Heroes Lost and Found (2 page)

“He took me to an underground bunker outside of the city and told me to behave myself.” One hand went up to her right cheek. “A few days later Lamarr showed up, then a few weeks later Blockhead and, well,” Rachael whispered, “you know the rest.”

Outrager cleared his throat and continued. “Dykovski’s assigned super was Kit Masters, flying and flame-throwing strongman. Code name Inferno.”

“I remember Kit.” A lump rose in my throat as I mentally went through the list of supers I’d known, most of them dead. “Nice guy. Alpha. Hero. Hell, he was my idol before I got…” I paused, trying to remember how it felt to not be a super. “Before.”

“He was one of the original Alphas,” Hunter offered. “Agency old-timer. Had one Guardian actually retire due to old age and was rotated to a second one.” He nodded towards the screen. “Being Dykovski, I assume.”

“Which is when the trouble started,” Outrager replied. Another picture flashed up on the screen, this one of Kit.

I gasped. I remembered a blond, happy man who loved to do shows for the kids, juggling fireballs between posturing for the cameras and strutting his stuff. He’d done more public relations than fighting in the past few years, mostly because the Agency had run out of pairings to give the public a decent fight. Mike had referred to him many times as “The Old Man”, pointing at him as an example of the best life you could have under the Agency’s control.

The screen showed a mess of a face, the two black eyes and bloody nose obscuring his fine Grecian features.

“Seems Dykovski liked to keep control over his super with a little physical encouragement,” Outrager added. “Records say that he beat the hell out of Kit twice, on the record. Warned twice to lay off. Had to reschedule two public shows due to his injuries. Nothing permanent, but enough to screw up the photo ops.”

“What was his problem?” Steve snarled. His hands twisted into fists, curling up on the black leather. His nails scraped narrow trenches in the expensive covering.

“Dykovski disagreed with the Agency’s choice of enforcement. Seems he wanted a bit more hands-on control than just the plugs.”

“He’s a bully. And a disgrace,” Hunter said in a low voice.

“Okay.” I exhaled, trying to push down the anger to manageable levels. “We know who the Controller is and where he found Rachael. I don’t care where he met Lamarr. What we need to find out is how he captured Linda.”
And executed her,
I added silently.

The room went quiet.

“She seemed like a very nice woman,” Rachael offered.

I nodded. “She was. Tough old broad.”

“Her name was Linda Matheson, for the record. I’ve got a shot of her here.” Jessie rotated another image onto the board. She beamed out at us, her silver jumpsuit all kinds of glitter and sparkle as she posed for the camera.

Steve chuckled. “Man, did they dress her up.”

I smiled, thinking of some of the stranger costuming experiments Mike and I had gone through, courtesy of the Agency’s PR geniuses.

“How’d she end up with a tag like Blockhead?” Rachael asked, her voice growing stronger.

“Came in after being a female wrestler for most of her life, if you can believe it. Kept her stage name.” Hunter shook his head. “Don’t think anyone really wanted to try and change it, lose her fan base. Took most of her fake moves and incorporated them into her performances.”

“Wait,” Peter interrupted. “Wrestling is fake?”

Rachael slapped his hand lightly and giggled.

I held in a smile. In the short time Rachael had been on the team, Peter’d become the older brother she never had, someone for her in her age range who she could bond with.

And share fashion tips.

I rolled my eyes and waved at the screen, gesturing for Jessie to continue.

“We’ve no idea of where she went after fighting with you guys in Toronto, but she somehow ended up as the Controller’s prisoner.” Outrager paused. A sheen of sweat covered his forehead. “And he executed her by setting off the explosive implanted at the back of her neck.”

Hunter leaned forward, rubbing his hands together. “I thought the only way to activate the plugs was through our…” he grimaced, “…through a Guardian’s wristband.” He glanced at his own.

