The Hero Beat

by Nick Svolos

  Reuben,

  Meet me on the roof of 510 S. Flower at 2:00 AM tonight. It’s important.

  S

  I don’t know how, but I knew who the “S” stood for. A supervillain by the name of Sinfonie.

  A memory from twenty years ago played through my mind. I was fifteen. My dad was off at a lodge meeting and Cindy Nguyen and I had the house to ourselves. We had grown up together, next door neighbors who played in the sandbox together as toddlers, but now our relationship had become something else. We were laying on my bed, making out with the clumsy, fumbling exuberance of a pair of hormone-riddled fifteen-year-olds who thought they knew what they were getting into. We’d only done this a few times before, but we were getting the hang of it. A recently-purchased pack of condoms sat waiting in my nightstand drawer, and I feverishly hoped that tonight would be the night I got to try one out.

  I had one hand on her breast, massaging it through her bra, and I began to move my hand down her flat belly. A thrill surged through me when she didn’t stop my progress. My fingertips reached the buckle of her belt and began to fumble their way into her jeans. A thought entered my mind, “Oh God, should I really let him do that?”

  I froze. I didn’t think that thought. Memories flooded into my head, but they weren’t mine, they were hers. Sensory input became confused. I could feel a hand squirming into my pants. I felt my desire for it to reach further and my mind reeled as I realized that the hand was mine and the pants were hers.

  “What’s happening!” our voices cried out in unison. I heard it through two sets of ears. I became aware that Cindy was in the same situation. I heard her thoughts in my head, and she heard mine. Something was horribly, horribly wrong.

  We panicked. We desperately tried to shut out the thoughts that didn’t belong in our heads, but each time we tried, we ended up with the wrong thoughts. The memories were worse. All the dark things that we hid deep down inside, things we refused to admit to ourselves, things we weren’t even aware of, these were all laid bare. There were no secrets. We would rather be making out with a guy from the football team. We would do or say anything to get us out of our jeans. We were acutely aware of every petty, rotten thing we ever did. We were terrified. We had no idea how to separate our minds.

  We screamed and pushed each other away. We blacked out.

  When I awoke, it was over. I was myself again. Cindy was on the bed and I found myself on the floor. We just looked at each other in stunned disbelief.

  Cindy was the first to speak. “Did that just really happen?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I levered myself up into a sitting position. At last, I managed to say, “Yeah. What’s going on? It’s like I have two sets of memories or something.” I shook my head, thinking maybe that would help. It didn’t.

  “Me too,” she said. She started buttoning her blouse, but stopped. She reached over to my nightstand, opened the drawer, and saw the box of condoms. She glared at me. “I need to go.”

  That was the last I saw of her for a very long time. A couple of days later, I heard that Cindy’s parents had sent her away. I was convinced that it was all my fault. I still didn’t understand what had happened, and thought I was the source of whatever it was. Maybe I had some kind of superpower. I spent the next week trying unsuccessfully to read other people’s minds. My frustration grew, and Cindy’s absence left a hole in my life. Her parents refused to talk to me, let alone tell me where she was. I began to act out, and after a couple of weeks of self-destructive behavior, my dad decided that he’d had enough. He finally cornered me and forced me to come clean.

  Sobbing at times, I told him the story. He sat down beside me and gave me some advice, “Get over it. I know it’s hard, and it probably seems impossible right now, but you need to give yourself some time to heal up and get on with life.” Gruff, to the point, and almost always right, that’s my pop.

  Cindy came back into my life about a year after I got out of college. She told me that she’d been back in the States for a little while and that she’d read some of the pieces I’d written for the Beacon. She’d also read the piece on adolescents with powers and wondered if she had been the original inspiration. I told her it was, although I never mentioned her or our experience in the piece.

  We spent several hours clearing the air between us and getting up to date with each other, our experiences since that night when we were fifteen. I learned, all off the record, of course, that her parents sent her to a school in Japan, one that specialized in helping people come to grips with their newly-manifested powers.

