Control: Out of the Box (The Girl in the Box Book 38)

by Robert J. Crane

  I got stopped at the security checkpoint. The lobby was clear, for once, and the guards had pulled out the party favors: big guns and bad attitudes. They watched me with extreme skepticism, though again they let me through with my weapons. Not my cell phone, though. (Because this time, I didn't have it.)

  “Hey,” came a stern voice from behind me as I finished clearing the security checkpoint. Chalke was just coming in, her usually perfectly coiffed hair mussed from – presumably – the wind, and a slightly frazzled look on her face. She got stopped by a guard with a submachine gun and had to flash her ID. “Hold up,” she snapped at me, pausing to comply with his requests rather than getting herself shot or tased. My money was on shot, mainly because it was what I would have most liked to see and he already had a gun. Though tasing would have been nice, too.

  “Sure,” I said to my boss, because I had neither the disposition nor the reason to argue. Where was I going to go? The president was on his way down to the bunker beneath the White House, where he'd be nice and safe, surrounded by Secret Service. They'd already started bringing in klieg lights to ramp up the lumens in the hallways to make sure one Kristina Bonner couldn't sneak through. Assuming she'd survived our little wreck. There was no tunnel to the White House basement and they had seismic sensors everywhere in the ground around it. If Frost came gliding in from above he'd get popped by a Secret Service sniper before he came within a hundred yards, hopefully.

  Besides, they already had a second doctor down there to give the president a full workup, and I wanted to see the president get a prostate exam like I wanted to fling myself off a tall building without flight powers.

  Chalke was done clearing security a moment later, aided by the fact she never carried a gun. She hustled toward me as I stood in the center of the lobby, wavering back and forth on slightly woozy legs, enjoying the sway of the room now that the adrenaline had dumped out of my bloodstream and the fatigue was fully settled in. When she got to me she grabbed me by the arm and started pulling me toward the offices.

  “What is this?” I said, laughing. I went along with her because there was no reason not to. I could rip out of her grip so fast her fingers would be split off her hand, but why would I? There was no threat here. The strength of her hold was like an infant to me.

  She dragged me to the Roosevelt Room, which was empty, and thrust me inside, slamming the door shut behind me.

  The moment was too perfect not to say it, so I did. “What is your damage, Heather?”

  She looked at me with eyes that were practically glowing, and whipped out the glossy photographs that Mike Darnell had promised to messenger to me during our meeting outside my apartment this morning – a lifetime ago, really. Or so it felt. “What is this?”

  Me, a capable liar by this point, peered at them, showing no hint of recognition. “I don't know. A chat room? Here, let me see, maybe I can suss it out for you. Unless it's anything to do with Furry Appreciation, in which case you're going to have to unpack that all on your own.”

  Chalke blinked at me, fire leaving her eyes, uncertainty replacing it. “You mean...you haven't seen these before?”

  “No,” I said, putting some real fervency into my voice, because I'd just been manhandled in a way that usually got people killed for attempting it. “Let me see. I'll–”

  “Never mind,” Chalke said hastily, shoving the photographs back into her bag, crumpling them in the process. “I thought they – that you – never mind.”

  I stared at her, trying to give her my best suspicious look. “...Okay.”

  Well, this was awkward. Chapman had to have told her I knew they were in the Network together. Clearly she'd been sure that I knew about her, and probably thought I'd figured it out from those photos. My sincerity in lying had thrown her off, though it shouldn't have. Chalke dealt with social liars all the time – in Congress, in Washington at large, when she looked in the damned mirror. If I'd fooled her, I didn't hold out much hope it'd last long.

  “Why were you at Joint Base Andrews this morning?” Chalke asked, shifting us away from her uncomfortable topic and onto one that was the same for me.

  “Got a call from the White House,” I said. I had suspicions that I hadn't actually gotten a call from the White House, but that was how the guy had identified himself. Sure, I thought I recognized those dulcet tones, even through a hammy, fake Southern accent, but I didn't feel like I should tell my boss that I'd showed up at a presidential assassination because the boyfriend she didn't even know I had told me to.

