Uh oh, Zack said again as that thought became obvious to him.
“Yep,” I said. “Number one—Palleton Labs. Number two—the task force. And number three —” I paused, because in truth, I had only the vaguest idea of what to do about this one, but now that I had it on my list … I’d work the problem. I’d come up with a solution.
You can’t do that … Bastian said, uneasily.
“Oh yes, I can,” I said, clicking the lock as I opened the door. “Number three … President Gerry Harmon.”
19.
It took me a few hours of slow flight to reach the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. I had walked out into the desert a ways and hung out there for a little while, waiting until the darkness started to fall before I really launched off. I didn’t want to chance some real-time downlooking satellite getting a clear picture of my flight path, after all. They were going to come after me, but I didn’t have to make it easy for them.
I kept the speed relatively low, tried not to race the sunset. That strained my patience, my hoodie stapled again to my damned head (seriously, you guys, ow) and wig hair whipping in the wind, but it was better safe than sorry, I figured.
I found Palleton Labs out in the Portland suburbs after night had fully fallen. It was a strangely pyramidal building, the sides sloping closer together with every floor as it rose. It was only four stories tall, which was fortunate, I guess, because a couple more and the top of the building might have come to a razor-sharp point. Thankfully it was distinctive enough that I knew it from the sky, and it took very little searching to pick it out.
I overflew the building twice trying to get a clear idea of what was waiting for me. Palleton Labs had been attacked by Timothy Logan and his buddies about a month ago, after all, and whoever was in charge of this establishment would surely have tightened security. We humans are really good at making sure to close that barn door after the horse has cantered off, after all.
Sure enough, I caught sight of security guards on the roof, walking the perimeter, and even inside when I swooped low enough to take a look inside the well-lit hallways. Apparently whoever was running this show had decided a display of manpower was the best deterrent against another burglary.
Unfortunately for them, they were planning for the last burglars and not the one that was about to rob their asses blind.
I bound every one of the rooftop guards to the gravel on my next pass, then dropped onto the roof between their insensate bodies (I had put a little extra oomph! into the light webs I used. Not enough to crack skulls, but enough to cause significant bruising and loss of consciousness). Gravel crunched beneath my feet as I settled down, and I stalked over to where I’d burned through the roof the last time I’d been here.
The rooftop had been repaired, which was good for them, I guess. It would have been easier on me if all I’d had to do was lift up a sheet of unsecured plywood, but that was probably a little too much to ask for. I wondered if they’d taken my entry point as a critique of another of their security flaws and used it as a chance to improve. I suspected they had if they’d gone to the trouble of hiring a metric ton of security guards.
I sighed. “Fine, make my life difficult,” I muttered. I stripped the pistol out of the holster of one of the guards, then helped myself to his ammo and several mags from two of the other guards. It was a full-sized Glock, looked like a 17, though I couldn’t tell for sure in the dark. I checked the spare mags and they fit, so apparently the security guards had gone with a standard-issue weapon. I didn’t know whether that was unusual for security guards, but it made me worry just a little bit that these were more than garden-variety rent-a-cops.
Rather than trying to carve through the ceiling like last time and finding out immediately how they’d improved their security system, I stuck my head over the side of the building. Two guards were pacing on the sidewalks below, but they weren’t looking at me. I wrapped them to the concrete walking path with light webs, then flew up and did the same to the guys walking the beat on the other side of the building. I watched for signs of any other patrolling guards, and when all was clear after five minutes, I drifted over the side of the building in hover mode and wafted up to the big glass windows of the fourth floor. Offices were lined up inside, and I could see roving guards moving around in the hallways beyond. I waited until they were past, then cut my way carefully through the glass window, carving a circular section out using my finger as a blowtorch. I caught the glass before it fell into the office and crashed on the floor, then flung it like a Frisbee into the night. I heard it break in the distance, and after a few seconds in which nobody hurried to investigate, I sighed in relief and flew into the office.
Palleton Labs was pretty much as I remembered it; offices on the fourth floor ringed the exterior of the building, and inside was a windowless wall that hid a secure vault. I looked up at the tiles above me and decided at some point I was going to need to test whether they’d put alarms in the ceiling. But not yet, probably.
I dropped down to my chest like I was going to do a pushup, hiding behind the waist-high solid walls that separated the offices from the corridor. There were windows above that, but I was so close to the wall that the passing guards probably wouldn’t be able to see me as they completed their circuit. Their footsteps were a steady clicking, a cadence, almost, which suggested they might be ex-military. That wasn’t usual for security guards, especially not multiple security guards at the same location. More and more, I got the feeling that Palleton Labs was hiding something really valuable in that vault.
I just hoped, since I was going to the trouble of becoming an actual criminal, that it was going to be something worthwhile and germane to my mission to unravel the mysteries surrounding me. Ten thousand tons of diamonds would also have been acceptable.
I waited until the guards passed again and then bound them to the solid corridor wall with light webs. They thumped against it hard, damaging the drywall. Once they were out, I used the cracked drywall that one of them had so helpfully busted with his head and peeled back a layer. I found steel beams inside, as I’d expected. Last time I’d been here, I’d found the entry door to the interior of the fourth floor where they kept the vault sealed with a door that Timothy Logan’s party had to burn through with their resident Gavrikov.
