought.
“Checklist,” Storm repeated, shaking her head in amusement. In all the years they’d known each other, Jean had never let herself become so flustered.
They were a well-practiced team, and their work was quickly done. After making sure there were no planes in their vicinity, they damped the interior lights and cracked the surface hatch. Overhead, the basketball court in the athletic yard split in two and slid apart, allowing the great aircraft to rise almost silently into the night sky. Both women gave a wave to the kids they knew would be watching from their upstairs bedrooms, and then, as they cleared the surrounding trees and the roof of the mansion, Storm turned the nose toward Breakstone Lake and shifted to horizontal flight mode.
In less than a minute they were a mile high and miles removed from the school, slipping into the stratosphere at a speed that would carry them to Boston in a quarter hour, tops. The shape of the Blackbird made her as impossible for a radar to detect as the paint scheme foiled visual sighting. This meant plane and crew had to be extra vigilant for any other aircraft sharing the increasingly crowded Northeast sky. Occasionally that meant taking a more circuitous route, to avoid even the risk of contact.
Immediately after takeoff, both women felt the familiar presence of Xavier’s thoughts among their own.
I’m sending you the coordinates of your target’s current location, he told them telepathically. Scott and I are en route to Mount Haven Prison. We’ll be incommunicado until we leave the facility. Once you land, you have to rely on your own skills to track him.
“We’ll be fine, sir,” Storm assured him aloud.
“Let’s hope he cooperates,” Jean muttered, thankful for the refuge of potential action as she struggled to keep her conflicted thoughts to herself.
Storm engaged the autopilot, but Jean paid no attention as she stared out the canopy window. For all she actually noticed, a blank wall would have served just as well.
Storm’s eyes narrowed as the tempo of the great ramjets increased, the surge of power making itself felt as vibration through the body of the aircraft as well as through sound. She checked the throttles and the flight dynamics liquid crystal display for a status update on the engines.
The airframe shuddered slightly as they passed the sound barrier, and miles below, amid the hills that crowded the Connecticut and Massachusetts border, she knew people would be looking around in surprise at the distant thunder of their sonic boom.
Storm disengaged the autopilot, shifting to manual flight mode, and retarded the throttles, but that did no good; their speed continued to increase, and at the rate they were gaining altitude, the Blackbird would be suborbital in mere minutes. Great for a hop over the pond to London and the professor’s Scots associate Moira MacTaggart; utterly useless for a short-haul trip of a couple of hundred miles to Beantown.
The problem, she realized, wasn’t with the controls. Someone was bypassing them to manipulate the airframe and mechanical systems directly.
“Jean,” she said, and when her friend didn’t reply, she repeated herself, a little more loudly, accompanying her call with a touch of Jean’s arm that carried with it just the gentlest shock of lightning.
Jean jolted awake like a student who’d been caught napping in class, denial vying visibly on her face with embarrassment for prominence.
“Sorry,” she said quickly, “I’m sorry,” shaking the cobwebs from her brain and releasing every hold her teke powers had placed on the aircraft.
This time, when Storm slowed down the engines, they complied, and she turned the Blackbird into a sweeping descent out over the Atlantic that would quickly bring them to their destination.
“You okay?” Storm asked Jean, who at first didn’t seem quite sure how to answer.
“All of a sudden,” Jean replied, trying to make what had just happened a joke, “damned if I know.”
“Something wrong?”
“It’s nothing.” Jean shook her head, wriggled in her sheepskin-covered seat to make herself more comfortable, even though both of them knew it was anything but. “I was thinking, y’know, if only we could make the flight go faster. I guess my wish fulfillment kinda got . . . carried away.”
“Ah” was Storm’s only comment. It spoke volumes.
“What?” Jean demanded.
“Nothing. I asked, you answered, end of story.”
“What, Ororo, for God’s sake!”
The other woman shrugged. “Maybe it’s just that Logan’s back in town.”
Jean slumped in her chair, as much as her harness would allow. “Oh, God, it shows.”
“Jean,” Storm said flatly, “the sun ‘shows’ every morning when it rises. It has nothing on you.”
“Why me?” Jean muttered, covering her eyes with her hands. “Why him? It isn’t fair.”
“You annoyed or tempted?”
“Truth, both.”
“Ouch!”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“He has the look,” Storm agreed with a throaty chuckle.
“Then take him off my hands, please, before there’s a disaster.” To illustrate her point, she waved her hands to encompass the flight deck and remind Storm what had nearly happened mere minutes before.
“Grown woman like you, grown man like him, you saying you can’t set a proper example for the children?”
“You’re gonna bust my butt forever about this, aren’t you?”
Storm turned serious. “I like him, Jean. But what I feel, it’s minor league. You two, you’re the show.”
