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Chapter 85 – Gotham NightsHanna struggled against the vines. The ones at her wrists and waist were squeezing much harder, but they did not seem to have the purpose they’d had seconds ago. She kicked the one near her ankle, and it flew over her head. So she rolled onto her shoulders and used her feet to fling the vine near her throat far away.
It landed right in the giant’s face as he rose to his feet, and promptly tried to strangle him. With a roar, he tore it in half.
Alex dropped down on the three vines writhing toward the patrons, and put a massive shock through each of them. Then she leapt into the air again and headed at Hanna. The big guy was handling his vines just fine.
Alex dropped to her knees and used both hands to grab the vine that had an end around Hanna’s left wrist. She ran a nasty current from one hand to the next, and the vine seized up.
Mister Muscle started to pick up the whole planter, obviously planning on dropping it on Hanna while she couldn’t defend herself, so Alex hit the big jerk with another lightning bolt. Mister Muscle yelled in pain and fell backward, with the planter still in his hands. He hit the tile floor pretty hard. The planter broke when it landed across his stomach.
Just in case that still didn’t stop him, Alex grabbed his ankles, one in each hand, and sent a bigger jolt right through him.
Hanna reacted instantly. She slid her left wrist out of the dead vine’s coil and rolled to put her weight on the vine hanging onto her right wrist. Then she twisted the vine in a move that would have broken a man’s wrist.
The vine didn’t like it, but it wasn’t damaged.
She reached over and yanked the combat knife out of the scabbard strapped to her right ankle, and then she gave the vine a long, diagonal slash.
It really didn’t like that. It uncoiled from her wrist and retreated toward the podium. Hanna looked, and maybe twenty vines that Alex hadn’t electrocuted were frantically writhing over to the podium, where they were either protecting the green woman, or else seeking her protection. Hanna couldn’t tell which.
* * *
Batman had found two more armed minions guarding the loading dock exits, and dispatched them with boomerangs before they even knew he had spotted them. The invisible boy had apparently come along, keeping quiet when he needed to. And having an invisible guard watching his back was surprisingly useful.
The boy finally whispered, “I think that’s all of them.”
Batman growled, “You can’t be sure of that.”
The boy said, “Nope, but I did look down some hallways you haven’t got to yet. By the way, I’m Klar. You’re the Batman, right?”
“Now is hardly the time for introductions.”
The boy sounded like he was shrugging. “Okay, if you want to be that way. I’m gonna go back and make sure my friends are okay. If you want to make a fast disappearance while no one’s looking, now’s the time.”
Batman listened as the footsteps raced off down the hall and around the corner. He didn’t like the fact that the boy had been confident it was time for a quick vanishing act. He moved across the loading dock and into the shadows. He scattered a handful of powder behind him to make sure no one was tracking him, not even invisible supposedly-helpful boys.
* * *
When the SWAT team and the four uniformed officers came charging up the steps, Sam swung the doors open. “Come on in, boys. I could use some help.”
“McCloud!” one of them groaned. “We should’ve known.”
Sam smiled. “This time, it wasn’t me.” He held his badly-bandaged hand up for everyone to see. “And I could use a few stitches.”
* * *
Alex had all the vines and pod-plants herded into a pile around Poison Ivy, and she was floating a few yards in the air where she could hurl a lightning bolt at anything that tried to scurry away.
“Excuse me! Terawatt? I’m Chris Coughlin …”
Alex insisted, “Excuse me, but these plants are all still alive, and still dangerous. I really need you to move back with the other patrons, and not distract me.”
But the redhead insisted, “I’m a writer for one of the local papers, and I would really love an interview with you.”
Alex called out, “Action Girl!” Hanna came trotting over. “Ms. Coughlin is a member of the press. Please take her over where it’s safe, and get a business card from her.”
Hanna carefully went with one of her American accents. This time, she sounded like she was from Boston. “The police are here. I don’t know what they think they’re going to do with handcuffs. Nothing they have is going to go around the giant’s wrists.”
