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Chapter 130 – Rosenberg, LimitedAlex was pretty sure Clare Tobias wasn’t there because she had a secret crush on Bruce Schneier. She immediately used her TK to pull out that business card so she could see the phone numbers. She then used her TK to send Mister Barnes a fast text that wanted criminal Clare Tobias was here and posing as one of his security people. Then she sent a copy of the text to Willow, so the whole SRI could get notified.
Then she took an intercepting path and headed Clare off, even though she knew this could turn out to be a totally bad idea. She pulled out her GoPro as she went, and she got it running, and she made sure her little clip-on sound system for it was on.
She stopped in front of the woman and smiled. “Excuse me, can I ask you a couple of questions?”
The woman crisply said, “I’m sorry, but I have a time-sensitive problem I have to deal with.”
Alex just kept smiling. “I’m sure you do, Miss Tobias. May I call you Clare? I’d love to ask you a few questions and get your point of view on things, especially since you’re currently the fourth most wanted person in America.”
“You seem to be confusing me with some manner of felon. I’m Andrea Harrison, and I’m part of this security detail.”
Alex didn’t let her smile drop. She didn’t stop recording, either. “That’s a really great cover. I bet you’ve got some awesome ID, too. But I figure the real security people will be able to ID you in a split second. So maybe you could answer some questions first. You weren’t really going to try to assassinate the President and frame Terawatt, were you? Who are you here to kill? Is it true you’re connected with the people of Umbrella Corp? Is it true you have superhuman strength and speed? And why, with all the money the Tobias family has, would you give that up to work for an international terrorist organization?”
Clare casually asked, “Have you told anybody about seeing me?”
Alex couldn’t believe someone as smart as Clare Tobias was asking a question that dumb. Did the Collective train their people by showing them Doctor Who eps? Or maybe people were really just that dumb that they’d tell the bad guys ‘oh no, I haven’t told anyone else yet so go right ahead and murder me please’. The one thing she totally wasn’t going to do was say ‘no’.
She rolled her eyes. “Well, duh. I texted the security people here and the local cops, and I sent my editor and my agent some pics of you that I got from way over on the other side of the room when I spotted you.”
Clare glanced around without making a big deal of it, in a totally casual super-spy way. But Alex could see three security guys rushing up from behind Clare, and there were probably about that many rushing up behind Alex, and maybe some coming from the back hallways where the staffers went.
Alex tried to sound calm as she stalled, “You can run for it, but these guys will shoot you. You can take me as a hostage, but then I’ll keep asking you really annoying questions. And these guys will shoot you anyway, because they don’t have to play by police rules. Or you can think up something smarter than I can.”
Clare suddenly grabbed Alex in a choke-hold and turned so their backs were to the wall. Crud, Clare was really strong! With her other hand, Clare reached inside her blazer and pulled out a small glass vial full of a yellowish, nearly-clear liquid. “Nobody come any closer! This is a nerve gas based on Sarin. If I crush this vial in my hand, it’ll volatilize in seconds, and nobody in this entire building will make it out alive.”
Alex had her chin down, so Clare wasn’t really going to be able to choke her out. And Clare didn’t want to do that anyway. She wanted a conscious hostage she could use as a screen, not a limp body she would have trouble dragging around.
But why had Clare been heading for the food and drinks, instead of planting the vial in the conference room with some sort of release system so she had time to get away? And where was the release system? Surely she’d need something to release the nerve gas in a spray, plus some kind of timer or remote trigger.
Alex totally wished she knew more about poison gases and how to use them. Her not knowing enough about nerve gas and bombs and triggers and electronics might just get everyone in this building killed in the next few minutes.
But the more Alex thought about it, the more she was sure Clare had been heading for the food and drinks. She wasn’t going to release a nerve gas into the air, which would probably be way easier to do through the HVAC system. She was going to spike the food. Or the drinks. All Clare had to do was pour that bottle into the big coffee urn, and she could poison most everyone important without affecting herself.
