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Chapter 37 – Invisible RobbersThe SWAT guys walked her over to a grumpy-looking policeman in an ugly suit with his badge on a lanyard around his neck. The SWAT team leader said, “This is Captain Sarter. He’s in charge of this situation.”
She said, “Good day, Captain. I’m Terawatt. I believe you have a situation that your hostage negotiators and SWAT teams will not be able to resolve without loss of life.”
The guy just stared at her. Okay, he was staring at her boobs, the jerk. He finally said, “I saw it on the news, and … I had no idea.”
She said, “I know, it’s difficult to believe in superheroes and supervillains until you’ve had to deal with it in person. But you have two supervillains in there, and I have reason to believe they are not stable. In fact, I have reason to believe that they have already committed at least three murders and two attempted murders since Sunday. And that doesn’t touch on a host of other charges including robbery, grand theft, home invasion, and animal cruelty. They may also be clinically insane, in which case your hostage negotiator has a serious problem on his hands.”
Another policeman in a suit stepped over. This guy wasn’t as old, and looked like he was still in good shape, and his suit fit. “I’m Lieutenant Hanley. I take it you’re Terawatt?”
“In person.”
He said, “Can you give me any details on the ‘insane’ part? If either of these guys is a psychopath or a sociopath, knowing that will change the entire dynamic of the negotiation.”
She gave him her best imitation of her sister, but with the Terawatt voice. “I only have inferences based on the information my people and these Homeland Security officers have gathered. A mutagenic chemical has been used on a small number of people in your town. It causes — and I know you’re not going to believe this — invisibility. Not the clothes or the food they eat, but just their bodies. Three athletes at the nearby high school were dosed on Sunday. They may have been using anabolic steroids or other illegal performance-enhancing drugs, so a drug interaction may be making them even less stable and empathetic than they were before, when they were merely the worst bullies in their school. The third member of their group was captured yesterday afternoon, just after he beat two men unconscious with a steel pipe. As such, we can’t know if they are having a psychotic break, or having hallucinations, or losing impulse control, or any of a hundred other things. We do know this much: they can’t see in normal light anymore, and they see only in infrared. As such, if they do go to a place like Brazil, then when it gets over ninety outside, they might be blind. As the outside temperature matches human body temperature, they certainly wouldn’t be able to see people easily. The fact that they have not considered that suggests that they are less than stable.”
“Or less than smart.” Jack stepped forward. “Terawatt. Colonel Jack O’Neill, Homeland Security. If they can’t deputize you, I have the authority to temporarily deputize you as an agent of the DHS, and under specific circumstances, to make that deputization permanent.”
She acted like she didn’t know who he was. “Thank you, colonel. Given my experiences in California, I think it unlikely that their superiors will allow them to deputize me.”
The captain said, “Look, I don’t want you just to go busting in through the window or something. I don’t want any hostages hurt.”
She insisted, “These people are not stable. If you delay, people will get hurt. And worse.”
Jack asked, “Do you have a plan?”
She said, “I’m willing to let the police negotiate a surrender. I’d rather not put any hostages in danger.”
So they waited while Lieutenant Hanley called into the bank and tried to talk some sense into the invisible guys’ heads. Alex didn’t think there was much chance of it working, but she was still crossing her fingers. And she pretended to ignore all the news crews back behind the police barriers who were photographing her.
When Lieutenant Hanley walked over to talk to Captain Sarter and the SWAT leader, she followed Jack, who was obviously going to stick his nose in, whether the locals liked it or not. And she made sure to float a couple inches above the ground, so she’d look taller.
Lieutenant Hanley said, “Sir, they’re not being rational. And they’re not worried about our snipers.”
The SWAT guy said, “We’ve got two snipers with views into the bank, and neither one can see a perp. They’ve seen a shotgun, a semiautomatic, and a grenade floating around in mid-air, and some hostages secured with duct tape, but if they can’t see a target, they can’t take a shot.”
Jack cut in, “Like Terawatt said. Invisible bank robbers. They can walk out those doors, walk right up to your people, grab someone’s weapon, kill half a dozen officers, then just drop the weapon and walk away. They can move around and not expose themselves to sniper fire, unless you’ve got infrared scopes that can work in bright daylight.”
Captain Sarter said, “Look colonel, you got any useful suggestions?”
