I blinked at him. “What plane?”
Harry grinned broadly. “Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy getting into a spot of bother every now and again while trying to help you, young lady, but … I’m getting paid for this. We all are. Veronika’s in contact with your employer’s agent, and we’ve got full license to do whatever we have to—how’d Veronika put it? ‘Aid Sienna Nealon however necessary.’”
I stared at him. My employer’s new agent had authorized payouts to people to help me. I felt taken aback, not quite sure how to respond. “That would have been good to know thirty days ago,” I finally decided, trying to be judicious in my reply.
“Better late than never,” Harry said, turning us north, toward the freeway, and taking us out of the federal dragnet that was encompassing Salt Lake City.
69.
Harmon
“The Starbucks is clear,” Reed Treston’s staticky voice sounded over the piped-in speaker in the Situation Room. I had my eyes closed, basking in semi-darkness, a little light penetrating through my eyelids. I had my focus on Scott Byerly, holding him without crushing his mind utterly, while Reed and Augustus and the surviving members of the Revelen crew checked the last known location of our fugitives.
“I have no sign of the speedster leaving the building,” the commsat operator spoke through to me.
“He probably left at regular speed,” I said, closing my eyes. “Watch the building for three people departing.” That would be too easy, though, wouldn’t it? “Watch for two people departing as well. You have a new description on Sienna Nealon.” I kept my eyes tightly shut. “Check the security camera footage in the Starbucks, Treston.”
“On it,” Reed said tightly. He wasn’t wavering yet, but that was because my imprinting was fresh. “It’ll be a few minutes.”
“By all means, take your time,” I said with all sarcasm, “I’m sure they’re not getting farther and farther away by the second.” I hit the mute button on the speakerphone as Cassidy entered, her laptop clutched under her arm. She wasn’t wearing that wetsuit she so frequently wore, thankfully. I was at my limit of being able to cover for her, after all, and manipulating the thoughts of the Secret Service agents outside as well as Jana so that a woman without a security clearance or any sort of ID could enter the White House Situation Room was one more drain on my abilities.
“You sent for me?” Cassidy asked, holding her laptop in front of her chest like some sort of shield.
“Sienna Nealon continues to fail at dying,” I said, closing my eyes once more. I didn’t need to look at her face to know Cassidy was displaying a subtle interplay of emotions—mostly relief at the fact that I was failing in my attempts to end this little bitch as spectacularly as she had. “For such a blunt instrument, for such an unknowing … uncouth … barbarian, she certainly is good at causing problems.”
“She’s not what you expected,” Cassidy said, as though I were looking for catharsis instead of aid.
“I don’t care what she is,” I said, “so long as she will be a corpse, and soon.” I opened my eyes. “In that vein, what do you have?”
“I don’t, but—” Cassidy rushed to say more before I could give her an angry earful, “… I do have a new formula that’s being manufactured as we speak.”
I stared at her. “And your simulations …?”
“Eighty-five percent.” She shrugged to absolve herself in case of failure. “I thought it might be worth a test run.”
“Indeed it is,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “You have a subject in mind?”
“You have a few we could try it out on,” she said without guile. “But if need be—”
“No,” I said, the idea lodging in my brain. There was merit there. “I like that. But … we’ll need to study long-term side effects.”
“Provided it’s used on existing metahumans, I can’t conceive of a lasting side effect,” Cassidy said. “Because our DNA regenerates damage at such a rapid pace, even something truly toxic could be metabolized out—”
“Remember, I know people, not chemistry,” I said.
“High-level metas will heal from whatever it does,” she said with another shrug. “The worst you’d experience is a regression of effect, which could conceivably be offset by regular dosing … but that might introduce toxicity—you know what, never mind,” she finally caught on. “We’ll see what happens on the trial.”
“So you want me to use Sienna Nealon’s friends as test subjects,” I said, chuckling softly to myself. “Cruel.”