  There, she learned to control her abilities, speak Japanese and several other languages, and received a first-rate education. She left the school with a degree in Environmental Science and complete control over her psychic abilities. Rising Stars, the official Japanese government-sanctioned superteam, immediately recruited her. The promise of adventure and doing good proved too strong to resist, and she accepted. The government showered her and her teammates with wealth, equipment and luxury. It was almost too late when she realized it was a trap. At first, she simply noticed that some of the things she was being asked to do were morally questionable, but she explained it away. As her time with the group progressed, she was ordered to use her powers to do even worse things, such as stealing secrets from the minds of visiting government officials and getting dirt on political opponents. She drew the line when they told her to alter a man’s memories, and she decided to escape and return to the United States.

  On the run from the Japanese government, she went underground, finding a home with a radical environmental group by the name of Nature’s Resistance. She created a new persona for her operations, Sinfonie, and used her powers to help them when more conventional means failed. With her assistance, the group monkey-wrenched a dozen clear-cutting operations, shut down a couple of global polluters and even put together enough evidence to put the CEO of a major transnational corporation in prison on environmental charges. The group was considered to be a terrorist organization and she was on the watch lists of at least a dozen nations.

  Through all this, Cindy and I remained friends. She’d contact me a few times a year and we’d get together for coffee and she’d tell me about her exploits. She provided most of the funding for the group through thievery. Her targets were generally wealthy industrialists with a lot of expensive shinies laying around for her to steal. Her training, athleticism and abilities made her an excellent cat burglar. Sinfonie’s reputation grew, and she made quite a name for herself as one of the world’s finest thieves and most effective eco-terrorists. And then, one day she walked away from it all. She retired from the Life about five years ago, met a nice guy, got married and had two kids. They had me over to their place for a barbeque last July Fourth.

  I couldn’t imagine what had brought her out of retirement, but it had to be big. I looked at the clock radio and saw that it was almost 1:30 AM. Flower street was a short walk from the Angel Tower, so I could make it in time. I looked longingly at the bed, but instead threw on a pair of jeans and a fresh shirt. I thought of calling Helen - Herculene, I corrected myself - but I didn’t want to use a phone or anything that would alert Archangel. Besides, she was probably either romancing or scaring the heck out of some poor IT guy at that moment. I pulled a piece of stationery out of the desk and wrote her a note telling her I was following up on a lead and where to find me. I stuffed it in an envelope, added the cocktail napkin and sealed it. I went down to the street level and checked out with the guard there, telling him I was taking a walk and asked him if he could have the note delivered to Herculene as soon as possible. The guard eyed me curiously, but told me he would. I left the Tower and walked out into the night alone.

  X

  I walked down the deserted street to Flower and turned left. Downtown L.A. has a few nightspots, but this was the Financial District and at this hour it was pretty much a ghost town. I felt very exposed out there in the muggy night, but arrived safely at my destination
at about 1:50. The plaza-level doors were open, and I was not terribly surprised to see there were no security guards on duty. Sinfonie probably used her powers to convince them to take a nap or something. I walked over to the bank of elevators and found one that would take me to the uppermost floor. She must have done something to the security systems, too, because the elevator took me up to the sixtieth floor without requiring me to swipe an ID card across the little RFID pad. I hoped she’d done the same thing to the security cameras. I didn’t relish the thought of being linked as an accessory to whatever it was she was planning.

  On the sixtieth floor, I found the door to the stairwell propped open. I climbed the stairs to the roof, finding the door there open as well. The air on the roof was fresh and a bit cooler than down at street level, though still warm. There was even a slight breeze. I saw Sinfonie crouching by the edge of the roof, costumed in her black skinsuit leggings, a loose-fitting gold vest and black overcoat. For some reason, she wore black boots with stiletto heels, which always mystified me. I mean, how the heck did she fight in those things?