Alex didn’t say anything, but she was figuring it would take the SRI to confine someone as dangerous as the big guy, unless he needed regular doses of whatever biochemicals he was on. As for Poison Ivy, she would be a major problem if this version of ‘Pammie’ was anything close to as dangerous as other-Selina’s version. And this Pammie would probably not want to go shoe shopping with Alex and Hanna.
Alex had no idea what to do about the vines, either. They were alive. Not just plant-alive, but ‘creepy attacking tentacles’ alive. How in the world had Poison Ivy managed that?
* * *
Bruce strolled over to where the young woman was trying to talk Chris Coughlin into not making a nuisance of herself. He’d known Chris long enough to know that wasn’t going to happen.
Chris looked over in his direction, and her eyes dived down to the nearly empty champagne bottle in his right hand. He took a swig and put a little slur in his voice as he asked her, “Hey, Chrissie, y’want a swallow?” He knew she’d say no, so he wasn’t worried about her finding out that he had emptied the champagne and replaced the contents with part of a bottle of 7-up.
She sighed as she looked at him. “Bruce, maybe after you talk to the police, you could get your ‘date’ to take you home. You look like you could use some sleep.”
He waved his arms exorbitantly. “But the night is young! And the whole party got ruined. I didn’t even get to welcome everybody to the new wing, and I had a speech an’ everything. Even if the green babe in the leaf bathing suit looked ready for action.”
Julie stepped over and took his empty hand. “Bruce, there’s a nice detective who’d like to talk to us about what happened. Maybe we could go do that now, and they’d let us go sooner.”
“Oh, good idea, Jule! Anything you say.” He let Julie lead him over to where Chief of Detectives Peter B. Clifford was standing irritably. The man was probably regretting switching from cigars to nicotine patches right about now.
Bruce knew about Terawatt, but Klar and Action Girl weren’t regular features in the news. And Action Girl was a little too fluent with accents. He suspected the accent he had heard when she burst through the window was her real accent, which would make her Scandinavian. And Klar might have a German codename, but his voice was very clearly Middle America, probably Illinois but well outside of Chicago. Based on superpower-related news reports this year, he was going to peg Klar as coming from the Bloomington-Normal area of Illinois. Was Terawatt putting together her own power base? That could be good. Or extremely bad. It all depended on what the woman was up to.
He turned away from that puzzle to deal with the police. “Chief Clifford! Great to see you again! Would you like some champagne?” He finished off the bottle before Julie could take it away from him.
It looked like Peter Clifford was about two incidents away from developing a facial tic from stress.
“Terawatt! I’m Sergeant Joe Broadhurst. I can see you’re still keeping threats under control, but can I get a quick statement from you while you’re here?”
Alex played along for the sergeant’s sake. “I’d be happy to cooperate with the NYPD. The DHS asked me to fly here on official business, because they were following reports of a possible super-powered problem. When the 911 calls came, I was asked to fly in and check it out. I was really not expecting to find three different super-powered individuals engaged in a battle, with several more threats lurking around the room and another half-dozen heavily-armed minions posted at the exits.”
She then went on with details about the battle, the big guy — who had apparently identified himself as ‘Bane’ before she got there — and Poison Ivy, and Action Girl’s big entrance, which was probably going to be on the front page of the New York papers tomorrow, since there were several videographers present for the museum party.
She knew he wasn’t doing the ‘we do everything we can to help you’ thing that Dave Watt and the other Paradise Valley policemen did for her all the time, but she also knew from stuff she’d seen, like in Bloomington, that he was cutting her a lot more slack than a policeman at a major crime scene in a really ritzy spot ought to.
And that was a good thing, because she spotted when the police let Bruce Paine and his bimbo date leave the museum. Bruce looked like he was going to pass out drunk in about ten minutes, but she figured this was all part of the stuff other-Selina had talked about. On the other hand, Alex wasn’t sure Bruce would go out patrolling after this mess. For all she knew, he had some major bruises and stuff from fighting Bane — and was that a dorky name or what — so Bruce might not even patrol for a couple of nights.
