The Crucible (Steel City Heroes Book 2)

by LE Barbant

Willa traced his steps, walking back toward his office.

  “May I help you?” a receptionist said, interrupting her line.

  “Oh, no, I’m good. I just have a meeting with…”

  The secretary was already checking her books. Half a week of casing Dobbs’ movements and she hadn’t considered what to do once inside. She wasn’t prepared, but she couldn’t back out now. The news of the assault on her family clouded her judgment. Her grandfather, not to mention her friends Elijah and Chem, would find her strategy—or lack thereof—laughable.

  “With whom?” the secretary asked, staring across the divide.

  “With John,” Willa said. She imagined there had to be a John working in the office.

  “John who?” the secretary said.

  Willa cursed herself for not coming up with a better plan. She closed her eyes and considered which poem would get her past the front desk without hurting the administrative assistant too much.

  “I’ve got this, Kate.” A man in an expensive suit stepped up to the desk. He placed his hand lightly on the small of her back and ushered her toward an office. “Come with me. Ms.…”

  In her panic, Willa latched onto the first name she could think of.“Branton.”Willa turned and followed the suit back through a maze of cubicles. The room was filled with hungry support raisers hunting for the dollars that might save the Mayor’s race. As she wove through the office, she sized up her rescuer. He had movie star hair and walked as if he owned the place. She didn’t know who he was or where he was leading her, but she decided to roll with it. A spell played on the tip of her tongue in case she needed to make a speedy exit.

  The man crossed the threshold of a glass office wall, indicating that he was a person of some importance. He closed the door behind them. “Have a seat, Ms. Branton.”

  Willa sat, taking in her surroundings. The man’s office was rather spartan. No pictures of family, no inspirational cat posters, and no clutter anywhere.

  “So what can I help you with?” he asked

  The man leaned back in his chair and extended his legs onto the pristine desk. His overpriced shoes stacked at the ankles.

  “I’m a…writer.” Willa hoped a half-truth would be more believable. “I was hoping to get an interview with the Mayor about the race. I didn’t have an appointment, but you know.” She smiled, and drew her finger down her cheek and across her neck, and pulled on her shirt. Willa had never used her femininity for any sort of advantage, and she felt awkward in the attempt—like a fifteen-year-old trying to buy her first pack of cigarettes.

  “Well, after last night’s gala our man is the talk of the town.” He dropped his feet to the floor and leaned forward. Putting both elbows on the desk, he interlaced his fingers. “But now tell me why you’re really here.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Come now. You can trust me.”

  At first Willa tried to configure another lie, but her brain seemed out of control. Her anxiety shifted and she felt tremendous peace in his presence, like he was her best friend. She knew she could tell him anything. Her mouth started to move. “I found out some things this week about your boss. Well, actually, it’s about my family and your boss.” The words flowed freely, each syllable more honest than the next.

  The man nodded. “Okay, now we are getting someplace. Now who are you really?”

  Willa rubbed her neck. As she spoke, tension that had lived in her shoulders for what seemed like a lifetime dissolved. “I’m Willa Weil. Dr. Willa Weil. I teach, or I used to teach literature at the University. I’m just trying to find out more about my family and what they had to do with the Mayor.”

  “Nice to meet you, Willa. But how did you expect to get anything out of Dobbs? Surely you weren’t going to try and seduce him?”

  Willa laughed. Her move a minute earlier was clumsy, and embarrassment spread pink across her face. The man in front of her was so charming. “I guess seduction isn’t really in my wheelhouse. But I have other skills…” She smiled like a drunk at her new friend.

  “Skills? That sounds intriguing. Why don’t you tell me about them?”

  “I’m not like most people you know,” Willa said. “I have abilities, and I come from a long line of people with abilities. I can do magic.”

  Willa’s wizardry was her most guarded secret. She had rarely shared it with anyone, and those few times that she had were dire situations.

  What harm could come from telling him?