  She also wore a set of high-tech goggles, but they were perched on the top of her head to allow her to look through a pair of binoculars at the matching building across the plaza. My eye was drawn to the logo that adorned the tower. “Galestorm Technologies” shone out of the night in bright red twenty-foot-tall letters.

  Holy moley, she’s robbing Gail Crenshaw. I stepped up quietly and crouched down beside her, behind the little wall that ran around the roof. “You’re supposed to be retired, Sinfonie.”

  “’I try to get out, but they keep pulling me back in.’ How you doing, Reuben?” she grinned as she lowered the binoculars. She was wearing a little domino mask to conceal the area around her eyes. I had no idea why these supers thought those things worked. Modern face-recognition technology made them obsolete years ago. I guessed some people just liked tradition.

  “Oh, you know, the usual. Went out last night and almost got killed at a refinery, broke my arm, played pool with a supervillain who later tried to kill me, went to a funeral and then to a fancy party with a pretty girl and now I’m on a rooftop about to become an accessory to something breaking-and-entering-y. Nothing special. How ‘bout you?”

  She reached into one of her bags and pulled out a manila envelope and handed it to me. “Well, unlike you, I’ve had an interesting day. A friend from the old days dropped this off at my house today as I was taking the kids to soccer practice. That pissed me off, but that’s another story.” She nodded at the envelope in my hand. “You should take a look.” I sat down against the wall and opened the envelope. Inside, there were several photographs, some photocopies of what appeared to be invoices from a number of Brazilian companies, and a note with a hand-written geographic coordinate for somewhere in the southern hemisphere and a date, February 7, 2014.

  Several of the invoices bore a logo I recognized, Stormfront Holdings. Most of the invoices were written in a foreign language I couldn’t make out, so I couldn’t read them. One photo showed a crater with burned and leveled trees emanating out from it. The trees all pointed, from bottom to top, away from the center, like they were knocked down by some sort of explosion. I couldn’t tell from the photo how far the devastation spread, but I thought it must be at least a quarter mile. Other photos showed construction equipment working at the crater. The equipment bore markings and logos that matched those on some of the invoices. A final photo showed a computer screen. It showed an invoice from a steel mill in Milwaukee, another holding of Stormfront. The payee line listed Galestorm Technologies and the only line item was for a “Special Project”. The amount due might have been the gross domestic product of a small country. I added up the amounts on the other invoices and it came to an amount exactly five hundred thousand dollars below the amount of the steel mill’s bill.

  She was right about it being interesting. I don’t know why I hadn’t connected it before, but Stormfront Holdings was in bed with Galestorm Technologies. Stormfront was a front for Galestorm. It was too cute by half.

  While I made my way through the envelope, Sinfonie kept herself busy making preparations for the crime she was planning. She removed a spool of thin cable from her gear bag, unraveled it in a tight spiral on the building’s roof. She pulled another piece of kit out of the bag. It looked like an electric motor connected to a pulley system. She carried this over to a solid-looking stanchion on the roof and bolted it in place. She took one end of the cable and threaded it through the pulleys, clamped them into place and tested the mechanism. It quickly pulled a couple of feet of cable through the assembly before she shut it down. She went to the other end of the cable and threaded it into what looked like a shotgun that had a grappling hook projecting from the business end. She stood, took careful aim and fired. The grappling hook shot out into space as a motor in the gun fed the cable through at a high enough rate that the hook traveled freely and wrapped itself around a support for the helipad on the top of the Galestorm building. She detached the gun, put it back in the bag, went back to the assembly on the stanchion and used the winch to take up the slack and put a strain on the line.

  I didn’t like where this was going. “OK, so Galestorm uses its holding company to get something from somewhere in Brazil. Something made out of metal. The Stormfront connection is interesting because I can link them to the blast at the refinery, but I don’t see how this factors in.”

