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Chapter 48 – AppearanceAlex needed almost an hour to find Jack, because he wasn’t in the meeting room, and he wasn’t in any of the conference areas around the meeting room, and he wasn’t in any of the offices close to the meeting room, and he wasn’t in any of the private conference rooms that were locked so Lieutenant Annie Farrell couldn’t check inside. She had to find an unlocked, empty conference room, go silvery, and go up into the ventilation ducts to peep into each one of the locked rooms, one by one.
And maybe she needed to stop and listen to what some of the people were talking about. In one room, some Moroccans were arguing with some Spaniards who apparently knew about Jack and wanted to convince the Moroccans to cooperate without telling stuff they weren’t supposed to tell. In another room, one of the British intelligence officers was explaining what little he knew about Myrhorod to some other intelligence officers. She was pretty sure one of the others was one of the French guys who had made a pass at Jo, and one was a stiff German who didn’t seem to like the British guy. In yet another room, the American State Department guy was horse-trading favors with the Belgian and French state department types to try to get them to do what he wanted. And in yet another room …
Ick. Couldn’t these people keep their pants up and their skirts down at least until nighttime? Eww.
In the last room she checked, three of the CIA guys were conferencing with the people back home, probably in Langley or D.C. if she had everything straight. They were whining about Jack making them look stupid, while their bosses back in America were telling them to shut up, because Jack was also making them look not guilty. Being dumb and getting taken advantage of by Marissa Weigler was way better than being directly involved in the murders and possible tortures of a bunch of foreigners. And since Weigler was dead, they didn’t have to worry about throwing a fellow agent to the wolves. And anyway, she probably deserved it if she had a gun and still couldn’t defend herself against a teenager. Alex wanted to leap out of the duct and yell at those guys for being so dumb that they hadn’t realized Marissa had been murdering their fellow CIA agents for at least fourteen years.
So no luck searching for Jack anywhere around the conference room, where she thought he was supposed to be. So she tried looking in a bunch of other places that made sense to her, which was why it took her so darn long to find him.
He was in the officers’ club buying whiskeys for some of the other high-ranking officers and talking them into doing what he wanted. She figured she had better let him do that, because it was important, and there really wasn’t anything the SRI could do about Danielle while they were in Berlin. She decided she had better let him do the casual chat thing he did so well, when he wasn’t doing the annoying stuff he also did really well.
So she called Acid Burn on her Terawatt phone. Willow already knew about the prison break.
Willow said in that AutoTuned voice, “I’ve been running stuff off some NSA hardware and monitoring the police bands down there at the prison, and there aren’t any signs of super-powered activity, which maybe just means she’s lying low right now, or she’s long gone. And they’ve got roadblocks and stuff on all the major roads for miles around the prison, and they’re searching with K-9 squads, too, lots of luck on that one. I alerted all of Team Terawatt, and G.M. says he’s brewing up more GC-161 for the team just in case, and lots of antidote. Then I made sure the Paradise Valley police knew, and I sent a bunch of mean emails from hundreds of different usernames to the state governor’s office about the whole ‘Danielle Atron is locked up so we do not need a superheroine anymore’ dealie.”
“Good work.”
Willow asked, “Is Big Cheese taking it okay?”
Alex admitted, “I haven’t been able to tell him yet. He’s in a bigwig meeting and it’s really important, and they’re not gonna want me interrupting whiskey-on-the-rocks time for this.”
“Ooh, keep an eye on him. He’s not really a big drinker. Except on quiz nights.” Willow giggled at the memory.
Alex said, “I’m sure he’s being really careful. I don’t think he likes to lose, and not getting his way on this thing would be a big loss.”
Willow said, “The Germans are already launching a big search cordon all around that amusement park. Did you know the owners had it closed for repairs and they wanted to have it open again by next month, but the whole ‘dead CIA bigshot next to your flume ride’ thing is really messing up their grand opening plans? So the police searched the entire amusement park first including all the underground areas. And someone at your conference probably leaked stuff, because the police are specifically looking for a sixteen-year-old girl who may have a bullet wound.”
Alex said, “The only place I know about near there is the Knepler house where Mister Knepler got shot and used like a target. Can you get me directions from the base to that house?”
