Limitless (18 page)

“My God,” came a voice from down the alley. Footsteps pounded toward me as drops of rain fell on my face. I could smell everything, and it smelled like I’d gone dumpster diving in a medical waste bin. Webster’s face came into view above me, and he halted before kneeling next to me. “Are you there, Sienna?”

“I am right here, yes,” I said in a nearly normal tone of voice. “Trust your eyes on that one.”

“Where are you hurt?” he asked, urgently running his fingers over my shredded clothes. In any other situation, it might have been considered copping a feel, but since he looked utterly panicked and I’d been bleeding out from the places his fingers were treading, there was really nothing erotic about it. Unfortunately.

“Mostly on my pride,” I said, brushing his hands away gently. “Although there’s a hell of a metaphorical bruise on my ass where it just got kicked.”

He blinked at me, then blinked again. “You’re—you’re all right, then?” He didn’t look like he believed me. Like he hadn’t seen me regrow a foot yesterday.

“I’m more or less fine,” I said, gingerly sitting up. “How’s the count back at the gallery?”

His face paled, which took some doing since he’d already been white as a blank canvas when he’d shown up and seen me. “Not good, though I think it would have been a great deal worse if you hadn’t dissolved that bomb’s effects.”

“These people are some nasty customers,” I said, my voice hoarse and cracking. “It’s the guy.”

“The guy?” Webster said, sheathing the baton he was carrying in his hand like an afterthought. “What guy?”

“That guy from Angus Waterman’s house,” I said, suppressing a coughing fit that was threatening to consume me if I didn’t get a drink of water soon. “Our guy. The one we’re hunting.”

“This is him?” Webster asked, a little disbelieving. “That seems a bit farfetched.” He paused then glanced down at my ragged appearance. “Are you quite sure you’re all right?”

“It’s him,” I said firmly. “Think about it—a serial killer using bombs? He had a woman with them who used two knives to dispatch your SWAT team, another guy lurking in the background that was probably our bomb maker, and the man himself taunted the hell out of me.” I thought back to what he’d said. “He mentioned Omega. This is about Omega somehow.”

“Bloody hell,” Webster said. “Are you sure?”

“Oh, I’m sure,” I said. I was pretty certain I hadn’t been hallucinating that. I ran a scraping, ripped-up boot across the pavement as I drew my leg closer to me. “He was pretty blatant about it.”

Webster looked like he was trying to decide whether to believe me or not. “Hell, hell and more hell,” he said finally. “Can you walk?”

I pushed against the ground and failed to rise. “Give me a minute,” I said.

I saw motion above and looked up to see his hand extended, reaching down to me. I took it, and he pulled me to my feet. With maybe a little help from my own strength. “Thanks,” I said.

“We need to get everything he said to you down on paper,” Webster said, starting back down the alley toward the gallery. “Every word, every gesture, a description of the people you saw—everything. Any part of it might be a clue that could lead us to him.”

“Agreed,” I said, following behind him with just a little bit of a limp. It wasn’t because I was hurt, it was because once more my boot had been damaged so badly that I was walking with an uneven gait. “I just need to make one stop first.”

“Oh?” He slowed to let me catch up. “Where’s that?”

“A clothing store,” I said, matching his shortened strides with my wobbly walk. I gestured toward my shredded outfit, sweeping over the bloodied flesh exposed by the bomb damage. “Can I borrow a few dollars—err, pounds?”

Webster just looked me over once quickly and turned his head again, like he was trying his best not to gaze on anything that might maybe have been exposed. “Of course,” he said, but I could see the blush on his cheeks even under the dirt from the explosion.

Chapter 43

“Murder, murder, murder,” I said, standing in the middle of the bullpen in New Scotland Yard. “Why kill the guy out in Hounslow other than to somehow penetrate the city’s surveillance grid?”

“I told you that’s not all linked,” Webster said. It was depressingly quiet in here, the bitter smell of stale coffee left un-drunk filling the air.

