Because I was shifting in size from that of an enormous Sienna giant to the size of a bug, sometimes within seconds, and entirely out of my own control.
“Your little fake drone seems to be making good time,” I said as we crossed the loping plains of Illinois. Ahead, I suspected, was metropolitan Chicago, though I couldn’t quite see it yet.
“It’s actually a real drone,” he said. “I just stuck a cockpit in when I removed one of the remote piloting systems. I seldom use it, though, because it’s so much slower than the SR-71 or the Concorde. Blends better, though, in a crowded sky.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling a tug of sadness. “I get the sense that the sky over America is going to be crowded for a good long while yet.” I didn’t take the obvious path and hammer him with the fact that it was his own damned fault for implicating me in a miniature nuke attack, because he’d already expressed a total lack of remorse for that. And since he hadn’t actually killed any other human beings in said attack, as much as I wanted to rip his throat out for screwing me over, I was having a hard time working up the motivation to do so, especially since he was presently protecting my ass from a government that was trying really hard to draw and quarter me in the modern style.
“Mmm,” Greg acknowledged stiffly. He was a really short guy by nature, stocky and stout, kinda like me in that regard, and probably within an inch of my natural height. He’d apparently tailored his planes to adapt to that height, though, because every one of the pilot seats seemed to have been raised a few inches. It was a strange thing to notice, I suppose, but I noticed it.
“Okay,” I said, changing tacks, “so I’m calling you Hank Pym or Scott Lang. You choose. Generous, huh?”
He didn’t look at me. “Hank Pym,” he said softly, almost before I finished the sentence. When I left a pregnant pause for him to elaborate, he took the invitation. “Hank Pym was a brilliant scientist who created countless inventions. Scott Lang was just a thief.” He pursed his lips hard. “I hate thievery, especially thievery for monetary gain.”
“Didn’t you … steal this drone?” I asked, wondering if you could drown in irony. I hoped not. “And your planes? And helicopters. And—”
“Yes,” he said, swiftly and impatiently. “But not for gain. They’re tools. And I always chose the ones heading for decommission, preferring to restore them myself through my own tinkering. So I suppose I stole from the boneyard of the military and a few companies here and there, but … nothing that anyone was going to consider a great loss to their bottom line.”
“Including that nuke?” I fished.
“The nuke was from a program called SADM—Special Atomic Demolition Munitions,” he said, taking on the air of a professor giving a lecture, “they were designed as suitcase bombs. I also stole some of the old Davy Crockett field artillery nukes. Yes, they were all headed for decommissioning. They were also generally small, a kiloton at most in their natural size. Of course, I reduced the one I aimed at you, or else it would have blown up considerably bigger.” He sounded a little defensive about it.
I decided to detour around the argument I saw because … what was the point? “So … you can’t control insects, can you?”
He hmphed, and I realized it was a very, very muted chuckle. “No. I looked into it after I discovered the full scope of my power as an Atlas, but it was … well, impossible. You see, ants communicate by—”
“So you’re an Atlas?” I asked. I laid my head back on the headrest and found it very comfortable. Like he’d regularly had company in his plane trips and refurbished the chairs accordingly. When he nodded, I said, “I’ve fought an Atlas before. In Minneapolis, once, close to the end of the war. He didn’t shrink.”
“He could have,” Greg sniffed. “Most Atlases are simply idiots, though, like most metas and most humans. They never see the value in the small, only the big. Personally, I reverse the calculus and find it works much better. When I discovered my power included the ability to shrink not just myself but others and objects as well, it was like opening a door to endless possibility.”
“Which you decided to parley into a career as an assassin,” I said.
“Yes,” he said softly.
“Why?”
“Because it pays better than being a cell biologist,” Greg said. “Or an entomologist. Being good at what I am good at … pays better than heroing, I would imagine.” He gave me a sidelong look. “And certainly better than working for any of the paramilitary organizations that I tried to contract with before settling on this freelancing path I’ve been on the last few years.”
“You might be surprised how well heroing pays these days,” I said. I’d approved the payroll for the new agency, after all. It was rich because I’d wanted it to be, and the good news was it was pretty rapidly becoming self-sustaining thanks to all the jobs they were picking up from local and state governments.
“Perhaps,” he said. “Ultimately I just decided to become the best in my chosen field. To use conventional weapons—but have everything I need on hand. Immaculate preparation, ready for nearly any contingency.”
“You didn’t seem too ready in Portland,” I said.
He grunted his displeasure. “I was not informed that Bruce—Friday’s—accomplice was you.”
“Or when you tried to kill him in the river before that.”
“His being a metahuman was withheld from me as well. As you know, that is crucial information in dealing with a dangerous subject—”
“Or above the Sierra Nevadas—”
“Fine,” he cut me off, “dealing with you has been a humbling exercise in empirically finding the holes in my contingency plans. Are you happy now?”
“Well, the government is after me now in record numbers, so … no, I’m not super duper happy at the moment.” That thought settled like a worry on me, one that was bound to persist past the current crisis. “Don’t suppose you’d like to stand up and take credit for that?”
“To whom?” Greg asked.
