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Chapter 115 – Covering upAlex mainly goofed off around the house for the last few days of the winter break. Her bruises and owwies slowly faded. The worst were the goose egg on the back of her head, her hip pointer, and her sore ribs. Even if her left knee and ankle and shoulder weren’t a whole barrel of fun.
Still, if you were all beaten up, TK was a great power. She could lie on the couch, watch TV, and use her TK to grab a Diet Coke or an energy bar or a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. Or two pints of Ben & Jerry’s. And she did the cleaning in her room and in the living room with TK, so she was still doing her chores, just not with her hands and arms.
And since she was all battered and bruised, her mom didn’t fuss when Alex ate all her mom’s Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia, and also Alex didn’t have to drive to the grocery store to buy new pints.
And Ray came by just to be a great boyfriend, and Nicole and Robyn both came by to be great friends, and Gloria brought over two dozen really great doughnuts, and Marsha and Louis dropped by to bring her treats and tell her how Marsha’s ‘coming out’ went.
It turned out Marsha’s parents were pretty good about their daughter having a superpower. Her dad apologized to Louis when he found out it was his own daughter who’d been accidentally causing everything. And her mom believed it was accidental, because no one covers herself in silver enamel paint or does a header into wet concrete on purpose. And her brother thought it was hilarious that Marsha was probably responsible for their dad getting that birthday cake on his head. And she told her family she was definitely not going to be a superhero. Or a supervillain. And she was going to try to pretend she didn’t even have any powers. And it looked like her brother didn’t figure out she was maybe the reason he ended up with paint all over him when he was painting his room, or that she was winning a lot more than half the coin tosses for dishwashing because she was cheating. So it looked like the only problem Marsha was going to have was her brother was bugging her to use her powers to do mean stuff to this family down the street that he didn’t like.
Shar was not enjoying being grounded and having no TV or computer privileges except under special circumstances, but she just spent more time taking care of Alex and playing with dolls and reading. A lot of the ‘playing with dolls’ was either episodes of ‘Terawatt and Pyre fight the bad guys’ which was usually either Petey Johnson or a giant monster or a giant Petey Johnson monster, or else acting out “The Iron Giant” with Shar as the robot and her Skipper doll as Hogarth. Shar pretty much had the entire movie memorized, anyway.
Okay, when Shar played ‘Terawatt and Pyre fight the bad guys’ and she used the cherry jello mold out of the fridge as a giant blob monster, things kind of turned into a huge mess, so it was a good thing Shar did it on the kitchen floor. By the time Alex caught her, the jello was all over the floor and the wall and the lower cabinets, and Shar looked like she had rolled in it. Alex knew it would have been mega-yucky to get that much cherry jello out of the living room rug, because even with a steam cleaner the stains might not have ever come out. And Alex’s mom was totally not happy with finding what was supposed to be for dinner being all over the kitchen.
Shar’s extra reading was kind of freaky. Some ‘young adult’ book publisher had a string of brand new books out: ‘The Adventures of Kari Strong’. Shar had every single one that was out already, and it looked like a new one was coming out monthly. Kari Strong was a ten-year-old girl who had just accidentally gotten superpowers and was trying to keep everyone from discovering her secret, while also trying to stop Baron von Kreep from unleashing his mutated monsters so he could take over the world. It was pretty obvious that someone was capitalizing on the Terawatt craze in a way that they didn’t have to pay any royalties to anyone. Alex was reading all the books after Shar finished them, because she was really hoping there was nothing in any of the books that was too close to the truth about Terawatt. Shar was already on book three: “Kari Strong and the Extra-Slimy Slime Monster.”
“Ooh! Ooh! Alex, Alex, Alex! Listen to this!” Shar came jumping down the stairs and leapt onto the couch. Alex caught her with some TK so Shar didn’t land right on Alex’s sore ribs.
“Shar, I was watching TV,” Alex patiently told her. Okay, she’d been watching a mostly-boring news show with newspeople talking about Gojira. This one weird biologist guy with a little bit of a speech problem kept calling it ‘Godzirra’ instead, which just sounded stupid.
“Yeah, but you have to listen to this!” Shar insisted. She started reading aloud. “Kari turned on the radio and cringed. It was Terrible Tony T, the shock jock. And he was claiming he had evidence that ‘Superhero Girl’ was a fraud. Ooh, he made her so mad!”