“Oh, sure, I’ll upload that to your T-Phone. Be sure to use it with the GPS tracking app, so you can’t get lost. You gonna pay it a little visit?”
She said, “I’m thinking about it. I want to check with Jack first.”
Willow said, “You might want to wait until dark, just to be sure. Some of these Europeans may be touchy about unexpected stuff zooming over their heads.”
Alex muttered, “Ooh, good point.” It was hard to look at the nice, clean, neat, undamaged area around her and see it as the center of a World War.
Willow said, “Oh! And someone in your area is having the police check every pharmacy and doctor and hospital and clinic — well, that’s not what they’re called in German — to check for injured sixteen-year-old girls, or missing meds, or missing suture kits over the last week. I don’t know how they’re gonna check the illegal places, since your Erik Heller wasn’t big on the legal.”
Alex said, “I need to let the police do their job. Mister Iowa thinks the Company may still have at least one team moving north tracking Hanna.”
Willow said, “I heard that part over the phone yesterday. I’ve been trying to get into their command and control system, but it’s all encrypted pretty well, so I’m still hoping to get lucky on the decryption, but don’t count on it. The signals are getting reflected off a military satellite, so all I have is some really general info. It looks like they have one team in northern Germany and one team in the Latvia-Estonia area. Or something close. The second team could be on a ship in the Baltic Sea, for all I can tell.”
“That’s really useful, though. Thanks,” Alex said. “Captainmal and jackryanrules coming up with anything?”
“Oh, yeah!” Willow said enthusiastically. “They’re really good. I think they’re kind of frustrated that I can crack their firewalls and they can’t crack mine, but mine is a homebrew, and it’s got my own hacks of the standard packet filter software, and I don’t always need massive throughput so I can do some more intensive filtering and blocking a lot of the time. Plus, they don’t know that they’re using my software for one of the layers in their firewall.”
Alex said, “Big Cheese seems to have gotten some of the top people around for his project. I wonder how he managed it.”
Willow said, “He’s good with people, a lot better than plenty of senior officers, and he has an awesome rep as a spec ops guy. I mean, he’s legendary! More than that. He’s like legen…DARY! And your Mister Iowa? First in his class at West Point and youngest major since the last war. His pal was second in the class right behind him. And your new roomie? Only woman ever first in her class at West Point, which is pretty much impossible when you have to include your physical training scores in there, too. And she’s one of the only women ever to get all the way through Special Forces training, and she didn’t just squeak through, she was numero uno in her training group, which the Defense Department didn’t think was possible before she proved ’em wrong. Big Cheese just keeps rounding up the big guns. Like you.”
Alex said, “We may need that kind of ability if we’ve got to find Hanna and bring her in. We’ll probably have to go after her and she’ll have home field advantage.”
Willow said, “I have no idea what the Company teams are doing, since there isn’t anything in the police reports to go on, and I’ve been looking through everything in the entire Baltic Sea area, and I’m handling the German and Finnish reports myself but I’m running the other reports through a translator, even if the results are kind of wonky. I mean, a computer just doesn’t grok a real language well enough to translate it cleanly. You get weird stuff. The classic urban legend on this is the first Russian-English translation system, supposedly they gave it ‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’, translated it to Russian and then back to English, and got ‘the vodka is good but the meat is rotten’.” Alex managed not to giggle out loud. “That’s probably not true, but it’s one kind of mess-up that you see. So I’ve been scanning the translations, and nothing looks likely. I think they’re wandering around aimlessly hoping for a small miracle, or that someone calls ’em home before they have to justify wasting all this time and money.”
Alex grumbled, “Great. Danielle’s on the loose and has superpowers again. We have no clues on Hanna. The Company still has two teams in the field, and they don’t want to hand the case to the SRI. Anything else yucky?”
Willow didn’t say anything for a few seconds. She finally whispered, “We lost Maggie Walsh?” Alex just clenched her teeth. Willow said, “Captainmal traced her to a private airport outside of Sewell, New Jersey. She was taking these weird hops, probably trying to lose anyone tracking her. But she vanished from there, and we have no idea where she went. Jackryanrules is pretty sure she couldn’t have taken another flight out of there unless she wanted to wait at that little, nothing, private airport without food or a place to stay for about a week and a half before the next flight that went anywhere. So we think someone picked her up in a car and drove her away. We have no idea where.”
