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Chapter 131 – The Rosenberg Military-Industrial ComplexWillow drove Alex back to the hotel late that night, and when Alex got up the next morning she got dressed in just casual stuff and drove herself back to Willow’s house for the ‘programming’ day. She took a little detour and drove around Willow’s neighborhood and didn’t see any suspicious cars, so she figured maybe the badguys were off cowering in their secret lair while ‘the DHS’ came in for the imaginary security audit.
Although she did get to see that other SUV she had checked out, and a grumpy mom was making two pre-teen kids clean out the back of the car, and they were acting like she was torturing them by making them clean up their own junk.
Alex parked in Willow’s driveway and brought in her purse and camera bag and computer tablet. Then she had breakfast. Willow had fresh-baked scones, and the whole house smelled delicious and breakfast-y. Some of the scones were regular, and some had mini chocolate chips mixed in, and some had little tiny fragments of orange peel, and all of them smelled awesome. Plus, there was real butter and three kinds of homemade jam that Willow had canned herself, probably from her own trees. Alex ate one regular scone, two chocolate chip ones, and two orange ones. The chocolate chip scones went really great with the cherry jam, but they were also really good with just butter.
Okay, pretty much everything was good with real butter. Even lima beans.
And Willow had beverages. Regular coffee, decaf, and a thermos of hot water for making tea. She told Alex, “Well, I figure we’re having visitors this morning, and I’m trying to be better at being a host, because Jack still teases me about how I just sat here like a lump the first time he dropped in.”
And Willow had a warming drawer, like in a fancy restaurant! Willow had a double oven, one on top of the other, and under the bottom oven was a real warming drawer so she could make food and then keep it hot, and also she could even control the humidity in the warming drawer so she could keep crisp food crisp or keep moist food moist. Alex decided right then that she needed a warming drawer in her kitchen when she had her own house. She thought about how she could make some of the Thanksgiving dinner stuff hours ahead and just keep it hot until she was ready, and she wondered if her mom had ever thought about a warming drawer for their kitchen.
Once Willow had all the scones baked and in the warming drawer or else in the other oven to keep them warm while they waited for the ‘security audit’, Willow walked Alex through a typical programming day.
“So first, normally I don’t put on nice stuff like this, and lots of times I just work in my comfy pajamas, but not the slinky stuff that’s just for Jack, because that doesn’t keep me warm, and when you sit in slinky satin stuff you slide around and you end up slipping off the seat or else giving yourself a major wedgie. I make sure I’ve got plenty of coffee for the morning, and then after lunch I switch to Mountain Dew and like that, and then when I program into the night I figure when I want to go to bed, and I taper off on the caffeine so I’m really sleepy at the time I want to hit the hay. And then I just … sit in front of a computer all day. It’s not exciting.”
Alex nodded, like it made sense to her that you could sit in front of a computer and program all day every day without going bonkers. She said, “Okay. Just go ahead and do that. When I get bored taking pictures of you, I’ve got other stuff to work on.”
“Okay, if you’re sure …”
So Alex watched Willow get to work. Some hot coffee in a thermos cup, some comfy clothes, and then a focus like a laser beam. Willow just zoned in on the words on the screen and started typing. It was amazing, and sort of freaky. It was like Willow could just hold every piece of her programming project in her head all at the same time and arrange it all so she could write every section in whatever order she felt like. Alex wasn’t exactly Miss Super Programmer, but she could read C code, so she watched as Willow worked out a really complicated math problem using a whiteboard program and a math program, and then wrote it in really tight C code so she could break one GIS algorithm into pieces that she could feed into the parallel processing system she already had.
Alex got pictures of Willow concentrating ferociously as she worked. Willow didn’t even notice when Alex closed the drapes and turned off the lights in the room so she could get pictures where Willow’s concentration was lit mostly by the light coming off her monitor. That was trickier than it sounded and Alex had to fiddle a ton with the settings, because cameras didn’t automatically adjust for changes in light levels the way human eyes did. Alex even floated the camera over between Willow and the window to get some head-on and nearly head-on pictures.
Then Alex went and worked on her own project: going through yesterday’s photos to try and find the cars that showed up way too often. She found three. There was a fairly new gray Honda that had followed Willow to Cupertino, then was still in the lot there when Alex and Willow left, and then tailed them to the Chinese restaurant. Alex had its license plate, because she had used her 70-200mm lens when she was supposedly just taking pictures of Willow with her car, and so she had zoomed in on all the cars in the lot that she thought looked suspicious. She sent that license plate off to Jack. There was that black SUV from the other night that she already had the license plate for. And there was an off-white utility van that she was pretty sure was the same one that had taken turns following Willow in the morning, and also had taken turns tailing Willow on the way home.
