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Chapter 186 – We’ll Always Have ParisAlex and Ashley stayed at Marie’s for another hour, and then Alex managed to convince everyone that she would be safe walking to the Metro station, assuming they went the right direction this time.
But when they left Marie’s apartment, Alex led Ashley upstairs to the roof. “We’re flying home. I want to make sure you’re safe, and I might get another call for help. If we’re down in the Metro, I might lose a cellphone signal.”
“Okay … I mean, flying with you wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be …”
Alex thought about some people she had pulled into her morph before. “Take a deep breath and then we’ll both go silvery.”
Once Ashley inhaled, Alex went silvery with her. They took off and went high enough in the air that no one was going to spot them in the dark, and they were back at their hotel in about two minutes. Ashley had left the bathroom window open a couple of inches so the bathroom would get less humid, so Alex just flew through the gap and went normal in the space between the bed and the bathroom door.
Ashley took a deep breath. “Oh, my God, I couldn’t breathe! How do you do it?”
Alex just shrugged. “Lots of practice. And it doesn’t do that to me.”
Ashley hugged her again. “I was so worried about you!”
Alex smiled and hugged her back. “Well, I was pretty worried about you, but the best way I could take care of you was taking care of everybody. And I managed to go rescue some friends of mine, so it worked out pretty well.”
Ashley admitted, “I saw what you did to that guy, so I knew in my head they couldn’t hurt you, but I was still just a wreck the whole time I was at Marie’s waiting for you to get back.”
“Oh, crud.” Alex muttered. “I need to call home and tell everybody we’re okay before this is all over the news and everyone freaks.” She pulled out her tPhone with her TK and made sure it would read as her Alex phone before dialing home.
“Hi, Mom, it’s me, I just wanted to let you know we’re perfectly safe …” She moved the phone away from her mouth to whisper, “Mom hadn’t heard yet. Oops.” She went back to the phone call and explained that yes, Terawatt had needed to fly in and stop badguys, and no, she hadn’t gotten even a scratch, and yes, Ashley was totally fine.
Ashley took the phone and managed, “No, I wasn’t fine, I was terrified for her the entire time she was gone, and I have no idea how you do it. You are even more amazing as a mom than I thought before.” She stood there and listened to Alex’s mom for maybe two minutes, making faces and sympathetic noises and sometimes looking over at Alex with a shocked expression.
After they hung up, Ashley gasped, “Okay, whatever you do, don’t tell me the story about the giant spider.”
“Good plan,” Alex warned her. “It was totally ooky, and I didn’t think I had a fear of spiders before, but when I got home, I just wanted to bug-bomb the whole house. And the yard. And the whole neighborhood.”
“How on earth do you do it?”
Alex admitted, “I lucked out. I mean, it was stupidly amazing luck. But this agency of the Department of Homeland Security figured out how to find Terawatt and talk to her, and they’re absolutely awesome, and they got a child psychologist for Shar with a way that Shar could get tons of therapy over Skype and the child psychologist doesn’t even know where Shar lives. And Jack is great, and he’s got a teenager of his own so he’s really good to talk to when I don’t feel so great. And they had me talk to a real military psychologist after a couple of the missions, because military guys understand about seeing horrible stuff and feeling horrible about how your mission went. I’ve gotten to meet so many amazing people, and I’ve gotten to help stop so many bad things and save people … If I wasn’t doing this photojournalism deal where I can help people, I really think I’d be going to the Air Force Academy and becoming Lieutenant Alexandra Mack, U.S.A.F. so I could officially help people all the time.”
So then Alex needed to call Ray, and Ashley needed to call her roommate back in Chicago, and so on. They just sat on opposite sides of the bed and made phone calls for like half an hour, while Alex ate nine energy bars because she was still hungry.
Ashley finally grinned at Alex. “Good thing it’s not morning here.”
“Yeah.” Because if it was ten in the morning, she would have been calling her mom in the middle of the night and waking her up to tell her there was nothing to worry about, which would totally make her mom worry like crazy.
Alex went to bed that night with her tPhone ready and on the bed next to her, just in case anyone called for emergency help. And she didn’t even think about going out and trying to find a costume shop where she could get a Terawatt costume.
* * *
Alex woke up the next morning and instantly checked her phone to see if she had missed anything. She had slept through a few texts, but that was all. Acid Burn sent her a text that she was notifying everyone on the team. Hermione had sent her a text that said they had the pumping station backflushing the main lines, and Ron had gotten reinforcements so they were keeping the station safe. Louis and Marsha had sent her a text that Acid Burn sent them a 411 and they were glad she was safe. Jack sent her a text that he wanted a conference call with Tera at one in the afternoon her time. And her dad sent her a text that he loved her very much even if she was giving him gray hair.