Alex said, “Are we checking everything she’s done since Project Galinka?”
Willow said, “Yeah, but the post-doc and second doctorate stuff isn’t on-line except her research papers. She wrote or co-wrote fourteen published papers in a single five-year period, plus three papers she wrote from her doctoral dissertation, which is pretty insane. The people ‘cap’ talked to said one published a year is pretty major, unless you have a slew of grad students so you can make each of them write a paper a year and slap your name on it. And she wrote a ton of papers out of the Desert Research Institute thing.”
Alex asked, “What did she write on?”
Willow said, “Well, the last? Sequencing the genomes of several arachnids and insects, analyzing intron patterns across major taxonomic categories for desert hardiness, studying genetic keys to adaptability to desert climates, like that. We can’t get a ton more than that, because the Institute had a major fire just a little while ago, and their computers are all dead or off-line. ‘rules’ is checking to see if it’s possible Walsh flew in and torched the place to cover her tracks. Meanwhile, the NIH stuff we can look at? Eight papers she wrote or co-wrote on oncogenesis — that’s normal cells turning into cancer and cancer growth and like that — but the real research-y stuff the NIH has all locked down and won’t let us peek at because of some ‘don’t talk to anyone about this’ clauses in the grants. And the Princeton and Yale and later Princeton stuff, we’ve got the research papers, but not the details of the research. Did you know her first thing was an MD-PhD.? She’s crazy smart. Okay, big emphasis on the ‘crazy’ part of it. The Yale stuff is on genome sequencing and parsing, but some of it was apparently off the books for some government research deal. The Princeton stuff, before and after Yale, is pretty much on biochemical control of genome changes. The later papers she published are all on really awesome stuff like maybe modifying your genes to make you less likely to get breast cancer if it’s in your family tree. The Princeton guys don’t seem to know why Walsh wasn’t all up with the pharmaceutical companies on this stuff, because that would make them tons of moolah, too.”
Alex grimaced. “So she’s gone somewhere private. A secret research lab that could pay her what Yale or Princeton could? Who could that be?”
Willow said, “The guys have some ideas on that, and none of them are good. I mean, we’re talking ‘working for KAOS’ kinds of stuff.”
Alex sighed and signed off. Jack was going to be SO happy when she told him all of this stuff.
* * *
She went back to the officers’ club and found Jack just sitting there listening to one of the generals telling a story about some duke getting the back of his uniform pants caught on a helicopter door and nearly getting a helicopter-assisted wedgie when the pilot tried to lift off while the guy was still caught.
She walked up, saluted, and took her position on the correct side of her officer. Jack introduced her around as his genius computer hacker who figured out all about Project Galinka when the CIA itself couldn’t. The generals and colonels all congratulated her on her skills and her hard work, and she just stood there and said ‘thank you, sir’ a bunch.
Jack finally asked, “Lieutenant, you come all the way in here to get a Cosmopolitan? Or did you find out something else I don’t want to hear?”
“The latter, sir,” she said. She kept it like Annie Farrell didn’t get when Jack was teasing. She said, “I found information that the CIA still has two teams out looking for Hanna Heller — or Hanna Zadek if you prefer — but I can’t crack the encryption they have on their C&C, and they’re reflecting off a mil sat, so I just have general locations. Northern Germany and Latvia. Also, some of the Germans in the meeting room this morning leaked intel and already have the Berlin police searching for a sixteen-year-old girl who may have been shot. I haven’t come up with any police reports that look like signs Hanna has been moving, but I’m having to run the Latvian and Estonian and Lithuanian and Polish and Finnish police reports through translators, and computer translators are never as good as humans. Also, I have unfortunate news on the home front, some of which will probably make the international news.”
“Like what?” Jack asked.
“Danielle Atron escaped from prison already. The method she used suggests she got her superpowers back.”
The British general huffily said, “We didn’t hear about Atron wielding superpowers!”
Jack said, “Yeah, we tried to keep it out of the news. She managed to give herself … what was it?”
