Chapter 151 – Kinsey Test

Jack calmly insisted, “I’m not dating her.”

Kinsey gave him a slightly raised eyebrow and prepared to hit Jack with all sorts of stuff. Probably creepy surveillance photos and maybe even worse. The creepy minion was standing there with a bunch of files that were probably chock full of creepiness.

Jack smoothly continued, “I’m engaged to her. That’s a bit more than ‘dating’. And I’m planning on moving all the way up to ‘married’ as soon as I can talk her in to it.”

“Even though she might be a threat to the United States of America?” Kinsey asked bitingly.

Jack stared right into Kinsey’s eyes and told him, “I’ve got a pretty good idea of just who is a threat to my country … Senator.”

Wow. Alex was so going to tell Willow all about Jack standing up for her and insulting a powerful U.S. Senator to his face over her.

George growled, “Stand down, O’Neill.”

Jack turned aside and walked over to the big window at the side of the room. He put a hand on the edge of the fancy draperies and muttered, “Wow, great view. We need to talk to the Secret Service about some additional security measures, because a good sniper would be in effective range from at least four of those buildings.”

George added, “As you would know from years of Spec Ops.”

Kinsey kept a really good poker face, but his minion didn’t. Alex hadn’t thought General Hammond would help Jack threaten someone like a U.S. Senator.

But Kinsey wasn’t done. He touched a button on his deskphone and said, “Send them in. Now.”

Alex whirled to the side and flew backward, too, so she had Kinsey and the door both watched. Hanna did the same thing, turning and backing up some, so that the big window was behind her and to the side. That was probably safer, since a sniper couldn’t hit Hanna now unless he fired an anti-tank missile through that wall.

The door opened, and two men walked in. Two men Alex had never seen before. Both were wearing dark suits with thin dark ties and white shirts. The first one was a handsome man, maybe six feet tall, with black wavy hair that was a distinguished gray at the temples. The other man was a few inches taller, and a fair bit younger.

Kinsey was enjoying himself now. “General George Hammond and General Jack O’Neill? Meet Special Supervisory Agent Lewis Erskine and Special Supervisory Agent James Rhodes of the FBI’s Counter-Terrorism Unit. I believe they have something to tell you.”

Alex would have been really worried, except Jack and George weren’t. Okay, Jack was good at acting calm when he was upset, but General Hammond and Major Davis weren’t worried, either. At least, they didn’t look like it. And maybe Jack had planned this out, because this had to be the FBI guys from that conference call.

Kinsey turned his head slightly. “Agent Erskine, I believe you said you had something relevant for me?”

“Yes, Senator,” Inspector Erskine said carefully. “It all goes back to the attempt on your life. The two deceased terrorists took cyanide —”

Alex tried not to react. More guys taking cyanide? Were these more Shop agents? And if so, why would they be trying to kill a super-important Senator like Kinsey?

“— and at first we were having trouble identifying them. Their fingerprints had been chemically burned off, which suggested to us that they knew they would be in one or more of our databases. Fortunately, we were able to assemble a list of potential Shop agents to work from. We couldn’t match their fingerprints, but they neglected to burn the prints off the soles of their feet. We used the data to go to the hospitals at which each of these possibles had been born, and we checked the old archived files from the neonatal nurses. Babies are typically printed, not with their fingertips, but with the sole of the foot, and we were able to match those and ID the subjects. So we were able to establish that both of these assassins were former Shop agents who had gone rogue and had not turned themselves in when Terawatt brought down their organization. Still, we didn’t know the significance of the cyanide poison …”

Kinsey looked uncomfortable, but he gave Jack a ruthless smile right there.

Agent Erskine continued, “Although I noticed that you did.”

Kinsey’s smile just sort of froze.

Agent Erskine added, “I had no idea what that meant, and I was not going to make idle speculations about a U.S. Senator. But then General O’Neill called me and helpfully explained about Colonel McNamara and The Shop and the NID, and contributed some suppositions based on the illegal NID base in the Sonoran desert.”

The smile slid off Kinsey’s face like a slug sliding down a wet window. Kinsey’s minion clutched his files like he might have an accident in his pants at any second. Agent Erskine pretended he hadn’t seen any of it.

Senator Kinsey growled, “None of that is evidentiary, most of it is slanderous, and all of it is likely to get you shipped off to the coldest FBI office in Alaska.”

Agent Erskine didn’t flinch or anything. He just kept going, “As you say, none of this is evidentiary, and you know I’m a stickler for adhering to the letter of the law. However, according to the United States Patriot Act which you vigorously supported, as a member of a DHS or DOJ organization, I am also obliged to turn over this information to the appropriate committee within the House of Representatives for a decision on whether to impeach you, and to turn over any additionally-collected information to the Senate if the committee rules for impeachment and it then goes to trial in the Senate. Since one of the appropriate committees in this case is the House Committee on the Judiciary, and the chair of that committee considers you a threat to his chances at the next Presidential elections, this could be … unfortunate for you.”

