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Chapter 185 – Is Paris Burning?“Your three!”
Harry Potter reacted as soon as Ron yelled. These things were too fast, but he still tried to get his L85 swinging around in time. He managed to put two rounds into its stomach before it swatted the L85 to the side. And he knew a couple of rounds in its gut probably wouldn’t slow it down. These things were insanely tough.
They were also insane. They weren’t strategists or tacticians or even fighters. They were maulers, like if you were unlucky enough to have to fight an angry wolf with just melee weapons.
Lord, that hadn’t been fun.
He rolled backward and let it tear the L85 out of his hands. It was still moving forward too fast for him to stop, so he let it push him onto his back. Hitting the concrete floor that hard knocked the wind out of him, but he didn’t give up. He kicked off with his legs, his feet catching it right about where he just shot it.
It flipped over him and tried to grab his throat as it flew through the air.
He had figured on something like that, so he slashed across its hands with his Fairbairn. The damned thing managed to avoid losing a couple of fingers, and it crashed just past his head. It leapt to its feet before Harry could even roll out of its reach.
Ron’s combat shotgun took most of its head off, and it collapsed in a heap.
Ron’s voice came over the comm system in his ear. “Black, this is Red. Situation?”
Harry immediately replied. “Black here. Shaken but not shredded.”
“Brown to team. This position is not defensible, and we’ll have to cross eighty meters of open ground to get back to the Bushmaster. I have lost contact with White and Grey and Green.”
Harry gritted his teeth. If they’d lost Moody’s fire team, they were in trouble. The Krauts and Frogs were hard at work trying to storm the support building, and had their hands full. And as far as he knew, the Dutch fire teams had been wiped out as soon as they entered the back side of the factory.
“Red to team. Move to my position ASAP.”
Right. Ron was always thinking strategically. They couldn’t defend Ron’s position for long, but standing near these crates was just asking for something else to leap on him and rip his throat out. Or smash him through a brick wall. Harry moved. He turned with his back to Ron, and covered the crates with his L85 as he moved backward.
Ron looked up and gasped, “Oh, dear God.”
Harry risked a glance up, and he gulped. Thirty feet above the concrete floor, Hermione was trotting along a steel I-beam that ran the length of this half of the factory. Harry knew Hermione had gotten up in the structure to get out of the reach of the killers and secure a clear sniping position, but what she was doing was bloody dangerous.
A killer leapt from a skylight overhead, and Hermione had to dodge. The thing missed her and fell all the way to the concrete, but Hermione lost her balance.
Harry guessed the thing would land on all fours instead of conveniently going splat, so when it hit the ground he was ready to put two rounds into its skull.
Hermione toppled off the beam while Ron made a gasp of sheer terror. She fell about six feet and came up short. She dangled under the beam and yelled, “I’m all right!”
Harry watched their surroundings as Hermione struggled with her makeshift security system. Now that he knew what to look for, he could see she had some sort of steel hoop around the beam, and she had roped herself to the hoop. She had to have been running along dragging the hoop right behind her.
Ron looked around frantically and clicked his comm system. “Brown, this is Red. We cannot move to your position. You’re going to have to lower yourself and cross the terrain while we provide fire support, or else you’ll have to pull yourself back up to the beam and continue scaring the life out of me.”
Another two killers came out of the darkness, staring up at Hermione like she was a steak dangling down for their dinners. Harry figured Hermione’s feet were dangling within reach of a good jump from one of these things.
He carefully lined up a shot on the one moving parallel to his position, and put a round through its head.
Ron waited until the second one turned and charged right at them with ferocious quickness. He waited until it was too close to miss, and he took its head off with the shotgun.
But there were plenty of fifty-five gallon drums over near Hermione’s position, and if there were any threats lurking behind the drums the good guys wouldn’t find out until it was too late. If Hermione wasn’t dangling there, he’d toss a couple of grenades just over the drums and clear that position. But that would shred Hermione. And if the drums turned out to be full of something explosive or flammable, that would go badly, regardless. Still, they couldn’t move to Hermione’s position, because they would be moving right into the enemy’s access areas.
Hermione suddenly yelled, “Yes!”