Alex said, “Lightning blasts, telekinesis, and shapeshifting. Also, according to Terawatt, Atron glowed purple when she got excited.”
Jack suddenly slapped himself on the forehead. “CRAP! If she got her powers back, we need to check everyone else who took that stuff!”
Alex cringed inwardly, but said, “Yes, sir, I’ll get right on it. The other news? Dr. Maggie Walsh, who we identified last night? In the last few weeks, she flew a very roundabout route to a small private airport in New Jersey and has vanished.”
Jack said several really naughty words, including a couple of combination words she’d never even heard before.
Alex moved out to a place she could sit and she emailed Acid Burn and captainmal and jackryanrules. “Need checks on all GC-161 perps in case their powers are coming back, too.”
In a matter of minutes, she got a message back from Jack’s IT guys: CA prison system just didn’t bother to tell us Cready has been begging for more antidote.
Oh, great. So there were more problems going on, and some people just didn’t bother to notify the system, including the people who needed to know the most. Fabulous. So not of the good, as Buffy would say.
Oh, crud. Something horrible occurred to her. She sent another message as fast as she could type. “Check on Macks and R.A.”
Okay, the prison guys probably thought Cready was just a loony, or trying to make people think he was a loony. She really felt sorry for him. She didn’t think she could stand it if she was a flaming blob of fire all the time, and it never stopped burning her skin, and she couldn’t go back to normal, and she wouldn’t be able to eat or sleep or anything. Even if he’d been a bad person before, that was pretty much like being in hell.
Still, it seemed like her problems just kept expanding and multiplying, like one of Maggie Walsh’s cancers. She really wished she could talk to other-Willow and other-Buffy, and maybe even other-Riley, about their world’s Maggie Walsh, because they might have some helpful insights.
It felt like a really long time, but her phone insisted it was only four minutes before Acid Burn was back with another message: “All okay. GM says they weren’t exposed long enough for permanent changes in their DNA so they are fine and they will stay fine.”
Whew. She should have thought about this a long time ago, and she hadn’t. She didn’t want to think about all the bad stuff that could have happened to the people she loved. She couldn’t stop thinking about all the bad stuff that could have happened to them. She needed to be a better superheroine. That was all there was to it.
At dinner in the mess, she filled the team in on the assorted bad stuff she’d learned, plus the stuff she’d discovered while peeking in the private conference rooms. Okay, she didn’t mention the thing with the French female officer and the Belgian intelligence agent doing that stuff on that table, because, well, ick. Everyone else gave their news. Riley was pretty sure the Germans would side with Jack, and Graham said that the Brits were divided down the middle on whether to throw their support Jack’s way, with the military squarely in the ‘support’ camp and the intelligence divisions opposed. Jo said that the Spaniards just weren’t sure, even if the diplomats were saying they would probably support Jack. Then Alex explained about Herr Knepler’s house and how she wanted to go check it out.
Jack nodded. “That’ll work. Go as Terawatt. Get there a little before sunset, so you can look around inside near the front windows without using a light. Then fly back here and land outside the conference building right at eight. I’ve got a list of about ten dorks who can’t wrap their heads around superpowers being real, so I’m gonna challenge all of them, and they’ll give me the ‘put up or shut up’ routine if I play it right. So then Terawatt flies in and does a little demo, and impresses the tar out of ’em. She then flies off into the night, and comes back a little later from a different direction as a puddle so no one knows. In the morning, we call for a vote, get some cooperation, and see if we can figure out where Hanna is hanging out. Maybe she’ll be up for a little cross-country skiing.”
Riley said, “Colonel, I think we have to assume she may be up for a little biathlon. If she was trained by this guy since she was potty-trained, it’s pretty unlikely she can’t use a rifle well.”
Jack said, “Good thing we have a bulletproof superheroine.”
Jo said, “And we may have problems with the CIA’s HK teams. We’ll need to know whether they’ve really been called off.”
Jack grinned at Alex. “Fortunately, with the best hacker on the planet, we can get that intel.”
Alex thought about saying something smart-alecky, but Annie Farrell wouldn’t. She said, “Yes, sir.”
