Second Guess (The Girl in the Box Book 39)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Sent a text,” I said, trying to feign innocence.

  “Now?” Reed asked, tilting around to look at me. “To who?”

  I shrugged. They'd see soon enough.

  If it even worked.

  CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE

  Olivia

  The alarm klaxons howled, the console informing us of very, very dire tidings. That I was standing by a nuclear reactor in the process of meltdown was quite obvious to me. In the worst possible way.

  “Should we, uh...leave?” Angel asked. We were standing side by side next to the mysterious console.

  “I guess I could rocket us out of here before it goes all to hell,” I said, transfixed at the gibberish digital scroll rolling down the console. “But...”

  “Outrunning a meltdown wouldn't necessarily mean we outrun the fallout?” Angel asked.

  I frowned in concentration, trying to get to the real core of my feelings on this matter. “No, it's not that. I think it's...” I looked at her, and I could see the almost imperceptible distortion of her contact lenses in her eyes, “...I don't know that I want to walk around the rest of my life knowing that I was standing next to this reactor minutes before it blew, killing however many people, and that I ran...when they couldn't.”

  Angel looked stricken, then flicked her gaze away. “Yeah,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “That's a really good point.”

  Something moved through the reinforced window separating us from the cooling rods. Steam was hissing out there, as the rods plunged into the cooling water. Unsure whether that was good or bad, Angel and I inched closer, uncertainly.

  The klaxons started to fade. Footsteps down the hall heralded the arrival of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team...and hopefully some engineers to start fixing this mess.

  CHAPTER NINETY-SIX

  Scout

  “What the hell!” Francine shouted, spasming wildly as she seemed to come out of her electrically induced trance. The phone shot out of her hand, a little spark jumping between her flesh and the phone. She jerked, toppling over onto her back.

  “What is it?” Isaac was beside her in an instant. “What happened?”

  “Someone – someone snuck in behind me while I was fending off that – that–!” Francine shouted, then let fly profanities, gazing spitefully at her phone, which sat across the room, sparking quietly, little bolts of electricity crawling over it. “They kicked me out of the system and...” She blinked, voice fading. “...I think they pinged me. Got my GPS location.” She seized Isaac by the sleeve. “We have to go. Now.”

  Something that bordered on relief flashed on Isaac's face, immediately taken over by a tightly laced steely look. There was no argument; on the contrary, he grabbed her by the hand and hauled her to her feet. “Scout – you heard her. Pack fast. We need to move.”

  “Oh – okay,” Scout said, and stuttered into motion, heading for her room. She didn't have much to pack; a couple masks that Isaac had picked up in town. A few snacks for the impending flight. She scooped them all into a backpack.

  Did Isaac seem a little weird to you out there? AJ asked as she threw her things into the bag.

  “Yes,” Scout whispered. When she paused, she could hear the other two going through the same motions in their rooms: cramming things into their own bags. “But I've kinda thought so since...”

  She didn't need to finish. Since Nealon told you that thing about him and Francine banging away while you and I were getting beat down out in the tank farm?

  “Yeah,” Scout whispered. “Since then.”

  I know what you mean, AJ answered after a moment's pause. It was a long moment, one in which she was certain he was going to come back at her hard, tell her she was being foolish, letting Sienna Nealon into her head. But it's gotta wait, you know?

  “I know,” Scout said, tossing the backpack over her shoulder – both shoulders. First they had to flee, to live to fight another day.

  Or else all of this would be for naught.

  CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN

  Sienna

  “Crisis averted,” Jamal said. “I booted her out, got the rods submerged in the remaining coolant, and stopped the drain.” He took a deep breath, then blinked a few times, looking around the Gulfstream's cabin. “I swear I felt an assist there, though.”

  “What do you mean?” Reed asked, standing at his shoulder – but looking at me.

