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Chapter 117 – Weeping WillowAlex hung up her tPhone and rushed to the door. “Willow! Come on in! We’re gonna have dinner soon. You’ll stay, right?”
Willow looked like she was going to burst into tears. In a tiny voice, she said, “You may not want me around after you hear what I have to tell you.”
Alex admitted, “Jack just called, and said you were really upset, and I needed to hear you out. But he didn’t say why, which isn’t like him, and he didn’t make any jokes, which is totally un-Jack-like.”
Tears filled Willow’s eyes and began streaming down her cheeks. “W-we found out why The Collective has so many people who are young and too handsome and too smart and too dynamic and too much of a go-getter. Howard Royer Locke.”
Alex winced a little. “The guy from Project Galinka?”
Willow nodded miserably. “He made 420 genetically engineered babies and stuck ’em in six orphanages around the world so they’re all between 25 and 31, and they all have birthdays in the middle of the summer, and they’re all adopted as infants, and they’re all too pretty and too strong and too fast and too athletic and too aggressive and too smart, and that makes them turn out extra-successful …”
Alex suddenly felt sick to her stomach. She knew who Willow was really talking about. No wonder Jack wouldn’t say why. No wonder he didn’t feel like making a joke. She stepped forward and hugged Willow tightly. “It’s okay.”
Willow hugged her back, but did it like she was afraid she might break Alex’s ribs or something. “It’s not okay! It’ll never be okay! I’m a monster! I’m a part of The Collective, and now I’m gonna turn out like the other Willow and go all evil, and I’ll have to start wearing all black and dye my hair black and do bad stuff all the time, and I might even have to be nice to Maggie Walsh!”
Alex wouldn’t let go when Willow tried to back away. “You’re not gonna go all evil. The other Willow only went like that because she absorbed so much black magic, and that can’t happen here.”
Willow whimpered, “If someone killed Jack, I … I think I could. I could totally go Crazed Revenge Woman to get back at people. I told you about the fake parking tickets for Cordelia, and the stuff I did to Mr. Gorsky’s computers. I don’t think I’m a nice person.”
Alex’s mom and dad came into the room.
Her mom hurried over and put an arm around Willow. “Honey, what’s the matter?”
Her dad stepped over, too. “Willow? Is there anything we can do?”
Willow sobbed, “I’m a monster, and you shouldn’t let me in your house or let me near Alex and Shar, and you shouldn’t buy me wonderful Christmas presents anymore even if they were so nice and I loved everything and you have great taste in clothes. And I can’t tell you what’s wrong because it’s a national defense secret.”
Alex said to her folks, “Jack just called. He told me you both have clearance to hear this, but you can’t discuss it with the rest of Team Terawatt, except Shar, who’s probably eavesdropping right this second anyway.”
“I AM NOT!” yelled a high-pitched voice from the hallway.
Alex explained, “There’s a secret international group that’s behind a lot of the badness we’ve been dealing with. We think they’re behind pretty much all of it, except the Danielle Atron stuff and the really long-term chemical spill stuff in the former USSR. Maybe even the giant clam problem in Santa Monica, since that may have been one of their factories. Hanna and Shar aren’t the only genetically altered babies they messed with. They’re just the latest ones. That we know about, anyway. So from 25 to 31 years ago, they fed probably-genetically-engineered babies into a group of orphanages, and all these babies are super-pretty and super-strong and super-fast and super-healthy and super-smart and super-talented.”
Willow sniffled. “And I could be some sort of ticking timebomb who’s gonna go off and do badness all over the place, and there’s a ton of horrible stuff I could do, and all of you should hate me!”
Alex insisted, “We don’t hate you, and you’re not gonna turn into some sort of monster, because you’re too smart for that. Other-Willow figured out how to beat the ‘dark side’, and you’re just as smart. Maybe even smarter. And we know about the badguys, and they don’t know we know, so we’re a couple steps ahead of ’em on the intel front. And I’ll always trust you and believe in you.”
“Us, too,” her mom softly murmured.
“YEAH!” hollered Shar from the hallway. “You’re my Auntie Willow, so that means you’re a good guy!”
Willow turned around and asked, “Shar? Could you come in and give Auntie Willow a hug? Because I really need some Shar-huggage right now.”
