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Chapter 105 – White HouseJack looked at her and said, “Look, Tera, the country needs this a lot more than you do. If they don’t want to let you through, you can just fly home. Tough beans for the entire United States. I mean, just ask the city of Santa Monica if they’d be happy you got stiffed by these yahoos. Or Paradise Valley, California. Or Tromaville, New Jersey. Or Bloomington, Illinois. Or half of Pennsylvania. Or the entire American Southwest.”
Alex could tell it was Jack’s ‘good cop, bad cop’ bit. He was really good at it, even when you’d seen it before.
General Hammond sternly growled at the agents, “It appears we’re at an impasse. I suggest you get your director on the phone immediately, because if you can’t get this resolved in the next half hour, you three are probably going to be taking the fall for this screw-up, and you’ll be out of a job by tomorrow afternoon.”
Alex decided to play ‘good cop’ since Jack was setting it up for her. “General, given that someone just tried impersonating me in the middle of Andrews Air Force Base, I think it’s important to let these people do their jobs. If they can’t pass me through, then they can’t. They can explain to the senators and the press what went wrong. I’m sure people will understand that they have to do their jobs.” She turned to the Secret Service people and said, “My secret identity is far more important than getting this deputization. I can’t cooperate with your guidelines. Perhaps we can make this work next year. Or under the next President.”
Jack said sarcastically, “Yeah, I figure as soon as you’re not around to save Teaneck, New Jersey or Lizard Lick, North Carolina, this President’s gonna get impeached. And convicted. So it probably won’t be that long.”
Black-haired Guy stiffly stated, “I can call the director’s office, but the director’s not in on a Sunday.”
“Of course not,” General Hammond growled. He pulled out his own phone and pressed a speed-dial button. “Davis? Get me the director of the Secret Service. Home number. ASAP. If you can’t get ’em, get me the President and tell him he’s about to look very bad in front of the whole world because his people won’t let Terawatt into the White house.” He waited impatiently.
None of the Secret Service agents was breaking a sweat. Alex figured if they were ready to get shot and killed to protect the President, they weren’t too worried about getting yelled at and maybe fired for doing what they were sure was their job.
“General George Hammond here,” the general snapped into the phone. “Your directive to keep Terawatt out of the White House without proper ID is about to cause a national crisis.” He listened for a few seconds and then nodded. “Then you’d better contact your staff at once, because your office is about to create a disaster for the Commander-in-Chief, and I think we know whose head will be rolling tomorrow morning.”
He hung up and said to the Secret Service agents, “That directive you got? It’s an electronic forgery. Your director’s going to be calling you or your immediate supervisor in the next few seconds. And then this coming week, your agency’s computer security is going to be under the scrutiny of a DHS audit team, the GAO, and both houses of Congress.”
Only seconds later, each of the three agents put his or her hand to their earpiece and listened intently. Blonde Guy put his wrist to his mouth and murmured into his supposedly-hidden mike, “Are you sure?”
He listened a few more seconds and then told General Hammond, “Sorry, sir, but it appears we’ve been hacked. The director did not issue that memo, even if the verification system assured us it was legit, so our security system on our internal net appears to have been compromised.”
Jack whipped out his phone, and hit a speed-dial button. “It’s me. Yeah, I’m at the White House. No, I haven’t created an international incident, yet, but someone hacked the Secret Service internal net and issued a memo under the director’s authorization to block Terawatt. Either that, or it was to make sure a fake Terawatt got through the screening process, so I need you on this now. And no, I’m not going to say that, because I’m standing in front of the general, Finn, Terawatt, three Secret Service agents, and a bunch of guys with guns.”
Alex knew he’d just called Willow. She asked, “Speed dial number one?”
Jack smiled. “Absolutely. Number one with a bullet.”
Alex tried not to smile too much, but Jack and Willow were really a cute couple. For a couple that had an old guy and someone who was Miss TMI.
Two more Secret Service agents came running down the hall. One of them stopped in front of the general. “Special Supervisory Agent William J. Hall, sir. This is my responsibility, since the memo came directly to me, and I gave the orders.” He turned to face Alex. “Ma’am? Could you demonstrate your four best-known powers? Maybe a fast flight down the corridor and back, then a burst of lightning strong enough to knock out one of the ceiling lights, then transforming into your silver form and moving while in that form, and finally lifting something substantial with your telekinesis?”