What a pain in the neck. If they lost him right now and he did go out patrolling, it would be a mega-pain. Still, she had to stay there and play ‘wholesome, law-abiding superheroine’ because there were tons of witnesses and a few guys with video cameras. And the police would be really grouchy if she didn’t, and New York City policemen seemed to have this whole ‘oh yeah, ho hum, I saw stuff like this before’ attitude going on. This would probably really stink if she didn’t have an SRI ‘cooperator’ taking her statement and being nice to her.
And she really did need to stick around, because these policemen had no chance of controlling Bane when he woke up, unless they just shot him full of holes with every gun they had. She just hoped that Sergeant Scott would show up soon with some SRI backup and maybe some security cells that could hold someone like Bane.
And if this Poison Ivy had all the powers that other-Selina had mentioned, every guy in this room might be vulnerable. That would be mega-bad. Especially if Poison Ivy could just use her biochemical powers on them and then yell, “Everybody shoot Terawatt and Action Girl!”
At least she was pretty sure Grover had managed to sneak out without any trouble.
* * *
Grover hoped that Alex and Hanna were having it easier than him. He was hanging onto the trunk of Bruce’s limo by his fingertips. Pretty much literally. He had a pretty weak grip with both hands at the front side of the trunk where it snugged down against the rear window, and this thing was well made, so there wasn’t a handhold. He couldn’t get his feet down to the rear bumper for any support, either.
At least they didn’t know he was there. He had his earjack down in his boot, so it wasn’t visible from inside the limo. He had his invisible rope rolled up and shoved in his one pants pocket. At least he wasn’t freezing his butt off lying naked on a metal trunk while a car drove through Manhattan at thirty miles an hour. Or at zero miles an hour, because even at this time of night, traffic was brutal. He had no idea how people put up with it if they lived here all the time.
He was hoping Bruce was going to go home, ditch the girl, and do his Batman thing, so Grover could call in the big guns: Terawatt and Action Girl. Hanna had been teaching him and Cindy self-defense, and Hanna pretty much made the colonel’s crack troops look like wimps. Except Major Finn and Captain Miller and Sergeant Scott. Scott was just a bull, and always just let Hanna pound on him while he patiently worked to get her in an MCMAP-approved hold or armbar. Miller was damn good, too. But Finn was the champ. Hanna might be stronger and faster than Riley, but Riley was really skilled in martial arts, including a bunch that weren’t part of the official armed forces training. Grover was pretty sure Lieutenant Lupo would be pretty impressive against Hanna, too, but she had that whole broken leg thing until Janet gave her the all clear.
Grover decided he would pay money to see the Batman fight Riley. That would be awesome. Or Riley vs. that Bane goon. Okay, Bane against Hanna had been incredible. He just wished he’d been able to watch a lot more of it, instead of having to do his job. And he wished Janet wouldn’t be too mad at Hanna — and Jack, too — when Hanna came home with a black eye and a goose egg on her jaw. And a hundred other bruises.
Rats, Bruce was taking Julie to some fancy nightclub first. Was there any point in sneaking in to keep an eye on Bruce? Bruce did know that there was an invisible guy loose in the area. Would he try something sneaky, like ditching the limo and going out a back door to hail a cab and head off to patrolling? But if he did that, wouldn’t Julie realize something weird was going on?
But if Grover tried to follow Bruce into a really crowded nightclub, it might be pretty much impossible not to be discovered as soon as someone bumped into him. He decided to stay with the limo, but if it stopped anywhere and Alfred got out, Grover was going to slide off the trunk and move to a safe spot, because he did not want an ex-SIS agent hunting him down, invisibility or no.
* * *
Alex waited, doing her best to look patient when she really wasn’t. All the museum patrons were gone. The security guards were all off to the hospital. The police had arrested Bane’s minions. She’d had to fly over and zap Bane two more times. And still no one had any way to contain Bane or Poison Ivy or the vines. It wasn’t like you could just handcuff a woman who could spray anyone with poisonous yellow stuff. Some smart guy had some heavy chain and some padlocks, and he’d used that for handcuffs and leg-cuffs for Bane. Alex thought the leg-cuffs were a really good idea, considering Bane could probably drop-kick a policeman over a squad car.
