“It doesn’t matter now, does it?” Janis said. “Creed was killed instead, and now Reginald’s back in hiding. The only way I found him the last time was because he left behind a necklace that allowed me to enter a rapport. But when we were chasing him, when I still thought Reginald had taken the shot, I blew the rapport apart. It doesn’t exist anymore. I can’t contact or locate him. And it’s not like he’s going to come looking for me after I nearly killed him.”
“You might be surprised,” Kilmer said.
Janis felt her face furrowing in question. “What do you mean?”
He raised a finger to tell her to hold. With his other hand, he unlatched a transceiver from his belt. He spoke something coded into it and nodded at the response. Moments later, the kitchen counter in the next room could be heard rising on its hydraulics. An elevator door opened, and two pairs of footsteps emerged, one of them scuffing as though in a limp.
Janis double-checked what she was feeling.
No way…
“He surrendered to us this morning,” Director Kilmer confirmed as one of his agents emerged beneath the archway with a late middle-aged black man. He looked almost nothing like the yardman and custodian Janis had become accustomed to around the neighborhood and at school. But his aura was identical.
“A Champion has come home,” Kilmer said.
Reginald Perry stopped, his blue-eyed gaze moving around the room of stupefied faces.
“Hello,” he said quietly.
36
The resonance of past and present shook Reginald, and it was all he could do to suppress an upwelling of emotion. For a moment, he was in a hotel room in 1961, the faces of the next generation of Champions flashing up at him, Madelyn’s flittering consciousness telling him they would need his help. And now, except for two, they were all here.
And here he was. Twenty-five years later. A Champion again.
“Hello,” he managed.
The kids gave uncertain nods, a couple of them murmuring their own hellos. The same kids who, only a few days before, had nearly blasted, electrocuted, and crushed him to death. Director Kilmer had accepted his explanation of the shooting, fortunately, and from the looks of them, so too had the kids.
“Come join us,” Kilmer said. “Janis was just telling us about your collaboration. But now that you’re here…” He opened his arm to the seat beside him on the couch. “I’m sure there will be questions.”
Reginald nodded at his former assistant director. His escort from the below-ground facility retreated into the kitchen, where Reginald heard the elevator door open. As he unburdened his legs and sat back, he felt all the weariness since his last Champions meeting with Kilmer, a full quarter century before, sigh in his bones. For some reason the feeling took shape as a chuckle.
“Let me tell you,” he said, “it’s been a long time getting here.”
Something like excitement shone in Scott’s eyes, the Champion with whom Reginald had become closest over the last couple of years. But there was what appeared a deeper understanding in Janis’s gaze, as though she could feel what he was saying. That made him want to well up again.
“How do we know you’re who you say you are?” Margaret asked. “You have a sister who can shape shift, right?”
She was sitting with her legs crossed tightly at the knees, one foot pumping impatiently.
“It’s him,” Janis said testily.
“Janis is right,” Director Kilmer put in. “The first thing I did after securing him this morning was to ask him some questions. They weren’t easy to come up with—his sister had infiltrated the last Program—but there were a few questions only he would know the answer to.”
“Such as…?” Margaret asked.
“Well, I asked him what Director Halstead’s final cable in New Jersey had said.”
“He didn’t get it in New Jersey!” Margaret cried, planting both feet on the floor and cutting her gaze back to Reginald. She looked as if she’d just scored a major point in a court case and he, the defendant, was toast.
“Right,” Kilmer said, holding up a hand, “and he knew that. It was a test. He corrected me. He also told me exactly what I had suspected. That the cable contained, among other things, Director Halstead’s decision to report him as dead. The cable was sent years before the Scale caught up to him. There was no way they could have obtained that information. I couldn’t even obtain it.”
Seeing no opening for cross-examination, Margaret sat back and re-crossed her legs. Her gaze remained narrowed though, telling Reginald that her suspicions were far from allayed.
“Margaret here is right to have questions,” Reginald said. “You only know a little about me, so let me start there. I was discovered in the late forties by Director Kilmer’s predecessor. I was placed with five others like me, and we began our training in a program similar to what I imagine yours is like. Offense, defense, social engineering, developing our abilities. When I started out, I could mold my features somewhat. While still in the foster home where I grew up, I would use that ability to blend in with the other children so I wouldn’t stand out. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. But after training…”
He shifted the cells of his face and hair to resemble each of the Champions’ parents in turn, starting with Mr. and Mrs. Graystone, moving to the Spruels, and ending with Tyler’s mother.
Each shift was met by various sounds of surprise from his audience.
“It was a good program,” Reginald said, shifting back to his natural form, “but as you know, it didn’t last. Just as we were pushing the Soviets out of Eastern Europe, the Scale moved in.”
“Like this time,” Janis said.
Reginald nodded. “After the Champions, I spent a number of years on the run, then a number of years trying to find you. I wanted to keep an eye on you. I’d been warned that the Scale might move against your group. Thing was, they got to me first. They used my access to monitor you.”
“So you were working for them,” Margaret said.