Cassidy stood there, still using her laptop as a shield. It wouldn’t protect her from anything I would attack her with, but the protective instinct was simply that; instinct. “They would heal,” she said again. “Cancer, tumors, paralysis … all them have enough power that they’d—”
“I approve,” I said. “Assuming we’ve really lost her again, I’ll have them brought back here, and you can proceed with clinical trials.” I paused in thought. “Where is this drug being manufactured?”
Cassidy blushed. “One of Cavanagh’s old outfits in Frederick, Maryland. They don’t know they’re doing it for us, it just … appeared in their system. It was the closest R and D facility I could subvert.”
“That’ll work,” I said, and then, remembering how she’d started the conversation, I felt a curious desire for commiseration. “How many times did she dodge your attempts to kill her?”
Cassidy swallowed visibly. “I … don’t know.”
“Don’t know?” I almost laughed. “I have a hard time believing you didn’t keep count.”
“Do you enjoy wallowing in your failures?” she asked, with an air of snottiness that was tied to her youth and how much I’d just wounded her with my incisive critique.
“Enjoy them? No,” I said, “but I do find them instructive. I’ll take stock of what’s happened today and yesterday, for instance, and see if I can apply it in the future. It seems to me I suffered from a perfect storm, a confluence of events that fell entirely in her favor.” How else could one describe an escape from a highly-trained metahuman task force, the entire US Air Force, and real-time satellite tracking with hundreds of eyes on its feed?
“Do you know what you’ll come up with?” Cassidy asked, starting to lower the laptop. “Variables you can’t explain. Maneuvers that seem impossible for anyone, even a meta, to pull off. Ingenuity that breaks every box you try and put her in—”
I laughed. “How appropriate, that analogy.”
Cassidy flushed. “Because of her upbringing.”
“I’ve never believed in the undefeatable foe,” I said. “You watch these TV show nowadays, and they’ve always got their master criminal—Moriarty, Hannibal Lecter, Khan … what’s the name of that fellow on The Blacklist? Spader plays him wonderfully. Whatever the case, they’re always the smartest man in the room. They’re ten steps ahead of the entire government and even when they get imprisoned—in a glass cage, as inevitably happens—and they come face to face with the good guy who dogs them … they’re already planning their escape, because imprisonment was their idea.” I leaned back in my chair and shut my eyes. “You’re the smartest person in the world, Cassidy, when it comes to sheer intelligence. I’m the smartest when it comes to moving people. I know their minds. I know how they work. I’ve controlled influencers throughout the world to get the results I want. I am not just the smartest person in the room, I control the smartest people in any room.” I looked up to find her quavering slightly. “Through thought, through other … methods of compulsion you’re familiar with.” I closed my eyes once more, enjoying the darkness.
“Sienna Nealon is a philistine,” I said. “She never even finished high school, never set foot in a college. She’s never been the smartest person in any room, even when she’s alone in one. She has all the social skills of a wild ferret, and that’s where her strength is. She’s crafty. She possesses power and animal cunning, with a gut instinct for human nature. That’s not intelligence. That’s not
brilliance in any measurable sense of the word. She knows cruelty and force, and she knows when they’re aimed her way, that’s all. She’s been on the swinging side of the stick enough to know how to avoid hard end. But she can’t dodge forever. Not what I’m bringing to bear on her. This will ultimately come down to a show of force—as it did on the shores of Salt Lake just a few hours ago—and she won’t always have other people darting in to save her at the last minute. She’s an idiot, a rube, a troglodyte, and these are her last days on this earth. Mark my words. She can’t stand against the might of Washington, and she damned sure cannot stand against the two of us united against her. We will outthink her.”
Cassidy did not speak, but I could feel her nod of acquiescence. She excused herself from the room, and the fatigue claimed me. I dozed off in the chair, passing into the realm of sleep, enjoying silence in my mind for the first time in days, knowing that what I had just said was most certainly true.
70.