I looked around. The smoke alarms were glaringly obvious and seemed to be newly placed, the outline of old ones visible in the places where the ceiling tiles hadn’t been replaced. There was a weathered, circular outline of paler coloring visible around the edges of the new smoke alarms. I suspected they’d gotten the full upgrade, including more sensitivity and maybe even heat sensors.
There were also cameras, which meant I probably didn’t have a ton of time.
“As the great 21st-century philosopher Deadpool once said,” I muttered under my breath, “maximum effort!” And I triggered a blast of pure Gavrikov-based heat.
The inferno leapt out of me as though I’d been carrying the Aria fire with me all this time, just waiting for a chance to let it out. It seared through the wall in front of me, turning the metal reinforcement behind the layer of drywall to molten slag. When I finished, there was an ovoid hole big enough for me to step through, and I did just that, finding myself once more in the presence of the Palleton Labs vault.
The vault itself was probably thirty feet by ten feet, a rectangular room in the middle of the floor, with biometric locks and keypads built into the steel door. I didn’t even bother to try burning through, because I knew it had been attempted before.
What’s the big plan now? Zack asked. I still hadn’t shared it with him yet, because I felt like being mysterious.
“Stuff,” I said casually. I’d had very little socialization over the last month, and it might have been making me more ornery than usual, if such a thing was possible. I looked down and cracked my knuckles. “Gavrikov?”
Huh? Gavrikov wondered, but he put his power at my disposal nonetheless.
Fire alarm klaxo
ns were already wailing in the halls, and when I triggered off another quick burst of flame to burn through the floor, they started in the entry as well. I took a step forward and dropped down to the third floor before the sprinklers kicked in. There wasn’t a vault on the third floor, but it was pretty obvious where the massive support columns had been placed to hold that monstrosity up. Water started to trickle down through the hole a second later, dripping like an indoor rainstorm onto the carpeting.
I was in a cubicle farm, no guards in sight. Why would there be? There was nothing on the third floor worth protecting, after all.
I took a few long strides into the middle of the room, mentally calculating where the vault would be above me. It didn’t take a lot to eyeball it.
Are you going to drop the vault down? Eve asked, filled with curiosity. Because I doubt that will open it.
“You’d better wait and see,” I singsonged, enjoying myself tremendously. I stared at the ceiling, finishing my calculations as the sound of booted footsteps hammered in the corner stairway. They passed right by the third floor without slowing down. Predictable, but a sign I needed to hurry.
I lifted off the ground and put my hands up when I reached the ceiling, placing my shoulders squarely against the underside of the vault. I pressed, crunching my way through the ceiling tiles and into the concrete subfloor. The pressure on my shoulders got intense in a hell of a hurry; I was against the bottom of the vault now, flush with the concrete supports holding it up.
Oh, man, Zack said, finally getting it. Really?
“Just like saving Chicago from a meteor,” I said, far more cheerfully than I should have been considering I was about to lift several tons. “This should be good, because I haven’t really worked my upper body in a month or so.”
Yes, your deadlift has suffered, Bastian said dryly. I bet you can only juggle six or seven garbage trucks at this point.
“Thanks for the sweet workout idea,” I said, grunting as I started to fly up. “If we … make it through this shit … I am totally … using THAT!”
The last word came out in a grunt as the concrete subfloor separated from the steel beams that were holding up the vault. Most of the concrete peeled away; apparently the contractor hadn’t bothered bolting the vault down, so when I broke through the slab, it busted all to pieces, aggregate material shattering into pebble-sized chunks and raining down around me.
I was pushing hard, and my shoulders slammed against the unbending steel barrier of the vault bottom. It was surprisingly lighter than I would have guessed, much, much lighter than the meteor I’d stopped with my shoulders only a year or so earlier. I rose and the vault rose with me, horrendous sounds of metal bending in the walls and drywall cracking and crumbling filling the air around me.
I felt the roof cave in around me as I lifted the vault out of its place on the fourth floor. Security guards nearly shit themselves before my eyes as I passed through the fourth floor. It crumbled after me, sending those dudes scrambling for safer ground rather than giving them a chance to shoot at me or something. If fortune favored the bold, then the lady stealing a multi-ton vault out of a suburban lab should probably have put some money on the lottery later tonight, cuz this? This was some serious chutzpah.
The last pieces of the roof came crumbling down around me, and I shook the vault slightly, careful to maintain my grip as I rose a hundred feet into the air. I wanted to get some of the debris off, but I also didn’t want to get too high. If I stayed low, even with the metallic mass of the vault, I could avoid being seen on radar. That was important to my current plan.
Well, shit, Eve said in rough admiration, you really did it.
“Suck it, doubters,” I said as I turned north and west. I propelled myself forward, and the vault, resting on my shoulders, came with me. “I bet this gives someone an ulcer.”
The question is, Zack asked, who?