Jack just smiled. “I’ve got a dozen. One, let Terawatt do her thing. Two, if you don’t like letting a superheroine save your bacon, have half a dozen guys go grab as many IR viewers and infrared sensors as they can, so you can at least see the perps if they leave the bank. Three, I’ve already got two of my people monitoring the front and side doors with our IR viewers, but we’re going to run out of battery power before a lot longer, and a hostage crisis like this could go for a long time. Four, blanket the area in front of every door with a thin layer of fire extinguisher foam or tactical foam, so you can see when an invisible perp steps onto the foam. Five, for real fun, scatter a lot of broken glass in front of the doors before you layer the foam, because these invisible perps are barefoot. Six —”
“Barefoot? How can you know that?” asked the captain.
Jack said, “Weren’t you listening? They’re invisible. Their weapons aren’t. Their clothes aren’t. Their shoes aren’t. The food they eat isn’t. These guys are hungry and thirsty and naked and cold and scared, and just generally ready to explode. And when that happens, you’re gonna start losing hostages fast. They beat two parapsychologists half to death just for showing up with a cart of instruments. They hacked Milton McClane to pieces with axes. They beat two cheerleaders to death in the girls’ locker room in the high school down the street when the girls weren’t even their targets, and they beat a dog to death with a shovel just because they could. And they weren’t under this kind of stress then. I figure you’ve got less than an hour before one of them goes postal on as many hostages as are within range. And since they have a grenade, it’s only gonna take one irrational moment to take out most of the people in the bank.”
Alex said in her best Terawatt tones, “I believe I might be able to end this stand-off, if you’ll let me go in.”
Captain Sarter sneered, “And what are you gonna do when they start shootin’ at you?”
She calmly said, “Let them shoot, as long as they’re aiming at me, rather than an innocent bystander.”
Jack said, “You seem to be forgetting. She has this thing called superpowers.”
She said, “If you can show me a blueprint of the building with the HVAC ductwork on it, I can get in without the perps knowing it. I should be able to disarm at least one of them before they know they’re under attack, and I should be able to disarm the second one before anyone gets hurt.”
Captain Sarter said, “That’s a lotta ‘shoulds’ and it’s my ass that’s on the line if you screw up.”
Jack said, “Fine. Play ‘CYA’ and ‘jurisdictional dispute’ while two psychos get ready to explode all over your civilians.” He pulled out a phone and pressed a speed-dial number. “Sir, it’s Colonel O’Neill. I need to take jurisdiction out of the hands of some locals who are about to get a bank full of hostages killed.”
“You can’t do that!” growled Sarter.
“I’m doing it right now,” Jack said ruthlessly. He glanced at her, and she realized he was giving her a chance. He wanted her to play ‘good cop, bad cop’ with him! On real policemen! Oh, man, this could go so bad …
She tried, “Colonel, I would prefer to work with the local law enforcement personnel, if at all possible.”
Jack frowned. “Me, too, but some people can’t deal when they’re up against stuff outside their box. Somebody moved his cheese, and now he’s paralyzed.”
She said, “Be fair. No police agency has ever had to deal with invisible criminals before. There’s only one city in the country that has superhero protocols, and no one else has figured out how to cope with supervillains without calling out the National Guard. Or calling your people.”
Jack said, “Doesn’t matter. I make a phone call to the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security calls the Illinois state governor and the mayor of Bloomington, they call the chief of police, and then it’s my case to handle.”
Sarter turned to the SWAT leader. “Can you drop those guys in the bank?”
“No, sir.”
He turned to Lieutenant Hanley. “Can you talk those guys down?”
The lieutenant sighed. “I doubt it. Standard negotiation protocols don’t work when you’re dealing with a psychopath. In fact, they can make things go real bad, real fast. The FBI’s put out official guidelines on this.”
Sarter gritted his teeth and cursed a few times. After he got a few f-words and d-words and b-words out of his system, he said, “Okay, colonel. You got your wish. You just better pray you’re not about to get two dozen hostages killed. And maybe a superheroine.”
Jack said, “All right. First, show Terawatt the blueprints for the HVAC system. Then get her … how many exits are there? Three?”
“Three.”
“Roger that. All right, get her three two-liter bottles of coke.”
Everyone looked at him like he was nuts. But then Alex remembered what he had said to the police when Captain Sarter first got snotty with him.
Boy, Jack was so sneaky! She couldn’t imagine what he was like as a boy. He was probably like Louis without the business focus, plus the practical joking of someone like Louis’s friend Joey Simonson. But Jack got into the Air Force Academy if he was an Air Force colonel now, so he had to be smart, too, with good grades, and probably some sports team stuff.
She only had to wait a matter of seconds before someone was running over to her with the big plastic bottles of coke. She picked one up. It felt like the bottles were the same temperature as the outdoors, and that was even better. If you could only see in infrared, then maybe you couldn’t tell the difference between two things that were the same temperature.
