Dreams of the Golden Age (31 page)

“You just keep going, this is getting better and better,” she said.

“I can’t trust the courts and police here to see what you really are—they all take orders from you. I’m sure most of the superhumans do as well. So all I have are threats.”

“How very noble of you,” she said, deadpan.

He stopped, glared at her. “You’ve forced me to this.” He seemed agitated, like he’d expected her to be frightened and was frustrated that she wasn’t. They always were.

“Yeah, you just keep telling yourself that.” She was way too tired for this, and her stomach had started squirming. Vomiting all over their nice empty office would be gross, but it would serve them right. But no, she had to stay well and alert. As well as she could, anyway.

“Sonic, Shark, bring her daughters here. Then we’ll have this conversation again.”

“Shark?” Celia questioned, raising an eyebrow at him. She’d been calling him that to herself as a joke. “And what you do, bite people?” Nobody answered.

The mentalist said, “We’re not going to hurt them—”

Majors cut him off with a gesture. “Of course not. But we need to have some kind of leverage.”

Celia’s imagination spun out because she’d had too much experience with men like Majors and their plans. He could find plenty of ways to threaten Celia without physically hurting the girls: take them away, hold them hostage for the rest of their lives, brainwash them, turn them against her. Convince them to convince her. Make
her
hurt them. His mistake: seeing them as pawns. Her girls were better than that.

“I’d rather you kept your hands off them,” she said, and was pleased to hear an edge in her voice. A supervillainy edge, even.
You meddle with powers beyond your ken, puny mortal …

Majors smiled like he thought he’d gotten claws into her. “You see? I’ll get through to you. Soon enough you’ll understand that this is for the best.”

He nodded at the others, who moved into action. They began stripping, peeling off jackets, shoving down trousers, and unbuttoning shirts. They all wore skin suits of some sleek, shimmering black material. She guessed the fabric had some kind of reflective, antitracking properties. It might even have been bulletproof. At least that was how she’d have done it. The woman put her hair up with a clip, a couple of the guys put on gloves, they stretched muscles and cracked joints in an obvious show of preparation. When they all lined up with Majors, still mundanely clothed, they looked as badass a team as Celia had ever encountered.

She raised a skeptical eyebrow at them. They made an effort to ignore her, but they had to make the effort.

Majors said, “Mindwall, you’ll have to stay so her pet telepath won’t find her.”

“I’ll give you as much protection as I can,” Mindwall told the others.

“Don’t worry, we’ll be back before you know it,” the woman said.

“Pet telepath?” Celia said to Majors. “Really?”

He chuckled. “What else should I call him?”

“The father of my children?” she said to the departing team, heading toward the elevators. “You might want to keep that in mind. Just saying.”

“Can we gag her?” the remaining shark said.

After thinking a moment, Majors said, “No. I want her to be able to say she’s changed her mind.”

They settled in to wait. Majors retired to a chair across the space. He sat facing her, his arms crossed, studying her. She wondered what he was discovering. She just looked back, her expression still. Maybe she’d learn something about him, if they kept up the staring contest long enough. Like whether he had superpowers, and if so, what were they. He probably did, to be able to head up a superpowered team like this. Or he might have just been the money, the organizer. So, Delta had superhumans. Majors had to win this battle, or he wouldn’t be able to keep that secret for much longer. That was all she really needed to know, that his threat came out of fear. Frankly, she didn’t much care about Majors in the long run. She knew his type, and his type made mistakes. He needed her alive, so she was okay for the time being. A solution to this would present itself.

The second shark planted himself in a guard position behind her. Her skin crawled, sensing his presence without being able to see him. He was probably some kind of heavy, with a combat-related power. A kinetic strike or superstrength. She wondered if he had a temper to match. The superstrong ones often did. Like her father, who’d have made short work of Majors.

The mentalist wasn’t happy, pacing along the side of the room, just out of sight of the stretch of windows. She couldn’t tell if he was frustrated because the group had separated, or because he disagreed with Majors’s decisions. Maybe this was a weak point in the group. She didn’t have the first clue how to get around his telepathic block. Setting him against Arthur would be placing the irresistible force against the immovable object. Knocking him unconscious would probably do the trick. Simple, really. Too bad she was tied to a chair.