  “She kind of peeled off in a hurry,” Jamal said. “Like someone got in through a backdoor on her and started messing with her connection or...I don't know.” He rubbed his eyes. “I only caught the aftershocks as she retreated. Felt like she did it in a hurry, though.”

  “What do you imagine could prompt that?” Reed asked. Still staring at me.

  “Another hacker tracing her back to her IP address,” Jamal said.

  My phone buzzed. Loudly.

  “Who is that?” Scott tried to lean in to look at my phone, but I stuck my hand in his face and physically pushed him back. “Rude,” he announced, ripping himself away from the skin to skin contact with my palm.

  “Says the guy who wanted to spy on my conversation,” I said, taking in the content of the text message I'd just gotten. “Our villain was operating from an IP address in Western Kentucky.” Everyone in the cabin looked at me. “Outside a town called Windyville. I have coordinates here.”

  “You had a hacker leap in behind her,” Jamal said.

  “Another favor owed?” Reed asked darkly.

  “If so, I owe it,” I said, checking the follow-up text: I'll add it to your tab.

  “Cassidy?” Reed asked quietly.

  “No,” I said, pocketing the phone. “Jamal's old pal ArcheGrey.”

  Jamal perked up at that. “Arche? You know how to contact her?”

  “...You don't?” I asked, genuinely puzzled that such a bright and clever guy could be stymied by the challenge of getting hold of the world's most elite hacker. As though she wouldn't monitor usage of her own callsign all over the net.

  “Well, I...” He looked flustered. “...I guess I haven't...tried...too hard. Lately.”

  Reed rubbed his forehead with both hands, and I wondered whether he'd genuinely developed a headache in the last thirty seconds or was just doing it for effect. “Can you...please...just stop making deals with the various devils you know?”

  “Hey, Arche isn't an angel, but I'm not sure she falls under the heading of devil, either,” Jamal said.

  “You just saying that because you got a big ol' crush on her,” Augustus said. “I gotta meet this girl at some point, see what all the fuss is about.”

  “Can we talk about this some other time?” I asked.

  “If your pattern of evasiveness on the subject holds,” Reed said, still rubbing his face, “then no. Probably not.”

  “If you think I'm not going to pull every string, work every contact, do any deal I can to keep a nuclear meltdown from hitting the Tri-State area,” I said, “the most populous place in the entire US...I would submit you have not been paying attention to me for the last umpteen years.”

  He just did not stop rubbing his head, moving his fingers down to massage his temples. After a long, deep sigh, he said, “I'm going to go talk to the captain and see if we can change our course.” He looked rather pointedly at me. But he didn't say anything. I guess we really were going to talk about it later.

  Yay.

  CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

  Windyville, Kentucky didn't have a proper town center that I saw. There was a trailer that was the location of the local beauty salon, a cluster of houses close to the intersection of a few main roads. That was about it, and in a flash, we were onward and following roads off the beaten path into woods beyond town.

  Our target was a house five miles outside of “town,” off the paved roads and onto the dirt and gravel. We pulled up just outside the trees and stopped a few hundred yards from the target.

  “We should have shotguns for this,” Augustus said.

  “Why shotguns?”
Jamal asked.

  “He's quoting Pulp Fiction,” Scott said.

  “Naw, I really believe we ought to have shotguns if we're going to go busting into the hideout of our villains,” Augustus said. “I mean, aren't we working for the FBI right now?”

  “We are,” Reed said. He'd been awfully quiet since our little tete-a-tete on the plane. He'd stopped rubbing his forehead and temples after a half hour or so, but I sensed he was still in a mood as related to me and my wheeling and dealing tendencies. “But they're not just going to hand us all guns and trust us to carry them all over the country, not without the official FBI badges and clearance and whatnot.”

  “You literally had the badges and clearance last week,” Augustus said, looking right at me. “Why can't they give you a little somethin' somethin'?”

  “Because I don't have badges or clearance now,” I said with a smile, “and the idea of giving Sienna Nealon a gun makes government lawyers shudder in fear.”