“The media, the government,” I said. “Anyone who’d listen?”
He cocked an eyebrow in surprise but kept his focus on the planes unfolding beneath us. “Who do you imagine would want to listen to that tale, exactly?”
Intentionally or not, I think he might have had something there. “Damn you,” I said.
He kept staring straight ahead. Maybe it was his way of expressing remorse. “I don’t think anyone would take notice even if I were to broadcast a full confession on YouTube, complete with demonstrations of my ability, and my additional nuclear stockpile in the backdrop—you know, for color.”
“Why do you think I said, ‘damn you’? I know a truth when I hear one.” I sighed. “Still, you could at least try.”
“I’ll take it under advisement,” he said, and we both knew the advisement period was over. I didn’t have a lot of faith that a full confession would do much good. The hornets’ nest was already fully engaged in being pissed off at Sienna Nealon right now; it was highly unlikely that they’d put their stingers away, at least in the short term.
“Least you could do after trying to kill me,” I said, knowing that it wasn’t close to the least he could do.
The least he could have done was leave me to die in Montana under a hail of bullets the like of which probably hadn’t been seen since … hell, I don’t know. Pick a big battle in a big war with hundreds of participants, because there were a lot of bullets flying at me in Montana. More than the US had seen in one place on our soil since the Civil War, I would have guessed.
“I’m not trying to kill you now,” he said stiffly, once again justifying himself. “I’m not even trying to kill your oversized and under-intellectual boyfriend—”
“You keep insulting my honor like that and I’m going to gut you just as a warning to others.”
That elicited a brief smile. Because he didn’t think I was serious, I guess. “Sorry.”
“An actual apology,” I said. “Amazing. Did it hurt?” We settle
d into a few more minutes of silence until I came up with another worrying thought. “Since Sam is your buddy … is he going to know where to find you?”
This caused Greg to shift uncomfortably once more in his seat. “No. I had a series of safe houses across the country that I used when he and I … worked together. I taught him some of my strategies, tried to take him from the path of being a stupid Atlas who only went big to—”
“Becoming small and lethal and an invisible danger to people everywhere,” I said. “Thanks for that, by the way.”
“You’re welcome,” Greg said, playing the straight man. “I shut down those safe houses after we parted ways slightly less than amicably. I haven’t been back to any of them since, and I never revealed all my locations to him, or in fact …” He looked sullen for a moment. “… ever told him my real last name.” He looked right at me. “It’s not actually Vansen.”
“Smart move,” I said. Really damned calculating, more like. But when you’re an assassin, I suppose it only made sense to hide your identity even from potential partners. “I mean, deceptive as hell, but … smart.” I looked out the thin viewing slit. The city of Chicago was stretching out in the distance ahead, the far western suburbs already underneath us. I noticed we were descending, and also, possibly, shrinking. It was tough to tell this far from the ground. “How’d you two hook up?”
“I took him on after my last partner … moved on to other … work,” Greg said, the words coming in fits. “We ran across each other in the course of work early in my career moving between those unaffiliated paramilitary groups, and when … my other partner …retired, I looked him up.”
I didn’t press him to fill the Swiss-cheese holes in that story. Not like I had a lot of leverage over him right now anyway. The suburbs were getting bigger and bigger, spreading out under us, and I realized that, yep, we were getting smaller. And closer to the ground. The houses were looking pretty swank, too, well-kept and newly refurbished. They looked like they were out of a John Hughes film. “Where are we going?”
“I only have one safe house left,” Greg said tightly, “so we’ll hole up there while we plot our next move.” He brought us lower and lower, and we continued to shrink. I suspected we were no more than a foot long at this point, as we crossed into a neighborhood where the houses looked like they were probably very old and very expensive.
“Looking like a pretty nice safe house,” I said. “Most of mine have been dives, because they’re cheap and I’m budget conscious. But you go in style. I’d say I like that, but since you make your money killing people …”
Greg tensed as he brought us in even lower. We skimmed over the roof of a two-story brick house, probably only about three feet above it, but it seemed a lot farther given how tiny we were now. “I do what I have to.”
“Pfft,” I said, poking him again. “You don’t have to kill people.” He gave me a sideye. “What? Is that because I kill people? I did it in the course of law enforcement.” Mostly. Especially these last few years.
“It doesn’t really matter now, does it?” Greg asked. “Because apparently … I’m now out of business.” He’d brought us down even lower, through the high trees that hemmed in the neighborhood yards. We were aiming at the wall of a white paneled house, heading straight for it.
“Um. Um. Um.” I was pointing at the wall we were going at, traveling at the speed of several hundred miles per hour, unable to quite articulate the words.
Greg didn’t look over at me. “Hmm?”
“We’re—uh—the wall—”
The plane continued to shrink as we headed toward what looked like a small vent mounted to the outside of the structure. It got huge in front of us, massively huge, to the point where instead of being in danger of hitting the wall, suddenly it felt like we were going to be swallowed up whole by the darkness on the other side.
“And … now,” Greg said, as a light flipped on in the vent. We easily slipped between the covers and came in for a soft landing on a runway that felt so enormous it might as well have been an outdoor landing strip in Utah.