“But we took all the wristbands offline.” The words sounded lame in my mouth. “We blew it up, the farm near Buffalo.” I looked at Hunter. “You took us there. You said it was the main database for all the plugs.”

“It was, as far as I know.” Hunter nodded. “But the Agency probably had other options around. Those bastards planned for almost anything.”

“Except for us.” Steve thumped his chest, puffing up with pride.

“Except for us,” I repeated.

Hunter smiled at me, adding in a mischievous wink. “I don’t think anyone could ever plan for you, Jo. You’re a freaking force of nature.”

I blew him a kiss.

Outrager looked at Hunter, the start of a scowl on the Agency rep’s face. “You understand there are some resources you didn’t know about. That you can’t know about.”

I gritted my teeth. I suspected Outrager was pissed at Hunter for switching sides, but this wasn’t the time or place for it.

I stood up and walked towards the monitor, hands on hips. “We saved the fucking world once already and took down a rogue super two weeks ago. So shut the hell up and listen to me.”

The shocked look on Outrager’s face said it all. It morphed into a sneer as he crossed his arms and waited.

“Go ahead, Surf.” He dragged out my stage name like a child sucking taffy off his fingers.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Hunter wince. My postcoital bliss was definitely gone.

“Where did Dykovski get all these toys?” I asked. “He was able to capture Linda and activate her plug. He supplied Lamarr with a jet pack. He wasn’t able to do all that with good wishes and chocolate kisses. What did he find or get?”

Outrager shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his gaze darting around the room.

Hunter looked at me then at Outrager and back to me, his right eyebrow lifting just a fraction of an inch. Considering Outrager had had no compunction about sending us to our probable death a few weeks earlier, this had to be something big to cause him such discomfort.

“He accessed a series of Agency caches,” Outrager said, sounding like he was confessing a mortal sin.

“Caches? Agency caches?” Hunter stood up. “What are those? And why wasn’t I briefed about this?”

“Because your super wasn’t an Alpha. There was no need for you to know. The same with the rest of you. Including Surf, of course.” The dismissive tone sent my blood pressure soaring.

Outrager continued on, his tone now a low drone as if he were reading a press release. “The Agency installed caches across the country in case an Alpha needed resupplying without having access to a fully supplied base. Usually used for multi-city battles where we couldn’t have the super disappear for hours at a time.” He sounded like he was describing a day spa. “Nothing too large, just a few rooms to repair and reload for those supers using ammo-based weapons. Some accessories were on hand for emergencies, of course.”

I felt the rumblings of a headache behind my left eye. “What sort of stuff, perchance, would be there for ‘emergencies’? And do you have a record of those he plundered?”

Outrager opened his mouth and closed it. A second later he repeated the motion, this time managing to speak. “He took some very…specialized equipment. Meant, you realize, for use only in extreme emergencies. Extreme.”

“What did he take?” I snapped.

The Agency liaison looked down at a clipboard. “He procured three jet packs, as you know, a tracking/activation device and a special…” His speech trailed off at the end, his last few words indecipherable.

“Let’s start at the beginning. We know about the jet packs. What’s this tracking/activation device?” My voice trembled on the last sentence, my suspicions rising through the fear.

Outrager sighed. It seemed like the sigh of a child caught stealing cookies and trying to sound repentant. “We developed a special attachment to the Guardian wristband.”

Hunter flinched and looked down at his own device again. It’d been dead since we took down the mainframe and destroyed the database holding all of our activation codes. The damned wristband wouldn’t come off and had gotten in the way more than once during our entanglements, a very visible reminder of our past.

“We had a plan. If a Guardian died, we’d have to switch the owner…” He frowned, and I could see the wheels in his mind reconfiguring his speech. “We figured out a way to have more than one code on a Guardian’s brace. All the Guardian needed to do was scan the super’s plug, and the attachment would add the code to the activation brace.”

“How would he keep them apart?” Hunter interrupted. “How would you know which code belonged to which super and so forth? And how many codes could one of these hold?” He looked at his own dead bracelet. “And how the hell is he powering it when mine’s been dead since we took out the base?”

