Painkiller (28 page)

Phinneus cackled like it was some great joke. “I taught him and he went and taught you. Now that’s what I call training your own competition.” He quieted down and got serious, the wrinkles around his eyes subsiding. “He didn’t make it through the war with Century, did he?”

“No,” I said, feeling a sudden lump in my throat. “He didn’t.” I didn’t bother to elaborate.

The limo hit a bump, and I looked out to see we were on Lake Shore Drive heading north. Again. I turned my gaze to J.J. down the row. “You got anything?”

He took a second to realize I was talking to him. “Uhmm … I’ve got … uh … yeah, no, I got nothing more right now. I can’t get through NITU’s firewall without brute forcing it, which is probably a good thing, since it’d be disappointing if a school that emphasized science and technology had servers as easy to break into as an elementary school.”

“Then I guess we wait until we get there,” I said, and we settled back into an uneasy silence as the limo rolled on.

When the limo pulled up to the Northern Illinois Technical University campus, the sun was already coming out from behind its clouds. Which was good, because I was starting to believe Illinois maybe didn’t have a sun. We headed across campus at a quick walk, the whole damned cluster of us: me, Reed, Augustus, Kat, J.J., Veronika, Phinneus, a still-limping Fannon, and Harry, who looked surprisingly steady for a guy who’d downed as much booze as he had.

“Man, we got the full-on Justice League going here,” Augustus said as we made our way through the campus. People moved out of the way, probably because I was at the lead. I saw a few cell phone cameras, and saw Veronika wince at them, trying to keep herself from just going over and destroying them in peoples’ hands, probably.

“Avengers,” my brother said, making that coughing noise under his breath.

“These geeks,” J.J. said, elbowing me, like he wasn’t dying to just join in with them. His inside-baseball expression melted as he realized I wasn’t buying it.

We stormed the stairs of the science building where Gustafson had his office, and I nearly shoulder checked President Breedlowe as she came out of the entrance. She looked dazed, but her eyes snapped into clarity when she saw me and my scary-looking entourage. “Oh,” she said, smoothing out the front of her suit as she came to an abrupt halt. “What are you doing here?”

I decided to just hit her with the truth. “Dr. Jacobs and Dr. Gustafson were working on creating a biological weapon for use against metahumans with funding from Edward Cavanagh,” I said. “Tell me where he is.” At that point I dropped any pretense of being nice.

She put up her shields, folding her arms, and her face darkened. “I’m—no, I’m not telling you that.”

“Fine,” I said, “then I’ll arrest you for obstruction of justice. I have a feeling Gustafson isn’t going to want to be taken alive, so the war crimes tribunal will just have to content itself with drawing and quartering you and your university.”

“BOOM!” Augustus whispered, at meta-low volume, voice filled with quiet awe.

Breedlowe fell apart in a second. “He just left, in a big truck, and I don’t know what he was doing because he was being really evasive and—”

“What kind of truck?” J.J. asked, sneaking forward to insert himself into the conversation.

“Big,” Breedlowe said, looking like she was about two seconds from breaking into a sweat even on this chilly day. “Transfer—err—tractor trailer? Whatever they call them. The big shipping trucks. He was driving it.”

“Not every day you see a fancy doctor relegate himself to truck driver,” Veronika said from somewhere behind me. “Looks like Gustafson’s moving down in the world.”

J.J. had his laptop open. “I need your WiFi password,” he said to Breedlowe, who looked like she was heading fast for catatonia. J.J. stared right at her. “Now, lady, before your employee of the month drops the bomb on Chicago and kills more people than you have enrolled in this dump!” My eyes widened a little as J.J. played his hand hard.

“It’s, uh,” Breedlowe stammered, “… number one uni in I-L-L.” J.J. looked up at her. “It’s spelled like it sounds,” she said with a broken voice.

“I’m in,” J.J. said, staring at his laptop, which was holding with one hand and pecking away at with the other. “Bypassing into the security … okay, I’ve got surveillance cameras … rolling back …” He looked at Breedlowe. “Where did you see him in this truck?”

“Behind the building,” Breedlowe said, pointing to the science building behind her.

“Got him and a timestamp,” J.J. said, staring at the screen. “Switching to CPD camera network …” He glanced at Breedlowe. “You should be proud of your IS department, I couldn’t breach them. City of Chicago, on the other hand …” He concentrated as we all held our breath. “Okay, got him. Let’s get to the limo and give chase.”