He didn’t know what it was, but he knew it was some good news. Finally. He came up with six things it might be, and he was really, really hoping it was choice number one. Even though there was really no way it could be Terawatt, since the bloody stupid Italians and Spaniards hadn’t wanted them to call Terawatt when it might be a false alarm and perhaps piss her off.
He was sure that Hermione would have been able to come up with a lot more than six.
* * *
Alex swooped down into the street, staying silvery because she really needed a uniform. And it sure didn’t look like there were going to be nice costume shops in this neighborhood.
She zapped the two threats in the street and moved down to the next block to zap the two there. The first threat just wielded a big knife-blade, which made for a really good target. She zapped that one and moved at the second threat, a big guy who looked like he spent too much time hitting the clubs.
The big guy saw her coming, and moved. He darted to one side of the street, leapt so he hit a building about ten feet up, and kicked off so he was heading right for her. And he had what looked like the business end of a pitchfork in one hand.
But he was making a big jump through the air, which meant she had all the advantages, even if he was quicker than she was. That would’ve been bad for her if they were sparring and she wasn’t using her powers. But they weren’t sparring.
She darted upward and used her spare TK to slam him into the street. Then she zapped him before he could get to his feet again.
All four of the threats had been walking — well, maybe creeping — from the same general direction. She darted over a block and found three more threats coming from the same direction. She zapped all three and moved over another block.
Crud! There were four more of them! After she zapped them, she moved yet another block over. Only now she was seeing that they were spreading out in kind of a circle from maybe a central area.
She looked at the street signs at the intersection, and then she flew up to about five hundred feet so she could get a better view of the area. She quickly called General du Vallée on the number he had just used. Naturally, she got someone who was minding the phones. And they spouted out a bunch of French that was probably ‘please identify yourself and you shouldn’t be calling this super-important number and why can’t we see your caller information?’
“Je ne comprends pas,” she started out. “Parlez-vous Anglais? I am Terawatt. I do not have time for a lot of run-around right now, because we have a serious problem in Paris.”
It still took at least thirty seconds to get the general. “I am most sorry, Terawatt. How may I help you?”
She gave him the names of the streets at the intersection below her, and she explained, “We’ve got some sort of central area that’s maybe eight or ten blocks south-southeast of my position now, and these threats are creeping out of it. We need extensive containment. If you can get enough soldiers and police to cordon off this whole area, and we can find the source for the outbreak, we can contain it. Maybe.”
The general replied, “Our units are suspiciously close to what you are computing as a central area. If you could provide support, it would be useful.”
“Will do.” She hung up and pulled her tPhone back into her morph before zooming down to fifty feet above the streets where she could zap more threats.
She zapped sixteen more of the threats. They were pretty creepy. She totally wouldn’t have wanted to run into them without superpowers. Not only were they strong and quick, their eyes kept doing a freaky ‘change into cat slits’ thing that should have been impossible. And they just moved like predators. And they seemed to really like pointy things.
Oh, crud. She was sweeping past an old church that looked like it had been the site of a battle between some of the attackers and a bunch of military guys. It was pretty obvious from the deserted official-looking vehicles and only two guys, one military-looking and the other helping the military guy, making their way unsteadily out of a door that things hadn’t gone mega-great. And if these were military guys, they might have intel for her. She dived down.
The one guy with the receding hairline and the ponytail did not look like the kind of guy who would be wearing mil spec gear. He looked like the kind of guy who got into barfights with Marines. But he was helping the other guy toward the military vehicles, and the other guy was totally military. And not doing so great.
She flew so she was right in their way. “I am Terawatt. Am I right that you have been fighting these attackers?”
The older, less-military guy growled in a smoky voice, “Yeah. And I’m Commander Marshall Lawson and this is my op. So back off. If you even are Terawatt, which I doubt.”
She decided to channel Jack, because the guy was really annoying. “Oh, you see many flying women who hurl lightning bolts in your line of work?”
The hurt guy, who looked Asian-American, snorted with laughter, and then groaned in pain, which made Alex feel bad for making him hurt more.
Lawson whipped out his right arm, revealing a nasty-looking wristblade that had blood all over it. He growled, “Look bitch, get lost before I turn you from a Terawatt into a bunch of little kilowatts. We handled this. We had a higher casualty rate than I wanted, but we took out Aroon and his queen bitch, and we bombed their little chemistry lab. No more CTX.”