“It was a balancing act,” Reginald admitted. “But it had some advantages. It allowed me to watch them, too. Not up close—they were too cautious for that. But in my contacts with their leader, the Witch, I was able to get a sense of who they were, what their angle was. For years they seemed content to check in now and again, but when they ambushed me this past fall, I knew our time had run out.”
“Why didn’t they just take us out when we were all young and defenseless?” Tyler asked.
Reginald held Tyler’s jaded eyes for a moment, this young man who had lost his father and now his brother.
“That was my fear at first,” he said gently. “That they would do just that. But slowly, I began to understand how the Scale operated. They were monitoring the Cold War. Every time either the U.S. or U.S.S.R. appeared on the verge of gaining a sizable advantage, people in influential positions died, restoring the former stalemate. When Gorbachev came to power, a moderate reformer willing to negotiate with Washington, he was assassinated days later, a crazed military dictator installed in his stead. Years earlier, when the nuclear non-proliferation movement began gaining steam here and in Western Europe—”
“Rally leaders became targets,” Janis said, her eyes keen with insight.
“That’s right,” Reginald said. “And, more recently, when the Soviet Union’s new and improved Artificial program proved no match for the Champions, the Scale proceeded with their plans to grab Jesse. One or more of you were to have been targeted, as well. That directive expanded to include all of you after the Soviets’ failed bank heist in West Germany.”
He paused to allow the Champions to absorb the truckload of information he’d just back loaded onto their lives. When no one spoke, he continued.
“The Scale talks as if it’s an altruistic organization. Maintain the balance of powers and head off nuclear war. Maybe some of their members believe it. But there’s a clear money interest here. In a perpetual Cold War, both sides must continue amassing th
e weapons, defenses, and detection and delivery systems that will offset the other side’s ability to destroy them.”
“That’s where the name comes from.” Scott said, turning to the others. “I always thought the Scale was meant to suggest something reptilian. But it’s this whole concept of balancing.”
Reginald nodded. “The buildups are becoming more and more unstable, though. That’s what the Scale can’t or won’t understand. The slightest misperception by one side or the other and everything goes up in a giant mushroom cloud—one that would destroy all life on earth many times over.”
A darkness seemed to fill the hollows of Janis’s face. “So when you say there’s a money interest, are we talking the defense industry?”
Director Kilmer shifted forward. “We actually looked into that possibility, the late Director Halstead and I, after the dissolution of the last group. Nothing we found linked the big defense companies to the Scale. Of course, that link could have been well disguised.”
“Either way, the Scale is under someone’s directive,” Reginald said. “Someone who is using the Witch’s powers of clairvoyance to see what needs adjusting, using the Scale’s members to execute those adjustments. It would have to be a person or entity with money and resources—not only to maintain an organization like the Scale all these years, but to give the Soviets a massive cash infusion.”
“Cash infusion?” Margaret asked, becoming interested suddenly.
“After I escaped you Christmas morning, I took refuge at my sister’s…”
“Was she the shooter?” Tyler asked in a hoarse voice.
“I’m afraid she was, Tyler, yes. And I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t make it any easier, but what goes around tends to come around. I believe hers came around last night.”
“She’s dead?”
Reginald reflected on the loudness of the shotgun blast and scream. “Or gravely wounded.”
Tyler nodded in a way that was hard to read.
Reginald nodded back and returned to his original intent. “Earlier in the day, my sister met with the Witch. When I asked about the meeting, she was more forthcoming than usual. She indicated that with your team crippled and in hiding, balance would soon be restored. The Scale would resume it’s old role of monitoring Cold War conditions. When I pointed out that the Soviets were on the brink of bankruptcy, Shadow suggested that was being taken care of.”
Beside him, Director Kilmer began nodding. “Recent intelligence has General Dementyev invoking a date in his speeches as the next phase in the Russian revolution. January twenty-second. The analysts dismissed it as a figurative device, the date being an important one in the first revolution. But it could be when he’s expecting this infusion.”
“Wouldn’t that kind of money leave a trail?” Janis asked.
Scott spoke up. “All they would need is a guy like Techie to wire it in and out of any number of foreign accounts before landing it in the Russian coffers. Probably lay all kinds of traps in his wake, too.”
“I’m of the same mind,” Reginald said. “Someone would be hard pressed to find the source.”
“So, what happens then?” Janis asked. “Dementyev reclaims Eastern Europe?”
“That’s the Scale’s hope,” Reginald answered. “It puts the U.S. and Soviet Union back at parity. The buildups resume. NATO is sure to resist, though, and that’s where the uncertainty comes in. Does Dementyev deploy tactical nuclear weapons?”
“Right,” Kilmer said, raising his eyes to the Champions. “That would have been your job—to neutralize those weapons. But without a Program, the U.S. is going to be faced with the decision to launch a retaliatory strike. If they do, it could easily escalate into a full-blown nuclear contest. If the U.S. holds back, Dementyev could decide to push his advantage with equally fatal results.”
“And that brings us to the plan,” Reginald said.
With the stakes laid bare, the sound had gone out of the living room. Good, he thought. It would focus everyone on what was to be the most important decision of their lives.