Shar scrambled in. She was already in her Pyre costume, as if she’d known ahead of time she might want to be wearing it. Alex wasn’t surprised at all. Shar had probably picked up Willow’s pain five minutes before Willow pulled into the driveway.
Willow hugged Shar, who hugged her back and said, “It’s okay, I’ll pertect you, and if any badguys are mean to you, you don’t have to go all Darth Vader on ’em, ’cause I’ll go firebend ’em for you.”
Alex would have said something about not letting Shar do firebending on badguys, but Willow was crying on Shar’s shoulder and Shar was hugging her hard and doing a great job of being supportive.
Alex’s mom insisted, “Now we’re about to sit down to dinner, and as soon as Shar changes back into her regular clothes, you’ll eat with us.” Her mom suddenly got a stricken look on her face and said, “Umm, I mean, if you want to, because I just remembered I fixed ham loaf for dinner. Sorry.”
Willow smiled tearfully. “I’d love to eat with you, if you still want me to, and I really don’t care if you don’t keep kosher, Jack sure doesn’t, and I’ve never had your ham loaf, so I’d like to try a small slice, if you don’t mind.”
Alex added, “There’s really good stuff to eat if you don’t like the ham loaf —”
“I made the salad!” Shar declared proudly. “And it’s got sliced almonds, and mandarin oranges fresh out of the can, and sliced sweet onions that Aunt Barb showed me how to cut up without crying, and little spinach leaves, and a special dressing, and it’s my favorite green salad ever, and Uncle George does Popeye jokes every time we have it.”
Alex’s dad smiled. “I’ll let Willow do the Popeye jokes tonight.”
Her mom said, “She might even have a new joke we haven’t heard ten times before.” Her dad acted like her mom had just shot him through the heart with an arrow.
Willow giggled tearfully and whispered, “Thanks, you guys are the best.”
Alex’s mom asked, “Is Jack being good with this?”
Willow nodded. “Yeah, he’s being way too good about it. He ought to be throwing me in prison like Mata Hari and having me executed, and he won’t even let me give him back the ring.”
“The ring?” Alex’s mom asked excitedly.
“You got married?” Shar piped.
Willow showed everyone the diamond ring on her finger, and she explained, “No, it means Uncle Jack wants to marry me, but we haven’t gotten married yet.” She looked around. “Didn’t Alex tell you about it already?”
While everyone else said ‘no’, Alex said, “I figured you’d want to tell everyone yourself, and I didn’t want to ruin the surprise.”
Willow frowned. “See? I’m a bad friend. I was so busy with Jack, and then we were so busy with the Pacific thing, and then that was so horrible, and I didn’t tell all of you.”
Alex carefully asked, “Have you told your mom and dad?”
Willow winced a little and confessed, “No? I mean, I wasn’t speaking to them after they were so mean about Jack, and then this ‘evil genetically engineered baby’ thing came up, and that was what I talked to Mom about.”
Uh-oh. Alex gently asked, “And how’d your mom take it?”
Willow smiled tearfully. “Actually, way better than I thought. Some of the stuff from when I was little, like them not wanting me to play with Xander and Jesse, and not wanting me to be all confrontational about Cordelia, and not wanting me to go out for sports, and all that … They knew I was too strong and too fast, and they were afraid I’d hurt someone or people would realize I wasn’t normal. Mom said she was afraid if I got into a fight with Cordelia, I’d punch her in the face and kill her. Or maim her. And Mom said she was worried about my fragile juvenile psyche, not Cordelia’s face. And my dad’s knee he ruined cycling when I was like five? They lied to everybody about it because … I busted my dad’s knee to pieces without realizing it. I was a horrible child, and they still kept me.”
Alex frowned. “That doesn’t make you a horrible child! You were a great child!”
Alex’s mom said, “Accidents don’t make you a bad person, even if you’re really strong.”
Shar insisted, “Yeah, that’s not as bad as when I burned Mommy when I was little. Or when I burned Alex.”
Alex scooped Shar up and hugged her and insisted, “Those were accidents, and not your fault at all.”
Willow pouted, “Mom and Dad were terrified for years I’d hurt another kid by accident, or I’d get in a fight and really hurt someone, and I thought they were just being hypercritical parent-type people, but really they were trying to protect me. And Mom said they wanted to adopt a baby who’d look like them, with brown hair and brown eyes and stuff, but when they saw me they just threw away their plans and picked me.”
Alex smiled. “I bet you were the prettiest baby ever.”