Alex wondered if that meant there were a couple more cars and trucks she just hadn’t spotted.
She was still looking for more possibilities when the front doorbell rang. She put the tablet down and hurried to the front door. Willow still beat her to it.
It was Graham and Jo and Lieutenant Bailey. Fortunately, Willow remembered the role she was playing, because Alex might have just invited everyone in, even though there might be someone out there watching through binoculars. Or even through a sniper scope.
Willow opened the door and insisted on seeing credentials. Then she stepped inside for a minute, like she was verifying stuff on her computers. Then she stiffly invited them all in.
Once she had the front door closed, Alex came over and shook Graham’s hand and hugged Jo and said hi to Lieutenant Bailey, even though Lieutenant Bailey was totally surprised that Alex knew Jo and Graham so well. Then they all went into the kitchen for hot scones with lots of butter. Alex was totally not surprised that Lieutenant Bailey went for a can of Mountain Dew instead of coffee. He was probably just wishing Mountain Dew Baja Blast came in cans, too.
And Willow already had the kitchen curtains closed just in case. That was good. Alex hadn’t thought of it until after they all got in the kitchen and sat down.
Graham asked, “What smells so great? And is it for us?”
“It’s scones!” Alex gushed. “Willow made ’em herself just this morning, and they’re awesome!”
So they all had a scone. Okay, Alex had three, even though she’d already had breakfast.
It took Lieutenant Bailey about three minutes to put together ‘Alex knows Miller and Lupo’ and ‘Alex saved the Cupertino meeting yesterday’ and ‘Colonel O’Neill had to run Operation Tera-twin yesterday to protect Terawatt’s secret identity’. Then he just stared at Alex for like twenty seconds with his mouth open. Then he grabbed his laptop and researched A.L. Mack for a couple of minutes until he slapped himself on the forehead. Then Graham had to tell him that he couldn’t talk to anybody about this, not even to Lieutenant Marshall or Sergeant Carlson.
And then they really did go through a security audit. Lieutenant Bailey went over the computer and network security stuff with Willow, while Jo and Graham checked the physical security, and went over Willow’s car really thoroughly, and used really high-powered monocs to check the utility poles and neighboring houses and stuff.
When they were all done, Willow baked a couple of frozen pizzas and heated up a big pan of homemade lasagna for everyone for a late lunch.
Jo asked her, “You’ve got a ton of solar panels, and more UPSes than I’ve ever seen. So if someone took down that utility pole, you’d still have power and computer connectivity and cable service and cellphone coverage?”
Willow nodded eagerly. “But you could knock out most of that if you hit my satellite dishes and my solar panels with anti-tank weapons or something. And I’ve got a small cistern under my back yard so I could do without city water for a little while. Longer if I didn’t water my plants or do a lot of dishwashing or a lot of me-washing.”
Graham said, “Your computer security is good. I’m more concerned about your physical security. We looked at the pictures Alex sent, and we tracked down Mister John Deakin, Special Supervisory Agent for the NID, who is working out of a Bay Area office and is probably these dorks’ boss. So the colonel’s pretty eager to set up a trap and let them plant their bugs again so we can arrest them and get the NID in even more trouble. I think we can play this up and really get Congress breathing down their necks, because bugging a possible problem who has access to DHS computers is one thing. Planting cameras to look into the bedroom and bathroom of a pretty twenty-something is an entirely different matter.”
Alex added, “And they’ve been tailing Willow all over the place, too, and I don’t know if they just want to know where she goes, or if they’re planning on kidnapping her or something. I’ve found three vehicles I’m pretty sure of, and I don’t know if I’m missing some other cars.”
But Jo was happy to look over Alex’s pictures, and she came up with two more maybes, a blue Prius and a pretty little taupe Audi convertible. Alex made a mental note to watch out for them, too.
After Graham gave Willow a list of suggestions for physical security and the ‘security audit’ team left, Alex cleaned up in the kitchen while Willow went back to work. Okay, it wasn’t her fault that she ate the last two slices of pizza. They were just sitting there looking really lonely! But she saved all the rest of the lasagna and put it back in the fridge. After all, she might need a snack later.
Then it was really pretty boring all afternoon long. Willow was totally lost in Programming Land, and Alex figured the next pictures she wanted to take needed to be done at night while Willow worked at her computer. So Alex did other stuff. She snooped in Willow’s library to see if there were any books she’d thought about that Willow already had so they wouldn’t be good for gifts. She watched some of Willow’s DVDs and just pretended she didn’t accidentally find the drawer of Willow’s R- and X-rated DVDs. Yick. She worked some more on her on-line computer course. She Skyped with Hanna and then with Robyn. She got in plenty of martial arts practice. All that kind of stuff.