Wow, that seemed pretty reasonable. Even if Danielle Atron could do the same stuff. And that Psych guy could probably make most of the people here think she was doing that stuff. She darted down the hall at full speed, about two feet from the ceiling, then she stopped abruptly and darted back. She lifted her hand and pointed her finger at the ceiling light, then blew it. She overdid it a bit, and a dozen ceiling lights up and down the hall went out, setting off a beeping alarm. Oops. But there were other lights in the hallway, so it didn’t go dark. That would have been really embarrassing. She went silvery, flew up to the ceiling, and puddled across the ceiling, down one wall, over the desk, and then went normal while standing on top of the desk. She said, “Here.” She handed Blond Guy the notepad and sign-in ledger and pens that had been on the table before she pulled them into her puddle as she flowed over the top of the desk. She would have stood on the floor, but then they would have seen she wasn’t as tall as she looked when she was floating behind Jack. And she lifted the female agent off the floor. Even with the woman’s comm system and guns and ammo, she wasn’t anywhere near two hundred pounds, so it was easy. The woman looked like she wanted to scream, but she just twitched a lot.
Alex set the woman back down and flew over beside Riley, to hover a foot above the floor.
Agent Hall stiffly told her, “I think that establishes your bona fides.” He glanced up at the wrecked lightbulbs in the ceiling fixtures. “And that you could have fried all of us instead, if you had malicious intent. Thank you.” He turned his head. “Agent Blaylock, please escort them to the Roosevelt Room.”
Black-haired Guy nodded. “Yes, sir.” He faced the general. “Follow me please, General Hammond.” Then he led them through the mansion and into a windowless conference room.
Jack glanced at his watch and frowned. “Only eight minutes to spare. We need to find out if these two attacks were coordinated, because if Miss Tobias was supposed to take us out and then replace Terawatt, she might have been trying to discredit Terawatt and cause an international incident. You saw what she was carrying. The headline would’ve read ‘U.S. President assassinated by Terawatt using KGB weapon.’ That would not be good.”
General Hammond muttered, “We need to set up some passphrases with replies for IFF, if we’re going to run into this sort of problem in future. Or if your hypothetical shapeshifter ever appears.”
Alex pointed out, “I don’t think any of that would help with someone like Psych, who could just make you think he’d said the right thing.”
General Hammond scowled. “We need some safeguards for that situation, too.”
Just then, Jack reached for his phone. Alex figured he had it on vibrate, because she hadn’t heard it. He answered, “O’Neill.” He listened for several seconds, wincing a couple times, and then said, “You know what to do. I’m not available for the next couple of hours.”
Riley asked, “What is it, colonel?”
Jack groaned. “It seems Miss Tobias might have some superpowers like our personal T-800. As soon as they had her off the base, she ripped the zipcuffs in half, beat up the guards sitting with her, dived out of a truck going thirty miles an hour in traffic, and sprinted off into a housing complex at Usain Bolt speeds. They’re setting up a grid and searching for her now.”
Riley asked, “Another Action Girl?”
Jack shrugged. “Well, Sergeant Scott made sure someone got a blood sample while Tobias was still out cold, so we’ll know pretty soon. But I’m guessing no. Action Girl would’ve shaken off that taser shot and torn me in half, if she’d had that tasking.”
Riley pointed out, “Still, sir, she could have enhanced strength, enhanced speed, fighting skills …”
Jack asked, “Could Lupo have done all that?”
Riley nodded. “Without a doubt. Busting zipcuffs isn’t as hard as people make it out to be, as long as you know what you’re doing. Jumping out of a speeding car without seriously injuring yourself just takes training. Anybody can learn to do it. And if you’re running away from a vehicle that’s going thirty miles an hour, you’d look like you’re going a lot faster than you really are. So we’ll need to get some camera footage to figure out how fast Miss Tobias really is.”
Alex complained, “And in the meantime, I’ve got an Evil Twin running loose in Washington, D.C.”
Jack said, “Well, she’s still in the superheroine outfit, but I peeled off the mask, and Sergeant Scott made sure they used acetone and unglued that wig. So she doesn’t look like you from the neck up. She looks like a woman in a Halloween costume.”
Alex pointed out, “Which also means all she has to do is steal a dress and some shoes, and she’s one more woman in a big city.”
Jack smirked. “One more woman who we have pictures of, and who has several bloody spots on her face. She shouldn’t have glued that mask on like that.”
Eww. Alex tried not to cringe, but she’d worried about that very thing more than once. Gluing her mask on, then losing skin if it got torn off. Eww, eww, eww!
General Hammond shook his head and said, “Colonel, I didn’t thank you at the time for tasering Miss Tobias, but it certainly sounds like she was even more of a threat than we thought.”
“My pleasure, sir. People who try to kidnap my people and kill generals? Not gonna get invited to my place for the big Fourth of July weenie roast.”
Alex tried not to smile too much, but she got a really warm feeling from hearing Jack refer to her as one of ‘his people’. General Hammond made a ‘harrumph’ noise that Alex thought was maybe to keep from breaking into a big grin.
