Monster

by Michael Grant

  I am terribly sorry for the destruction and chaos and loss of life Knightmare has caused.

  I ask that people leave me and my friend Erin alone as I attempt to gain control over the beast. Attacks on us will only unleash Knightmare and more will die. Please, I beg the government that caused this to back off as we work tirelessly to control the danger. —Justin DeVeere, AKA Knightmare.

  Tweet from @CalNewswire:

  CHP issues BOLO for black female age 19 riding red motorcycle 101 south. Consider armed and extremely dangerous.

  Tweet from @ConspiracyWATCH

  Secret Monterey-area DARPA facility site AKA The Ranch is ID’d as experimental site, scene of multiple fatalities cause unknown. #ExposeDARPA

  Tweet from @NewsUncensored

  #Knightmare @JustinDeVeereArt part of USG conspiracy to exploit PBA alien technology?

  Tweet from @GlennBeck

  #Knightmare How many deaths before government admits truth that “powers” are loose in the world? #ExposeDARPA.

  Tweet from @cnnbrk

  White House denies rumor that alien mutagenic fragments are still reaching earth.

  Tweet from @BBCBreaking

  MoD rushing troops to Islay after reports of destruction caused by monster. New Loch Ness monster hoax?

  Tweet from @washingtonpost

  NTSB unable to reach preliminary conclusion re causes of LaGuardia plane crash. Cover-up alleged.

  NSA intercept of phone call between Shade Darby and Professor Martin Darby:

  [Call begins]

  SD: Hi, Dad, it’s me.

  MD: Oh, thank God. Where are you? Are you all right?

  SD: I’m okay, for now anyway. Dad, I am so sorry. I never thought it would come back at you.

  MD: Well, Shade, it was perfectly predictable, don’t you think?

  SD: (Silence)

  MD: I mean, if you’re smart enough to have tricked us all and smart enough to have taken the ASO, you’re smart enough to realize there’d be consequences.

  SD: Yeah.

  MD: (Sigh. Silence.)

  SD: I don’t have anything good to say, Dad, I’m just . . . I was just looking for a way to [inaudible] not a victim. I mean, the world is changing, nothing is going to stop that, it’ll be powers against powers. I . . . I don’t want to be helpless. Waiting.

  MD: You’re not making sense, Shade. Surely you know you’re not making sense. You have to come back and give yourself up. You don’t know the kind of people you’re dealing with.

  SD: If they’re so bad, then giving myself up seems like a bad idea. Who’s not making sense now?

  MD: Fine, great debating point, Shade, give yourself a gold star. But what do you plan to actually do?

  SD: I don’t know yet. I have this power now. I mean, what’s done is done, I am what I am now.

  MD: Sweetheart, they will catch you. If they catch you, it will be worse than if you surrender peaceably.

  SD: I hear you.

  MD: You hear me. And you ignore me. Same as ever.

  SD: Dad?

  MD: Yes?

  SD: I miss Mom.

  MD: Yeah. Me too, kid. Me too. I try to do her job, too, but I’m not her, I’m just me.

  SD: You’ve been a great father.

  MD: Don’t make that past tense, sweetheart. I am still your father. I will always be your father.

  SD: And I’ll always be your daughter. But . . . But things have changed now. Things have . . . Look, I have to go. They’ll be tracking this call. I have to hang up.

  MD: Shade, don’t—

  [Call ends]

  CHAPTER 14

  A Career Setback

  THERE WAS OF course only one reason for Tom Peaks to be summoned to the Pentagon: he was to be fired.

  Failure had a taste, at least for Tom Peaks: it was the flavor of scotch. He poured his third scotch, held the bottle up for inspection, and laughed mirthlessly: it was Lagavulin, from Islay, Scotland. He wondered if the distillery would survive what was being called, with a confusing lack of geographical accuracy, the Loch Ness Caterpillar.

  “Best enjoy it,” he told himself. “There may not be a next year for Islay scotch.”

  Peaks took a sip, set the glass aside, and resumed packing his carry-on bag.

  “Do you know when you’ll be back?” his wife asked, leaning out of the walk-in closet.

  Peaks shook his head. “Nope. Probably just a quick overnight.”