  Chalke was looking at me suspiciously. “On the tape they showed you moving before the shot had even been fired.”

  “I got a text saying 'GUN' over and over again,” I said. “Took me a second to realize that was what the Secret Service calls out when they're trying to get the president down. As soon as I figured it out, I reacted.”

  Chalke was staring at me, that suspicion returned. “So if I check the digital records of your phone, they'll reflect this? Same with the FBI line for the White House call?”

  “Far as I know,” I said with a shrug. Though I had my doubts that Harry's call would show up as from the White House, spoofing technology could have made it possible that it did – assuming he'd employed it. Harry wasn't stupid, but he'd been born in the 1950's. Tech savvy wasn't usually a thing with those damned Boomers.

  Chalke was still staring at me with slitted eyes. “Has anything changed in the investigation? Either of the Bilson murder or this Network?”

  “Yes,” I said, easing closer to her. “That was something I wanted to mention to you before – I think Jaime Chapman is a member of the Network.” I said it with full sincerity.

  Chalke's eyelids fluttered a little, but her expression stayed roughly the same. “Explain.”

  “Remember Bilson's diary?” Here the trick was to feign earnest sincerity. The method: leaning in, using my body language to make it clear I thought this was interesting, and that I wasn't at all appalled to be near a human tick like Chalke. This forced me to get closer than I really wanted to get, but it also made it seem like a more intimate conversation. “He'd tagged someone in that group as Tech Head. Furthermore, when I'd talked with Bilson before the China business, he seemed very insistent that I delete Socialite off my phone. Which I didn't, because I'd never had it to begin with–”

  “Right,” Chalke said, still staring at me with eyes narrowed.

  “–And it made me think: what kind of person would have the sort of tech power and influence that Bilson would be intimidated by?” I really got into my story, lowering my voice, checking around me like we were being overheard rather than being shut in a private conference room in the most secure building in the world. “It couldn't be just some low-level guy that runs an app company that shows you where poop is on the streets of San Francisco. It'd have to be someone with some real sway. Now, you could have argued that maybe Inquest's founders fit the bill – until earlier this year, when everyone found out their business was almost total bullshit.”

  Chalke nodded along. Her eyes were relaxing as her belief that I suspected her dissolved under the influence of my enthusiastic theory.

  “So who does that leave?” I asked, straightening up, putting a little delight in my eyes, like I was a freaking genius. “I mean...Jaime Chapman is the tech guy. Furthermore, he had a meeting with the president this morning, and it did not go well.”

  “The president tell you that?” Chalke asked. Her voice was a little husky.

  “Yeah,” I said. “When I floated my theory of Chapman being involved. Coincidence that Chapman has a rough meeting with the president on the same day that someone tries to gun Gondry down?”

  Chalke nodded, cleared her throat, and paused before speaking. “This assassin...it's the same person who killed Bilson, isn't it?”

  “Not sure,” I said, trying to play the careful, almost disinterested investigator. “Forensics is working on the bullets from Joint Base Andrews. Time will tell. Maybe we'll get more
idea from Marine One, too, but we've probably got enough to make a determination from the Andrews material, compared to the bullet that killed Bilson. At the very least, I believe the caliber is the same.” I hesitated, baiting the hook.

  She took it. “You don't believe it's the same person, though.”

  Now I poured on the skepticism. “It could be. But it's awfully convenient timing.”

  “There aren't that many people who could make that kind of shot,” Chalke said. So very firmly, too.

  “True,” I said. “And that's good, albeit circumstantial, evidence in favor. We'll see how it plays out.”

  Chalke nodded, then straightened to her full height. I hadn't even realized she'd been slumping, but now she towered over me. “What's your gut tell you?”

  “That this is a mess,” I said without hesitation. “That as per fricking usual, there are so many factors in play that a meta juggler would struggle to keep up with them all.”

