Chapter Twelve

The first thing I realized, as the synapses fired in the gray matter I called a brain, was that I couldn’t feel the left side of my body. I was semi-sure that was due to the concrete floor I had woken up on. There was no light, but I could hear the plink-plink of droplets forming a small puddle. I sat up and rubbed feeling into my numb extremities.

There was no light, so I felt my way to a metal wall. I rapped on it and heard an echo. Three walls connected to open space, the back against concrete. I was in some sort of storage locker. The door was predictably locked from the outside.

Sweet had gotten my clothes from Goodwill. On the offbeat chance, I checked the pockets and came up with a lighter. It looked as if it had gone through a wash, so I tested it to see if the torch would light. The gasper lit on the twelfth try. I extinguished it because I saw nothing I hadn’t already guessed before.

The dripping came from one of three pipes that ran perpendicular to my room. I touched one; it was hot. The second was cold, but the third was just right. The hot line was the one dripping a slow drip. There was rust around the joint, and it gave me an idea.

I was counting on the third line being the gas line. I’d have a chance to escape if the joint would give. I gathered water from the puddle and poured it on the junction. There wasn’t enough water to do the job I needed, but any extra help would be appreciated. I started pushing against the joint. The pipe was old, and I worried I would break it in two, which wouldn’t do me any good. I needed just a little crack.

I was still alive, which meant things had changed for the mysterious Mr. X. The fact that the Hero Twin hadn’t immediately avenged his brother led me to believe Mr. X had him on a tight leash, and if that was the case, Mr. X was someone to be afraid of.

Lights came on outside my container. There were the sounds of people filing into the area. I pressed my ear against the front wall. I could hear the buzz of a crowd. Then things quieted down. Footsteps approached. Whatever was going to happen to me was happening now. I worked the pipe quickly, applying all my strength to the joint. I felt it give some and placed my hawk-like nose near it. I smelled the telltale trickle of gas leaking out. However, it was too little, and it needed to pool more for my plan to work. I needed to stall. I scrunched down in the corner just as the door swung open.

The Twin that ankled in was different than the one I remembered from the train and from the library. He was smaller. His stance was off, less rigid. The angle of his body was smoother, and the outfit seemed a size too big on it. The mask was different too. It looked more feminine. This was no Hero brother, but a Hero sister.

Hero Triplets?

She cocked her head at me, taking in my disheveled appearance, my cowering act. Satisfied she saw whatever it was she needed to see, she turned on her stems and walked out. There were words directly outside my cell, my name was definitely mentioned, but everything else was muffled, indistinct.

In a moment, the Hunter visage I remembered so vividly stepped into the light. He held the exciter injector in his hand. The mask still had its evil grin, but now I was sure the man underneath wore the smile too.

“Don’t hurt me!” I curled up in a ball. I needed him closer, under the pipe. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t kill your brother!”

He’d have to come get me, and I hoped he’d do it with gusto, not paying attention to the smell that must be accumulating at the ceiling. He moved in, and I could hear the growl from under the mask. When he reached the spot, I ignited the lighter and tossed it above his head. I rolled back into a ball as the flames filled the small room. The Twin had taken the brunt of the blast, while I was sure I’d lost hair on the back of my head. His mask, a melted goo, adhered to his face. He stumbled out of the locker while trying to pull the burning material from his head. I ran past him, picking up the discarded exciter gun as I went out.

I launched onto a loading dock. A cargo hauler was parked at a downward angle in front of a huge overhead door. What was more surprising were the nearly two hundred armed personnel clad in pseudo-military tactical gear who had turned to stare at me as I emerged from the storage container.

“Oops, wrong room. I was looking for the Salvation Army.”

The Hero sister was standing on the back of the semi, as if to address the men. She made a silent motion, and the men sprang to action, raising guns and moving en masse toward me.

Before any of them could open fire, I hoofed it past a row of identical storage containers until I found a door marked Stairs. It opened to a hallway, and I had to try more doors until I found the one up. As I entered it, the men poured into the hallway. The first report rang out, and I stayed low as I made my way up the first flight. As I rounded corners, the stairs looked as if they would continue up to heaven. It was ages before I saw the lobby door. I slammed against them and immediately saw Liberty Tower’s logo.

I spun around in amazement. I’d been in this lobby not three days before on my way to Reece’s vault. Why was I here? Why was there a secret army below the Little Technologies offices?

I didn’t have time to think. I made my way to the front as two black-clad men exited the stairwell. They shouted something to a guard behind a desk in the lobby. I heard a buzz, and the revolving door I was making for stopped dead, trapping a patron inside. I was cornered. I looked for another route. My bulk was insufficient to break through the glass, so I moved quickly away from my pursuers. Fortune was with me as a ding sounded and an elevator opened. I ran across the tile floor. Two additional soldiers joined the chase. I slid between closing doors, narrowly escaping their grasps. I punched the top floor and headed for the only place I knew there.

