Tyler checked himself before standing. His insides felt like a pot of Campbell’s Chunky, but the heat had withdrawn from his body. He shambled back to where Erin was gaining her own feet.
He grasped her arms. “Are you all right?”
She pressed her lips to his, firmly and briefly. “You found him?”
“Yeah, he’s out of action.” Tyler turned to the command and control house. Flames still flickered beyond several of the windows. The drapes over one had caught fire.
“In time, hopefully,” Erin said, giving voice to Tyler’s own chilling thoughts.
They crossed the street at a run to find out whether there were any survivors.
36
As Janis and Scott approached the collapsed house, the rest of the storm pushed off, leaving a light drizzle in its wake. Agents emerged from behind the shelter of wrecked cruisers and neighboring homes to check on injured associates, including Agent Saldana. Janis spotted Minion tending to Shockwave, whom she had pulled from the blackened bushes.
The war for Oakwood appeared won, but at what price?
“Do you feel anything?” Scott asked, nodding toward the collapsed house.
Janis combed it again and shook her head. Astrally speaking, the ruin was a dead zone. She extended both arms forward and began lifting away giant jaw-fulls of smoking debris.
“So they’re both…?” Scott asked.
Janis was starting to nod when a force pulsed in her awareness, faint and quavering. She couldn’t tell who it belonged to. Titan and Jesse possessed a similar signature. Ever since the battle in the Grove, she suspected the two of being related, maybe even father and son.
She redoubled her effort. When she had excavated down to the smoldering core of the ruined house, something moved. Scott ran forward and began scaling the collapse.
“Wait,” Janis called. “We don’t know who it is!”
Wreckage spilled from a giant back that was breaking into view. Scott paused. The giant was dust-coated. He wavered to his feet and peered from a bloody face. A single eye blinked twice.
Crap, Janis thought.
Scott, who had also taken note of the one eye, began to reverse course. As Janis readied a mind blast, the giant brought the back of his wrist to his other eye and wiped away a clot of blood. When he dropped his hand, a second pitted eye blinked beside the first.
Janis relaxed with a breath.
“Jesse!” Scott shouted. He closed the remaining distance to their teammate and hugged a steadying arm around his waist, even though he looked like a child next to their teammate’s eight-hundred-pound frame. When Jesse’s knees buckled, Janis seized both Champions and delivered them to the driveway. Jesse plopped onto his bottom and covered his face with giant, scraped-up hands.
“You’re hurt,” Janis said.
“I’ll be all right,” he grumbled. “I was down low when the thing blew. Titan caught the brunt of it. Any sign of him?”
Janis peeked toward the wreckage. Amid the chunks of concrete, wooden planks, and pulverized plaster, she spotted a grisly artifact—a huge detached leg. She grimaced as she turned back to her teammates.
“He didn’t make it,” she said.
Jesse grunted in a way that was hard to read. Satisfaction? Sorrow? Indifference? He heaved himself up and began lumbering toward the street. His life force was stronger than only moments before, but still…
“Shouldn’t you rest?” she said. “Where are you going?”
“To check on our parents,” he replied.
Our parents!
Janis stretched her awareness to the end of the Meadows, to the command and control center. The magnetic interference that surrounded the complex was hard to penetrate, but Janis picked up a signature she had sensed far too many times in the recent past—one of incineration and death.
The front door of the house was open when they arrived at the end of the Meadows. Janis led the run up the walkway, followed by Scott and Jesse. She had glimpsed the smoking remains of the fire starter across the street. But how much damage had he done before Erin and Tyler had reached him?
The answer began to take ghastly shape as Janis stepped over the threshold. Someone had covered the bodies beneath the windows—Tyler, from the psychic residue on the linens. Janis counted four fallen agents.
“They would have taken our parents downstairs,” Scott said. He was trying to reassure everyone, but Janis could feel his uncertainty.
They proceeded to the kitchen and found two more covered agents near the sliding-glass door. Someone had cracked the door open to draw the foul odor from the house—Tyler, again.