Alex just had to grin as Shar kept reading. Someone had been listening to Glenn Howard, because some of Terrible Tony T’s statements sounded way too much like stuff Glenn Howard and some other people had really said, just exaggerated to make the statements sound extra stupid. Shar did a little dramatic reading as poor Kari got so frustrated listening to Terrible Tony T that her powers started going haywire and she ruined her homework she’d spent an hour doing.
Alex decided not to mention that she’d had the same kinds of problems more than once.
And once Shar was done doing her one-woman stage performance, she raced back upstairs so she could find out how Kari was going to stop the extra-slimy slime monster and get even with Terrible Tony T. At least, since this was a Young Adult book, the monster wasn’t eating dozens of people in horrible ways. It was just ruining buildings and sliming anyone who tried to stop it. And troublesome Mayor Morris M. Milktoast already got covered in extra-slimy slime while trying to cut the ribbon at the opening of a new building, when Kari flew in and fought the monster, so he was blaming Kari for getting slimed instead of thanking her for not being eaten by a slime monster. Mayor Milktoast was always causing problems for Kari in every book, and he had the whole city’s police force trying to track down Superhero Girl, which was even more of a problem because Mayor Milktoast lived across the street from Kari and her family, and Mayor Milktoast’s daughter Marjorie Mae Milktoast was stuck-up and snobby to Kari, and Kari’s annoying big brother Karl had a huge crush on Marjorie so he was no help at all.
Alex idly wondered if the publishers wanted some new ideas for Kari’s adventures. And she wondered how many chapters it would be before Terrible Tony T got slimed, because he was always a loudmouthed jerk in every book, and he always had something like that happen to him by the next to last chapter. The books were really predictable. Formulaic, even. She smiled and whispered, “SAT words for the win!”
She wondered how hard it would be for Willow to put together an artificial language program that cranked out new Kari Strong books, just using the words and phrases from the books that Shar already had, and the plot that seemed to be the same storyline for every book. It would be pretty fun to ‘write’ new Kari Strong books just for Shar when Shar ran out of official ones to read, and Alex could come up with twenty or thirty plots just from some of the stories she had heard in Hermione’s dimension. Alex could come up with more than that if she wanted to write stories based on stuff that had really happened to her when she was younger, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to admit to some of those stories yet. Maybe she’d tell Shar those stories when Shar was older, like maybe sixteen. Or fifty.
Late that afternoon, Jack set up a conference call on her tPhone with her and him and Colonel Watanabe and Colonel Watanabe’s boss, some general whose name Alex didn’t quite get, even if she couldn’t say so on the call because she didn’t want to look stupid, because there was no way his name was ‘General eBay’. But the Japanese had Gojira’s body moved up onto the shore, which had been a giant problem to make happen because it was so huge, and they had a giant airplane hangar set up over the carcass, and they were trying to figure out how to cut it apart and feed the pieces into a special sealed furnace to deal with the radiation problems. They figured there were maybe five or ten tons of radioactive compounds in the entire thing, but getting those ten tons separated from the thousands of tons of monster was going to be a huge engineering headache.
And Colonel Watanabe said they had Yuki all taken care of! Alex gushed, “That’s great!”
He said, “Yes, she needs a great deal of heat energy constantly, but we have nuclear power stations where we have constant waste heat problems. So she has a full-time job, going from unit to unit, absorbing the extra waste heat until the coolant is a slush and the pipes are covered in ice. That takes care of each nuclear power unit for several days. And we have set up several ‘apartments’ for her in the hottest areas of some of the plants, so she can sleep in comfort and enjoy a nice, non-frozen beverage and hot food.”
The general said, “Our engineers are working on a special radiation-protective suit that would not freeze solid if she wore it, so that in case of a nuclear accident, she can go in and absorb enough heat that our engineers could follow her in and solve the technical problems.”