Jack grinned. “As it happens, I already got that gym bag out of the jet and I’ve got it in my quarters, which has an Air Force guard detail on it 24/7. I’ll bring it down to your quarters right after dinner, and Lieutenant Lupo will be on guard duty while you do that voodoo … that you do … so well.” He gave Jo a smirk. “You wanted to see how exciting our job is, so …”
Jo said, “This ought to be a lot more interesting than I expected tonight would be.”
Jack nodded and said, “The real fun will start tomorrow. As soon as I stick our collective necks out, we’ll have to deal with Hanna before anyone can chop them off. And we have yet to find out if Hanna is going to be a rescue, a salvage, or a capture.”
Alex said, “I’d like to play it as a rescue, if we can.”
Riley gently said, “She may not let us. She’ll probably assume we’re just more of the CIA’s teams.”
Jo said, “However, she probably won’t assume Terawatt is.”
Jack said, “If she’s been living in a hut in Finland with no electricity her whole life, she may have no idea what Terawatt is.”
Riley said, “That should work to our advantage. Hanna won’t know what Terawatt can do, and may not even believe in Terawatt’s powers.”
Jack just gave him an eyebrow and said, “Lucy, you got some ’splainin’ to do.”
Riley gave him a little grin and said, “She must have ridden with the British family from Morocco to Spain, because Weigler and her pet psychos wouldn’t have bothered to interrogate and kill them otherwise. So I think we can assume Hanna doesn’t have flight or superspeed or any other sort of transportation power. When she fought auxiliary assets 2 and 3, she used hand-to-hand. We’ve been told that in the Moroccan base she used hand-to-hand and skill with a handgun. That doesn’t sound like she has any sort of ranged attack, like lightning bolts or telekinesis. And Weigler shot her at close range, drawing blood. That doesn’t sound like she has Terawatt’s shapeshifting abilities, either. I think that, based on the evidence we have so far, we’re talking about advanced human characteristics: strength, stamina, quickness, toughness … Lieutenant Lupo could probably take her in a fight.”
Alex thought that was pretty smart of Riley to figure all that out. She just hoped he was right.
Jo looked at Riley and said, “Sir, I’m not sure whether that’s an insult or a compliment.”
He nodded. “To most people, it would be a compliment. To everyone at this table, it might be taken as an insult.”
Jack said, “Let’s get to work. Farrell, you have computer geeks to contact and ask for help on reading police reports. Everyone else, let’s do that chatting thing.”
Alex moved to her quarters, where she could sit on her bed and IM back and forth with Acid Burn and Jack’s IT guys. She let Acid Burn do the fancy bits, so Willow made every one of the computer hackers get a personal email supposedly from the ruler of their country telling them to stop trying to hack Annie Farrell’s computer. They were all forged, naturally, but Willow had to show Alex how to examine the packets in order to tell they were forged. Not that you could tell who really forged them, or anything like that. Willow was way too good for that kind of slip-up.
But Alex was getting kind of concerned. Somebody should have seen Hanna somewhere by now. It had been days since she killed Marissa Weigler. The big Berlin manhunt hadn’t found anything. The checks on local doctors and pharmacies and clinics, whatever the Germans called them, hadn’t turned up anything, either. Alex was really hoping Hanna wasn’t dead in some storm cellar or something equally awful.
The news on Danielle Atron and Maggie Walsh wasn’t any better. The prison authorities had finally given Cready some antidote just about the time his clothes started smoldering. And there was no evidence that Walsh had anything to do with the mess at the Desert Research Institute, but something weird had happened there, and there was a dead body the SRI was trying to get for a proper autopsy, but the local sheriff was being a big pain in the butt, and the state police liked local sheriffs a lot better than pushy, mysterious feds with weird three-letter acronyms.
Five or six years ago, Alex would have absolutely been backing that sheriff. Nicole would have been leading a protest, and Alex would have been waving a sign and being all angry at the ‘big government’ meanies. Now? Maybe she was a big government meanie now. She didn’t think she liked that idea. And she didn’t like the thought that she had changed so much inside her head that she was now wishing that local sheriff would stop being a big jerkhead. She wasn’t at all comfortable with the idea, or the idea that her beliefs might keep changing. And what if they changed to something like Marissa Weigler’s beliefs, or Maggie Walsh’s beliefs? She really didn’t want to end up being one of the supervillains the SRI had to thwart.
