Limitless (7 page)

“Would you mind letting him loose?” Wexford asked. “I hate to impose, but… we are responsible for his safety while he’s here…”

“Sure,” I said, and let him go with a final, not-so-gentle crank of the arm that elicited a grunt of pain. “Since you asked nicely.”

“What will you do now?” Marshwin asked, her spine just a little straighter now that Halstead was out of my grip. It was the only hint of how stressed she must have been while watching me manhandle him.

“Follow your boy Webster’s lead,” I said, cracking my knuckles now that my hand was free of Halstead. I popped each of them in turn, eliciting a wince from Wexford and an even stare from Marshwin. “Track this guy down. Stop him.”

“Very good,” Wexford said, still with that tight smile. He looked a little like a butler who’d been told he was done for the night. “We entrust this investigation to your capable hands, Ms. Nealon.”

“At least somebody does,” I said, nudging Halstead with my toe as I turned to leave. He grunted, clutching his arm and wrist to his side. Wuss. I hadn’t broken them or anything, though soft tissue damage was a possibility.

“And Ms. Nealon,” Wexford said as I hit the door, opening it.

“Yes?” I asked, turning about.

“Do be careful,” Wexford said with a faint smile tinged with worry. “I should not care to see you come to additional harm while assisting us.”

“There’s nothing these pricks can do to hurt me.” I smiled and shut the door.

Chapter 13

I snuck up on Webster without him even realizing it. He was studying something on his computer, staring at it like it contained the very secrets of life. He had on earphones and was bent over as if he were listening to the very secrets of the universe.

Or he could have been watching porn on the internet. He was certainly hunched over enough for it.

The bullpen had cleared out; the few windows provided a sweeping view of the darkness falling outside. The smell of coffee that had been so strong earlier in the day had faded along with the volume of noise in the room. I saw other people coming in now, maybe the night shift, and heads were down as people worked on computers or paperwork. I approached Webster.

When I got close enough to see his computer, I knew why he had the headphones in. He was on YouTube, watching an interview from NNC, the National News Channel. It was a couple years old, but I recognized it immediately.

Since I was the one being interviewed.

I could remember almost every word like it had happened yesterday. I watched the interviewer, Gail Roth, asking a question, and even without reading her lips, I knew what she was saying. That moment was etched in my mind, along with the slightly burnt smell of the hot lights in the studio, the scent of the makeup they’d spackled on my face that made me feel like a geisha, and the sense that the air conditioning in the room was in a perpetual and losing battle with the heat coming off the lighting rigs.

“Why you?” Gail Roth asked me. I watched her lips flap in time with the question, and I could hear her words in my head. She had blondish-brown hair and enough of the look of youth still about her that she wasn’t going to be kicked off the national newscasts for the crime of aging just yet.

“Why not me?” I asked as the camera shifted angles to catch my reaction. I had gently taken Gail’s question and lobbed it back at her. Reed had taught me how to do it, said it was a sales technique called a porcupine. I hadn’t asked him how he’d known that.

“You’re… nineteen years old?” Gail asked, and waited for my nod. “You’ve just saved millions of people from a tyrant who supposedly had enough power to take over the world—”

“Yes, he did,” I said, interrupting her to confirm that little fact for her. Sovereign definitely had the power to take over the world. I’d seen what would have happened if he’d gotten his way. Enough power was not his problem.

Gail paused, eyes searching me as she made a face to play for the camera. “You have to understand, for the viewers at home… we’re taking a lot of this on faith. Everyone’s seen the footage from the battle over Minneapolis, which was—incredible. Scarcely believable. The sort of thing you’d see in a Hollywood summer tentpole, not the evening news. You turned into an enormous, flaming dragon—”

“I’d just like to point out,” I said, interrupting her again, “that the camera adds ten pounds, and there were an awful lot of cameras pointing at me that day. Like… all of them, I think.”

“You turned into a giant dragon,” Gail Roth said, not breaking away. Her gaze was annoyingly penetrating. And not in any kind of good way. “You burst into flames. And you killed a man—”

“A very bad one, but yes,” I said, nodding. “Again, just for the record, I did try very hard to get him to surrender first.”