  “That's a really good point,” Scott said.

  “Yeah, I'd say lawyers ruin everything, but even I'd hesitate to hand you a gun I liked for fear of never getting it back after you go on a spree with it,” Augustus said.

  “Speaking of going on a spree,” I said, trying to get their heads back in the game. “We're unarmed here. The local FBI office is sending a team, but they're at least thirty minutes out by my reckoning.” I checked my phone clock. “The sheriff's department SWAT team is similarly going to take a while.”

  “One might think this place was chosen by our terrorists for its lack of proximity to serious law enforcement opposition,” Reed said dryly.

  “And one would be right,” I said, “especially given the only reason we're here this quickly is because of that rinky dink airfield we barely survived landing on. Still, we're left with the choice: go in or wait.”

  Reed rolled his eyes. “Don't.”

  I stared at him. “What?”

  “Nothing,” he sighed, but it was definitely something. “Let's go.” And he led the pile-out from the car.

  The house was a simple building that looked like it had been around for a hundred years or so. It seemed to have started as a one-room cabin, but had some additions added on over time, more rooms to expand the footprint. I didn't see an electrical connection, and wondered how they'd charged their phones or powered any devices they had–

  Then it hit me – lightning lady. Who needed device charging plugs when you had a Thor with you?

  “We really should have shotguns for this shit,” Augustus muttered.

  “I knew you were quoting Pulp Fiction!” Scott pointed his finger at Augustus as we ran, bent nearly double, trying to stay low and in the cover of the trees.

  “Maybe,” Augustus said slyly.

  I stopped at the treeline just shy of the house. I could see into the windows from here, though they weren't exactly huge picture windows. They were the smaller sort that befit this style of construction. Peering inside revealed nothing, because the slice of the house that could be seen through the windows was minimal.

  “How do we tell if they're in there?” Scott asked, his voice meta-low. He was covering behind a wide-trunked maple tree.

  “I got an idea,” Jamal said, sans laptop for once lately. He broke cover from his tree and sprinted full-out to the side of the house.

  “Anyone else got a bad feeling about this?” Augustus asked.

  “Stop mangling your movie quotes,” Reed said. When he caught a sharp look of questioning from Augustus, he added, “Star Wars.”

  “That wasn't a movie quote,” Augustus said. “I do have a bad feeling about this. My brother is running up to a terrorist hideout without any cover.”

  “I wouldn't say 'without any.'” My hands were lit with fire and ice, and my eyes glowing with fairy light. If anyone in that house so much as sneezed, they were getting either a two-thousand-degree compressed bullet of flame shot at them or a spear of ice chilled to minus 50.

  “Same,” Scott said, and his hands shimmered, awash in water.

  Someone thumped up next to me, and I didn't turn to look; the flash of slightly frizzed hair told me it was Lethe. “What's all this shit your brother's been giving you about making deals?”

  “Ater-lay,” I said under my breath.

  “What is that? Pig Latin?”

  “You said you were a cop,” Reed said from two trees down. “Shouldn't that be right in your wheelhouse?”

  “Chill, you two,” I said. The sense of rising tension between my grandmother and my brother was not a reassuring thing.

  Jamal had crept on one of the windows and placed his palm on the glass. There was a flash, and I saw him direct electricity into the house. The other windows flashed, and then everything was quiet.

  “Nobody's inside,” Jamal announced.

  “Did you just...did you...?” Augustus seemed to be searching for a way to describe what had happened. “What did you just do?”

  “Ran low level voltage through the place to see if I encountered any living things,” Jamal said. “The heart...it's kind of electrical. So I probed for beating hearts.”

  “Then...there could be dead hearts in there...?” Scott asked.

  Jamal started to answer, then froze. “...Yes. I guess.”

  Putting an end to the argument, I flew into the nearest door, smashing it in. It hadn't even been locked, and inside I found a wide open area that was bereft of life but full of the recent signs of it.