“I’m proposing that we hack the Witch’s vision,” he said. “Get her to believe that the only way the Scale carries out that monetary transaction and restores the balance of powers is through an all-out confrontation with the Champions.”
Scott pushed up his glasses. “As in winner takes all?”
Reginald nodded gravely. “Winner takes all.”
37
Janis shifted her gaze from Reginald to Director Halstead, who had stood and begun pacing slowly, hands clasped behind his back. He often did that in their meetings when he had something substantial on his chest.
“Reginald and I discussed his plan earlier today,” he said. “Officially, I’m no longer your director. In fact, the entire Champions Program could be days, even hours, from being shut down. I want to make that clear. What Reginald is proposing isn’t my decision to make anymore, and it won’t be sanctioned by your government. This decision is yours.”
“If you were officially our director,” Janis posed, “what would you say?”
She wondered if her teammates’ hearts were knocking as hard as hers.
Kilmer stopped pacing and faced the group. “The conservative option is that you remain in hiding. The Witch seems to have made it clear that noninterference will spare the rest of you. But the situation as Reginald described it coupled with your premonition, Janis…” He blew his breath out. “I’m not sure who else has the ability to stop the transaction and prevent what’s likely to become a nuclear battle over Eastern Europe.”
“What if we took out the Soviet’s medium range capability?” Scott asked. “Like we’d have been asked to do if we were still an official team?” Janis could already feel him working out the computer hacks in his mind.
“The minute you become active again,” Kilmer said, “the Scale will target you. Anyway, without executive funding and military resources, I don’t see how we could pull that off.”
Margaret fluttered a hand to get Kilmer’s attention. “So you’re saying that if we vote yes, this would be a rogue operation?”
“Pretty much.”
Reginald cleared his throat. “The alternative is giving the Scale carte blanche in the matter.”
“Where would this confrontation take place?” Tyler asked.
“The Grove,” Kilmer replied.
“In our neighborhood?” Margaret cried.
Janis couldn’t take it anymore. The night’s slow burn toward her sister exploded like a cherry bomb. “Do you understand what’s going on? Do you have even the slightest clue? You complain about being left out of the loop, but you won’t shut up long enough to actually learn anything!”
“I understand enough to be skeptical,” Margaret shot back. “He’s telling us to put our lives on the line.”
“Yes, for the sake of humanity!”
Margaret stood. “Well, good luck with that. I’m going home.”
“To do what?” Janis asked. “Fill out another career map?”
Margaret screwed up her lips, too incensed to respond. As she went to march past them, Scott stood suddenly, blocking her path.
“Out of my way,” she ordered.
Scott held his hands up to where they were not quite touching her shoulders. “We’re all the team that’s left, Margaret, and you’re a crucial part of it. We need to make this decision as a unit.”
“I could make you move,” she said.
“I know. But I’m asking you to stay.”
Though Scott spoke with more authority than Janis could ever remember him doing, his words were textured with genuine concern. Janis felt her own anger losing steam in deference to what Scott was saying. The decision needed to be collective. She watched to see how her sister would respond.
Margaret shifted her weight to one leg as she looked from Scott around the room. At last, her eyes narrowed in on Janis’s.
“I’ll stay as long as I’m respected.”
“Fine,” Janis sai
d.
Though her face remained in a pout, Margaret returned to her seat. As Scott lowered himself back to the couch, Janis took his hand where their thighs touched and gave it a tender squeeze.
Thanks, she said.
“Why the Grove?” Margaret asked Director Kilmer, though with far less challenge in her tone.
He paused a moment, as though to make sure everyone was okay with one another, before answering. “As our home court, it gives us an arena we can prepare in advance. Agent Dutch has agreed to help develop a battle strategy. Both he and Reginald would train you.”
“How many Scale members are we talking about?” Scott asked.
“Six,” Kilmer said. “Five if Shadow was taken out last night.”
Scott looked troubled. “So, potentially six of them against four of us?”
“Reginald would make five,” Kilmer pointed out. “And we would have agents positioned around the field up there.”
“What about Jesse?” Tyler asked.
Kilmer shook his head. “Still sleeping, unfortunately.”
“Who are the Scale members we’d be facing?” Janis asked.
Kilmer turned to Reginald.
“I understand your director has briefed you on a couple of them already,” Reginald said. “There’s Henry Tillman, who goes by Titan. He’s what we used to call a powerhouse. Super strength, impenetrable skin. His weakness is his eyes—or eye, singular. I shot one out in ’61. I don’t think he’ll leave himself open to that again. Then there’s my sister, Shadow. A shapeshifter, like me, but also a master of weapons and hand-to-hand combat. She was struck by shotgun fire at close range last night, but I don’t know her condition. She’s a survivor. Whether she’ll be in shape enough to fight is another question.”
“Any healers on the team?” Janis asked, the question coming intuitively.
“None that I know of,” Reginald replied. “Now, I’ve said a bit about the Witch already. She’s old, but her clairvoyant powers are potent. She can see into the future as I described. She’ll position herself nearby to help coordinate the battle.”
XGeneration (Book 6): Greatest Good Page 21