She settled into her chair, shifting to the right. “What were you talking about with him up there? While you were fighting?”

“Geopolitics,” I said with a straight face. “State-of-the-world-type stuff.”

She blinked once, and that was all the reaction she gave that the answer might not be what she expected. “How so?”

“Well, Sovereign was of the opinion that people are in need of… stewardship,” I said. “That they should be made to fear in order to keep them between the lines. That he could build a better world just by imposing his will on all of us. I politely disagreed, telling him that you can’t stomp on a person’s free will and freedom like that. Then I disagreed less politely. With punches to the face.”

“You have a real wit,” Gail said, and it didn’t sound entirely like a selling point the way she said it.

“As you pointed out, I’m nineteen,” I replied. “You’re just lucky I’m not answering, ‘Totally!’ and ‘OMG!’ to everything.”

Roth turned her head down to look at her notes at that point, leaving about a half second of dead air. I remembered taking that moment to catch my breath. I could feel the sweat rolling down my back from the nervousness. “How long had you known this ‘Sovereign’?” She frowned. “Did he have a real name?”

“Marius,” I said, nodding. “His name was Marius. I’d known him for about a year, on and off? He came to me under false pretenses.” Very, very false pretenses. “He’d introduced himself as an ally, as a friend. It was only later I found out he was behind everything—”

“You realize that the concept of a giant conspiracy to keep this secret of metahumans under wraps is… well, it defies most peoples’ ability to believe?” Gail asked me. She did it a little haltingly.

I was ready for this one. “I know how they feel,” I said. “I felt the same way myself when I learned about the secret. I was raised as normal as anyone.”
You know, except for being locked in my house until age seventeen.
“When I found out the truth about what I was, it was an eye opener. But I quickly found out that not only were there people out there with powers beyond those of normal humans, but there was this whole other world under the surface, and there were bad things brewing in it that wouldn’t just go away if I ignored them.”

“Back in January of 2012 there was an incident in the city of Minneapolis,” she said, looking back to her notes. “A man—”

“A beast,” I said, ignoring the growls of protest in my head.

“—killed two hundred plus people while putting the city under a kind of siege,” she finished. “Was that a metahuman incident?”

“Yes,” I said. It had been. I took a breath, hoping her follow-up didn’t go in the direction I didn’t want it to.

“A week later, the city of Glencoe, Minnesota, was destroyed in a blast not dissimilar from what you unleashed in northern Minnesota at the close of your war.” Now she was turning toward accusing. “Was that you?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “That was Aleksandr Gavrikov, a meta with a very similar power.” Exactly the same power, in fact. Because he was in my head, too, now.

“Another incident in western Kansas a few months later,” Gail said, flipping through her notes. “Hundreds of square miles on fire. An incident in the British museum, where the security camera footage shows you fighting with undisclosed adversaries—”

“I can explain that one,” I said, feeling like I was rapidly losing control of the situation, “those were Sovereign’s allies. Well, some of them were, at least, and—”

Gail’s voice overpowered mine. “You seem to have been involved in a lot of… incidents. Orlando Airport. A plane crash outside Bloomington, Minnesota. Some sort of battle on the freeway. The destruction of a warehouse—”

I felt my fingernails dig into my palms, drawing me from that moment, the moment when I could feel all control slipping away, back to the present, and a bullpen in New Scotland Yard where I was watching it all unfold on a screen. There was a tightness in my chest as I remembered the moment, and I looked away, trying to clear it out of my mind. I didn’t to be reminded of that interview, of what had happened during it. Because of it. Not now.

“Hey,” I said, ripping Detective Inspector Matthew Webster out of his interview-induced coma with a tap on the shoulder. He fumbled, the headphones popping out of his ears before he could watch things on the screen go from bad to worse for me.

“Oh, oh,” Webster said, flushing as he fought to spin back around and stop the video. “Oh. All right, there you are.”

“Here I am,” I said. “And there I am.” I gestured toward the monitor, and he clicked the mouse rapidly toward the “shut down” command without even bothering to close the browser window. “And where are we?”

