XGeneration 7: Dead Hand (XGeneration Series)

by Brad Magnarella

  The ensuing anger burned hot in Janis’s head. Her powers back online, she lifted herself telekinetically and flew toward Shockwave. He remained where he had unleashed the force, arms folded across his chest, hips tilted in a posture that suggested cocky satisfaction.

  That only stoked Janis’s rage.

  “What in the hell are you doing?” she demanded, coming to a hover in front of him.

  Shockwave unfolded his arms in surprise. “Oh, yes, apologies,” he said in his refined way. “That first wave was only meant to push you to safety. I’m afraid I went a little high on the dosage.”

  “Not that,” Janis said. “That!” She pointed at the engulfed van, noxious black smoke now pouring off its burning tires. “There was a person in there, someone we could have gotten information from.”

  “Hmm,” Shockwave said thoughtfully, the flames reflecting off his visor. “I suppose you’re right.”

  Janis sensed that he was conceding for the sole sake of disarming her anger. Given the opportunity to do it all over, he would have nailed the van just as hard, if not harder. She rose up and crowded him. A part of her savored the discomfort it caused in him. He shuffled back a step.

  “Listen to me and listen good,” she said. “I can only imagine the kind of sadism that went on in the Scale.” She gave him a telekinetic shove in the chest, and he staggered for balance.

  “Hey!” he protested.

  “But here in the Champions…” She shoved him again. “…you think about the consequences of taking a life…” Another shove before he could regain his balance. “…before you take it.”

  Her final shove landed him on the seat of his jumpsuit.

  “Understood?”

  She foresaw his plan before he could act on it. With a pair of thoughts, she disconnected his helmet from its battery and then slipped into his mind. She exerted just enough force to blot out the part of his cerebrum that controlled his powers. By the time he extended an arm, he was no longer Shockwave.

  Just Diego.

  “Understood?” Janis repeated.

  He looked at his powerless hand, then lowered his arm. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Understood.”

  Janis glowered over him for a moment, but she felt the totality of his defeat. She had made her point. She lowered herself to the road and stuck a hand toward him. After a moment’s hesitation, he grasped it and allowed her to pull him to his feet.

  “I know you were trying to help,” she said, her emotions back under control. “But think next time. We followed them back here for information. And now…” She gestured toward the burning van. A deep sadness for the woman stole the rest of the fight from her, a woman who had appeared mentally disabled. “We’ll just have to hope we can glean something from the gunmen.”

  “Negative,” Scott said, emerging from the trees to her right. “They’re gone, too.”

  When her powers had come back online, Janis had sensed that Scott had help, that he was safe. She placed her arms around him anyway and pulled him against her, finding comfort in his solidity and warmth. He rubbed her back, then held her waist below the flares of her ribcage.

  Glad you’re all right, he thought inside her head.

  You too.

  By the time they separated, Minion had joined their group. She stood to one side, chin tucked with the same contrition Janis felt radiating from her thoughts. “I’m really sorry,” she said. “When I saw Scott in trouble, I went overboard, conjured more minions than were necessary. By the time I dispersed them, they’d already beaten the men silly … and then some.”

  Janis only nodded. She was too emotionally taxed for more anger. Plus, she could feel Minion’s sincerity. “There’s a learning curve,” she said. “The refinements come with practice. I’m glad you guys got here when you did.” She looked around. “Where’s the rest of the team?”

  “Agents picked up a faint signal from Titan’s tracer,” Shockwave said. Though he continued to wipe sand from his jumpsuit, he showed no ill will for his just-lost shoving match. “Director Kilmer had Tyler and Erin accompany a team of agents to investigate. Margaret is still in Oakwood. I understand Kilmer is having her work on Agent Steel to see if she can pry up whatever she’s hiding.”

  “Well, let’s hope one or the other leads to something,” Scott said, checking his watch. “We don’t have much time until Viper comes calling for those disbursement codes.”

