I bit back an angry reply that was ringing in my head, something about suffering and not getting what I wanted for years and years. It was pointless, though, bickering with her. The tables had turned in title, if not in fact, and somehow I was now in charge of her. That boggled the mind. “That’s very mature of you,” I said, without even bothering to throw some emphasis on the word mature. She caught it anyway and gave me a narrowing of her eyes in response.
“All right,” Foreman said, and gestured toward the open door. “Now we’ve got a basic working group, so we can start hammering out everything we know and everything we need to start doing.”
I walked out of the cell first, warily, keeping one eye on my mother as I edged out the door. She caught me looking and nodded subtly. I knew what she was thinking; she was pleased as punch that she’d suckered me on the way in the door. It was her way of reminding me to always be vigilant. Tempted as I was to repay the favor by bludgeoning her with something heavy the first time she turned her back, I promised myself I would resist the temptation. Probably.
“We need to set up fast,” Foreman said. I walked on the left side of the hallway; my mother was an arm’s length away at my right, and the two of us only had eyes for each other, watching as though each of us was a heartbeat away from striking the other. “Our latest intel suggests that Weissman—Century’s leading man, second in command next to Sovereign—is in Rio de Janeiro. He’s got a net of telepaths working the streets, tracking down the metas.” He stopped just outside the door that he’d sent Ariadne and Scott through earlier, and indicated for me to run my ID badge across a metal strip nearby, which I did. The door buzzed and opened, and we walked through a guardroom where we were greeted by two men with AR-15s pointed at us. “Sentinel,” Foreman announced, and the men lowered their weapons. He glanced back at us. “Prearranged code word. If I hadn’t given it within five seconds of walking through the door, they would have opened fire.”
“Clever,” Mother said, unimpressed. “We used to do something similar at the Agency.”
We walked on, and I suppressed my desire to make another joke about her age, something about being on the cutting edge back in the 1890s. I tried to remind myself I was a better person, and I caught a vague whiff of disagreement from the souls I’d thrown in their own little boxes in my mind. It may have been me arguing with myself, for all I knew.
We passed the door behind the guards and found ourselves in a more open space. Foreman led us down a carpeted hall and knocked on the door of a room labeled “Conference 4.” He entered without bothering to wait for a response.
It was tense inside, with three people spaced around a long, rectangular conference table. I took one look at Ariadne, seated near one end of the table, Scott, across from her, and Agent Li, sitting in the middle, and wondered what the hell had happened in this room to make my mother and I walking in together actually lower the tension level. I started to voice that thought, but Senator Foreman took a seat at the end of the table and waved for us to do the same. I made my way over to Scott and sat down, across from Agent Li and just a couple seats from where Foreman had sat. My mother made her way to the opposite end from Foreman and took it, staring down the long table at him with Ariadne directly to her right.
“Let’s get this discussion under way,” Foreman said, surveying all of us. “Welcome to the first advisory council meeting of the Metahuman Policing and—”
“Whatever,” my mother said, interrupting. “Let’s just call this what it is to spare us an unwieldy acronym—Agency 2.0.”
Foreman appeared ready to argue for just a beat, then he seemed to pause. “Fair enough. For the sake of expediency.” He looked around the table. “To start with, let me state that Ariadne Fraser will handle the administrative side of this new venture—which is strictly off the books, in spite of sharing intelligence developed by the CIA, NSA, Homeland Security and other departments. She will be reporting to Congress and the Executive Branch. Sienna Nealon will be our head of operations, and Agent Li will be your liaison and oversight for the foreseeable future.” Foreman looked from Li to us. “He’ll be here to make certain you stay within the boundaries and guidelines wherever possible, since he has experience with FBI procedures already.”
“Lovely,” my mother opined from the end of the table. “It’s always nice to have a professional on the team. Maybe it’ll help make up for the amateur in charge of operations.”
“You know what?” I asked. “I bet I’ve bagged more wildfire metas in the last year than you have.”
“I think we can agree you’ve probably bagged more men in the last year than I have,” she said acidly.
“If we’re talking body bags, I bet it’s neck and neck,” I shot back. “Though I probably haven’t smacked around nearly as many unsuspecting convenience store clerks, if we’re keeping count of those—”
“No mother/daughter cat fights on company time, ladies,” Foreman said, unamused.
“I could host one later, if you want,” Scott said, drawing a glare from Foreman. “Sorry.”
“So tell me about this ‘Century.’” My mother looked attentively down the table, waiting expectantly.
Foreman looked at me, and it took me a minute to realize this was my department. “Uhm,” I said, and listened to my mother cough quietly. “Let me start with the basics. By the accounts I’ve heard, there are one hundred of them—one hundred of the strongest metas on the planet. Their immediate goal is to wipe out the competition, at which point we’ve speculated there’s some unknown ‘Phase Two’ that relates to subjugating humanity.” I cleared my throat. “As for what we know specifically about them, it’s very little. Sovereign is at their head, though I haven’t run across anyone able to give me a description of him—”
“He looks to be in his early forties, olive skin, dark, curly hair,” my mother said pointedly. She looked over at me and I could see Li across the table, scribbling furiously on a notepad. “Talks in a deep voice, with a thousand years of accumulated confidence that says, ‘Don’t mess with me because I never lose a fight.’” She folded her hands on the table. “He’s powerful. More powerful than any meta I’ve ever come across. He can do things I’ve never seen, and since I hunted wildfire metas for several years and accumulated the best record in the Agency for capturing them,” she looked at me pointedly, “that says something.”