“I read there are like two hundred thousand cameras in London,” I said, pacing around in my new jeans and blouse. I’d gone more practical and less dressy this time. Also, cheaper. Webster didn’t dress impressively enough for me to blow his clothing budget with impunity, so I’d gone as practical and low-cost as I could. “You can’t tell me that someone doesn’t have the ability to run through each of them.”

“I don’t know,” he said with a shake of his head. “Some of them are private, some of them belong to individual towns—”

“Wonderful,” I snarled into the empty air. The bullpen was pretty well abandoned save for the two of us. “So someone is watching, maybe. They’ve at least got the ability to black out certain cameras that could give us a hint of where they are, but apparently there’s no central location we could go to… I dunno, watch where the cameras started to go dark so we might have a hint of where this guy is going next?”

“Well,” Webster said, “that’s how I understand it, yes.”

“Gahhhh,” I said, letting out a slow breath. “Okay. So. We need to get access to the systems one by one—”

“I can try to do that,” he said, making a note on a pad. “Though I have my doubts whether the commissioner will believe that the bloke who did the gallery heist is the same one we’ve been after.”

“We need to figure out how they got to this guy that worked the system. If they’re doing this, there has to be more network in place than you know about.”

“I don’t even know who we’d speak to about that,” he said.

“And I need something to eat, desperately,” I said, feeling at least some of my current state of crabbiness being brought on by the angry rumble in my belly. Healing always drained me, especially my stomach.

He blinked at me. “Well, I suspect I can do something about that, at least.”

“Good,” I said, feeling a little embarrassed, “because I’m still broke.” I didn’t have an ATM card to my name, and it was a few miles past embarrassing.

“How’s your phone?” he asked.

“Not so good,” I said, holding up the debris that I’d retrieved from my pocket before I’d discarded my old clothes. The faceplate was shattered, a spider web of cracks spreading out from the upper right hand corner. A piece the size of my thumb had been broken cleanly away, revealing a speaker and some other little electronic doodads beneath. “I don’t think it’s salvageable.”

“I bet the mobile insurance people see you coming and close the shop straightaway.”

I stared at the broken phone. “Honestly, this doesn’t happen to me anymore. This is like… a throwback to the way things were a couple years ago, when I couldn’t own anything nice without it getting destroyed.”

“Back in time,” Webster said with a single nod. “Right, so. Fancy a curry? Fish and chips? You Americans like hamburgers, right?”

“This American fancies whatever the hell she can put in her mouth at the moment,” I said, and it took a second for my brain to catch up on that one. “I mean, whatever you’re hungry for is fine.” I knew I blushed on that one.

He chuckled, but not too much. “Fish and chips?”

“Sure,” I said and grabbed the cheap plastic poncho I’d bought for a pound instead of spending Webster’s money on an actual coat. It did a billowing thing of its own as I pulled it on over my head, but this was way less cool than what his trench coat did.

“Very nice,” Webster said, staring at me and my clear plastic poncho.

“I kind of doubt that, but you’re sweet.”

“It doesn’t obstruct the view,” he said and turned to head for the door, smile on his face.

We were almost out when he stopped in the middle of the aisle. I didn’t run into him, but only because I was paying attention. “What?” I asked. His attention was fixed on the TV in the corner, and it took me only a second to see what he was looking at.

TV news is TV news, whether it’s in America or Britain, I realized. Constantly reporting on the same recycled shit, with the same breathless vomiting of regurgitated “news” every few minutes until the air becomes so saturated with it that they’re forced to find some new tidbit or angle lest their viewers tune out. Or pass out, possibly.

The footage of the explosion had doubtless been on all morning, dissected panel-style, with subtle glee by journalists of all stripes. I could have sworn I’d seen that at least a few times in my endless pacing of the bullpen while we’d talked. I’d figured it would have been on all day and night, as surely as the sky was blue and politicians were hard or wet at the thought of a crisis to manage.

This, though… this, I hadn’t quite predicted.

I knew Parliament when I saw it, and this was a full shot of it. Big Ben to one side of the frame, the view looking across the Thames quite picturesque even with a hint of haze and fog with the grey sky as background. That was normal.

No, it was the caption on the giant bar at the bottom of the screen that drew my attention. Because that was a cause for worry and concern.