She grabbed the other two bottles with her telekinesis, instead of holding all of them in her arms. Then she went straight up, the other two bottles flying upward with her. She was moving pretty fast, but she still heard Captain Sarter swearing in surprise when he saw her in action.
She flew up about two hundred feet and hovered over the bank. Then she drifted over until she was right over the back doorway, and she dropped the first bottle. It tumbled downward and hit so hard the plastic bottle pretty much disintegrated. There was brownish foam all over the place. So no invisible guys were going to be walking out that door without making footprints. She dropped the second one just outside the side door, and the third one just outside the main door.
Then she dived down to the bank’s HVAC system. Jack had pointed out what she needed to do: if she yanked off the back panel from the big air conditioning unit on the roof and scooted the filters out of the way, she could go silvery right into the ductwork in the ceiling over the heads of the robbers. And she didn’t even need to land to have enough telekinesis for that.
There were four screws holding the panel on, and all she had to do was grab the screws with her telekinesis and turn. She had all four screws out, the panel off, and the filters lifted out in maybe twenty seconds. She went silvery and flew into the ductwork.
It only took her a matter of seconds to get to a duct with a big air vent over the middle of the bank area. And then she could see what was going on. About twenty hostages were tied up with duct tape and sitting on the floor in front of the main door and the side door, so if cops burst into the bank, the hostages would get shot, or at the least, trampled. She could tell the two invisible guys were pacing back and forth by watching their weapons. One had a pump-action shotgun, and the other had a semi-automatic rifle. On the table behind them were two handguns and a grenade. An old ‘pineapple’ style grenade, instead of the modern things Sam had, but still a grenade that could kill every single person in the bank.
She thought about trying to sneak the handguns and the grenade up into the duct with her, but she couldn’t tell where the invisible guys were looking, so she couldn’t be sure one of them wouldn’t spot her if she tried it. And she really didn’t want them going ballistic and opening fire on the hostages if they thought some other invisible guy was loose behind them. Or whatever they would think if they saw their weapons floating up into the air. They were acting pretty freaked already.
“I heard something out there!”
“Shut the fuck UP!”
“No, YOU shut up, ’cause I heard something!”
“Well, there’s nothing out there”
“What if they’re at the back door?”
“What if? We got it boobytrapped with the other grenade. And there’s no one movin’ at us out either of these windows.”
“I say we grab one a’ these bitches and make ’em bring us our money or we blow her fuckin’ FACE off outside in front of the whole fuckin’ town!”
Uh-oh. It sounded like it was time for Terawatt to get these guys looking away from the hostages. But first, she took care of the grenade. She bent the little pin so if one of the guys tried to yank on that ring, nothing would happen. The grenade would stay safe, and the guy would just get frustrated.
She flew down out of the duct through the big vent, and landed right behind the shotgun, which she made sure was still pointing at the floor. She went normal as she landed, and she immediately reached out and slapped the guy on the back, hitting him with a big lightning zap. She just used her telekinesis to hold the trigger so he couldn’t fire it when he convulsed and fell to the floor.
The other invisible guy whipped his rifle in her direction. “What th–…?” And he pulled the trigger.
Or, at least, he tried to pull the trigger. He tried over and over, but it only took a few pounds of telekinesis to hold the trigger mechanism frozen so he couldn’t fire it. She flew right at him with one arm outstretched, and she zapped him as soon as she touched him.
Eww, he was naked and his chest was all hairy and sweaty.
She grabbed the gun with her telekinesis and let him fall to the floor. Then she took the last two cans of Silly String out of her fanny pack and sprayed the stuff over the unconscious guys, so she could see where they were.
She flew over and unlocked the bank doors and waved the police to come in. Then she started going around, ripping the duct tape off all the hostages. They all had their ankles taped together and their hands taped behind their backs. She made it look like she was incredibly strong by taking hold of the layers of tape and ripping the tape apart with her telekinesis instead of her grip strength.
The police were charging in before she had half the hostages untied, and so the first thing she did was point out where the bank robbers were. Then she told them about the grenade boobytrap on the back door. Then she let the policemen escort all the hostages out and get their statements, or whatever policemen did after the robbery was over. Police shows never showed that part, probably because it was really boring.
Jack strolled in with Captain Sarter. “… and like I was telling you, someone like Terawatt doesn’t bust in and start shooting anything that moves. It’s quick, it’s clean, it’s a surgical strike.”
She said, “That reminds me. I need to put the air conditioning unit back together.”