But not everyone would drink the coffee. Did that matter? Was the objective to just poison a handful of important computer people and wreck the meeting? Or would the poison somehow affect other people who didn’t drink the stuff? Or what if it was like the t-virus stuff so it would infect all these people and then they’d go back to their offices and spread it to everyone in the computer industry and wipe out Silicon Valley in one fell swoop?
And what the heck was a ‘fell swoop’? And why was her brain going off in weird tangents when she had a major crisis on her hands?
Alex couldn’t figure out how to tell what was in that vial without stealing it out of Clare’s hand first. Clare might be a lot stronger, but Alex had other abilities. Okay, she could stop Clare by using her powers to yank the vial out of Clare’s hand. Or by protecting the vial with a TK forcefield. Or doing one of those and shocking the crud out of Clare. If she had to. She reached into her camera bag without looking down and found what she was after.
Alex didn’t bother to turn her head. “Come on, Clare, even I know that’s not a nerve gas. You don’t have a trigger system for it. It’s a poison you were going to put in the coffee. I’m just a dumb reporter, and I can figure that much out.”
She felt Clare tense up to do something violent, and she figured she was out of time. She already had the flash unit from her camera bag. The flash had metal contact points where it slid into her camera’s hot shoe. She pressed the contacts against Clare’s wrist so that her fingertips were touching Clare’s skin at the same time.
Clare screamed and convulsed when Alex’s bolt of electricity cut through her. Alex’s TK wrapped around the vial so Clare couldn’t crush it, and Alex used some more TK to slide it from Clare’s shaking hand and let it ‘drop’ safely to the carpet and ‘roll’ out of the way.
Clare staggered backward, and three security guards grabbed her. Clare was pinned face-down and zipcuffed in seconds.
Alex started taking more pictures as she pointed out, “That’s Clare Tobias. She broke out of zipcuffs and beat the snot out of a military security team when she was caught at that Air Force base in D.C. So you might want something more secure.” She picked up the vial and used her TK to speed-dial Jack while sliding her phone up the inside of her blouse until it was just above her bra. Once she was sure Jack or Walter was on the line and would be able to hear her talk, she clearly said, “And I think you’d better call the DHS and the FBI as fast as you can, because Clare Tobias wouldn’t be here for nothing, so this is probably something just as nasty as that Umbrella thing in Iowa.” Then she took some more pictures.
Mister Barnes showed up and looked at Clare, and then at Alex. “What exactly did you do? She’s supposed to be one bad-ass fighter.”
Alex shrugged and lied, “My dad’s a chemist and a genius inventor. He hotwired the capacitors in my flash so I can use it as a taser if I absolutely have to. I finally had to. It’s probably wrecked now.”
Clare groaned from underneath two security men. “You little bitch! When I get loose again …”
Alex just stared at her. “Get in line. I’m A.L. Mack. I’ve already been targeted twice by Danielle Atron and once by Azure Crush. Someone who’s extra-strong? I’ve seen scarier. In my own high school.”
Clare writhed angrily. “Goddamn, that hurt! Why does everybody have to taser me?”
Alex knelt down and took a couple more pictures. She asked, “Is that how the DHS captured you at Andrews Air Force Base? Who was it? A team of Navy SEALs? Army Rangers? Delta Force? Air Force SFs?”
“Fuck you.”
Alex told her, “You’re supposed to say ‘no comment’.”
Clare really cursed at her then. But Jo Lupo was way better at the cursing thing. Clare just mainly said the F-word a lot.
Mister Barnes carefully said to Alex, “You can hand me that vial now. It’s not safe to be carrying around.”
Alex firmly told him, “And it’s sure not safe to hand off to people you don’t know. I’m hanging onto it until a DHS or FBI agent I can verify comes to take it.”
Mister Barnes frowned at her but obviously didn’t want to wrestle her for it, given what could be in it. He said, “In that case, we’ll all move to a secure office.” He raised his voice. “Get that coffee and food quarantined in case it’s already been tampered with. Tell the conference there’s been a security problem and they’ll have to skip the mid-afternoon treats. Then get that bitch in handcuffs and legcuffs, and I want two pairs of handcuffs on her.”