It read, “Metahuman attack spurs Parliamentary response; emergency legislation and vote planned for tonight.”

Aw, hell.

Even in England, this couldn’t be good.

Chapter 44

“Ah, politicians,” I said as we walked down the street toward our lunch. “Always just one or two laws away from fixing everything that ails you. Utopia is just a few bills away, ladies and gents.”

“People are scared,” Webster said, the rain dripping down the bridge of his nose and gathering there like an unfallen tear. “They want a response.”

“How about an intelligent response?” I asked, gathering my poncho around me. “I suppose that would be too much of a stretch.”

“You think that passing some laws in response to this situation is a bad idea?” He gave me that cocked-eyebrow look.

“Well,” I said, “let’s see. They tried to kill your police. They murdered civilians. They stole a painting and took hostages. They set off a series of bombs in the middle of London.” I ticked the points off on my finger as I enumerated them, talking over the rain dripping against the hood of my poncho. “Seems to me that if we actually catch them, you’ve got a great basis for charging them with enough shit to keep them in jail for the rest of their lives. So what’s another law going to do for you?”

He looked deeply uncomfortable. “Perhaps fund training for dealing with these sorts of situations—”

“I’m sure that’ll come, and I don’t think it’s a bad idea,” I said. “But you know they’re not talking about that. Mostly they’re talking about passing laws that seek to control the situation while failing to acknowledge that sometimes the things that evil men do are just beyond their control.” I felt my expression darken. “Or they’re talking about putting those of us who didn’t have anything to do with the so-called bad guys and their craziness into jail or detention or deportation.”

Webster looked like his cheeks were burning, but he was almost contrite. “I honestly can’t blame them.” He took hold of a door to a nondescript pub, opening it and holding it for me. That was a nice touch, I thought, even as we argued about how best to treat my kind.

“I can’t blame them for being scared, either,” I said, pulling the hood down as I stepped into the pub. It had a bar straight in front and a lot of wooden tables dotting the room. A long plate-glass window overlooked the sodden street. There was a smell of something fried in the air. Smelled like home to me. “But again, there’s a difference between taking intelligent action when you’re afraid and just taking action. One can get you out of trouble; the other does nothing or makes it worse. It’s the difference between being in a hole and continuing to dig down versus starting to shovel sideways and up.”

“I can’t see how passing a law is going to make it worse,” he said with a shrug as he led the way over to a wooden, circular table in the corner of the pub. There were only a few patrons here, scattered around, and having conversations as hushed as ours was.

I stared at him. “And I can’t see how a law making something already illegal even more illegal is going to do anything but put a bunch of words on a page that someone will sign for no purpose.”

He extended a hand to offer me a seat, and I sat down as he pulled off his coat and headed for the bar, ostensibly to order, since the placard on our table said that there was no waitstaff and the bar was the place to do that sort of thing. I sat there in silence, pondering what to say to him next while I waited for him to come back.

He spoke first when he returned, surprising me. “My mum called while you were in the toilets earlier.” It took me a second to realize he must have been talking about before we’d left New Scotland Yard. “She was worried.”

“I don’t blame her,” I said with a shake of the head. “What happened this morning was scary. She probably saw it on the news. I’m surprised it didn’t give her a heart attack or something.”

“She asked if you were all right,” he said, sitting down next to me instead of across. He placed a menu, retrieved from the bar and covered in a smooth, faux leather binding, in front of me.

I took a second before grasping at it. “I hope you told her I’m fine.”

“I left out a full description of what happened, yes,” he said, browsing the faded, yellow-tinged pages of his menu. Mine smelled faintly of old cigars. I wondered how long this pub had had these menus. “I decided it would be better if she thought we weren’t anywhere near the goings-on.”

I stared evenly at him. “Probably for the best,” I agreed and turned my attention to the menu.

He ordered for us a few minutes later, ever the gentleman—fish and chips times two. While he was placing the order, standing at the bar with his suit pants creased and one foot up on the actual, metal bar that rested underneath the—well, the bar, he was the very model of an English gentleman.

But I wasn’t thinking about him at the moment.