  “Well, be sure and tell them you need some time off. The kids feel like they’ve barely seen you lately.”

  Well, they’ll see a lot more of me when I’m unemployed, Peaks thought. He was not overly worried about finding another job; he’d made lots of contacts during his time with HSTF-66—there was a man who ran a security company, and a woman who was vice president of a major pharmaceutical, who had both tried to recruit him at various times. But what kind of jobs would those be? Organizing security details for spoiled rock stars and self-important billionaires? Or running the in-house security for some big pharma outpost?

  Maybe I’ll just watch TV and stay drunk for a week. Or a month. Or whatever.

  He grabbed his bag, kissed his wife on the cheek, stopped by each of his two daughters’ rooms to tell them he was heading out of town, and then he was taken by staff car and helicopter to Travis Air Force Base. There he was ushered aboard one of HSTF-66’s small fleet of passenger jets, popped an Ambien, and slept till Andrews Air Force Base, where he was picked up by a Pentagon staff car.

  His appointment was for nine a.m., which was not a good sign since it was neither a breakfast nor a lunch meeting. Nine a.m., early, no doubt so that Undersecretary of Defense Letitia Pope could get the distasteful part of her day over with early.

  Somewhat to Peaks’s surprise, Pope did not keep him cooling his heels in her outer office. He was shown in promptly at nine.

  The undersecretary had a pleasant office in the E-ring of the Pentagon, the outer ring where VIPs got windows looking out over parking lots. Peaks glanced at her ego wall: pictures of Letitia Pope with the secretary of defense, the president, the ex-president, the king of Jordan, various NATO counterparts, and of course, her degree from Princeton.

  Pope was middle-aged, with bottle-blond hair formed into a hair-sprayed helmet. She wore a tweed business suit that gave her a vaguely corporate air.

  “Tom, how are you?” Pope asked, extending her hand. “How was your flight?”

  “Fine, fine,” he lied, and took the seat she indicated on the couch in a small sitting area. Coffee was carried in on a silver tray by an enlisted man.

  “Well, Tom,” Pope said, sounding regretful, “things are not going well.”

  “Ma’am, we’ve had some difficulties,” he acknowledged.

  Pope raised a skeptical eyebrow at his mild choice of words.

  “But our core research is going well,” Peaks added, “very well, despite—”

  “Despite a destroyed airliner and a destroyed Golden Gate Bridge.”

  “As I said: difficulties.”

  “And nine dead at the Ranch.”

  Peaks nodded. He was not surprised by the negativity. He had excuses, reasons, explanations, but the Pentagon had never been a big fan of explanations for failure.

  Pope looked at him searchingly, as if making up her mind about him. “Give me the short overview on the research.”

  Peaks nodded again. “Yes, ma’am. Well, as you know, we are working on several solutions concurrently. Broadly there are three avenues: robots, cyborgs, and biologicals. The robot technology is performing nominally in tests. The cyborgs show great promise, though we are having technical issues with the head-to-computer interface. And we have proof of concept with the biological approach, though we did lose Carl and—”

  “—And your most hopeful biological test subject refused to cooperate and escaped, doing, what, ten million dollars in damage? And at least one other escaped at the same time. Have you located them?”

  “Not yet,” Peaks sa
id stiffly. “We, um, can’t really use law enforcement assets to their fullest, since of necessity this would be a shoot-on-sight situation. Cops don’t do shoot-on-sight. But California Highway Patrol has a BOLO out for her, and once they or one of our surveillance assets locates her, we have a go-team in a high state of readiness.”

  The door opened behind Peaks, and Pope stood for the secretary of defense herself, Janet Oberlin. Oberlin lacked Pope’s minimal approachability. She was gray, hatchet-faced, chilly, and, in Peaks’s view, not up to the job, like most people in this government.

  “Madam Secretary,” he said, and offered her his hand. She looked at him, then at the hand, which she considered for a long moment before shaking.

  “Go ahead, Ms. Pope,” SecDef Oberlin said. “Don’t let me interrupt.” She sat equidistant from Peaks and Pope in the larger of the two armchairs.

  “I was just saying that we have a rapid-response go-team ready to deploy as soon as we locate Dekka Talent and Aristotle Adamo.”

  “And what about ASO-Three? The Iowa rock?”

