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Chapter 47 – Not Quite MagicalHermione gritted her teeth. “And why would you know this much about me?”
The brigadier said, “Jack, would you care to explain why one of your people has this much intel on one of my people?”
Jack smoothly said, “Ted, I would love to.” Then he turned and looked at Alex. “Farrell, would this be one of the women on your short list, like your redheaded friend?”
“Yes, sir, she would be.”
Jack turned back to the men and said, “As you may have guessed, Farrell is not just another pretty face. She’s possibly the best hacker on the planet, and she’s also a highly trained military asset. She just hasn’t been out of the Academy long enough for me to get her a promotion to first louie yet. But one of her personal projects was scanning the globe for more women like her. Extremely intelligent, highly creative, and also serious threats when in the field. She came up with half a dozen so far. That’s how we found Lieutenant Lupo over there. She also found Captain Samantha Carter, the astronaut, but she’s off limits while she’s busy NASA’ing. I don’t understand Farrell’s programming or her algorithms or her search methods, but your Miss Granger turned up, too.”
Hermione scowled. The brigadier huffed, “Miss Granger has certain highly classified events in her history which should not be looked into by anyone’s computer searches.”
Jack said, “Well, we’ll be good little boys and girls. Right, Farrell?”
She quickly said, “Yes, sir!”
* * *
Hermione let herself be led by the brigadier over to where Mr. Parker, her boss at MI-6, was waiting impatiently. She knew that the Parkers had a long, long history of service for the Crown, going back to before the Napoleonic Wars. Sir Peter Parker, Vice-Admiral Christopher Parker, Admiral Peter Parker, and so on. Still, it was slightly droll that Mr. Parker’s first name was Peter, given the current popularity of the Spiderman character.
Brigadier Brathwaite-Thomson said to Mister Parker, “Did you find out what I asked about O’Neill’s people? Because they’re finding out about us, including things that should be kept under hatches, like Miss Granger’s history.”
Mister Parker said, “Yes, sir. We already know about Jack O’Neill’s past.” He looked at Hermione and explained, “He’s a legend in spec ops. He’s supposedly the field director for the American Department of Homeland Security’s HWAAA program, but our contacts tell us he’s really running a black ops group called the SRI under the DHS banner. He and his people handled the Myrhorod disaster, and the Siberian fiasco before that.”
Hermione gulped a little, because several of the top SIS agents had been sent with two crack SAS teams to intervene in whatever was going on in Siberia, and none of them came back alive. She checked, “Operation Siberian Egret, sir?”
Mister Parker nodded unhappily. “O’Neill has rounded up the cream of the crop by anyone’s standards. And the fact that most of his people are still alive, when none of ours survived that one op, speaks volumes. As far as we know, in five separate incidents in former Communist countries, he has completed mission objectives in all five, and lost a grand total of three agents. We lost sixteen in Operation Siberian Egret alone. Riley Finn was first in his class at West Point, with Graham Miller second. In any other year, Miller would have had a first. Finn was also a really impressive decathlete for West Point, and a lot of sports experts think he would have placed a lot higher than fourth at their college national championships if he had trained like most decathletes do, instead of focusing on being first in his West Point class. Josefina Lupo is the only woman ever to finish first in her class at West Point, and she also ended up leading her group when she went through Special Forces training, which was popularly believed impossible for a woman before she did it. Finn and Miller both have medals we don’t even have classifications for. And Lieutenant Farrell doesn’t exist.”
Hermione instantly realized what Mister Parker meant before she said something stupid, like ‘of course she exists, I just talked to her’. The woman wasn’t Lieutenant Farrell. She asked, “CIA? NSA? NSC?”
Brigadier Brathwaite-Thomson said, “She certainly ate our hacker team for breakfast, while calmly sitting in the meeting room this morning.”
Mister Parker said, “She doesn’t show up anywhere. She may be a cover story, but it’s also possible she cleared her own records so thoroughly we can’t trace them.”
Brigadier Brathwaite-Thomson said, “Jack claimed she was probably the best hacker on the planet.”
