The Protectors (24 page)

“Idiot.” Lyla recognized the look in my eyes and finished the thought. She rushed in and hugged me. “You finally understand.”

I hugged her back.

Harder than I wanted . . . harder than I should have. She’d let emotion dictate her actions and risked our lives in the process. She’d embraced Diego out of pure convenience. And I still wasn’t convinced that last night’s sexcapades weren’t just another form of manipulation—using powers more conventional than mind control.

But right now, right here, it simply didn’t matter. Alone, desperate, and confused—I
needed
Aphrodite more than I feared her. And she needed me.

“What are we going to do?” she asked, voice muffled against my chest.

“I’m not sure.” All my options were dried up.
Strategic genius, my ass.
“I just walked us into a CIA-sponsored deathtrap, so maybe I’m not the best person to ask.”

She pulled back and sized me up. “Well, at least you’re honest.”

My head tipped forward and I stuck my hands in my pockets. “Yep, that’s me.”

“We’ll think of something,” Lyla said. “It’s a long flight to Istanbul.” She drew my gaze upward with a finger beneath my chin. “And you’re wrong . . . what you said before. You’re not alone. You don’t have to be, at least.”

Lyla let the words hang in the air before starting back toward the hangar, mixing a little hope into my despair sandwich. Made me skeptical as to who was the better tactician.

“Hey,” I called out. “So was this always the plan?”

She stopped. “What do you mean?”

“Your new Iran. When you opened the mission folder in Scotland, did you count on going after more than the nuke program?”

“The thought crossed my mind.” She paused and looked out at the runway. “In the end, I guess I’m no different than those thousands of people crying and dancing in the streets this morning. We were all waiting for the same thing.”

“Which was?”

She smiled. “An opportunity.” With that, Lyla turned and walked back to the hangar.

I tried not to chuckle, but couldn’t. The woman knew how to make a point.

On my way to check the G-V’s status, I thought about what she’d said. About that crowd in the bazaar, taking advantage of their opportunity.
Thousands
of people; moving, shouting, crying. At first they reminded me of atoms under pressure, crashing into one another until the whole unit reached critical mass, like a nuclear bomb.

But this was different, somehow. The crowd just kept growing, more and more people feeding on each other. Not a buildup to detonation, but a self-sustaining reaction. When people joined together like that, individual shouts became one voice. A crowd became something bigger. Something
unstoppable.

The inspiration slapped me across the face halfway to the plane. “Holy shit,” I said aloud.

I know what we have to do.

—

When I got back to the hangar, Lyla was bringing Diego around.

“Come on,” she said, pulling him upright on the hangar office’s couch. “You can sleep on the plane.”

I couldn’t tell if his eyes were even open, with two feet of messy hair obscuring his face. Lyla grabbed Diego’s hair band from a nearby desk and stuffed it in his hand. After robotically gathering up his mane, Blaster rolled his neck out and groaned.

Lyla squatted next to him and asked, “How do you feel?”

Diego extended his palms and wiggled his fingers. Tiny sparks flickered around the tips, then fizzled. “Barely enough juice for a cheap magic trick. Pathetic.”

“So you have to travel the old-fashioned way. You’ll live,” she said. Diego finally noticed me by the door.

“Speaking of pathetic,” he said, with a spectacular lack of enthusiasm.

I sighed. “Well, at least we know he’s not embraced.”

At the mention of “embrace” Diego cast the stink-eye at Lyla, who dismissed it. “Be angry with me all you want, it doesn’t change our situation. The CIA ordered Scott and me dead, and I’m fairly certain their satellites will have noticed a hundred lightning strikes on a rainless night. We are
all
in danger now. Work out your differences later.”

Diego frowned. I extended my arm and said, “Welcome to the shit list, pal.” He grudgingly accepted my hand and pulled himself off the couch—the closest thing to a truce we were gonna get.

“Is the plane ready?” Lyla asked. I nodded but didn’t move to leave. Both of them stared at me.

“Don’t everybody talk at once,” Diego finally said.

“I don’t mind talking,” I said. “Just don’t know if you’ll like what I have to say.”

“What?” Lyla asked.

“I’ve got a plan. A good one, I think. But it’s not gonna be easy.”

Lyla cocked an eyebrow at me. “You’ve had a busy five minutes.”

“Yeah. Call it runway inspiration.”

“I figured you might come around,” she said.

“Well, don’t get too excited. It’s gonna be a bitch,” I admitted.

Diego scoffed. “It usually is with you,” he grumbled.

“They think we’ll run,” I said. “Expect us to hide. It’s the by-the-book option, maybe even the smart option. Find a hilltop mansion in Paraguay and hunker down. Might take the Agency months to find us . . . years even. But they
will
find us.”

“Who cares?” Diego said. “If they come, we fight.”