Willow frowned. “Well, I don’t think that counts for much, because someone designed me to be a pretty baby.”
Alex’s mom firmly said, “You have just as much right to be happy about your looks as any movie starlet or any Miss America contestant or any news anchor, because that’s something they were born with, too, and not something they earned, like your college degrees and all your computer stuff.”
* * *
After Shar reluctantly changed out of her superheroine outfit and they sat down to dinner, Alex’s dad suddenly asked, “If there are these super-babies who are 25 to 31 now, are any of them really threats after all this time? And how are you going to find them?”
Willow sighed and looked around. “We know there were 420 of ’em, including me, and most of them were in orphanages outside the country, and all the orphanages have suspiciously missing paperwork, so tracking down some of them is gonna be impossible, but we’re working on Americans right now.”
Alex almost choked on her ham, because she suddenly thought of three more people who were between 25 and 31, and too good looking, and too strong, and too tough, and way too good at being soldiers.
Shar stared at her and asked through a big mouthful of salad, “Alex? How come you’re worrying about Major Riley and Lieutenant Jo and Captain Graham?”
Alex’s mom looked back and forth between her two girls and finally gasped, “Oh, no.”
Her dad started to say, “Not Jo, I mean …” And he just tailed off.
Willow groaned. “Okay, maybe I wasn’t supposed to tell this, but Riley and Jo, too. But not Graham.”
Alex thought about how many times someone had noticed that Jo was really pretty, or really strong, or really tough, or really a great martial artist. And Jo had healed up awful fast from that broken leg. And Jo had been first in her class at West Point, and then had kicked butt in Special Forces training. And then there were all the times Jo had shown just how smart she really was. She wondered how Jo was handling the news.
And then there was Riley. No kidding. She thought back on all the times she’d thought about how smart he was, and how he knew tons of stuff, and how he was so good at languages. And everyone said he was amazing at martial arts. And he’d picked Jo up and run full speed out of the spider cave. And he was amazingly brave, too. Yeah, she could believe that, too. She just was surprised Graham wasn’t the same, because he was smart and handsome and tough, too.
Alex’s dad finally said, “Well, if Jack was allowed to pick the cream of the crop from the entire armed forces, then it’s not too surprising he ended up with some superhumanly talented people.”
Alex agreed, “Yeah, and I went after some people who were some of the most awesome people in the whole multiverse, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Willow’s more than just a great computer hacker in this universe.”
Her mom added, “A great computer hacker who’s beautiful, and also a lovely person.” Willow blushed so hard she was beet-red.
Her dad suggested, “So maybe Willow needs to be driving down here every Sunday afternoon for our kung fu lesson with Jo.”
Alex grinned. “Yeah! And then after dinner, after Jo goes home, Willow can stay and spend the night and we girls can do girl stuff in our room.”
Shar nodded eagerly. She would have said, “YEAH!” but she had a huge mouthful of ham loaf.
Alex’s mom smiled patiently at Shar. “You can take smaller bites, honey. We won’t let Alex eat the entire table before you get fed.”
Her dad stressed, “Girl stuff sounds fine, as long as you and Shar still get to bed at a reasonable hour. Just because Willow doesn’t have school on Mondays doesn’t mean you two get out of it.”
Willow smiled shyly. “Well, I sort of have school on Mondays these days. I’ve been having conference calls with a couple of my old professors at Cal Tech, and now I’m working on a doctorate in computer architecture via distance learning.”
Alex asked, “Don’t you know more than the professors on that kind of stuff? Especially the computer security stuff?”
Willow shrugged. “Well, I know more in a few areas, but they know more in other areas, and there’s a ton of cool stuff I can learn from them. And once I do the coursework through the textbooks and journals and homework and tests and all that, I’m going to use three papers I wrote — well, two I already wrote and one I’m just starting on — in computer architecture and security issues, and Professor Goldfarb said I can submit the three of them as my thesis because they’re basically all three on the same thing and each follows the next, and he said he really learned a lot from the second one and he couldn’t wait to read the third one!”
Alex’s dad teased, “Will we have to call you Doctor Rosenberg?”
Willow grinned back. “No, you won’t, Doctor Mack.” She added, “My mom is already Dr. Rosenberg. My dad is just Professor Rosenberg, or Rabbi Rosenberg, so I’ll just be Professor Rosenberg. Or Ms. Rosenberg. But it’ll take a couple years of study. I told Dad about it on my way down here, and he said he’s really proud of me for continuing my education.”