Riley and Sergeant Scott finally arrived with an SRI security truck and half a dozen heavily armed soldiers. Bane went into one of the heavy security cells in the truck. Sergeant Scott had a big fishing net with a really tiny mesh that Alex could telekinetically scoop all the vines into, so they could haul all the vines out and shove them into one of the other cells. And Alex warned Riley about all the stuff the other Poison Ivy might be able to do.
Riley nodded. “Right, we’ve got CBW gear in the truck, and an airtight cell with a private air circulation system, so we can handle her.”
It was probably a bad thing that Alex spent so much time doing SRI stuff that she knew CBW meant Chemical and Biological Warfare.
Riley added, “We’ve got bunny suits and even several MOPP-4 rigs.”
Okay, she had no idea what that meant. She was pretty sure ‘bunny suits’ meant full-body suits, maybe with airtanks so they’d sort of be like astronaut suits without the helmets, but she had no idea on the other thing. But she wasn’t going to ask when there were police and reporters listening in, because she didn’t want to look stupid. And what was she going to do if she asked, “What’s a MOP 4?” and somebody said “To clean floors, dummy!”
Once she was sure ‘Pammie’ and her vines were properly locked up, she flew over to Chief Clifford, who was looking extra grouchy. No wonder McCloud and that nice Sergeant Broadhurst got yelled at a lot.
She hovered a few feet in the air and gave him her best Terawatt tones. “Chief, I wanted to thank you for your assistance and cooperation.”
He grimaced. “Well … Thanks for not letting Marshal McCloud get himself killed in front of his girlfriend. And thanks for protecting two hundred people who could have my badge in an hour if they wanted to apply pressure. I don’t suppose you can tell me what’s really going on around here?”
She fibbed, “I don’t really know. I’m here on a personal request from the Department of Homeland Security to help investigate reports of super-powered activity. But I have no idea why two new supervillains just happened to turn up the first night I’m here.”
He grumbled, “It’s probably the Batman. McCloud spotted the clues, but the commissioner didn’t want to believe it. If he hadn’t turned up, Bruce Paine and the Westons and the other museum directors would probably have been in real trouble.”
She said, “If there’s anything I can do to help while I’m here in town, please contact Major Finn and have his people call me.”
He growled, “Just don’t break anything. And if you can get that Bat to leave my city alone, I’d appreciate it.”
She lifted off into the air like she was heading for the top of the Empire State Building, but she was really headed for the top of the Paine Foundation Building.
* * *
Bruce carried Julie into the master bedroom of the penthouse. She was out cold, after Alfred drugged her drink. He needed to find the criminal element connected to the call-girl ring, deal with it, and find a way to help Julie, and he needed to do it soon.
He had previously downloaded the data from the chip in Julie’s phone, and his computers were still working on decrypting it. So he had to put the call-girl ring off for another night. But he couldn’t sleep. So he slipped on his uniform and silently slid open the door onto the penthouse patio.
Just as he was pointing his grapple gun at a nearby rooftop, a voice called out from above his head, “Hello, there, Bruce. Is there a costume party you forgot to tell your date about?”
It was Terawatt, without any question. She was just floating in the air, like she was lying on her side on an invisible mattress. And she sounded so smug. He growled, “I would prefer it if you didn’t tell Mister Paine I just committed breaking and entering. I’m trying to break a criminal hold on this girl’s call-girl ring, and I needed to read the data off her cell phone as a start.”
She said sarcastically, “Oh, yeah, I believe that one. Absolutely. You should know that my support people have you on film, changing from Bruce Paine to Batman in the back of your limo, and then switching back afterward. Not to mention that Klar saw you. Isn’t that limo pretty cramped for clothing switches? Speaking as one secret identity to another.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. If Bruce Paine was trying to impress the girl by pretending to be me, he’s playing a very dangerous game.”
She just smiled knowingly. “You should definitely work on your cover stories. Multiple layers, if you can work it. And I know you don’t have any reason to trust me. Yet. So tell me what you know about me.”