Kinsey snapped, “And that’s attempted blackmail, which will put you in a federal prison for a long, long, time. That won’t go so well once they find out you’re a fed.”

Erskine calmly said, “It would only be blackmail if I were extorting money or favors from you in exchange for suppressing the information. I have already turned copies of our files over to the House Committee on the Judiciary and two other House committees because of the varied nature of the actions. So this is simply a statement of fact.”

Kinsey paled just a little, but his minion just about came unglued. Kinsey just glared at Jack. “You think you’ve won, but you’re wrong. I have a lot more pull and a lot more favors owed than you realize. Once I deal with your little power play, you’ll find that you have a very powerful enemy on your ass.”

Jack looked at him like he had threatened to throw spitballs. “Senator, if you give Terawatt or Action Girl or any of my other people any trouble, I will personally introduce you to Charlene Roberta McGee, and then I’ll let her know that you were one of the powers behind The Shop. You know what they did to her, don’t you? She saw her father murdered right in front of her, and with his dying breath he told her to take down everyone connected with The Shop. I think you’d last about three seconds once she found out. Three agonizingly long seconds. I hear being burned to death is about as painful as it gets.”

Kinsey stared right back at Jack. “Are you threatening me, general? Because I can take that shiny star away in a second.”

Jack leaned forward. “It’s not a threat. It’s a promise.”

Kinsey snapped, “I think you can forget about being an officer any longer, O’Neill.”

Alex floated forward with lightning crackling around her so she looked more threatening. “Senator, if you kick him out of the DHS, then you will have to explain to everyone on the planet why Terawatt and Action Girl and Klar and our military Orphans won’t work with the United States anymore. And then I will fly Charlene McGee in to meet you personally. She thinks of General O’Neill as a sort of adopted uncle, so she’ll be extremely mad at you. And I’ll tell you something else. The last thing she got mad at? Gojira. I think you know how that went.”

Kinsey’s minion actually looked like he might wet himself. Well, good!

Alex yanked the top file out of the minion’s hands and tossed it toward Agent Erskine. Pictures and reports went flying all over the place. And …

Oh, crud. She really didn’t want to see pictures of Jack and Willow stark naked and having sex in a motel room, but it looked like that was what Creepy Minion had on Jack. Alex used her TK to scoop everything up in one stack, and she asked Jack, “Do you mind if I incinerate this … extortion material?”

Jack casually said, “You know, I think I’d like to keep it and show it to Willow. Maybe they caught her good side. Or maybe she’ll lose her temper and crash every hard drive on every computer the Senator and his people have ever touched.”

Alex yanked the other files out of Creepy Minion’s hands, glanced at the tabs as she moved them past her face, and dumped them in Agent Erskine’s hands. If one of the tabs had said ‘Terawatt’ or ‘Mack’ or ‘Action Girl’ or something like that, she would totally have hung onto them or given them to Jack. But they had names she didn’t know personally, even if a few names had the words ‘FBI Agent’ in front.

Agent Erskine glanced at the names on the tabs, and Alex was pretty sure he was really, really ticked off but not going to show it. He just said, “Now, Senator, I’m going to have to ask you where you got these files. If these came from a government agency, that may constitute abuse of your public office. If not, then I’ll need to see evidence of the source and the payment process, so we can rule out misuse of campaign funds or official funding sources, although if you personally paid for private investigators to acquire data like these, then that may also be a felony under …”

Jack gave Alex a head-nod, and they slipped out of the office and closed the door behind them, along with the rest of their group. He then gave a fake-cheerful announcement to the peons in the outer office. “Hey, there, guys and gals! Senator Kinky —”

“Kinsey!” one of the peons insisted.

“Like I said. He’s likely to be getting impeached in the next few weeks, and maybe indicted for some naughty stuff, so all of you might want to get your resumés in order and start applying for new jobs before you get dragged down with the rest of the sinking ship. Or you could play it really smart and voluntarily testify against him and get on everyone else’s good side. Oh, and since he was going to try and blackmail Willow Rosenberg, the best computer security expert on the planet, you might want to start backing up everything you care about, before she goes all Old Testament on your work computers. And your home computers. And your phones … and your iPads … and everything else you own that’s smarter than your toaster.”

He strolled out the door into the hallway, a big smile on his face and a folder of really naughty pictures clenched tightly in his hand. Alex figured Jack was going to do something awful to Senator Kinsey as payback, because he really didn’t like people being mean to Willow.

Jack pointed at the vent she had slipped out of only a few minutes earlier, and said, “You’d better get going. Burn will have a GPS heading for you to get you back to the Blackbird. And if Senator Kinky doesn’t get the hint this time, we’ll really lower the boom on him.”

George Hammond’s eyes flicked down toward that folder, and he didn’t say anything. He just looked angry. Alex was pretty sure he was totally cheesed off about the senator doing stuff like that to Willow, because General Hammond really liked her.