She texted everyone back while Ashley showered, and then Alex took a quick shower while trying not to think about contaminated water supplies. She was so getting a super-fancy water treatment system in her basement when she and Ray got a house. And solar panels and satellite dishes like Willow. And maybe even a panic room for Ray and any kids or relatives.
Okay, she didn’t even know how to build a panic room to stop supervillains.
The morning papers were full of stuff about the supervillains and the water system and the cordoned-off area and all that. Not that Alex could read them because they were all in French, but the front page pictures were pretty obvious. Alex could pull up French newspaper articles on the crisis that were on the internet, and she could paste those into a translator program and get a decent translation, but she didn’t have to do that because the story was all over the British and Spanish newspaper websites, too.
The café was kind of empty, and the people working there were glad to see them. It sounded like a lot of tourists had kind of panicked last night and this morning, and were rushing out of Paris just in case this was going to be another Beirut or whatever. Okay, that probably was a reasonable thing to do, given what happened in Beirut. And Ogden’s Marsh. And what could have happened in Davenport. And Minneapolis. And Rome. And Tokyo. And …
So Alex had a few extra pains au chocolat and they decided to go to the Louvre.
The Louvre wasn’t completely empty, but it totally wasn’t anywhere near as crowded as the tour books and the internet sites said it would be. And Alex had a computer map of the Louvre with routes to go see some of the coolest stuff there in the smallest number of steps. So they spent the whole day just walking around seeing tons of totally awesome stuff, except when they snuck out for a nice lunch and conference call. Well, Alex was still hungry from last night, so she got some falafels from an open-air restaurant they walked past, and then had a big lunch with Ashley.
When it was time for a conference call, Alex went into a building like she needed to use the bathroom, and Ashley sat down at a nice café to wait for her. Alex went up the stairs until she reached a locked door. Then she went silvery and flew under the door and up another flight of stairs until she could get out on the roof. She made sure she wasn’t going to be seen by anyone even in nearby buildings, and she stayed silvery anyway.
She dialed into the call a few seconds early. “Terawatt here.”
“O’Neill here with Acid Burn, the IT Trio, Klar, and Team One. We’re expecting —”
“The E.U. Terawatt Liaison Office here. We have General du Vallée of the Paris office, as well as Lord Ronald Wellesley and Miss Hermione Granger of the London office.”
Jack didn’t give the late people a hard time, and Alex was really glad of that. “Is everything under control in Paris now?”
Ron answered, “We’re still clearing the sector, but it’s at least contained and isn’t going to spread any further. We still have several thousand innocents dead, roughly four hundred injured, roughly four hundred CTX victims dead, and another seven hundred CTX victims apprehended, many of them seriously injured as well.”
Hermione took over. “The CTX victims appear to be already addicted after a single dose, and so they’re going through pretty nasty withdrawal, too. We don’t know if they’ll recover.”
The general reported, “We have found that there was a building being used by your Majestic group as a logistics and research center, and a large number of people had been shot to death inside there. We also found a large number of Majestic agents inside the cordoned area, almost all of them killed by the CTX victims.”
Jack grumbled, “I hope you documented all of it and you’ve got your PR people showing it all to reporters, and you’re protesting to the U.N. and our President, because someone needs to step on those dorks.” Willow added something rude in French that made the general and Hermione crack up. Alex had no idea, it just sounded dirty because of her tone of voice.
So the general talked about the horrible death tolls and injury tolls, and the numbers of crazy CTX victims that were locked up so they wouldn’t break loose and kill everyone in sight, and how lots of people outside the cordon — especially tourists — were over-reacting.
Jack contributed, “I talked to a few people, and we’re currently looking for ex-Commander ex-CIA officer Marshall Lawson, who may know something more about this mess, but he’s gone to ground. Was the Majestic base all shot to pieces, with multiple victims stabbed or beaten to death by a martial arts master?”
The general replied, “That is what it appears to be so far, but we have not had the chance to do a proper forensic assessment.”