He refrained from giving anything else away. “Terawatt. First seen roughly a year ago in Paradise Valley, California. Believed to be a hoax at first, then as news about the supervillains you fought became more mainstream, your powers became more … believable. Danielle Atron seems to be your arch-enemy, and it’s possible your powers are connected to the GC-161 scandal that nearly ruined Paradise Valley Chemical. You were first photographed by A.L. Mack, and you used the situation to your advantage by putting your name out there, and giving the newshounds a sound bite. A.L. Mack also has connections to the chemical plant, but most of the town does in one way or another, so that’s not enough to prove causality. You have expanded your field of influence over the last several months, moving from just one city up to worldwide operations, probably in conjunction with the SRI, which is a black ops group under the DHS. You now have other supers on your team, although whether this is good or bad is still up for debate. I saw Action Girl and Klar. I have to wonder about your supposed connection to the Toxic Avenger of Tromaville, as well as a few other cases.”
She just said, “I stopped the man in Tromaville. That’s all, so far. But I’m going to wait and see what the legal system has to say about him. He does make super-powered vigilantes look extremely bad, you know.” Then she asked, “And what did you find out about photographer A.L. Mack?”
“You seem to know a lot about my activities and my behavior,” he pointed out.
She gave him a look. “When you’re ready to be honest with me, you’ll get full disclosure. But yes, I have a source on you that you’ll be really unhappy about.”
He went back to her question. “A.L. Mack is Alexandra Louise Mack AKA Alex Mack, a high school girl. Good grades, but nothing like her older sister Anne Barbara Mack. High participation in school activities, according to her files. Several years of experience with photography before catching you. Stood up to a bully and indirectly led to said bully being expelled from school, then stood up to the bully again just a few months ago and got the bully arrested, and finally that bully nearly wrecked the school when she became Azure Crush. Alex Mack is signed up for all AP courses in the fall, and is apparently looking at photojournalism majors in colleges. She may also be up for a Pulitzer.”
Terawatt smiled broadly. “You are good. Now then, I know who you are —”
“You think you know who I am, but you’re mistaken.”
Terawatt continued, “— and I’d like you to be someone I can count on, just like I want you to know you can count on me. So what can I do to convince you to trust me?”
He cautiously asked, “Why do you need me to trust you?”
She insisted, “So I can tell you my secret identity. So I can help you with computer support. So we can have a superhero team when one of us needs help.”
“I don’t need any help in my own city,” he growled menacingly.
She just gave him another smile. “So says the man who nearly died tonight. Bane would have crushed you, if Poison Ivy didn’t chemically enslave you.”
She was really getting on his nerves.
“And how do you know so much about Poison Ivy?” he asked suspiciously.
She smiled smugly again. “My secret source, which you won’t believe, and then if you ever do believe it, you’ll really hate it.”
Suddenly he felt tugs around his throat and at the sides of his head, and the concealed fasteners that kept his cowl from being removed simply … unfastened. His cowl was already off his face before he could grab it.
She said, “Okay, I know that wasn’t nice, but think about it. What else could I wield with my telekinesis?” He felt one of his batarangs lifting out of its compartment. It flew over to stop ten feet in front of Terawatt. She pointed at the batarang and said, “I am … Terawatt. This is my town, and any supercriminals who come here will have to face me.”
Of course. He had wondered, but Alex Mack seemed so young. And it seemed impossible that someone like Danielle Atron could overlook someone who would be right under her nose, since Alex was a daughter of Atron’s head researcher.
She waved her hand. The batarang flew back to his belt and his cowl flew back onto his head. Terawatt’s mask and lipstick and eyeshadow and wig all peeled off, revealing a face he had seen when she was interviewed on the Today Show. Terawatt was Alex Mack in a wig and falsies.
Unless Terawatt also had shapeshifting or illusion-casting abilities. He needed to consider a lot more options, now that he was dealing with superpowers.
He checked, “So you’re flying around the world fighting monsters and super-criminals, and you’re only seventeen?”
She pouted. “Hey, I’ll be eighteen in a couple days!”
