“At your earliest convenience,” I said. Blech. This was almost as bad as that crappy Rogue Hunters show’s dialogue.
“Parking lot at Mount Tabor. Fifteen minutes.” Click.
Gee, nice to hear from you, boss; glad you were sooo concerned about me down in Colombia, embedded in a dangerous rogue Empowered organization. Yeah, I’ll bet he lost a lot of sleep over what happened to me.
I parked the Dasher on the street near the parking lot—that was the deal. Protocol and security, as Winterfield put it. I’d say it was anal bullshit, but I wasn’t in charge.
There was a black van in the parking lot. That would be Winterfield.
I pulled my hood up, my breath misting in the freezing fall evening. No moon tonight, so it was dark. The fir trees on Mount Tabor slept.
Don’t trust anyone, ever, Lenore, my cell mate in Special Corrections, used to tell me, over and over.
It could be someone else’s black van. I slowed down. My boot crunched on a dried walnut shell. I stopped. Listened. Watched the van to see if anyone came out. Nothing. It was cold. Screw caution, I wanted to cut to the chase.
I trudged up to the van. The side door opened. There was Alex, all cleaned up in the black suit and white shirt all Support agents wore. He even had the silver tie clip on his skinny black tie. His black hair gleamed with gel. He smiled.
“Good evening, ma’am,” he said, just a hint of a drawl in his voice. I’d be more likely to be charmed if this wasn’t a ride to spook central.
He helped me inside, slid the door shut behind me. Winterfield scowled at me from the driver’s seat.
I raised my eyebrows. “What?”
“Funny, Brandt. Very funny. What was that you were doing outside?”
“Being careful. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“There’s careful, Brandt, then there’s being extremely obvious and forced in your caution. You didn’t look natural at all. Then you stopped suddenly and looked around. Suspicious as all hell.”
“I stepped on a walnut shell.”
He tilted his head. “And you thought mama squirrel might come and get you? So what?”
No one rained on a day like Winterfield.
“We will have to work on your subtlety.”
Something else to put on the list.
He got up and joined us in the back of the van. “Time to get suited up.”
Hanging on a rack was a thick rubber suit with even thicker elbow length rubber gloves, and then eyeless helmet. Great. The sensory deprivation crapsuit.
“I gotta put that on?”
“Why are you surprised? That’s the procedure.”
I crossed my arms. “You ought to trust me by now. I did take Mutter out.”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
“But it sounds like Support has.” I was pissed at having wear the crapsuit again.
“No, Support hasn’t. But procedures have to be observed. We must limit who knows where this facility is. You’re an infiltrator inside a very dangerous Empowered criminal organization that would love to discover Support facilities. What if you get found out, and have the facility’s location forced out of you. This way you can’t tell.”
Heart-warming how much they cared about me. But he had a point. The Scourge would be very interested in knowing Support locations. Ashula had told me to keep my ear to the ground. She wouldn’t say why, but I got the impression the Scourge would pay a very nasty visit if they knew where the facility was.
Winterfield gave me a thin smile. “Don’t worry, Brandt, we’ll help you.”
“Gee, thanks.”
Alex looked at me sympathetically, but kept his mouth closed. Probably didn’t want a lecture later from his senior partner.
They helped me into the suit, then strapped me into a rolling chair, locked the wheels. I got ear plugs, nose plugs, eye covers, and then the damn helmet.
It was like being in limbo. I couldn’t see shit, couldn’t hear shit. I couldn’t smell, or even feel anything. Support wanted me totally cut off from the world.
I lost track of time, and drifted off to sleep.
I was back in Colombia. The killer walking tree-things were chasing me again. Only this time the trees sprouted little kids with green fuzzy fur on their heads, and leaves for hands. The children opened their mouths and tendrils slithered out.
I woke up screaming inside my eyeless helmet, still cut off from the world. My heart hammered in my ears. It was the only thing I could feel. Even my skin felt nothing—the inside of the suit numbed it somehow.