Alex darted up toward the vent, going silvery as she moved. She popped the vent out, puddled into the opening, and pulled the vent back into place with the screws outside the ductwork. Then she used her TK to drive all four screws in really fast, and she zoomed through the ducts until she was back out of the building. She popped her tPhone out of her morph and took off in the direction it was telling her to go. It still took her a few minutes to get to Andrews Air Force Base and dive right into the Blackbird. Then it only took an hour to get home, because when she bailed out over Paradise Valley, she didn’t try to slow down until she dived into the town’s creek beds.

So she got to school on time, and everything was great. Including right after school, Ray giving her a dozen gorgeous red roses for Valentines Day. When she saw that Louis was giving Marsha a dozen really pretty yellow roses at the same moment, she buttonholed Ray. “Did you tell Louis to give Marsha the roses?”

Ray sort of blushed and admitted, “Well, we both got emails from someone telling us we should do it, and warning us not to tell who the email was from.”

Alex frowned. “Was it Willow?”

Ray looked really uncomfortable and confessed, “Jack. It was Jack, okay? Don’t tell him I ratted him out. I could really use the help, and he threatened not to tell me any other great ideas, like for your birthday and stuff.”

She stood on tiptoe and gave him a big kiss. “I won’t mention it. And they’re totally gorgeous. I love ’em. And I definitely won’t say no to chocolate, but don’t tell other guys to give their girlfriends chocolate, because there are plenty of girls like Donna who’d have a cow if their boyfriend gave them a hundred thousand calories for a present.” Ray winced, so she asked, “What?”

He whispered, “Donna’s BF bought her a big box of chocolates and really spent a ton on it.”

Alex managed not to wince. After all, Donna and her boyfriend were having big arguments about stuff pretty much all the time. They were a match made in … maybe Reality TV Land.

And then, when Alex’s dad got home, he had a dozen roses for her mom! She just stared at him for several seconds before she fussed, “What’s going on? You never get roses for Mom.”

He smiled. “Your boyfriend sure knows how to score brownie points all the way around. He texted me that he was going to buy you a dozen roses, just in case I didn’t want to look bad in front of Barb.”

Alex suspected that Jack had also told Ray to give her dad that heads-up. Jack was sneaky like that.

*               *               *

Just after dinner, while Alex and Shar were cleaning up in the kitchen, her tPhone rang in the theme music from “Hackers”. Wow, that totally made it hard to guess who it was. She tapped her earjack with her TK and said, “Tera here.”

Willow’s AutoTuned voice bubbled, “Hi! I’ve got Pinkie Pie —”

“That’s Pinkamena Pie!” Jack insisted.

“— on the line, too. We’ve got FYIs!”

Alex carefully said, “Fire away, but I’ve got a little pitcher here with big ears.”

“I do not have big ears!” Shar fussed.

Willow cooed, “Oh, you don’t have big ears honey, you have the cutest little ears ever!”

“Thanks, Auntie Willow! You have pretty ears, too,” Shar answered, even though Willow had only said it over the earjack.

Alex wondered if there was any point at all in trying to keep Shar from learning about this stuff. Telepathic eavesdroppers were probably going to be a huge headache someday. She gave up and asked, “Shar, would you go watch ‘The Iron Giant’ for a while?”

“Sure! Anything’s better than drying pots!” And she sprinted out of the room. It was only a few seconds before Alex heard the sounds of the movie. Shar must have been watching it before dinner, when she was supposed to be doing her homework, and had left it queued up. And that meant that after clean-up, Alex was going to have to check that Shar got her homework done. Great. Alex hated having to play ‘bad cop’ when Shar wasn’t doing stuff she was supposed to, and Shar knew just how to make Alex feel worse about doing it.

Willow said, “I’m glad she’s gone, because I sure don’t wanna talk about naked pictures of Auntie Willow doing the reverse cowgirl with Shar listening in.”

Alex winced a little as she dried a pan. “You don’t have to talk about the pictures anyway.”

Jack agreed, “Definitely. Even if I am absolutely keeping those prints.”

Alex rolled her eyes. She had no idea whether Jack was telling the truth or just being a huge smarty-pants, but either way, he was being so naughty she was surprised Willow wasn’t doing something about it.

Willow went on, “Well, SSA Erskine was uber-helpful, even if I still think Jack needs to do some of the apologizing.”

Jack pretended to protest. “Hey, I have a rep to maintain!”

Willow continued, “Anyway, Senator Kinsey —”

“Kinky.”

“— fine, Senator Kinky fibbed to the DIA to get them to do that totally illegal surveillance of us that weekend in D.C., so we’re going to nail him on that one, too, and the DHS Secretary is chewing up some DIA tuchises so some more of them may rat him out on other stuff. And the spy camera Major Davis planted is working great, and so are the bugs Jack planted, so —”

Alex interrupted, “Okay, I guessed the things I snuck to Jack were two bugs and a phone tap, but where did the spycam come from? I thought he found one and took it out.”