Mister Parker said, “She’s too young to be any of the major names. But it’s possible she’s good enough that no one’s gotten a name for her yet.”
Hermione winced a little. “Are you suggesting she might be better than, say, S4l1x680 or P$ychon4ut? Because our people couldn’t stop either of them back when they were active. They both stopped on their own. If the colonel has her in a protected situation, she would never need to stop, and we might not be able to block her without completely disconnecting our information from the internet.”
The brigadier said, “I find it rather disturbing that she found out about Miss Granger. The intelligence on Harry and his father is supposed to be unavailable by computer, and the information on Miss Granger was supposed to be unrecorded. That means we have a leak, a mole, or a serious protocol error.”
Mister Parker said, “Unless they got their information from the other side.”
Brigadier Brathwaite-Thomson said, “That’s an even less appealing option, Parker.”
Mister Parker said, “There’s yet another option that’s even less appealing, sir. O’Neill’s project? The SRI? It’s not commonly known, but it’s the Superpowers Research Initiative. He may have someone with enough psychic powers to read it out of our heads. If that’s true, there’s no stopping them from finding out any secret you’ve ever known.”
Hermione winced. “And if they really are the Superpowers Research Initiative and they’re after this girl, that suggests a few things I really don’t wish to think about without a pint in my hand.”
* * *
Alex watched avidly as the British delegation took their turn. Unfortunately, that meant she actually paid attention while their head diplomat complained about CIA incompetence and cowboy activities for almost half an hour. Alex was really glad when the intelligence lead stood up and introduced Hermione.
Hermione stepped into the middle of the square with just a notepad and a remote control. She said, “First off, I want to thank everyone for their cooperation in compiling and sharing forensic results. We could not have managed this without the complete cooperation of everyone’s intelligence agencies and police forces. This is the sort of arrangement that makes the EU strong.” Alex noted that a number of people around the room really liked that bit.
Hermione started operating the remote control, and a map of Europe appeared on all four video screens. Alex could see a bunch of little skull-and-crossbones symbols that probably marked all the dead bodies involved in this thing so far. Hermione started manipulating the map as she said, “We started with deaths spread out over half of Western Europe and no idea who or what was connected to this CIA problem. But our people naturally focused on the British deaths first. A family of four caravanning about northern Africa and southern Europe. They were all shot at close range, execution style, with .380 caliber bullets that our forensics people identified as coming from a Walther PP, based on the marks on two shells found at the scene of the crimes. Each one was shot in the chest and head at a range of four or five feet, and the peculiar shape of the powder burns suggest that a modern silencer was used as well. So where else does this particular gun show up? Oddly enough, everywhere.
“A little old lady in Germany is shot to death in her house with no signs of robbery. Marta Zadek has no known enemies and no known living relatives. Lo and behold, it’s a .380 caliber, and forensics matches the bullets with the ones that killed the family of four. Former CIA agent Erik Heller is found dead in a Berlin street, killed by … the same gun. And finally, CIA officer Marissa Weigler is found dead at a closed amusement park, killed by the same gun, which is modified for the CIA silencer found in Weigler’s pocket. She has her fingerprints all over the gun and the silencer and the magazine and the bullets in the magazine, and she has powder residue on her hand as well, so we have reason to believe it’s her firearm. There’s also an arrow in her hip. And someone else’s blood drops moving down the slope she apparently fell down, over to near her body, where she was shot, and then leaving.
“But the interesting features don’t stop there. The arrow matches several arrows shot into the body of a small-time German criminal, Gustav Knepler, who was apparently shot with the same Walther and then used for target practice post-mortem by some manner of psychopath. That Walther is almost certainly CIA-issued, and the property of agent Marissa Weigler.