Alex was really happy that Yuki had a job and a place to live, and she could eat and drink stuff again. And she wasn’t dying of cold somewhere mega-yucky. Plus, Colonel Watanabe was getting her a superheroine uniform she could wear and a helicopter with a really big heater in the passenger compartment, so they could rush her to the rescue for emergencies. If some silicates or something like that showed up again, Yuki was going to turn those things into popsicles. And she was probably going to be awesome for floods or tsunamis, because she could do instant ice dams. Colonel Watanabe said there were already several winter festivals that wanted her to come out and make ice or snow and be a sort of special guest.
* * *
Also, Willow drove down to visit. She was all worried about Alex’s bruises, and all concerned about Shar running into danger on her PyreJet. So Shar got hugs for rescuing Alex, and a stern talking-to for scaring the living daylights out of Willow when she listened in on Jack’s comms. But Willow spent the day with them, and taught Shar how to make real Italian zucchini-tomato casserole, which Shar even tried because it was from Auntie Willow. And naturally, Alex’s mom and dad insisted Willow eat dinner with them, and they all talked Willow into staying overnight, even though Willow hadn’t brought any stuff. But Alex loaned her some peejays, which were just a little on the big side because Alex was about three inches taller, and they had stuff in the bathroom cabinet like unopened toothbrushes from the dentist’s office, so Willow was pretty much set for the night. Shar slept in a sleeping bag on the floor, so Willow could sleep in Shar’s bed, even though Willow could have slept in the guest bedroom. And Willow, like always, was just so pleased someone would want her to stay with them.
Some day, Alex was going to meet Cordelia Chase, and she was going to tell Cordelia what a ginormous jerkhead she was. And what was wrong with Willow’s parents, who were supposed to know tons of stuff about psychology, that they let Willow get so beaten down that she didn’t have any self-esteem except about what she could do with her brain? Someday Alex was going to tell Willow’s parents that they were ginormous jerkheads, too. Well, maybe she’d just say that they were really bad at taking care of a child.
Since she looked all bruised, and she felt all bruised, she wasn’t up for going out on a date with Ray, even though she really wanted to go out with him. And she wasn’t up for going to see Ray’s basketball game on Friday night. But her family and her friends were the best in the world.
So after the basketball game, Ray and Louis and Marsha came over, and they showed her the video footage Louis took of the game. Alex just sat sideways in Ray’s lap and cuddled against him and watched the video. Louis wasn’t a great videographer, but he wasn’t nearly as bad as, say, Alex’s dad. And frankly, KPVC had a photographer on staff who was pretty darn lousy unless he was operating a big steadicam system or a full-sized television camera on a large tripod.
Louis muttered, “I know I’m not the greatest cameraman in the world, so don’t make fun of the jiggling and stuff.”
Alex fussed, “I wouldn’t do that. I might give you some advice here and there, like … Right there. See how you had to make a jerky movement back the other way right there? When you’re filming like this, try and plan ahead. See how the ref’s already moving that way? He knows the ball might be moving back the other way pretty fast as soon as that happened, and he’s already adjusting. If the refs are moving, then you can be ready to move the camera in that direction.”
“Oh. Okay. That’s a good point. And … Oh, crap.” Louis winced as the camera suddenly went weird and jumped off to the side of the court where no one was. He said, “Marsha brought me a hot dog from the concession guy, and she kind of loaded it up with too much mustard and relish, which is just the way I like it, and that’s where it ended up all down my shirt.”
Alex thought it was so weird that Louis still had these goofy things happening to him, even with Marsha trying to keep her powers under control. Maybe Marsha’s powers weren’t totally under control yet, and she was worrying more about Louis than most things.
Alex said, “That’s okay. It’s not like I never missed something because I tripped or somebody walked into my shot or whatever. Just watch out, and think about what might happen next, and then be ready for it.”
So they watched as Ray led their offense and passed the ball around and got the ball to Tony for an easy lay-up.
Alex told Louis, “See? You did great there. You knew people were gonna be passing the ball around —”
“Even Jackson,” Louis kidded.
“— and you knew the passes were going to be pretty fast, and you kept up with everything.”
Ray smirked, “Jackson’s been a lot better since someone made him think UCLA thinks he’s a hotdogging loser, and he finally realized the whole team was P.O.’ed at him. He’ll still take the shot even if a guy’s right in his face, but he’ll pass the ball off as soon as the defense pulls other guys over to guard him, too. His scoring average per 48 minutes is down, but his shooting percentage is up, and his assists are way up.”