Jack grumbled, “Probably Lawson and his guys. This is just a wild guess, but he may have caught his own superiors messing around with this crap, gotten pissed off about it, and taken care of things on his own. It wouldn’t be the first time. It’s how he got shitcanned from Blackwater, which you did not hear from me. If that’s true, he’s lying low because he won’t trust us, either. If you track him down, talk to him but don’t get close. He’s probably very jumpy, and a jumpy Lawson goes hand-in-hand with high casualty rates. There’s a reason why the CIA let him go years ago.”
“That is … less than encouraging,” said General du Vallée.
Jack complained, “Yeah. And if any of your people see some American guys who claim that they’re military and that they have priority on the case, have those guys arrested at once and checked thoroughly, because we’re not supposed to have any military on this op anywhere in Europe, so these guys are illegally passing themselves off as American soldiers and you should throw the book at them. Maybe you could throw them in the Chateau d’If for a few decades and let ’em try and dig their way out.”
General du Vallée sounded amused as he said, “That is not usually what we hear from the Americans.”
Alex made a mental note to look up the ‘chateau duh-eef’ or however it was spelled, and if she didn’t find it in a couple minutes of googling, she’d just text Willow.
They all talked for a few more minutes about using the NATO fast reaction teams, and calling Terawatt even if it might be a false alarm, and how the Parisians were appreciative that the teams hadn’t completely destroyed a multimillion-Euro facility that was needed to be operational to clean the CTX out of the water lines for that section.
When they were all done, Alex just retraced her steps and walked out of the building like she had really taken a potty break. Ashley even had a chocolate-filled croissant for her to eat. Then Alex got some more food from a different street vendor. Mmm, crepes made fresh right in front of you. Why didn’t American places do that?
They went back to the Louvre and stayed until it closed, and then they ate dinner at this Lebanese restaurant that was awesome. She totally needed to learn how to fix really good shawarma and moussaka and stuff. She wondered if she could get Shar to eat eggplant if it was in really yummy moussaka.
* * *
Alex played tourist with Ashley all day Monday and Tuesday, too. The crowds were still down on Monday, so they went to the Eiffel Tower and Montmartre. But pushy tourists were clogging up Paris again by Tuesday morning, so Ashley took her to the Musée Gourmand du Chocolat which was amazing. And scrumptious. But Alex wondered how the Parisians put up with all the tourists and the pushiness and the crowds. The British tourists seemed mostly polite, but some of the German and American tourists? Oh, man. There were a couple of jerkheads at the Eiffel Tower who made her feel embarrassed to be American. She just wanted to run around pointing at them and yelling, “We’re not all like that! Really! I swear!”
Ashley drove her to the airport Wednesday morning, and they hugged goodbye and cried a ton. Alex was still red-eyed when she went through the security stuff with her backpack that had the last eleven energy bars crammed in it because Aunt Ashley didn’t want any of them.
Then flying standby got to be less fun. She couldn’t get on any of the first six flights back home, even when she ran to other concourses to try getting on some of the United Airlines international partners. So she ended up not leaving until nine in the morning. At least, with her running to three different concourses, she managed to eat three fast-food breakfasts with no one noticing. And she bought a bag of baked goods to eat on the plane.
And it was a good thing she only had a small backpack and a bag of baked goods, because there was no overhead storage room by the time she got on the flight, and she was stuck in between an overweight man and his mega-hefty wife who didn’t want to sit together and who really wanted her to go away so they could put up the armrests and take over the middle seat.
If they wanted three seats together, why didn’t they just buy all three seats?
So she was stuck in between two huge blobby people who both acted like it was their right to take over the armrests and blob over into her space, which was already tiny. She thought about doing something mean to one of them, but she managed to control herself. And when lunch got served, both of them kept asking if she was going to eat all of her stuff. So she ate all her baked goods when she got hungry, and she said ‘mmm’ a lot, and she didn’t share. And she ate a bunch of her energy bars and didn’t share them, either.
By the time she got to New York City, she was really ready to be out of the jet. She rushed right over to the first three United flights to San Francisco International and made sure they all had her on the standby lists. And then she also went over to a couple of United international partners and tried them, too. After that, she had an entire pizza for a late lunch.
This really creepy guy sat down next to her and tried to be all suave. He’d spotted she was stuck in the airport and trying to get a flight out, and he was basically with the ‘you must be bored let’s go to the airport hotel and screw’ routine. Which was too icky for words. When she told him to go away or she’d call the airport security because she was underage, he just got up and started harassing this bleached blonde who had too much carry-on luggage and really looked like she needed a break.