“And that leaves us with five more bodies with tentative links to this mission gone askew. Two policemen, and three men who are apparently CIA ‘auxiliary assets’: a man named Isaacs and two of his underlings. The policemen were killed by a strong individual, approximately six feet tall from the angles of the cuts, highly trained in knife fighting since the killer took out two police officers, and using some manner of combat knife. The auxiliary assets had not left Isaacs’ nightclub at the time of these murders, and Weigler and the girl were probably not in the vicinity. So the most likely suspect is Erik Heller, who is the right height, with the right training. The two underlings were later killed while the girl was suspected to be in the area. Both were killed in fairly brutal hand-to-hand combat by someone who was stronger than a normal man, knew how to use that strength, and was noticeably shorter than both men. Given that, the only reasonable suspect we have is this girl. Isaacs was killed with a steel pipe in a street fight, and Heller’s prints were found on the pipe, so we are conjecturing Heller killed him, too.
“And that leaves us with the blood droplets. Weigler shot someone at the amusement park. That someone shot her with an arrow at roughly the same time, then finished Weigler off with her own gun. The fingerprints on the gun that aren’t Weigler’s match no one in any of our databases, and no one connected with any of these crimes, so we’re considering it might be the girl. The girl appears to have lived her entire life ‘off the grid’ as the Yanks say, so we have no prints for her. If this is the girl, she’s probably seriously wounded and gone to ground nearby. By now, she may have died of blood loss, or be desperately ill from infections. So we should begin a door to door search of everywhere a teenaged girl might hide out, starting with a one-mile radius about the last murder site. She was shot by a professional. She’s injured. She can’t have gone far.”
Alex watched as the CIA guys tried to object to Hermione’s conclusions. And she watched as the State Department guy blustered and stalled. And she watched as Jack shut all of them up.
Jack stood up and said, “I’m Colonel Jack O’Neill, Department of Homeland Security. We were brought in just yesterday to save some CIA asses, and we’ve already solved this case. And I can tell you that as far as we know, everything Miss Granger deduced or guessed is correct. But there’s a lot more.”
“You can’t!” one of the CIA guys shrieked.
Jack pointed at the senior CIA officer. “Keep your boys under control, or I’ll have my people throw them out on their ear.” He turned back to the crowd. “Fourteen years ago, Marissa Weigler told her CIA bosses that Erik Heller shot and killed Johanna Zadek, who happens to be the daughter of Marta Zadek. Erik Heller disappeared with Johanna’s two-year-old girl Hanna. The girl has apparently been using the name Hanna Heller ever since. We didn’t believe the information we got in our briefing, so we checked everything we could. Weigler scrubbed a project called Galinka, which turned out to be the only intersection she ever had with Heller. As far as we can tell, she is the one who shot Johanna, and Heller has been hiding out for fourteen years waiting for a chance to get even. Weigler or someone on her orders then killed everyone else on the project, except one grad student who is still out there. But all three other CIA officers on Project Galinka ate a bullet and were listed as suicides. Same for the university cooperator, Professor Howard Royer Locke of Princeton. The only survivors of the project were Erik Heller and the little girl, Marissa Weigler naturally, and Locke’s grad student. I can think of four possible reasons why the grad student didn’t get killed, and all of them are pretty nasty. My best guess is Weigler let the grad student kill Locke in exchange for staying alive, but that’s pure guesswork. Why? Seventeen years ago, the grad student did her doctoral research on …” He turned and looked at Alex.
“Controlled mutagenesis in the hominidae embryo, sir,” she quickly reeled off.
“Controlled mutagenesis in human embryos,” Jack growled. “Project Galinka must have found a way to experiment on women without their knowledge, or at least without their full knowledge. We may never know, but I’d guess abortion clinics, planned parenthood clinics, maybe clinics that did embryo implantation and other kinds of work for women who had trouble getting pregnant. The women just didn’t know that they had Frankenstein’s monster growing inside them.
“We have no idea why Heller went rogue. Maybe he fell for Hanna’s mom. Maybe his conscience finally woke up. Maybe he figured out that Weigler was going to put a bullet in his head pretty soon. But our current best guess is that he tried to run with Johanna and Hanna, and Weigler tried to stop him. He’s probably been training Hanna for years on how to be a soulless assassin just to take down Weigler. The CIA has videotape footage of Hanna inside the base they took her to in Morocco, and whatever’s on that footage scared them so bad they still won’t release it to us. But here’s what I was told last night: Weigler sent in a double to see Hanna when Hanna asked for Weigler personally. Hanna killed the double before anyone could react. Hanna dropped the first armed guard into the room, took his gun, shot the guards behind him, finished the job, and was good enough at evasion to escape a CIA base on full alert. Maybe that’s true. Maybe she had a few abilities they weren’t expecting.”