Louis snarked, “Well, anything’s up when you start from zero.”
Alex pretty much thought Louis was right, even if he was being kind of mean about it.
Ray pointed out how their coach had a game plan they were following, and they were trying to put a lot of pressure on the other team’s superstar forward, and they managed to get two defensive fouls and two offensive fouls on the guy well before halftime, and the opposing coach had to bench the guy. So then they opened up a big lead, and when the other team put their big superstar back in, Tony and Heyward managed to get the guy to foul out in a few minutes, so their team won by a lot. Alex remembered that last year the guy had scored over forty points against them and just slaughtered them, but that was also because Jackson had tried to score just as many points and had missed way too many times, so the guy had also gotten a ginormous number of defensive rebounds and that made everything worse.
And then, on Saturday night, Ray took Alex on a date that didn’t go out of the house. He came over and ate with Alex and her family, and then Alex’s mom and dad took Shar out to see the new Pixar film, so Ray and Alex had the living room to themselves, and they watched a horror movie on DVD, and Alex sat in Ray’s lap the whole time. And when they weren’t necking, they made fun of the movie and the characters in the movie and the plot of the movie and the way that the people you were supposed to like kept doing really, really dumb stuff, and some of them were just mega-annoying.
“No, don’t go up into the attic all by yourself!”
“And he’s leaving his knife with the girl who’s never gonna use it. These guys are so retarded.”
“Okay, that’s the stupidest plan to catch a monster I ever heard, and I saw years of Scooby-Doo cartoons.”
“Man, even Scrappy-Doo wasn’t this annoying. Are we supposed to root for the monster to eat this guy?”
Then, after the movie was over and they had ice cream sundaes in the kitchen, they made fun of the movie some more.
Alex admitted, “That would’ve been brutal to sit through if you couldn’t say anything out loud.”
Ray grinned. “Oh, you’ve got to go see a horror movie some time with my Great-aunt Edith. She yells at the screen. I was so embarrassed when I was a kid. Now it’s just hilarious.” And then he did an imitation of his great-aunt yelling at the movie in the middle of the movie theater. “Don’t you OPEN that door, child! I’m warnin’ you, don’t you DARE open that door! OH! OHH! I tol’ you not to open that door!” Alex laughed so hard her ribs were killing her.
And Ray was so funny Alex had to fly down the hall to the bathroom so she didn’t pee herself at the kitchen table. When her folks got home with Shar, she and Ray were still sitting at the kitchen table and saying funny stuff and laughing like crazy. Alex was laughing so hard she couldn’t even explain why she was laughing really hard, and Ray was no help at all, because he just kept saying stuff that made her laugh harder, and every time he did more imitations of his great-aunt, she just about peed herself.
And crud, did her sore ribs hurt afterward from all that really hard laughing.
The last day of winter break was Sunday, and Alex had to skip church. She didn’t like missing church, but there was no way she could wear one of her good church dresses when she’d be showing way too many bruises on her legs and arms and face and around her collarbone. She’d need like a paint can full of foundation.
So she stayed home from church and worked on the homework she hadn’t gotten done yet. Mainly that was reading ahead in calculus and chem. She had a term paper due in a little over a week, but she’d already written the whole thing, and she’d gone back over it once to check all her quotes and her references. Well, that, and making sure she had lots of stuff on symbolism, because Ms. Walters was sort of fixated on that. All Alex needed to do was the final editing pass, and then printing it off, because Ms. Walters was asking everyone to use a computer to write the paper and print it so they’d be used to doing it like that when they went off to college.
And since Alex was still pretty sore, Shar helped Uncle George in the yard. Alex sat on her bed and worked at getting linux running on her laptop. Unix stuff was just so weird. It was like someone said, “Oh, that’s way too long to type, just throw away every single vowel and any consonants that you don’t need so you can get the whole thing down to four letters or less, you won’t have any trouble remembering that, right?” So they had all these mega-weird words for commands and things. And really, who in the world thought ‘fsck’ was a good name for a command? It just looked dirty every time she typed it.
Willow loved unix and linux and a dozen other weird unix-ish unices, but she was a super-genius who could remember anything. Alex really thought it needed to be easier for normal people to use.