“I can get some sketch artists working on his face,” Li said, looking up at Foreman.
“Don’t waste too much of your time,” I said. “One of Sovereign’s powers is to change his appearance.”
There was a moment’s quiet. “How do you know that?” Foreman asked.
I tried to remember; I thought I had heard it in a flashback involving Adelaide, a mysterious Omega operative who’d apparently killed my Grandfather, but it was vague, fuzzy. I couldn’t be sure, so I lied for the sake of convenience. “It was in a record I retrieved from Omega.”
“Speaking of Omega,” my mother said, “I don’t care for them, but they could be useful in a threat situation like this. It sounds like we have a common enemy.”
Foreman looked at me. “We might as well ask the Primus of Omega what she thinks.” There was an uneasy silence as I realized that he and I might have been the only ones at the table that knew what he was hinting at.
My mother’s sigh was loud enough to fill the room. “Yes, that was my suggestion, to parlay with Omega’s Primus, though—and I admit my information could be out of date—when last I heard, it was a man named Gerasimos and had been for several hundred years.”
“There’s a new one now,” Foreman said dryly.
“Oh?” My mother’s impatience was her undoing here; she was walking right into the rake that Foreman set out for her. “How soon can you make contact? They have a lot more resources to draw on than you might expect.”
“I’d say we can make contact very quickly.” Foreman angled his head toward me. “What do you say? Are the resources of Omega at our dispos
al?”
“Such as they are,” I said. “The remaining operatives in England will need visas—”
“Oh, dear God,” my mother said. “YOU?” She swore under her breath, but we all heard it. “How did you become the Primus of Omega?”
I inclined my head slightly. “There weren’t many people left—”
“There would have to be nobody left,” she grumbled.
“Well, it’s pretty damned close to that,” I said back, not keeping the heat out of my reply. She wasn’t wrong, but it was still annoying.
“Give me their names and I’ll make sure we don’t run into any problems,” Foreman said. “We’re cooperating with the UK government on this, so I suspect I might even be able to expedite things on their end as well.”
“That’d be good,” I said. “There are a few of them whose help I’d like, especially for field operations.”
Foreman nodded. “So ... what’s your first order of business?”
I froze and felt my mouth go dry. There was hot air blowing directly on me from the duct above, the smell of the furnace-heated air heavy in the room. I looked around the table from Foreman’s earnest mien to Li’s slightly hostile stare to Ariadne, who wasn’t even looking at me. My mother was staring coldly, and I came back to the empty hardwood space in front of me. “Um, well—”
“Our fearless leader,” my mother sighed.
Something snapped in my head and I felt rage flood me, a kind of cold anger that fueled my thoughts and made them race faster. “First priority is identifying the metas presently in the U.S.”
Foreman nodded. “Then what?”
My mind raced back to the preliminary thinking I’d done while I was on the flight back from London, hashing over ideas with Reed and the others before I’d left. “Two parts to that—one is to start bringing whoever we can under our protective aegis—”
“Brilliant,” my mother said, “round them all up strategically in one location. I’m just now realizing that’s what happened in China and India. It wasn’t an accident of fate at all, not some random hostilities or regional conflict.” She wore a look of calculated ill ease—which is to say she was pissed and trying not to show it. “That was the opening salvos in this campaign to wipe out metahumans. They clustered them together and made them the low-hanging fruit of the equation. Now the first part of your plan is to re-enact it?”
“We have to do something to try and protect them,” I said.
“Rounding them up like you’re suggesting just makes them easier to kill,” she replied. “If you want to protect them, disperse them further.”
“Century will wipe them out a cloister at a time,” I said, “then go after the spares with mercenaries or some of their other members.”
“Let’s table this part of the discussion for now,” Foreman said. “You mentioned a second reason to start sniffing out the metas in the U.S. What is it?”
I felt myself blush a little. My idea was starting to sound stupid, and my first instinct was to get flustered, just like I always had when mother called me out on something I was doing wrong. “Well, uh ...”
“‘Well, uh,’” my mother said. “Spit it out.”
I didn’t look at her. “We speculate that Century is tracking down uncloistered metas by using telepaths. So if we can find those telepaths first—”
“You can take them out and seriously hamper Century’s tracking efforts,” Foreman said shrewdly and shot a look at Li. “Any idea how to do that?” His gaze came back to me and I could see he was giving it serious thought.
“They only have the capability to sweep a few cities at a time,” I said. “I’m not exactly sure how telepaths work, but from what we do know, they come into a town trying to get a reading on metas, then capture a few so that they can try and use them to locate any friends or acquaintances that these individuals might have who are also metahuman.”