The elevator ride to the lower level of the command and control center were some of the longest seconds of Janis’s life. She tried repeatedly to contact her parents, but whether for the interference or reasons she couldn’t bear to consider, she could not reach them. No one spoke.
When the elevator door opened, the three of them hurried toward the conference room. Beyond the door, Janis picked up a low murmuring. Voices! She broke into a run. The door opened, and Tyler’s face peered out. Before he spoke, Janis read the situation in his blue eyes.
“Everyone’s all right,” he said.
Beyond Tyler, Janis could see their parents milling nervously. Kilmer and Reginald had remained with them.
“Well done,” Janis whispered to Tyler. She regretted whatever circumstances had delivered the deformed mutants into the Scale’s clutches, but Janis knew the fire starter wouldn’t have stopped with the agents.
When Janis’s mother spotted Janis, her eyes lit up before her entire face collapsed into a quivering pile. Even her father, who rarely showed emotion, broke into a large smile as his dark eyes wavered with moisture. Janis stepped into their double embrace, nestling her face into their shoulders, their comforting smells, hugging them around the waists.
“So glad you’re safe,” she said.
Her mother, too overcome to speak, sobbed quietly.
“You too, sweetheart,” her father answered for both of them.
For the next several minutes, Janis let them hold her. They had already lost one daughter.
Scott’s parents were embracing him too, Janis sensed. And for once, his mother wasn’t scolding him. Even Jesse’s stepparents, with whom Jesse had had difficulties, were fussing over their son. She could hear his mother inspecting the wound on his brow, his father asking him what the other guy looked like. Janis thought she heard Jesse’s low chuckle.
“Any word on Shockwave and Minion?” Kilmer asked when everyone had separated.
Kilmer’s mother, who had been tottering around the reunion, hands alternately clapping together and fussing with the pillbox hat atop her orange hair, blinked at him. “Do you mean Shasta and Mittens?”
“No, Mother,” Kilmer said quietly. “Those were the neighbor’s cats.”
“They must be around here somewhere,” Mrs. Montgomery decided before shuffling off, making kitten-calling sounds.
“Shockwave was stunned,” Janis replied. “But he should be all right. Minion stayed with him.”
“Good,” Kilmer said, “because once everyone is patched up, we’re going to need to meet.”
Janis picked up the thought lingering behind Kilmer’s dark visage. “So … this is it?”
He nodded grimly. “I’m afraid so, Janis. The president is shutting us down. This time for good.”
37
“Are we all here?” Director Kilmer asked, glancing around the conference table.
Janis peered around as well. She was seated among Scott, Tyler, and Erin. Minion and Shockwave were sitting off to their right, Shockwave’s face still gray from having absorbed one of his own blasts. For the first time in months, Jesse filled most of the left side of the table, a solid anchor. Reginald, the only other adult in the room, sat beside Kilmer.
Eight surviving Champions, Janis thought. For what’s looking like our final meeting.
Hey, don’t be so sure, Scott said.
<
br /> “We’re done,” Kilmer said bluntly, as though to kill the idea. “Reagan sent me word earlier this evening. There are no contingencies this time. Starting tomorrow, everything comes down. The cameras, the computers, the motion-detectors, the entire surveillance infrastructure. And this…” Kilmer gestured toward the walls, though Janis understood him to mean Oakwood’s underworld. “It’s all coming down as well. The emergency bunkers will be the last to go.”
“But why?” Scott asked.
“The president feels that too many outsiders know about the Program. Prince Khoggi, Viper Industries, our most recent defection.” Though Kilmer’s voice remained even, Janis suffered a stab of guilt. The signs pointing to Margaret had been there. “He lauded our many successes—and wanted me to pass that on to all of you—but put simply, we’ve become too great a liability to his presidency. And with the Cold War at an end, his executive account, which counted on large donations, is shrinking. The money isn’t there anymore.”