Jack cheerfully explained, “Oh, there weren’t any bugs in the room when we came in. Davis palmed two spycams he snuck around security, probably courtesy of someone he knows in the building, and he planted one and ‘found’ the other. And when I leaned on the front of Senator Kinky’s desk, I planted the thumbtack bug on the underside of the desk. It’s got Bat-Tech, and it’s a passive system, so it should evade any bugsweeps, but we have to put a special-wavelength laser on it to get a signal off it, and so we’ll lose it as soon as he closes those fancy curtains, which also have a bug planted on them.”

Alex guessed, “The ‘ball of lint’ thing.” So Jack hadn’t just been threatening the senator with snipers, he’d also been figuring out lines of sight so he could put a laser on that thumbtack bug.

“Right. And I planted the phone tap on a phone cable in the outer office, while all the minions were focusing on you.”

Oh, yeah, and Jack was the one who got them focused on her for a couple seconds. Jack was a really sneaky guy. Every time she thought she’d worked out how sneaky he was, he raised the bar some more.

Willow smiled. “That one’s not really necessary, because I have his phone number and all the numbers for his minions and peons in the building, so we can monitor those through a little applied phreaking, and —”

Jack insisted, “But we don’t need to, so we can go through slightly less illegal channels, and General Jackson is even covering the bugs we planted under the Domestic Terrorism banner, because Kinsey’s intense smarminess convinced Jackson that he probably really was part of the oversight group for The Shop. Which is now smaller by two people, one of whom I figured was invulnerable.”

Willow asked, “Is that the Borden guy you pointed out? He seemed pretty … not at all memorable. He was just kind of gray and quiet at that thing.”

Jack complained, “Yeah, Arthur Borden. One of the deadliest counter-assassins this country ever cranked out in his heyday, and he wasn’t at that thing because he wears a lot of nice gray suits. He’s got a very small black ops group, but they’re pretty legendary in the biz. They do one thing, and they do it better than anyone else, including the Russians and the Chinese and the Bulgarians and the Iraqis. They kill people. You kill some American agents and their agency cries for a while and tries to handle it and fails drastically? Someone talks to someone else, who talks to someone else, and Borden sends someone in his group out to handle it. A short time later, there’s dead bodies and disappeared people. The end.”

Alex wanted to be horrified, but she’d already seen stuff like The Shop and the NID. And torturing eight-year-old girls and turning them into terrifying weapons of mass destruction, or trying to destroy the ISS and maybe start a planetary ablation cascade just to clean up after yourself, was so much worse than training guys to go shoot other countries’ assassins. She didn’t like the fact that she was no longer horrified to hear about this kind of stuff. It meant that Terawatt was getting tougher, but that meant that Alex Mack was losing a lot of the stuff that she had cherished.

Jack went on, “I’m pretty sure Borden’s people will track down every one of the remaining Shop guys and make sure they’re very publicly dead, just to send a message.”

Alex uncomfortably asked, “Is that … a good thing or a bad thing?”

Jack sighed. “It’s … a thing. It’s not good, except that they’ll probably do a better job of clean-up than we could. It’s not bad, in the sense that we really don’t want these loose cannons running around assassinating people and then doing Christ only knows what.”

Well, it sounded like a bad thing to Alex, except for the whole part about getting rid of more Shop sickos who were a threat to Shar.

Jack added, “With McNamara gone, the DHS will probably be able to close up his personal ‘weapons shop of Isher’, and with the way things are going between us and the former USSR boys, that should be a good thing.”

Alex asked, “So what’d you find out from all the bugs you placed?”

Jack sounded smirky, even over a phone line. “Well, Senator Kinky isn’t all that happy that Agent Erskine is so clean he makes Ivory soap look schmutzig.”

Willow giggled. Alex had to think for a second to remember even a little bit of German she’d picked up from somewhere, maybe the German classes she had in fourth grade from that nice Mrs. Koenig, but she thought maybe that meant ‘dirty’.

Jack kept going. “So the senator tried putting pressure on Erskine’s bosses, not for the first time apparently, but Erskine has been Mister Bureaucratic Efficiency on this one, and every Feeb higher-up that Kinsey called had already gotten a memo that their CTU was having to investigate an unnamed U.S. Senator. After that, pretty much the entire top two tiers of Feebs plus their Director know that’s Kinsey himself. And two of the three House committees that Erskine turned over his findings to happen to have chairmen who hate Kinsey, so Erskine’s getting protection on that side as well. Kinsey’s head minion, whose name turns out to be Harper Jameson Kensington the Fourth, called over a dozen weaselly D.C. contacts to apply pressure on Erskine and us, but word is suddenly out on Kinsey, and no one wants to leap onto a sinking ship unless they get hazard pay and a personal lifeboat up front.”

Willow added, “I went ahead and monitored H.J.’s cellphone, and he’s been calling mommy and daddy back home, trying to get them to put some heavy pressure on people for him, but someone else has been calling daddy, and he wants H.J. to bail, and to take measures so no one thinks he’s an Orphan, or his future as a politician is toilet-bound.”