“It’s pure chemistry,” Jean told herself as much as Storm. “I’ve never experienced anything like it. I see him, and the brain disengages completely. It’s”—she searched for the right word—“primal. And I can’t hide it from him, I can’t bluff that nothing’s happening—or that nothing’s going to happen. And then there’s Scott . . .”
Her voice trailed off. Storm reached across the center console and gave her friend’s hand a squeeze, but she knew that was scant comfort.
“Have faith, Jean. You’ll find a way to work things out.”
“I hope so, Ororo. Really I do. For all our sakes.”
The radio crackled with Xavier’s voice. Storm answered.
Washington is a company town, that “company” being the federal government. And despite the promises and strenuous efforts of both political parties and numerous national administrations over the past few decades, the sheer size of that government has grown well beyond the physical capacity of the District of Columbia. Nowadays, working Washington is considered anything inside the Capital Beltway, with associated office parks springing up even farther out from the city itself, in such bedroom communities as Rockville and Gaithersburg and Reston.
In Rockville, Maryland, there was a new clutch of moderate high-rise buildings, ostensibly associated with the Nat
ional Institute of Standards and Technologies, a couple of miles and one town over. Impersonally modern, they looked just like a score of similar structures scattered across the nation. Midlist government glass boxes.
This time of night, the only staff on duty were the security officers and the cleaning crew. Even in an age of terrorist threats and heightened awareness, these weren’t considered viable targets. The bulk of the surveillance was handled remotely, at a central office keeping watch through a phalanx of cameras slaved to a computer monitor system. There was a manned reception desk in every ground-floor lobby, another couple of uniformed security guards to patrol the floors, but that was it. Big Brother was responsible for the bulk of the work.
The officer at the desk didn’t think twice when Yuriko Oyama strode through the doors. Her group were the odd ducks among the building’s federal tenants, working all hours of the day, all days of the week; something to do with auditing, they explained. The guard didn’t figure he was paid enough to be more curious, especially since all their credentials were in order. He did figure this was his lucky day, a treat for the eyes just before his shift changed.
Yuriko flashed her ID and strode to the waiting elevator, totally aware of how intently the desk guard was staring at her backside. She was a fine-looking lady, and the guards had eagerly added the many sequences of her coming and going to their pirate surveillance disk of local hotties. The guard paid her the compliment of never taking his eyes off her, waiting till the elevator doors were closed to pack up his station and prepare to hand it off to his replacement.
On the top floor, Yuriko passed the cleaning crew without a second glance. At the end of the hallway there was a single door as nondescript as the building itself. No lock, only a hand scanner. She pressed her right hand against the plate and the door obligingly unlocked.
Inside was a suite of offices that could have belonged to any midlevel bureaucrat working for any midlevel agency. The only personality to the rooms was that there was no personality whatsoever.
As she proceeded to her destination, she passed behind an opaque glass wall divider, and a remarkable transformation occurred. With each step, Yuriko’s features began to ripple and flow like wax exposed to direct heat. Black hair took on the color of flame, amber skin darkened to a blue that was almost midnight. Features that were pleasantly Asian became haughty and aristocratic and altogether Caucasian, a face as predatory as a hunting eagle yet possessing beauty enough to launch the thousand ships of fabled Ilium. The clothes seemed to flow into the body until what was left seemed mostly naked, save for an arrangement of ridges and scales that afforded a measure of protection and the illusion of propriety.
Her eyes were chrome yellow. Her name was Mystique.
In William Stryker’s office, she sat in Stryker’s chair and activated Stryker’s computer monitor. On its screen appeared the legend >VOICEPRINT IDENTIFICATION PLEASE.
In Stryker’s gravelly voice, Mystique replied, “Stryker, William.”
Obligingly and instantly, the monitor flashed >ACCESS GRANTED.
Working fast, because that was her nature and because she was on a clock, Mystique called up the directories, selecting RECENT ITEMS from the main menu and then a folder labeled simply 143. That in turn led to a series of files: FLOOR PLANS, LEHNSHERR, INTERROGATION SUMMARIES, AUGMENTATION . . .
She read quickly, printing everything on screen. As she proceeded through the documents, the set of her mouth tightened and her eyes narrowed. This was worse than she’d ever suspected.
Downstairs, a second Yuriko strolled into the lobby, barely acknowledging the man at the desk. Since he’d just come on duty, he had no idea there were two of her loose in the building.
In the office, a few minutes later, Mystique looked up suddenly at the faint klik of the door locks disengaging. Her time was up, right on schedule.
The real Yuriko walked to her desk and began to hunt through the main drawer for something, seemingly unaware of the other presence in the room. Then, without warning and with a speed that defied description, she whirled around to level a Glock 19 at the intruder.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “What are you doing here?”
A uniformed janitor stirred into view, hands waving before his body, fear plain on his face. He wanted no trouble.