Oh, great. A biochemical. Another biochemical. “It’s not over. Aroon had a large factory that E.U. units are dealing with right now.”
The hurt guy groaned, “The water supply. It may not be safe after all. Tia did say there were already traces leaked into the system.”
If Alex hadn’t been silvery, the hair would have stood up on the back of her neck. Since she was silvery, it just felt like it. “You knew this was a threat to the Paris water supply and you didn’t tell anyone? Are you insane?”
“Go to hell! We handled this on our own! They were my men!”
He yelled at her some more, but she ignored him as she darted to the roof of the church. As soon as she thought she was too far away for him to hear, she called General du Vallée again. This time, she lucked out and the general was right there to talk to her. “Terawatt here. It’s a biochemical codenamed CTX. Aroon may have released it into the water supply here. Commander Marshall Lawson led a team that’s probably American and took down Aroon, but did NOT alert the French authorities of the danger.”
The general said some bad stuff in French. At least, that was sure what it sounded like from his tone. “We were concerned this might be a water-borne or air-borne threat, so we have been studying our options. There is a water treatment station near Aroon’s factory, so we are assuming that is the entry point, and some of our units are trying to halt its operation right now. We are already trying to warn the citizens in the area, despite the dangers from the attackers. Once we have stopped the water treatment station, we will begin clearing the sector’s water lines and taking samples for verification. We already have military and police cordons going up around the zone of threat, and knowing that it is a chemical in the water will make the process much easier for our forces.”
Well, yeah. Even Alex could figure that one out. If it was airborne, it would be mega-grim and the forces would all require gasmasks or NBC gear or maybe even full-body protection. If it was biological instead of chemical, the attackers would have to be treated as contagious. “So there’s only a small sector that gets water from that place?”
“But yes. And we can isolate an area around that sector if those are the only people who can become poisoned.”
She suggested, “And that Commander Lawson probably knows some more about the chemical and its effects, so your staff needs to consult with him and his superiors. I’ll contact General O’Neill and see if he can exert some influence.”
The general muttered, “That would be most useful, since this sounds like a group of your countrymen acting without any concern for others.”
She sighed to herself. “General, I would like to be able to disagree with you, but after meeting him, I think you are absolutely correct.”
He just glossed over that bit. “Now if you could assist our people and the other E.U. units, I would be most appreciative.”
“That’s just what I wanted to do.”
He said something in French to someone else, and then told her, “We are now patching you through to joint communications at the factory. This should also give you a GPS beacon to use for guidance.”
She replied, “Merci beaucoup.” That file from Willow was totally useful.
There was some static, and then someone said something that sounded French, followed by, “I repeat, we require assistance as soon as possible” and then a sentence in what sounded like German.
Alex cut in, “This is Terawatt. I will be there shortly.”
And she very definitely heard Hermione Granger yell, “Yes!” over the comms.
She checked her tPhone and there was a GPS reading for her. She headed east and south, and she spotted the factory less than a mile away. The GPS reading was coming from a great big armored personnel carrier with a big machine gun on top. There were half a dozen of the threats pounding on the doors into the thing.
Okay, the threats were strong and fast, but they couldn’t bust a door into an APC with their bare hands, like Azure Crush could. But one of them had wedged a big steel bar into the right-hand tread so it was stuck. That wasn’t good.
She zapped all six threats and yanked the steel bar out of the treads while she was on her way to the factory. Then she flew in through the already blasted-open sliding doors to find Ron Wellesley and Harry Potter defending a large, open section of the factory instead of doing something dumb like getting over by the big crates, where stuff could sneak up on them. And Hermione was hanging over twenty feet above the floor from a long girder, with several of the threats closing in on her.
But Hermione wasn’t panicking. She was holding her rope between her knees so she was upside-down, and she was carefully picking off the threats with headshots every time any of them got close to her.
Alex spoke into her tPhone. “Miss Granger, get ready for a grab.”
Hermione looked over at Alex and gave her a thumbs-up, even if Alex was just a silvery blob instead of her usual Terawatt appearance.
Alex grabbed Hermione and pulled her into the silvery morph, sliding her out of the rope harness at the same time. With all the gear Hermione was packing, Alex was just barely able to hold the two of them in the air as she flew Hermione over to the guys.
