It would be best if he could leave Cedric at some town and continue on his way. However, if he did that, the authorities would hand the younger null over to the GCA without a second thought. Cedric would go willingly, in fact, and from there he would head straight to General Stone at Prom-E. He would also welch on Oliver, which meant that authorities would catch up to the older null in no time.
Oliver’s options were limited. In the dead of winter like this, life depended upon safe shelter, and safe shelter could only be found in the towns and cities. If he wanted a chance to survive, he would have to give up his hard-earned freedom and turn himself in.
They came to a plowed road and followed alongside it, riding on the snow-crusted shoulder. Oliver was almost relieved when they finally saw lights in the distance.
Almost.
The nearest lights belonged to a cluster of houses, a small development on the unincorporated outskirts of a larger town. Oliver slowed the snowmobile as he approached. A family—mother, father, two children—were exiting their little electric car, headed into their warm house.
They stopped to stare as Oliver parked the snowmobile and killed the engine. He wondered what he could say to them.
As it turned out, he didn’t get the chance to say anything at all.
“Help! Help me!” Cedric already scrambled off the snowmobile, tearing the scarf from around his face and discarding it in the snow. “Please, I’ve been kidnapped! Help!”
The father ushered his family into the house with an urgent command for his wife to call the police. Oliver, meanwhile, snatched up the discarded scarf, looped it around his neck, and worked to start the snowmobile again.
The engine churned to life. Cedric turned around. “Hey!”
“You’re on your own, ingrate,” Oliver called, and then he was off into the night. He wouldn’t get far, not with someone notifying the police. Cedric still had the Brotherhood fighter’s rifle strapped across his back, though. He’d been wearing it since they’d left the farmhouse, had most likely forgotten that it was even there. With any luck he would be taken as the larger threat by the family that he had pled to.
Yellow light blazed from the street lamps of the small town ahead. Red and blue flashed and a siren cracked the air, two blue police cars headed his direction.
The first one passed him, continuing on to the development where Cedric awaited pickup. The second stopped twenty feet ahead of him. A voice sounded over the loud-speaker.
“This is the police. Turn off your vehicle and step away from it with your hands in the air.”
Oliver did as he was told. He had pulled the scarf up over his nose as he rode, but he couldn’t hope for anonymity for long.
Might as well try the brazen truth.
An officer exited the driver’s side of the car, approaching slowly across the salted blacktop. “We had a report of some suspicious youths in the area, son. I’m going to have to ID you.”
“My chip’s deactivated,” Oliver said. “You might as well handcuff me and take me in. I have an illegal firearm in my right coat pocket. I shot a man with it this afternoon. And I’m the kid that everyone’s blaming for the Prometheus School Bombing, but I had nothing to do with that.”
The officer stood in the road, for an instant stunned by this confession. Then, in a flash, he had his weapon out and trained on Oliver.
“Keep your hands in the air! Hands in the air! Don’t move!”
Oliver was hard-pressed not to roll his eyes. At the moment, all he wanted was a sheltered room with a heater and a nice, hot meal.
Thoreau was right: the essentials of life were food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. Everything else was secondary, and in this particular moment, exhausted as he was, he could feel the want of those essentials keenly.
So he submitted to being cuffed, patted down, having backup called because he had a gun in his pocket. By the time they finally loaded him into the back of the police cruiser, his teeth chattered from the cold.
Happily, the heater was on.
They took him to the police station and put him in a cement room with nothing but a table and chairs in the middle and a mirror on one wall—an interrogation room. Someone would be watching from the other side.
“Can I please have something to eat?” he asked the officer on duty. “The past twenty-four hours have been miserable.”
The man returned ten minutes later with a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup. He set the tray on the table and efficiently removed the handcuffs from Oliver’s wrists.
The food was glorious.
The officer settled into a chair opposite him. “So what kind of confession can we get out of you?”
“What kind do you want?” Oliver asked through a mouth full of bread and melted cheese. “I’m assuming you’ve already called the Feds on me. I really didn’t have anything to do with the school bombing, though. I just make a good scapegoat.”
“Is that so?”
“None of the students are even dead,” said Oliver as he dunked a corner of his sandwich in the soup. “The whole operation was conducted by a group called the Overmountain Brotherhood. They’re planning an attack on another Prometheus campus—though whether they follow through with it remains to be seen. I shot their rabble-rousing ringleader in the shoulder this afternoon, at a farmhouse about an hour up the road. He had every intention of shooting me and Cedric first. I guess luck was on my side today, though it’s been pretty scarce in everything else.”
“You spin an amazing tale,” the officer said.
A sarcastic smile curled up one corner of Oliver’s mouth. Had he expected the man to believe him? It was too fantastic for anyone outside the loop of events.
Before he could reply, though, someone knocked from the other side of the observation window. A voice spoke from a speaker just above it.
“The Feds have issued a Do Not Interrogate with this one. He’s to go straight into holding, with no further contact from any of us until they get here.”
The officer’s brows shot up, but he tipped his head in acknowledgement. Without another word, he stood from his chair.