“Like links in a chain,” Scott said with a nod. “Makes sense. If you’re a meta, odds are overwhelming your family is as well, that someone up the tree came from a cloister or knows others who are metas. We’re all connected, except for wildfire metas and a few other loners. You just keep following that chain in both directions until you reach the end, then try and get hold of another chain and another until there are none left.”
“An apt metaphor,” I said. “And they’re cutting more links out all the time. If Weissman’s in Rio, they’ll be putting all their attention there for the time being. Except for Sovereign.”
“Oh?” My mother gave me a questioning look. “You know something else about him?”
“I guess I’m a priority for him,” I said, feeling myself flush. “Not sure why, but Weissman said I’m the only meta outside Century that he’s categorically forbidden to kill.”
Scott gave me a funny look. “How’d you make the list?”
“If I knew, I’d tell you,” I said. “There are some things going on with Century that make no sense at all. Like, remember when they tried to kill us in the woods, when they shot Andromeda? But now they’re not allowed to kill me? Weissman said that was direct from Sovereign. Same with this whole extinction protocol: Weissman said it’s his program, that Sovereign doesn’t really care about it. Meanwhile, Raymond told me that Sovereign and Century are going to make the world a better place by removing the old order of metas and putting a new one in power.” I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s like we’re in the middle of this giant puzzle, and there just aren’t enough pieces in place for us to see the entire thing yet.”
A pall hung over the conference room. “Who would have the answers?” Li asked, watching me with a measured gaze.
“Sovereign,” I said. “Weissman. The other members of the one hundred.” I sighed. “But I don’t know who any of the others are.”
“So we have two problems that need solving,” Li said. “One, we need to gather intelligence to ascertain where metas are located in the U.S. regardless of what we decide to do with them. Second, we need to discover any Century operatives within our borders, and—obviously this would be much worse—any operating within the government or even our new agency. Counterintelligence,” he finished, “in order to fend off their efforts against us.”
I leaned my head back against the worn leather headrest of the chair. “That’s a tall order, and we can’t even do it by traditional means.”
“Because of telepaths?” Li asked after a moment’s hesitation.
“Yes,” I said.
“There aren’t that many telepaths in the world,” my mother spoke up from her end of the table. “If there are only a hundred metas in Century, I can almost promise you that they can’t have gathered more than ten telepaths at most to be part of their number.”
Foreman placed fingers on his chin, contemplative. “How do you know that?”
My mother smiled. “With the Agency, we started to track the basic disposition of metas by type. Pure telepaths are rare. If Century got their hands on ten, it’d be probably half of the current supply worldwide. More now, I suppose.”
Scott leaned forward. “Is it possible they could be tracking metas through other means?”
“Cloisters,” I said. “They’re a good starting point, since they’re essentially communities where almost everyone is a meta. I don’t know how well a telepath can sift a brain, but my impression would seem to suggest that they can go through it like—”
“Like you or I would with our touch,” my mother said. “They just don’t have the touch requirement, and can do it without anyone but a very well-trained person knowing that they’ve done it.”
“So a telepath could sit at the edge of a cloister,” Scott said, talking it out, “and just dig through the inhabitants one by one, pulling out their memories of every meta they’ve ever had contact with?”
My mother nodded slowly. “Yep. Depending on the strength of the telepath, they could be as close as a few hundred feet away or as far as hundreds of miles.”
I chewed my lip. “
Or more. Some can do more.” Everyone looked at me. “I’m pretty sure Zollers touched my mind from a lot farther away, unless he followed me to England.”
“Maybe he was in England?” Scott asked.
“He touched my mind only a few days earlier when I was still here in Minneapolis,” I said. “So unless he traveled in the intervening time, I think we can safely assume that the range might be longer in certain circumstances.”
I looked around and saw my mother contemplating that, deep in thought. “Maybe because he’d touched your mind before? That could have had something to do with it, helped him find you, the lone grain of sand in the middle of a beach.”
I played her statement back in my mind again, searching for the sarcasm, the barb. I didn’t hear it. “Maybe.”
“So, for agenda,” Foreman said, and I looked over to find him writing on a small, pocket-sized notepad, “so far, I’ve got inventorying the metas presently in the U.S., gathering intelligence, and setting up counterintelligence in preparation for Century’s first moves ... what else?”
“We should track down the remains of Omega here in the U.S.,” I said. “They had a presence here, complete with operatives and facilities. They may have lost their European operations, but I suspect they’ve still got some people in place here.” I looked at Foreman. “Karthik—one of my people in the UK—could help with that.”
“Expediting visas,” Foreman said, writing on his notepad. He looked up. “What else?”
“We had a lot of kids in school at the Directorate,” Ariadne said at last, drawing everyone’s attention to her. She sat, red hair limp and lifeless around her pale face. “Someone should check on them to be sure they’re all right.”
I felt a surge of concern, like I’d forgotten something. “Joshua Harding,” I said quietly.
“Who?” Scott said, looking over at me.
“This kid,” I said. “He helped me evacuate the dorms on the night the Directorate was destroyed. He promised me he’d help get the kids to the nearest cloister.” I looked to Ariadne. “That’s definitely something we need to look in on.”
Legacy: The Girl in the Box #8 Page 5