He turned his head. “Miss Granger, you didn’t tell us about the anomalies in the DNA of the blood samples you got at Weigler’s death site.”
Hermione coolly answered, “We’re re-testing, because the results that came back can’t be right. They have several sequences that are completely wrong for a normal human.”
Jack said, “That would be because Hanna Heller is not a normal human. She’s a pretty sixteen-year-old girl … who happens to be stronger and quicker and tougher and more durable than anybody in this room. If we’re lucky, that’s all we’re facing. But this is someone who will not stop just because she gets shot. You haven’t been told about how the CIA found her. Two full CIA Nordic teams went to find Erik Heller. Two heavily-armed men went into a small cabin and never came out. A full team went in and found the girl and two dead agents. They just assumed Erik Heller had killed the two men and made his escape undetected. We know better. Two heavily armed men on a CIA hunter-killer team entered a small house and were brutally killed by a sixteen-year-old girl. How dangerous do you have to be to take out two armed men who are in that house looking for a trained attacker? Well, that’s how dangerous this little girl is.”
Jack stepped into the middle of the square. “Some of you already know who I am and what I’ve done. The rest of you need to ask around. This girl had her DNA tampered with as an embryo, and she has superpowers. The CIA hasn’t admitted it, but they have at least one HK team, maybe two, moving north toward Finland, looking for this girl. They’ll eventually find her, at which point they and everyone in the vicinity will die. The only team on Earth prepared to handle a problem like Hanna Heller is mine. At any minute, the CIA guys in this room will get a message from their bosses that the President of the United States has told them they’re off this case and it’s mine now. They weren’t smart enough to realize that Marissa Weigler was running a rogue project seventeen years ago that dealt with experimenting on humans. They weren’t smart enough to realize that Marissa Weigler scrubbed that project fourteen years ago and killed anyone who threatened her personal security, even though lots of those corpses were CIA personnel. They weren’t smart enough to realize that she was playing them again when she talked them into going after ‘rogue agent’ Erik Heller before someone got hurt. They weren’t smart enough to figure out that Weigler was going rogue, hiring assets off the books, and killing anyone who got in her way. They aren’t smart enough to deal with Marissa’s little creation. I’m asking all of you to confer with people who know my rep, and then let me and my team handle this as gracefully as possible. Thank you.”
He walked out of the square and past the shocked CIA men. He cocked his head slightly at Riley, and Alex had to shove her tablet into the valise to keep up with Riley and Graham and Jo, who were all trooping out after Jack.
Jack led them all the way to the mess hall, which was only serving soups and sandwiches in between meals. He said, “Lieutenant Farrell, go get me two pieces of pie. Whatever looks good to you. And bring two forks.”
Alex hopped up. Jo and Riley went with her. Jo said, “I feel the need for speed. Or at least an ice cream sandwich.”
Riley said, “Graham had this apple strudel stuff at lunch that smelled amazing. I want a piece.”
Alex said, “Thanks for coming over and helping me out. Both of you.” They pretended they didn’t know what she was talking about. But if she’d had to go over by herself, she wouldn’t know if Jack was plotting behind her back or not, and she really needed to be able to trust him.
When they sat back down, Jack took a couple bites of one pie, and left all the rest for Alex to eat.
Jo asked, “Sir, how did you know about the anomalies in the DNA samples?”
Jack said, “I guessed. Granger wasn’t going on about what they could tell about the girl from the DNA, and she said they had plenty of blood samples. Bill Lee lectured at me enough about Maggie Walsh’s papers in genome mangling that I figured I knew what was going on.”