Alex was sore enough that she even had to take it easy when Jo came out to give everyone the weekly kung fu lesson. So Alex concentrated on moving really slowly and getting the moves down just right for some new stuff, while Jo ran everyone else through their paces. Alex was pretty happy about her mom and dad getting in better shape and doing better in ‘class’, and Shar was doing great for an eight-year-old. Alex could tell when Shar was making herself not yell ‘kapow’ and ‘blam’ when she punched and kicked, which was just so cute.
* * *
When school started up on Monday, Alex had to pretend there was nothing wrong. That meant taking lots of pain relievers before school, walking like her hip and legs weren’t sore, and wearing enough coverstick under her foundation that her bruises on her face didn’t show. And she was wearing a cute knit hat that covered up the goose egg that still hadn’t completely gone away on the back of her head.
Stupid super-strong monster. She was just glad she was the one who got hit by that giant tail, because it would have killed Shar or Yuki instantly.
At least, since she wasn’t a guy, other guys didn’t walk up and slap her on the back or punch her on the arm or smack her on the back of the head. Guys were really kind of weird. If her friend had a terrible sunburn, would she go over and slap her friend on the sunburn? No! But guys did stuff like that to their friends all the time.
No, girls attacked other girls in ways that were a lot more subtle and a lot less physical, even if they could be just as painful.
Kelly and her posse walked up to Alex. Kelly looked her over and asked, “Face breaking out again? That’s a lot of foundation.” A couple of her posse smiled cruelly.
Six years ago, little Alex would have folded like a wet paper plate. Three years ago, Alex would have thought about pushing back, and done something sneaky with her powers. But Alex wasn’t the same person she had been six years ago, or three years ago, or even ten months ago. She’d seen way worse things than a high school girl trying to be mean just because she was really insecure.
Not that Alex still wasn’t tempted to push back. She was even thinking about lots of ways that she could jab Kelly right where it would hurt the most. She could make a mean remark about Kelly’s hair, or her shoes, or even make a cheap shot about how Kelly just barely made it onto the Homecoming Court by the skin of her teeth. Or she could do something really cruel, like use her TK to rip the elastic in Kelly’s panties so they’d fall down around her ankles here in the middle of the hallway in front of two hundred high school kids who would all laugh and point and say gross stuff and then go tell the rest of the school.
Okay, Alex couldn’t do something that cruel, because she knew how painfully humiliated she would be if something like that happened to her, and she could imagine the awful things high school guys would say for weeks, and she knew the kinds of cruel things the mean girls would say about it.
Alex decided to go with the Selina approach. She gave Kelly a big, fake smile, “Kelly, it’s so great that you’re worrying about other people! I mean, just the other day, a bunch of people were saying you were a mean jerk to everybody who you weren’t trying to get stuff from, and I was saying no, you’re really not a horrible person, and here you are, proving I was right.” She patted Kelly on the shoulder and said, “Thanks for being concerned!”
Alex walked off, with Robyn and Nicole right beside her and trying hard not to snicker. When they got far enough away, Robyn asked, “What are you going to tell people about the extra foundation?” They both knew she was covering up some nasty bruises that still hadn’t faded, because they had seen the bruises when they had visited her.
Alex told her, “That I got a rash from a plant or something when I took my little cousin Shar to L.A. so she could go to Disneyland.”
Nicole said, “That sounds good.”
Alex was so glad she’d finally told Robyn and Nicole her secret. Having people who knew the truth meant she had so many people who were looking out for her. Those first years where only Annie and Ray knew about her had been a nightmare a lot of the time. Having her family and friends in on the secret just made her life better in a lot of ways. And what would she have done if the SRI hadn’t wanted her to help them, and hadn’t been smart enough to figure out who she really was? How would she have ever helped Grover, or Hanna, or Shar, or even Azure Crush? How would she have met Hermione? How would anyone have stopped those silicates, or Gojira? Okay, she could see how the SRI all by itself might have stopped that blob and the big tarantula, but maybe not stopped the giant spider babies without losing pretty much all their ground personnel.