“Come on, Mike. Who do you think she is? Azure Crush?”
Mister Barnes gave the guy a glare. “Which would you rather be? The obedient guy who put two pairs of handcuffs on a wanted terrorist because his boss is a paranoid goofball? Or the idiot guy who let a wanted terrorist escape and beat the holy crap out of him in the process because he didn’t listen to orders?”
“Fine, fine …”
Alex pointed out, “She’s recovering really quick from a shock that should have been incapacitating. She’s probably a lot stronger and tougher than you’d expect.”
Mister Barnes frowned. “You seem to be especially well informed about her.”
Alex shrugged. “I made my mark in the news biz by getting the first Terawatt sound bite. I had to go into a super-battle to get it. And Danielle Atron and Azure Crush have both come after me since then. So I’ve made it my business to be better informed about superheroes and supervillains than anyone else out there. That includes Miss Tobias. You should already know she’s that Terawatt impostor who tried to kill a bunch of generals and maybe the President.”
Mister Barnes nodded. “Yeah, pretty hard to miss a hundred news reports and a Most Wanted position and a nationwide BOLO.” He ordered, “I want her in a secure room with at least three armed guards watching her at all times. And see if anyone has a steel cable so we can try and ground her out just in case she’s got electrical powers, too.”
Alex didn’t tell him that Terawatt’s lightning powers didn’t work that way, and an impostor with lightning powers would probably not have a problem with a grounding cable. If someone, someday, decided to try and stop Terawatt by grounding her out or throwing water on her, they were going to be in for a big shock. And a big surprise.
Mister Barnes looked at her and asked, “Could you come with us, if you’re going to be carrying that vial around instead of trusting me?”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “I wouldn’t miss this for anything.” She used her TK to text Willow again and give her the 4-1-1, even though the phone was still in her bra. Texting without looking at the buttons was pretty tricky, but she’d been practicing, and if she made a few typos, Willow would still figure out what she meant.
So Alex went downstairs into the basement areas, where the security guys had set up shop. One room was definitely set up for a holding cell. It had solid concrete block walls, and everything had been taken out except a heavy steel table and a couple of really solid-looking chairs. Plus the door was a security door in a steel doorframe with an extra-heavy lock.
After that, it got really boring. Mister Barnes wouldn’t let her get out her tablet which she wanted so she could organize her work and send it off to KPVC. He wouldn’t let her leave. He wouldn’t leave her alone as long as she had that vial. He wouldn’t let her go without giving a detailed story to the police and the FBI and whoever else showed up. And he wouldn’t let her try and interview Clare, either. So she sat down and pretended she was just playing games on her phone.
She got a text on her phone. It was from Graham: sri on its way pls stall til we arrive.
Then she got a text from Willow: r u okay?
She texted back, letting Willow know she was fine, no one got hurt, they had Clare Tobias, and there was a vial that someone like Bill Lee or Hank Marshall needed to analyze.
She got a text from Jack: operation tera-twin under way.
She had no idea what that meant. Oh, wait, she probably did know what that meant. If she was right, this was going to be awesome. She was just sorry she wouldn’t get to see it.
Then Alex spent about twenty minutes with her GoPro face down in her lap but making it look like she was concentrating on playing a game on her phone. She was using her TK to edit her GoPro footage and create some files the TV station would want to use. That was hard, because she had to keep her camera down where the security guys wouldn’t notice it, so it was hard to study the footage. Then she held her phone down by the camera and used her TK to hook them up with a cable she had in a pocket of her camera bag. Then she used Willow’s app to make her tPhone look like it was her regular Alex phone so A.L. Mack could email stuff off to KPVC. Once she was done, she actually played Carcassonne on her phone for a while. The only problem was that if she wasn’t playing on easy mode, the AI kept clobbering her, which was mega-frustrating.