  Janis felt the enormity of the looming dilemma. Provide the codes, and the kingpin would have the funding for the Soviets and their Dead Hand Project. Withhold them, and Reagan would pull the plug on the Champions Program—so long, see ya—and the kingpin would still get his money, eventually.

  “And let’s not forget Jesse,” she said, as much to remind herself as everyone else. “He’s still missing.”

  If only she could link to him.

  Jesse lowered his head toward the small window again. They had been driving steadily for the last hour, the van taking turn after turn. Jesse couldn’t see out well enough to know whether the driver was following a direct route or trying to confuse Jesse and whoever might be following them. Probably the second. They could just as easily be five miles out of town as fifty.

  He looked back at Titan, who had fallen asleep. His head lolled between slumped shoulders as the van turned again, this time onto what felt like a dirt road. The sudden vibrating awakened him. He snorted and peered around blearily, then ground a fist into his good socket.

  “Must be getting close,” Titan said.

  Jesse hoped so. He also hoped someone at their destination would have info on the kingpin. Otherwise, the Champions wouldn’t have anything to work with when they arrived.

  The van tilted forward, made several steep turns, and lurched to a stop. The driver got out. Jesse heard his footsteps coming around the side of the van. The rear door opened onto night and the blasts of insect sounds.

  “Follow my lead,” Titan mumbled.

  He scooted out and extended an arm back into the van. Jesse grasped it, and following a heave, he was out too, his hips and back groaning as he straightened. Titan was stronger than he appeared, Jesse noted as the man released his arm. He would need to remember that.

  “So, what is this place?” Titan asked in a half-cheerful, half-malicious voice.

  Jesse looked around, too. The van had descended an earthen switchback into what looked like an old quarry. A pale wall of bedrock loomed over them. To one side, large industrial cylinders lay in a rusting heap.

  “This way,” the driver said, slamming closed the back of the van and motioning them toward the wall.

  Jesse was aware that more men had arrived at the van. They crowded around the front and removed the large-headed passenger. Placing a metal band around his brow, they ushered him off. Jesse turned back to the wall in time to see a section of stone retracting. Light shone from a round opening. He ducked in after the driver and Titan, realizing they were inside a cylinder like the ones piled up outside. Their heavy footsteps clanged over riveted metal.

  After a hundred yards, the cylinder opened into a large room, lights strung across a ceiling of metal rafters. More cylindrical openings shot off, like spokes from a hub. Clustered on one side of the room was a small bank of computers, a couple of men monitoring them. To Jesse’s right was a common area of some kind, taken up by couches, chairs, a large table, and a row of fridges.

  “Have a seat,” the man who had been driving said. He was dressed in military fatigues, small arms holstered beneath the hem of a thick Kevlar vest. “Someone wants to talk to you.”

  “The boss man?” Jesse asked.

  “Your new handler,” the driver answered.

  “Good,” Titan said. “I want a few words with him, too. Mainly about the pecking order around here.” He lumbered to the common area and opened the fridge doors. He pushed some things around, then turned with an armload of packaged bread and boloney. “You planning on restocking anytime soon?” he asked, but the driver had already left.<
br />
  Jesse looked the room over again. Seeing no evident danger, he joined Titan at the table, hungry himself.

  “Do you know anything about this handler?” he asked.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Titan said. He laid out the slices of bread and began piling rounds of boloney onto every other one. “The only ones gonna be doing any handling around here are you and me. Got that?”

  Jesse’s B.S. detector was as refined as they came, and right now it wasn’t picking up any signals.

  “I’m telling you,” Titan went on. “It’s gonna be different this time.”

  Jesse shrugged even though he could tell his father meant what he was saying.

  “Here,” Titan said, capping half the sandwiches with final slices of bread and pushing them toward Jesse. “We’ve gotta build ourselves up again. Get our strength back. The boss man’s gonna have a lot of work for us. Saving-the-world kind of stuff, but it pays well, too.”

