“About time you showed up,” he said.
“Nice to see you, too.”
We went all the way to the last building in the back of the storage complex. I used the key code and let us in. Down a hall filled with doors and bad fluorescent lighting.
It was the next to last door. I paused. My replacement wrist comm was identical to the old one, right down to the scratches. But what if they somehow sensed it was different? What if they detected it? Perhaps one of the cell leaders knew.
I could feel Speed Guy’s gaze on me. I unlocked the door and we went inside.
Nefarious and Ashula were there, along with two other people I didn’t recognize. And Frank. Shit. I rubbed at my skin around the wrist comm. What if she touched it, and it got a read. I was screwed then.
They stood around a big conference table. There was a map of the world taped on the far wall. Everyone looked over at me when I came in. The two unknowns frowned. One was an albino woman with a cloud of frizzy hair, the other a guy with skin so dark it shone.
“I gather you are expecting her,” the guy said to Nefarious. He had a French accent. He was tall and skinny, and wore a gray business suit and brown shoes that gleamed even brighter than his skin.
Nefarious was dressed all in black.
"This must be your local commander," the albino said, giving me the once over. She spoke with a Spanish accent.
"Got it in one, lady,” I said.
Ashula came around the table and walked up to me. "Mat, I am so glad you are all right."
All right was a relative term. I never liked it. "We made it out," I said.
I crossed my arms. "Nice of you to wait around back at the hideout." I aimed that at Nefarious.
"We had no choice,” Nefarious said. That was it. Nothing else. He moved on to his agenda. "This organization survived a deadly attack yesterday, an attack by security forces of the Ellis Conglomerate."
"Yes, yes, we know that," French-accented man said.
"Mister Odobe, I am explaining this again because the meeting is now starting."
Odobe jerked his head at me. "So, you wait until your local minion has arrived before beginning the meeting proper?"
"Let's not be diverted by procedure," Ashula said, smiling at the man. "We must observe the courtesies; it is the basis of who we are."
Odobe shook his finger at Ashula. ”Who we are is an ‘organization’ deemed a criminal, rogue Empowered group by the Hero Council and the United Nations."
Nefarious tapped the table top. "They might depict the Scourge as a super criminal group, but we know we aren't."
Odobe harrumphed. "That is what you say. I see things differently. Why not embrace who you are?”
"I concur," the albino said.
Ashula leaned over the table and started at the other woman. "Of course you would, Lightning."
There was history there, but of course I had no idea what it was. Ignorant as usual, but this time it wasn't anyone's fault.
But that didn't mean I wasn't going to weigh in. "Can we listen to what the boss has to say? It's been a crappy week, and I'd like to get on with things, so we can get to the weekend and I can have some fun."
Lightning's face got nasty. Tough. I'd been glared at by far better, starting with Keisha.
Odobe laughed, a deep, chest laugh. Gold rings flashed on his fingers, each with a different gem. His suit wasn't exactly cheap either.
Speed Guy must sleep in his outfit. He leaned against a wall and moved his hands in a blur. Juggling? Who the hell knew? I couldn't see what he was playing with.
"I didn't bring us together to discuss the Scourge," Nefarious said. He nodded at me. "Ms. Brandt brought the activities of an Ellis subsidiary to light. Emerald Biologic."
Odobe and Lightning got interested at this. You could practically see their ears perk up. Money. That had to be the reason.
"Emerald Biologic has been developing dangerous new technologies and apparently selling them to the United Nations, individual countries, and even other companies, apparently with the Hero Council's approval."
That was a weak ass way of talking about what they’d really been up to.
"Are we to appropriate this technology?" Lightning asked.
"No. We are to destroy it."
Odobe and Lightning looked like Nefarious had just thrown cold water on them.
"I thought we were looking at taking down the Hero Council?" Odobe said. "Has not that been our shared goal since this organization was reconstituted two years ago?"