The police showed up pretty soon, and she insisted on not handing over the vial until she could verify it was going to someone like the DHS or the CDC. They didn’t like that. She insisted, “Look, I study this stuff for a living. Get someone like Dr. William Lee of the DHS, or Professor Henry Marshall of the HWAAA here, and I’ll turn it over.” Then she reeled off the names of some of the CDC doctors and scientists Terawatt had met in Iowa, too. She tossed in Dr. Samantha M. Finn just to see if these guys were paying any attention to what she was telling them.
Next, some FBI guys showed up, led by Special Agent Matthews. Their clothes looked oddly like the security guys, which didn’t make them look all that official. She told them the same thing. The FBI guys were getting really cranky at her, when Agent Matthews got a call. He stepped out of the room … and came back in about four minutes looking like someone had just stolen his lunch and then laughed in his face about it.
He growled, “The DHS will be here in a couple minutes, and they’re taking over the whole case. They’ll take Tobias into custody and they’ll take the evidence Miss Mack won’t cough up.”
One of his men smugly asked, “Can we watch her argue with them?”
He fumed, “No. They’ve even got one of the guys she mentioned.” He glared right at Alex and told her, “Kid, I hope you know what you’re doing, because the DHS has some black ops groups that make Tobias and her former pals in the NID look pretty damn wholesome.”
She gave him a smile. “Thanks for being worried about me.” Okay, she didn’t really think he was worried about her. She figured he was more worried about not getting much out of her and having the case yanked out from under him. “But Terawatt has said some really good things about the DHS people she’s worked with, so I’m going to trust them … And I might be able to find out more about who these DHS people are.”
“That’s a really bad idea, kid,” he frowned. “You may not be the most cooperative reporter I ever met, but I don’t want you to get yourself in real trouble. Some of these people are not nice guys.”
Okay, maybe he was worried about her. It would be nice if she knew some nice FBI people to go with the goodguys Terawatt already knew. She asked, “Agent Matthews, can I get a business card from you? You seem like a nice guy, and maybe I could find out something off the record you’d like to hear about.”
He handed her a card. She looked over it and then tucked it into a pocket. After she thanked him, he said, “Look, if you end up in a jam, call that number. We may not be Terawatt, but we’re still the good guys.”
Still, she had to wait a little while longer before Lieutenant Marshall and Lieutenant Bailey showed up in cool uniforms and acted so stiff that the FBI guys were really cheesed off at them. Especially when Alex said, “Professor Marshall, thanks for coming. I read your doctoral dissertation. That was totally awesome.” She hadn’t really, but she needed to look like she knew about him without revealing that she was actually Terawatt.
Once the FBI guys stomped out and slammed the door, Alex put her fingers to her lips and snuck over to the door to eavesdrop …
“Hey, Matthews. ‘Ooh, can I get your business card?’ Nancy Drew back there is all warm for your form!”
“Shuddup, Mitchell. There’s no way she’s hot for me. And she’s like sixteen, so keep it in your pants!”
Okay, that was ickier and less informative than she was hoping for. She sighed. “Never mind. Okay, here’s the vial she was going to pour somewhere. My guess is the coffee urn. So it’s bound to have something nasty in it.”
Lieutenant Marshall said, “Thank you, ma’am. I would prefer it if you would come with us so we can make sure you’re not contaminated, but Captain Miller said you get special priority because of who you’ve photographed. But please go see your doctor as soon as you can to make sure you’re not coming down with anything unpleasant. This could be something extremely nasty.” He had a metal box with foam padding on the inside and fancy gaskets around the edges. “This ought to keep it safe until we can get it back to the lab.”
Lieutenant Bailey added, “And now we get to the fun part: transporting supervillains.”
Alex suggested, “She doesn’t handle tasers too well.”
Lieutenant Marshall grinned. “Yes, ma’am, we’ve discovered that for ourselves.”