The only good part of the afternoon was when Willow called Alex in to look at the internet feed, because Anonymous had gotten into some federal computers and had just posted the NID and CIA’s list of their Top Twenty suspects for who might really be Terawatt. And all of them looked like they could be Terawatt if you gave them a wig and a mask — and a padded bra in a few cases — but none of them were Terawatt material with their jobs and lifestyles. Two of them were cosplayers Terawatt had met in San Diego, and several were already models, and a couple were trying to make some money as Terawatt impersonators, but none of them were doctors or policewomen or like that.
And when Alex asked Willow who Anonymous really was, Willow said, “No one except the very top few people know. Even the members of Anonymous don’t out themselves to other members of the group, so no one knows who we — I mean, they — are.” Alex just gave Willow a look.
Then at six, Willow drove them over to her favorite Mexican restaurant. They had a great dinner, and Willow told her some really funny stories about Jack taking her out to eat, because Jack might be nice and friendly to good waiters, but he could be really snarky if the waiter was rude, or the people at the next table were stupidly loud for no reason, or a family had a baby screaming at the top of its lungs and was just ignoring the kid. Willow also confessed that Jack would tease her just a ton if he caught her ogling a waiter. Or a waitress.
Alex asked, “So, what do you do when you catch Jack ogling a hot waitress?”
Willow pouted. “He doesn’t! He never does! He just stares at me a ton, even if sometimes he’s staring at my cleavage. Sometimes he asks if I like what the waitress is wearing, which is why I have a Hooters costume in the dresser at his place and this tiny black cocktail waitress dress, but he just doesn’t do the looky-loo thing when we’re out together. It’s really annoying when I’m the one with the wandering eyes, because it’s supposed to be the guy who does that.”
Alex was pretty sure that same Prius was following them on the way home, along with the gray Honda. It was hard to be certain, because Silicon Valley had about a zillion Prius and Audi and BMW ‘statement’ cars, plus plenty of way more expensive cars.
After she went back to the hotel that night, she Skyped with Ray, who was still psyched about the basketball game, because they played the Rangers again and won by seven. That pretty much guaranteed they were going to win their league, and they might even go undefeated in the league, since only one of their remaining conference games was against one of the top teams. So they were looking at a really good seed in the state tourney for their division, and their basketball team hadn’t won their conference in years.
* * *
The next morning, Willow picked Alex up at the hotel extra, extra early. Willow was in a really expensive-looking ecru women’s suit with an above-the-knee hem that looked great on her. Alex was glad she was wearing the nice outfit she’d brought, even if she was ‘just the shutterbug’ today.
Well, she was totally hoping she was just the shutterbug, because she so did not need another Clare Tobias incident.
Willow drove off to Travis Air Force Base, with Alex using her makeup mirror to check cars and trucks behind them on the roads. Alex was pretty sure the black SUV, the Prius, and the Honda were following them and switching off fairly regularly. Once she knew what to look for, it was easier to see how they would have one car tailing Willow with the other two out of sight, and then one of the other cars would move up to where they could see Willow’s car, and the first tail car would drop back out of sight.
Willow went through the standard security stuff at the air force base checkpoint before driving over to a visitors-only parking area near one of the big hangars. Alex had to show her ID and all that stuff, too. There was an SRI Cessna Citation X already waiting for them. It was even the newer eight-seat one instead of the original six-seat one Jack had started with that was now Team Two’s Cessna.
Alex made sure to get pictures of Willow walking out to the Cessna and climbing aboard, plus more pictures of Willow making herself at home once they were onboard. They really made Willow look like a super-cool jetsetting billionaire type. Then they spent most of the trip to Washington D.C. talking about installing linux and being a sysadmin for a linux box, because Willow knew way more about this stuff than whoever wrote that on-line course. And there was stuff about sendmail that only super-awesome unix gurus like Willow understood, because sendmail was so obscure and complicated it made regular linux stuff look like fingerpainting. Alex totally did not get a lot of the weirdness in sendmail, even after Willow explained why it was so weird and cryptic and freakazoid.
Then, when they landed at Andrews Air Force Base, which was never going to be Alex’s favorite base after the last few visits, General Hammond and his adjutant Major Davis were there to meet Willow and escort her to the meeting. Alex remembered that Graham had called him ‘Paul’ on the phone instead of Major Davis, so she figured the major was a pretty nice guy, and knew Graham from somewhere.
Alex made sure to get some good pics as the officers shook Willow’s hand and were really respectful and stuff. Deferential! That was it, they were deferential. She loved SAT word wealth, now that she didn’t have to study for the SATs. She totally needed to get a word-a-day app for her phone.
Willow introduced General Hammond and Major Davis to A.L. Mack, the photographer who was getting pictures of her for a story. They were nice and polite, but they didn’t know her. And that was just the way Alex liked it.