“But the Cold War isn’t over!” Janis cried. “And you know that!”
Kilmer held up a hand. “I’ve passed all of our information on Prince Khoggi to the president. I’ve been assured that the money in the Swiss account will not find its way to the Soviets. In the meantime, the U.S. will begin building a case against him. It’s a matter of unraveling his businesses.”
“I’m still seeing something on the horizon,” Janis insisted. “A large-scale attack.” She thought about her most recent vision: nuclear warheads obliterating the beach, her helplessness in the face of them. “I think he’s already moved the money.”
Beside her, Scott cleared his throat. “If Prince Khoggi knew everyone was focused on the Swiss account, wouldn’t that have given him the perfect opportunity to execute the transfer from another one?”
Reginald, who was a master of coin tricks, nodded his head. “Classic misdirection.”
“The president insists they’ve been monitoring all transactions,” Kilmer said, “but the bottom line here is that the U.S. can’t act against Prince Khoggi until the Champions are dismantled.”
“Because of the risk of Khoggi exposing the Program,” Tyler said.
“Exactly.”
“Why not earlier?” Janis asked.
Kilmer’s brow furrowed. “Why not earlier what?”
A cold realization swallowed Janis’s heart. “If Prince Khoggi’s ambition was to shut the Program down, and he’s known about it all this time, why didn’t he leak its existence earlier?”
“Probably because he didn’t want you simply shut down, but destroyed,” Kilmer offered. “He couldn’t risk you popping up somewhere else and acting against his interests. Especially where he couldn’t monitor you.” He spoke the last part like an admission: despite his efforts, the Scale had found them anyway.
But Janis was beginning to sense that no matter what their director had done, the Scale would have found them.
“The call Scott traced back to the building that housed the original Champions headquarters,” she said. “Did anything come back from the team you sent up there?”
“Some things of note, yes,” he replied, “but nothing particularly useful. Someone buried a sterile line on the building’s switchboard. Judging by the age of the wiring, though, it’s been there for decades. It used to connect to an office on a lower floor, but now it uplinks to a communication satellite—impossible to trace.”
“Whose office?” Scott asked.
“A search back through the archives showed a lease to a government contractor, probably one of Prince Khoggi’s earliest front companies. And before you jump to any conclusions, their office was there before ours. By a good year, at least. Entirely coincidental.”
But Janis was shaking her head.
“What?” Kilmer asked. The others were looking at her with similar questioning expressions.
“Not coincidental,” Janis said, her intuition still fitting the pieces together. “Not coincidental at all. You said that the president’s executive account depended on donations, right?”
He nodded cautiously.
“Director Halstead may have founded the Champions Program,” Janis said, “and you may have resurrected it, and various presidents may have endorsed it, but all the while, Khoggi has been funding it.”
A few murmurs went up. Shockwave whispered something skeptical-sounding to Minion. Director Kilmer raised his brows at her in a way that said, Now you’re reaching.
“It makes sense.” Reginald had been frowning in thought. Now he raised his chin from his fist. “In fact, you brought up the question yourself, director. The other day. How was it that I was discovered by the Champions Program, but not my sister, who ended up in the hands of the Scale? You were right—anyone bothering to look through the foster-care records would have known we were twins. And someone did know. Only it wasn’t Director Halstead. It was Prince Khoggi. Just as he was balancing the U.S. and Soviet Union, he was balancing the population of Specials, moving them in and out of the larger game as required.”
“The Champions and Scale under a single umbrella?” Scott said in wonder. “Holy hell.”
“Two sides of the same coin,” Reginald agreed.
“Divide and conquer,” Janis put in.
“Now wait a minute,” Kilmer said, holding up both hands. “We don’t know that.”
But even as he spoke, Janis could sense his mind flipping back through the Program’s history, the circumstances of its creation, the consequences of its campaigns, and the coincidences. So many coincidences. She felt a soul-jolting realization hit him: though operating under the authority of the president, all that time he had been in the pay, not to mention the pocket, of a rogue operative.