He blinked in confusion as I saw his mind try and catch up. “Oh, right. Ah, we are nowhere. No other hints of any of your friends around the city. We sent out units to all the last known addresses and came up a bit dry. It looks like the rest of them are in hiding, but perhaps your friend Angus didn’t get the message.”

“I told you, they’re not my friends.” I let out a slow exhalation. “So, what do we do now?”

“Well, I don’t know about you,” he said, standing, pulling his trench coat off the back of his chair, “but I’m at a dead end for the night and bloody tired.”

“Right,” I agreed. “We should get some rest and come back to this tomorrow. Call me if something comes up in the meantime?”

“Certainly,” he said. “I’ve got your mobile number.” He frowned. “Is your mobile still working after that explosion?”

I reached into my pocket and pulled it out. The screen was a little cracked, but it lit up when I pushed the button. “Looks salvageable.”

“Are you going to check into a hotel?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’ll just—” I reached for my credit card in my back pocket and pulled it out with a snap. It emerged as half the card it used to be.

“Well, damn,” I said, staring at my half credit card. “I hope they’ll still accept it.”

“Is the RFID still intact?” Webster asked, leaning down to peer at it.

“The RF-what?” I held up the half card and tugged the other half free from my pants pocket. They were too damned tight. Always. Pants were not made for my hips.

“There’s no RFID on this card,” Webster said with a shake of his head. “It uses the magnetic strip, and that’s snapped clean in half. You’re not going to get them to accept this because no one can read it.”

“Son of a bitch,” I muttered.

“You can just stay at the U.S. embassy,” he said, putting his coat on. “Doubtless they have some extra space.”

I glanced back at Mary Marshwin’s office, where I’d left the U.S. ambassador in a pile on the floor. “Yeah… that’s… probably not going to happen…”

“Perhaps you could ask the commissioner for a housing allowance,” he said.

I looked at the door of her office. The lights were still burning, and I hadn’t heard anyone leave. “Maybe.”

“No cash?” Webster asked, pulling my attention back to him.

“I didn’t exactly have time to hit the bank before I came over,” I said. I could feel the fatigue settling on my bones. I’d been awake for over twenty-four hours, and I’d flown here, which took a toll. Especially at supersonic speed.

Webster had his coat on now, and it had bunched up on his shoulders, crooked lines that told me he was tense. “I’d suggest you could stay with me, but I’ve only got a one-bedroom flat.” My heart raced a little at the mere suggestion and fell at the next words he said. “It’s truly a disgrace, though, an utter mess. I think I might die of embarrassment if you saw it, actually.”

“It’s fine, I’ll figure something out,” I said. “I’ll just… grovel to your Foreign Secretary. Maybe he’ll come up with something. Or try and get someone from my office to send me a wire transfer—”

“I rather doubt you’ll find a Western Union open at this hour,” Webster said apologetically. His face was crumpled, and I watched it loosen. “There is one other option,” he said. I could tell he was still running it through his mind.

“Oh?” I was open to just about anything, even a youth hostel at this point. (Not the torture porn kind.) The thought of having to ask Marshwin or even Wexford to set me up with pocket money for a hotel was about as appealing to me as the thought of drinking straight out of the Thames. “What did you have in mind?”

Webster looked embarrassed for just a flash. “Well, my mum has a place on the outskirts. It’s got an extra room, it’s not too far, and she’s a bit lonely…”

“Your mom?” I asked, in just a little disbelief. I thought about it for a quarter of a second, and the image of me pushing Halstead’s face into Mary Marshwin’s carpeting came back to me. “Sounds good,” I said.

“A word of caution about my mum, though,” he said, and I could tell that some regret was already settling in. “She’s a bit… um…”

“It’s fine,” I said and tried to give him a reassuring smile. “Whoever she is, trust me when I tell you that she’s probably an absolute angel compared to what I’ve dealt with in the past myself.”

Chapter 14

Philip could smell the fear in the room. He liked that smell. The scent of piss and blood, the anticipation of what was about to happen. It made him quiver under his suit. He wasn’t going to get his hands dirty, not on this one, but he was more than happy to stand back and let Liliana do her level best to make Angus Waterman scream until his head burst.