Everyone kind of stood there, stock still for a minute, J.J.’s sudden bout of hard-charging intimidation turned leadership taking a moment to settled in on us all, even the newbies who had just met him.

“You heard
the
man
,” I said, putting emphasis on that last part and causing J.J. to inflate with pride. “Let’s go get Gustafson.”

“Take a left,” J.J. told the driver, switching his attention between the computer sitting on his lap and the front windshield.

“Don’t,” Harry said with a shake of his head. “If you go that way, we’ll never get him. Take Lake Shore south.”

I blinked at Harry. “You can read that in the probabilities?”

“Yeah,” Harry said, nodding. “Probably a wreck or something.” The driver took his course as Harry looked at me. He’d finally put aside the bottle. “Our odds are improving somewhat.”

“Good,” I said, as Harry eased closer to me by a couple inches in what could have been an innocent readjustment to the way he was seated but didn’t quite feel like it. “What?” he asked me.

“What are you doing?” I asked, eyeing him.

“Sitting next to you,” he said, giving me a little bit of a smile. It was charming. “Is that a crime now?”

“It probably takes a back seat to the two self-confessed murder counts I’ve got you on,” I said, as seriously as I could.

“Ooh,” Harry said, making it seem like something uncomfortable. “You are the most serious young person I’ve met. What are you? Thirty? Forty already?”

“I just turned twenty-four last month,” I said.

His brows shifted up in surprise. “Oh my. You are young.”

“And
you’re
hitting on me,” I said, feeling like I’d caught him in dirty old man mode.

He shrugged it off without any guilt. “Look, when you get a couple centuries on you, it’s not exactly easy to date in your age bracket. So … what’s an older gent to do? Just give it up?” He chortled. “Not likely. I’ve still got the physiological needs of a thirtysomething.”

Harry’s whole persona was so laid back that I didn’t feel uncomfortable with the way he was going about making his case to me. All the same, I wasn’t buying into it, either. “Kat,” I said, calling over Reed and Augustus, “I found you a new boyfriend.”

Kat peered down at me, then at Harry, appraising. “Uck, not even.”

“Thanks, Klementina,” Harry said with a tight smile. “You just keep pretending that winter in Smolensk never happened.”

“Whut?” I asked, my jaw suddenly loose.

“Huh?” Kat’s eyes were like hubcaps.

“Did he just call her …?” Reed asked.

WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY SISTER?!
Gavrikov shouted in my head, loud enough to make me blanch.

Dammit, Gavrikov, you didn’t hit the ceiling like this when Scott or Janus or that nasty assclown Taggert had their way with her
. I felt Aleksandr relax a little in my head, though he was still watching Harry suspiciously through my eyes.

“Besides,” Harry said, glancing subtly at me, “I like a girl with a little meat on her bones.”

Kat gave herself the once-over, self-consciously. “What am I, a vegan meal over here?”

“Not much of one,” Harry said, “besides, you had more personality before you lost your memory.”

“Take a right,” J.J. said into the awkward silence that followed. “And then an immediate left.”

“Don’t do that,” Harry said, shaking his head sagely. “Take the second left.”

“Probabilities again?” I asked.

“No, this is just basic knowledge of Chicago traffic,” Harry said. He pointed at the computer sitting on J.J.’s lap. “Plus, I’m watching his future, and correcting for the five times I’ve read him shouting, ‘No, that was wrong, my bad’!”

J.J. looked up at Harry in awe. “Wow. Thank you.”

“Yeah, I’m not exactly being a hero here,” Harry said. “There’s self-preservation involved.”

“All right, I’m up to the live feed,” J.J. said, glancing back down again. “Looks like Gustafson is on Lower Wacker.”

I stifled a giggle. Harry didn’t bother, guffawing loudly. “That kills me,” he said then got serious. “I mean, uh … yeah, it still makes me laugh after all these years. ‘Wacker.’”

“And here I thought you were too old for me,” I said. “Really, you might be too young.”

“You had a twelve percent probability of smiling when he said ‘Wacker,’” Harry said nonchalantly. “Your control is good, but you found it funny. You don’t even have to admit it, I just know.” He smiled.

Dammit.