A little later, Jack dropped off her gym bag, along with three cheeseburgers. Alex wolfed down the burgers, because she was probably going to miss out on late snacks in the mess hall. About ten minutes later, Jo came in to ‘stand guard’ while Terawatt did her thing. Alex started by using her telekinesis to take the screws out of the screen over their air conditioning duct.
Jo gaped in shock as Alex went silvery, and then puddled into the gym bag. She stayed silvery as she slipped into the ductwork and flew up to the roof, where the HVAC systems were. In various places, she pushed a few filters and fan-blades and a fancy filtration system out of her way, and she slipped out one of the big air intakes. Then she stayed silvery as she puddled across the roof of the building. She flew like that over to the air traffic control tower, and she puddled up the side of the thing to the top of its roof. Then she flew straight up, still silvery, until she flew up into a big cloud bank.
Once she was hidden in the cloud, which was really more like a big fog bank than she had expected, she went normal and used Willow’s GPS program to figure where to go. Willow had a map image and a Google Earth image and an integrated image, so Alex managed to figure out where to head off to. She flew several miles until she thought she was in the right area, and then she went silvery to zoom down to rooftop level. She found a big building with a big roof, and she picked out a spot where she could go normal again without anyone seeing her, unless they were hiding on the roof already.
She used Willow’s GPS app again. She had gone a little on the wrong angle, and a little too far, but she hadn’t gotten herself totally lost. She just had to go silvery and go about a quarter mile east and back toward the base.
She floated down to the level of Herr Knepler’s roof. He had a nice little house that sort of reminded her of a fairy tale cottage. It took her a few minutes of checking the doors and windows and stuff to find the not-quite-closed attic window on the back side of the roof. It looked like someone had climbed up a drainpipe to the roof, forced the window, and gone in that way. There was some long-dried blood on the drainpipe and the roof. A couple of handprints, and some smears. But whoever it was had gone back out and not gotten the window closed all the way. If it was Hanna who had done that, she was one tough girl. Alex wouldn’t have wanted to try to climb a drainpipe to a roof with a bullet hole in her.
Alex used her telekinesis to open the window, and she stayed silvery as she checked out the house. She figured that if Hanna — or somebody else — was still in the house, there wasn’t much Hanna could do to her silvery form. The house looked untouched. Alex didn’t see anything suspicious in the kitchen or the bedroom or the bathroom or the sitting room. Or parlor. Or whatever it was called.
The basement, on the other hand, was chock full of suspicious. There was a basin that had probably been bloody water, but was now dried up. There was a trash can with bloody rags and bloody gauze and bloody stuff. Alex used her telekinesis to lift stuff out piece by piece, because she really didn’t want to touch any of it.
Eww. There was a bloody pair of needle-nosed pliers. There were two bloody sewing needles bent into curves, with some heavy black thread still attached. There was a pair of scissors with a tiny bit of blood where you’d cut a thread. There was no bullet. Alex was guessing that Hanna had stitched herself up and maybe still had a bullet inside her.
And there were blood drips on the floor in several places. Alex took a few pictures of the blood drips, and even found a ruler and put it on the floor next to a couple of the spatter-y drips so maybe someone could study the pictures and figure out something. She sent the pics off to Willow right away, and wished she could send some solid stuff, like the dried blood, because maybe Jack had someone who could analyze it and figure out how many days ago Hanna had left the traces.
But all the blood was dry. The sleeping bag in the corner of the basement had some blood about halfway down on the inside — one big spot and two smaller spots — but that was all dry, too. The canned food that had been left looked like it was several days old.
Alex figured she had better search the house really thoroughly, in case there were hidden rooms or something. But she didn’t find anything like that. She did find a few hidey-holes, like one under the refrigerator that was big enough to hold maybe a small briefcase. And one in the bedroom in the wall behind the bed that was big enough to hold several handguns. But nothing big enough to hold a sixteen-year-old girl.
She ate a protein bar she had tucked in her right glove, and she waited until it was dark. Then she flew back out the attic window, closed it all the way and locked it on the inside with her telekinesis, and flew straight up until she was sure no one would notice her.