  Peaks shrugged. “We know who had it, and we have a BOLO out for that girl as well—Shade Darby, her name is. And we are preparing to move her father, Professor Martin Darby, to the Ranch.”

  “You’re grabbing a Northwestern University professor?” Oberlin demanded, and too late Peaks recalled that she was a graduate of that college.

  “For use if we can’t . . . can’t reason . . . with his daughter.”

  Oberlin rose to her feet. “Do you have any idea how that looks if it ever gets out?”

  “Why should it get out?” Peaks asked, and he allowed just the hint of a threat in his tone. Not enough to get him arrested right then and there, just enough to remind them that he, Tom Peaks, had all the secrets, and people with dangerous secrets needed to be treated fairly. Carefully. Respectfully.

  Neither Pope nor Oberlin answered, but rather than feeling vindicated, Peaks could see by their hard looks that he was finished.

  Still, he was employed at the moment, and he would continue to do his best.

  “There again,” Peaks explained, “there’s the problem that law enforcement can only take things so far. We could ask them to arrest this Shade Darby person, but to what end? The young woman in question has powers that would make it all but impossible for her to be arrested.”

  “And do we have any notion of where that person is now?”

  Peaks met her eye and tried to conceal his impatience. Why were they making him jump through hoops? If he was to be fired, he’d rather get it over with. “We have some sense that they are moving west. We think they’re stealing cars, switching plates, stealing smartphones as well.”

  “No one’s catching them stealing cars?”

  “The girl’s power involves speed. She can move faster than the human eye can see.”

  Oberlin shook her head and looked disgusted. “Jesus, what a cock-up. We’ve lost control of ASO-Two and -Three and -Four—”

  “We have the Mother Rock,” Peaks interrupted. “Or will as soon as the ship docks in LA.”

  “Swell,” Pope said dryly. “But we’ve also got this Knightmare person killing citizens left and right; we’ve got your experiment, the Dookie person, whatever her name is, silly name, the girl from the PBA. And this speed-freak girl. And the kid who went berserk. That’s four supers running around loose, here in the homeland.”

  “Yes,” Peaks said tightly.

  “And none of your countermeasures is ready.”

  “We are ready to begin testing additional cyborgs.”

  “That’s where you stick a human head on a robot body?” Oberlin asked.

  Peaks winced. “In effect, yes, though it’s more complicated than—”

  Oberlin waved that off. “What you have ready right now, today, is bubkes, am I right?”

  “There are the rapid-response teams . . .”

  “No, no, no,” the SecDef said. “I remember the briefings, Mr. Peaks, I remember being in a conference room three, no, almost four years ago, watching your PowerPoint and you telling us that conventional means would be useless against people with enhanced abilities.”

  “Not useless,” Peaks said. “Just . . . limited. Justin DeVeere, the one who calls himself Knightmare, is not fast; he moves at normal speeds, and we are confident that we can take him down. Dekka Talent as well, and the Adamo kid.”

  “But not the Chicago girl.”

  “As you know, we’ve studied powers. Super-speed presents a very tough challenge. The girl in the PBA who called herself the Breeze moved at just under the speed of sound in short bursts, or could travel distances at something like two hundred miles an hour. We think Shade Darby is faster, maybe quite a bit faster. And she appears to form some kind of protective armor over a streamlined shape. It’s a physical impossibility to aim a gun at her—she’s effectively invisible when she’s moving.”

  “So how do you stop her?”

  “We have to trap her,” Peaks said. “We have to trick her into a trap.” He almost added, Problem is, we don’t know how to do that, but stifled the outburst of honesty.

  Pope lifted some papers from the coffee table between them and peered sidelong at one. “This wasn’t strictly your problem, but we have fresh confirmation that the Haqqanis have ASO-Four.”

  “As you said, that was not my operation, that was run by CIA. And the Adamo person was Colonel DiMarco’s project, undertaken without—”

  “That’s General DiMarco now,” Oberlin said. The last flicker of hope in Peaks’s head was drowned.

  “Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to have terrorists with enhanced powers?” Oberlin said, sounding as if she were giving a speech. “We are tasked with the job of keeping the American people safe, and so long as I hold this position, we will keep them safe.”

