A sh tload of crazy powe.., p.35
A Sh*tload of Crazy Powers, page 35
Ah, fuck this. If there’s anything on the phone, the owner will have encrypted it. I’m on the verge of putting it down, getting my shut-eye. But that’s the thing about smartphones: there’s always something else to distract you. Without really intending to, I navigate to the photos app. Mildly curious, I guess: what kind of photos does a psychotic religious nutjob even have?
The first thing I see is a video. And on the thumbnail image: Senator Arthur Weiss.
Up against the railing, anger and fear on his face.
Frowning, I play the video. Not sure I really want to, but unable to stop my thumb tapping it.
The footage. For a moment, the view is all cockeyed, blue sky and lens flares, a hint of grey concrete at the bottom corner. As if the phone’s owner hit record before positioning the camera. The sound, tinny through the phone speakers, is all wind noise.
The angle stabilises. The camera blurs for a second, then focuses on the senator. He looks terrified, his mouth moving, the wind obscuring his words. Dyson holding him, the railing pushed against the small of his back, his top half stretching out over the drop.
The wind noise drops. “You getting this?” Dyson says.
“Yeah yeah,” the woman holding the phone replies.
“I don’t know what you think you’re going to achieve,” the senator says. “If you kill me—”
“What?” Dyson sounds relaxed, almost languid. “What’s going to happen, that won’t happen already? Will Elise and I –” He gestures to the camera, or at least, to the woman holding it. “– not get arrested? Not get our money? Tell me, senator, what exactly does keeping you alive get me? I’m curious.”
Weiss’s face is the colour of old paper. “This is a mistake.”
“I don’t make mistakes. But apparently, you do. Elise, are you getting this?”
“I already said I was.”
“Good. I want a record.” No more languid tone now. Just cold, hard steel. “If I’m going down, I’m not having you making it out smelling like roses.”
“Please…”
“Time to choose, senator. You die, and Elise and I go to jail, along with those poor saps we roped into this. Or you live. The only way you get to that second choice is if you give me my insurance.”
He shakes the senator, who lets out a choked gasp. “So let’s hear it. Why did the Frost girl not do her thing? Where the hell was she?”
What the fuck am I watching? What is this?
“I don’t know.”
“Come now, senator.”
“I don’t know!” Flecks of white spit flicker in the sunlight, grainy on the footage.
Dyson smiles.
“Let’s start from the beginning,” he says. That relaxed tone is back in his voice, which is somehow scarier than when he was angry. “Let’s start with you hiring us to crash your little party here today.”
FORTY-SEVEN
Teagan
I’ve lived through actual earthquakes. I have been in situations where the ground was literally shifting underneath my feet, the whole world tilting and shaking. I think I felt more stable then than I do now, sitting on this perfectly steady couch in this crappy little office, staring down at the phone. The whole room feels like it’s slowly tilting sideways.
The senator’s head sags. He raises his eyes to the camera. “You don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on here,” he says. “If you’re smart, you’ll—”
“Drop it!” Burr’s voice, offscreen. More jerkiness, more wind noises.
A few moments later, the camera goes haywire, a whirling mass of sky and people and ground and guns, flipping end over end. My PK, getting in on the action. The video keeps filming, but whatever happens to the phone, it comes to a stop face down. The screen goes black, the audio nothing but crashes and bangs and terrified shouting.
There is no freaking way I just heard what I heard.
It takes me more than one try to rewind the video. My fingers are shaking too much. Once again, I hear Dyson say, “Let’s start with you hiring us.”
It’s a trick. Another part of Dyson’s game plan. Or Phan’s. It has to be.
I stop the video on Weiss’s face, when he looks back up at the camera. Stare at it. Trying to decipher the look in his eyes. I’m expecting to find surprise, shock, outrage even. But that’s not what I’m seeing. There’s a cold look on his face: cold, and determined.
You can’t see shit. You’re imagining things.
But that isn’t true is it?