  The man picked up a pen and started making notes on a yellow pad. “Magic? Like Harry Potter? Please, keep going. I can see you want to tell me.”

  And she did. She wanted to share everything.

  Willa walked him through her life. She talked about Edwin, the PPG Tower, her magic, and even Elijah. The man was unfazed by her report, which might have been the most surprising thing about the whole interaction. He sat composed, calm as a summer’s morning. Finally, she told him about her visit to Rizzo’s mansion on the North Side.

  He nodded, then looked up from his notes. “Is that it?” he asked, as if taking notes at a PTA meeting.

  Willa felt like she was swimming in a warm bath. Everything faded. “No. It’s not all,” she heard herself say. “The Mayor orchestrated my mother’s murder. And I’ve come to kill him. I meant to do it here. Today. But I took pause in the elevator because I knew I couldn’t get away with it. Maybe with some time—with more planning—I could do it and no one would know.”

  The two sat in silence, staring across the desk at one another. Tension came over her, but she couldn’t name it.

  Finally the man spoke. “Thank you for your candor, Willa. But truthfully, I knew you were coming. In fact, my brother and I have been waiting for you.”

  Willa bit the inside of her cheek and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

  She smiled. “You’ve been waiting for me? But why?”

  He rose and stood directly in front of her. Leaning in close, he placed both hands on her shoulders. “Because you’re going to tell me exactly how I can find your friends.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Traffic through the Squirrel Hill tunnels was uncharacteristically light for the time of day. People going into the city for the evening often jammed up the passageway through the ridgeline. Elijah smiled, remembering Boston, where the tunnels offered an opportunity to speed up—knowing that the staties wouldn’t be there to pull you over. But in Pittsburgh, for some reason, people went inordinately slow through the tunnels, backing up traffic sometimes for an hour. The Squirrel Hill tunnels were the one thing he hated about living in Homestead. So goes the difference between the Northeast and the near-Midwest.

  Cruising down 376 toward Oakland, his thoughts wandered back to the past week’s events. Something ominous was brewing in Pittsburgh, but he couldn’t understand it. And ignorance was a weakness—one that he sought to overcome at the Hillman Library.

  The transformation that changed Elijah’s body hadn’t touched his attitude toward knowledge. He remained the quintessential researcher, head buried in a book. He still believed that any problem could be solved through careful data collection and objective analysis. So he was going where the information was. As the skyline peeked over the rolling hilltops, he thought of Brooke and Rex and Alarawn Industries.

  It seemed like a lifetime ago since the battle at PPG Place. Though his scars were still fresh, he felt like a different man. Thinking of Brooke always brought sadness. During those last moments as he struggled for his own life, and the lives of his friends, he didn’t want to destroy Brooke. Elijah tried to redeem her. But oftentimes the story doesn’t end the way you want it to. They all lost a lot at the tower, and he lost her.

  Elijah eased the Subaru into a spot on the back side of the library. There was something about Oakland in the summertime. Most university towns slowed between semesters, but Oakland was transformed. There were plenty of students that stuck around for work or summer classes, but for the most part, this part of the cit
y—a city unto itself—was a mere vestige of its usual appearance.

  His study carrel was empty, much like most of the library that evening at Hillman. He settled in, opened his computer, and started searching. The historian could have spent time back at his apartment surfing the Internet, but focused research belonged in its proper context. Elijah was a strange mix of a 21st century academic and something a bit more antique. To him, even the smell of the volumes inspired greatness.

  He looked at this notes, although he had already committed the number to memory. 32608. The rudimentary scratches made no sense imprinted on the interior of a highly sophisticated piece of technology. It had to mean something.

  Elijah Googled the digits and settled in on the simplest answer. The numbers matched the zip code of the southern section of Gainesville, Florida. After an hour of searching local news and community forums he gave up. Nothing tied the drone to Florida. And the only connection between Gainesville and Pittsburgh was a sizeable number of snowbirds, older folks who moved south for the winter. Elijah jotted a note in his journal, insistent that he would return to considering the city if nothing else emerged. He then wrote: Univ. of FL?