The Concorde taxied to a stop and I was left sitting there in the co-pilot’s seat, staring at the complete nothing anywhere nearby. “Well … this is a really nice safe house you’ve got here. Kinda empty, though.”
“You think so?” Greg allowed a rare smile as he held on to the stick.
“Yeah, I think s—oh.”
The world had once again changed outside my window, the walls that had seemed hundreds of miles away now only a few football fields in length from me. There were planes lining one side of the room, which now looked like a massive hangar. I looked to my right and found a row of various cars and old military vehicles. I counted at least one M1A2 Abrahms main battle tank, a few prototypes I’d never seen before, a Soviet T-72, and a host of other vehicles from the military, like an MRAP. Another section was lined with helicopters, and along the far wall what looked like a small rack appeared to hold model boats … which I suspected were real boats.
“For someone who prides himself on not being a thief, you have kind of a lot of stolen merch here, guy,” I said, giving Greg a pointed look as he ran through his post-flight checklist and taxied the plane into a spot that seemed perfect for the Concorde.
“Like I said,” Greg blushed furiously, flipping his switches, unable to hide his embarrassment now that I’d seen his Fortress of Solitude, “I believe in being prepared.”
51.
Augustus
My day had been long, starting with the raid in Nevada in the morning and working our way back across the country. We’d rolled up eight out of the ten names on our list of plumbers, hitting them like they deserved to be hit and finding that—big surprise—every single one of them had been packing meta powers.
“That last guy didn’t play fair,” Jamal said, holding a damp cloth to his head. He’d taken a blade hit right to the forehead from some guy who seemed to be able to pull them out of his skin like porcupine quills. Spontaneous generation of blades wasn’t a power I’d ever seen before, but it beat the hell out of the next thing he’d done, which was to turn his coffee cup and the coffee inside into hardened steel, which he’d bounced off Jamal’s forehead at high speed.
“Duck next time,” Scott said lightly, rustling the bushes as he stretched. We were hiding on a stretch of road outside Durham, North Carolina. Darkness had fallen already, and there weren’t any street lights this far out. We were a thirty-odd-minute drive from the Raleigh-Durham airport, and the city had faded surprisingly fast.
“Ha ha,” Jamal said, pulling the cloth away from his head. He’d stopped bleeding a while ago, the big baby. “When do you think this guy is going to show up?”
“Casey said any time in the next hour.” Reed was staring into the darkness, down the road. We’d had our receptionist back in Minneapolis spoof her number and book an appointment with the plumber in question, giving them an address down a road with no exit. Now we were just waiting, and hoping that word hadn’t gotten out yet to the last few members of this organization still free that they were getting rolled up hard today.
“Where’s our last stop again?” I asked. It was a little chilly in the North Carolina woods, and silly me, I’d heard Vegas this morning and nothing else, so I hadn’t brought my coat. I rubbed my arms, the thin material of my dress shirt doing nothing to keep me from freezing my ass off.
“Southern Alabama,” Reed said, “but if Team Two keeps up their current pace—”
“The B team, you mean?” Scott asked.
“—They might get to mop up that mess before we get there,” Reed finished, undeterred.
“How’s it feel to bust up a massive criminal conspiracy to mess with US law enforcement by giving sketchy people superpowers?” I asked.
“Ask me when it’s done,” Reed said, all clipped and pissy. He threw a very disapproving look over his shoulder at me. “You’re not supposed to jinx us like that.”
“Man, we could fail
right now and we’ve already busted up their production facility and seventeen out of their twenty distributors,” I said. “Andrew Phillips is going to get on TV tomorrow and take full credit for this, you know. He’s going to brush right past the fact that the FBI had nothing to do with any stage of it and just throw himself right into the honey.”
“True story,” Scott said, and when he took a glare from Reed, “What? You know it is.”
Jamal frowned, and for the first time in a couple hours it wasn’t because of his head injury. “This was us and local law and state law enforcement all the way, and he’s going to jump in and declare victory to distract from the fact he’s probably having zero luck with catching Sienna. Bogus.”
“‘Bogus’?” I looked at my brother. “You been cribbing language notes from Bill and Ted again?”
“Keanu Reeves is the man,” Jamal said without shame. “You see John Wick?”
“Those movies are pure badassery,” Scott said.
“Yeah, well, I hope you all display some of that yourselves tonight,” Reed said, and then corrected himself: “More of it, I guess, since you’ve done pretty well today.” What had started off as a shot, he amended to make a compliment. Not bad.
“I personally could use a drink right about now,” Scott said.
“Turn on the spigot, waterboy,” I cracked.
“I was thinking whiskey, actually,” Scott said, “which is another substance I have no control over—”
“Car coming,” Reed said, shushing us. “No … van.” I could almost see his ears perking up as he listened. “A hundred yards out. Get ready just in case.”
“Man, we have not heard a car in the hour we’ve been out here,” I said. “This is probably the guy.”
“Guys, actually,” Reed said, squinting into the dark. “Van has a driver and passenger.”
“Time to cowboy up,” Scott said. “Party of two, your reservation is about to be cashed in.”
Small Things (Out of the Box Book 14) Page 27