Alex asked, “Is Kinsey doing sicko things to those two interns from Playboy?”

“Jack, you didn’t tell me about any Playboy Playmates …”

“For Pete’s sake Will, I don’t tell you about a lot of useless crap. I was focusing on planting a couple bugs right in front of people. He’s got two twenty-year-old bimbo interns with bleached blonde hair and boob implants. It’s not like he’s the only one. And so far, according to our bugs, he hasn’t made a move on either one. Ol’ Kensington’s making a big play for at least one of ’em, but he isn’t getting any traction in the polls, if you know what I mean.”

And it dawned on Alex that someone like Kinsey wouldn’t bother himself on interviewing and hiring interns. Even really sexy interns. Mister Kensington was probably the sleazebag behind that bit of creepy hiring practice. Kinsey probably saved his sleaze up for extra-sleazy mega-big stuff.

Jack added, “No, the senator’s playing it close to the vest and telling H.J. to go make shit happen, and if it’s actionable not to tell him. It’s the old mobster deal.” He switched to a Godfather imitation that wasn’t all that great, but Alex had heard worse. “So … it would be a terrible shame if Fabrizzi had an accident tomorrow, and it proved to be fatal. Not that I would wish something like that on a fine, upstanding member of society …”

Willow teased, “Febreeze-y? Does this mean you and Charlie finally got around to doing laundry?”

Jack immediately leapt to the defense. “Hey! I’ll have you know Charlie’s a whole lot better about laundry and showers and deodorant and everything since he started dating Hanna.”

Oh, yeah, Hanna had a really sensitive nose. She’d probably be able to tell every time Charlie wore a t-shirt for an extra day, or wore his jeans too many days in a row, or forgot to air out his sneakers, or any of that. And Hanna was really pretty direct a lot of the time. She wouldn’t hint around. She might not even know how to hint around yet, unless she’d watched Janet a bunch or Cindy showed her.

Alex felt like she was totally not a good friend, because she wasn’t making more time for Hanna. Even if a lot of the time, it felt like she had no time to do anything other than school and superheroing.

Okay, sometimes it felt like there wasn’t time to do even that much. And really, she had gotten a lot of time to chat with Hanna during the Davenport thing. And with Grover. And how weird was it that the ‘teen table’ thing with Hanna and Grover worked better with Jack there, too? Sometimes Alex wondered how Jack got all the way through the Academy and those years as a junior officer without getting kicked out of the Air Force for being a snarky smart-aleck.

Willow admitted, “Yeah, he’s way better about keeping the kitchen clean, from what you said.”

Jack replied, “Hanna. Again. He knows he can’t bring her over to the house if the kitchen’s a cesspit, or any of that stuff, because she’ll notice. In about a microsecond. Any of his guy friends? You could have an erupting septic tank in the middle of the living room floor, and they’d be oblivious.”

“I told you not to build your living room over that old septic tank,” Willow teased.

Jack switched to a ‘crochety old guy’ voice, “Dagnabbit! It was good enuff fer my daddy, and his daddy, and HIS daddy, so it’s by gum good enuff fer me! We luv that there living room septic tank thang!”

Willow told Alex, “See? I knew there was a reason not to let him move to West Virginia.”

Alex hinted, “So with all this kidding around, I guess the Senator Kinsey problem is all dealt with?”

Jack answered, “Well, technically that would be a ‘no’. We just have a handle on most of the problem right now, but if he can get some Appropriations Committee hearings going before he gets impeached and tried, he’ll stick it to us as hard as he can.”

Willow added, “But if Terawatt flies in and makes an appeal to protect the budgets of the agencies she works with, and points out why Senator Kinky hates her agencies so much, that ought to deal with that problem, too. And Big Cheese and Top Banana are monitoring the committee meeting thing pretty hard right now, so if anything comes up, we’ll let you know ASAP.”

Alex complained, “I’d just like some normal-time, you know? Just plain old me doing me-stuff, instead of having to fly off and save the world every week.” Then she felt kind of whiny, because things had really been a lot calmer since the summer. Mostly. With a few exceptions.

A few really awful, horrible, massive exceptions that she’d nearly died from.

She didn’t know what Maggie Walsh and The Collective would get up to, and it really bothered her that she hadn’t been smart enough to get more information out of Wacky Maggie the one time she had a chance to talk to her. If only Alex had been smart enough to get just a hint out of Walsh about what The Collective was going to do next. Alex was sure that other-Sam or other-Hermione or other-Willow would have been able to pull it off.

A/N: Arthur MacGillivray Borden is better known as ‘Mac’. He is Matt Helm’s boss, in the books by Donald Hamilton. I do not own that property, even if we do have most of the books in the series on our home bookshelves. By the way, Matt Helm is not a cool swinger who does wholesome espionage stuff, as in the Dean Martin movies or the TV series. Matt Helm is an assassin and counter-assassin who is ruthlessly good at his job, as in all the books. His boss is a lot more ruthless, as befits a guy who sends killers out to kill other killers, or maybe be killed in turn.