Alex shook their hands and said, “It’s an honor! Ms. Rosenberg’s said really nice things about you, General. And if there’s anything you don’t want me photographing, just tell me, and I’ll stop.”
On the other hand, since she was just a photographer, she could get a few more pics of Willow greeting important people like the Secretary of Homeland Security, but then she couldn’t go into the meeting room. She had to wait in a side room with a couple of adjutants and lower-rank officers who weren’t entitled to go listen in, either. Like Lieutenant Webster, who looked like a nice guy, but was never going to be confused for a movie star. Alex was good with that, because she’d had to deal with way too many super-handsome Orphans. Even if Lieutenant Webster thought Alex was pretty hot and wanted to ‘chat her up’ as Hermione would say. Or Lieutenant Merridale, who was a black woman who looked like she was fresh out of the Naval Academy. Alex figured you had to be pretty dang awesome to get through the Naval Academy when you were black and female both, and then land an important assignment like this.
So she played dumb. Jack said playing dumb was one of his most useful skills, and she had to admit a lot of people had underestimated Jack. So she asked, “What’s going on in the meeting? What kind of stuff are they talking about? Is it super-secret spy stuff?”
Lieutenant Merridale told her, “There’s no spy stuff. It’s a really long meeting about computer security. You should know this. You came with Ms. Rosenberg.”
Alex nodded. “Well, yeah, I knew that part, but there are all these generals and admirals and the head of the whole DHS. And I really like Ms. Rosenberg, she’s been really nice to me, but she can do stuff on a computer that’s just freaky. I mean, she borrowed my tablet, and she hooked it up to her network, and she cracked my password in like half a minute, which is like impossible. But I learned not to use my boyfriend’s name as a password anymore.”
Okay, that worked great. Not only did everyone else in the room think she was stupid, but Lieutenant Webster decided to keep his pickup lines to himself. Saying the magic word ‘boyfriend’ was really good that way. When everyone else pulled out paperwork and got busy, Alex downloaded images from her camera to her tablet and started going through them to decide what she wanted to keep for her pictorial on ‘Willow Rosenberg, CEO and Computer Genius’. Some of the pictures were just blah, but some of them really captured Willow. And some of them really captured the way other people felt about Willow. Alex thought that was way more important, because those pics really showed just how awesome and important Willow really was, even if Willow didn’t see it.
Alex snacked on a couple energy bars while she worked, and before she knew it, it was nearly lunchtime. The door opened, and one of the Air Force SFs said, “Miss Mack? Could you go with the colonel here for your lunch?”
And it was Jack. Alex had to bite the inside of her mouth to keep from bursting into a huge smile.
Jack gave the room a big scowl. “You’d think a colonel has better things to do than feed some Woodward and Bernstein wannabe, but noooo!” Everyone in the room looked at her like ‘oh you poor kid’.
She trotted off behind Jack, who hurried her out of the building and over to a Humvee. She was totally not surprised to see Hanna was in it already. She and Hanna hugged happily before Alex stopped and got in her seat and put on her seatbelt.
They drove off the base, through the busy streets of Washington, D.C., and to a seriously secure office building that was solely for the Department of Homeland Security. Jack said with a smirk, “At least the NID’s banned from this building right now, after some of the crap they pulled. We know they’ve still got people on the base, and some of ’em were probably complicit in the Clare Tobias fiasco, which makes me want to trust them SO much.”
Jack had a gym bag in the car, so Alex quick-changed into Terawatt before she got out of the car and went into the building. Being Terawatt also made going through building security just totally easy. And there was a conference room with a big table full of food that Sergeant Walters and Sergeant Scott and Grover were setting up. So first, they ate. And Alex got to eat as much as she wanted, which was one of the many great things about Jack. It was sandwiches and hearty salads, plus cake for dessert.
Afterward, Jack called Iowa on a videophone system, and it was Riley and Jill. Alex was so surprised. Not. Jack carefully set the web camera up so only he and the sergeants were showing up on the screen.
Jack asked, “So … is everything up to date in Kansas City?”
Jill looked a little confused, since they weren’t even in Kansas. But Riley repressed a smile and answered, “They’ve gone about as far as they can go.”
Then Jill got it, too. She burst into song, “They went and built a skyscraper seven stories high, about as high as a buildin’ oughta grow!” Alex still didn’t know the song, but at least she knew it was a song, and it sounded like it came from an old musical.
Jack laughed and teased, “Finn, why don’t you sing, too?”
Finn stiffly said, “Sir, my singing voice is so bad it has been officially declared a weapon of mass destruction. I am not allowed to sing within a two-mile radius of any civilians.”