Scott
Scott waited in the car for the others to return, a vehicle borrowed from the local FBI field office. The pressure of Harmon in his mind had been intense, suffocating, and left him feeling desperately confused—well, not even confused, anymore, just sure that Sienna Nealon was not the villain she was being painted as and just as sure that if she crossed in front of the barrel of his gun, his finger would be compelled to pull the trigger.
It was painful, knowing his mind was not his own, but Scott wasn’t railing against it. Not now. He’d already lost that battle and had no interest in a painful replay, especially not when he felt the slithering serpent tendrils clutching at his mind fading into the recesses as Harmon slackened his grip. What was that? He almost felt … sleepy? Except he wasn’t terribly sleepy, surprisingly. Perhaps it was Harmon on the other end, all tapped out after a hard day of mind-controlling others.
Reed opened the car door and got in the driver’s seat. Augustus followed, getting in the passenger side. The three Revelen survivors were in the vehicle behind them—Gothric the Medic, Joaquín the Gaucho with the green eye beams, and Mac the Knifer, as Scott had taken to thinking of the Aussie. “Halfway home,” he muttered, rebellious enough to sneak that thought out while Harmon was napping.
“What?” Reed looked back at him, dead serious. “What did you say?”
“I said I want to head home if we don’t have any leads,” Scott said, and Reed seemed to let it go. He was still nominally in charge of this op, after all—it wasn’t as though Harmon had told anyone that he had to directly mind control Scott at this point. That would probably be embarrassing and bring up questions that even someone as brainwashed as Reed couldn’t fully ignore. “Do we have any leads?”
“She’s got a new look on the security cam footage,” Reed said dutifully.
“You didn’t notice that in the house fight?” Scott asked. How mind-numbed is he, not to see that?
“Yeah,” Augustus said, rubbing his hands together from the chill, “li’l sister got herself a tank top going on, with a dyed mohawk and hipster glasses.” He didn’t laugh, which he would have if he hadn’t had a telepath suck the life out of his brain. “Wouldn’t have pictured that for her.”
“Sienna will do anything to avoid the cold clasp of justice,” Reed said sternly.
What the hell did Harmon do to your brain to bring out this vengeful side of you, Reed? Scott wondered. It had to have something to do with inflating his sense of self-righteousness and decreasing his ability to see anything in shades of grey. Then again, Scott had felt the sudden, inexplicable urge to kill Sienna, and it seemed to have manifested in the form of seeing her as some sort of subhuman monster anytime she was in his sight and thinking about her in the most loathsome, reviling terms when she wasn’t.
“We’re gonna fit it on her, though,” Augustus said, and they did a little fist-bump in the front seat. “She’s gonna get clapped up—in a coffin.”
“She went out the back exit,” Reed went on. “Satellite techs at the Pentagon are following her movements now that they have an updated description. We just have to wait for them to find her.”
“Hrm,” Scott said and started to fumble for his phone. He didn’t have it; it had probably been lost in one of the battles. “Augustus, I need your phone,” he said, trying to keep his idea on the down low so that Harmon couldn’t hone in on it later. He’d felt the killing fury rise through their connection and figured he had one major rebellion left before the president decided it wasn’t worth it and snuffed him from two thousand miles away.
“Yeah, sure,” Augustus handed him the phone. Scott selected J.J.’s name out of the short list of contacts and dialed. It only rang once before it got picked up. “It’s Scott. I need you to run analysis for me.”
“Uh, okay,” J.J. said, calmer than he would have been if he wasn’t also being mentally manipulated. “I’m on this satellite thing now—”
“The Pentagon’s working on that, right?” Scott asked, knowing damned well that J.J. would do the job faster.
“Well, sure, but—”
“I know where she’s going,” Scott said, turning both Reed and Augustus’s heads immediately. “Or at least where she’ll end up.”
“Go on,” J.J., Augustus and Reed chorused in perfect, nerve-rending harmony.
“She knows the president is her enemy now,” Scott said, speaking to all of them, knowing he’d get roughly the same response. “How long do you figure it is before she does what she does and comes right at him?”
“That’s not going to solve her problem,” Reed said.
“Oh, she’d do it, too,” Augustus said.