Interlude XXIX

He snapped at his assistant, “Stop here.”

Kensington pulled over in his obnoxious little Jaguar. “Yes, Senator.”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can. If I’m not back within half an hour, you know what information to release.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the next time you drive me anywhere, drive something American. Got me?”

“Yes, sir.”

He strolled into the park, making it look as casual as he could manage. Someone was sitting on the primary bench, so he went to the first alternate bench, sat down, and turned off his cellphone. Then he opened up a copy of the Wall Street Times, as agreed.

He didn’t actually read it. He counted off the seconds on his Rolex. If his contact didn’t arrive within two minutes, he’d have to try again tomorrow.

A minute and forty seconds later, the guy sat down on the other end of the bench. “Keep the newspaper up, please, Senator.”

“I have done this before,” he muttered quietly.

“I trust your phone is powered off.”

He nodded quickly.

“Good, because you appear to have pissed off Willow Rosenberg, who has made her ire known among the white hat communities in telecom and computer security. So your cellphone is probably not your own anymore.”

He complained, “My personal website has gone down about ten times a day since then. My IT people can’t stop it, and they tell me I’m not going to be able to hire anyone good enough to deal with the attacks. And my personal pages on the Senate website keep getting defaced. My IT people have warned me not to turn on my personal computer while it’s connected to the internet, or it’ll get attacked and I’ll probably end up with everything on it exposed to the entire world.”

“Miss Rosenberg is extremely attractive, and quite popular in the community, and —”

He hissed, “She’s an Orphan!”

“I believe that most people in the community are not holding that against her. The people who are out to get her tend to be people like P$ychon4ut, who would be a lot more dangerous to deal with. Our people in the DHS have gleaned some intel from O’Neill’s classified reports, and we have reason to believe P$ychon4ut is hiding out in India and working for an Orphan who may or may not be plotting to take over India, or perhaps most of Asia.”

He complained, “Damn Orphans!” He took a calming breath and asked, “Are your people going to help me against O’Neill and his superheroes and his Orphan bedbunny hacker?”

“Our thinktank assessed a variety of options, and we have a counter-proposal for you. Make an effort to give O’Neill more autonomy and more authority. We think it’s highly likely that he could have a major failure before long. If he’s facing Walsh and whoever’s backing her, and also these Orphan terrorists, and also these madmen in India, along with the problems in Russia … and we give him the authority to face off against all of them without mandating that he stick to SRI taskings … we think he’ll eventually be in over his head and spread far too thin. As soon as he loses a few superheroes, or a couple of his teams, he’ll be vulnerable. And if he sticks his nose in personally and has it cut off, you won’t even have to issue a public reprimand. You can take care of his remaining people while he’s being planted six feet under at Arlington.”

Kinsey managed not to smile.

*               *               *

Samantha Carter looked up from her hospital bed. She was sick and tired of being in the isolation ward, and sick and tired of feeling like shit all the time. The promotion and the shiny new medals didn’t make up for all of it. One of the nurses had been all excited about it, and had even taken Sam’s uniform jacket and put all the crap on it, and then hung it up outside the isolation area where Sam could look at it when she wanted.

Her dad would have been ecstatic. Maybe if she’d felt like she wasn’t getting rewarded for being a political pawn, when Terawatt had done all the real work and actually deserved the medals, she might have been pleased about the promotion.

The doctors were telling her she was making excellent progress, and she should just be glad she wasn’t on a heart-lung machine or scrambling for a dozen different organ transplants. But she was fully aware that her recovery from being microwaved like a TV dinner was only part of the problem.

She didn’t have to be a biochemist to know that the doctors were still worried about the after-effects of those nucleic acids and their breakdown by-products. And she didn’t have to be psychic to know that General Peterson had come by, not because he was an old friend of her dad’s, but because he and his people were concerned about what effects that alien lifeform might have on her brain.

Granted, she was worried about that, too. She had been scanned and studied enough that she was sure she had no spores left inside her, but she didn’t know if it was possible to transfer any sort of knowledge or urges or commands through those biochemicals that looked unpleasantly like RNA-analogues to her. And if peculiar biochemicals could cause weird effects on people, like what the North Korean supervillains had experienced, she wasn’t in a hurry to find out what might happen to her.

Still, all the RNA-analogues had been thoroughly denatured, so what had been left in her body wasn’t like a functional RNA molecule. Granted, she had been somewhat lucky. She had designed her Terawatt-maser so that she could try out a wide variety of microwave frequencies in a really short period of time while she set it up. And she had hit on one frequency or harmonic that really worked on the alien macromolecules. And Holy Hannah had that hurt! Still, how could they not recognize that she was clean and the alien biochemicals were no longer a threat?