If Little Technologies was in on this, then there’d be men waiting for me. I popped the escape door on the roof of my car and hoisted myself out. I could see a second car ascending next to mine. I waited.

When my car stopped, there would be a rush to grab me. It wouldn’t take long for them to figure out where I went. I looked around frantically. I blocked the trapdoor with a wrench I found lying there. It would take the soldiers a moment to clear it. That moment was all I needed.

My car stopped. I heard the door below me open and the sounds of men entering the car. The second car arrived and their door opened. I moved over to that car as the bangs against the trapdoor started. I opened the second roof hatch and dropped into a now empty car.

I ran full throttle from the open elevator and down past Reece’s vault. Police warning tape still hung loosely in front of his open office. The black army was on my heels. I didn’t have a lot of time. I remember it was Wednesday. If my luck held out, I’d have my escape route.

As I rounded the corner, I grabbed the back of the big box that housed one of Reece’s color television cameras. The whole contraption rolled back, probably on wheels. I pushed it with everything I had toward the men as they came into sight. They slammed into it full on as it toppled over.

I about gave the window washer a heart attack as he cleaned the pane of glass from the outside.

I waved him to the side and kicked at the window. It took two kicks, but broke free. Wind whipped at me hard, which made the jump to scaffolding difficult. I nearly continued past it into freefall, but the window man grabbed me and pulled me back. I thanked him and indicated I wanted to go down, my words barely audible in the howl of the wind. He nodded and slowly loosened our counterweight.

We descended. As we passed other offices, I held my fingers to the side of my face, showing the universal sign for call the police. One of the black-clad men had crawled to the window opening; I could see another holding fast onto him. He extended his gun over the side and tried to take a shot at me. I moved over to avoid the bullet and nearly tipped our lift. The cleaner pushed me back the other way to rebalance us. I leaned as close to the building’s front as I could, trying to make a smaller target. My assailant leaned out farther to get a better angle, and his partner lost grip on his waist. The man went by too fast to catch, but not so fast that I couldn’t see the terror etched on his face.

When I die, I hope it’s not like that.

As we got closer to the ground, I could see black shapes mingled into the crowd surrounding the red splotch. However, by the time we touched down, the yodel of police sirens had drawn close. The black army men had vanished.

The police cars pulled into classic barricade formation, squawking on loudspeakers for the crowd to move away. They got behind their cars, guns drawn and beaded on me. I was told to remain where I was.

Shortly thereafter, military vehicles arrived. They, too, set up a perimeter. Their guns were much bigger than the police’s. I could see down the barrels of theirs.

Next came black cars and men in suits. This must be the CIA. They didn’t draw any guns, seeing that there were enough already on me. Instead, they moved within the ranks of the police and army, taking positions near those in charge.

Sweet pulled up, an exasperated look on his face. I shrugged when he caught my eye. The motion made everyone with a gun uptight, but they relaxed when I didn’t explode. I don’t know why someone didn’t just arrest me. I wasn’t armed, save for the exciter gun and a lighter. Everyone was afraid.

And from what I knew, they had a right to be.

An army command car pulled up. General Archdeacon stepped out, his presence making ripples in the crowd. His first words were, “No one shoot! I am under direct orders from the president to take this man alive.”

The president knew my name? The president? I wondered if I could get his autograph.

Archdeacon walked past the assembly, past the barricade, and up to within five feet of me. A good six inches taller than I, even without the army boots, he leaned his blond and gray buzz-cut toward me a good half an inch as a greeting.

“Glass,” he said civilly.

“General,” I returned his greeting the same way. “You’re looking good. Lost some weight?”

“You’re a funny man, Glass.” There was no sign of his finding the joke funny. “Well, you got my attention. I hope you have something of value.”

I motioned to the stain on the sidewalk. “There were two hundred more like him in the basement of this building twenty minutes ago, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were all gone now. They were getting ready to move out. Loaded into the back of a semi truck. I’m sorry I didn’t get the license plate.”

“Two hundred?”

“Yes.”

“Like him?”

“Similar.”

Archdeacon chewed his lip for a moment. He shouted orders over his shoulder, never taking his eyes completely off me. “Sergeant! Secure this building. No one goes in or out. Start a ground minus sweep. Highest level precautions.”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

The general, focused on me fully again, nicely asked, “May I arrest you now?”

“By all means.”

* * *

“You know, Glass,” Archdeacon began, once we were safely situated in the army recruiting office he was using as a temporary command center, “if you had just let the CIA take you into custody, this whole ‘traitor’ thing would have been cleared up quickly. We’ve been watching you for some time, ever since the CIA got word of Mendelssohn’s death.”