“Lo siento, a puerta fui abierto!” he said.
Yuriko reached out for the man’s ID, hanging from a lanyard around his neck, comparing face to photo. Then she used her own terminal to access the night’s crew roster to make sure both were legitimate.
With a wave of the hand, she dismissed the janitor and returned to her desk without giving the man another thought. It never occurred to her to wonder what a janitor was doing in her office without his cart of supplies.
Mystique considered that as she strode quickly down the outer hallway, right past the man whose face she was using. The real janitor stared at her in disbelief—it was like watching your mirror image pass you by—and reflexively crossed himself. Mystique was thinking about Yuriko. This caper had gone down far more easily than she’d anticipated. That gave her hope, an emotion she hadn’t allowed herself since Magneto’s capture. Before long, if all went well, maybe it would be Stryker who was on the run. And the society he championed that lay in ruins.
The Blackbird approached Boston low and late, literally skimming the surface of the harbor at an hour when they had sea and sky all to themselves. Their objective was a stretch of waterfront near the Marine Industrial Park that was in the nascent stages of urban renewal and gentrification, a city planner’s attempt to upgrade this part of the South End into a reasonable facsimile of the more respectable neighborhoods across I-93.
They found a derelict slip with more than sufficient underwater clearance for their needs and gentled the Blackbird to a landing. They disembarked first, then signaled the autopilot to submerge the jet to its resting place on the bottom. There was a good ten-foot clearance to the top of the vertical stabilizers, the aircraft’s tallest point. Even at low tide, there was little chance of contact with the kind of small surface craft that cruised these waters, and even less of being seen.
Hopefully, the women wouldn’t be around here long enough for either to become a problem. They both put on trench coats to cover their uniforms.
As they made their way through the deserted and randomly derelict streets, Storm played with the atmospheric balance around them to roll a dusting of mist over this part of the city. She didn’t want a real fog, that would be too blatant, cause too much disruption to the local community; her goal was just enough to make it easy for them to slip out of sight if they had to.
The coordinates Xavier had provided led them to a church.
In better times, this had been a house of worship worthy of its parish. Constructed to last by stonemasons and old-world artisans who were building more for their children’s children than for themselves, it still presented a proud and dignified front to the desolation that surrounded it. The spire towered over the scattered clumps of row houses that remained and the long-abandoned factories that gave their owners and tenants work. Much of the stained glass, produced by contemporaries of Louis Comfort Tiffany, still remained, although it was probably only a matter of time before it was looted or destroyed.
The wall of one of the buildings opposite had been tagged with some fresh graffiti: CLEAN THE GENE POOL! KILL MUTANT SCUM!
Storm didn’t appreciate the sentiments.
“They’ll never let us lead our lives,” she said, and this time she let her anger show. She clenched her fist, and from off in the distance, out to sea beyond the entrance to Boston Harbor, came the kettledrum beat of thunder.
They circled the church without approaching it, and Jean used her teke to try every doorway they passed. To their surprise, all of them appeared to be stoutly locked.
“Somebody taking care of this old place?” Storm wondered aloud.
“I caught a couple of thought flashes from that bar up the st
reet.”
“From the guys we saw through the window?” Storm made a face. “You’re a braver woman than I am.”
“Tell me about it,” Jean agreed, matching her tone to her friend’s disgust. “Thing is, this church has a rep. It’s supposed to be haunted. By its very own demon.”
“Get out.”
“No lie. They believe it. Even the local tough guys steer clear of St. Anselm’s.”
“I’ve never met a demon.”
“After you, then.”
An artful combination of telekinesis and a push of wind popped the bolts on the main doors, which swung wide to their stops, creating an echoing boom throughout the body of the church. From the rafters, coveys of pigeons exploded into view, startled from their nighttime slumber.
The women said nothing as they made their way down the nave. Most of the pews had either been taken or were trashed in various corners, leaving a large open space leading to the transept and the altar. Up in the shadows below the vaulted ceiling, a pair of chrome yellow eyes watched their progress. And then, in a faint bamf of imploding air, they disappeared.
Just as suddenly, Storm stopped, looking steeply upward and to her right.
“What?” Jean prompted.
“A shift in the air,” she replied quietly, matter-of-factly.
“Movement?”
“More than that. A sudden vacuum there.” She pointed to where the lurking figure had been. “And an outrush of air from something popping into being.” She turned her arm to the altar. “There.”
“Gehen sie raus,” came a whisper from the deepest darkness ahead of them, in a voice calculated to chill the soul. They saw a lit candle set beside an open Bible. As they watched, the flame flickered from a sudden breeze and the topmost pages stirred.
“He’s gone again,” Storm said, and Jean nodded as they both heard from a balcony high overhead: “Ich bin ein Bote des Teufels!”
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