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” I say to the empty room.
I watch it again. Then once more. Each time, I’m convinced I’m going to see or hear something different. No dice.
OK. OK, think. If Reggie cracked the phone, then she probably downloaded the contents. She may or may not have seen the video, and she may or may not appreciate what it means. She may or may not have reached out to Tanner already, but either way, it doesn’t matter. Because I’ve got to show Tanner this, right fucking now.
It’s starting to sink in now, really sink in. Why the hell would the senator hire Dyson? Why take hostages? Why disrupt an event that would benefit him if it ran smoothly? And how was Phan involved?
Enough. Get it to Tanner.
And that’s when I hear footsteps. Coming down the passage towards the office.
Tanner, or Africa, or even Jonas. Someone who knows about this place, anyway. This time, I do push myself off the couch, the phone clutched tight in my left hand. The vacant, weary feeling has gone, my brain fizzing, like a Coke poured too quickly into a glass.
“In here!” I say, as the footsteps reach the door. “Holy crap, you are not gonna believe th—”
Senator Arthur Weiss pushes through the door.
For a few seconds, we just stare at each other. There’s a quizzical, almost pleased little smile on his face.
He’s not alone. There is another man with him, a broad-shouldered, middle-aged dude with a chest-length, greying beard. He has a sunburn and an ID badge in a lanyard around his neck.
I don’t know what expression is on my face. Really, I haven’t the faintest clue. Do I tough it out? Pretend I was just leaving? He can’t know that I have the phone, right? I mean, fine, it’s in my hand, but he can’t know that I have the phone. Then again, there’s nothing he can do to hurt me, not a single thing, and the hostage situation is over, so…
“Teagan,” he says, as if we just bumped into each other on the street. “You weren’t kidding. That is one well-hidden passage.”
What am I supposed to do here? Attack him? Push past him? Run like hell? Then again, I don’t know if I can get past the scary-looking guy with the beard. Who is he? I haven’t seen him before.
“After everything that happened,” he says, “I wanted a chance to talk. Just you and me.”
“I…”
“I asked my pilot to come pick us up.” He gestures to the other man, who gives me a guarded nod. “My chopper is on the roof right now. How about you and I take a quick ride? Of course, I can’t drop you at your apartment.” His smile gets wider. “But my plane is at Van Nuys, and I’d be happy to arrange a car for…”
His voice trails off as he looks down at the phone in my hand. For a long moment, the three of us are silent.
Do something.
But my poor, exhausted brain is still trying to process what I saw on the video. It’s trying to match the friendly, calm face in front of me, the face belonging to a man who almost got thrown off a roof, with the idea that he may be into some seriously bad shit. It’s not quite deer-in-headlights, but it’s close.
The senator’s smile reappears. He shakes his head, digging in his pocket. “You know,” he says. “None of this had to happen.”
Too late, my PK picks up the shape of the object in his hand. Right before he pulls it out and aims at me.
His Taser.
The one he showed us before, back in his hotel room a million years ago.
There is perhaps half a second between me noticing it and him aiming it at me and pulling the trigger. Half a second when I could have grabbed it with my PK, ripped out of his hand. What stops me is the knowledge that I won’t be able to control the energy, that in this close space, I could end up hurting all three of us.
The hesitation is the polar opposite of what I should do. But that’s the thing about dangerous situations: you can go through a bunch of them, one after the other, and when a new one comes along you still freeze.
I should have learned kung-fu.
And then the barbs embed themselves in my chest.
FORTY-EIGHT
Teagan
Tasers are not just my kryptonite – they are everyone’s kryptonite. There isn’t a single person on the planet, abilities or not, who can withstand fifty thousand volts delivered directly to the chest.
God, it hurts. Imagine the gnarliest cramp you’ve ever had, multiplied by your entire body, only a million bees are attacking you at the same time and they’ve gotten inside your skull. But that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that you cannot express this pain, on account of your entire body going rigid and everything up to and including your voice box freezing solid.