Alex was also glad that she had a reputation for dressing in her own style. Donna was wearing her cheerleader uniform, complete with short skirt and short-sleeved crop top. Kelly was wearing one of her usual outfits that was just inside the school regulations, including high heels that weren’t quite too high, a miniskirt that wasn’t quite too short, and a blouse that wasn’t quite too low-cut. Alex couldn’t wear any of that stuff today, because her bruises would show. But if Alex Mack wore a funky long-sleeved shirt, and overalls in a complementary color, along with her accessorizing knit hat and cute sneakers, then people just accepted it as her ‘style’.
A lot of people around the school seemed to think that having someone popular wearing stuff in her own style meant that anybody could wear stuff in their own style without getting picked on. Alex was all in favor of that. Mostly. Having cool hair colors or a pierced lip, like Lindsay, was kind of neat. A girl wearing a tight, see-through, black lace top that didn’t conceal her nipples was just icky and against school regs and likely to get her arrested for indecent exposure. There was a gigantic Gojira-sized difference between having your own unique style and being a groty sleazebag.
* * *
And speaking of Gojira, Alex had heard back from Jack. The Russians had run a scientific research sub all around Novaya Zemlya and the surrounding areas, just doing scientific re-mapping of the seabed and totally not because someone like Jack was yelling at people about what Gojira was and where it came from, and they’d found an enormous ‘cradle’ on the ocean floor, and when they had investigated with a bathysphere, they found an undersea base big enough to be self-sustaining, and it was crushed. The Russians figured Gojira was ‘grown’ somehow in that cradle, and when it was released, it smashed the base, probably accidentally. They figured from studying their high-resolution sonar images that it probably did the damage with one massive swipe of its tail. But a base set 3600 feet under the water meant that everyone in it died when it was busted to pieces. Jack was trying to get the DHS to sponsor a joint US-Russia deep diving expedition to go explore the thing, but he wasn’t having a lot of success, because 3600 feet down was below the official crush depth of the subs people wanted to use. Even the military ones.
But Alex was figuring that Gojira was a Maggie Walsh project, and a really time-consuming one, at that. So maybe Wacky Maggie wouldn’t be unleashing anything else horrible on the world for a few months. And Jack didn’t think there was much chance that Wacky Maggie was in that undersea base when it went, so Maggie would be causing even more trouble sooner or later.
And Willow had worked up cost estimates for the undersea base and that giant cradle and the whole Gojira project including the submarine. She was figuring something in the neighborhood of 2.7 billion dollars, maybe more, since The Collective wouldn’t be able to go through normal channels to buy some of their stuff. But Jack couldn’t see where even an international group could throw away that much money without someone noticing. So they had money sources that the SRI still hadn’t come close to tracking down.
That wasn’t good. It was ‘totally of the bad’ as Willow insisted.
But there were lots of possible sources of their money that weren’t exactly ‘visible’ or easy to track even if you were Willow. Or Jack’s IT guys. Or the entire U.S. DEA and FBI. Or the State Department.
Jack explained, “Nobody wants to talk about it, but no one knows who sold the North Koreans those biochemicals, so The Collective could be making tons of untraceable bucks from selling evil biochemicals all over the world. And if the North Koreans are buying, then there’s no telling who else is in the market and just didn’t bother to let us know.”
Willow added, “Or drugs. There’s a ton of untraceable cash going all over the world for drug sales. And illegal gunrunning. And then all the really major legit stuff that people skim money off, like oil, and gambling, and like that.”
Jack complained, “And I can’t go to certain groups who might have ways of doing some of the tracking, like the FBI and the DEA and the NSA, because we don’t want The Collective to know we’re onto them.”
Willow agreed, “Yeah, I really don’t want people with billions of dollars to throw around to suddenly realize that it would make their lives a lot easier if someone just killed me. Or Jack.”
Jack pointed out, “You’re still under wraps. No one in the DHS outside of us and Hammond has any idea who Acid Burn is. And we’ve kept knowledge of Terawatt’s secret identity down to a small group inside the SRI. The general said he didn’t want to know. He said, ‘what he doesn’t know can’t be squeezed out of him.’ I’m good with that.”
Alex noticed that Jack very carefully didn’t say that he was protected.
After the call, Alex wondered if Jack was safe at all. And she wondered just how unsafe things were for him, even on that military base tucked away in West Virginia.