Captain Sarter said, “Nah, leave it as is. The bank’s gonna want to make a complete inventory and check everything anyway, including seeing how much damage we did, so they can gripe to their buddies on the city council and in the mayor’s office.”
Jack grinned. “And the police are gonna want to try and figure out what the heck you did.”
Jack escorted her out of the bank. “Terawatt, you did a great job. The United States government really appreciates it. I don’t know what the problem is with these cities and deputizing you.”
She noticed a news crew was filming the two of them with a parabolic mike, so she made sure she was using her Terawatt voice and she said, “Thank you for your kind words, colonel. It was a privilege working with America’s finest. But, now that the supervillains have been apprehended, it is time for me to depart.”
She still managed to hear the interview that was going on over in the 7-11 parking lot next door, where one of the hostages was telling an interviewer, “And she was so fast it was like she came out of nowhere! And … pow! Pow! It was over, and the invisible guys were down on the floor, and she was spraying some kind of capture net or something over them so they couldn’t get away. And then she was so strong she ripped off the duct tape like it was toilet paper! And …”
Alex jetted away from the bank building and headed low over the building and trees toward the high school. Then, once she was sure no one was following her, she dived down to the ground and went silvery. She puddled through alleys and back yards and stuff, until she was close enough to the police cordon that she could see news vans as she peeked through the low bushes in front of a Starbucks. She spotted a storm drain really close to where Jack’s SUV was parked, and she found another storm drain in the parking lot behind her.
Then she just had to find her way from one storm drain to the other. It took her three wrong turns and maybe fifteen minutes to cover the less than two hundred feet if she could have gone straight to the car. She came up out of the storm drain and puddled under Jack’s SUV, then waited until she was pretty sure no one was looking before she puddled up the side of the SUV and in through the window. Having it open about an inch was enough for her, even if it wasn’t even enough for other people to get a good look into the car.
She puddled back into the gym bag and changed back into her ‘Annie’ clothes. Then she grabbed some of Jack’s communications gear, carefully put the headset on over her wig, and slipped out of the SUV. She moved over to where the SWAT team was standing, which was away from the reporters, and she let them get a look at her so they would know she couldn’t possibly be Terawatt. She walked over and checked with Riley, who was actually on the phone and doing important communications stuff, because apparently the Department of Homeland Security really didn’t want Jack going around taking hostage crises away from local policemen and making everyone mad at him.
So maybe Jack had been bluffing. She would have to remember that Jack was trickier than she knew, even after watching him operate for two days. And she would have to remember that Jack was pretty good at getting guys mad at him, like that Captain Sarter.
Then she found out the really non-fun part of fighting crime and saving people: the paperwork. Jack had forms to fill out and reports to write. Riley and Stewart had reports to write for Jack. She had to pretend to write up an official report for Jack, too. And there were the reports for the inter-agency cooperative effort at the school, and the apprehension of supervillains, and even reports that seemed to be Captain Sarter and Lieutenant Hanley trying to explain that they were facing supervillains and they had to let a superheroine fly in and do the rescue. She didn’t like Captain Sarter, but she didn’t want all those policemen to get in trouble for needing a superhero to deal with threats they couldn’t see and had no idea how to handle.
When she finally had a chance to talk to Jack about what he would’ve done if she wasn’t around, he said, “Close up? Tranq darts. Long distance? When they had a shotgun and a semiauto and grenades? We probably would have had to ask Finn to break out the sniper rifle. That would not have been a good time.”
By the time they got done with the piles of reports and stuff, even with Jack sneaking some of his reporting stuff onto her stuff, it was dinnertime. And she didn’t get enough to eat at lunch, so she was starving. Jack took her to an all-you-can-eat buffet and let her pig out.
But things still weren’t done. She and Jack drove Grover and his mom and girlfriend home, and Jack talked to Deborah for over an hour before she agreed to let Grover go to a secret DHS base in West Virginia, as long as she could move there, too.
So then, the next morning, Alex got to sleep in and eat lots of breakfast and watch some lame morning TV, while Jack and Riley went and had a long talk with Cindy’s mom and dad about the whole ‘invisible boyfriend’ thing. She was starting to realize that being a superheroine might be chock full of yucky stuff, like paperwork and meetings and conferences. Meeting with Willow and her friends was a ton of fun. Meeting with police captains and deputy mayors and stuff? Not a ton of fun. Not even an ounce of fun. She just told herself that getting out of the paperwork and meetings was not a good enough reason to go to work for Jack. And if she was really working for Jack, there would be some real reports to write and some real meetings to attend.
And Jack would probably sneak as many of his reports into her workload as he could get away with.