Alex’s mom insisted, “Well, he should be. You’re a very remarkable young woman.”
Pouting, Willow said, “Maybe, but that meant more to me before I found out someone made me that way.”
Alex said, “No, you’re still amazing. Even for the people we know about, like Riley and Jo.”
Willow added, “And Clare Tobias. And you-know-who in the Big Apple.”
Oh, right. Duh. Adopted into a really rich family, driven, really smart, really good-looking, really strong and fast, really skilled in martial arts … Just like Riley. And Willow had even said his birthday was really near hers. But hadn’t she said that about … Alex gasped, “Glenn Howard!”
Willow cringed. “Eww, I didn’t think about him! But he has the same birthday as me. I’d better check on him, too. All we need is a creepy radio shock jock running for President and being one of the badguys.”
Shar volunteered, “I could go firebend him, if you want.”
Alex said, “No Shar, that’s not a good idea.”
At the same time, Alex’s mom said, “Charlene, what did we talk about just yesterday?”
Shar pouted as she recited, “No firebending on people, even if they’re badguys who totally deserve it, but I can firebend on their weapons and their monsters. And if a badguy builds a robot like Baron von Kreep did, I can firebend that, too.”
Alex tried to get Willow to stay the night, but Willow was adamant. “Oh, no, I really need to drive home tonight. I’ve got a ton of computer analysis I need to do, and I really need to be at my computers for most of it, even though it’s really great you guys are offering. I mean, I don’t know what I’d do without all of you.”
Alex’s mom offered to make some coffee for Willow to drive home with, but Willow told her, “Umm, I kind of get hyper with coffee, and I was just gonna go with a package of organic ginger chews I’ve got out in the car. That way, I’ll be able to sleep when I get home.”
So Alex hugged Willow, and Shar did, too, and Alex’s mom and dad did, too, and Shar came back for another hug.
Alex stepped outside and watched Willow drive off. Willow, and Riley, and Jo, too. How was Jack going to explain all this to General Hammond? Okay, General Hammond seemed really nice. Most of those guys at that fancy meeting at Andrews Air Force Base weren’t so nice. How was Jack going to explain this to them?
It was just a good thing Jack only had two soldiers to justify. Maybe he wouldn’t even need to tell anybody about Willow.
* * *
Graham was home, but not enjoying the time away from his office. Not after the latest news on The Collective. And he couldn’t talk to his girlfriend about the problem, because the colonel had designated everything about The Collective as Eyes Only. He picked up his phone when it rang, and he checked the Caller ID.
He was just glad it wasn’t Lupo again, because that woman was really stressing out. He hadn’t seen her stress like this in combat against creatures that would have most people pissing themselves and fainting. She hadn’t stressed like this when she was lying in a cave with a broken leg and no time for evac before her position would be overrun by hundreds of giant baby spiders, plus a Mark 77 blast.
Maybe she didn’t mind dying for her country but she was afraid she could be an enemy of the things she cared about. Maybe she was feeling like everything she’d worked so hard for was slipping through her fingers. Maybe she was feeling like all her hard work didn’t matter anymore, because she was some sort of genetically designed freak. He didn’t think he could imagine how awful Lupo had to be feeling right now. And Riley. If it wasn’t ridiculously late on the East Coast, he’d call Riley and let him know his friends were still there for him. But Graham knew from experience that Riley the farmboy still opted for the ‘early to bed, early to rise’ approach, even when he went on vacation.
“Miller here.”
“Captain? This is Sergeant Mark Philip Carlson.”
“Yes, sergeant?” Graham was getting a really bad feeling. Carlson was never this formal.
“Sir, I just received a personal email from something called Kids Of the Breslynn Orphanage, and … I …” He gulped. “I need you to have base security come arrest me.”
Graham had a sudden impulse to bang his head on his coffee table. Instead, he said, “Sergeant, I know what that email means. You’re not the first person to get that letter and demand to be arrested.”
Carlson stopped and thought for a second. “Who? You mean … the ell-tee?”
Graham said, “Roger that. I want you to sit tight, don’t do anything crazy, just stay home with your wife, and come see me at seven ack emma in my office. Then you and I will sit down together and call the colonel. Also, I want you to forward your copy to me, so I can send it off to Acid Burn for analysis.”