  “You saying we need to get someone more capable to take on this case?” Chalke asked, leaping right to replacing me. Interesting. I would have laid down all my lost Caribbean bank accounts that she'd replace me with someone way dumber and less capable.

  “Is there someone more capable on cases involving metahumans?” I asked, maybe a little slyly.

  She looked like I'd slapped her right across the ass. With that fabled steel rod she usually kept up hers. “Well, we could certainly look at getting a different investigator if you feel...overmatched.”

  “The only place I'm overmatched is that I have almost no evidence, the little I have has been stolen, and I had to spend the morning protecting the president from an assassin that may or may not be involved in the Bilson case,” I said, cool as a frost giant.

  “That's priority one,” Chalke said, though she faded a little in her delivery, which I found interesting. “Just...keep at it. I'm sure–”

  Someone shouted back in the lobby, and I heard it through the intervening walls. Thudding footsteps started coming our way, and my reaction to them must have been profound, because Chalke stopped talking without me even saying anything. “Sorry,” I said, “something's happening.”

  I strode to the door and ripped it open, probably a little fast given it was an antique. A lone security guard was rushing toward me, held up only by the fact he was having to snug his rifle tight to him to keep it from bouncing against the sling. “Agent Nealon!” he shouted as soon as he saw me stepping out of the Roosevelt Room. He was utterly breathless, traveling at a sprint.

  “What?” I poised to dash for the bunker. “Is it the president?”

  He shook his head. “No, ma'am. There's a report of a metahuman at the Lincoln Memorial. Black smoke looking thing.” His breaths were coming in gasps.

  “Oh, great,” I muttered.

  I could feel Chalke stiffen behind me. “Our evidence thief. What's it doing?” She stepped forward to lurk behind my shoulder.

  “Nothing – yet,” the guard said, still breathing heavily. “But it has hostages, and it's calling for her,” and he nodded at me. “Says if she doesn't come out and face it...” He gulped. “...it says it'll kill them all.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  Chapman

  CHALKE: We have a situation. Is this Lincoln Memorial thing on the news yet?

  Chapman stared at his phone. It was getting close to twilight, his meetings were done, he'd checked in with the office – and he was tired. Feeling the results of late-night talk and travel and rising to be on East Coast time.

  This woke him, though. He got up from his chair as he waited for someone to answer Chalke's inquiry and made his way to the hotel room's curtains, drawing them back. He had a fantastic view of the Lincoln Memorial and the reflecting pool, and from here he could see...

  Well, something was going on out there. Sundown was coming, and the cloud cover above Washington was giving the sky a nice orange tinge. A crowd seemed to be assembled on the Memorial side of the pool, though they were far enough off he couldn't distinguish what was going on. The reflecting pool was nearly still, too, almost a mirror.

  CHAPMAN: I'm looking at the reflecting pool now. Looks like something's going on down at the World War II Memorial.

  He fetched the TV remote and turned it on. It was already tuned to NNC, and the chyron at the bottom was declaring, “METAHUMAN EVENT AT LINCOLN MEMORIAL REFLECTING POOL.”

  CHAPMAN: National News Channel is reporting something's going on. Guessing they don't have a camera on scene yet. Or video from the internet.

  No one had said anything in Escapade yet, so he grabbed his laptop and logged in, pinging Devin with a simple message: Lincoln Memorial? It'd be enough to get him moving in the right direction. Get him working on the security cams in the area, if they were crackable.

  Chapman had his own ideas about what to do, though, and he logged into Socialite's system architecture. “Location services,” he muttered under his breath, activating the tracking algorithm in the code that would tell him how many active Socialite users were in that area right now.

  Ah. Thousands. Too much data.

  He narrowed the focus of the GPS search on the map interface. Now he had it down to those standing in the vicinity of the pool itself, the Lincoln Memorial, and around the World War II Memorial.

  There. A hundred and twelve results.

  He checked their livestreams first, then opened another window to see what Instaphoto had to offer. Here, he had to go with a hashtag, because, having not built Instaphoto from the ground up like he had Socialite, it didn't offer this nifty tracking feature. He was looking to find a way to implement it, but it hadn't been a high priority.