The Roosevelt Room was really pretty nice, even if it didn’t have a window. It had a really big conference table with nice chairs. It had all kinds of interesting photos and things on the walls. If Agent Blaylock wasn’t standing there with them, she would have been walking around oohing and ahhing about all the stuff.
Then the door opened, and the President walked in. The actual President! Of the whole country! He was with four staffers and two more Secret Service agents and about a dozen old guys. She figured the old guys were all Senators and Congressmen, because she thought she recognized one of them. Not that she wanted to recognize him, because he was a Congressman from Mississippi who had said some really mean things about letting unidentified people with superpowers represent the United States of America when nobody knew if she was some sort of crazed psycho felon or what.
Okay, she would have said pretty much the same stuff if it had been Azure Crush running around loose doing stuff in Europe and California and Pennsylvania and New Jersey. She hadn’t really been that happy about Az doing the stuff on the beach in Santa Monica even when Terawatt was right there to keep an eye on her.
The President shook her hand and said some nice stuff about Americans who want to step forward and help others. She didn’t really get it all, because she was kind of shocked at getting to shake hands with the President and stuff. Maybe she was a little star-struck, even if he wasn’t a movie star. Then a grouchy-looking judge with a kind voice did the swearing in and deputizing part.
After that, the President introduced every one of the Senators and Congressmen. She smiled and said, “How do you do” and “Pleased to meet you” and all that stuff, even if she wasn’t pleased to meet any of them.
Then the President said, “Terawatt, I hate to impose on you, but there’s a very large crowd of reporters down in the press room. If you could answer a few questions after my press secretary announces you’ve been deputized, I would appreciate it.”
She just agreed, “Yes, sir. I assumed that was a possibility as soon as I saw all the press outside.”
But one of the Congressmen grumpily asked, “And are you going to be supporting the President when he runs for office again?”
But Jack had prepared her for that one, so she had an answer. “No, I am not. And I’m not going to be supporting anyone else. I’m not in this for political reasons, and I don’t intend to support or oppose any political candidates, whether they like me or not.” A couple of them seemed to relax at that.
Another one asked, “And do you intend to keep helping out foreign countries, when America needs your help?”
But Jack had warned her about that one, too. “I don’t ever intend to put another country ahead of my country. But we have to stop supervillains and monsters wherever they pop up, whether it’s in New Jersey or New Delhi. If I hadn’t fought those silicates in Ireland and Italy and Japan, there’s no telling whether we would have been able to stop them once they took over Europe and Asia and Africa, and then billions of them attacked America.”
But Jack had been right. Telling these guys what they wanted to hear was as good as saving the day in their state, because now they weren’t worried about her being a big threat to their re-election efforts, or their political party, or any of that stuff. And Jack had been right that they were even less polite than the generals. She was so looking forward to the press conference.
Not.
She lifted about twenty inches into the air and followed the President and his staffers. Jack and Riley and General Hammond walked with her. The Congressmen and Senators looked more impressed by one little floating-in-the-air thing than she thought they would be.
The White House was pretty huge, so it took a few minutes to walk to the press room. Boy, she would not want to be one of the people stuck keeping this place clean.
And she didn’t have to walk right into the press room cold. The President’s press secretary, this friendly woman named Ellen, walked in first. She told the press that Terawatt had been a temporarily deputized agent of the Department of Homeland Security for some months, and had just been sworn in as an official deputized agent of the DHS. And then Ellen stayed to help Terawatt with the reporters. Alex was going to have to ask Jack how to do something nice for Ellen, like maybe a bouquet of flowers. Alex would have loved to get a big box of chocolates, but that was her, and she knew way too many women who totally worried way too much about their weight and didn’t really like it when their guy bought them a big box of high-calorie chocolates.
Jack whispered, “Fly in. Make an entrance.”
So she did. She floated in mid-air, turned on her stomach, and flew into the room Iron Giant style, only with lightning crackling from her hands.
Then, even with Ellen keeping the press questioning down to something manageable, Alex still had to answer questions from a room of what had to be two hundred reporters and camera people. If she hadn’t already had to face way worse things, it would have been totally intimidating.
Still, she didn’t expect the first question would be, “Did you vote for the President?”
Jeez. She made sure she was in her best Terawatt voice and she told that guy, “I’m not going to answer that, because I don’t think the role of a superhero is to interfere with politics, anymore than it would be the role of a military officer.” And she sure didn’t want to admit she’d been too young to vote at the last election.
Someone else immediately called out, “Then why are you flying all over the place superheroing?”
She looked their way and said, “Because it’s a job someone needs to do, and I happen to be the someone who can do it. It’s not safe, and it’s not loads of laughs. It can be painful and brutal and horrific. But it needs to be done.”