Jack and Sergeant Scott both snorted in amusement, while Hanna stopped and whispered something to Grover, who whispered back. Alex was pretty sure Hanna was checking that Riley was making a joke. After all, given some of the powers they’d seen, it wouldn’t be too big a stretch to have someone with a lethal singing voice, sort of like an evil Dazzler.
Jill said, “Things are looking pretty good here, sir. No traces of the virus in the water or in any of the animals we’ve captured. We’ve been working with the CDC and the National Guard. They have 87% of the Quad Cities population vaccinated against the t-virus, and an estimated 74% of pet cats and dogs, and there’s been a massive effort to get strays off the streets, along with a big four-city effort to wipe out all the rats and mice and pigeons and crows. And thank you for swiping me from what’s left of S.T.A.R.S.”
Riley reported, “We’re now working with the Army Corps of Engineers and the CDC on protocols for excavating the Spencer Mansion and the Spencer Building so workers are protected from what might still be in there, and so we’ve also got enough heavy weaponry to deal with any emergencies. But they think they’ll be ready to start excavations by the end of next month.”
Jill and Riley took turns talking about what the Army Corps of Engineers was working up, but it sounded to Alex like backhoes and cranes with armored, sealed compartments for the operators so they wouldn’t get exposed to viruses, and so icky things couldn’t get at them. And after seeing those Tyrants and what was left of William Birkin, Alex really didn’t think that Armored Personnel Carriers and Abrams tanks were overkill.
Then Jack snarked, “And, in other news, super-powered criminal Clare Tobias got taken down by a girl reporter day before yesterday. Marshall’s looked at what she was carrying under an electron microscope and says it’s not the t-virus. It’s a prion in what he’s guessing is a preservative solution, but he’s analyzing it to make sure.”
Riley asked, “A prion like in Mad Cow Disease?”
Jack nodded. “That’s our current guess. He’s already started some computer simulations and some lab animal tests we won’t be telling PETA about. But I’m pretty sure it isn’t designed to make your teeth whiter than white.”
Yeah, Alex didn’t think so either. A prion like Mad Cow Disease? She was guessing it would do something horrible to you like turn your brain to swiss cheese. If most of the top execs and gurus of the American computer industry turned into drooling idiots, it would destroy most of the advances in the computer biz everywhere. That would be great for P$ychon4ut and The Collective, but really bad for everyone else.
Jack went on, “Clare doesn’t feel like talking. There are a couple CIA guys who want to get their hands on her and see how she likes waterboarding, but there’s no way I’m going for that. Not to mention I doubt they have any idea how strong and quick she really is, which would probably end with another embarrassing escape. She has no idea of everything we currently know, and I’m good with that.”
Riley asked, “Since they have to know Willow Rosenberg is an Orphan and isn’t playing ball with them, was this aimed at her personally?”
Jack scowled. “If so, then we need to warn Team Two, our friend in Gotham, and Terawatt’s little blonde buddy.”
Jill asked, “Sir, do I not have clearance to know who you’re talking about?”
Jack said, “You have clearance to know that Lieutenant Lupo and Sergeant Carlson are also Orphans. You do not yet have clearance to know Terawatt’s personal secrets. She’ll tell you when she wants to.”
“Yes, sir.”
Riley told her, “Don’t worry. It’ll work out. And things will be more of a surprise this way. They’re all fun surprises, not the ‘oh heck Wesker is trying to kill me’ kind of surprise.”
Jack kidded, “And you won’t have to say ‘heck’ either, Valentine.”
After the conference call was over, Jack sat everyone down. Alex grabbed another piece of cake, too. Jack addressed everyone: “Operation Tera-twin went off without a hitch yesterday. But now we’ve got to scout out another site in another city a lot farther away from Base Two, and plan a new op. We had to have several vans in place so Terawatt could just appear from between two of them, and then ‘vanish’ when she ran back out between two others. We had to arrange for the drop-off of our badguy. We had to have the cellphone footage already faked with the right backdrop and ready to go, with the right cooperator turning it in to the TV stations for us. It was a logistical headache. Next time I watch David Copperfield do magic, I’m gonna be a lot less snarky about what’s involved in making the whole illusion look right. This means we don’t have a back-up plan the next time Terawatt goes mano-a-mano with a supervillain without changing into her uniform first. This could be a problem. So Tera, don’t do it again. At least, not until I tell you we’re ready with Operation Tera-twin 2: Electric Boogaloo.”
Alex nodded. “Okay. Afterward, I thought of some stuff I could’ve done instead, but I was just too stressed out, worrying she had some t-virus or something on her. Or maybe in her, which could’ve been worse.”