  “There we go,” he whispered, looking at one of the livestreams.

  There had be fifty, sixty people standing on the steps of the war memorial, all facing in one direction – toward the Lincoln Memorial – with their backs to the World War II Memorial. It was a little eerie, like they were all pod people.

  And there, behind them, was that smoky black creature standing tall over them all up a step, with the Washington Monument in the distance behind as a backdrop.

  CHAPMAN: It's that thing that stole our notebook.

  BYRD: lol sounds like grade school all over again lololololol

  Idiot.

  CHAPMAN: It's got Bilson's diary with codenames for all of us.

  CHALKE: Nealon is on the way to counter it. It called her out, threatening hostages. Police on scene.

  Chapman zoomed the video out slightly; yes, there were the police, standing at a careful distance. Were the hostages mind controlled? He activated the audio, but it was all the crowd noise around the person filming. Half the concrete surround around the reflecting pool had been cleared, and no one was close to the hostage situation save for the hostages themselves, all lined up in neat rows on the steps below the World War II Memorial. Everyone else was back at what they probably deemed a safe distance.

  Dumb. He'd have left entirely rather than rely on some misguided conception of what safe distance entailed on this sort of thing. But then that level of strategic thinking was probably one of the reasons he ran one of the largest companies in the world and those peons standing near the pool would die penniless or nearer to it than they'd ever be to his level of wealth.

  KORY: All I see is what's on the internet. We're combing the streams now, posting them live to capture clicks, but all I've got is crowd shots and people babbling about how worrying this is.

  JOHANNSEN: Are the hostages making any noise? Can anyone see their faces? They're standing so perfectly in line. Looks like a mind control thing, doesn't it?

  KORY: Big time. Super creepy.

  BYRD: yeah im watchin on the feed and it looks lik some1 has scooped their brains out n replaced w/ pudding

  “Surely you must sympathize, then,” Chapman muttered. His computer beeped – an alert that Devin was pinging him. He opened a window directly to video chat, ignoring the request for text.

  “Oh! Who
a!” Devin said as Chapman appeared on his screen. “Sorry, didn't expect you to just...show up, boss.”

  “This is urgent,” Chapman said. “Can you get a window open into DC's surveillance on the mall?”

  “I think it's technically part of the parks department,” Devin said, typing swiftly. “But I do have an open door into DC Metro right now, and I'm working on getting the Memorial's footage. I'll open the path to you as soon as I've got it.”

  “Do you have any kind of a view on this thing closer than what's on the news or net right now?” Chapman asked.

  “No. The best footage is streaming live on Socialite and Instaphoto right now. Nothing I've got beats that, but give me a few minutes and maybe I can come up with something.”

  Chapman stroked his chin, thinking. “Hey, Devin...?”

  Devin cocked his head at Chapman. “What's up, boss?”

  “You know that facial recognition tracking program we've got running around Sienna Nealon?”

  “FaceTrack? What about it?”

  “Can you apply it to footage coming in from that geographic area?” Chapman felt his eyes narrow suspiciously. He wasn't entirely sure why.

  “I guess,” Devin said. “But to be honest, it's been kind of a waste so far in the months we've had it running. I mean, we haven't picked up anything genuinely suspicious. Just a lot of false positives.”

  “Do it anyway,” Chapman said. “Nealon's on her way, and it'll theoretically kick in when she gets close, but I want it running in advance.”

  Devin shrugged. “Okay, boss. Will do.” And he started typing.

  “I'm muting the line,” Chapman said. “May be back in a minute. Ping me when you get into the surveillance cams.” And he hit the button to video and audio mute Devin, minimizing the window so he could work on the next thing.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  Sienna

  I took the Corvette to the National Mall because it was still parked under the White House portico and because I wanted to, damn it. Screeching to a stop at the curb, I stepped out under scrutiny from the DC police, who waved me through without asking a single question.