All right, now he believed she was really a teenager.
She said, “You’ve been thinking about fighting crime since you were nine or ten. I’ve been coping with these powers, and weird side effects, and having Atron’s people hunting me down, since I was thirteen. In some ways, we’re very much alike. We both grew up in loving families —”
“My parents were MURDERED,” he snapped.
She huffed, “I was getting to that. My parents were kidnapped by Danielle Atron, locked in a room with a time bomb, and left to die. While I was trapped and forced to watch. It was the worst moment of my life. But I chose not to do this alone, so I had friends who helped me, so I was able to rescue my mom and dad at the very last second. And I wasn’t as secretive as I thought, so the one outsider who knew my secret identity that I didn’t know about was the one who got the police and the FDA and the National Guard in to help, just in time to capture Danielle and her sidekick Lars. I was lucky. I very nearly lost my parents, too, so I think I have a halfway decent idea what you went through.”
She glanced at her mask. The ‘lipstick’ leapt back onto her lips. The ‘black eyeshadow’ leapt back onto her eyes. The mask leapt back onto her face. The wig leapt back onto her head. He realized the removable eye-black would be a very handy addition to his mask.
But he would have to ask her for it. He would have to ask her for it, and then he would owe her something.
She pushed, “So let me help you out.”
“How? By flying around in a bright white leotard that people can see from a mile away?” he growled.
She morphed into a silvery blob, which was probably even worse for hiding in the shadows. The silver looked like it had an albedo as high as a mirror. She spoke while she was still in ‘morph’ form. “Give me a copy of the encrypted data. I have access to the fourth best decryption system on the planet.”
He thought out loud, “So you have access to … not the NSA or the CIA or … let me think … fourth … The SIS decryption computers in London.”
She gave him that smug smile again. “You know, maybe I should call it the second best.”
He made an induction and said, “You have a private computer specialist with a massively parallel computing set-up.”
She nodded. “Yep. She goes by the nickname Acid Burn when she’s working for me. If you’re a good boy, I’ll introduce you. Come to think of it, she might be a really good ‘date’ when you want to go with the womanizing jerk routine and you want to duck out early for bat-stuff. For several reasons.”
He had an extremely powerful computer of his own, but his decryption algorithms weren’t state of the art because PaineTech hadn’t needed anything like that. Yet. He thought about Julie, and he decided this would make a useful test. He said, “I can transmit a copy of the block of data right now.”
She gave him an email address that she said was a dead drop used by the Superpowers Research Initiative. He had found rumors about the SRI, but nothing solid … and here was someone who clearly had useful links to them. That didn’t make him trust her more. In fact, it made him trust her less. But she had to know how suspicious he would be of a black ops group, so she had to know that, too. Did that make it a double bluff or a con game?
He pulled out his communicator and used several codewords to get Alfred to make the transfer.
She pulled a phone out of her glove and pressed a speed-dial number. Then she flipped it to speakerphone. Wherever the call was being re-routed to, it took long enough to bounce the signal off half a dozen communications satellites.
A heavily AutoTuned and apparently female voice gave a chipper greeting. “Hi, Tera! Having any luck with Mister Paine?”
Terawatt coolly said, “He’s right here. Would you like to say hello?”
“Oh, hi, Mister Paine! I really love Paine Electronics’ latest PE-2080k high-end PROM burners. They’re way more convenient and more adaptable than the competition’s. Whoever you’ve got on the design group deserves a big raise!”
“Burn, he just tossed a file onto Jack’s dead drop. Go grab a copy and decrypt the code chunk he’s got there.”
‘Acid Burn’ asked, “Umm, Mister Paine, what’s the data source, and what’s the encryption program, and what’s the data supposed to look like?”
He explained, “It’s off an SD card in a late-model Samsung cellphone, and the data should decrypt into names and phone numbers and personal data. I don’t know all the encryption programs available for the Samsung Galaxy line.” Although he really should. He resolved to address that deficit as soon as possible.