Once Alex let Hermione out of the morph, Hermione made a quick inhale and said, “We need to get out of here.”
Ron nodded. “We need to evac. Can you fly all of us over to the APC outside?”
Alex shook her head no. “No, but I can pull all of you into my morph and puddle the three of you to the APC. I already took down the attackers there, but there was a bar in the treads so you need to check the treads are okay before you go anywhere in it.”
Ron thought for a fraction of a second. “Good. Take us all there, drop me and Hermione, and then take Harry with you to the secondary site. They need backup, and you’re as much backup as it’s reasonable to ask for. Plus Harry’s very good at breaking things.”
“Thanks so much, Ron.”
Alex smiled at the byplay and moved. She pulled the three of them into her morph and puddled out the doors toward the APC. Two more threats were moving swiftly toward the thing, so she detoured slightly to hit them with lightning before dropping off Hermione and Ron.
She hung onto Harry and tried flying, but he was still too heavy. Okay, him and all his gear and weapons and ammo and stuff together were too heavy. So she puddled off toward the nearby water plant.
The fence was already busted apart in a couple places, so she just puddled right through one of the holes and headed toward a smashed-in door. There were five guys dressed in military gear in a short hallway, firing through an open door straight ahead, as well as down hallways to their right and left.
Alex let Harry out of her morph, and he made a small gasp before he snapped, “Situation report!”
A man who might have been a corporal said with a German accent, “Ambush. We can’t advance down either side hall or into the main area dead ahead due to threats behind solid barriers. We tried stun grenades, but they’re resistant to them. The French units are having the same problem at the rear.”
Harry glanced at her, and she said, “Got it.”
He told her, “If you could clear left, sweep in a semi-circle through the open area dead ahead of us, and come up behind the flankers on the right, we can advance forward. Then you can move to the back side of the plant and clear the way for the French units.”
“Roger that, sir,” she said as formally as she could. He just grinned.
She flew down the left hallway. There were several dead soldiers with their throats cut or else their whole chest cut open, which was seriously icky. And there was a barricade at the end of the hall, where someone had taken down a door first. She flew over the barricade and zapped the three men on the other side. “Clear left!” she yelled as she moved on.
She swept in a big arc behind two more threats who were hiding behind a couple of big forklift-like things. She zapped them next. “Clear center!” Then she took out the last two threats, who were guarding the right-hand hallway with pitchforks and big knives. “Clear right!”
She darted past pipes and pumps and controls and all kinds of stuff she had no idea about. The back side had a garage door thing that was huge. It was maybe forty feet high and thirty feet wide. She figured it was for trucking in entire replacement pumps and things. It had a regular-sized door in the middle, and there were half a dozen bloodily murdered soldiers scattered around it. There were two threats hanging on hinges of the big garage door about ten feet above the regular door, just waiting for more soldiers to try and get in. She could see four more threats lurking behind a stack of big drums. She zapped the foursome before flying over and zapping the hinge-dangling twosome, who fell to the floor with a thud.
She used her TK to yank open the small door, and she yelled, “This is Terawatt! I have cleared the interior for you. Check with the German units for verification.”
She darted away from the door, because she figured the guys on the other side might be really jumpy, and getting shot or getting blasted with grenade fragments was totally not fun.
She caught up with Harry when she got back to the middle of the water plant. He was standing before a panel full of lights and switches and dials. There was a weird thing like a chem lab pump system with tubes running back to a cart of six fifty-five gallon drums, and Harry had already smashed that up pretty well. And he was busy with his own comms. “Okay, Hermione, I got that. But how do we make sure the pumps are off? There’s more of this crap in the pipes, and we don’t want it moving any farther downstream.” He paused for a few seconds and groaned, “Fine. How do we get these pumps to reverse, and where do we dump the contaminated water?”
Alex told him, “I think General du Vallée is already working on that. Have Hermione call him.”
And while Harry did that, she called Jack on her tPhone.
“O’Neill here. What’s the sitch, Kim?”
She managed not to roll her eyes, but maybe it was because she was still silvery. She gave him a rundown on everything from the threats roaming the local streets to Commander Lawson to the water plant.