Nefarious turned and gestured at the wall map of the world. "The Hero Council holds the levers of power over the Earth.”
“This is no secret, Drake,” Odobe said. He looked bored. “How will going after a biotechnology company change that situation?”
Nefarious laid a duffle bag on the table, unzipped it. “Ms. Brandt discovered this at an Emerald Biologic facility on the Oregon cost.” He pulled out the Hero Council jumpsuit I’d found. I forced my hands to unclench.
Odobe’s eyes narrowed. “A Hero Council jump suit?”
Nefarious lifted it so they could see the name.
“Titan?” Lightning said, and then said something in Spanish.
“The same place where they are making new life forms and turning children into slaves,” Nefarious said.
Odobe and Lightning looked at him like they thought he was full of shit.
I jumped in. “They have been modifying people and plants. They’ve got children being used to create living armor and other tech. They’ve created monster plants that can walk.”
“Ellis,” Lightning said. It wasn’t a question. Her cheeks reddened and her mouth tightened. “So, he is in league with the Hero Council.”
I pointed at the jumpsuit. “That’s proof.”
Odobe twisted one of his rings. “Not necessarily.” He seemed to be one of those guys who doubted everything.
I stood there, my chest tightening, gut churning. They weren’t going to go after Emerald Biologic after all. Damn it.
I fiddled with my wrist comm, brushed my finger against the button. Three short presses, and one long one would be all it would take, and then Support would swoop down. I’d be the hero. Assuming I lived.
And Ellis could keep on creating nightmares and enslaving people, kids.
I tasted bile.
Ashula spoke before I did. “That tells us something very important,” she said.
“Oh?” Odobe was still Mister Skeptical.
“That the Hero Council values Emerald Biologic, and, in particular, a site designated Emerald Green.”
Odobe stroked his chin. “We can use that.”
“Precisely.” Nefarious turned on the portable computer, swiveled the screen. A map of Colorado came up, the God’s eye view, and zoomed in on Colorado Springs.
Electricity crackled from Lightning’s fingertips. “The Citadel.” She said something in Spanish. The Hero Council’s North American stronghold.
I stopped fiddling with my wrist comm.
Nefarious froze the image of the computer display. He drew a green circle around a point to the northwest of Colorado Springs. “This is the Emerald Green facility. Its proximity to the Citadel provides more evidence that the Hero Council values what Ellis is doing.”
Ashula caught my eyes, smiled at me, as if to say, see, we agree with you. They had a roundabout way of doing that.
“What’s the plan?” Odobe asked.
Just like that, the man was all business.
Nefarious typed out commands on the computer keyboard, and a split image popped up on the screen. On the left was the Citadel, the fifty-story tower with the huge surrounding concrete circle of offices and workshops called the Disk, looking like a circular version of the destroyed Pentagon in Washington, DC. There were four aircraft and helicopter landing pads on top of the base of offices, surrounding the foot of the soaring tower.
It would take a huge army to storm that place. Even then it looked dicey. A circle
of tall, skinny glasslike poles surrounded the Disk.
“Force projectors,” Nefarious pointed a computer cursor at one.
“Are you trying to convince us this is a bad idea?” Speed Guy asked.
“Just showing that we won’t be able to storm the place.”
I frowned. He was just showing off.
“So, what is the plan?” I asked.
“You will take a team into the Emerald Green facility. Here.” He zoomed in the right-hand screen image until we could see a giant complex of green buildings, like a city of tinted glass buildings, all the glass emerald green. “Once inside, you will head to an area designated in the intelligence data you obtained as ‘the Hothouse’.”
“Then what?”
“You will deploy an electro-magnetic pulse weapon, which will destroy the facility. There will be a timer. You will have fifteen minutes to clear the area. The resulting secondary explosions from the chemical tanks in the Hothouse will destroy the “unlife,” as you call it. The EMP will wipe their computers.”
“But it won’t wipe out what Ellis knows.”