This was not how she wanted to be spending her afternoon.

The second part of any kidnapping was the waiting. The kidnappers made demands, everybody had to wait while the demands were delivered, then wait for a respectable amount of time to pass while negotiations continued. Celia, meantime, waited for rescue, which could happen quickly if the kidnappers weren’t that clever. Or she could be here awhile.

The chair was a standard padded task chair, comfortable for what it was, with plenty of lumbar support. But no headrest, nothing to lean on if she tipped her head back. She wanted to lie back and maybe take a nap. Kidnappers always hated it when she was able to sleep during her own kidnapping.

She dozed off anyway, but it wasn’t comfortable, and she jerked awake when she started to slump forward and tugged against her bindings. Her nose had started running, and she awkwardly wiped it on her shoulder. No dignity. That was fine, she didn’t need dignity to get out of this.

A phone rang. Celia instinctively looked around at her own pockets, but they’d taken her purse and her phone. The noise came from Majors. He retrieved the device from his pocket. Even halfway across the space, Celia heard a panicked voice on the line. Majors’s expression darkened.

“Fine,” he said, when the explanation had stopped. “Just get back here. We’ll deal with it.” He put the phone away and looked over her shoulder, taking in his remaining henchmen. He told them, “There’s a problem.”

Celia smiled.

TWENTY

A
RTHUR
stayed in communication with Captain Paulson as the police attempted to locate the car and identify Celia West’s captors. They succeeded at neither. The car dropped off surveillance after a couple of blocks, ducking through blind alleys and into the south part of town that didn’t have so many cameras. The features of the two people weren’t clear enough—they wore large sunglasses and turned the collars of their coats up—and the facial recognition software, even the advanced version on the Olympiad computer, couldn’t identify them.

Suzanne arrived within the hour to find Arthur at the computer, Bethy slouching in a chair at the conference table, and Anna pacing.

Anna had been pacing the whole time, thinking. Focusing. Trying to drill through whatever the bad guys had done to block her ability. That was Arthur’s hypothesis, that they had a way to block his telepathy, and the same block affected Anna’s power. But she had to be able to do something, and she knew she could find Celia if she could just figure out
how.
She was giving herself a headache.

“Grandma!” Bethy called and ran to the woman, who caught her up in a hug. Suzanne glared at Arthur over Bethy’s shoulder.

“I had to include them. It was Anna—” He sighed. “Anna, would you care to explain?”

“Not really,” she said. But now everyone was looking at her, and she didn’t have a choice. “I find people. I know where people are.”

“That’s your power?” her grandmother asked, looking thoughtful. “We’d been wondering. That’s … all right.” Anna realized just how closely her family had been watching, waiting for her to reveal … something. If she’d been anything like Captain Olympus, they probably wouldn’t have had to wait so long. She’d never have been able to keep it secret.

She probably shouldn’t have kept it secret for so long. “It’s not very impressive,” she said, frowning.

“Don’t sell yourself short. You knew instantly that something had happened to Celia,” Arthur said, not turning from the computer displays.

“But if they’ve got somebody who can block mental powers, then I can’t do anything, none of us can do anything—”

“We can always do something,” Suzanne said. Anna suddenly felt better. They were the Olympiad.

“I’m afraid we’re at a bit of a loss here,” Arthur said. “Paulson will do what he can, but this came out of the blue, and we’re not expecting any ransom demands—”

“No, it didn’t,” Anna said. “It didn’t come out of the blue. Mom was leaving the courthouse after the hearing about the lawsuit. What if … she thinks the lawsuit happened because someone wants to stop West Corp from getting the city planning contract. She must have gotten the lawsuit thrown out, and what if those people are working for whoever wants to stop her?” The empty office building. Superior Construction’s fake lawyers. If this had anything to do with the lawsuit, the trail would start there. She blushed.

“Yes, Anna?” Arthur prompted gently. “What is it?”

She was thinking out loud but afraid to speak too quickly lest the pieces that were falling into place got jostled. “I think I know where we can go to figure out who took her.” She explained about Horizon Tower, about tracking down information for the lawsuit, about the empty law office. Her father politely didn’t ask her how she knew so much about all this.