It was a lot easier to fly back to the air force base. She could see it from miles away, for one thing. She landed on top of the air traffic control tower, where she could keep an eye on the area where Jack was going to do his little demo. And she checked her Terawatt phone, which told her she still had fifteen minutes to waste.
So she called Hermione on the number ‘Annie Farrell’ had gotten.
“Who is this? Why am I seeing a ‘restricted’ number on this line?” Boy, someone was feeling grouchy.
Alex said in her best Terawatt voice, “The individual using the name Annie Farrell gave me this number, Miss Granger. I am Terawatt. I will be arriving at the air force base where Colonel Jack O’Neill is currently pulling together a group of diplomats who refuse to believe in me. I would appreciate it if you could be there.”
“Am I going to have to clap my hands if I believe?”
Alex managed not to burst into giggles, but she still snorted. “No, Miss Granger. I am going to ask for you as my liaison to the EU intelligence community. It would be helpful if they could see that you are someone they have already met. Please be outside the conference building at eight.”
Alex hung up and hoped that Hermione wasn’t at some hotel five miles away, instead of still being around the conference. Maybe she should have called earlier, or planned this out ahead of time.
After that, she called Riley.
“Finn here.”
“Terawatt. Hanna Heller hid out in Herr Knepler’s house after the shooting. She was shot, but she still climbed a drainpipe and went in through an attic window she had to force. There’s signs that she fished around inside herself with a pair of needle-nosed pliers but didn’t find the bullet.”
Riley groaned. “That’s not good. And she must be really tough, too.”
She added, “And she stitched herself up with a bent sewing needle. Ouch. There’s food eaten there, too. And a sleeping bag with three bloodstains, one big, two small, all about waist height inside it. I’m taking a wild guess, but maybe she got shot in the, umm, abdomen.” Yay for SAT words, anyway. “And maybe she slept there for three nights before she took off. Maybe it took her that long before she felt up to going anywhere.”
Riley said, “That’s a pretty remarkable recuperation, especially if she still has a bullet in her. The abdomen is a bad place to get shot. It’s really, really painful. Even a nick on your kidneys or your intestines, and your condition will slowly degrade as you get an infection and internal bleeding. We need to find her and get her some medical aid.”
Eww. She signed off and floated around a bit, waiting for Jack’s big grandstand play.
A minute or two after eight, a small crowd came out of the main doors of the conference building. Alex figured that was her cue. She flew way up into the air, circled around so she was flying in from the west at about a thousand feet, and then went vertical so it looked like she was standing on air. She held her hands out in front of her and about two feet apart, so she could make really big electrical arcs between her palms, so she’d be mega-visible. Then she flew in at about thirty miles an hour, coming in at an angle so she could land gracefully and walk forward to Jack’s group of disbelievers. It was just too bad she couldn’t have a swirling magic wind about her that would make her hair swirl like in a Revlon ad but then be perfect when she landed.
Ooh. She could do that with telekinesis! It was too bad she hadn’t practiced that in front of a mirror first.
She came down with her right leg slightly raised, which just looked better when she practiced and watched herself in a mirror. She stopped about two feet above the asphalt and floated forward toward the nervously-looking crowd. Well, a dozen nervous-looking diplomats and intelligence officers and military types, and one smirky American.
She made sure she was in Terawatt mode as she said, “Colonel O’Neill? Your people contacted me and said I was needed for a super-powered problem? I hope this is serious, as I have two problems and two investigations going on back in the States at this very moment.”
Jack strode forward like he dealt with super-powered stuff every day. Oh, wait, come to think of it, he pretty much did. He grinned. “Terawatt? We have a super-powered teenager avoiding pursuit between here and Finland. We need to track her down first, and intervene second. And before we can track her down, we need to convince these gentlemen that superpowers are real, and that approaches that work for ordinary criminals are not going to go over well this time.”
She drifted forward until she was within a couple feet of the group. And she floated downward some, so she was only a couple inches off the ground. Maybe these guys would be looking at her face — or more likely, her boobs — and never notice she wasn’t standing flat-footed on the asphalt. That would be good. If they reported that Terawatt was a busty, 6'3" blonde, no one was going to connect her with little Annie Farrell.