“Marshall Lawson? Mid-fifties? Vaguely American Indian look with a ponytail? Looks like his fashion icon is Billy Jack?”
Alex nodded. “Yep.” Okay, she knew he couldn’t see her nod.
“Okay, watch out for him. He does not play well with other children, he’s lethal with his hands or with a knife, and he’ll pull out whatever weaponry is needed to complete the job, which is why he’s still in black ops even if he’s a loose cannon and has pissed off maybe ten times more senior officers than me, which is probably a world record.”
Wow, if Jack thought the guy was a loose cannon, that was a major diss.
Jack added, “He’s ex-CIA. Very ex-CIA. He’s supposed to be out of official business, which means he’s probably working off the books for Halliburton or Majestic or Blackwater or Academi. I’ll send this up the line, but I’ll bet a fifty we won’t find anyone who’ll admit he’s working for them now.”
“That’s not real encouraging,” she muttered.
Jack went on, “Big Cheese won’t mind hearing from me now, but Top Banana won’t be thrilled. Especially when he finds out these gomers have been causing an international incident, and he’s got to call the CinC and tell him that his administration’s going to get blamed for this screw-up.”
Alex heard the sound of a huge garage door opening, so she took her tPhone and jetted over to the big door at the back of the plant. Hermione was waving that big APC in, while Ron and three other soldiers stood just outside and watched out for anyone coming toward the building.
Ron backed in and yelled, “Drop the door! Then lock it down.” He turned and said to Hermione, “Get to Harry’s position. I’ll take the front.”
Alex jetted over to him as he ran through the plant. “What can I do?”
“Back me up. We’re hauling all the enemy forces into an empty steel water tank we can use as a jail, and then we want to get all our forces in here and lock it up, in case we get another wave of attackers. With the APC inside, we can hold the plant for a long time, and in an emergency we can pile into it for a secure exit.”
She flew alongside him to the front doors, which had been blasted off their hinges. He and another soldier wedged them back into place, while she used her lightning to weld the doors in place to the steel doorframe.
He grinned at her. “That ought to hold ’em out.” He turned to the soldier and said, “See if there’s a forklift small enough to drive down this hallway, and back it up against these doors so they’re more secure.”
She pointed out, “The windows aren’t secure.”
He nodded. “Neither are the skylights. The best we can do for right now is put a few guards up on the roof and keep everything off the walls.” He walked over to Harry’s position.
Hermione was studying the controls and talking over a comm channel. “Yes, sir, we’ve done that already. No, sir, it was Black. We lost Grey and White and Green, as well as most of the Dutch and French personnel. I have yet to have a chance to assess the German units.”
Ron contributed, “Three down out of eight.”
Hermione corrected herself. “Red reports Germans still have five of eight, which is better than anyone else.”
She disconnected and said, “Central says he’s sending in half a dozen experts on the plant and the water pipelines, and army cordons are already going into place. He’s got the experts arriving in another Bushmaster within the next fifteen minutes, so we’ll need to move ours over and be ready to let them in as soon as they arrive.”
Ron nodded. “And we’ll need to search the topside and underside for anything hitching a ride before we give them the all-clear to leave their Bushmaster.” He used his comms to tell the guys in his Bushmaster to move it over to one side of the big door, and then he walked off to talk to the soldiers who would need to open the big door and defend it from possible attackers while it was open.
Hermione glared at the cart full of drums of CTX. “I wish we had some sort of information on its chemistry. There might be something reasonable we could do to treat the water and clear the lines.”
Alex told her, “As far as I know, the last person alive who knows anything about this stuff is Commander Marshall Lawson, who is probably not going to cooperate with anyone I know. But I can take a look in a church not that far away that may have been a worksite for Aroon.”
Hermione pursed her lips. “Could you, please? There’s very little for you to do here, and there are a lot of threats still out there.”
Alex looked at where a couple of the soldiers were following Ron up a really narrow ladder to a really high catwalk and then to a doorway onto the roof. She flew up there ahead of them and popped the door. When no one tried to leap in, she flew out and checked the roof, and then she flew around the outside of the building to make sure the sides of the plant were still clear.