Then the two lieutenants stepped into the ‘holding cell’ room and used a thing like a metal squirt gun to spray Clare in the face with some clear liquid. She cursed furiously, but passed out in about twenty seconds. One of them wheeled in a dolly like what the police slapped Hannibal Lecter into in ‘Silence of the Lambs’. They checked Clare’s vitals to make sure she was really out, and then they expertly unlocked her cuffs before lifting her into the restraint system in the dolly. The cuffs in that thing weren’t like handcuffs, or leather bands. They were massive metal restraints that looked like they could hold Azure Crush. Then they wheeled her off to the freight elevator and then whatever they came in. Maybe a chopper from the closest military base you could land a Cessna.
Alex checked that the security guys and the FBI guys weren’t hovering nearby just to intercept her and interrogate her about the DHS guys, and then she walked up to find Willow.
The meeting was over. The food tables were all cleaned up and removed. The building people were vacuuming and stuff. The computer guys had apparently all cleared out, except for Willow, who was sitting on a couch with two computer guys who were talking to her.
Alex pulled out her camera and got some nice, clear snaps. It was pretty obvious to her that one guy was totally impressed with Willow, and the other guy was totally infatuated with her. Alex made sure she got a bunch of pics that caught their facial expressions and their body language, because she was pretty sure Willow wasn’t picking up on most of it.
Willow was really smart, but she just didn’t believe in herself, so she didn’t usually see it when other people believed in her and had good feelings about her. It made Alex wonder if maybe Willow had missed some of the positive stuff from her parents and only picked up on the negative stuff, because it sounded like they were being pretty supportive now, even if they weren’t so thrilled about Willow dating a guy who was way older and not Jewish and not liberal and part of what they thought of as the badguys.
Come to think of it, Willow couldn’t have picked anyone less likely to make her parents happy, unless she was dating a sixty-year-old Iraqi terrorist who had a harem. Or maybe that old Southern congressman with the really bad toupee who was a fundamentalist Christian.
Once Alex was done taking the pictures, she snapped the lens cap over the lens and draped the camera around her neck. “Ms. Rosenberg! Hi! I’m sorry I made you wait and all that.”
Willow stood up and smiled. “Miss Mack, I think you’re entitled to a ridiculous amount of slack on that, given you just tangled with a supervillain to save me and everyone at the conference.” She turned to her colleagues. “Robert, Theo, I’m going to run away now and take our heroine out to dinner and see if I can get her to tell me all about fighting a supervillain to the death to save a national conference, which sounds more like a James Bond movie.” It was pretty obvious to Alex that both guys wanted to invite themselves along, but didn’t have the nerve.
Willow took her down to the car. Alex whispered, “Assume we’re being watched.”
Once they got outside, Alex posed Willow in front of her cute electric car. Willow kept doing silly things like she was Vanna White in front of the Wheel Of Fortune sign, or one of those booth babes at a car show. Alex really wanted a picture of Willow looking serious and environmentally responsible, but she was happy with this, because it gave her a chance to photograph every car that was still anywhere in the parking lot. She figured at least one of those cars was some more NID jerkheads, or whoever those guys in the Hydra-mobile were really working for.
They got in the car, and Willow pulled a little black plastic box out of her valise. She turned it on and waited a couple of seconds. Then she smiled. She tilted the box so Alex could see the front. There was a little meter taking up most of the top half of the front, and the needle was way over in the green.
Willow started up the engine, which purred softly. “Okay, we’re not bugged.”
Alex said, “I’m sort of figuring they have to pull all their bugs out because of that big DHS security audit thing.” They smirked at each other. She added, “But they may be tailing you all over the place still. There’s a couple cars I saw this morning I wanna watch for.”
Willow asked, “What if they’re doing a front tail? Or a three-car rotation? Or they’re using an AWACS to keep tabs on my car so they don’t have to tail me? Okay, an AWACS is pretty much out of the question, but I did read up on tailing and how different groups do it.”
Oh, great. Alex hadn’t thought about cars that were in front of them. She needed to look for them, too.
So Alex watched for possible tails behind them and in front of them, and got pictures of a bunch of possibles all around them. Meanwhile, Willow drove them back toward her house, and they ate at Willow’s favorite Chinese restaurant. They got firecracker shrimp and General Tso’s chicken and pan-friend tofu with broccoli and vegetable fried rice and some other dishes that were just in to-go containers so they could take them back to Willow’s house. And Willow had some of the shrimp and the chicken, too.