“I was wondering that myself,” I said, as I flew off into the night, following the contours of the earth with care and dodging trees so as to avoid impaling myself on a pine. “I guess we’ll just have to find a way to open this puppy up and figure it out.”
20.
Harmon
I was half-asleep in my chair in the residence when the call came in. It was a chair I’d brought here instead of one that belonged, and it was—to use my wife’s opinion—ugly. It was overstuffed, something approaching three decades old, probably the sort of thing you’d find in an old man’s house, but I didn’t care. It had been cradling my ass since long before it was a presidential ass, and as far as I was concerned, it could keep cradling my ass now that it was presidential.
The trilling of the phone was a familiar albeit unwelcome disruption. I answered it immediately, and barely got out a, “This is Harmon,” before Cassidy’s voice burst onto the line.
“Sienna Nealon just hit a place called Palleton Labs,” Cassidy said, in that high-pitched, near-whining voice of hers. It was not my favorite part of her. (My favorite part of her was her brain. It was the only part of her I had any use for.)
I usually process news quite quickly. For some reason, that didn’t happen this time. “Excuse me?” I asked, probably sounding like I was chastising her for the rudeness with which she was delivering this information. I wasn’t; I didn’t care for formality, at least in this. “She broke in?”
“Yes,” Cassidy said, voice straining in a way that told me that a mere break in, it was not. There was more.
“And?”
Cassidy hesitated in the same manner that Jana had when she’d failed to name McSorley, McCluskey and Shane just that morning. “I don’t know for sure—”
“Yes, you do.”
“I think she stole some kind of … vault?” I knew it wasn’t mere speculation; she knew it for a fact.
My eyes flicked back and forth over the private sitting room, but I maintained a steely calm. “Let me know when you’re sure,” I said, letting her verbal obfuscation be my excuse for ending the conversation. I hung up without a further word, my jaw clenching inadvertently. My hand closed into a fist, something that never happened; I detested physical violence, and had never stooped to it myself.
I sat in the silence, in the semi-darkness, and eyed the door, where the Secret Service were probably watching me through the peephole. I didn’t care.
“That little bitch,” I said, and barely kept myself from bringing a hand hammering down on the arm of my chair. I’d already lost one valuable thing that night, after all. She wasn’t worth losing another.
21.
Scott
He was awakened in the middle of the night by a hard knock on the door to the small office in FBI HQ. Scott was half out of it, dreaming of wide waters, of the time he’d held back the MacArthur Park Lake from raining down on Sienna. Something about the memory was choking him, but the sound of the knock jarred him back to alertness, though he almost wished it hadn’t.
“Got company, boss,” J.J.’s voice came through the wood-paneled door. Scott felt the rough fabric of the couch against his sweaty palms. He reabsorbed the moisture and dabbed at his forehead. It came away wet, too.
“Who is it?” Scott croaked. His mouth was dry, at least. He forced himself to his feet and grabbed his jacket from where he’d left it, draped across the back of one of the visitor chairs in his office. He put it on as he opened the door and found J.J. standing outside, face more neutral than it had ever been in all the time they’d worked together. Most of that time had been during the war against Sovereign. With Sienna on our side, Scott thought dimly.
And now she’s the new Sovereign.
Something about that prickled at him. But is she, really?
Yes, a small voice insisted within.
“Contractors, according to Director Phillips,” J.J. said. “I guess the president called them in from overseas? Metas, you know.”
“We don’t have metas of our own to deploy?” Scott asked, feeling like he was walking hunchbacked, the weight of the world o
r the ocean or something on his shoulders.
“Not in civilian service, I guess?” J.J. didn’t seem very sure. “I honestly don’t know. He called, they came. Whistled ‘em up and now they’re here. They’re waiting for a meet and greet with the man in charge, which, uh, is you, technically.”
“Right,” Scott said, and followed J.J. down the hall.
When he got to the small meta-division bullpen, he found a strange spectacle awaiting him. Six unfamiliar guys, most in black tactical garb, were waiting, clustered in a small knot in front of him. They were pretty standoffish, eyes directed at Scott’s team, which was waiting silently and still across a chasm of desks. Reed and Augustus were just sitting there, staring at the newcomers as though they were going to attack at any moment.
“Oh, good, you’re here,” Friday said, hopping to his feet and drawing every eye in the room to him through the motion. Hunters, Scott thought. They watched for movement. Augustus and Reed were included in this assessment, too, though they had already gone back to staring down the new arrivals. Friday drifted over to Scott and inclined his head, whispering, as though everyone in the room couldn’t hear him. “Lot of tension here.”
“I noticed,” Scott said tightly. He took a quick look at the new folks and stepped up, figuring he needed to introduce himself. “My name’s Scott Byerly and I’m—”
“We know who you are,” a guy in the front of the line said. He was Eastern European, with jet-black hair and had the accent, though Scott couldn’t have placed it any more specifically than that if he’d had a gun to his head. The man looked to each of them in turn: “Reed Treston. Augustus Coleman.” His eyes narrowed when he reached Friday. “You, we do not know, but our files label you as ‘The Gimp.’”
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