Maybe she set herself up, but someone else called out, “So why don’t you just shoot the badguys?”
Uck. What was she, Dirty Harry? “First, I don’t believe in killing people. I don’t push my beliefs on others, but that’s my personal belief. I’m not saying our armed forces shouldn’t shoot enemy soldiers. I’m not saying our police forces shouldn’t be properly armed. I have worked with soldiers who routinely carry arms and have shot people. I’m simply saying that I personally do not want to kill anyone. Then most of the foes I have faced are bulletproof, so ‘why don’t you just shoot the badguys’ wouldn’t even work. And some of the foes I have faced have only attacked me because Danielle Atron gave them no choice. Let’s take Victor Cready as an example. He was given a dose of a biochemical that basically turned him into a blob of goo that was constantly on fire and he was constantly in agony from it, nonstop, day and night, for four straight days. It’s a wonder he didn’t go insane from that, because the blob aspect of his powers kept his nerve endings from ever burning out so the pain never ever stopped. Once he was arrested, he has been completely cooperative, only insisting on regular doses of antidote so he does NOT regain his powers. And when he was kidnapped from prison by Danielle Atron and told to attack me, he broke out, called 911, did his utmost to stop another supervillain, and was nearly killed for his efforts. If I had killed him that first time, Paradise Valley might be a disaster area right now. If I had killed Azure Crush when we fought, would we have been able to stop those monster mollusks without further loss of life? Maybe not. So I think some people deserve second chances. Lots of people are capable of turning over a new leaf, and I say we should find ways to help them.”
“Don’t you think it’s a waste of taxpayer money to keep people like him locked up instead of executing them?”
She told that guy, “First, Victor Cready is not under arrest for any sort of crime that carries the death penalty. And have you bothered to look up what things cost these days? It costs more to conduct all the trials and follow-ups for an execution than it does to keep someone locked up for the rest of his life, and it ends up being like a lump-sum payment instead of something that could be set aside to pay out using accrued interest. Furthermore, I do not think Victor Cready needs to be locked up in the standard way. He’ll cooperate however we ask, because he really doesn’t want to be in constant, unbearable agony.”
“What about locking up other supervillains?”
She said, “If they cannot be rehabilitated — and make no mistake, some of them clearly cannot — then I think we’re going to have to cooperate with other countries in this. If we have a small island in the middle of the Pacific for a supervillain prison, that would solve a lot of the problems we and other countries will have with incarcerating super-powered felons as the number of such people keeps growing. Or perhaps a prison under the ice at the South Pole. I don’t think we have a cost-effective way of, say, building a prison on the moon yet. But an ordinary prison can’t contain people who can fly, or turn into a puddle, or punch holes in concrete. Still, I’m not the criminal court system, so if a jury gives someone the death penalty, I do not feel that I have the right to object.”
“What do you think about Azure Crush walking on those charges and getting paid to pose nude?”
Yuck. She insisted, “I do not think women should be posing naked for magazines. I certainly never will do such a thing. If you ever see a photo that’s supposed to be me naked, you may automatically assume it’s a fake.” Especially since her boobs were nothing like what people were assuming. “However, I also believe a woman has the right to choose what she does with her own body, so if Miss Baker chooses to do this, then I am not going to fight her on this. As for the charges, I am willing to let our court system do what it does better than any other court system in the world.”
They asked her a bunch of other questions Jack had warned her about, like why did she go help other countries, and what did she think about the man-monster of Tromaville, and how did she feel about undercutting U.S. military commands with her international actions.
Boy, that one was probably going to keep coming back and biting her in the behind. How many important admirals and generals hated her now because of stuff she’d done when she was trying to be a goodguy?
Still, she wasn’t ready when someone asked, “How do you feel about Glenn Howard?”
Well, she wasn’t going to say she thought he was a jerkhead psycho who was desperate for attention and liked lying to stupid people. She said, “Mr. Howard is entitled to his opinion, and he has the right to free speech. Still, I obviously exist, and I obviously have superpowers. My family thinks he’s unfair and prejudiced against me, but I won’t say such a thing. Perhaps he just needs to come to Santa Monica and meet the people I saved from giant mollusks, or to Ireland and meet the people I saved from silicon-based lifeforms. I find his statements about me insulting, but that is no reason for me to make insulting statements in return.”
A couple of people wanted to ask her why she had a secret identity. Well, duh. But she was polite about it, even when she thought their questions were really, really dumb.
Then someone asked, “Is it true that a woman attempted to pose as you earlier today?”