Alex thought about doing something Jack had thought of which was really not nice at all. She could have used her TK to push a little on Mister Creepy’s bladder, and make the guy suddenly pee all over himself. She didn’t, but she was thinking about it if he didn’t leave that poor girl alone really soon. She probably wouldn’t even feel bad about doing it. Much.
But another girl came over and sat with the bleached blonde and chased off Mister Creepy. Well, that explained all the carry-on luggage. Alex got a good picture of Mister Creepy. Then she got up and found a security guy and reported that Mister Creepy was harassing women he didn’t know. She didn’t get anything helpful from the security guy, which was pretty frustrating even if she didn’t have evidence of a big crime.
She went and got something else to eat when she went to another concourse to see if she could catch a different flight. But it didn’t do a lot of good. She still ended up stuck in the airport for almost six hours. And then she still had a six hour flight to get home again, plus driving time afterward.
And once again, she was on a crowded flight and stuck in the middle in between two people she didn’t want to be in between. The guy with the window seat had really bad gas for the whole flight and kept getting up and climbing over her and the old lady in the aisle seat to go to the bathroom. He smelled so bad Alex just could not eat anything, and the people around them complained about the smell, too. The old lady in the aisle seat would just not stop bugging her with pictures of all her grandchildren and grand-nieces and grand-nephews. It was her own fault for being nice and being willing to listen to one or two stories. She just didn’t realize until it was too late that the lady had three huge scrapbooks full of pictures crammed in her bag and wanted to tell a story about every single one of the pictures.
She was so glad when she got to San Francisco and could take the shuttle out to her car and drive home. She stopped and bought half a dozen burgers at a fast food place and ate all of them while she drove home.
When she got home, it was almost eleven at night her time, which was the next morning Paris time, so she was exhausted. She hugged her folks and went straight to bed.
* * *
Alex woke up the next morning feeling groggy and jet-lagged. And the room wasn’t the same with Shar off to camp. It just didn’t feel the same.
She dragged herself out of bed and showered with colder-than-usual water to wake up, and then ate a big breakfast. There were a bunch of notes for her on the fridge. Her mom wanted her to make up a thing of stew in the slow cooker. Her dad wanted her to use up the veggies in the crisper drawer if she made stew. Her mom had a big shopping list that included Alex things like ice cream and Oreos and all the other things they hadn’t been buying while she was gone. That made her feel guilty, because it would be awful if a lot of the stuff she kept buying was ruining her dad’s diet. The doughnuts from Gloria’s sure were, because he couldn’t resist them.
And what was Alex going to do for good doughnuts when she was in D.C. for most of the year?
Once she got the stew going, she spent a while googling for good doughnut places in D.C. and all the towns around it. She was pretty sure she couldn’t just fly into the White House and ask the President if he’d have his chefs make her a few dozen really awesome Bavarian creams. Even if he wasn’t still mad at her about the anti-bullying thing, which she was not going to back down on. Not after seeing Carrie White.
Okay, there were a ton of doughnut places that people thought were pretty amazing, so she’d just have to try all of them. Just to make sure. She might have to make several trips to the ‘Astro Donuts and Fried Chicken’ place just to be sure. Especially since it was just a few blocks east of the White House so it was easy walking distance from her future apartment and Corcoran College. Even if she wasn’t convinced about a fried-chicken-and-doughnuts sandwich thing.
And she tried Skyping with Annie, but Annie was at Bill Lee’s base, and she was studying all the research Bill and Lieutenant Marshall and all their people had done since Jack had started running the SRI. So every time Alex Skyped Annie, Annie was in the lab studying unpublished papers and research notes, and meeting with Lieutenant Marshall, and working through more textbooks. So Alex didn’t manage to talk to Annie for more than a minute at a time, and she had to send a message to Bill Lee through Jack that you couldn’t work interns twelve hours a day, seven days a week, even if the intern in question wanted to work twice that much.
* * *
On Saturday morning, her folks drove over to Salinas to go to a wedding of an old college friend of theirs. Mike, the guy who had gotten married and then divorced before they even graduated from college. And then had gotten married again. And divorced again.
She got Ray to come over for lunch and just be with her and talk. And stuff. Not that they went past second base, because Alex had no idea when her folks would get home.
Okay, she didn’t go much past second base.