Jack nodded. “Good. The whole point of secret identities is keeping them secret. If that means you just call the cops and pretend to be a helpless hostage, then do it. Granted, you don’t let a hundred people die horribly while you’re sitting on your hands, but don’t blow your secret identity if you don’t absolutely have to. Remember, there are other people besides you who are likely to end up getting the short end of the stick if your other identity comes to light.”
Eww. Yeah. Alex could just imagine what would happen to her whole family and all her friends if Danielle Atron found out little Alex Mack was really Terawatt. That would be mega-bad, even with Shar there. Maybe even partly because Shar was there. It wasn’t like Alex didn’t have any idea how dangerous Shar could be if she was defending her family, because Shar had risked her life and french-fried a three-hundred-foot unstoppable mega-dinosaur just to save Alex. And Alex had seen what was left of The Shop’s research site, including that pond. That ex-pond.
Alex was not going to let Shar be shoved into the position where she had to do that kind of thing. That was all there was to it.
But Jack wasn’t done yet. He made a big show of looking at his watch. “Hey, I’ll bet that boring Rosenberg chick won’t be done with her boring meeting until five at the earliest, because those bureaucrats can jabber and whine and complain like nobody’s business. How about we do something fun?”
And Jack had a movie to watch. It was the latest “Toy Story.” Alex had a funny feeling that Jack’s son had said he wasn’t interested, and Jack still wanted to see it. Or maybe Charlie took Hanna to see it already. So they just sat and watched, and Jack got some hot buttered popcorn for everyone, and they enjoyed the whole thing, and then they watched the special features on the DVD. Whoever thought up the idea of an ‘outtake reel’ for an animated movie was a genius. She laughed so hard she just about peed her panties.
And then Jack drove her back himself, which was really nice of him. Or so she thought. He finally asked her, “Come on, I could tell there’s something you’re dying to ask me.”
She shrugged. “Okay, well that guy at the Davenport press conference? The one who was a flack for Umbrella? Well, wasn’t he really cruddy at his job? I didn’t think about it at the time, but later on, it hit me that he just totally folded as soon as Riley let him have it. Was he really working for Umbrella?”
Jack gave her a big grin. “I don’t know why you think you’re not brilliant.”
Oh, crud. “You set it all up!”
Smirking, Jack said, “Well, not exactly. His firm really was hired by Umbrella to tank your press conference, only he had an attack of conscience, and he called the DHS and eventually got transferred to me. So I just re-wrote the script a little bit.”
“Who else knows?”
He focused on driving for a moment. “Walter, since he does all the hard work at the office. I’m pretty sure Valentine twigged right away, but she’s a suspicious son of a gun. Finn? I don’t know. A lot of the time, he’s just an honest, hard-working farmboy. But he’s smart. Willow? I’m pretty sure she didn’t figure it out. She’s brilliant, but she’s not great at reading people.”
Not for the first time, she reminded herself that Jack was sneakier than you thought, even after you remembered he was sneakier than you thought he was the last time.
By the time Jack dropped her off at the building, it was almost five. When she walked back into the little room, Lieutenant Webster and Lieutenant Merridale and almost all of them were worrying.
“Did that colonel take you somewhere and interrogate you all afternoon?”
“Did he just dump you somewhere?”
“Are you okay?”
Alex had to fib, “He took me to see what Ms. Rosenberg does for the DHS. Some nice computer science guys showed me their firewalls and computers, and they talked about the kinds of threats she was looking for. She’s way smarter than me. And they bought me lunch! And ice cream for a mid-afternoon snack.”
Lieutenant Merridale snorted, “Honey, when a hottie like you pays attention to computer nerds, they’ll buy you anything. You shoulda asked for a Porsche, too.”
Lieutenant Webster smiled. “Well, maybe not a Porsche. You’d have trouble getting it through baggage claim on your flight home.”
Lieutenant Merridale grinned a huge grin. “Okay, I’ll give him that one. Maybe emerald earrings. They’d look good with your eyes.”
One of the other women in the room said, “You don’t look like the type who gives in and has ice cream in the middle of the day.”
Alex shrugged. “I work out a lot. Aerobics, running, biking … It’s one of the things I have in common with Ms. Rosenberg. I eat more calories than a lot of girls my size.”
“Rosenberg’s a closet jock? Man, I did not guess that one.”
So she chatted with them until a little after 5:30, when the meeting finally broke up. The Air Force SFs finally let them out of the room to go meet up with whoever they were supposed to be hanging with. And a driver was there to take Willow and Alex back to the Cessna.
Once the Cessna took off, Alex asked, “How’d the meeting go? What did they talk about? How many times did you impress ’em so much they just fainted?”
Willow breathed out a gust of exhaustion. “I don’t know which is worse. Guys who really know the details and want to argue about every last little thing it’s possible to do like I have a billion person-hours to spare, or guys that don’t understand the details and want to argue about stuff that’s impossible to do.”