She wondered how that news had gotten out so fast, but she still answered the question. “Yes. A woman who couldn’t fly and couldn’t make lightning and couldn’t transform into my silvery morph was illegally inserted past U.S. Air Force security by unknown parties. She had an artificial ‘poison fang’ glued to her palm, so that she could have poisoned anyone she shook hands with, or anyone she slapped. And she attempted to get into a room full of important generals and admirals, many of them connected with important U.S. military commands and the DHS. I think it’s safe to say I would have been accused of the crime. So if a woman comes to you and claims to be Terawatt, first ask her to demonstrate her flight and electrokinesis and telekinesis and shapeshifting powers before you believe she’s really Terawatt. And that applies not just to the Secret Service and national security, but also ordinary men and women of this country. I don’t ever want to find out that someone trusted a con woman in a Terawatt Halloween costume with their life’s savings, or someone in a bank just gave a Terawatt cosplayer all the bank’s money because she just claimed she’s the real thing. And here’s another hint: my uniform doesn’t have a zipper down the back.” She lifted a little higher into the air and turned around so everyone could see her back.
“Is it true you have a stalker?”
“I have three. That we know of.” A couple of the prettier female reporters up front visibly winced. She wondered if stalkers were a problem for famous newswomen. “At the moment, they’re all cyber-stalkers, but they’re real, and they’re all potential problems. One of them is a suspect in the disappearance of several young women, so this is yet another reason to have a secret identity.”
“What are your thoughts about the Tromaville woman who’s attempting to sue you for negligence and hospital bills from a car wreck she claims you caused?”
What? She said, “I hadn’t heard of that. Thank you. I was only in Tromaville for less than an hour, in only one place, so I think she’ll have a hard time convincing anyone that she wrecked her car at the right time and day and location. Then I was there as a temporarily deputized agent of the DHS, so I would be covered under the Homeland Security rules, which should mean that I can’t be sued for approved activities. And finally, if this ever comes to court, my attorney will just bring in Glenn Howard, who will convince the jury I don’t even exist.” Some of the press corps laughed at that, even if she thought it was a pretty lame joke.
And how creepy did you have to be to try to sue a superhero for damages that you were probably faking anyway?
“How did you get your powers?”
She smiled at the reporter. “I’m sorry, I don’t talk about that.”
“Did the U.S. government give you your powers?”
She said, “No. They didn’t even know I existed for a long time after I gained my powers, and not for some months after I started using them to thwart supervillains.”
“Why did you become a superhero?”
She corrected, “A superheroine? I didn’t plan on it. I probably would never have become a superheroine if it weren’t for Danielle Atron. The supervillains she unleashed on California pushed me into doing something to save people. Before I knew it, I was wearing a costume to keep from being identified, and then I was asked to help the DHS deal with invisible supervillains in Illinois, and things just … snowballed.”
“Well, what’s the difference between you and supervillains?”
Wow, that was rude. She said, “Intent. I’m not trying to steal a million dollars, and I’m not trying to kill someone who annoyed me, and I’m not unleashing monsters all over the planet.”
“Why aren’t you trying to steal a million dollars? It would be easy for you.”
Honestly, what was wrong with these guys? She told that jerk, “It would be wrong. And it would make life miserable for all the people that money was supposed to help. And in my other identity, I have a job I love, which pays me well enough that I don’t have to worry about not having food on my table or a roof over my head. And if the proposed tax code legislation goes through, then less-altruistic super-powered people would also have a reason to want to help their country, because they could get paid and have a way to collect income and pay their taxes, while screening their other identity.”
“Is it true that Mattel is withholding royalties on their line of Terawatt Barbie dolls?”
She said, “I don’t know the current status of that situation. The last that I heard was that Driscoll Enterprises was trying to enforce their copyrights and trademarks, and that they have already set aside their own royalty payments so that if the tax codes are changed, they would be able to pay me royalties. I think that’s generous of them. I think that super-powered people might re-think the idea of becoming supervillains if they not only saw that crime doesn’t pay, but they saw that being on the side of justice actually did have rewards.”
“What rewards are you getting out of superheroing if there’s no money in it for you?”
What a jerk. But she didn’t say that. She insisted, “Right now, the rewards are intangible, but they are there. When you save someone’s life, you know inside that you just did something special. Something that makes you feel good. When you fight off a giant spider, or an army of deadly silicates, or a bunch of giant carnivorous mollusks, you know you’re protecting your country and you’re saving people wherever you happen to be.”
“So are you doing it for the thrill?”
She shook her head. “Absolutely not. It’s not thrilling. It’s dangerous and risky and sometimes terrifying. Some of the things I’ve seen are utterly horrifying. There’s no thrill-seeking in that. I don’t see why you can’t see it my way: it’s wrong to have these powers and not use them to protect other people.”
“Then why do you the dirty work for secret black ops groups in the DHS?”