While half the team snacked, Jack said, “Half the people in the room won’t believe, even if they know about some of our missions. We may have to haul out our big gun and convince them superpowers are real. Then we’re gonna have to convince their intelligence people to trust us enough to help us find Hanna. Then we’re gonna have to do our job and round her up. I really doubt she’ll feel like cooperating, after what Marissa’s been doing, and the great white north is her hunting ground. If we’re insanely lucky, she’s rational and ready to pull in her horns. If not, we may have an angry super-powered kid to handle. Worst case? She’s already lapsed into full-fledged supervillain. I just doubt we’re there yet, because there’s not a string of dead bodies pointing toward Finnish soil right now. Fortunately, we do have the only team on Earth capable of catching her without just sniping her from a klick away.” He turned his head slightly. “And Lieutenant Lupo? You get to experience all the fun of an SRI field op. It’s like a trip to Disneyland, but without the copyrighted characters.”
Riley said, “So we let everyone argue among themselves all afternoon, then consult people in the know after hours?”
Jack nodded. “Yep. And Farrell may have to deal with an angry British data analyst with a top secret backstory.” He flicked his eyes back behind Alex and toward the doors into the mess, where Hermione was standing and frowning. “So … I go put a word in the ear of every general and senior intelligence officer who wants to talk to me. Finn, Miller, Lupo. Go work the room like you were already doing. Feel free to be as honest as you want about Marissa and The Company, because nobody in that room except those CIA dorks is going to be sympathetic to their plight. Even that State Department guy wanted to punch Pressman and his bosses in their oily faces.”
Jack led everyone else out of the mess hall, just stopping for a second to point Hermione at Alex.
Hermione strode over and sat opposite Alex. “Okay, Annie Farrell. Or whatever your real name is. How do you know about me?”
Alex said, “Just pretend my name is Annie. I can’t give you more than that right now. What I can give you is going to be completely insane. So let me make some completely wacko guesses about your past. If I get close enough, just wince.
“Your parents are dentists. At eleven you went to what we in America would call a private school, maybe in a castle in Scotland. You were the swotty smart kid who had her hand in the air every time, and you weren’t making friends. Plus you had big buck teeth that the other kids made fun of.” The alarm in Hermione’s eyes told Alex that she was batting nearly a thousand. “There was a boy. Maybe his name was Harry and maybe his pal was named Ron. And maybe a psychotic villain was after Harry and trying to get at something in the castle. Harry was ridiculously brave, and really humble about it, which made a lot of girls think he was hot stuff. But he needed a brain, and you ended up being his ‘data analyst’. Harry saved the day with Ron’s help and your help, and then the adults stepped in and said ‘oh you should have come to us’ and ‘oh no, don’t do this again’ and things like that. But things didn’t stop. The psychotic villain and his minions and his connections kept coming after Harry and kept doing things that you had to stop, and in the end you found out that the headmaster knew all along, and was letting Harry get ready to take down the Big Bad and face that kind of problem in the real world. Harry and Ron are now in your SIS, and you’re the ‘bright boy’ in MI-6 data analysis now.”
Hermione gulped and said, “I can’t talk about it. But … how did you know? Some of that … We didn’t tell anyone! And it’s not in our records!”
Alex asked, “Are you dating Ron?”
Hermione nodded tentatively. “We’re not supposed to. SIS rules.”
Alex said, “My name isn’t Annie or Farrell. I’m not any kind of military officer. And I only help out, I’m not officially in the SRI.” She saw the reaction in Hermione’s eyes, and she said, “Someone told you what the SRI is. That’s okay. The colonel’s stressing that pretty hard, so everyone in the room should know what it is by tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll be checking up on his story as soon as I’m done with you,” Hermione said.
Alex nodded. “Good. Verify everything you can. Check on what he’s been doing the last few months in the United States, because we’re getting supervillains popping up all over the place, mainly thanks to Danielle R. Atron.”
Hermione said, “And that’s how you knew about Marissa Weigler.”
Alex corrected her. “No, it’s how we knew that superpowers could possibly be involved in this case. We just had to sit on our hands until the CIA was in so much trouble that they had to beg the Pentagon for outside help. We didn’t find out about Marissa Weigler or the project or anything until last night, on the way over here. We just work faster than most people. And we know a few things that most people don’t want to know about. Like how I really know about you.”
Hermione just said, “I’m waiting.”