Alex wondered, “Were they asking you to magically redirect satellites to snoop on P$ychon4ut even though you don’t really know where he is?”
Willow rolled her eyes. “It was almost that bad. About four of the people in the room had no idea what they were talking about, and would just not shut up! We had to spend half the meeting telling them why their stupid ideas they saw on TV wouldn’t really work. And then there were two guys who were like the Felix Unger of computer science. Like it matters whether you filter packets with my software or the other standards. You still have to let packets in at some point, and the filtering gets done essentially the same way in each program, so running the packets through all three programs in a row won’t do anything extra except slow down network traffic just a stupid amount, and also expose the firewall to attacks that would work on any of the three proggies. And most properly spoofed email headers can’t be detected by rules-based checkers, because they meet all the rules. That’s why they’re called ‘properly spoofed’! Unless they also say they’re being sent from Latveria or the Duchy of Grand Fenwick or something …”
Okay, Alex got the ‘Latveria’ joke, but she had to stop Willow and ask about Grand Fenwick.
So Willow complained about meeting with a bunch of people who mostly shouldn’t have been allowed to go to the meeting in the first place. There were also bureaucrats who worried about their favorite software getting pointed to as a problem. And there were bureaucrats who just wanted to turn off all services except the ones they used, even if the services they used, like email and web browsing, were the major offenders. And there was one NSA guy who was fine with snooping on everyone in the world, but he didn’t want the firewall to check what he was sending in his emails. Willow complained about the meeting for maybe two solid hours.
But Alex could be a good listener, and Willow felt a lot better when they landed at Travis Air Force Base. It was only six o’clock their time, so they drove through a Carl’s Jr. on the way to Willow’s house, and then they stopped at the grocery store closest to Willow’s and got a dozen pints of Ben & Jerry’s, and they hurried to Willow’s house.
And when they walked out of the grocery store, that same Prius was parked in the handicapped parking with no handicapped sign hanging from its rearview mirror, so Alex used her TK to let all the air out of the guy’s back right tire and shove a big nail into the tread so no one would know Terawatt did it. She would have called the police on him, but she knew it wouldn’t do any good, because he’d probably wave a federal badge at the cops and get away scot free.
Stupid NID jerkheads.
They drove to Willow’s house, put the ice cream in the fridge, and pigged out on burgers and fries while they watched some of the NASA footage Willow had scavenged that wasn’t going to be released.
Okay, that wasn’t as much fun as Alex had hoped. The main reason NASA wasn’t going to release the footage was it was mostly really, really, mega-boring. Watching Sam calibrate astrophysics instruments for two hours, while Captain Baker sat in the cockpit just in case something happened, and his co-pilot Lieutenant Isaacson and Professor Colby the other mission specialist just slept? Not all that thrilling.
Then they ate ice cream and Alex told all about Jack and the meeting and the movie and that stuff. And Willow complained some more about stupid guys who didn’t know enough to know they were computer-morons. Willow didn’t say anything bad about the Secretary of Homeland Security, except that he didn’t make a couple of his people shut up and leave the room.
And Alex got Willow to do some more computer work in her computer room with the lights off. With the darkness outside, Willow’s face was lit only by the light of her monitors, and Alex got some really cool effects shots that way. Alex ended up getting Willow to slave her monitors to the camera’s hot shoe and write a little control program so the monitors would give one really short, really bright flash with some color in it, to get the ‘looking into the color monitor in the dark’ images Alex really wanted, because what the camera would pick up was not what the human eye did.
Alex went back to the hotel, checked out, and drove home so she could see Shar and her folks, because she had really missed them. And she figured she had all the pictures she needed, including a couple close-ups she figured Jack would really like. Shar was already asleep by the time Alex got home, but somehow knew to wake up enough to get lots of hugs before snuggling back into the bed with Piki the Pikachu.
Alex smiled at the cutest snugglebug ever and decided she didn’t really need to ever get Piki back.
* * *
When Alex woke up really early Friday morning, she got going on all the stuff she needed to do. She did some more photo editing and sent most of her selected pictures off to Jack for him to look over. Then she Skyped with Hanna and Cindy while she did her martial arts workout. Then she did her upside-down sit-ups, where she used her TK to hold her feet against the ceiling and she did her sit-ups. She sure couldn’t do two hundred sit-ups like she could when she was sitting on the floor, but she was going to work up to a pretty good number of reps. Then she did the rest of her aerobic workout and TK weight-lifting before she showered. She was totally pleased, because she was up to lifting 245 pounds with her TK and it didn’t give her a headache like she was getting hit on the head with a cinderblock.