  He grinned and stuffed a sandwich into his mouth. Jesse was starting on his second when a shadow appeared in the cylinder ahead of him. Titan turned his head and wiped his mouth with a forearm.

  “Must be the handler,” he mumbled.

  When the figure stepped from the cylinder into the full light of the room, Jesse’s half-swallowed sandwich lodged in his throat. He made a choked sound and hammered his chest with a fist.

  “I should’ve known,” Titan said, unimpressed.

  The handler looked from him to Jesse, who had finally managed to swallow.

  “You?” Jesse said.

  “Welcome home,” the handler said to Titan. “But you should know, Jesse here only freed you in the hopes you would lead the Champions to our leader. He never had any intention of joining the Scale. He still doesn’t.”

  When Titan’s eye fell on Jesse, all the paternal gonna look out for you light went out of it. “That true?” he asked.

  “What? You’re gonna believe … hey!”

  Titan hooked a finger into the front of Jesse’s coat and jerked. The coat ripped away revealing, not an orange jumpsuit, but an armored Champions uniform. Jesse rose to his feet, hands balling into fists. The next thing he knew he was sitting, wrists bound behind him with metal shackles he couldn’t break.

  How in the hell did that happen?

  But he knew.

  He raised his eyes to the handler, who stared back at him.

  “I ain’t gonna forget this,” Jesse said.

  “Lock him away,” the handler ordered.

  23

  Reginald stepped into Director Kilmer’s office and closed the door behind him. He had been warming up in the training room in case he were called to action. As he crossed the room, his muscles felt lithe and fluid. Kilmer, on the other hand, appeared stiff and stooped.

  “Any progress on those operations?” Reginald asked.

  “Aside from the cleanup at the crash site?” Kilmer shook his head. “Scott and Janis were ambushed while tracking one of the vans that picked up Titan. Backup arrived in time to help, but they ended up killing any potential informants in the process. The team I sent out to track Titan’s tracer? They lost the signal and haven’t been able to pick it up again. So, not only have we lost our lines to the kingpin, we’ve lost a Champion. Until we can find him, Jesse’s on his own—and I don’t like that.”

  “For his sake or ours?”

  With a steep frown, Kilmer mulled it over. “Both,” he decided.

  “What about Agent Steel? Has she given anything up?”

  That she had been acting as an insider for the Scale hadn’t overly surprised Reginald. She had undercut Kilmer’s authority once before, probably in an attempt to have the Program shut down.

  Kilmer showed his palms. “Whatever she’s hiding, she’s holding onto with that iron will of hers.”

  “Where does that leave us?”

  “That’s actually why I summoned you. Titan made a call to the kingpin earlier tonight, a call Scott was able to trace. It led to our old headquarters in Arlington. The building, anyway. Do you remember it? Brown concrete, thirty-odd stories, on the corner of Wilson there.”

  The disclosure shook Reginald. “Yeah, but what does it mean?”

  “How well did you know the former director? Halstead?”

  Reginald felt his brow knit. He had once suspected Halstead of ordering the hits that had killed his teammates, Madelyn, and their unborn child. In a flash, he saw himself in Halstead’s office, striking him with a pistol butt, the gash above his eyebrow filling with blood. But…

  “I know how that sounds,” Kilmer said quickly, “but there’s a reason that call led to a secure line in the same building. I’m just trying to narrow down the explanations, rule out the ones that don’t make sense.”

  “Halstead coming back from the dead doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “I’ve gone back through the archives and come up with his medical diagnosis of liver cancer, a death certificate, and a note about his cremation. He’s dead on paper, sure. But so were you once.”

  “He’s not our kingpin.”

  “You suspected him at one time.”

  “I suspected you at one time, too.”