Man, these guys were just asking for it. She was not going to lose her temper. She was not. “I don’t do ‘dirty work’ and I don’t commit crimes and I don’t sneak around with black ops groups. The DHS has recognized security agencies which protect people, and sometimes they need help.”
“Who were you working with in Santa Monica?”
She said, “That would be the HWAAA, which is a DHS hazardous waste management program. Also, they contacted the EPA while I was there, so also the Superfund people of the EPA. Hazardous wastes can do more than just poison you or give you cancers. Just ask Azure Crush about that, because she was nearly eaten alive by more than one of those things.”
“Why was Azure Crush involved in the Santa Monica situation, and why did she stay to help you out?”
She explained, “Azure Crush showed up in the first place, because she thought I was snooping around in her personal business. As soon as she stormed out onto the sand and was nearly swallowed, she realized I was telling her the truth. My presence there had nothing to do with her presence in Los Angeles. Then she was extremely angry about nearly being eaten. When she found out that some large portion of the Santa Monica homeless population might have been eaten over the previous two months, she insisted on staying and helping.”
“And why would she care about homeless people?”
She said, “Azure Crush doesn’t come from a nice home. She’s had a very hard childhood, and she’s spent more than one night huddling under a bridge wondering where her next meal would come from and fearing she might be attacked by the next person she saw. She’s been homeless. She knows what it’s like. She isn’t homeless now, but that’s only because someone is making money off her. She cares about the homeless, and she was furious that those monsters might have been eating homeless people for months, and no one knew, and few people cared.”
“That’s a pretty nice thing to say about your arch-enemy.”
She said, “Azure Crush is not my arch-enemy. We fought once. That’s all. And it was Danielle Atron’s fault. Since then, I flew one time to Beverly Hills to make sure that she was all right and not being taken advantage of, and to assess whether her protection was adequate in the event of a Danielle Atron assault. That accidentally led to her coming out to Santa Monica and helping us. She may be very strong, but she was risking her life. And she knew she was risking being killed in a truly horrible way: being sucked down under the ground and being slowly smothered to death in the digestive system of an underground monster. She put her trust in me and the DHS representatives, and I believe we showed her that her trust was warranted. Yes, she made some tactical mistakes because she has no military experience, but we got the job done.”
“How many more of those giant clams are out there?”
She sighed to herself. “We don’t know. If any of those monsters laid eggs under the sand, there could be more giant mollusks hatching for a long time to come. All that will have to be a part of a costly and possibly dangerous hazardous waste abatement project. But once the project is completed, the beach will be safe once again.”
“How do you feel about Barbie dolls, and Mattel making money off your image through them?”
She had loved her Barbies when she was little, but she was not going to say that. “I wish that Mattel’s flagship doll didn’t have proportions that are so unrealistic. We have enough problems in this country with people valuing appearance over hard work and intelligence, particularly when it comes to young women. I’ve certainly been guilty of that more than once in my life. I think we all have. On the other hand, I have seen a young girl using her Terawatt Barbie to pretend she was fighting crime and saving the day, instead of the usual Barbie activities, so perhaps this is a step in the right direction. After all, everyone in this country can fight crime or save the day, because everyone in this country can become a police officer, or a fireman, or an EMT, or a doctor, or a nurse, or an intern, or a soldier, or any of a hundred other meaningful careers.”
“Does that mean that you have one of the jobs you mentioned?”
She smiled. “I think you know I’m not going to answer that, and I think you’re smart enough to know why. I don’t reveal anything about my other identity. I don’t sign autographs, for the same reason.”
After a few more questions, Ellen the press secretary walked back out and said, “I’m sorry, but the President has requested a meeting with Terawatt, and so I need to ask her to depart. However, I will stay and answer questions about Terawatt’s deputization and what that means for the DHS.”
So Alex finally got to fly back out of the room. Jack was waiting for her in the anteroom, alongside Riley and General Hammond and another Secret Service agent, plus someone who looked like a staffer. The staffer led them back toward the Roosevelt Room. Since that was near the Oval Office and some other important rooms, Alex figured it was going to be an important meeting somewhere.
Jack must have seen how she really felt about getting out of there, so he mouthed, ‘come with me if you want to live’. She had to make an effort not to giggle. Then he grinned. “You did great, Tera.”
General Hammond agreed, “You made the DHS look good. There are going to be a lot more people happy about the decision to officially deputize you once that press conference hits the airwaves.”
Jack added, “Which in a couple cases will probably be in twelve seconds or less, knowing some of those newsies.”
Alex hadn’t enjoyed it, but it hadn’t been nearly as bad as, say, facing several hundred giant baby spiders in a dark cave.