Then she got Shar going on breakfast, and they played Barbies for a while before Shar went and dug out her new Kari Strong book. Alex was pretty sure that wouldn’t last all morning. But at least her mom could be at work all day. While Alex had been working with Willow, her mom had needed to take one whole day off to watch Shar and two of her little friends, and then had needed to take two hours off the other two mornings to get Shar going and drop her off at a friend’s house for the whole day.
Jack called on the tPhone, so she went with the official Terawatt voice. “Terawatt here. Is there a crisis?”
Jack laughed a little and said, “Nope, no crisis, I was just hoping to talk to your reporter friend. What’s her name again? Peter Parker? Irene Merryweather?”
Irene Merryweather? Who the heck was that? Jack knew way too much about comic books and stuff.
He went on, “At any rate, the photos were beyond great, and I sent them on to a nice guy I know, so A.L. Mack may get a call soon from someone at Newsweek. Don’t over-react.”
NEWSWEEK?!?! She was already over-reacting! There was no way she could talk to someone from Newsweek without melting into a gooey glob of fangirl.
Jack just went on, like she hadn’t turned into a squeaking, babbling mess. “So it won’t be a prank when they call you, and I already cleared an interview with Willow, although I’d like you to go over anything they write, and polish it up. I don’t think I’d be too unbiased.”
“Jack! I can’t ‘polish up’ stuff from important reporters! I’m just …”
“You’re just the most powerful superheroine on the planet, plus the woman who knows Willow better than anyone except me. Maybe even including me, because I tend to insert my own little prejudices everywhere.”
Yeah, right. Although she didn’t think Jack would be very fair if someone had something negative to say about Willow, like how she got suckered by her venture capitalists. And what if they wanted a really sleazy cover photo of Willow? She’d better make sure none of those cosplay photos turned up in the story. Especially not that Psylocke one.
And then Willow called, and she was still laughing pretty hard, because the NID guys had gotten caught red-handed putting those bugs back in place, and the FBI had legal wiretaps on the Bay Area NID office so they had Mr. Deakin telling them to go do illegal stuff, so the whole Bay Area NID office was in handcuffs down at the local FBI office, and the NID guys had made a huge, pompous deal about ‘I’m a big important NID agent and you can’t arrest me!’ as they were being handcuffed in front of her house and shoved into the FBI cars. Willow said she even went outside and waved at them as they got shoved into the cars and driven away.
So Alex told her that Jack really liked the pictures Alex took. But Willow just insisted, “Well, duh on that, because you’re a great photographer! And not only are you great at taking pictures, but you can get pictures no one else can, and you have the steadiest video anyone ever saw unless they’re walking around with a huge steadicam system! You will totally rule Corcoran, you know that? Everyone else will be a wannabe, and you’re already a superstar with major street cred, and I knew you wouldn’t take any pictures of me that weren’t really nice, because you’re my best friend.”
Lunchtime was really easy, because Shar was done watching “The Iron Giant” again, and she wanted to help in the kitchen. So they made lunch and picked out Shar’s favorite slow cooker recipe and got it going, and Alex even let Shar brown the cubes of beef they sliced up. And Alex let Shar try browning a few cubes with her powers, which made Shar so happy she was squealing. Okay, all three cubes ended up over-done, because Shar needed a lot of practice on fine-tuning her powers, but at least they weren’t turned into lumps of charcoal. Alex figured they would all be edible after cooking in the slow cooker all afternoon. But just in case, she used her TK and put toothpicks in the three Shar-grilled cubes when Shar wasn’t looking.
And then Shar watched a movie on the TV and then ran around in the back yard practicing her kung fu until she was tired enough to take a short nap. “But just a tiny one, because Piki’s lonely, and it’s totally not because I’m a baby or anything!”
* * *
Shar was still napping when the home phone rang. “This is Eleanor Clift. May I speak to A.L. Mack?”
Oh, crud oh crud oh crud! It was Eleanor Clift! THE Eleanor Clift! Alex tried really hard not to squeak or anything. “This is A.L. Mack, Mrs. Clift. I go by Alex when I’m not doing copyrights.”
The woman on the phone laughed lightly. “It’s all right, Alex. You can call me Eleanor. A mutual friend showed me some of your photos of Willow Rosenberg, and I was really impressed. We’d like to do a story on her, particularly now that she’s made the news with her contract with Homeland Security, and the Clare Tobias incident this week. She’s extremely topical, and in this business you seize the day. I’ve already called her, and she’s agreed to a phone interview. We’d love to do a piece on her with your photos. You’ve really captured something meaningful.”
“Umm, thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. You haven’t seen what magazine editors do to your hard work. Trust me, it’s not pretty.”
* * *
A/N: Eleanor Clift is a real person, and her name is used without her permission. But you knew that already.