  “Look, I just want to know if it’s plausible. Keep in mind, I was only there a few months before the Program ended. Halstead, on the other hand, had been in his position for a good ten, twelve years. All that time, he was within a few blocks of some of the biggest names in defense. He would have seen the kind of wealth the industry was starting to generate, would’ve had time to make connections with the higher ups. He recruited Specials, like yourself. He hired the secretary, Mrs. Nance, who turned out to be Shadow. Doesn’t that strike you as a little coincidental? I mean, how could he have known about you but not your twin sister? Different foster homes, I get it, but there would’ve been records of your placement.”

  “I see where you’re coming from,” Reginald said. “But if there’s one thing I’ve become good at over the years, it’s reading people. Halstead doesn’t fit the profile of the person we’re after.”

  “No?”

  Reginald thought about Halstead’s forlorn cheeks, his ill-fitting dress shirts and ties, the way he drank bourbon out of a coffee mug. But most of all, Reginald remembered his sober sincerity: from his recruitment of Reginald to their final goodbye, when Halstead had hugged him. You deserved better than this, he’d said. The words still resonated deep in Reginald.

  “No,” he said.

  “Does this number look familiar to you?” Kilmer asked, sliding a piece of paper across the desk. Reginald leaned forward and studied the ten-digit number printed in Kilmer’s bold hand.

  “Should it?”

  “It’s the number Titan punched on the payphone. You used to call Director Halstead on a secure line, didn’t you?”

  Something in his tone transported Reginald back to their old office, then-Assistant Director Kilmer interrogating him on how his peculiar skin cells had ended up beneath the fingernails of Madelyn’s dead body. The same indignant anger bristled up Reginald’s nape.

  “What are you getting at?” he asked.

  “It’s a question, Reginald. That’s all.”

  Reginald took a calming breath and talked his twenty-six-year-old self back down. This isn’t personal. He wants the same thing as you. To find the kingpin before all hell breaks loose.

  “Can I see your phone?” he asked.

  Kilmer raised his eyebrows in question, but did as Reginald asked, turning around his desk phone with its three-by-four arrangement of buttons. Reginald pushed the piece of paper back to Kilmer.

  “Read off the numbers.”

  Reginald’s fingers moved over the buttons as Kilmer read them.

  “The number of the emergency line must’ve changed fifty times while I was there,” Reginald explained when they had finished. He tapped his right temple. “The number you’ve got didn’t spark anything up here, so I wanted to see if there was any kind of tactile memory—my fingers anticip
ating the rest of the sequence before you read it off.”

  “Anything?”

  A couple of times a finger had jumped to the next number. But more often, he had anticipated wrong, perhaps tapping into another memory. “Not enough to be even close to certain.”

  “Well, I’ve got a team en route to Arlington, in any case,” Kilmer said. “They’ll check out the switchboard and the building’s current tenants—mostly accountants and government contractors, from the looks of them. But we’ll see what happens when they start scratching surfaces.”

  “Before the midnight deadline?” Reginald asked skeptically.

  “Probably not. But we’ve gotten lucky before.”

  “Any word from the White House?”

  Kilmer exhaled as he leaned back. “The president has already taken a good deal of political risk with us. We can’t expect any more help. If we try to withhold the disbursement codes beyond the deadline, Reagan will kill the Program, sweep it under the rug. He’s not going to chance his presidency on this.”

  “But if Viper does get those codes…”

  “We’ll play the hand we’re dealt,” Kilmer said.

  24

  The Kremlin

  Moscow, Russia

  “The funds are to arrive today,” General Dementyev said from behind his desk. “You will have no more excuses. The Dead Hand system will be operational within two weeks, as agreed.”

  Aksakov, the Minister of Defense, looked over at the Chief of Staff before speaking. “General, we have met with the Central Committee.” He paused to clear his throat. “Given the destructive power of the Project, we urge you to consider more time for proper development and review.”

  Dementyev felt the first maddening wriggle in his head.

  The Chief of Staff took over. “As it stands, General, there are few to no fail-safes. Once the launch order is given, the Dead Hand becomes a fully automated system, activating an incomprehensible number of warheads. It will need a human override, at the very least.”