Oliver took a hasty bite of his sandwich, worried that it might not follow him to his cell, lamenting that he hadn’t gotten more than a dip of the soup.
The officer took pity on him. In a low voice, he said, “Carry your tray with you. Don’t give me a reason to put you back in handcuffs between here and your holding cell, okay?”
The past few days’ calamity had taught him gratitude for the strangest little mercies. This was one of them, that he would be allowed to finish this meal, meager though it was.
His cell, like the interrogation room, was made of concrete and sparsely furnished. Hot air poured in through a vent above the door. A cot stood by the opposite wall, with a commode and sink in the corner. The blanket on the cot was scratchy wool, promising warmth and discomfort at the same time.
The place wasn’t thousands of feet underground, though. It wasn’t hewn from living stone or shored up with rotting wood.
Oliver finished his soup and sandwich, relishing every last bite. He left the tray by the door and curled up on the lumpy mattress, cocooned within the blanket.
He should have stayed in the basement with Jenifer. This was a distant second to that. It was worlds beyond being cooped up in a Brotherhood base.
And it was lightyears beyond the death that had awaited him in a woodshed only hours before.
Monday morning brought breakfast and the sound of incessant whining.
“I don’t see why I have to be here. I’m a victim! I was taken from Prom-F with the rest of my classmates. Some people tried to kill me yesterday before I escaped. I only had that gun because Oliver told me to take it. I haven’t done anything wrong! Please, someone listen to me!”
At some point in the night, they had put Cedric in the concrete cell next to Oliver’s. Of course he would complain about such injustice. He was too special to be housed among criminals.
> His protests lasted through Oliver’s breakfast—fried eggs, hash browns with ketchup, orange juice—until one of the officers outside finally got fed up.
“Can it, kid. The Feds are the ones ordering you to be held here. They’re coming for you this morning, so you shouldn’t have long to endure. We can tape your mouth shut if that’ll help.”
Cedric was quiet after that.
Mid-morning, the lock tumbled out of place on Oliver’s cell door. He looked up from where he lay on the cot, but he didn’t make any effort to rise.
A man in a long wool coat entered. “Get up.”
Reluctantly, Oliver obeyed.
“Put your hands behind your back.”
They were transferring him. He submitted to having his hands placed in cuffs, to being led out the door and down the hall. Someone was doing the same to Cedric. The younger null protested violently at the injustice of it all, and Oliver sincerely hoped they would transfer the two boys in different vehicles.
His expectations were met. His escort helped him into the back of a black sedan. An identical one was parked next to it, awaiting Cedric’s advent.
Maybe, if he was lucky, they’d be sent to different destinations, too.
But that was ridiculous. With Prom-F gone, they would both end up at Prom-E. That’s where all nulls went.
Once again, his life was over.
Chapter 17
Stone Cold
Monday, February 25, 2:15 PM MST, FBI Field Office, Boise
Upon arrival in Boise, Oliver was taken to a small interrogation room and left there. They brought him lunch, but no one came in to speak with him.
Would it kill these government offices to get some comfortable chairs in their holding areas? But then, the discomfort was probably the point.
Yelling echoed through the closed door, emanating from down the hall. Maybe they were arguing about him. Maybe something else had happened.
Had the Brotherhood gone after Prom-B yet? Had they been intercepted? There wasn’t even a TV so he could watch the news.
The argument ceased. Footsteps strode down the hall, and a key slipped into the lock on his door. Oliver settled against his chair, dangling one arm over the back in a cavalier pose, his expression flat. He would sooner gut himself than show these people he was rattled.
The door opened. A federal agent scowled as he held it for Oliver’s visitor to pass through. General Bradford Stone swept into the room.
Oliver maintained his sullen glare and inwardly congratulated himself for such control.
“And here we have the unhelpful null-projector,” General Stone said smugly.
“And here we have the lying general,” Oliver rejoined. “Thanks for telling everyone in the world that I’m an antisocial mass murderer.”
He tipped his salt-and-pepper head in acknowledgment. “We had to get you back somehow. Poisoning the well against you was the easiest method, if you’d survived and managed to escape.”
“How Machiavellian of you.”
General Stone grunted, pleased by the remark. “You’re going to tell me everything you know about the people who took you, where they’re located, how you escaped, and any other pertinent information I want.”
With utmost insolence, Oliver thumbed his nose at the man, his fingers spread and wiggling.
General Stone slammed both hands on the table. A vein in his forehead pulsed purple. “Do you really want to play games with me, boy? Do you really?”
Oliver weighed his options. Stone needed him, so he wouldn’t kill him. But he might as well, for all the freedom Oliver had ahead of him.
The general continued. “Almost three hundred people are dead because you refused to cooperate before, do you understand? Two hundred seventy-eight, with another thirty-six in critical condition, their bodies burned, some of them beyond recognition. And you could have prevented it.”
“Bull,” said Oliver, even as guilt wrenched through him. “Prom-F was a target the minute Button’s message got through, so the fault lies with whoever pulled me off campus to allow that projection to occur.”