The next meeting turned out to be a really short ‘thank you for all your hard work and I wish there was more we could do for you’ thing from the President, and a ‘thanks for not making the re-election issues worse’ thing from some White House staffers. Then Sergeant Scott drove everyone back to the air force base, Jack made sure she got some more to eat, and she finally got to fly home.
Unfortunately, when she got home it was so late that she had already missed the first kung fu lesson with Lieutenant Lupo. Crud!
Well, at least she got to eat dinner with Jo and just talk about stuff. And Shar was so excited about taking kung fu lessons she didn’t want to take her gi off for dinner, and so she got spaghetti sauce all down the front. Fortunately, there was lots of stain remover in the laundry room.
—
A/N: IFF == Identification Friend or Foe (having a way to tell if the unidentified whatever is one of your guys or one of their guys). In Air Force terms, it’s an electronic system to identify that another object is a friendly, although technically the systems cannot identify foes with 100% accuracy, because it could be a friendly who cannot receive or respond to your IFF.
Interlude XIXJack O’Neill sat in his small office in his home. Charlie was asleep, or at least doing a good job of faking it. Good on him. Being able to fake sleep was almost as important a life skill as being able to fake wakefulness.
Jack didn’t bring work home with him. All of his work was Top Secret and Eyes Only these days, even the incredibly, tediously boring paperwork people kept insisting on, even when it wasn’t particularly helpful and it had to be incinerated or locked away somewhere safe anyway. So mainly he used the room for storage and his fly-tying jig and his gunsafe. And the things Willow left that didn’t fit in his closet or his dresser. And his stuff that he had moved out of his closet and dresser so Willow had more room. But he did have a laptop computer in there on a little roll-around computer desk. He didn’t keep anything on the hard drive except the software to let it boot up and connect through Willow’s firewalls into his own intranet. And it was set up with a lot of RAM and nothing he downloaded got written to the hard drive, either. He typed in his password, which no one was likely to guess, since it was the first letters of the first thirty words of the theme song for “The Flintstones.” Willow made him change his password every month, but he’d already picked out the next song that would be his new password. He hummed, “Ding dong, the witch is dead” while he put his finger on the fingerprint reader and let it do its job.
He studied the new information the IT guys had come up with on Clare Tobias. Hot blonde, twenty-seven, with a history of really good grades at really expensive universities. Impressive engineering creds, so she could have built that poison fang all by herself if it came down to it. Adopted by venture capitalist Michael Tobias and his wife at five months old. The IT guys had even scrounged up a couple of photos of her, including her high school prom pic as the prom queen, and her high school yearbook photos, and a really cute photo of the brand new parents holding their brand new kid with a teeny Santa hat on her. Photogenic didn’t begin to describe her. She had real promise, her parents had money, she could do anything in the world … Too bad she decided to become a supervillain.
Why? Why would someone like her go from ‘has everything including a promising career’ to ‘kill a roomful of important brass and maybe take a shot at assassinating the CinC’? There was something he was missing. Something they all were missing.
He looked at the rest of the intel on the screen, and he frowned. He was getting an idea that he really, really did NOT like. He rubbed a bruise on the outside of his left thigh, and he thought.
Interlude XXMaggie Walsh walked down to the briefing room. She knew she was a few minutes late, but she wasn’t concerned. She knew he would be another minute, and no one had the balls to start the meeting without him. Even if most of the room could take him in hand-to-hand without trying, no one but her had any idea how to access the vast funding sources he used to run The Collective, and no one wanted to kill him and then be destitute.
She took a seat near the head of the table. Most of the room wanted to be away from his seat, because he was not accustomed to treating failures lightly. She wasn’t worried. In fact, she couldn’t wait to surprise some of the room.
He walked in with his two bodyguards. She gave him a smile, and he smiled back. No one else dared try that.
He took his seat at the head of the table and simply looked at one of them. “Report.”
“North Korea has, unsurprisingly, had trouble buying large quantities of teratogenic biochemicals. Not even the Chinese want to sell to them. So we’ve been making a killing. Our people in Moscow were able to get us the radium, and the American bloc was willing to make a trade, so we made enough profit to make up for the cost overruns on Project 24.”
He asked, “Have you sold them any GC-161?”
“No. Even if Atron was being cooperative — which she definitely isn’t — we wouldn’t consider it. The India bloc would try to get their hands on it, and we’re having enough trouble keeping them under control. The North Koreans very obviously have one of three objectives with this, and given the volume of biochemicals they’re buying, the conclusion’s fairly obvious. We don’t want them able to control their own destiny afterward, when we don’t have any of our people in place yet.”
“Next.”