“Oh, shit,” J.J. said. The responses slightly surprised Scott; he was expecting a uniform reply. Perhaps Harmon hadn’t completely scrubbed their brains out, then.
“J.J.,” Scott said, “I need you to do an analysis of the most likely avenues Sienna would use to assassinate President Harmon.” He swallowed heavily, fearing a stir in his mind that did not come, fortunately. “We need to know how prepared the Secret Service is for this contingency.” He blinked at Reed and Augustus, who were nodding along in tandem, back to their new programming.
“Aye, sir,” J.J. said, and Scott heard him tapping away at the keys a moment later. “I’ll get right on it, priority one.”
“Good,” Scott said, and hung up. Reed and Augustus both turned back around, staring wordlessly out the front windshield. Scott didn’t break the silence, but he didn’t expect there was much going on in either of their heads. That was all right, though, because he was doing enough for all of them, though it was along a line neither of them would have approved: Once J.J. finishes with that study … how the hell do I get it to Sienna?
71.
Sienna
I slept through every leg of the trip, secure in the knowledge that Harry Graves, one of only a few people I’d ever met who could see the future, was watching over me. I slept on the car ride to Idaho Falls, where I boarded a chartered plane paid for by my employer. I slept on the jet, which took me to Los Angeles, to one of the smaller airports where I passed no TSA checkpoint and no baggage claim before getting into the back of a black limo like some movie star. And I slept in the limo as it delivered me to the beachfront house of Steven Clayton, Hollywood hottie.
Okay, I made that name for him up. Or People Magazine did. One of us.
By the time I ended up on his doorstep, I felt almost human again in terms of rest, though I suspected that the makeup I’d applied before I fled Cedar City had long ago been washed off, probably in the briny depths of the Great Salt Lake. My hair was similarly a wreck, what little of it there was left, but I also didn’t fuss too much about this, because … well, there was nothing I could do. Also, the government was trying to kill me, so a bad hair day just didn’t feel that apocalyptic.
“Hey,” Steven Clayton said when he opened the door. He was a tall drink of handsome, and he wrapped me up in his arms as I let him. I let out a long sigh, because I felt like a cat
sleeping in a warm beam of sunshine.
Then I realized his forearms were in skin to skin contact with my underarms and hurriedly had him set me back down before the touch of my powers got too intense and I ate his handsome soul.
He brushed his light arm hair as though he expected flakes of ash to come dropping out. “That really does burn.”
“I should come with a warning, like a pack of cigarettes,” I said sadly. “‘May be hazardous to your health.’” I looked him over again—he still looked like the sexiest man of the year or whatever title he was vying for now—and sighed. “Good to see you.”
“Good to see you, too,” he said, ushering us in. He shook Colin’s hand, then Harry’s, like a real man. Colin gave him a limp fish, and I could practically feel the disapproval radiating from Steven, but Harry gave him a squeeze, enough to make Steven hide a cringe.
I wondered what was sparking their little grapple back and forth, but I didn’t have time to delve into it, because a blond streak came shooting at me, screaming, “SIENNA!”
Kat crashed into me as I got an arm up. She slid in and squeezed me a lot like Steven had, only maybe a touch harder because she was a meta. “Urk,” I said, “Kat.”
She let go in plenty of time to avoid feeling the burn, leaving her delicate hands on my side but safely on the fabric of my tank top. “I was so worried about you until we saw you in Vegas!”
“I would have called, but … I didn’t have a phone with your number programmed into it,” I said, turning perhaps a little scarlet in the cheeks. “Also, I figured you had, ahem …”
“Betrayed you?” she fished with a big smile, poking at me with her words. Like she did. Kat was not a huge brain, but she knew enough to occasionally score a point. If I hadn’t known her for as long as I did, I would have ascribed it to luck, but I think it had something to do with her empathy, which—despite my occasional complaints to the contrary—did exist, and was quite powerful when applied. She could heart to heart like no one.
Unyielding (Out of the Box Book 11) Page 21