Acid Burn merrily chirped — yes, even through the AutoTune it was definitely a merry chirp — at him, “Hey! You’re in luck! Samsung’s chip engineers made a bad choice on primes for their algorithm, so instead of having two to the 24 different possible encodings, they really only have two to the 17, and that’s pretty fast to crack especially if you know what you’re looking for, and ooh, this is a nice, small file, so let me get this cued up and launched, and … there we go. So if we use the information you just gave me, we ought to have this in no time.”
He growled, “And what constitutes ‘in no time’ here?”
She said, “Here’s a hint!” And she started humming the ‘Jeopardy’ theme song.
Surely she couldn’t mean that this was going to take seconds, instead of days. That would be ridiculous. But she had known about the weakness in the Samsung encryption algorithm, and she had known the stats off the top of her head. She had to know how fast her parallel processing system was.
In fact, it took her under two minutes. That made him want to grind his teeth until he cracked a molar. He had already been working on this problem, and she had crushed his computing power like he was running code on an old IBM XT.
She piped up, “All done! I’m sending it back to the addy you used to fire it off to Jack’s dropbox.”
“That shouldn’t be exposed,” he fumed.
She beamed, “Oh, it isn’t, but I can read all the packets, so I can see the chain of routers you really used along with the ones you spoofed, so I can chuck it back into the ‘thomas2’ mail server at your foundation, and I can peek inside your firewall even if you don’t want anyone to, so I’m looking at the logs for your internal mail server, and I can just fire it off to the address of the last outgoing personal mail that used SMTP and MIME, and there you go! Instant return address. And it’s for your butler Alfred, if that username means anything. But don’t worry, I won’t tell Jack if you don’t want me to. But you really should want me to, because Jack’s really awfully trustworthy for a military type.”
He clenched his teeth again. There was no way she should have been able to stroll through Paine Foundation firewalls like that. He was going to have to talk to Lucius about strengthening their network security. A lot.
Terawatt casually explained, “She means Colonel Jack O’Neill, supposedly head of the HWAAA group in the DHS but really head of the SRI. I trust him, too, although I really didn’t until I went on an op with him and his Team One and found out what kind of people they really are. Klar said you found him, and he followed you around a bit. Well, Jack and his team rescued Klar and stopped the badguys, and then found a way to help Klar out even though he can’t stop being invisible.”
“By making Klar their personal invisible agent,” he growled.
With a smirk in her tone, Acid Burn answered, “Nope, but thanks for playing our game! Jack made sure Klar has a home, and Klar’s mom and girlfriend are really happy, too, and his GF is really a sweetie, even if the cheerleaders sure weren’t nice to me when I was a high schooler. And … hey, is this supposed to be a call-girl’s private address book? Because some of the ‘private data’ is preferred sex activities and preferred sexy costumes. Wow, I never thought of ‘naughty nun’ or ‘hot domina’, I don’t think my boyfriend would go for those, and this one guy likes his hookers to dress him up like a baby girl and spank him and stuff? Kink-ky! These guys are really big names in New York society or business or both, so this would be really bad if it got out, so you’re not going to use this for badness, are you?”
“Does she breathe?” he asked caustically.
Acid Burn complained, “I don’t know why everyone says that, because of course I breathe, and it’s not like I even have any superpowers, I’m just good with computers.”
He asked, “Which of the customers aren’t high society or important city businessmen?”
“Okay, running a quick database join, and … you got your pick of Falcones. Carmine Falcone, Mario Falcone, and Sofia Falcone. Isn’t Sofia a girl’s name?”
He said, “She is a girl. She’s Carmine’s only daughter. Mario is one of his sons.”
Acid Burn fussed, “Ooh, that’s a little too icky for my tastes. Not the lesbianism, which I’m totally of the okay with, but the whole incestuous ‘Deliverance vibe’ thing there. And the stuff she likes to do to the girls is pretty … hardcore sadist.”
Terawatt asked, “Burn, can we keep the TMI to a minimum?”
“Sorry.”
He said, “So it looks like I need to drive out and pay Carmine a little visit. He won’t like that. And he tends to try and discourage unexpected guests.”
Terawatt flipped to a vertical stance. “Great! Can I go, too?”