They all had.
“But why not pull the money earlier if Khoggi wanted us gone?” Kilmer asked.
“For the same reason he never leaked,” Janis replied, handing their director back his own answer from minutes earlier. “He wanted us destroyed, not simply shut down. Especially when we threw his balance-of-powers game out of whack. He almost succeeded tonight, too.”
“But maybe he succeeded in destroying what was left of the Scale,” Reginald pointed out. “I’m wondering if his bold decision to send them to Oakwood, coupled with his pulling our funding, doesn’t signify something. Perhaps a shift in strategy.”
“I see nothing to be gained by giving the Soviets an undetected first-strike capability,” Director Kilmer said. “But at the same time…” He blew out a lungful of air. “Because it doesn’t make much sense, I think we have to assume he’s up to something.”
Several faces turned toward Janis.
“I am feeling something,” she said, trying to make sense of the chaotic lines and auras that criss-crossed and bloomed over her inner vision. “Developments. I just can’t tell what they are, exactly.”
“I wasn’t going to share this,” Kilmer said. “I didn’t see the point. But in the process of going back over Khoggi’s various businesses, we’ve found some unusual things. For the past several years his construction enterprises have shown large outlays for materials that don’t fit with the projects on record. But that’s the operative term, isn’t it? On record. Unfortunately, that’s all we have.”
“It suggests he could be building something,” Reginald said.
“Or simply laundering money,” Director Kilmer countered. “But neither one changes the fact that the Program is done. All I can do is share this information with the President. It will be up to him whether and how to act on it. The one thing I can assure you is that it won’t involve us.”
“So what does happen to us?” Minion asked.
Janis picked up the lonely note in her teammate’s voice. Here she had just joined the good-guy team only to learn they were being shut down—and, oh, they had been funded by the bad guy all along.
“I have orders to relocate you,” Kilmer said.
“Relocate?” several of them asked.
“We’re to do it in
shifts, so as not to arouse suspicion. But yes, you’ll be separated, moved out of state.” He looked around apologetically. “The rest follows from your contracts. You’re never to speak of the Program again, not of its existence and certainly not of your membership therein. The same goes for your powers, which you’re never to exercise. At least not without executive authorization, but don’t get your hopes up. The president is shredding all evidence of the Program and has no plans of sharing it with his successor.”
“When?” Minion asked.
“Well, it’s last in, first out,” Kilmer said, “so you and Shockwave will be the first to relocate. Probably within the next few days.”
Shockwave raised a hand. “May I ask where?”
“It’s still being arranged. You’ll know soon.”
“Different states, though?” Minion asked.
Janis caught something that went beyond simple loneliness this time. She wasn’t sure how she hadn’t picked up on it earlier—though with everything that had happened since the hostage situation at Thirteenth Street High, her mind had been pretty well occupied. Minion and Shockwave were dating.
Janis’s gaze moved from them to Tyler and Erin, also an item, and at last to Scott beside her. A fist pummeled her chest. The idea of leaving the neighborhood in which she’d grown up was devastating enough. But would the Program really separate them?
“Different states,” Director Kilmer confirmed for Minion. Then, seeming to tap into Janis’s wavelength, he looked around at the six members of his team who had coupled up. “I’m really sorry,” he told them all.
38
The Grove
Monday, June 23
11:48 a.m.
Scott lobbed an underhanded pitch but not far enough. Janis relaxed her bat as the ball thudded into the grass ahead of her.
“Ball two,” she called, kicking the softball off to one side, toward the playground.
“Sorry,” Scott said, reaching down to grab another ball from the cloth bag. His head wasn’t into lobbing softballs. But that was the whole point, Janis had argued. For the last several days they had been thinking about nothing but the end of the Program, their fates, Margaret’s whereabouts, whatever Khoggi was up to. They needed to pull back, allow their brains to reboot.
XGeneration 7: Dead Hand (XGeneration Series) Page 20