He didn’t name General Stone as the culprit. He didn’t have to.
The man didn’t flinch. “This ‘Button’ would have been off-campus before the attack and unable to project. The personnel wouldn’t have gathered all together in the cafeteria. The body count wouldn’t have been anywhere near that high.”
“They had their own projectors with them,” Oliver said. The Brotherhood fighters wouldn’t have tranquilized him so quickly otherwise.
“Who had their own projectors?” General Stone pressed.
“You know who. The military blew up one of their bases two days ago and blamed it on a methane leak.”
A puzzled expression crossed the general’s face. Was he wondering how Oliver had connected those two events? Did he think the null was stupid, or just oblivious? He stared hard, unspeaking, as though his gaze could bore holes into Oliver’s head.
Two hundred seventy-eight people dead. The death toll at another Prometheus campus might be double that. Even worse, the other campuses weren’t nearly as isolated as Prom-F and could have collateral damage beyond the school, depending on the type of attack.
“They’re planning to hit another campus,” Oliver said abruptly. Much as it galled him to give General Stone any information, he couldn’t nurse his own pride when so many lives were at stake.
“Who?” General Stone said again.
“Does it really matter who they are? And for the record, no one would be dead or in danger if you people would quit stealing children from their parents.”
General Stone grunted, but made no further acknowledgment of the accusation. “Which branch is their target?”
“Either Prom-B or Prom-C,” said Oliver. “Prom-B is closer.”
“And when will they strike?”
“I don’t know. I put a bullet in their rabble-rouser yesterday afternoon, so maybe they’ll delay.”
General Stone was not one to let on that anyone impressed or amused him, but both those emotions flashed across his face now. “And?”
Oliver shrugged. “It’s anyone’s guess how serious the injury was. With any luck, he’ll be out of commission long enough for his allies to question their stupid plans.”
“And his name?” General Stone prompted.
The null-projector was done with giving information. “Go talk to Cedric if you want a name. He was there too. He’ll squeal like a stuck pig and be glad to do it.”
The general’s eyes narrowed. “One of my associates is speaking with him right now, in fact.”
“Good,” said Oliver. “You’ll get the information you want, and I’ll get the satisfaction of withholding it from you.” It was a win-win. And a lose-lose, but most compromises in life were.
General Stone thumped his fist against the table and turned to leave. He paused on the threshold, though, to ask, “You really shot someone?”
“When the only options are to kill or be killed,” said Oliver, keeping his voice light, “the decision almost makes itself.”
The door swung shut behind the general, but not before a ghost of a smile crossed his face. Oliver fought the instinctive pride that leapt within him at having so pleased his adversary. He didn’t want General Stone’s approval. He didn’t want anyone’s approval.
Half an hour later, his holding area’s door unlocked again. “Get up. Come on,” General Stone said.
“Prom-E?” Oliver asked, sarcasm thick on his voice.
“Prom-B. Your stuck pig squealed. Since that’s their target, you’re going back in the line of fire.”
The general had a private plane and traveled with only a handful of underlings. They boarded and were in the air within minutes, cutting in line in front of all scheduled aircrafts.
Cedric was not with them. Oliver deigned not to ask what had become of him. General Stone would only need one null-projector, and it made sense that he would choose the stronger of the two for
the job. In all likelihood, Cedric was joining the rest of the nulls at Prom-E, whoever they were.
“So this Abel Ross is a null,” General Stone said.
Oliver fixed his gaze on the screen in front of him, determined not to be drawn into conversation. Even though it was only showing NPNN—and muted with subtitles, at that—it was better than conversing with the unscrupulous man.
The camera switched to Veronica Porcher for an update on the Prometheus School Bombing. Oliver’s picture flashed on screen.
According to the subtitles, he was still at large.
“Hey. Why haven’t you called off your national manhunt for me? I’ve been in custody since yesterday.”
General Stone glanced at the screen. A triumphant smile played at the corners of his mouth, but he held his tongue.
The wretch. Why did so many adults have to be so rotten?
Oliver stewed in bitterness as he watched the rest of the report. What good did it do them to maintain that he was still missing? To use a projector to broadcast that news nationally?
Maybe it lulled the Brotherhood into a false sense of security. If he was still at large, that meant their plans had not been discovered and they could move forward.
But wouldn’t it be better if they saw their plans as compromised and scratched the whole attempt? Or was General Stone using Prom-B as bait to lure them out of hiding?
The plane touched down in Seattle. The campus was an hour’s drive away. Oliver’s misgivings swelled as he loaded into the back of a black government sedan in the falling night. They headed east on the freeway.
General Stone spent the majority of the trip on his cell phone, giving cryptic orders. From what Oliver could decipher, he had had Liberty Ross removed to Prom-E. Even if Abel attacked, he would fail in his main objective.
It was a stupid move on the general’s part. Abel was a psychopath with only his children to lose. Take them away, and nothing would restrain his thirst for vengeance. If he arrived to discover Liberty gone, he would raze the school without hesitation whether Oliver was present or not.
Oliver Invictus (Annals of Altair Book 3) Page 12