I swallowed the urge to remind him that I couldn’t put cruise missiles to sleep.

“By then, it’ll be too late. Every government in the world will be against us. You can bet the CIA is already stoking that fire, telling agencies worldwide about Iran and how we tried to wreck a nation all by ourselves. Before long, they’ll leak their insidious bullshit out to the bigger world: TV, newspapers, the Internet. We’ll get packaged as power-hungry supervillains, and half the planet will listen. We won’t just be fighting the CIA then. We’ll be fighting
everyone.
”

“What is our alternative?” Lyla asked.

I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

“We don’t run from the Agency. We go through them. I’m saying, walk up to the front gate in Langley, Virginia, and rip the top off the place. Pull that weasel Tucker out of whatever hole he’s hiding in and make an example of him.”

Diego cackled. “
Hombre, tienes cojones.
I like it!”

Lyla . . . not so much. “Scott, the Agency isn’t some playground bully.” Her eyes were fearful, almost pleading. “We can’t just punch them hard and hope they’ll run away. Declaring war on the CIA . . . that’s suicide.”

I shook my head. “Not a war. A message. In fact, attacking the Agency head-on allows us to deliver
two
messages. First, the obvious one. The Langley campus is a bitch. We’ve all seen it. Small army of police, military base ten minutes away, and state-of-the-art defenses. One of the most secure facilities in the world. We cut the head off
that
snake? Message is pretty clear: we can get to anyone, anytime.”

“And that makes them
less
likely to kill us?” Lyla asked.

“No. But it makes them more likely to listen to us.”

She rolled her eyes. “We can call them on the
phone,
if you want to talk. Why risk our lives?”

“Because you’re wrong,” I said. “The Agency is exactly like a bully. And y’know the best way to get a bully’s attention? You don’t call him on the phone and beg him not to steal your lunch money. You kick down the fucker’s front door, walk right into the living room, and smack that little jackwad in the mouth. Sure, he’ll be pissed-off . . . but I guarantee you, he
will
listen. And so will the CIA.”

“To what?” Diego asked.

I smiled. “The second message. The one that’s gonna save our lives.”

They glanced at each other, then me. I looked straight into Lyla’s unblinking stare.

“You saw that crowd today. Thousands of people. How did you feel, walking among them? Surrounded by their energy, their power?”

She tilted her head back and closed her eyes, remembering. After a long moment, the eyes blinked open and her fiery gaze refocused on me.

“Invincible.”

“Damn right,” I said. “We can make that happen again, but bigger.”

Both of them demanded “How?” simultaneously.

“If you’ve ever had cause to trust me, I’m asking that you trust me here. I’ve got an idea, but I’ll need your help with the specifics. Getting back to the States will take a couple of days, and we can go over everything along the way.”

Lyla and Diego listened intently.

“This is our chance. Get onto that campus, send our message . . . and when we walk out, we won’t have thousands of people on our side, we’ll have billions. We can be what we’ve always wanted to be—before the CIA, before all the lies and the bullshit. Get on that plane with me, and I promise . . .

“We can really
be
the Protectors.”

Yeah, they got on the plane.

CHAPTER 43

G
etting back to the United States took us three days. We went through four countries, rode three planes, and Aphrodite chartered one boat. Only excitement we ran into was on the final leg. The Coast Guard flagged down our yacht from the Bahamas off the shores of North Carolina. When the boat slowed to pull alongside, I dropped the whole crew. Lyla pouted for a half hour; if she’d had her way, she would have stood on the bow of that patrol craft like Captain Morgan and forced the Coast Guard to take us all the way up the Potomac River. I preferred a slightly lower-profile approach until we had the intel we needed and a fully charged “Zeus.”

The three days were just what we needed. The rare peace afforded by our voyage gave us the perfect window to strategize. Funny how your concentration improves without the impending threat of being obliterated by a tank.

Once we figured out exactly
what
we intended to say to the Agency when we had their attention, the
how
portion of the program took up most of my focus. Assaulting the Langley headquarters was a daunting task by itself, and most of the detailed, step-by-step planning could only be accomplished once we had serious reconnaissance in hand. There was one desire, however, that I could satisfy from the comfort of the yacht.

Tucker.

Our message needed to be delivered in person, and since we had to smack the CIA in the mouth to do it, I couldn’t imagine a better person
to take the punch than Mr. “Nighty-night, Knockout.” I couldn’t even think about our last conversation without shaking in anger. The smug bastard had tried to kill me
twice,
but after witnessing the destruction of the armored brigade on the satellite feed, my guess was he was a trifle less confident. Maybe even worried. To guarantee him a spot in our crosshairs, though, “worried” wasn’t enough. I needed “scared shitless”—to the point of making a beeline for the securest location he knew.

A three-word text message sufficed. I typed it into my burner phone and smiled.