Nefarious nodded. “It will if Ellis is in the Hothouse.”
“How do you know that?”
He tapped the computer screen. “The intel you provided.”
That couldn’t have been in there. But I didn’t know for sure.
“Okay. Fine. How are we supposed to get in?”
Nefarious glanced at Odobe. “He will provide a way under.”
Odobe put his hand on his chest. “Pardon, but why should I?”
“Because we need you to create a tunnel beneath the complex’s outer perimeter.”
They locked gazes. Macho posturing.
But Odobe looked away suddenly. “Very well. I will do it.”
“Thanks for the assist,” I said to Odobe. I looked at Nefarious. “What’s the second part of Double Tap?”
“An infiltration of the Citadel.”
This was Mutter-level insanity.
Lightning looked like someone had struck her with lightning. “Incredible. Do you both have a death wish?”
Odobe began laughing, a deep, rumbling belly laugh. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. “I needed a good chuckle.” He grew serious. Something about the way he stood made me realize his power was a connection to the Earth. I could almost feel the floor tremble. This was a very powerful man.
The gold on his fingers, and on the chain around his neck. The gems studding those rings. He must be worth a lot of money. If his power was connected to the Earth, then the Earth’s riches-gold, silver, gemstones-were his for the taking. He could be fabulously wealthy. And yet he was still concerned about money.
He slapped the table, rattling it and making Lightning jump.
“I’m in.”
Just like that. A gambler. Maybe he went through money. “My people need things to be different,” Odobe said. “The UN stifles our opportunities by preventing us from controlling our ancestral territory.”
Power then. The Hero Council and the UN held power, and he wanted it. Nefarious seemed the same. But Ashula, Ashula I thought was different.
Before I realized it, my hand was back on my wrist comm. Three quick presses, then hold for three seconds. Stall a bit, ask more questions. Then the sudden attack.
I’d already waited too long. Zhukova would have a stroke if she knew where I was and what I hadn’t done.
“We have a way into the Citadel,” Nefarious said, and I paused, fighting with myself. Those kids in Colombia and on the Coast. Those things. The twisted, alien things that reared out of the water in that lab, and lumbered and bellowed on the mountain. That could be the world, remade by Ellis because he wanted to remake it into something else. Power again.
I forced myself to listen to Nefarious.
“We can get into the Disk as UN personnel and civilian workers—there are thousands there.”
“Then what?” Lightning’s face clouded. “What will being inside the Disk do? Or do you intend to penetrate the Citadel’s tower itself and take over?”
Nefarious smiled. “Something like that.” He tapped on his computer keyboard and the screen display showed a weird looking map—blue dots connecting by lines, superimposed over a ghostly looking globe of the Earth. One dot said, “The Citadel.” Another, in France, said, “The Arch.” One in Japan said, “the Pagoda.” There was another blue point in Australia, and a fifth in India.
“These are the five Hero Council fortresses. Regional headquarters. Each considered impregnable. Even if you were able to penetrate one, you’d be overwhelmed by quick response teams.”
“Tell us something we don’t know,” Odobe said, then laughed that rumbling laugh of his again. “There’s a reason why each of these is located in a city—quartering security forces and additional Empowered.” He got serious, his voice going deeper. “So, I say again, tell us something we don’t already know.”
“Very well.” Nefarious smiled again. “I will.” He typed on his keyboard. Bright blue lines appeared, connecting each dot to every other dot.
“This is how each fortress is protected. By being connected to every other fortress, via a quantum tunneling network, created by James Goldin.”
A quantum tunneling what? That was crazy. Goldin—Doctor Prometheus, had been dead for like forty years. And why hadn’t anyone heard of this before?
Odobe started to laugh again, then got serious. “Hypersonic transport is how they respond so fast, that and the local security teams.”
Nefarious leaned forward. “The Q-T network can’t handle transporting more than a handful of people at once, and then it needs to be reset. Goldin actually considered it a white-elephant.”