It was utterly frustrating, and patience was not her strong point. She clenched her jaws and concentrated on writing another computer program. That was another sticking point. They wouldn’t let her have access to the internet or even a really powerful computer, in case she was suddenly seized with the urge to write an unstoppable computer virus, or something else utterly ridiculous. She didn’t think they had any real understanding of how computer viruses worked, or what their limitations were, or that there was no logical connection between RNA-analogues from the slime and functional computer viruses. So she was writing code on an out-of-date laptop with no connectivity, and then someone else would take her code and check through it and then run it elsewhere. That meant this was taking a hundred times longer than it should, because any typos she missed had to come back for correction, and anything they didn’t understand about the science or the algorithms had to be brought back here for review followed by arguments, which took a ridiculous amount of time.

It would really be helpful if they brought in someone who didn’t have delusions of competence. But this guy Wilson was an idiot, and was too stupid to realize that he needed to bring in bigger guns. Unfortunately, her preferences for ‘bigger guns’ were being ignored. McKay was Canadian, and Hawking was British, and Fillipenko was Russian, so the U.S. military wasn’t going to bring in any of them as her science liaison. She had suggested a dozen American scientists who were actually qualified and talented, as opposed to, say, Wilson, but the clearance process was taking forever.

And there was the pain in her ass, yet again. Wilson was standing outside the viewing window and just staring at her chest. What a creep. She was wearing scrubs! It wasn’t like she was in a string bikini! What was wrong with the big dolt?

She glared at him and just wished she could demonstrate her martial arts skills on him. For about ten solid minutes. If she could just punch him once right in the mouth … She lifted up her right hand in a fist to let him know what she was thinking.

The viewing window in front of him suddenly flexed alarmingly. Then it cracked most of the way across.

*               *               *

Hermione Granger looked up when Ron let himself into her flat.

He took one look at her with all her papers spread out all over her dining room table, and stopped. He checked, “Anything ‘eyes only’? You could’ve told me not to come over tonight.”

She got up from the table, her neck cracking from being bent over for so long. “Oh, Ron! I’m so tired of this.”

He gave her a long hug and whispered in her ear, “Looks like someone needs a back massage.”

Mmmm. She could really go for one of his massages. She didn’t know where he’d learned how, but he was really good at it.

She was fairly sure that he’d gotten it from that book his brother Charlie bought him for his sixteenth birthday. The one he kept hidden away and wouldn’t let her look at. Ginny said that Ron had bought Harry the same book for Harry’s seventeenth birthday, and she appreciated that enough to forgive most of Ron’s crap from their childhood years.

She said, “I’ve got to get this finished first. And you can look. It’s Terawatt liaison material, but nothing classified. It’s just the details on the seating arrangements for the March conference. There are a hundred little requirements, and it’s a nightmare.”

He looked over her notes, which were in her tiny handwriting, and covered page after page. She had a scale mock-up of a conference room laid out on a two-foot by three-foot sheet of graph paper, with post-it notes cut to table and chair size arranged over the sheet. He wondered, “Why do you have to keep the Frogs and the Bellochs separated?”

She groaned. “Page seven, paragraph four. There’s an illicit affair going on between a French female officer and a Belgian intelligence agent, and the Belgian’s wife is now part of the liaison office, and she’s mad about it but she doesn’t want to divorce him because she’s seeing someone else, too, and it’s like one of those bad French sex comedies, only without the comedy.”

Ron scowled. “And you have to arrange seating to make everyone happy, and they stuck you with all these loony side rules you have to follow, too? Are they mad? It’d take a supercomputer to figure it all out!”

Hermione realized what she needed to do. She kissed Ron and murmured, “Ron, you’re a genius!”

Ron kissed her back and murmured, “You only say that when you’re being a genius and I’m still lost on page one.”

She smiled. “Tomorrow morning, I’ll write up a program to try every possible configuration and check all of them against the list of rules. Then I can move on to something meaningful.”

“Does that mean …” He wiggled his eyebrows lewdly.

“No, it most certainly does not mean what you’re hoping it means,” she insisted. “I have a great deal of really fiddly details to cover, since the meeting’s in London this time, and most of the liaison group is quite content to treat me like a secretary anytime they think they can get away with it.”

Ron glanced at some of the artistically trimmed and carefully labeled post-it notes as she carefully folded the graph paper and then put everything away in a sealed envelope in her briefcase. “You’re inviting the Yanks, too? I thought …”

Hermione admitted, “I have been having some more chats with Tera. I mean, Terawatt. And she got in quite a spot of trouble with some of the American higher-ups because she didn’t clear things with them first when she saved the day here, and so they got yelled at by their bosses. So I’m inviting General Baylor of the U.S. European Command and his staff. And Jack O’Neill. And Tera, of course.”

“Of course. You and your mate Tera.”

“Oh, stuff it, Ron. She’s really nice, and I think she doesn’t have many people she can just talk to when she’s being Terawatt.” She gave him a smirk. “And for some reason, she thinks you’re nice, too.”

“Oi! I am nice!”