And they talked about how they were going to get their stuff to college in the fall. Ray was going to be living in the jock dorm in the fall with a roommate he had no idea about, and he couldn’t have a car on campus as a frosh, so he was figuring that everything he wanted to take would fit in his biggest gym bag plus his medium gym bag plus three really cheap plastic hanging garment bags, and then they’d all fold up and not take up much space in his room when he wasn’t using them as suitcases. And that was including taking a basketball and a football and a pump for them. And three pairs of sneakers. Alex was figuring on three suitcases, five or six hanging garment bags, at least two packing boxes of mementos and books and things, her camera bag and another box of camera gear, a computer bag, a box or two of shoes and boots, plus all the other stuff she’d need to take, like her bathroom stuff and a couple sets of towels and a couple sets of bedsheets and some of her DVDs and any kitchen stuff her mom had put aside for her to take off to college.
Ray had been figuring they could get both their stuff in Alex’s car, then they could drive out and leave her car at Jack’s. But Alex was pretty sure they were going to need to haul a trailer even if it was mainly for her stuff. Because there was no way she could ask Jack to fly the Cessna out to Camp Atron just to carry her stuff to D.C. for her.
Okay, she could ask. And Jack might even say yes. But she really thought she shouldn’t ask.
Ray carefully explained, “I don’t think it’s really a ‘girls are different from guys’ issue. I just can’t take everything I want because it’s a pretty small room, and I’m not taking anything I don’t want broken or stolen, because I have no idea who my roomie is gonna be, or what his friends are like, or what the guys down the hall are like, or anything. And Coach Ware warned me that some of the guys who they’ve had to kick out of the dorm in past years have stolen stuff from their roommate or their hallmates, or gotten really drunk or stoned and smashed up a lot of stuff. Or worse. So I’m not bringing anything like my laptop or my favorite books. I’m bringing a picture of you for my desk, and that’s about it. We get new sheets and towels for our room every week as part of the program, so I don’t need to bring stuff like that. We eat at the training table like all the other athletes, so I don’t need any food or cooking stuff. And the b-ball team gets special university laptops that have software on ’em to keep people from downloading games and going to inappropriate websites, so that’s all the computing power I need, not counting my tPhone. You’ve got a whole apartment to outfit, and you can bring as much stuff as you want and not worry about it getting ripped off or just ‘borrowed without permission’.”
He was pretty unhappy about not being able to bring a lot of the stuff he wanted, so Alex gave him a lot of kisses to make up for it. And really, he had all his music on the tPhone, and he could surf the web on it, and he could look up Wikipedia stuff on it.
She checked, “I could buy you a tablet computer for your birthday if you want? Then you could read books on it or play games on it, or even do schoolwork.”
He frowned. “Yeah, that would be great. But it might wander off, and I’m pretty worried about losing something that might have Terawatt intel on it.”
She kissed him and murmured, “We’ll just keep it Terawatt-free. You can have that junk only on your phone. And if your phone walks off, Willow’s got GPS on it so we can get it back.”
He grinned. “Yeah, a tablet like what you’ve got, or even smaller, so it’ll go in my school backpack and be out of sight.”
She wondered, “Do your textbooks come with the athletic scholarship?”
He nodded. “Yeah, the school even has academic advisors to make sure the jocks really get their books and notebooks and stuff and don’t trade ’em for cash when no one’s looking, and they try to make sure you get your assignments all done and turned in, and you’re ready for tests, and all that. Coach Ware says basketball and football and women’s basketball are their biggest problems on academics, and some of the small programs like women’s gymnastics even have higher GPAs than the school average.”
Alex teased, “You just better not hang around those cute perky little gymnasts in their teeny sexy outfits.”
He laughed. “You know who I’m gonna be hanging with as much as we can manage. And your apartment’s gonna be a heck of a lot easier to study in than a dorm with a couple hundred music players going full blast.”
Alex’s folks didn’t get home until after five, and Ray had already left because Louis was coming over to his house for dinner and hanging out, and Alex had already gone over to the grocery for more ice cream and also salad fixings. Alex noticed that her mom and dad were both losing weight, because they were totally looking better in their nice clothes. And over dinner, she heard all about the wedding, and how this was wedding number four for College Friend Mike, although her dad thought it could just possibly be number five, and her mom wasn’t thrilled with the way Mike kept getting older but the wives were always around eighteen or twenty. Alex was totally glad she didn’t have that guy for a dad.
It was weird how much more relaxed the after-dinner stuff was with Shar off at camp. No one was complaining about having to help with dishes, and no one was lobbying to watch their favorite movies, and no one had to be monitored as she got through her bath and drying her hair and everything. Also, Alex didn’t have to constantly worry about thinking about the wrong things and getting ‘overheard’ by Shar. Raising kids was totally harder than you’d think, and raising kids with superpowers was extra-hard.