Outrager held up a picture. It showed a small black box, barely the size of a computer mouse. “This was only in emergencies, you understand. The idea was to put the super back under control until the Guardian could return to base and the super reassigned to a different Guardian. Purely as a last resort, you understand.”

Steve let out something between a growl and a snort. I felt like joining him. The depth of the Agency’s demand for total control over our lives seemed to have no limits.

Outrager scratched one ear. “So, ah, back to your question. It could hold up to twenty different codes until retrieved by the base computer and distributed to new Guardians. As to activation…” He flushed a deep red.

I felt a stab of panic in my belly. In all the time we’d been dealing with Outrager, I’d never seen him flustered. Now he looked like a virgin asking his first girl out on a date.

“He just taps in the code, as with all Guardians. Multiple supers, multiple codes, but they’ll all still explode when he hits the button. As to the power, ah, well…” Again the pregnant pause.

“Spit it out already,” Rachael snapped.

Outrager stared at the super for a second, taken aback by her attitude. Away from her captors and bullies, she’d blossomed into a pretty tough young woman.

Despite the circumstances, I smirked.

“The emergency power pack was built to not only keep the wristband going but to provide extra memory space for the codes.” He let out a nervous cough. “It will detonate all the codes and thus all the plugs if it’s removed from the Guardian’s wristband or if the Guardian dies, unless properly hooked up to an Agency mainframe and a shutdown procedure followed. No pulse, automatic activation. Prevents the supers from taking out the Guardian in a mass rush.” Outrager glanced over at me. “Or if the Guardian gets knocked out. Any major disruption of the Guardian’s brain waves indicating unconsciousness and the device activates all the plugs at once.”

My half smile died, replaced by a wave of nausea. “How does the scanning work?”

“That’s where you got lucky, in a matter of speaking.” He tapped the photograph, his short manicured nails denting the glossy surface with half-moons. “The super in question has to stand still and be within twenty feet to be properly scanned. One code at a time under very controlled circumstances. It’s not meant to be done in a hit-and-run sort of situation.”

The headache blossomed with a fury I hadn’t felt in years. “So this is what the bastard was trying to do at Cherries ’n’ Lemons? Lock onto us one by one and blow our heads off?”

Outrager appeared honestly sorry, his tongue flicking out to wet terminally dry lips. “We planned to have the special attachment only used in case of an accidental death of a Guardian in the field, something along those lines,” he stammered. “It was never intended to be used like this, against supers who were behaving themselves.”

I stared at the floor and wondered if I could shoot Outrager through the wires, reach out and touch him long-distance. It took a minute to get my temper under control, but I managed.

Hunter didn’t even try.

“Get this fucking thing off me,” he snarled as he bashed his inoperative Guardian brace against a very expensive black mahogany side table. “Get this thing off now.”

He slammed his hand down again, knocking black wooden chips free. A third strike ripped his skin open, the blood flowing down towards his fingers as he continued to smash the brace against the rapidly deteriorating table.

A few steps had me at his side, kneeling down as another chunk of table dropped away. The rest of the team sat there, frozen in place.

“Hunter.” I touched his shoulder, feeling the muscles flex under my touch. “Hunter, stop.”

The brace came down once more on the table. I glared at Outrager. He stared out from the screen, his expression unreadable.

“Stop.” I slid my hand down to Hunter’s forearm, covering the brace. “Stop,” I repeated in a whisper.

Hunter looked at me. I choked up, seeing the pain in his eyes, the tears about to break free.

“I want this off. I don’t want to be one of them anymore,” he said. “I don’t want to be able to hurt anyone ever again.”

I moved my hand down farther, covering and intertwining his bloody fingers with my own. “We’ll fix it.” I cleared my throat and glared at Outrager. “What’s the range on this? How close does he have to be to set off a plug?”