Hermione let him hug her, and she wondered if she could arrange things so ‘Annie Farrell’ could have some free time just to have dinner with her and Ron, and maybe also Harry and Ginny. And she wondered if she needed to take some special precautions to keep SIS agents from recording their little get-together. L might not like that. On the other hand, L might congratulate her on her initiative.

Although she would rather not have a meeting with L ever again. She shuddered at the thought of Ron’s family finding out that L wanted her to become the next Double Oh. That would not go over well, largely because Ron’s family knew too much about how things really worked, and some of them knew what a Double Oh officer really had to do on assignment.

Ron’s hand slid down her waist to caress her bottom. He whispered, “Come on, 009. Why don’t you show me your espionage agent wiles?”

She knew she shouldn’t have told him and Harry everything L said in that meeting. She gave him a look and said, “Fine. But the entire time, I’ll be staring at the ceiling and thinking of England.”

Ron laughed all the way into her bedroom, until she kissed him hard enough to shut him up.

*               *               *

“Bruce? What’s wrong?”

He turned from the window and faced Julie. “Are you done with your workout?”

“Yes.”

“And your katas and forms?”

“Yes.”

“And the new training?”

“Still yes, and you’re not re-directing me that easily. What’s bothering you?”

He admitted, “They’re being so cooperative. Maybe too cooperative. I don’t like it.”

Julie asked, “Would you rather they be uncooperative and sneaky?”

He scowled and admitted, “Maybe. At least then I might feel like I have a handle on things.”

She pointed out, “You’re dealing with a superheroine who’s really only a seventeen-year-old girl who comes from a pretty sheltered environment. She’s still in high school. And if she met that other Batman while she was still learning the ropes, she may see you as a mentor figure. She might even have a crush on you.”

He managed not to wince at the thought. But he had already considered that, along with a few dozen other scenarios.

She asked, “So what’s really the problem?”

He frowned. “This is precisely the way I would go about luring my supposed partner into a sense of complacency before I took him down. And I’m not sure that any of my anti-Terawatt protocols will work in an emergency situation.”

“What about her teammates?”

He paused for a moment. “They’re comparatively easy. Tear gas for Klar. It will incapacitate him and make him visible as well as audible as he moves through the gas cloud. Action Girl is simply stronger and faster. Anything from tranq darts on up can handle her. No, Terawatt’s the key. And even if I never have to stop her, I’ll need the same protocols against Danielle Atron or any new supervillain with similar powers.”

She asked, “How many new supervillains are you expecting?”

He sighed inwardly. “I’ve been running projections, but fitting a reliable curve is impossible with the minimal data we have so far. But six years ago, there were no known supers, even if there were roughly 420 Orphans out there. Two years ago, there was one, and she was hiding. Thanks to Atron, as of one year ago we had a total of one superheroine and twenty-two supervillains, along with what may have been a supervillain in the Ukraine, maybe one in Chernobyl, and a probable one in Maryland. Now we have the monster of Tromaville, Action Girl, Klar and those invisible supervillains, Tsurara in Japan, the battalion of supers in North Korea … The list gets a lot longer if I include all the possibles I’m picking up, like Toronto, central Africa … I need to work with Ms. Rosenberg on this, only I don’t trust her.”

She pointed out, “Well, can you stop her from getting into your computers even if you don’t work with her?”

He gritted his teeth. “No.”

“Then what’s the harm?”

He looked at her and admitted, “I really hate it when I’m wrong.”

“And someone else is right,” she added with a smile.

*               *               *

Maggie Walsh listened impatiently while Josef tried to cover his ass yet again.

Her father finally interrupted. “Yes, we already know that your first team was wiped out. But why don’t you know exactly where they were at the time?”

Josef finally admitted, “My team did not perform regular GPS checks, even though it had been suggested. I did not force them to do so, because I did not want them to mutiny. We have the area down to a manageable size now, and Karen expects to find the site in the next several weeks. She may have to remove some witnesses.”

Maggie glanced over at her father. They both knew she was the one who had recommended the routine GPS signals, along with more frequent sat phone call-ins. But she also knew that Josef’s first team had been undermining him from day one. She thought it was remarkable that her father’s research had allowed him to emphasize aggressive behaviors as an expression in the correct segments of the genome. She thought it was excellent that it allowed his children to rise to the top of any field they chose. She also thought it was unfortunate that it led to these types of problems. The India bloc was a clear example of that particular flaw.

Her father waited until Josef sat, and then he asked, “Pierre, what happened to the two teams from the India bloc?”

Pierre smiled ruthlessly. “One of their teams thought it was infiltrating our Paris op. We merely let them meet our newest project. The second team didn’t follow up. They made for Dr. Walsh’s private project in England, instead.”

Her father glanced her way, so she supplied, “You would be surprised how ineffectual infiltration ops go when you have psychics on-site. The Winshire County project is still on track, just as it has been ever since I started designing it after we started having problems with Marissa Weigler.”

 
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