The limo turned and headed down a ramp, like it was descending into a parking garage. It wasn’t a garage, though, it was like an understreet—a street running under the main one. I raised an eyebrow, because I couldn’t quite recall seeing anything like this before. It was a steady, perpetual tunnel on three sides, with the fourth looking out over a river that I assumed was the Chicago.

“This makes things dicey,” Reed said, tapping me lightly on the arm to get my attention. “Once we get eyes on him, you could fly …”

I looked up at the roof of the “tunnel.” Yeah, I could fly in here, but not very high, that was for sure.

“He’s five hundred yards away and moving fast,” J.J. said. Our limo driver had his pedal to the metal, maneuvering his ride in between cars like it mattered. I could see him up there, a younger guy in a suit. Looked stiff, but it was probably just the tension.

“Screw your Uber, we should hire this guy full-time,” I said to Reed.

He gave me a pained look. “Tell me you’re not going to go with Chang’s offer. Just tell me.”

“Odds are against you on that one, sonny,” Harry tossed right over me.

“There’s the truck!” Phinneus shouted. He already had his pistol out and pointed, like he was going to shoot through the windshield.

Harry landed a hand on his arm, dragging it down, a serious expression on his face. “Whatever he’s got in that truck, it’s delicate. Survival probability of everyone in this car except the driver and the computer guy goes to zero if you shoot out the tires.”

“Instant mission failure,” J.J. said under his breath. “Ooh. The plot thickens.”

“So we can’t crash it,” I said as the limo weaved hard to get around some ass in a BMW that thought he owned the whole road. “How about I fly up and yank Gustafson right out of the driver’s seat?”

Harry cringed. “Odds do not look favorable if you do that. Not one hundred percent failure rate, but … not good, either.”

“Fannon?” I asked, and the speedster cringed. He was still being really quiet, his hooded sweatshirt pulled over his head.

“I can maybe do a sixty miles an hour right now,” he said, and I realized his clothes were wet with blood, still. “And not for long.”

“Can you fly me up to the top of the truck?” Veronika asked, leaning forward off the bench seat to talk to me.

I looked up at the bottom of the road above us, the supports racing by overhead. “Yeah. We should have enough clearance to do that.”

“You get me up there,” she said, turning around to look out, “I burn through and destroy whatever that plague thing is by superheating it.” She had a hopeful, alive look in her eyes as she turned her head back to me. “Whatever disease he’s carrying, I’m guessing it’ll burn up under superheated plasma.”

Harry stared out the window. “A lot better odds on that one.”

“I can fly out, too,” Reed said. “Provide support, maybe some covering fire—”

“Odds dropped at the covering fire part,” Harry said, squinting at the truck.

“I can just fly out and make a nuisance of myself, maybe offer a second target,” Reed said. Harry threw out a thumbs up.

“I’ll see if I can open some barriers, maybe blow some conduits like in
Watch Dogs
,” J.J. said. When everyone looked at him, he said, “Kidding! Totes kidding.”

“That game was boss, yo,” Augustus said.

“I know, right?” J.J. said, gushing. “I do not understand the haters.”

“Our odds of success just dropped two percent while we endured that egg-headery,” Harry said sourly.

“And out we go,” I said as Veronika and Reed sprang into motion.

The truck had a long, grey trailer behind it, and it was driving at the speed limit. I wondered where Gustafson was taking this monstrosity, but I didn’t have time to worry about it.

“I’m ready,” Veronika said, and I stepped out of the limo with her clutched in my arms. We soared over two lanes of traffic and I dropped her with a thump on the roof of the tractor trailer before settling down myself.

“Whoa! Down!” she shouted and we both ducked a support beam. It was a few feet above us, but if we’d remained standing we both would have suffered a real headache. “It’s every misogynist’s dream,” Veronika quipped. She must have caught my blank look. “We’re both on our knees.”

Reed came to a clumping landing behind us, way slower and more unwieldy than ours. He staggered and dropped just below the next beam, the concrete support nearly giving him a haircut. “Anything you can do …” he said with a smirk.

“I bet the sibling rivalry is fierce in your family,” Veronika said, her hand turning blue and hot in a second. The air lost all chill, the breeze of the moving truck the only thing keeping her plasma from overwhelming me even a few feet away.

“Look out!” Harry’s voice shouted across the divide between lanes as someone honked.

There was another noise that followed his warning by a couple seconds—loud, terrifying—