So Alex was able to just sit around with her folks and talk about Paris and Aunt Ashley and really annoying flights to and from Paris. Plus she had about fifty nice photos on her phone and twenty or thirty minutes of fun video on her GoPro to show them. They just didn’t talk any about the stuff that happened Saturday night after Alex and Ashley walked out of Marie’s apartment.
* * *
On Sunday, after church and lunch, Jack and Willow called her, only someone had messed with her ringtones again so her phone played reveille. Even if it was early afternoon Alex’s time.
Willow spilled, “Jack wanted the ringtone to be the theme music from ‘Last Tango in Paris’ but I said you wouldn’t like that. And you probably wouldn’t recognize the music anyway.”
“Isn’t that the movie with Marlon Brando having lots of creepy sex with some girl who’s like eighteen?” Alex grumbled.
“Well, maybe …”
Jack sounded smirky as he said, “Sounds like you’ve got that movie pegged. Nothin’ in there at all except creepy Brando sex.”
Willow insisted, “Stop it! It’s supposed to be an arthouse movie with important themes, but all anyone remembers about it is … okay, the sex scenes.”
Jack teased, “Oh, by the way … pass the butter.”
“Stop it!” Willow fussed. “And this is totally not why we called.”
Jack asked, “Oh, we have to get into that? I thought maybe we could trade movie critiques for a while, and then talk about the new house …”
“The roof is on! They’re installing the solar panels and satellite dishes next week! And the basement rooms are almost finished, and they look gorgeous.”
Alex told her, “I totally want pictures. Maybe even video footage.”
Willow gushed, “We can do that! I made a stabilizer for my new GoPro so it’s like yours, and it works totally of the awesome. Your dad should patent it and sell it.”
Jack snarked, “Yeah, along with that camera-flash taser he designed for you. Don’t you have photographers clamoring for one?”
Alex admitted, “Really, no one’s asking about it. I told the security guys, but that part didn’t really make it into the press coverage. And Clare isn’t exactly giving interviews about it, so it just sort of slid under the radar.”
Willow snickered. “That would be the funniest infomercial ever. Clare Tobias for the Ronco Camera-Taser.”
Jack segued, “And speaking of sliding under the radar, someone used the ‘Terawatt in Paris’ intel to track down some N-I-Dorks who fled the NID’s sinking ship and hid in another bilge like the slimy rats they are. It seems the former-NID contacts at Camp Atron aren’t reporting to the NID now, but to a Pentagon general. And we threw some disinformation around. We may have hinted around that Terawatt flew out of Camp Atron using our SR-71 touch-and-go trick again. So said general’s people made some phone calls and yelled at a certain captain at Camp Atron for not giving them a heads-up when Terawatt went off on another op, and he called some minions up and yelled at them. And someone might have illegally monitored some phone calls, so we now know who our Camp Atron problems are.”
“Great!” Alex cheered. “So can I go back there for martial arts training?”
“Not yet,” Jack said. “I need you to fly over there tomorrow morning at eleven and insist on speaking right away to the camp commander, a guy named Colonel Marsden. Go through the security crap at the gate and everything, and don’t worry if someone stalls you. Then once you get into Marsden’s office and his adjutant is out of the room, you can just stall him while the N-I-Dorks rat you out, and we’ll have ’em officially, with FBI and NSA evidence.”
Alex checked, “And will this get General Flagg in trouble?”
Jack revealed, “No, because it’s not him. But it is another of the DOD people we’ve suspected of giving the NID too much support behind the scenes. Flagg has apparently been supporting you ever since you covered for him about Maybourne when you talked to the President.”
She confessed, “Well, that was why I said it. I was kind of hoping we might get some bennies out of it some day.”
Jack pretended to sniff like he was crying. “You’ve become sneaky and underhanded, just like me! I’m so proud!”
Willow fussed, “Oh, stop it. And nobody’s as bad about this stuff as you are.”
Jack beamed. “Thanks!”
Willow muttered something under her breath and then perked up. “Oh! And Tera, be sure to say ‘I love it when a plan comes together’ so Jack can’t use it.”
“No brag, just fact.”
“I get a lot of that lately.”
So Jack and Willow just threw movie and TV quotes at each other for like two solid minutes. Jack was such a bad influence on Willow. Even if it was really, really funny.
“You want the truth? YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!”
And Willow totally could not do a Jack Nicholson imitation.