“But Goldin’s dead!” Lightning snapped. “Do you expect us to believe this network has been in place for decades and kept secret the whole time?”
“I do. Because it has been. We only learned about it from the data Ms. Brandt recovered in the recent operation.”
I couldn’t keep my mouth shut any longer. “That was the Ellis data I found.”
Nefarious nodded. “You couldn’t realize that Ellis had information stored on his private network concerning the Hero Council.”
“How would he get this super secret intel?” It didn’t make sense to me. Nor from the expressions on their faces, did it to Odobe or Lightning.
“An excellent question. The obvious answer is because Titan gave it to him.”
“Titan!” We all said it at once, even Speed Guy.
“Yes, Titan. Because he sees Ellis as the next James Goldin.”
“But Ellis isn’t Empowered,” I said.
“But he’s a genius nonetheless.”
Ashula stood, went to the world map taped on the wall behind her. I finally looked closely at the map—it was an old style map, the kind that had “beware of dragons” scrawled on it. A weird map to have at this meeting.
“No one knows the origins of our powers, where they come from, why we have them. They seemed to come out of nowhere in the 1950s. The first Empowerings occurred a few years after the atomic bomb was developed. But no one’s been able to find a connection.” She made a circle in the air over the map.
“This old mariner’s map of the world, actually a cheap reproduction, shows the world as it once was thought to be. India believed to be just west of Europe. We have this map here because it illustrates how wrong a worldview can be.”
She touched the map. “The same is true for the Q-T network. None of you realized it existed until just now.”
“There is more information in the data we uncovered. Information which indicates the existence of a far older world-spanning network.”
“Insanity,” Lightning said.
“Mythology,” Odobe added.
I shook my head. “You’re saying there’s some sort of ancient network, whatever that means? Doing what?”
“Connected to the source of our power,” she said.
There’s way more crazy
in this room then I thought you could cram into one small storage room.
She smiled. “Mat, I know this seems preposterous. Yet it’s true. This ancient network is connected somehow to the source of our powers. How it is connected we do not know. Yet.”
Lightning looked confused and angry at the same time. Her eyes were practically popping out of her head. “So how does this help us take down the Hero Council, which you claimed was our goal?”
“It shows us how connected Ellis is to the Hero Council, at least to Titan, and to an ancient secret. But they guard this secret. We need to cut off the head of the guardian in order to finally find the truth.”
Nefarious looked triumphant. His eyes shone. “We are going to disable their command facilities and their Q-T Network by inserting electromagnetic pulse generating devices into the Q-T network, and activating them at each of the fortresses.”
I smelled a lie. Something about the way he said it said he was lying; he wasn’t quite telling it like he planned it. I’d been around a lot of liars, so I could smell them from a mile away.
“You are going to somehow get five of these EMP devices into the Citadel, and then send one to each of the other fortresses, and simultaneously detonate them, in order to wipe out the command and control capability of the Hero Council and their UN minions,” Odobe said. “I just want to be clear on this.”
“Yes.”
Odobe grinned. “I’m in.”
Lightning jerked, stared at him. “You are as crazy as they are.”
He laughed. “I never said I wasn’t crazy—we all have to be a bit crazy to do all the things we do. It’s being Empowered—it makes us each a little crazy.” He got serious again. “But this is our chance. And it’s our cause. Because if what we have learned about Ellis is true, and Titan is in on it, we have to act.”
Ashula nodded. “Ellis is involved because Titan wants him to improve the Q-T network, expand it so that it can reach three times, maybe even ten times as many locations.”
I shivered. There it was. That was it.
“Destroying the Q-T network and disabling five headquarters is only a start,” Nefarious said. “The real work begins after that. But Ashula and I have been in touch with counterparts to our organization in other parts of the world, who have agreed to act against the Hero Council once this blow is struck.”
Empowered: Traitor (The Empowered Series Book 2) Page 20