She flew back to Ron, who had stepped out on the roof and was assigning duty positions. She said, “Roof and sides are clear, and there’s nothing moving in the area inside the fence. But there’s gaping holes in the fence now, and I’m pretty sure most of these guys can jump it without a lot of trouble, so it’s not much of a barrier.”
He nodded. “Got it. Thanks. And thanks for saving Hermione. And Harry. And me.”
She told him, “And have Hermione call me personally if you need me. No messing around and going through channels that take days.” She flew off toward the old church.
It took hardly any time to get there at her top speed, and smoke was coming out from the lower door where she’d seen Lawson and that other guy. She still didn’t even know the guy’s name, and if Jack was right, the guy was probably more likely to be helpful than Lawson. If she’d only gotten the guy’s name, it might be possible to track him down. Now? Not much chance on that.
She dived into the smoke. There was fire all over some steps where a kerosene lamp or something got smashed. She looked around for something like a fire extinguisher, but the place looked like it hadn’t been fixed up down here for centuries. There were blocks of stone with mortar that was just about to come apart.
Ooh. That gave her an idea. She used her TK to toss stone blocks and lots of gritty mortar all over the fire, until the fire was pretty much smothered. She flew on into the basement areas. The place was like a rabbit warren, and there were dead people all over. All of them except a handful were in military garb. There was one room that had been bombed, and there were still fires burning in there. But the walls were plasterboard over the old stone, so she used chunks of the plasterboard to beat out the fires.
Great. A totally shredded computer, some burned bits that were probably useful papers a couple of hours ago, chemistry stuff that might have been helpful before it blew up, and bottles of precursor chemicals that were now messes of shattered brown glass and burned junk. Crud.
She flew out of the building and called Hermione. “Terawatt here.”
“Did you find anything useful?” Hermione asked.
“Not even precursor chemicals in identifiable bottles. Sorry.”
Hermione said, “It’s not your fault. I don’t know if I can ask you to hang around for hours, but we may need you somewhere inside the cordon tonight.”
Alex told her, “I’ll be around. All you have to do is call me directly. Now I need to check on some people.”
“Good luck. And thanks for looking out for Ronald. And Harry. And not letting Harry blow up the pumping equipment we need. He likes C-4 a little bit too much.”
Alex had a thought that Harry and Jack needed to get to know one another better.
Hermione Granger climbed up the ladders to find Ron. He was monitoring the area and keeping an eye on his guards, while guarding the roof entrance into the plant.
He didn’t bother to put down the night vision binoculars he was using. “Hi, ’Mione. You talk Harry into putting away his C-4?”
She didn’t bother to react. She should have known he would hear her coming along the catwalk, and she should have known that he would induce that there wasn’t a problem, or else she would have called immediately on the comm system. “Harry has not been playing with explosives. He has, however, been studying how the plant works, so he may be prepared to blow up a water treatment station if the need ever arises in future.”
“Because we’ve never needed knowledge we acquired years earlier,” he said drily.
She didn’t react to that either, because — thanks to the headmaster she had trusted and given her loyalty to, who had been abusing their trust the entire time — they had needed far too much of that training and knowledge, going back to when they were ‘ickle firsties’. She wondered if the other Hermione in that other universe had been called a similar phrase.
She asked, “What did you think of Terawatt’s appearance?”
“You mean her staying that silver blob the entire time? Let’s hear your theories.”
She suggested, “She may have been injured, although she never showed any sign of that. She may have been taking some manner of precaution against the biochemical. She may have had a ‘wardrobe malfunction’. Or she may have been operating the entire time with no uniform.”
“And which do you think it was?”
She stated, “I think she was working without a uniform. She got here too quickly. I think she may have been vacationing in the area in her civilian identity, and she might have left her uniform at home.”
Ron didn’t react or even argue with her, which meant he had already been thinking similar thoughts. “So all you have to do is go through the last week or so of commercial flights from the States to Paris, cut your list down to California women between sixteen and thirty-five, and run some facial recognition programs. Even if that would completely undermine your relationship with someone who has gone out of her way to be your friend and your supporter. Not to mention saving my neck four times in under a year.”
Hermione suddenly felt miserably guilty, because Ron had known exactly what she was thinking. Would she have done the searches if she hadn’t talked to Ron first? Almost certainly. She murmured, “Maybe I need to make sure that no one else can come to the same conclusions I just did.”