Carlson asked, “Where am I gonna end up, sir? Guantanamo?”
Graham told him, “You’re going to end up on team two, just where you are now.” He remembered what the colonel had said to Lupo. “You’re not the enemy. You just share a common gene pool. We’ve served together, and I’ve seen what you’ve done to protect this country and this planet. That means I trust you a lot more than I trust some of the generals we’ll probably be dealing with over the next few months.”
After long seconds, Carlson said in a choked voice, “Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.”
Graham said, “So just sit tight. If you can’t sleep, I think ‘Broken Arrow’ is on about five different channels tonight.”
“I think I’ll stick with the Adam Sandler marathon on channel 38, even if I don’t feel much like laughing right now.”
Graham just said, “That’s fine.” He personally thought “Broken Arrow” had far too many gaping plot holes and fundamental military mistakes to watch it again. He wasn’t the biggest Adam Sandler fan, either. But there was a Jim Carrey movie on in a few minutes, and he figured he was going to be getting nervous phone calls for a couple of hours.
“Come to think of it …” he muttered.
He picked his phone back up and dialed Lupo. She answered in the middle of the first ring, which told him how desperately on edge she was. “Lieutenant Jo Lupo speaking, sir!”
He told her, “Lieutenant, we just got another hit from the Kids of the Breslynn Orphanage. I’d like you to call Sergeant Carlson and explain about what happened when you came to see me, and what happened when we called the colonel.”
“Sir? Carlson, too? How many hits is the SRI going to take on this?”
He frowned. “Way too many for my taste, Lupo. But look at it from an outsider’s perspective. Who’s Colonel O’Neill going to be recruiting? The top people in the entire country, but obviously not colonels and generals. He needs people who are at the top of their game. So forget people over thirty-five or forty. Everyone who’s gone through college and then military training, and then took a couple years to establish just how goddamn good they are? They’re going to be twenty-four or twenty-six, minimum. So he’s picking the best military personnel in the country who happen to be twenty-five to thirty-three or so. That means he’s picking from these special kids who also opted for a career in the American military.”
Lupo asked, “What else do I do about Carlson, sir?”
Graham ordered, “I want you at my office at seven. Then the three of us will call Colonel O’Neill and give him the news. You and I will be as supportive as senior officers can be.”
“Yes, sir. I will get on that ASAP, sir.”
“Thank you, Lupo.” He hung up and went to the fridge. He really wanted a beer, but he figured he was going to be ‘on call’ all night long. He grabbed one of the Dr. Peppers he had bought for Riley, and he thought about Riley as he opened it. “Hope you’re doing okay, buddy.”
* * *
Alex was checking her cameras before she drove over to Ray’s basketball game. She was still feeling achy, but she was way better than she’d felt Monday morning. Boy, was she glad she hadn’t had to run track or lift weights on Monday. Or fight supervillains and giant monsters.
And the b-ball team was doing so great! She really hoped everyone could stay healthy. Not that she was going to say anything like that out loud, for fear she might jinx things. But they had only lost one game so far, and that was against one of the big Bay Area teams who everybody said was one of the two or three teams predicted to win the state championship in their division. And it had gone down to the last shot of the game. Alex thought that Ray should have passed to Heyward for a shot to tie it up, instead of passing off to Jackson for a three-pointer to win it at the buzzer. Well, Jackson only just missed, so maybe it was a good play.
But before she got out the door, her tPhone buzzed in her pocket. Uh-oh.
She stepped into the home office, shut the door, and answered her phone. “Terawatt here.”
Jack replied, “Glad I got you before you were off to watch the Tera-date.”
Did he have a schedule for her whole life now? Okay, that would actually make a lot of things easier, if he already knew when not to call her. She just said, “I was just about to leave the house.”
He told her, “Okay, I’ll make this quick. I need Terawatt at Camp Atron on Saturday at 0400 your time. Miller’s Cessna will pick up you and Acid Burn. We need to have a face-to-face here about our Plan A friends and a certain orphanage. Wear your uniform. We’ll have guests. I’ll provide the gym bag, the food, the Diet Coke, and some chatter. I really need you there to support our SRI people, because we’ve got a few higher-ups who aren’t seeing them as a valuable resource, and I am not gonna let my people get railroaded.”