“It’s Terawatt. A few months ago, Terawatt had something impossible happen. Well, more impossible than usual. A woman came from another dimension and asked for Terawatt’s help in stopping an attack on multiple universes that would eventually threaten the entire multiverse.”
Hermione lectured, “There’s no evidence that alternate universes exist, despite a lot of theory on the quantum foam and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.”
Alex kept going. “Even better: other universes far enough away from us have slightly different physical constants — or at least that was the working theory, I don’t know enough physics to understand it, much less verify it — and apparently we still have a strong anthropic principle, so we have worlds much like us, but with slightly different physical laws. In one such world, magic is possible using wands. That world was the one where they were based and where they went through inter-dimensional portals to stop a true hellgoddess. In that world, perhaps the brightest witch in decades is a young woman named Hermione Jean Granger.”
“Now I know you’re having me on.”
Alex said, “I can’t prove it in any way, other than telling you things I was told about that Hermione, which may be absurdly close to things from your own life. But I can put you in touch with Terawatt, who wants to talk to this world’s Hermione and maybe enlist you in her fight against supervillains. I’d expect you to talk to your superiors about this and keep them in the loop. But Terawatt has a link to the U.S. military in Jack O’Neill, and it would be good if she had a link to European military or intelligence services, because the number of super-powered people is not going to taper off. If the colonel is right, there will be more problems around some of the most dangerous biochemical spills in the former Communist countries, and there will be ongoing problems in similar places all around the world. And then there are insane people like Marissa Weigler and Maggie Walsh and Danielle Atron, all of whom make Victor Frankenstein look like a certified public accountant.”
Hermione said, “Well, I can certainly agree to talk to Terawatt and help her find a liaison with the British government. Perhaps even the EU. But I doubt anyone would want me to be that liaison.”
Alex didn’t say anything, but Terawatt was definitely going to make it one of her conditions that Hermione be that liaison. She made sure she got Hermione’s work number and work email, just so Terawatt would be prepared.
* * *
After Hermione left, Alex moved to a table by a wall, so she could use the converters to charge her ‘Annie Farrell’ cell phone and her tablet while she worked. The Sour Kraut was still trying to hack her tablet. Didn’t that guy ever quit? Apparently not. Willow had sent her a message that ‘Annie Farrell’ had already pummeled his firewall and crashed his Unisys server, but the guy was back at it, on another terminal on another midframe.
Oh, and Jean-Pierre had sent her a note asking her out to what he called ‘a romantic dinner for two’ in his hotel room not too far from the base. And he suggested she bring a change of uniform so she would look fine in tomorrow’s meeting. Eww.
James sent her a note telling her that Hermione Granger was angry with him, but he knew her boyfriend so he’d talk her out of it by tomorrow. So much for Hermione keeping the thing with Ron quiet.
And Alejandro sent her an apology for Jean-Pierre’s antics, saying that Jean-Pierre had all the class of a tomcat … and just as many diseases.
Acid Burn and captainmal and jackryanrules were hard at work trying to track down any trace of Hanna, so Alex sent them everything she had heard in the meetings, or guessed based on what they said in the meetings. And she thanked them for making her look good.
In a matter of minutes, she got a new email from captainmal.
Bad news. Atron just escaped from prison. All the solid doors between her cell and the exercise yard were found unlocked and/or open. Her cellmate was in the exercise yard screaming for help. Atron apparently held the woman’s head against one of the poles of the security fence and drove a long spike through the woman’s mouth. Sideways through both cheeks. And then spot-welded the spike to the pole so the woman was trapped there by her face. Cellmate was so terrified of Atron she refused to say anything. No sign of Atron.
Alex gritted her teeth in frustration. How did Danielle Atron get superpowers again? Because that was what it had to be. Telekinesis to open or unlock doors, lightning to weld that spike to the post, silvery shapeshifting to go through the barred doors, and maybe the shapeshifting to go through the fence and escape. Or else flight. Or superstrength to leap over the fence. Or something new.
Any way Alex looked at it, Atron was super-powered again and on the loose. She went looking for Jack, because he needed to know ASAP.