Ron pointed out, “We are just about the only people who know she stayed silvery the entire time. If I say in my situation report that she was in her uniform, and you say in yours that you improperly called her about five hours ago and asked if she could fly here just in case, that should be all the protection we need to provide.”
Hermione didn’t manage to keep the guilt out of her voice. “But I wasn’t supposed to call her.”
Ron shrugged. “Fine. I’ll say I called her. I couldn’t care less if Alejandro and his pals get their noses out of joint.”
Hermione winced a little. It was utterly unfair that Ron got to call the Spanish and Italian generals by their first names, and she didn’t because he was an English peer and she was just a female ‘clerk’. She said, “Very well. But I’m going to check and see if our facial recognition programs would pick up anyone going through any of the Paris airports in the last two weeks as a match for Terawatt, and then doctor the images slightly.”
“That’s my girl.”
“Honestly, Ronald! I am not a girl any longer!”
But she could see he was grinning. He smiled. “You’re a very sexy woman who is far, far above me regardless of my ancestors. But you will always be ‘my girl’ to me.”
* * *
Alex flew off toward Marie’s apartment and made another phone call, this time with her phone set so it looked like it was Alex’s phone. “Ashley? You okay?”
“We’re fine. We drank too much wine, but we’re fine. Are you okay? You’re the crazy one running around in the streets trying to take photos of supervillains.”
Crud, Ashley sounded really upset. Alex apologized, “I’m sorry. I’m totally okay. Not even a scratch or anything. I’ll be at the door in a couple of seconds. Could you unlock it when I knock?”
“Of course! We’re not gonna leave you out there!”
Alex passed over the military cordon. There were barriers up, and French soldiers with trucks and APCs and stuff, and French policemen kitted out like SWAT teams. And they had forces on the roofs just outside the cordon, so they wouldn’t get surprised by super-powered attackers leaping down on their heads from a roof. That was good.
She flew into Marie’s building and went normal before walking down the hall to Marie’s door. She hardly finished her first knock when Ashley was yanking the door open and hugging Alex for all she was worth.
Alex hugged her back as she scooted inside and locked the door behind her. “I’m okay. Really, I’m okay. If I’d known you’d be this upset, I would’ve waited until after the army put up all their barriers and stuff.”
Marie wondered, “Were you not frightened?”
Thomas and Jean-Paul were there, too, sitting really close together on Marie’s loveseat. Thomas asked, “What happened to your camera?”
Alex had been thinking about the whole secret identity thing, so she had her answer. “I didn’t bring one of my good cameras, so I was trying to use my cellphone, but I couldn’t use my flash because I totally didn’t want any of those things to come after me, so I got like zero usable photos. If I’d brought my good Canon with my 70-200 mm lens, I would’ve gotten a ton of great pics. Not wanting to lug my professional camera around on vacation probably just cost me a few thousand dollars.”
Thomas winced. “Ouch.”
Ashley led Alex over to the couch. “But you’re sure you’re okay?”
“I promise I’m okay. And I wasn’t that scared. Now when Danielle Atron kidnapped me and tried to kill my whole family, that was scary. Or when Azure Crush came after me at my school. That was scary. Here? I just stayed in the shadows, and these guys never even noticed me. I just couldn’t use my flash on my phone.”
Marie asked, “Are we safe?”
“Oh, sure,” Alex insisted. “You’re a block outside the army cordon, and all the badguys are inside the cordon. And they can’t fly or anything, so they won’t be getting out.”
Jean-Paul asked, “Would you care for some wine? If it were me, I would be asking for a glass the size of Marie’s sink.”
Alex admitted, “Well, I’m really hungry now. I was sprinting all over the place from shadow to shadow, and I think I burned enough calories that I’m not gonna worry about what I eat for the rest of the trip.”
So she had a big plate full of leftovers from the dinner, with a glass of wine and a couple of glasses of bottled water. Marie seemed to think American girls were always on diets, so she was happy to see someone enjoying food.
Alex just explained around mouthfuls of really yummy dinner, “Oh, it’s just that I work out a lot. Aerobics, weight training, running, biking …”
Ashley said, “You should see her abs. She is seriously cut.”
“No showing the abs!” Alex insisted. “I’d have to take off my dress!”