  “I believe I do understand the dangers,” Peaks snapped. She was playing with him, like a cat with a mouse.

  Silence fell. Peaks could feel rather than see the looks being exchanged between Pope and Oberlin. A decision had been reached and he could do nothing but wait.

  Oberlin rose abruptly, motioning for Peaks to keep his seat. “I have a meeting with POTUS. I leave it to you, Ms. Pope. Good day.”

  Her assistant leaped to open the door and she was gone. Peaks turned back to Undersecretary Pope, assuming that he was about to hear the final words of dismissal. And yet, despite everything, every expectation, he was still stunned when it came.

  “Tom, we’ve asked you to do an impossible job,” Pope said with a sigh. “You’ve done tremendous work. But we feel it’s time to make some changes in the leadership of HSTF-Sixty-Six, and of the Ranch.”

  Peaks felt as if his whole body was tingling, like a mild electric current was going through him. He’d never been fired before; he didn’t know the proper etiquette, he didn’t know what to do with his hands or what expression to plaster on his face.

  “We want you to take the next week, Tom, and ease the path for General DiMarco. She’ll be taking over as overall director, which will free you up to focus on some aspects of your continuing research.”

  So that was it. They wanted to keep him on as a glorified project manager, a bureaucrat running the research program at the Ranch, but reporting to his former subordinate, the former colonel and now brigadier general Gwendolyn DiMarco. DiMarco was what was known as a “comer,” an officer with a great future marked out for her. She was the first woman general with substantial combat experience, she had a double PhD in anthropology and engineering, and was a star of the war college, third in her West Point class. Absolutely no one would be surprised if General DiMarco ended up as Army chief of staff, perhaps even chairman of the Joint Chiefs, someday.

  She’ll march in and take credit for all my work.

  “This is a mistake,” Peaks blurted. “This is a big mistake pulling me out at this critical time. DiMarco has already screwed up, she tried to control the morphing process and—”

  “General Di
Marco,” Pope said acidly.

  “She’s not going to know what’s going on, it will take her weeks to get up to speed and her judgment . . .” His rush of words petered out when he saw the set expression on Pope’s face. “Time will be lost,” he finished lamely. “Time we don’t have.”

  “The general will be at the Ranch to assume command tomorrow at fourteen hundred hours. I’d like you to fly back immediately and begin preparing staff for the transition.”

  Time stopped for Tom Peaks. It had happened: he had been fired, or at least demoted, which was the same thing really. This supercilious pencil pusher and her icy bitch of a boss had conspired to destroy his career and advance the career of, surprise, surprise, another woman. Peaks had never thought of himself as any sort of sexist, but it was becoming clear to him now that there was a good-old-girls’ network working against him.

  In fact, when he thought of it, most of his problems were because of women: Dekka Talent, Shade Darby, even that silly little social climber Erin O’Day with Knightmare. Now Pope and Oberlin and DiMarco.

  Peaks could barely master his emotions as he left the office, turned the wrong way in the corridor, corrected himself, and walked as fast as he could toward the distant exit.

  On the private jet back to California, he ordered a scotch from the cabin attendant—not an Islay product—drank it too quickly, and ordered a second to savor as he read yet again through the psychological profiles.

  Justin DeVeere, a talented young artist, utterly amoral, a complete narcissist.

  Dekka Talent, a seemingly average, underperforming young woman suffering from, but coping surprisingly well with, posttraumatic stress disorder and bouts of depression.

  And Shade Darby, the one with the thinnest record, the sketchiest profile. Good grades, great test scores, impressive IQ. A young woman sufficiently determined—and sufficiently bold—to manipulate her father’s data and pull off a heist under the noses of the entire security apparatus of the United States.

  She was the one responsible: Shade Darby. It was her theft of the rock that caused him to rush Dekka’s . . . introduction . . . to the role he had planned for her. It was her theft of the rock that first got the wind up Pope’s skirts. A former secretary of defense had once talked about how there were known knowns—the things we know that we know, like the sky is blue and the sun rises in the east. Then there were known unknowns, like what is the cure for cancer? But there were also unknown unknowns, and these were the most dangerous: things we don’t know we don’t know. The things that came out of the blue. The things you didn’t even know you had to prepare for.