Alex took a couple of pictures of Willow eating expertly with chopsticks, and she asked, “Aren’t you a vegetarian? I mean, I know you’ll eat other stuff …”
Willow explained, “I try to stick to a diet that has a low ecological footprint. Growing lots of fruits and veggies in my own back yard helps on that. And buying locally at farmer’s markets instead of in grocery stores where they’ve shipped stuff in from all over the world. But I do like meat. I mean, Jack makes a grilled, marinated strip steak that’s to die for, and he knows I love it, and he teases me every time about me falling off the veggie bandwagon. So I do eat meat, just not much of it, and I eat vegetarian whenever it’s convenient. But their General Tso’s is just so of the yummy!”
Anyway, Alex already knew from having Willow over that Willow didn’t insist on having a vegetarian dinner, or even on having a vegetarian main dish for herself. Alex figured it was part politeness and part Willow not being really assertive when she was just plain old Willow-the-friend instead of Willow-the-CEO or Willow-the-computer-guru.
And Alex got some really good pictures of Willow eating the fried rice and the tofu with broccoli using just those chopsticks. Willow was way better with chopsticks than Alex was. Alex had to cheat and use her TK, too. But it was probably a dumb idea to use your TK to eat, when you had to eat more because the TK burned up extra energy. That was like the complete opposite of a perpetual motion machine.
They took the leftovers and the to-go cartons back to Willow’s, and Alex ate another few plates of food when no one was watching. Then Willow gave Alex a tour of the back yard, as if Alex had never been there before. On the other hand, this was the first time Alex was taking pictures of Willow’s life. She was pretty sure there wasn’t another important computer company CEO in the world who was growing their own organic vegetable and fruit crop in their own little garden. There were probably CEOs who had big, expensive greenhouses and gardens, and made a bunch of workers with green cards grow their fruits and flowers, but not like this. And Willow was so excited about it that the pictures came out great.
Also, it meant that Alex got to get a good look at the back fence and make sure those cameras and things were really gone. She didn’t know if those guys were NID or not, but she was getting really cheesed off at them.
Then they watched the news on one of the news channels. There were four big stories everyone was covering, and three of them were super-stories. Photographer A.L. Mack helped apprehend wanted criminal Clare Tobias in the middle of a presumed terrorist attack in Cupertino. The National Guard and the CDC were running a massive vaccination program in the Quad Cities and for miles around there to address some of the possible t-virus problems. And … Terawatt apprehended a super-powered bank robber in Santa Fe.
Willow laughed. “Operation Tera-twin!”
And the bank camera footage clearly showed Terawatt running in and stopping a huge, hulking supervillain who picked up an entire desk and threw it at her, but she was too fast for him. And they slugged it out, with Terawatt clobbering him.
Alex watched it again on CNN2 and finally spotted it. “It’s Jo Lupo, isn’t it?”
Willow grinned mischievously. “Yeah, they used a special latex makeup to hide her real skin-tones, and a special Terawatt costume they sewed up the back after she put it on, so it looks right. Captain Fisher figured it all out for us. She’s even wearing contacts so she looks right for the people in the bank.”
“Wow.” Alex had to admit it, Jack was sneakier than you thought, even after you reminded yourself he was super-sneaky. No one was going to believe Alex Mack could be Terawatt after today.
So it had to be a fake bank robbery. So … “Is that Sergeant Carlson as the badguy?”
“Yep! Jack said Jo even choreographed the fight sequence and they’ve been practicing it.”
“Well, it looks really good,” Alex admitted. “Even if Terawatt’s not flying around or hurling lightning bolts or anything.”
But the networks had footage off someone’s cellphone of Terawatt flying away into the sky until she vanished. And it took Alex a moment to realize Jack had gotten someone in the SRI to get cellphone shots of her flying around on some previous op, and they saved it just for something like this. So whoever turned their cellphone footage over to the networks was another SRI connection.