SEE YOU SOON
.

Nothing like a personal threat/promise from a meta-human to speed Tucker on his way to a high-tech, maximum-security hidey-hole.

After sailing through Chesapeake Bay and into the winding waters that eventually lead straight to the Lincoln Memorial, we found the perfect place to hole up. Our voyage ended twenty-five miles south of Langley, near the Mason Neck National Wildlife Refuge. Large private homes dotted the shoreline east of the refuge—modern and luxurious homes, yet nestled within the relative privacy of four square miles of forest. Lyla picked one surrounded by tall thick trees and had our captain dock the yacht alongside a hundred-foot private pier jutting into the Potomac.

The mansion’s owners, a pharmaceutical lobbyist and his aging trophy wife, saw us arrive from the sundeck of the third floor. They were on us before we made it halfway up the pier. The guy stuck a finger in my chest and demanded we get our asses back on our distasteful scow and leave immediately. I wasn’t sure what a “scow” was, but thirty minutes after looking into Aphrodite’s eyes, the two of them were taking a weekend trip to his mother-in-law’s, and I was taking a dump in his master bathroom. What can I say—a Lacoste-wearing jerk poking me in the chest unleashes my inner jackass. I let my masterpiece bake unflushed behind a closed door; Lyla and I could use one of the other six bathrooms.
Six.

As we settled in, I grabbed my laptop from the dining room table and ushered Lyla and Diego into a dark-wood-paneled study on the
second floor to talk strategy. The room shouted ridiculous luxury: floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, leather-upholstered reading chairs next to a stone fireplace, and a desk that looked like it weighed more than my car. Felt like the kind of space where it’s mandatory to swirl brandy in a snifter while you discuss leveraged buyouts. Perfect location to plan a battle against the CIA.

“First things first,” I began. “We need to know as much as possible about the Langley headquarters, plus verify where that bastard Tucker is hiding. My guess is he’ll be somewhere on-site, coordinating the search for us.”

Diego waved me off. “I don’t need to know anything. I can go right now, scorch the whole building. You can sift through the remains for this Tucker person.”

“C’mon, man, use your head. The Agency knows us . . . knows what we’re capable of. They installed tranquilizing gas nozzles around the doors of the training center after Carsten started leaving whenever he wanted. The CIA might be arrogant but they’re not stupid. The complex will have defenses built specifically for us”—I pointed at him—“even you. Plus, our goal here is
not
to level the entire complex. Destroying America’s intelligence capability and changing the world order of power is a little supervillainy for my tastes. We can save ourselves without leaving the country blind and defenseless.”

Diego exhaled in disappointment, but perked up when I told him, “Don’t worry . . . you’ll still get plenty of opportunities to show off. You’re my muscle.”

“I assume I am to be the intelligence gatherer?” Lyla asked.

“Is there anyone better? I need you to set the table for me and Diego. To that end, I’ve got two options for you. One will take a few days, with almost no risk. The other is faster, but ballsy.”

Diego rubbed his hands together. “I prefer balls,” he said, regretting the words as soon as they came from his lips. Flustered, he backtracked. “You know what I mean.”

“You want me to embrace my way into the building itself ?” Lyla asked. “Find the information from facilities or security?”

“Whoa—there’s a difference between ballsy and insane. I don’t want
to risk you walking into one of the most secure installations in the world by yourself and never coming back. Let’s be a little less ambitious to start with.” I opened the laptop, which already had a Google satellite image up. It showed the entire complex, as well as the surrounding area.

“You ever worked retail?” I asked Lyla. “There’s a Starbucks here, less than a mile from headquarters, off the main access road. If you embrace the staff, get yourself a job handing out orders . . .”

“. . . look for Agency ID badges, embrace as many as necessary to build a web of minions.” Lyla wasn’t thrilled, but she bought in with a nod. “Depending on who comes in, that would take time.”

“Two or three days, I’m guessing. Even if you didn’t get any of the major players in security or maintenance, you’d be able to get phone numbers and home addresses we could use to find them. As long as you wear your contacts and a blond wig or ball cap, stay behind the counter, your exposure would be minimal. Think you can find a wig store nearby?”

“Please. Did you see that preening, ornamental troll of a wife? I am certain there are blond wigs in the next
room.
”

Diego piped up. “If that’s the low-risk idea, what’s the . . .” He carefully circumvented any mention of balls. “. . . the risky one?”

I tabbed to a different browser window—the website of
Washington Life,
D.C.’s high-society newspaper. If I scoured the mansion long enough, I’d probably have found a hard copy lying around.

“The other option is tomorrow evening, guarantees a lot of high-level contacts, and puts you right up against them.”

Lyla stared at the announcement and rubbed a thoughtful finger across her lips. I knew her answer before I asked the question.

“Wanna crash a wedding?”