That sounded bad. Mega-bad. She said, “I’ll be there. You can count on me.”
He said, “Great. I’ll tell Finn he can rely on you. And we’re not mentioning Acid Burn’s adoption status if we can avoid it.”
Crud. There went another Saturday morning of martial arts training. How was she ever going to get good at this stuff, if she kept having to skip lessons?
* * *
But still, on Saturday morning, she was hovering two hundred feet above the tarmac at ten minutes to four. It was too dark for anyone to see her, but she could see the lights of Graham’s Cessna on its final approach and touchdown, while a fuel truck drove out to where the jet was going to park, and a petite electric car with fake license plates parked nearby.
Alex smiled as a redhead in a trenchcoat and sexy dark glasses got out of the car and strode over to where the Cessna was taxiing. Willow just needed some black heels and sheer black stockings sticking out below her trenchcoat to be a classic Mata Hari type, straight out of a cool movie. Okay, Willow might not like that comparison right now.
When the Cessna popped open its door and Willow walked into the jet, Alex flew in after her. Graham was there, and Jo, and Sergeant Carlson.
It suddenly dawned on her why the Sergeant was there. Handsome, built like Conan the Barbarian, an awesome soldier … Okay, he could easily be an Orphan, too.
Alex finally realized the problem that the Orphans presented. What if the best politicians and businessmen and lawyers and soldiers and scientists and everything in that 25-31 age bracket were all Orphans? They’d take over the country without a fight!
Uh-oh. They could take over every country from within. There wouldn’t have to be a giant war. They would take over countries, wipe out any threats with their monsters and city-imploders and everything else creepy that they were making, and they would rule the planet. After they got rid of 9,999 out of 10,000 ordinary people who were in their way and using up their resources. They’d probably just keep a few hundred thousand slaves to mine their ores and cut their wood and raise their food and clean their mansions and anything else they wanted.
And then they’d probably get into wars among themselves and wipe out the rest of the planet by accident, because Willow said they were probably genetically engineered to be aggressive, so they’d take over stuff.
Unless regular people caught on in the middle of stuff and started a huge war against everyone in the world who was 25 to 31 and good-looking and smart and athletic. Eww, that would maybe be even worse.
She wondered if she was the last person in the SRI to figure that out. She was pretty sure this meeting meant that Jack had worked it all out. Okay, she was pretty sure Jack had worked a lot of that out way before they found out about the Breslynn Orphanage.
She sat down in the Cessna and Willow waved a tablet computer at her. So she pulled out her gym bag, pulled the tablet out of it, and started it up. Sure enough, Willow had a little chat program working for the tablets she wanted to contact. Alex was totally surprised. Not.
So suddenly in the chat window, a line from Jo appeared. ‘Willow, you’re not supposed to be able to get into these tablets.’
‘I wrote the software and set up the security so I’m pretty sure I am supposed to be able to get into the SRI tablets.’
Alex wrote, ‘I’m here, too. Are you doing okay?’
So they spent over an hour chatting silently with Jo about how worried she was that she’d get arrested and locked up, or at least lose everything she’d worked for since she was nine years old and she decided she wanted to be a soldier like her Uncle Marco. And Willow and Jo talked about how Jack had interviewed them and Riley and Sergeant Carlson for like an hour, looking for people dropping in and trying to talk them into joining other stuff right when things looked bad for them. Willow complained that when people in the industry knew Oracle was eating her alive, nobody ran in and volunteered to be her white knight, probably because everyone was afraid of getting Oracle’s muscle pointed at them next, and the most she’d gotten was a few dozen companies offering her stupid jobs running their IT groups.
Jo complained in her chat window, ‘Could be worse. About all I got was the chance to be on a special detail for a three-star general who’s a known lech; and putting out for an old white fart would be a shitload worse than pretty much anything I was facing. Carlson got an offer to jump straight to one of the CFL teams, but he thought the assistant GM he talked to was a slimy weasel so he said no. And we all know Riley did exactly what he planned at the NCAA’s, and he was busy looking at Ranger school.’
Willow added, ‘And Jack got blood samples from all of us, and they had a blood sample for Clare Tobias, but with just a sample of size five they don’t have a genetic marker mapped out. Yet. It would’ve been really helpful if Mister Gotham hadn’t told Jack hell no. Jack claimed he said kiss my grits Mel but I know he wouldn’t say that.’