* * *
So the next morning, after she got a new slow cooker recipe going, she flew into her secret hiding place inside her wall and changed into her uniform. Then she flew off to Camp Atron. She hovered outside of town for a couple of minutes so she could arrive at the front gate at exactly eleven.
She went normal and jetted down to the gate. Then she crossed her arms and glared at the guard as she hovered a couple feet above the road. “Excuse me, soldier. I need to speak with the base commander. At once.”
“Yes, ma’am, Terawatt!” the first guard piped up, snapping to attention and even saluting her.
The second gate guard elbowed the first one and said, “I’ll need to go through the security check first, ma’am. And then we can call the base commander.”
“Then do so,” she said curtly, like she was in a hurry and doing something important, instead of just going along with Jack’s plan.
The second guard called somebody, while the first guard did the security check. “I’m really sorry about this, Terawatt, but we have orders …”
She nodded crisply. “I understand, soldier.” She showed him her ID card signed by the President, which the private didn’t seem to want to let go of. And she gave him the security code Jack had told her to say.
When the guy finished, he stammered, “I-it’s an honor. My family won’t believe me when I tell ’em.”
“Knock it off, Williams!” the more senior guard growled. “Yer supposed to be a guard, not a fuckin’ fangirl.”
The guy blushed hard and snapped to attention.
The more senior guard looked at Alex. “Building B, ground floor, room 2. Y’know how to get there?”
“Yes,” she snapped.
“Good. Commander’s office. Captain Healey’s waitin’ for ya.”
She didn’t bother to wait for them to open the gate in the big fence. She darted over it and flew straight to building B. She knew just where it was. She’d looked at maps of the place enough times when she was going to her martial arts classes that she couldn’t go to anymore because of these jerkheads.
There were two soldiers on duty at the door into the building, and one of them opened the door for her as soon as he spotted her heading their way. She flew in. Room 1 was a bunch of administrative offices on her left. Room 2 was the base commander’s office on her immediate right. She used her TK to swing open the door before she got to it, and she flew into a waiting room that had an officer at a desk. His nameplate said ‘Captain Healey’. She figured he was the base commander’s adjutant. She also figured that he could be the captain that Jack warned her about.
The captain stood up when she flew in. “Terawatt. This is quite the surprise. What can we do for you?”
She gave him her best stony face. “I am sorry captain, but this is a matter of operational security. I need to speak in private with the base commander.”
“Right. Let me see if he’s available yet.” He checked the fancy desk phone in front of him and pressed a button.
“What is it this time, captain?”
“Sir, it’s Terawatt. In person. And she’d like to speak with you privately about operational security.”
“Terawatt? Really? In person? Then show her in!”
The captain opened the door for her and let her float past him. She was expecting a virile, impressive guy like the colonels she had met. Jack and Riley and some of the adjutants to high-ranking generals.
This guy was older and chubbier and a lot less attractive. His hair was receding so far that the top of his head was completely hairless and he only had a white strip of short hair going from one ear, across the back of his head, to his other ear. Even Harry Maybourne looked more impressive than this guy.
“Terawatt! What an honor! Please, come in, come in. Have a seat. Unless you don’t sit. If you’d rather fly, that’s not a problem. Can I have Captain Healey go get you anything? Coffee, tea, water …”
She floated into a not too cruddy chair and started going with the thing Willow suggested saying. “Please sit, colonel. I need to talk to you about an operational security issue that needs to be addressed on your base. But first, I think it would be helpful if I explain why I sometimes require an SR-71 Blackbird to perform several consecutive touch-and-go maneuvers on your longest runway …”
She just babbled while trying not to sound like she was babbling, but she’d thought she only needed to stall for like a minute, and after five minutes she was still going. Pretty soon she was going to have to do something because she was running out of stuff to make up.
The door finally swung open, and Sam Carter walked in wearing her uniform with all her medals and looking really impressive. Sergeant Carlson walked in behind her, looking huge and like he could bench press a Hummer. And behind the sergeant was an FBI agent who Alex recognized. Sam said, “Thank you, Terawatt.”
“It was my pleasure,” she fibbed, because none of it had been fun and some of it had been pretty uncomfortable.
Sam stepped forward. “Colonel, I’m sorry to inform you, but your adjutant and three of your non-coms have been illegally spying on Terawatt for former-NID operatives. We’re taking them into custody. They may be facing charges all the way up to accessory before the fact to felony, and possibly treason.”
“C-captain Healey? Surely there’s been a mistake?”