Now would have been a great time to have Alex and Winterfield get me out of this thing.
I wasn’t so lucky.
I didn’t dream any more. I lay in darkness, remembering the horror show in Colombia.
My heart pounded harder. My world was all surging adrenalin and very bad memories.
I was in a royally foul mood when Winterfield and Alex finally got me out of the crapsuit. I stood, tried to stretch out my muscles. My thighs were cramped and hurt like hell.
We were in a windowless little room with a bed, a sealed door, and a little clothes rack. Oh, and a toilet. A guest room in the Support dungeon. Could have been the same cell, I mean “guest room,” I’d been in last time I was here. Or it could be a different one. Hell, I might not even be in the same complex. I assumed it was underground, but only because I never saw any windows the last time I was in the dungeon.
Alex looked sorry, while Winterfield just shook his head. “Brandt, don’t give me that look,” he said. “You’ve done this before.”
“It still sucks.”
I glared at Winterfield.
He glared back with those ice-blue eyes of his. It was like trying to stare down an iceberg. “I already told you why we have to do this.”
I turned to Alex. “What about you, Alex?”
He managed to look embarrassed. “If it were up to me, sure.”
I looked back at Winterfield, raised my eyebrow. He shrugged, which made me madder.
“Not my call either, Brandt.”
I opened my mouth to swear, stopped before I did.
“Close your mouth,” he told me. “You look like a tall fish with your mouth open like that.”
Very funny. The man was a real wit. But I shut my mouth.
Alex smiled. “Listen, Mat, you aren’t the only one with a boss.”
“Sure, you’ve got Winterfield here.”
“And all three of us have someone else,” Winterfield said. He sounded like he was telling someone they were about to die.
Great, another piece of bad news. “Who?”
“You’re about to find out.”
Winterfield was even less charming when he refused to answer a straight question.
He waved his wrist over a wall-mounted pad next to the sealed door. The door beeped and slid open with a pneumatic hiss.
They took me out of the room and down a windowless corridor, past identical doors. It was so quiet I could almost hear myself think. Our feet made no sound whatsoever as we walked. Even on a carpet your feet made a little noise. This was absolute dead silence.
We turned at an intersection into an identical-looking corridor. I rapped on the wall as we walked. I thought I heard a faint rap.
Winterfield stopped, gave me a hard look. “Don’t go making noise.”
Huh. No noise. Interesting. I wondered why.
I shrugged. “Sure.” It wasn’t worth being yelled at.
We turned left and down another corridor. If this wasn’t the same mind-numbing maze of look-alike corridors I’d spent quality time in before, it looked exactly like it.
Eventually we reached a double-wide door with a couple of guards in full body armor and stun rifles. Winterfield flashed his badge at the guards, who stepped aside to let him do the wrist thing against the pad beside the door.
The door slid open.
We walked into a big room with a giant display screen covering the far wall. The display screen was a checkerboard of
different scenes: a snow-capped mountain, divers approaching an underwater wreck, a familiar-looking ghost town somewhere in the high desert. Maybe Shaniko in eastern Oregon. I’d gone there once on a class trip in middle school.
A slender blond woman dressed in a black jumpsuit faced the giant display screen, her back to us. From behind she reminded me of my old warden, Fulbright, sending ice down my spine. But Fulbright had dressed like a business woman, and kept her hair short. This woman’s was in a braid, and she wore a holstered stunner on one hip.
The display switched to a scene outside a building that said “public library.” The camera was at shoulder height. It panned over a team of Support men and women in black, carrying stunners, then the view turned to show the doors to the library. The team rushed the building, the camera view following.
Winterfield and Alex watched the scene intently. The woman in front of us leaned forward, resting her hands on a big conference table to peer at the unfolding scene.
“Where’s the camera?” I whispered to Alex.
He didn’t look away from the display. “Headmounted video from the team leader,” he said.