So it wasn’t until late Saturday afternoon before they drove back to the Air Force base and caught that Cessna Citation X back to Paradise Valley. It was just going to be her and Riley on the jet, because Stewart had to go check on containment for their new prisoners, and Jack had to take a plane in the other direction, to get Grover and Cindy and Deborah settled in that secret base somewhere in West Virginia that Jack couldn’t tell her about.
Before she hopped onboard with Riley to ride home, Jack took her aside. “Alex, we couldn’t have done this without you. So I have a couple things.” He handed her a manila envelope full of stuff. “Read through it while you’re on the flight home, and take care of yourself. If you need us, just call. And let’s try and do something less stressful sometime, like maybe we could just meet at Camp Atron when Terawatt has her martial arts training, and we could have a big lunch, talk about mutual friends, that kind of stuff. Whaddaya say?”
She had to grin. She shook his hand and said, “This was a lot better than I was afraid it was gonna be. So yeah, I’m up for more meets. And you’ll need to tone down the snarky when you meet my mom and dad.”
He smiled. “Oh, that. I can do the ‘serious full colonel’ routine if I have to. It’s just not any fun, unless I get to do it to people who are in trouble.”
So, once the Cessna was at cruising altitude and zooming westward, and Riley was busy writing even more reports and stuff, she opened up the package.
Holy crud.
Jack had gotten someone to go to Kent State University and get a bunch of information on their journalism school and their photojournalism major. And he had handouts on the journalism school — their J-school as they called it — and a CD that she played on Riley’s DVD player, which had a recorded half-hour tour of the campus and the J-school.
But that wasn’t all. There was a copy of a letter from a really big name national reporter who was a Kent State alum, putting in a good word for her. How did Jack get that? And then there was a sheet with information on the top eight photojournalism majors in the country, starting with the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and then going to the next level with Kent State and Western Kentucky University and Central Michigan University, with Texas Tech University and Point Park University and the University of Miami after them. And there was a post-it note from Jack that he could get her into any one of those colleges if she wanted.
Wow.
While she watched the whole ‘campus tour’ on Riley’s little DVD player, she thought it over. Jack was going to a lot of trouble to make nice. He knew her secret identity. He could have just blackmailed her, if he wanted to. But he was being friendly, and doing tons of stuff for her. Maybe he was showing her ‘the carrot and the stick’. Or maybe he really wanted her to work with them and be trustworthy all the time.
She knew that Jack could do a ton of stuff for her that she couldn’t do for herself. Like martial arts lessons for Terawatt. And maybe an official deputization from the Department of Homeland Security. And a super-fast jet plane to get her around the country to help out the people she wanted to help, like Grover and Cindy … or whoever turned out to be the next super-powered people who needed her help. And maybe finding ways that people like Grover could have a real life, instead of being stuck hiding from everyone forever. And if she did end up with a team of superheroes, she couldn’t possibly have homes for all of them, and food, and everything else they’d need. But Jack could. And maybe even would.
Once the plane got near Paradise Valley, she changed into her Terawatt uniform and made sure her clothes and her cameras and her files from Jack were all in her gym bag. Then she went silvery and took her gym bag with her, so she could do her little jump-out-of-the-jet deal again. Riley helped her with the door, so she hopped out while the jet was going about four hundred miles an hour, at about fifteen thousand feet. And he only needed to open the door about an inch, anyway. But the pilots knew they couldn’t get the door closed again very easily if the plane was flying much faster, and they knew that if they were too much higher than fifteen thousand feet, everyone except Alex would have to be on oxygen before they dropped the cabin pressure enough to open the door.
Still, bailing out at fifteen thousand feet up, going four hundred miles an hour through the sky, was just awesome. Mega-awesome. And as long as she was silvery, she didn’t need a parachute or anything. She flew home and got back early enough to fix dinner.
When her dad got home and saw her in the kitchen, he hurried over and gave her a huge hug, which told her that her folks had really been worrying about her a ton while she was gone. She hugged him back. A lot. He smiled. “Well, I see Terawatt saved the day again, only in another state.”
She told him, “Yeah, that stuff you found out about Grover Dunn, Senior? It turned out to be really important. And we have a new super-powered person to look out for. It’s Grover Dunn, Junior. Who’s invisible and can’t turn back to normal.”
With a smirk he said, “Step one on building your superhero team: get a second superhero.”
Then he hugged her again. And he showed her what her mom had done while she was gone: there was a five-layer chocolate buttercream cake all frosted and decorated and stuff, sitting in the fridge waiting for her.
Okay, she knew what her snacks were going to be this weekend.