Okay, sometimes Alex wished she was a busty supermodel blonde with amazingly long legs and perfect features. But she also knew just how much work went into looking that good all the time, and it was way more than guys realized. Libby spent so much money on clothes and accessories, and she spent so much time on her hair and her makeup, and she had to fix her hair or her makeup half a dozen times a day, even when she was inside a school building. And ‘being popular’ was a lot of work. Way more work than guys realized. For guys, ‘being popular’ meant being a sports star, or clowning around, or doing fun stuff with pals. For girls it was way more complicated, and way more work, and involved way more concentration on clothes and fashion and everything, because girls noticed that stuff. If a guy wore the same jeans and sneakers to school six or seven days in a row, none of the other guys noticed, much less cared. If a girl wore the same jeans and sneakers to school three days in a row, other girls wondered if she needed to do laundry. And heaven forbid you should wear the same top twice in a row, even if you really liked it. Then there was the whole thing with being friends with the ‘right’ people and not hanging with the ‘wrong’ people and dating the right boys. Her sister Annie wasn’t good on all the rules, so she had depended on Alex’s advice sometimes for dates and stuff like that, but she just didn’t want to spend the time and effort to be in the popular crowd. Alex was pretty sure from what Annie told her that wasn’t a problem at M.I.T., and Annie had lots of friends who felt the same way, even if the guys Annie had dated there sounded like they were really nerdy.
Alex was kind of surprised that what most of the big, important people there wanted to do was … shake her hand and tell her it was an honor to meet her. Weird. And no one said, “It’s a trick!” But maybe that was because they could see her and talk to her and shake her hand and see that she wasn’t a hologram or hanging from wires or anything like that.
She said, “We all know that there are going to be more and more super-powered problems in the coming years, so I would like all of us to work together as a team to help each other. I may be American, but I am not solely here to help Americans. I’m here to help everyone. If our super-powered girl wants to be a hero, I want to help her. If she wants to be a villain, I want to stop her. So perhaps I could circumvent Colonel O’Neill and have a liaison to the EU intelligence and police communities? That way, you could always contact me directly, anytime you had a superpower crisis. Colonel O’Neill is quite good at what he does, but you will always view him as being American military first.”
Jack pretended to scowl, which the diplomats liked seeing. One of them said, “But how would we find a liaison this quickly?”
She said, “I have already chosen one. Her name is Hermione Granger, and she is a data analyst for MI-6, and my sources tell me that she gave a very intelligent presentation in your meetings today. If you want someone else at a later date, I would appreciate it if she was kept on as part of the liaison committee.”
“Is Miss Granger here now?” someone asked in accented English.
“I-I am right here,” Hermione said, stepping forward. “I really didn’t think that … Good Lord. I am merely a low-level data analyst.”
Alex said, “Data analysts are what I need. They’re what we all need. If we are going to work together to protect people, we need data input, and data analysis, and information flow. We don’t really want diplomatic crises or people arguing about whose personal territory we might step on.”
Jack deliberately played ‘bad cop’. “That may be, but we were expecting you to go through American channels. And Miss Granger is … what? Eighteen?”
“I’m twenty-one,” Hermione said grumpily.
But Jack opposing Terawatt’s plan was all that it took for all the Europeans to band together and support it. They had probably been looking for a way to spit in his eye after his big stunt in the meeting that afternoon, and so Jack was working the room yet again. Most of them might never know that they were doing exactly what he wanted.
Okay, Hermione looked like she had already worked it out.
Alex said, “I know the German police are extremely competent, so they will find Hanna if she is in the area. So I am moving north toward the Baltic Sea, in an attempt to locate her before she has to defend herself and injures herself or others.” She turned her head and said, “Miss Granger? My people have already come up with your private and work numbers, as well as your private and work email addresses. You will hear from me shortly.” Alex lifted twenty feet into the air and said, “Good evening, and thank you for listening to me.”
Then she turned so she was lying on her stomach with her hands pointing forward, and she jetted northward at her top speed. Since she didn’t go very high up, she was lost to their sight as soon as she disappeared over the closest buildings.