“It’s as good a place to start as any,” Arthur said with a renewed sense of purpose. He picked up the phone again and talked to Paulson, passing along the information and closing with, “Wait for me, I want to be there when you go in … Well, I don’t exactly know what good I can do, and I won’t know unless I’m there, will I?”

He hung up the phone and started to flee the room before turning back. “Wait here. I’ll call as soon as we learn anything.”

“But Dad—” Anna called after him, but he was already gone. The real superheroes were on the job. Fine, okay. She returned to pacing.

Suzanne sat with Bethy at the conference table and took her youngest granddaughter’s hand. “It’ll be all right, I promise you. We’ve always gotten Celia back in situations like this.”

“How many times was Mom kidnapped?” Bethy asked, shocked.

“I … you know, I lost track.” Her brow furrowed, revealing bemusement.

Anna’s sense of panic was growing. The old Olympiad had always gotten Celia back, but the old Olympiad wasn’t around anymore. Just the elegant older woman who hadn’t, as far as Anna knew, used her power for anything but making crème brûlée in twenty years, and the telepath, and she knew very well how effective mental powers
weren’t
in a straight-up fight, especially if someone was blocking them.

She had to do something, so she got out her phone and pressed buttons. “It’s not working, why isn’t it working?”

“The room’s shielded, outside signals can’t get in,” Suzanne said.

Anna marched to the door, following her father.

“Anna, who are you calling?” Suzanne asked.

“Everybody.”

In the hallway, she sat on the carpet because her legs were shaking. “Come on, come on…”

Teddy answered on the first ring. “Anna, oh my God, I’m so sorry, I didn’t think you were ever going to talk to me again—”

“Teddy, shut up, I need your help. I need everybody’s help.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Somebody’s kidnapped my mom and they have some way of blocking mental powers because I can’t find her, my dad can’t find her. But I think we know where to start looking.”

He paused for a long time. “And you really think we can help? I mean, this is serious.”

“Exactly,” she said, exasperated. “You wanted to stop screwing around, so this is it. If we can’t rescue my mother, what good are we?”

“I’m just saying … maybe some of the other supers…”

“Fine. You don’t want to help, I’ll call Teia and Sam—”

“No, of course I want to help. We’ll get her back, Anna. You call Teia and Lew, I’ll call Sam. We’ll meet you at West Plaza, okay?”

“Yeah. Okay. Teddy—thank you.”

Suzanne stood by the entrance to the command room, watching Anna, her expression thoughtful. Anna prepared her usual defensive glare.

“Don’t tell me that I shouldn’t go out, that I’m too young, that I can’t handle it—”

“I’m not going to do that. Wait just a minute, though.”

Back in the command room, Suzanne went to one of the metallic cabinets along the side wall and opened a drawer. She didn’t have to dig around long before drawing out a set of thumb-sized devices and wires—earbud and microphone sets.

“Take this,” she said, hooking one of the devices around Anna’s ear, settling the bud in place. “It’ll keep you in contact with the command computer. We never had to use them much because of Arthur. I hope they still work. Bethy, here, you take one, too. We’ll need you to monitor the computer scanner and keep us all in the loop. All right?”

“You want me to help?” Bethy stared at them both. Anna wanted to hug her.

“I won’t have to teach you how to use the computer,” Suzanne said. “You’re your mother’s daughter, you know very well it isn’t all about the powers.”

“Bethy, you’re the smart one,” Anna said. “Everybody knows it.”

She had a look on her face like she didn’t believe them.

“Oh, Celia used to look just like that when she was your age.” Suzanne chuckled.

Bethy quickly hooked the speaker over her ear and turned to the console.

Back in the hallway, Anna’s phone beeped a missed call at her. She hit Reply. “Teia?”

“Teddy just texted and said someone grabbed your mom.”

“Yeah, I really need your help, can you come?”

She gave a short growl. “We’ll try. We usually sneak out after Mom’s asleep, but she’s up now and practically sitting in front of the door. But we’ll figure out how to get past her.”