I go down hard, back arching as the electricity rips through me. It is impossible to use my PK. Impossible to do anything but lie there and absorb the agony.
The senator bends down, plucking the barbs from my chest, which somehow makes the pain even worse. “Daniel,” he says. “Bring her.” The pilot scoops me into his arms. I’m barely aware of it, locked in my private world of pain.
The last time someone used a Taser on me, my PK went into overdrive. But it didn’t happen right away; it took a good minute or two. Until that happened, my ability was completely walled off. Plus, the first time, I only got hit with one barb. It’s both this time, and it hurts exponentially more.
I’m dimly aware of moving down the passage, then of the three of us stepping into an elevator. I have no idea where the elevator is in relation to the secret passage or the porn poster room. I’m desperately hoping that someone spots us, but it doesn’t happen.
As the elevator rises, the pain fades a little. I latch onto the sensation; I still can’t move, not really, but maybe if I can hold onto this, I’ll be able to use my PK. If I can do that, then—
“Think you need to hit her again, boss.”
“Yes, I see that.”
No, d—
The pilot puts me down, on the floor of the elevator. A second later, the senator pulls the trigger.
Ow.
Out of the elevator. More passages. Stairs. sunlight. Footsteps heavy on concrete. Helicopter rotor blades, silhouetted against an open blue sky. The sound of a sliding door. The pilot grunting as he heaves me inside.
Come on, you motherfucker. Come on!
No dice. My PK is there, I can feel it, but it simply isn’t responding.
Surely someone will have come looking for me by now. Africa or Tanner. Where are they? Why are they letting this asshole kidnap me? What the fuck is happening?
The door slams. I’m lying on the floor of the chopper, and as I watch, still twitching uncontrollably, a pair of gleaming leather shoes slide into view. The senator, making himself comfortable. A moment later, the helicopter’s engine starts. This being a luxury chopper, the cabin has sound insulation, so the noise of the rotor blades is just a distant roar.
My stomach lurches as we lift off, the world rolling around me as the chopper banks.
The senator puts a hand on my head, turns me up to look at him. He still has that maddening smile. And the Taser is still in his hand.
“If I see anything,” he says, “anything untoward, I will hit you again. There are still one or two charges left in this thing. I don’t think it’s caused any permanent damage so far, but my dear, that might change if you get another dose. And believe me, you’re going to need your strength.”
He pats my cheek. “So how about you just lie there quietly, like a good girl? Soon, you won’t have to worry about a thing.”
What. The fuck.
I try to speak, but my lips are burning-numb, and all I end up doing is drooling on the carpet. The senator notices. He pulls a handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and dabs at my face, almost kindly. Up close, I can just see the letters AW monogrammed on one edge in red stitching.
The senator straightens up, nods to himself, then pockets the handkerchief. He reaches over to somewhere I can’t see. “How long is the flight time?”
Daniel’s gravelly voice crackles through the cabin. “A half-hour, sir. The team is already on the ground.”
I replay the entire day, everything from the moment we met the senator. Trying to understand why he betrayed me. Trying to figure out why on earth he would hire Dyson and his friends.
The sheer number of hostage-takers. The lack of police. Phan’s photos. The Children of Solomon. The fact that Dyson seemed to know me, zeroed in on me before everything went to shit. The way he turned on the mercs he hired, all but ordering me to take them out. And the video on the phone.
My face reflects off Weiss’s polished leather shoes. It distorts my features, twists them almost beyond recognition. And deep inside my mind, the final puzzle piece clicks into place.
When is a hostage situation not a hostage situation?
All at once, the answer is there.
When it’s an audition.
“I beg your pardon?” says Weiss.
I must have spoken the words out loud. Amazingly, I manage to raise myself up one elbow, slowly lifting my head to look at the senator. It hurts like hell, but the pain seems unimportant now.
“I was supposed to stop it before it started,” I slur. “Wasn’t I?”