The FBI agent strode forward and handed his badge wallet to the colonel, who was looking really shaken up. Alex even felt sorry for the guy.
“I am Special Agent Thomas Colby of the FBI Counter-Terrorism Unit. Let me explain what has been taking place on your base, sir.”
Sam waved Alex out, and closed the door behind them. Sam whispered, “I would not want to be in the colonel’s shoes. He’s going to be trying to explain this f–…” She glanced at Alex and changed her words. “— fiasco to some very cranky generals, and probably the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security.”
They walked out of building B, while Alex floated alongside them. Alex asked, “Who else is on this op?”
Sam smiled. “Lupo and Bailey, and four other FBI agents, along with Acid Burn at your end of things.”
Alex smiled a little. “You do know what General O’Neill keeps calling the FBI guys, right?”
Sam smiled back. “We don’t call them Feebs when we’re on ops with them. But I’m sure they have some charming slang terms for armed forces officers whom they have to deal with.”
Alex hung around to watch the FBI agents shoving four badguys into cars and driving off with them. She was totally not surprised that the second gate guard was one of the four. And once all that was wrapped up, a delivery truck drove up. The back swung open, and Jo Lupo waved them over. Lieutenant Bailey was in the back, too.
Sam said, “Tera, we’ve got to go. But thanks so much. I don’t think the general really considered that you have better things to do with your time than play decoy for half an hour here.”
Alex thought it over and answered, “Well, there is something you could do for me.” Sam gave her a raised eyebrow. “You’re going back to Edwards to catch a flight back to base, right?” Sam nodded. “Can I ride along and just chat for an hour or two?”
Jo Lupo cracked up at the shocked look on Sam’s face.
So Alex rode down toward Edwards Air Force Base in the back of a fake delivery truck with Sam, Jo, Pete Bailey, and Sergeant Carlson.
Before they got onto the interstate, Jo spilled. “Okay, Carlson, go ahead and tell her. I know you’ve been dying to tell someone ever since Operation Tera-Twin.”
Alex guessed, “That was when you figured out my other identity, right? Because that was what tipped Lieutenant Bailey.”
Carlson nodded carefully as he looked around. “So I was the last person in here to figure it out?”
Jo admitted, “She spilled when we had to share quarters on the Berlin op.”
Alex argued, “No, you figured it out. You just didn’t know my real identity.”
Sam confessed, “I didn’t get a chance to figure it out, because she did the big reveal when she and the general got me out of isolation.”
The sergeant slowly admitted, “Well, when the general got me and the ell-tee to work on a super-battle for Operation Tera-Twin, it was pretty obvious that it had to be so that Terawatt’s other identity wouldn’t be exposed. And the only possible news story it could be that day was Willow Rosenberg and A.L. Mack and Clare Tobias. So I looked at a YouTube clip of A.L. Mack’s interview on the Today Show, and it was pretty obvious. I don’t know how Ms. Rosenberg fiddled all the databases so the NSA and the FBI couldn’t match you up with Terawatt’s face, but I do know she could do it if she wanted to.”
Alex grinned at him, “It’s okay. I trust you, just like I trust Jo and Sam and Pete. And you can call me Tera. But you can’t tell anyone else.”
“Right, ma’am,” he said firmly. “Besides, my wife already knows the drill. She won’t even ask questions like that.”
So they had a great time just talking, even if Sergeant Carlson was really careful about how he talked around three superior officers. And Alex found out Jo went out on a date with Jeremy Winkelman, and it went a lot better than Jo expected, and Jo was even going to go out with him again. Also, Graham’s girlfriend Rita was spending a ton of time hanging with Sergeant Carlson’s wife while Graham was running Team One from Jack’s base, even if Graham had flown Rita out twice already. And Sam Carter had found a really good motorcycle club to ride with, even if none of them were good boyfriend material or even good dating material. And Lieutenant Bailey’s GF was totally not happy that he couldn’t tell her what he was doing, or why he sometimes took off for days, or any of that stuff.
After almost two hours of just chatting, Alex needed to go, so Sergeant Carlson — who she was calling ‘Mark’ by then — just opened the back door of the truck, and she flew north up the interstate. She was home in not much more than an hour of fast flight. She even had time to work a lot on her unix tools course before it was time to work on dinner.
And when she Skyped Annie, Annie was finally home in her apartment, but was really grumpy that Bill and Hank were making her go home at a reasonable quitting time every day. Alex decided not to admit that it was her fault.