  He continued the search. Hundreds of products from around the world included the number, but none that appeared connected. It was a dead end, a meandering path through an overgrown forest.

  Leaning back, he ran both hands through his hair. They met and interlaced fingers on the back of his neck. Elijah closed his eyes and turned his chin toward the ceiling. Constant searching on the computer strained his eyes. He much preferred the work of the written page.

  Think, Elijah. Think.

  Elijah closed his laptop, and pushed it to the edge of the desk. He pulled out his notebook and turned to the first clean page. He wrote the figures at the top and stared at them. The numbers themselves, as they stood, would likely tell him nothing. If it was meant as communication, then it wouldn’t be explicit. He thought of the Bletchley Circle, the famous codebreakers of World War II in Britain. They had an uncanny ability to decipher complex code sent across enemy lines. To figure out this mystery, he would have to see through the numbers.

  Elijah started with the obvious. He translated the numbers into letters according to their alphabetical sequence: CBF_H.

  What to do with the zero? Maybe it’s an “o.”

  Though it was gibberish, he spent time rearranging the bramble of letters, trying to force a message to emerge. But the application of letters and numbers was going nowhere. Elijah started to break the numbers up. It was unlikely that the numbers stood together as a single whole. He started to group them, shift them, and reorder them.

  Before long the print on the page swam before his eyes. Elijah pressed the balls of his palms against his eyes, and breathed deeply. Oftentimes, in his historical studies, it was nights just like this when he would have a breakthrough. And right now, some new discovery was vital.

  But sometimes they came after a much needed break. Elijah tucked his laptop under his arm and slid the notebook into his back pocket. The steps of the Hillman were perfect this time of the year, the hot summer weather meandering toward fall.

  “You want a smoke, Dr. B?”

  Elijah shaded his eyes as he looked up at the undergrad. “Oh, hey, Julie. No thanks. I decided to quit.”

  The girl smiled. “Good for you. I’m going to quit when I turn thirty—or get pregnant, whichever comes first. I promised my mom.”

  Elijah considered a lecture on the health benefits of not smoking, but reconsidered. He was the last person who should be explaining healthy living.

  “Actually,” Julie said, “I’m glad I ran into you. The class has been fabulous and I think I might do this stuff someday.”

  “Do it?”

  “Yeah. History. I mean, like you do. I might want to teach.”

  Elijah grinned. “That’s great.”

  “But I had a question about the syllabus. I was looking at the due date for the final and it says 12/3/16, but that’s a Saturday. You want us to email it?”

  Her words hit him in the face. “Wait. What’d you say?”

  “Do you want us to email?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Elijah laughed like an idiot. “I gotta go. I just figured it out.”

  “Figured what out?” Julie asked as Elijah ran back inside.

  ****

  March 26th, 2008. It seemed so obvious now that he could see it. He opened his computer and Googled the date along with the terms Pittsburgh and technology. A long list of results gathered before his eyes. There were different meetings around the city, unrelated blog posts, and other various entries. The problem with information is that when there’s too much, it becomes a beach when you only need a grain of sand.

  Elijah changed course, and pulled up the websites for Pittsburgh’s city newspapers each in a different tab. He searched the date and started to scroll through headlines, cursing the medium-size city paper for having most of its information hidden behind membership walls. Elijah would be damned before spending $20 a month to read the paper online. But now he considered the subscription, just to break the code.

  Scrolling through headlines, nothing seemed to stand out. All the articles were rather pedestrian, the everyday events of a medium-size city in America. There were columns that followed local politicians, but none of them seemed to connect to the technology he was trying to uncover. Accidents, cultural events, and local social commentary filled the pages. None of it was helpful.

