by Tom Reynolds
"I'm in here," Sarah calls from down the hallway.
I follow her voice to the dining room. The table is already set, and Sarah is hurriedly running between the dining room and kitchen through a swinging door. Each time she appears, carrying another plate or casserole dish full of food. We're talking about a notch or two below a full-on Thanksgiving dinner here.
"Holy cow, this is a ton of food," I say as she comes hustling back through the kitchen door with the last bowl of mashed potatoes.
"Yeah, I think I might have overdone it a little," she says with a look of concern that indicates she's coming to this realization herself.
"No, it's great. Everything looks delicious," I say, trying to reassure her.
"My dad and I don't get to sit down to dinner together too often, as you can probably guess since he's still on the phone, working. I just wanted tonight to be really special."
"It is really special. Thank you. It’s been a while since I’ve had a nice home-cooked meal that Derrick hasn’t burned to a crisp. I really appreciate you doing all this work to trick your dad into liking me by feeding him delicious food."
Sarah smiles and kisses me on the cheek. As if on cue, I hear the door open down the hallway and instinctively jump away from Sarah, which makes her giggle.
"Just relax. Be yourself. I'm sure Dad's gonna like you."
Sarah's dad walks into the room, and I can't believe my eyes. My mouth drops, and a single word comes out. A "hello" that winds up sounding more like "ha...llo" as I catch myself from uttering what I was about to say.
Halpern.
"You must be Connor?" Halpern says as he extends his hand to meet mine. "I've heard so much about you. It's nice to finally meet the guy my little girl won't shut up about."
"Daddy!" Sarah protests, embarrassed.
"Nice to meet you, sir," I say, almost on autopilot.
"Sir? Please, call me Mr. Miller," he says with a smile that makes it difficult to tell whether he's joking or not. I know because it's a smile I've seen plenty of times lately. "Sorry that took longer than I thought it would. Work never seems to end nowadays. I won't bore you with all that accounting talk, though. Let's sit and dig in!"
Halpern is Sarah's dad!!!! I feel stupid that it never even occurred to me that people who work for The Agency would have secret identities too. Of course they would. If anything, they're more at risk for retaliation than metas, especially considering they don't wear masks or have super powers. I suppose the fact that it never even occurred to me that someone like Halpern wasn't who he claimed to be is exactly what they want. A man wearing a mask is someone who obviously has something to hide, but a man wearing a suit and name badge doesn't invite any questions as to whether he is who he says he is.
"Everything looks so great, Sarah. You did an excellent job," Halpern/Mr. Miller tells his daughter. I realize I've been almost completely silent for a full minute. Halpern doesn't seem to recognize me, not that he would since I'm not covered from head to toe in crimson spandex right now, but I need to say something before he stops chalking up my silence to anything other than just nervousness.
"Yeah," I agree.
Great job, idiot. Well, at least I'm selling the nervous bit really well, I think.
"So, Sarah tells me you worked with her at the lakefront over the summer," Halpern says, trying to break the awkward tension.
"Oh, yeah."
"You were a lifeguard there too?"
"Um, no. I was a beach cleaner."
"Oh. Well, that's nice too. At least you were outside, right?" he says with a smile.
"Well, not when I was on toilet duty," I answer back, giving him information he has no interest in knowing, and putting thoughts into his head he'd probably rather not have while pouring himself more gravy.
"Connor was at the lakefront when the meta attack happened, Daddy. He was the one who called 911," Sarah tells him.
"Well now, I didn't know we had a real-life hero sitting with us tonight," Halpern says. I nearly choke on a forkful of roast beef and quickly grab my glass of water for cover as my face turns red before finally catching my breath and swallowing my food.
Halpern's cell phone, which is sitting face down on the dining room table, goes off. He picks it up, looks at the screen, and sighs.
"You'll have to excuse me for a moment, guys. It's work. Sorry about this," he says as he pushes his chair back and begins walking back down the hallway toward his office. The door is almost completely closed before he picks up, and the ringing stops. I wonder if I would have been suspicious of a business call being so private that he couldn't even pick up the phone and say “hello” before being completely out of earshot if I didn't already know who Mr. Miller really is. Midnight definitely would have.
"So, what do you think?" Sarah asks me, as though my opinion of her father has equal weight as his opinion of me.
"Oh, he's really nice," I say, meaning it.
Halpern might not always be nice, but Mr. Miller certainly is, so far. My mind is still reeling with the revelation that Sarah's dad works for The Agency, and that he oversees almost all the meta prisoners on Silver Island. I guess in my head, I never thought of Halpern as a real person. I couldn't imagine him going home every night to a family and having a regular life.
"I wish he didn't have to work so much. I can't imagine how there can be so many ‘emergencies’ when Dad has the most boring job you could ever imagine. Seriously. If I can't fall asleep at night, I come downstairs to his office and ask him about his day. Within five minutes, I'm snoring. Every. Time," Sarah says. She either has no clue about what her dad really does, or she's just as good at lying as her father. Considering the level of secrecy The Agency operates at, I’m going to guess the former. "It's horrible to say it, but nights like tonight, I start to understand why Mom didn't stick around. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. That's horrible of me."