About halfway through the flight, the sat phone rang, and Graham got it. “Captain Miller here.”
It was Jack, and he sounded really grouchy. “Miller, I assume you have everyone onboard.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jack growled, “Your flight’s getting redirected. To Andrews AFB. And we all know how well that went the last time.”
“Yes, sir. Can I ask why?”
Jack said, “Because Hammond got over-ridden by a couple four-stars when he made an official report to the Joint Chiefs about our little, teensy-weensy personnel issue. Do not expect that this is going to be as congenial as a meeting at our HQ in West Virginny. Just alert everyone, and warn them not to let anyone rattle them, because … Crap, gotta go.” And the line went dead.
Jo muttered, “Well, I guess we also know the colonel wasn’t supposed to give us a heads-up.”
Graham pointed out, “But he did. So we act like we have no idea what’s going on.”
Just then the co-pilot popped open the door to the pilot’s cabin and announced, “Captain, we’re being redirected to Andrews, and we’re not supposed to tell you ahead of time. Sorry, sir.”
Graham nodded. “Okay, so it’s a good thing you’re not telling us. Go ahead and adhere to protocols from here on out.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sergeant Carlson asked, “Sir, are we being fed to the lions?”
Graham looked over at Willow and smiled. “We can’t be. Not all of us are Christians.” Then he gave the sergeant a serious look. “I’m putting my trust in the colonel. We’ll see how this plays out.”
Willow timidly raised her hand. “I can make sure we can get a call out without it being detected. And maybe Terawatt could make it. There are a lot of people who owe her favors right now.”
Graham asked, “Just one call?”
Willow shrugged. “At least one. I can check after each call and see when we lose the anonymity on our VPN through the DHS firewall.”
Alex thought for a second and said, “I’ve got a couple of ideas. Who did you want me to call?”
* * *
They landed at Andrews Air Force Base. Alex wasn’t too thrilled when the Cessna was directed over to that same building she had been in before. She was really wondering if this was going to be as bad as the last time. She glanced at Willow’s ashen face, and she realized it could actually be a lot worse.
This time, there were a dozen heavily-armed Air Force SFs waiting to escort the five of them into the building. And they went to the same security desk. And just like before, there was a creepy-looking corporal at the desk, being creepy and uncooperative. Corporal Creepy said, “Terawatt, we’re going to need you to step into the screening room on my left, your right, so we can verify who you are.”
She said, “That’s ridiculous, corporal. You know the official rules on my ID. I have the ID card. I have the powers. And the last time I went into that room, I was assaulted by a supervillain.”
The corporal at the desk smiled nastily. “We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.” And Alex heard the sound of several guns being cocked behind her. “Either you cooperate, or one of your traitor friends gets shot to death trying to escape.”
Alex knew she could disarm all those guys at the same time, using her TK. But wouldn’t that make everything a lot worse?
Willow whispered, “Just do it.”
She walked into the room, keeping all her TK ready in case she needed it.
The door swung shut behind her, cutting off all the sound from the hall. There was no attack. There were just two men in uniform, sitting in folding chairs in the middle of the room.
Both men stood up formally. The shorter one said, “Terawatt. Sorry to have to force you in here, but it is a matter of national security.” He gave her an oily smirk. “Colonel Harry Maybourne, NID. And this is Colonel Roger McNamara. We have a proposal for you.”
Colonel McNamara said, “We ID’ed Willow Rosenberg when she arrived at Camp Atron. We know who she is, because she’s running a civilian security study for the DHS, and civilian oversight is our jurisdiction. But if she’s on this flight, then she could be one of Colonel O’Neill’s traitors.”
Colonel Maybourne inserted, “It only took a few minutes to find out she’s twenty-five, born in the middle of the summer like your other traitors, and adopted as a newborn. Like Riley Finn, Jo Lupo, and Mark Carlson, except slightly younger.”
Colonel McNamara added, “Given the number of federal computers she’s been inside, we can already get her convicted for enough computer crimes to put her away for seventy years, and that’s before we try her for treason, which is punishable by death.”
Alex was furious. She wanted to punch these guys in the nose. To zap them right in the keester. To do something horrible to them. She just stood stiffly and waited for the other shoe to drop.
McNamara smiled ruthlessly. “But we won’t, if you convince her to go to work for us …” He took a breath. “… And you give us Charlie McGee.”