Alex called her family to let them know she was okay, even after Willow said she’d sent texts to the whole Tera-team.
“Willow! It’s not the Tera-team!”
Willow just grinned. “Are you calling the Tera-mom now?”
“Jack is a really bad influence on you!”
“What?” said the voice on the phone.
“Oh, hi, Mom, it’s me. I was just telling Willow Jack’s a bad influence on her, because she was saying you’re the Tera-mom.”
Her mom said, “Well, tell the Tera-hacker that we appreciate the Tera-updates while the FBI had you in a deep, dark basement.”
Alex rolled her eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t call then, but they were sorta watching me the whole time. First the security people, then the Cupertino police, then the FBI, and finally some nice men from the DHS who came and helped me out.”
Her mom worried, “Honey, was this another thing like in Iowa?”
“Umm, we don’t know yet. But it’s bound to be pretty horrible if they’ve got a wanted criminal sneaking in to do it.”
Her dad leaned in and said into the phone, “Well, you tell Willow to start going to safer conferences. Like maybe the American Accountancy Association’s conference.”
Willow leaned over toward Alex’s phone and disagreed, “Oh, I hear those accountants get pretty wild. They have a lot of accrued interest by the time they get to the conference, you know.”
Her dad snorted in amusement and then said, “Hang on a second. Someone else wants to get a word in.”
Shar’s voice piped up. “Hi! You didn’t tell me you were gonna do superheroine stuff with Auntie Willow! It’s not fair!”
Alex groaned. “Shar, I didn’t know there was gonna be a badguy there. And it wasn’t with Willow. She was in a huge meeting talking about stuff that was so boring even Mayor Milktoast would’ve been running out of the room.”
“Hey, it’s not boring, we were having a really interesting discussion about adaptive security for TCP/IP, and preventing spoofing of network packets!”
Shar sounded puzzled as she asked, “Auntie Willow, are you sure that wasn’t boring?”
Willow frowned a little. “Well, not to me, but maybe — just maybe — it would be to everyone else on this call.”
In a tiny voice, Shar asked, “Do I haveta learn all this stuff and like it to get you to come see me anymore?”
“Oh, honey!” Willow sobbed, “No! I love you, and you don’t have to like computers, even if I think they’re awesome. It’s just … Well, badguys are watching me now and spying on me, and we have to do this stuff so it looks like I just met Alex, and then we’ll make it look like we’re becoming really good friends, and then I can come down and visit you and it won’t look suspicious.”
“Can you come visit on Sunday?”
Willow sighed unhappily. “I really wish I could, but I think this is going to take weeks. Maybe months.”
“Can you come for my birthday party?”
Willow sighed again. “We’ll try really hard to make it work so I can come for your birthday party. But I might have to come in a disguise.”
“That would be totally awesome!” Shar stopped for a second and said in a pretty good Willow impression, “I mean, it would be of the awesome!”
Alex couldn’t help laughing. She could hear her dad laughing, too. Her mom just said, “Remember, we have to pretend we don’t know how to talk like Willow until after we’ve seen her a couple more times. Okay?”
“Okay!”
They talked with her family for a while, and then she called Ray to check on him.
“Alex, are you sure you’re okay?”
She smiled to herself. “Really, I’m totally fine. I just spotted her and called security and tipped off Willow so she could call everyone else, and then I just got in her way until the security guys surrounded her. And maybe I used something my dad invented to tase her. Or at least that’s what I told everybody. She was pretty cheesed off about it.”
“Well, I hope you at least got a really good picture of her being mad at you so it’s worth it, because we really don’t want supervillains targeting A.L. Mack, too.”
Alex just told him, “We already have supervillains targeting A.L. Mack. Remember?”
He teased, “Can we count Marsha on that list?”
“No! She’s not a supervillain! Don’t be mean.”
He pretended to think it over. “Hmmm. She likes cauliflower and the cafeteria’s hamburger surprise. I think that’s a sure sign she’s a supervillain. Maybe an alien.”
Alex protested, “There’s nothing wrong with cauliflower! And the cafeteria’s cooking isn’t that bad.”