"It's okay. No judgment here," I say, allowing her the opportunity to talk about her family if she wants to, but making sure not to push or pry.
"He just works all the time. I wanted tonight to be really nice for both of you, so you could get to know each other. Now he's locked back up in his office not even five minutes after meeting you. I'm sorry. I'm just really embarrassed."
"Don't be. Work's work. Trust me, I understand. I don't think I've seen Derrick for more than fifteen minutes at a time since he started his new company. The joys of being an adult, I guess."
"I guess."
The office door down the hallway squeaks quietly as it opens, and I can hear Sarah's father's footsteps coming closer and closer.
"Hi, Sweetie. I'm really sorry about this, but I have to go into the office. Something big has come up, and they need me there," Mr. Miller says to her.
Sarah's eyes begin to water ever so slightly as she quickly nods in his direction. She doesn't even protest his leaving, probably because she knows that those protests will fall on deaf ears. Or at least, ears that are unwilling to compromise the security of who knows what just to meet and spend time with his daughter's boyfriend.
The question of why Halpern is being called away has just entered my mind when I feel my phone vibrate inside my pants pocket. It’s not a normal vibration, though, but rather a subtle Morse code-like pattern that indicates the alert isn't coming from a text message or an email. The alert is directly from The Agency. They’re sending the coded message that allows them to contact me, directly, in case of emergencies. Midnight spent the better part of a week dissecting the app to ensure it contained absolutely no way for The Agency to track or otherwise spy on me before allowing me to put it on my phone. This is the first time it has ever gone off, and it can't be a coincidence that Sarah's dad is being called away at the exact same time.
"Uhhh," Sarah's dad begins, "I hate to do this to you, Connor, but I'm gonna have to walk you to the door, son."
"Daddy! What are you doing?" Sarah asks, dabbing her eyes to prevent tears from rolling down her cheeks.
> "I'm sorry, honey. It's nothing personal, but you know the house rules: no boys allowed in the house if I'm not here."
"So, not only are you embarrassing me by leaving in the middle of dinner after you promised to meet my boyfriend, but you're kicking him out too? We didn't even eat yet!"
"Why don't you make him a plate to go while I get my bag together for the office? You understand, don't you, Connor?"
"Yeah, of course, Mr. Miller. To be honest, I really have to get going too."
"You were going to leave anyway?!" Sarah snaps.
That was definitely the way wrong thing to say.
"Wait, what? No. I mean, yes. I mean, it's just that ..." I begin to stutter out before I'm interrupted.
"Fine. It's fine. I don't care. Both of you can leave. I'll take care of everything just like I always do. Don't worry about me. Like I even have to tell either of you that," Sarah rants as she bursts through the swinging door back into the kitchen.
I'm not sure what to do. I would follow her, but this isn't my house. If anyone should do anything, I assume it should be Mr. Miller and that I should let him take the lead. I glance in his direction to see if his face offers any clues as to what I should or shouldn't be doing in this situation.
"She'll be okay. She just gets worked up sometimes. She'll get over it. She's tough as nails, but she can be a little dramatic sometimes. Gets that from her mother," Mr. Miller tells me.
There's silence for a few seconds before Sarah's dad clears his throat and looks at his watch. Right. He wants me to leave.
"Well, I really should be going," I say. He jumps at the opportunity to begin ushering me out the door.
"Sorry about all of this. It genuinely was nice meeting you tonight, Connor. Sarah talks about you all the time, and I'm glad I got to see for myself that you're not some kinda weirdo or creep," he says.
"Uhh, thanks?" I say, not sure whether or not to take that as a compliment. Mr. Miller picks up on my confusion.
"I mean that in the best possible way."
I laugh nervously.
"All right then," he says. "I'll show you to the door before I have to jet out of here myself. I hope to see you again soon."
"Yeah, me too."
Chapter 10
Upon my arrival at Silver Island, it is immediately obvious that there is a lot more going on here than normal. The normally empty hallways that lead out in every direction from the receiving area are full of men and women hurrying between rooms. Some carry folders full of papers and photographs while others are clutching assault rifles and wearing combat helmets. Every one of them stops for a moment when I pass. Six-foot-three inches tall and over two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle. In reality, I actually weigh much more or less, depending on the powers I'm using at any given moment, just another side effect of the metabands that no one quite understands. It makes perfect sense to me, but then again, I'm the one who can fly.
They all stop to look at me because everyone who works here is never one hundred percent comfortable with a meta walking the halls. It's hard to blame them. The majority of the metas they encounter are the worst scum on Earth. They mostly see Metas who are mass murderers, genocidal maniacs, and criminals who only care about making others afraid of them. They deal with the worst of the worst, especially the ones who refuse to relinquish their metabands once they're caught.
The processes for detaining metas who have been weakened to the point of metaband power failure but still refuse to remove them are often cruel, but they have proven very successful. There's never been an escape, at least not one that anyone has ever found out about. Still, it's hard to ever feel completely at ease knowing that hundreds of feet below this facility are some of the worst criminals in history. They're in their concrete and steel bunkers with no possibility of release or parole. There's no rehabilitation for these men and women. The risk of removing their restraints and allowing them to power down their metabands is just too great. They had their chance to take off their metabands, and they refused. There are no second chances.