  “Someone's been eating out of cans,” Augustus said, nodding at a trash can that was a little rank, and getting kind of full. I could smell the residue of cold Spaghetti-O's, among other such fare.

  “We'll have the crime lab sift it when they get here,” Reed said, and a whirl of wind pushed through the place. He floated by me, looking into one of the rooms off the main while I checked another. “Clear,” he announced.

  “Clear,” I agreed.

  “Same,” Augustus said, pulling his face out of the last. “Not even a sleeping bag left behind.”

  “They took 'em with them,” Scott said, postulating out loud. “Whatever they were sleeping on.”

  “Makes sense,” I said. “If this was their safe house, then...they might be sleeping out in the woods for a while now that it's blown.”

  “And Arche found this through their hacker's phone GPS?” Reed was looking around the place with a cold eye.

  “Yep,” I said. I didn't sense he was looking for the answer so much as confirming something already going through his head. Or maybe...

  “Any chance she could get it to ping again?” he asked, after a long pause.

  “I could ask her,” I said, “but unless I miss my guess, those phones are dead, either fried or dropped somewhere that isn't remotely close to our perps. They're a little too careful for this. If anything, they'll pick up new burners to replace them in the next few hours, and not even dare to go online in a way that comes in contact with us.”

  “They've been playing it pretty smart so far,” Jamal said. “Exposing themselves to try and help melt down that power station? That was risky.”

  “It almost paid off,” I said quietly. “And all they lost was...this little slice of paradise.” I looked around the rickety house. It was dirty, bare...a real rustic shithole of the sort I wouldn't have wanted to spend any time in, even if I was determined to rough it for a while. “And a few cell phones. Not a terrible trade.”

  “If you're evil, you mean,” Scott said, looking at me with visible alarm.

  I shrugged. “Of course.”

  “Of course,” Reed said, but there was no hiding the distress – or maybe just actual stress – in his voice as he pronounced, “Another dead end.”

  CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

  The FBI and local cops showed up about twenty minutes later to find us all chilling in the rental car. It hadn't taken us long after arriving to realize that there was no plumbing to speak of, just a manual pump and an outhouse bereft of any toilet paper, presumab
ly because our quarries had taken it with them.

  “Bastards,” I announced upon discovering that I had to pee and that there was no TP.

  “Cry me a river,” Lethe said. So helpful. She didn't even offer any advice from her thousands of years of toilet paperless existence.

  I emerged from the outhouse a few moments later feeling distinctly sick to my stomach. Meta senses coupled with an outhouse? A terrible combo that made me wish I was human, and one with an impaired sense of smell at that.

  “Hey, did you just use that outhouse?” an FBI crime scene tech in full plastic regalia asked as I shut the door behind me.

  “Yeah,” I said, still quite irritable from the experience, “sorry if I ruined your stool samples.”

  He blinked behind the plastic goggles. “You know, we can analyze the pattern of local vegetables in–”

  “Let me stop you right there, ace,” I said, throwing up a hand. “I don't want to know any more.”

  “This is a crime scene,” he pouted. “You were an agent. You ought to know better.”

  “Sorry I pissed in your shitshow,” I said. “There's no toilet paper, and I didn't feel like hiking up in the woods above that ridgeline to do my business.” I waved in the direction of the nearest privacy, which was probably half a mile out, over a hill. “I'm sure you'll figure things out. You look like a man who knows his shit.” And I left before he could say any more.

  My team was spread out; Reed was talking to the agent in charge. Augustus and Scott were hanging back, discussing...something. Lethe was keeping her distance from all of them, and Jamal...

  I hit the manual pump to wash my hands, then eased up to Jamal, who was sitting on the hood of his car, laptop in hand. As I approached, he made no move to clear his screen, which was on Socialite. He wasn't scrolling his feed, though, or at least he didn't until I'd popped up on the hood next to him. “What's the view from the 'net?”