Another member spoke up. “We have the submarine fully operational. We were surprised that we didn’t have to design any replacement parts for the reactor. But we did have to do a surprising amount of work on the electronics, which were garbage to begin with, and had corroded or failed far more than we were led to believe. The high-voltage modifications we needed to make didn’t add more than twenty percent to the repair cost. Still, four hundred million rubles is looking like a good price for it. And the training they gave our crew was quite complete. We’re in position, waiting on Project 29.” He deliberately looked at her.
Maggie gave the twerp an icy smile and said, “I had to step in and make some corrections, but Project 29 is now moving along faster than anticipated, thanks to some DNA splices from the Downingtown lab that I was able to design before that situation went FUBAR. So we’re soon going to be ahead of schedule. It’s also going to be bigger than we planned. I am currently estimating over twenty percent in length and over seventy percent in mass.”
He smiled. “Impressive.”
She said, “And it will still be mobile. We also used some of Project 17 and let the Russian submariners and their partners kill each other, and then we recovered almost all of the four hundred million. Crew costs are a different matter, since they’re our people.”
He nodded. “Ahh, Project 17. The Lanzhou Lesson. A nice touch.” He looked down the row of people and raised an eyebrow.
The next person reported. “We have reason to believe the America bloc is trying to become their own splinter bloc, like India. We know they’re working on something that they won’t discuss with us. The Boyle Biochemical disaster in Santa Monica set them back a couple of months, and I believe the after-effects from that fire give us several large hints about what they’re attempting.”
Maggie added, “And they’ve paid extremely well for the details on Deemer’s formulations and some of my genetic enhancement work.”
He nodded. “Let them go ahead as planned, while making it look as if we are now quite unhappy and uncooperative, even if several of our number are willing to act against the bloc’s wishes for enough money. We have an agent in place who will help us out. If we let them wipe out the North American population, and our agent makes sure the bloc is wiped out as well, then it’s a win-win for us.” He looked at the next person.
“Danielle Atron is milking us for everything she can, which we expected. The two liters of GC-161 she showed our agent somehow vanished in Mexico City while they were waiting for their jet. She still wants all the money and the private island. She has worked out some idea of our overall aims, so she doesn’t want to be anywhere that might end up being a project target. She hasn’t told us how to manufacture GC-161 or its antidote, or some of the related chemicals she has promised. She did create three hundred milliliters of GC-161, which she used in a demonstration on one of our volunteers. He did not survive. It appears the minute modifications in our genetic structure are just the wrong modifications if we want to use GC-161 on ourselves. She thinks we can work around that if she can have an adequate lab and a top geneticist. From the way she said it, I am inferring she has some guesses about some of our membership.”
He looked over at Maggie, who said, “I’ll see what I can do. It’s not as if we can strong-arm her.” That was rather an understatement. Two of The Collective had tried that almost as soon as Atron proved less than cooperative. She had electrocuted one and telekinetically ripped the other in half from across the room. Several days after that, three more members had tried to deal with her by dosing her with some antidote stolen from the Paradise Valley Police Department. She had demonstrated that she was now immune to the antidote, and she had brutally killed all three. The clean-up and repairs from that had taken two full days. The woman did know how to make a statement.
The next person reported, “Our agent provided some new intel. It’s probable that the India bloc is moving ahead with ‘Project Argus’ well ahead of schedule, which probably means they are going to try to ‘steal’ all the unaffiliated.”
Maggie pointed out, “I wrote a position paper on that. For the reasons I outlined, that’s likely to cause more problems for them — and us — than it will solve.”
“Next report.”
“Neumann is still incarcerated. At least we now know where, and something about the setting, in case we need to extract him some time in the future. Tobias escaped, but now we can’t use her in the NID any longer. That’s two critical assets down, for no results. They weren’t able to kill or discredit Terawatt. They didn’t take out the SRI or Jack O’Neill or George Hammond. And they didn’t come close to infiltrating the White House to poison the President. The America bloc is blaming us.”
He just nodded. “Naturally. They’re unlikely to admit it was an ill-conceived plan. Terawatt and O’Neill are far more dangerous than they are given credit for. Anyone who views O’Neill as a simpleton merely because of his reputation is too stupid to remain alive in The Collective.” He looked around the table and said, “If that’s all, then get back to work.”
She didn’t bother to get up.
He smiled at her and patted her on the shoulder. “Maggie, good job. Do what you can with Atron, but limit your involvement if it’s going to interfere with your projects. You’re the most valuable researcher we have, and we can live without any contributions from her.”
She asked, “And what if we can’t get anything useful from her? She’s too dangerous to attack in force. We could lose our entire base.”
He smiled. “We give her an island!” He dropped the smile. “Once she’s there, we nuke it. Regardless of her power set, she won’t survive that.”
She sighed. “I hate wasting our nuclear arsenal. It’s limited.”
She looked into his eyes. “We should scam the India bloc into nuking it for us.”