  A thought crossed Elijah’s mind and he clicked back to his search engine. He typed in the date 3/27/08.

  If the code did stand for a date there was a good chance that the reporting occurred the day after.

  Scrolling through the new list of stories, one caught his attention.

  Local Nobel hopeful nearly loses daughter in car accident.

  Elijah opened the article and read the preview on the Trib’s website. The first paragraph chronicled the story of a terrible bicycle accident in a suburb outside of the city. He clicked read more, and a box demanding his allegiance and credit card number appeared on the screen. Elijah smiled; the commute to the library was worth the effort

  He tromped down the steps and located the Hillman’s collection of newspapers. Sorting through the stacks he grabbed the one for the 27th. He turned to page 3A and found the story in full. The narrative was tragic on its own account.

  Skylar Mumford, a ten-year-old, was the victim of a hit-and-run. Like most the other girls in the quiet suburb north of Pittsburgh, she was out on a bike ride, minding her own business. The car was never found. The story recounted the details of the surgeons at Children’s Hospital trying to save the girl’s life.

  As of the writing of the article, Skylar remained in critical condition. The article then shifted to comments by the girl’s mother.

  Dr. Sylvia Mumford was a scientist working at Carnegie Mellon, focusing on human enhancement. While DARPA worked to create soldiers, Smith was part of a team trying to configure new technologies that would improve the lives of everyday people. The young mother was on the verge of a robotics breakthrough when the accident happened.

  Elijah opened his laptop and Googled the name of the scientist. There were pages of published articles by her. She was an A-list celebrity in the scientific community. After her daughter’s accident, she founded a nonprofit called Bio-Org. In the world of intelligent prosthetics, Sylvia Mumford became a rock star. For several months, the press followed her religiously. Mumford swore that she would do whatever it took to save her daughter.

  The Pittsburgh community was enlivened by the narrative, and reporters continued to turn out stories. Until a few weeks later, when public interest dried up. Sylvia Mumford and her daughter disappeared from the public conscious.

  Elijah kept searching for another couple of hours but he couldn’t find any credible source that confirmed whether or not Skylar had survived and what her mother was doing now. The Bio-Org website had a banner across the top
begging for donations but it looked as if the site hadn’t been updated in years.

  The historian hated the fickle news cycle. Recent events were not the same as history. And this little story of a broken girl and her tech wizard mom would soon be forgotten.

  Elijah jotted down everything he could find about the family. If he were watching another researcher carrying out the process, he would’ve laughed at the spurious connections. There was no true evidence that this was even moderately connected to the military drone that sat in the basement of his house in Homestead. But desperate men cling to the thinnest of branches, and the Mumfords were the closest thing he had to a lead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “To you guys. For saving my ass,” Tim Ford said, raising his bottle.

  Chem and Elijah raised their own glasses in response.

  The hot, humid September air engulfed them in the outside seating at Voodoo Brewery. It was the kind of weather that made you feel like you were swimming on dry ground. The boys were in good spirits, especially now that Tim was able to get out of bed and throw down a few pints.

  “I’m surprised you can even stand,” Elijah said. “After the beating you took I figured I wouldn’t get my bed back for at least another month.”

  “There’s something I didn’t tell you, Elijah.” Chem grinned. “Ford is actually Wolverine.”

  Tim laughed so hard his ribs ached. “It took science and shit to make that son of a bitch. This is just Ford family tough, right here.”

  The guys talked for a while about nothing in particular and laughed a lot. Elijah asked a bunch of stupid questions about the Steelers’ opening game, which was playing on a wall-mounted television. When he asked the bartender to change the channel to something about the local election he was nearly run out of the bar.

  It was refreshing for Tim, since they were usually discussing Pittsburgh and monsters and other dire things. But this was just guys being guys, having a few too many drinks, and messing with each other. It reminded him of the only thing he missed from his days with Blackbow, when he and a few buddies would get off base and hit the local bars.