The men and women in black burst through the doors, ran across a tiled floor, and past a long counter. A teenaged boy stood in the middle of the library, laughing as flames shot from his fingers. His wet hair was dyed bright, flame orange.
“These vile works are an affront to God,” he shouted. “I’ll burn them all. Cleanse the world!” Ceiling sprinklers sprayed water over everything, but the kid ignored them.
The camera view bobbed back and forth. The Support team fanned out, moving behind low shelves for cover. I saw the badly burned body of woman wearing the smoldering ruins of what might have been a dress. A librarian. From a different angle now the camera bobbed back to the rogue Empowered. There was another body behind him. I swallowed.
The teen turned and shot flames at a Support agent. She jumped out the camera’s field of view. A stunner hummed and went zap! The kid staggered, but still stood, conscious. Shit.
“Must be high on Cement,” Winterfield said. The kid whirled around, still spewing flame from his fingers. The stunners hummed and fired, again and again. His body flopped like a fish on a pier, but he still stood.
Bang. Bang. Bang! The loud gunshots made me jump. Bullets slammed into him and he finally fell.
On the video feed a man’s voice said, “Rogue down.”
The woman in front of us nodded at the screen. “Thank you, Walker. Good work. First aid is ready for your team and the surviving civilians.”
“Copy that,” Walker replied.
The woman pressed a button on the table and the screens went dark.
She turned around. Her face would be stunning if it weren’t for the old burn scar covering the left side of her face. Where her left eye would have been was a black, multifaceted lens, like a bug’s eye. Her right eye was green. She looked me over, nodding to herself.
She pointed to conference chairs around the table, and we sat.
“I am Irene Zhukova, Director of North American Operations for Support.” She steepled her fingers, considering me. “You are Mathilda Brandt,” she said, like she was reading a label. “No middle name. Empowered—control type, plants, beginning when you were sixteen. Sentenced to special corrections at the same age, and paroled at twenty one. Currently you are a Support infiltrator embedded in the Scourge.”
I shrugged. “That sounds like me. I guess I should count myself lucky I didn’t get shot when I was captured back then.”
Winterfield shot me a “what the hell, Brandt?” look.
Zhukova shook her head. “Your situation was significantly different than the rogue Empowered Support was forced to terminate just now.”
Terminate just now. There was no anger, no scorn, in those words, just a matter-of-fact statement.
“In your case, your motives were different,” Zhukova said.
“He looked crazy to me,” I said.
“I do not have a definite diagnosis for his condition, but the public library was not the first place where he used his power to destroy, and to kill.” She looked at me flatly. “Regardless of his mental state, our first duty is protect the populace from rogue Empowered. Unfortunately, the illegal drug he had ingested rendered our stunners ineffective.”
“No one should kill unless they have to,” I said.
She nodded. “Not if they have a choice.” She tapped the conference table. “You had a choice in Seattle.”
The words were still matter-of-fact, but it felt like she had slapped me. “I stopped that asshole Mutter from destroying Seattle and killing God knows how many people. Where the hell were you during that?” I shouted.
Zhukova looked at me calmly, which only pissed me off more.
“Obviously not monitoring that operation,” she said, “otherwise things would have gone differently.”
I waved my arms. “Just snapped your fingers and Mutter would have been captured, right?”
She pursued her lips, watched me. “You did accomplish your assignment.”
“Gee, thanks boss.”
She ignored my sarcasm. “On the other hand, you broke procedure and allowed a highly dangerous rogue Empowered to threaten your family. You then kept crucial information about his plan from your case officer.”
Case officer—Winterfield.
She didn’t stop. “You should have contacted Support.” She turned to Alex.
“Agent Sanchez, you had a responsibility to maintain contact with Ms. Brandt.”
“That was on me, not him,” I said, my voice loud.
“Each of you has a duty to this organization independent of anyone else.” She crossed her arms. She wore fancy black gloves that ran up to her elbows, zippered with compartments. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Who wears gloves like that?