“Which would be why you bring your lunch every day,” he teased.
“Nyah. I’m sticking my tongue out at you.”
He laughed and said, “I miss you. And the whole team’ll miss having you running up and down courtside taking pictures. Even if Jackson insists you never get his good side.”
She just rolled her eyes, because she knew Ray was kidding and Jackson really liked the photos she took, and he’d already picked out the one he wanted for his yearbook picture. It was pretty awesome, with him easily outjumping two defenders and just a millisecond from letting go of the ball, and the angle she got made him look like he was way up in the air. He totally looked like an NBA star in that shot.
She took the phone into another room so she could get personal with Ray, although there was no way she was doing that icky phone-sex stuff Willow liked.
So when she was done talking to Ray, she went back and she watched some more news coverage with Willow. Also, CNN had some of the shuttle footage, with Sam Carter talking to the camera about what they hoped to achieve with the mission, and how they were going to get samples with a remote lander so they wouldn’t endanger the Atlantis shuttlecraft, and how they were getting all kinds of astrophysical measurements on the comet and on the asteroids that were closest and on deep space, and all that.
Willow gushed, “She’s really smart. When she was a freshman at the Air Force Academy she wrote a paper for her physics class on Kessler Syndrome that was so awesome they classified it.”
Okay, that was confusing. Alex wondered, “Isn’t Kessler Syndrome where you can’t recognize your friends and family and you think they’ve been replaced by doubles? Like in that episode of ‘Criminal Minds’ where the spec ops guy goes nuts and thinks his family and his coworkers and everyone he knows are all doubles and he kills ’em?”
Willow blinked. “Umm … I think that’s Capgras Syndrome or Capgras Delusion. No, Kessler Syndrome is way worse. It’s where a satellite crashes into another satellite and fragments go flying all over the orbital routes in low earth orbit, crashing into more satellites and other fragments, and then they crash into more stuff in a huge ablation cascade, and it all snowballs until all the earth orbits are just huge junkyards with no working satellites and nothing but fast-moving junk so you can’t put new satellites up for long because they get hit by more junk, and you can’t put a rocket into space because it’ll crash into some of the junk first, until finally the stuff loses velocity and burns up as it falls to earth hundreds or thousands of years from now. But she did these awesome simulations, and she figured out what the most likely Patient Zero cases are, like Envisat, this E.U. satellite that’s dead but still floating around in those orbital paths, and maybe I wasn’t supposed to go find that paper and read it.” She stopped for a moment and thought. “But you know, Kessler Syndrome would be a simple way of creating a fast defense against alien invaders. I should think about that.”
Alex frowned. “There’s got to be a better way to put up a defense against enemy spaceships than wrecking the entire planet.”
Then Willow got that teasing look on her face, and she said, “Wow, that Samantha Carter is one hot astrophysicist. Maybe I should trade Jack in on a newer model.”
Alex kidded her back. “I thought you’d set your sights on Selina Kyle.”
Willow scowled. “I changed my mind. Not only with the whole evil Orphan member of The Collective thing, but after listening to you talk about your Selina? I went and investigated Christakos Shipping and some of their other companies. Her father-in-law was big with the suspected bribery, but her husband is also suspected of big heaping wads of industrial espionage, because he just happens to beat out his competitors pretty regularly on sealed bidding by comparatively tiny amounts.”
Alex winced. “Almost like someone was breaking into their offices undetected and finding out exactly what their bid would be?”
“Yep. Almost like that.”
Alex did the best Selina imitation she could. “Mee-yow.”
Willow giggled and said, “With those ICBMs she’s got sticking out in front, I bet she can’t sneak through ventilation shafts.”
“Very catty.”
“She’s like a cat-astrophe.”
“Stop with the cat puns before I go cat-atonic.”
“Does she have a regular yacht, or a cat-amaran?”
“She probably only plays Settlers of Cat-an.”
They just made silly cat puns until they were giggling so hard they couldn’t talk anymore, and Alex was in danger of having Diet Coke come out her nose.