* * *
Jack looked up at the tense knock on his office door. “Come!”
Major Finn marched stiffly into the office. Well, this couldn’t be good. Jack hadn’t seen the guy this tightly wound since Finn’s mom called to say that his dad had been in a tractor rollover.
Fortunately, tractors had gotten better since the tractors that Jack remembered from his childhood, so the Finn family tractor that rolled over had a sturdy enclosed cab with a roll-bar, and the accident wasn’t fatal. It was still a dislocated shoulder and four broken ribs, plus assorted cuts and bruises, but it wasn’t a tractor driver crushed under the weight of a large tractor and then horribly mangled.
Finn came to full attention in front of Jack’s desk without being asked to. Not that Jack ever insisted on that crap, unless he was calling in someone to chew their ass off for some incredibly stupid move or some gross dereliction of duty.
Finn stuck out a sheet of printer paper. The guy was really pale. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. And his hand shook as he handed Jack the paper. Trembling hands? Finn never did that. Finn was a rock. That was one of the things that made him a great sniper.
Finn stiffly announced, “Sir. I have uncovered the mole within the SRI. I am insisting on an immediate arrest, full counter-terrorism protocols to prevent escape or outside intervention, and full background investigation.”
Jack looked at the sheet of paper. It was a copy of an email from something called K.O.B.O.: Kids Of the Breslynn Orphanage. He looked at the message and who it was addressed to. He swore under his breath.
Finn rigidly said, “This is all the evidence I need to conclude that our traitor is … Major Riley Jerome Finn.”
Interlude XXIIWillow was totally focused on her monitor. She was trying really hard to dig up more information, since Jack was so with the worrying and Riley was uber upset. After all, who wouldn’t be upset to find out you weren’t just you, but you were created by the badguys to be part of a whole new generation of badguys?
But the Breslynn Orphanage in Delaware had kept all of its records on paper, and then it had burned down. Willow suspected that it was like that Project Galinka building that had ‘conveniently’ burned down. Arson seemed to be a pretty popular way of doing the hidden paper trail for some people.
And the non-paper trail wasn’t going so well, either. The email that Riley got wasn’t really from KidsOfBreslynn.org, because Willow checked that first thing. No, that domain name was of the available. Whoever was behind this hadn’t even bothered to register that domain anywhere, which she would have done first thing, so she could trick naïve investigators and point the finger at people she wanted to get in trouble and to trick anti-spam filters that had reverse lookup subroutines, and half a dozen other good reasons. The email was spoofed, and all but the last two mail headers were forged before the email was untraceably inserted into a major international mail redirector-slash-anonymizer in Finland, and the original source was totally unknown. Willow couldn’t assume that the original mail came from outside the U.S. like it claimed.
But she did a lot of the investigating, and she got lucky. There were paper records from the Breslynn Orphanage that had been turned over to the Dover, Delaware Children’s Services every year since the orphanage was started, and all the Dover Children’s Services records were now in electronic form, even if they weren’t supposed to be available outside their offices. That meant that it took Willow an extra eight minutes to get access through a really badly protected firewall, along with making sure she wasn’t leaving any traces and she couldn’t be backtracked.
Okay … Wow, this was weird. Every year from 25 years ago to 31 years ago, there was a big spike of newborn infants turned over to the orphanage all at once, right smack in the middle of summer and then adopted really soon afterward, like a couple months, even counting all the paperwork for adoptions. And every year it was exactly ten kids, who all got adopted really fast despite the high cost for adopting infants.
Wow, those kids would have to be really pretty, and really healthy, and really darling, to get adopted that fast by what were probably fairly well-off people who could afford what the orphanage was asking for newborns.
Suddenly she felt like she was going to be sick. Kids adopted as babies … Kids who were born in the middle of the summer … Kids who would be exceptional … Kids who would now be 25 to 31 years old …
She knew she was hyperventilating. She couldn’t help it. She needed a paper bag to breathe into, and all she had was her reusable canvas grocery bags so she didn’t need to buy bags at the grocery store, and she never really thought she needed to keep paper bags and she had used the paper for recycling and gardening stuff, and —
Her mail server beeped with a new incoming message for her. The return address claimed that the message was from KidsOfBreslynn.org.
She began to cry.