“Ms. Brandt, why did you not use the contact protocol?” she asked me.
“I didn’t want to get caught. It would’ve blown everything.”
“An interesting choice of words. So, you did not give the location of the cell you were in. A Hero Council strike team could have struck before the disaster in Seattle, and averted all the damage and death. Instead you aided a highly dangerous rogue Empowered in obtaining a banned device which greatly magnified his already deadly power over air currents.”
I ground my teeth. I started to say something but she talked right over me.
“You enabled Kai Jones, AKA Mutter” in the destruction of the Sequoia complex. You are also indirectly responsible for the deaths of over two dozen Support agents and a sanctioned Empowered, as well as nearly a hundred crew members aboard the United Nations Control Ship Artemis. You put the entire city of Seattle at risk.”
My chest tightened. “I didn’t want any of that to happen. I was trying to stop it.”
She tapped her fingers together. “You acted out for personal reasons, to protect your family from threats that Jones made, failing to consider the bigger picture.”
I slapped the table top. “Hell yes!” I practically shouted. “Who wouldn’t have?” Mutter had threatened my family—Ruth, Ava, and Ella. Of course I did what I had to. Zhukova’s blood must be as cold as ice. “Wouldn’t you, if it were your family?” I demanded.
She shook her head sadly. “Sacrifices are necessary if we are to avoid much greater loss,” she said. “Otherwise far more families suffer.”
“I was told to expose Mutter to the Scourge, in order to get in good with the Inner Circle. If an HC strike team had swooped down at the farmhouse that wouldn’t have happened.”
“Perhaps. But you should have contacted Support. You can not make such decisions on your own.” Her voice was quiet, her tone still maddeningly matter-of-fact.
“Got it,” I said. I had no idea if she believed me or not. She moved on.
“Now, please tell me about your latest assignment for the Scourge, the operation in Colombia.
I swallowed, and gave her the same rundown I�
�d already given Alex. My voice caught when I got to the village of Dr. Moreau. I forced myself to describe what we found.
She raised an eyebrow. “The inhabitants of the village in question could have been afflicted with an unknown biological disorder, possibly a fungus.”
“A fungus? You’ve got to be shitting me.” I stood.
Zhukova looked at me calmly. “Sit down, Ms. Brandt.”
I sat. “You all know what this is, don’t you? You know.” I was shouting again.
Zhukova raised an eyebrow. “You waste too much energy with your anger. No, we didn’t know about the infestation in Colombia until you reported it.”
Infestation. She had a word for it. “But you’ve seen it before.”
“We know about other, similar-seeming occurrences elsewhere.”
I slapped my hand against my thigh. “Then why haven’t you stopped it?”
“We are dealing with a number of challenges.”
“Such as?” What could be more important than finding out who and what was behind this?
“Things that are on a need-to-know basis.”
And I didn’t need to know.
Zhukova went on. “Must I state the obvious, after already implying it? You are an informant, embedded in a dangerous rogue Empowered organization. It would be foolish to share too much information with you. What if you are compromised and forced to disclose what you know?”
My mouth was suddenly dry. That wasn’t a pleasant thought. “I wouldn’t spill my guts,” I said. She looked like she didn’t believe me.
She tapped the table in front of her. “It is true we know about other infestations of unknown biological origin. Most have disappeared by the time we investigate, while the ones that haven’t have not survived intact to reach a laboratory, and the remains have defied analysis.”
The Hero Council had genius level Empowereds, and Support was black ops central, the world’s number one spy outfit. How could something like this “defy analysis?”
Stupid, I was being stupid. When I’d been a kid Ruth liked to say that there were more things in heaven and earth then dreamed of in my or anyone else’s philosophy. Like Empowereds. No one knew what caused Empowering, or where it came from. Yeah, there were a million theories, but most of them came down to a roll of the cosmic dice.
Empowered: Traitor (The Empowered Series Book 2) Page 7