  She was shocked by this. “Stormfront blew up the refinery? How do you know?”

  “Last night, a small company that services the refinery shut down. They normally would have been in operation, and their drivers might have gotten caught up in that mess, so it seems like they had some inside information. I haven’t gotten anywhere with trying to find out who tipped them, but they’re owned by Stormfront. It’s tenuous, but there could be a link here,” I explained.

  She considered this for a bit, “Interesting. Stormfront’s been involved in a lot of nasty stuff. Polluting, deforestation, crimes like that. They have plenty of legitimate businesses, but when Galestorm needs some dirty work done, they have Stormfront find someone to do it. My old friends have been itching to take them down for years, but they cover their tracks too well. If I was still in the game, I’d probably help them take more direct action, but I don’t do that anymore. So, out of the blue, they drop this in my lap,” she gestured toward the envelope. “They knew I couldn’t pass it up.”

  “I don’t get it, Sin. This looks like some kind of shady mining operation, sure, but there’s gotta be a dozen of those going on at any time. What makes this one special?”

  “Oh, that’s right, you don’t read Portuguese.” She came over and pointed to one of the invoices. “This one isn’t a construction company. They claim to do ‘security’, but what they really are is mercenaries. This line item, here, translates as ‘Indigenous Population Removal’. They wiped out a village, perhaps several. These are people who have lived there for more generations than you or I could count, and they probably didn’t have anything more advanced than spears to defend themselves. Then there’s this.” She pointed to another invoice, “They do road work. Clearing, leveling, paving, the whole ball of wax. The coordinates on the note are about a hundred miles deep into a virgin rainforest. No roads, no civilization except for those villages. They cut a swath big enough for a six lane highway through that rainforest and murdered anyone who happened to be in their way, Reuben. You can see it on any map site with recent satellite images. Mass graves, too. So yeah, I want to find out what they’re doing.” She looked me in the eyes, “I want to find out how far up it goes, and if I can get the goods, I want you to publish it.”

  I looked away. I didn’t know if I wanted to get mixed up in this. I paged through the documents and photos again. If Sinfonie was right, this was a hell of a story. I already had more than enough on my plate, but the link between Stormfront and Galestorm indicated that there might be a connection between the refinery and what happened in B
razil. My instincts told me that this was too important to walk away from. I sighed, realizing that Sinfonie knew I’d go for it all along.

  “OK, so what’s your plan?”

  She smiled, “Something breaking-and-entering-y. ‘Plan A’ is for both of us to use these harnesses here to ride the cable over to that building. I get us in through the roof access and we hack Galestorm’s computers. We get what we can and get out. The harnesses have these little motors, see?” she showed me how the mechanism worked. “So, all we have to do is strap in and enjoy the ride. When it’s time to leave, we get out the same way.”

  I risked a glance over the edge of the tower and looked at the plaza, sixty stories below. My guts churned within me, and I thought I might be sick. This high-wire stuff was definitely not my bag. “OK, so what’s ‘Plan B’” I asked with dread. If ‘Plan B’ was better, she’d have led with that.

  “I link with you. Up here,” she pointed to her head. “It’s like what happened to us when we were kids, only I’ll be in control this time. You’ll see, hear and feel what I feel, but it won’t be like before. We’ll still be individuals. I warn you, it’ll be scary at first, but you’ll get over it pretty quick. At least this way, you don’t have to go across.”

  Ugh. So, my choices were to rappel, or whatever you call it, some two hundred and fifty feet above a splattery death or do a repeat performance of an adolescent trauma that still gives me occasional nightmares to this day. “I don’t suppose you have a ‘Plan C’?”

  “Nope,” she replied cheerfully. She always enjoyed putting me on the spot. “What’s it gonna be, you big baby? You can trust me, Reuben. I’m a supervillain.”

  “Oh, that’s reassuring. I guess we go with the Vulcan mind meld. I’ll just be a liability over there.”