He tilts his head, as if seeing me for the first time.
“Not bad,” he murmurs. “You’re smarter than you look.”
My strength fails me, and I crash back down to the floor, breathing in thick, heavy gasps. But oh, it’s all coming together now, all the little pieces. Weiss didn’t hire me to protect him. He hired me to protect everyone. Everyone in that ballroom. He hired Dyson to stage the whole attack, with the expectation that I would stop it before it could get going. Because that’s what I do, isn’t it? That’s how my PK works. If I’d been in tip-top shape, I’d have sensed the guns long before they were ever fired. I would have handled shit.
“Phan Duc Hong,” I say. “She was a… buyer. Wasn’t she?”
“Hm? Oh. Yes,” he says, speaking absently, looking out the window. “Her, and a few others. Geoff Williams from ArmCo. Ted Krzynski and Mia Horvitz from Steiner Group. The three people DynaCore sent over. Shame about Phan, although Ted and Mia will probably waste no time moving in on her interests.”
Almost everyone in that ballroom believed what has happening in front of them. The mercs holding the guns believed it too. They had no idea who I was. They had no idea that seven of the hostages, plus Weiss, plus Dyson and his fellow religious wack jobs, were there for a show.
My show. The Teagan Show.
They were there to watch me up close, to witness me stop an attack. A live demo of my ability. Where I would take out eighteen bad guys in one go. It’s a huge number for this kind of hostage situation, but that was the point. It wouldn’t have been enough for me to just take out the armed waiters, if they attacked. Weiss wanted to show that I could handle large groups, no problem.
It wouldn’t even have had to be dramatic. No flying objects required, no need to reveal my abilities to others. It would be the absence of guns that would confirm my ability. Well, that and a whole bunch of waiters getting arrested and/or getting the shit kicked out of them. Well then, there you go, folks. Isn’t she something? The saviour of the storm drain, up close and personal. Now, bidding starts at two hundred billion. Do I have two hundred billion?
And of course, Weiss knew what I could do. He trusted that if I was specifically on the alert for people with bad intentions, I’d be able to find them and shut them down. That’s probably how he sold it to these assholes. Yes, there’d be an element of danger, but it would be as close to battlefield conditions as you could get. Hell, maybe he even pitched it scientifically. A blind test.
And he protected himself. He didn’t just go out and hire a bunch of mercenaries. He hired the Children of Solomon, an insane religious group that badly wanted money to be insane and religious in front of as many people as possible. They hired the mercenaries. A bunch of suckers who would take the fall. Brandon Evans, Shane DuBois and the rest of them. They weren’t the bad guys – not really. The real bad guys were seven hostages, sitting there tied up with the rest. Wondering how it all went so wrong.
Weiss probably already had a plan in place to spring Dyson from jail afterwards. Maybe even the other Children of Solomon would come along for the ride. Everybody else takes the fall, Dyson and the senator ride off into the sunset, and I get forced to work for a bunch of multinational corporations.
My voice is barely there. “Why?”
His sigh is weary, as if he’s too old for this shit. “I would have thought you’d have figured that out too.”
I’m expecting him to leave it there, but he doesn’t. He bends down, elbows on his knees, eyes bright and alive. The Taser still pointed right at my midsection.
“Come on, Ms Frost. You’re not unintelligent, as much as you seem to enjoy presenting yourself that way. You must have known how wasted you were in Los Angeles. All the small little jobs Moira had you doing? You were meant for bigger things.”
“Like what?”
“Every year, there are dozens of geopolitical situations across the world where the United States needs to get involved. Insurgents, rebels, demonstrators. Rogue elements. Having someone like you address these problems—”
“Oh, and your arms dealer buddies were just there for funsies?”
“It’s how the world works, Ms Frost. If you think we manage to carry out operations overseas without the assistance of multinationals, you’re more naive than I thought.”
“And you just told me your evil plan, like a fucking Bond villain. Who’s naive now?”