I'm one of the “good ones,” but there have been “good ones” who haven't been what they appeared to be. In the last few months, I've done a lot to prove myself to everyone at this facility, but some will never be one hundred percent comfortable seeing someone walk down these corridors wearing silver wristbands.
Halfway to Halpern's office, I feel a slap on my back and turn to find Halpern's grinning face. He must drive like a maniac to have gotten here before me, but I did have to make sure that I went all the way back to my apartment just in case I was being followed. Maybe it's Midnight's paranoia rubbing off on me, but the coincidence that Halpern is Sarah's father just seems way more than coincidental to me. On the off chance this is all some plan to expose my secret identity, I need to be sure.
"You finally made it," Halpern says.
"I made it Mr ... Halpern."
Great. All that trouble to make sure he doesn’t find out my secret identity on the one in a million chance he’s onto me, and I almost call him Mr. Miller directly to his face. That would have been a fun way to blow both our covers with one big stupid slip of the tongue.
"Please, call me Agent Halpern," he says with a quizzical look on his face.
I can tell he’s curious as to why I've just referred to him as “mister.” Luckily, there's too much going on for him to give it as much thought as he might like.
"Follow me. We're not going to my office. We're going to the Briefing Room."
I follow Halpern down a series of winding hallways that all the look the same. Door after identical door holding who knows what behind a series of biometric locks. Halpern is tapping away at a tablet that is just out of my line of sight. The little that I can see is almost completely unintelligible to me anyway.
"Soooo, are you going to tell me what this is about?" I ask Halpern, who hasn't looked up at me since I called him mister.
"In a minute. Need to make sure we're in a secure area."
"Secure area? Isn't this whole place a secure area?"
"There's secure, and then there's ‘what I need to tell you’ secure. This way," Halpern says as he takes a sharp right down another identical hallway.
The hallways are all sterile-looking, a lot of white and steel. If you make a wrong turn somewhere, it’d be almost impossible to remember where since everything looks so uniform. This place has “maze” written all over it. We pass almost a dozen doors before we arrive at the one that must be deemed “secure” by Halpern’s standards. He presses his palm to a glass plate and bends down for a retinal scan. At the same time, he announces his name and identification number for voice recognition. The badge clipped to the lapel of his suit jacket emits a soft beep, and an unseen light inside of it glows green.
"I guess you can never be too secure," I joke.
"It's not perfect, but it's the best we can do."
"I was kidding."
"I wasn't. After you," Halpern says as the door hisses softly and rolls inside a pocket in the wall. The room itself is bare, brushed aluminum walls and little else. After Halpern enters, the door closes behind him, and we're now in complete darkness.
"Computer, load case file eight nine three five seven. Authorization code tango, bravo, zebra, eight, nine, nine, alpha. Agent Halpern," he announces into the darkness.
An instant later we're both temporarily blinded by the light of the wall in front of us as the entire surface becomes a display.
"I've told them a million times, they've got to install a dimmer on this thing," Halpern says as he rubs his eyes and blinks to adjust to the sudden change in lighting. "You sure you're ready for this, kid?"
"I'm not even sure what this is."
"Well, you're about to find out."
The ten-foot tall screen in front of us displays what looks like the type of photograph you see in private detective movies, a candid shot where the subject isn't aware he’s being photographed. The man in the photo has dark, coffee-colored skin, with
a cleanly shaven, bald head. He's tall with broad shoulders and wearing what I assume to be a very nice suit. I mean, it fits him better than the old ones I borrow from Derrick fit me whenever I need a suit. He’s talking on a mobile phone while ducking into a limousine that’s waiting for him on the street outside of an office building. He looks as though he's in his late forties but takes good care of himself.
"Do you know this man?" Halpern asks.
"No. Should I?"
"You really are just a kid, aren't you?"
I don't respond. The image slides over to make room for a cover from Finance magazine, where the same man is pictured alongside the caption: “The Baron of Bay View City.”
"His name is Desmond Keane. He's one of the richest men in Bay View City and has been for a very long time."
"Okay ... so since when is that a crime?"
"Within the past few months, Mr. Keane has become one of the richest men in the world through a series of seemingly one-sided business dealings."
"I'm still not following how this has anything to do with us."
Halpern clears his throat. "If by us you mean myself and The Agency, we have reason to believe that his recent business deals are a result of telepathic powers Mr. Keane has garnered from a set of metabands believed to have been acquired on the black market. It’s our belief that Mr. Keane has used his meta powers to coerce his business rivals and others into signing over assets and deals worth several billion dollars over the past month."
"There's a black market for metabands?"
"If you're as rich as Mr. Keane is, there's a black market for everything."
"But telepathy isn't a meta ability."
"No, it's not a known meta ability. There’s still a lot about metabands we don’t know. More active metabands are present on our planet than ever before. Just because we haven't seen an ability yet, doesn't mean it's not out there, especially with an ability like telepathy. If you're potentially able to control the mind of anyone on Earth, that's not something you're likely to start advertising. Especially if said ability came from illegally acquired metabands."