The office displayed much of the same propaganda it had before WWII, only the Nazis had been traded out for Commies. Slogans like “The Mark of a Man” and “A Man Among Men” sold the idea that only through service could you obtain the right to adulthood. There were certainly more posters aimed at women than the last time I saw the inside of this type of place. Women’s Army Corps took up nearly as much space as the men’s advertisements. Rosie the Riveter was no longer content to stay at home. They were leading whole divisions of the armed services. Hell, there had been a mystery woman in charge of a whole squad of black army soldiers.

It was a new world order.

“And how long have they known, General? I just traipsed halfway across the southwest chasing a dead man.”

“Again, Glass. You wouldn’t have had to do that if—”

“If I had just let myself be arrested for crimes I didn’t commit. Yeah, that’s an easy sell, General.”

He didn’t like the sarcasm, but since I was a guest, I didn’t get a browbeating. “They, like me, just wanted to know what you know.”

I got up from the table and moved around the room. “I had nothing anybody would have wanted before this started, but I’m assured by attempts on my life that I did. General, everything I’ve learned about this mess came after Reece’s visit.”

We’d spent the first hour catching up. The general sat quietly while I outlined everything I had done. I gave him descriptions of Vincent and his two stooges but made sure he knew to capture them alive as they were not an immediate threat. I took special care to reiterate the innocence of Lee and Sweet in the whole process so there would be no blowback on them.

The general took a loud sip from his coffee. He hated to wait for it to cool and usually burned his lip. This time was no different. He patted his upper lip with his tongue, cooling it off. He set down the mug and crossed his hands. “Glass, since the CIA came into existence, they have monitored communiqués from all corners of the globe, especially those that are generated domestically.” He reached down to a satchel, the type with folding compartments, and pulled out a thick binder. It landed on the table with a thump, and I was reminded of the case file Sweet had procured. I discovered it contained much of the same information, including the missing pages from the autopsy.

“Where did you get these?”

“I didn’t. This is a CIA file. When the autopsy of Jorge Mendelssohn reached the national level, it sent red flags all over the place. Remember, we had done the official inquest on the microwave incident.”

Oh, so it’s an “incident” now?

“To the trained eye, the state of the bodies recovered from your lab were too similar to Mendelssohn’s cause of death. It had not even crossed my mind your discovery could be used as a weapon.”

Reece’s story, that the general was orchestrating everything from behind the scenes, shouldn’t have held any merit. Archdeacon, in all the meetings we had during my military research, was bored when it came to technology. I swore he slept with his eyes open. He would’ve looked at the designs and seen gobbledygook, not a weapon. Give him a gun, and he would fire it. Ask him to build a gun, and he was lost. He was the least technologically savvy person I knew. He could never have been the one behind a conspiracy laced with science.

“Well, it seems you and I are the only ones. I wanted military technology with my name on it. The Glass Radar or something. I wanted to make a difference and make my mark doing it.” It was a hard pill, but it was the truth. “I was blinded by my pride.”

“Are you still blind, Glass?”

It was a pointed question, so I parked myself again and gave him an honest answer. “I don’t know. I’ve been chased across three states in the same number of days. I’ve been told many things I didn’t want to hear. I’ve been responsible for at least three deaths, one just by association. If you’re asking me if I’m still clueless, then no; I have an insight into the big picture. If you are asking if I have delusions of grandeur, those died with Tangie.”

“So what do you have?”

I motioned to the exciter gun. “For starters, I have that. It will need to be analyzed.”

The general nodded. “We’re bringing in some people for that. We understand the MASER weapon and its methodology, why do you need to go further with it?”

“Mendelssohn built the thing. There was no way he would have let them drug him with the exciter fluid. So it had to get into him some other way.”

That confused Archdeacon. He reached for his cup, thought better of it, and sat it back down. “How do you know he had the fluid in him and, for that matter, that he didn’t know?”

I smiled. I would get to showcase the skills I’d developed as a detective since I’d seen him last.

“Witnesses say that Mendelssohn ran from an alleyway out into the middle of a St. Patrick’s Day party. He tried to lose himself in the crowd, believing that the MASER wouldn’t be useful picking one guy out of hundreds. He knew the effects of the gun and the exciter drug by then, especially after helping take out Stalin.”

“And you’re sure what the Ruskies told you was on the up-and-up?”

I shrugged. “As best as I can guess, them being spies and all. So the killer had to know Mendelssohn had the fluid in him, or they wouldn’t have targeted the crowd.”

“Why?”

I was exasperated. It should have made perfect sense, but here I was, dumbing technology down for him, as I had so many years ago. “When you use the magnetron without something to reflect the microwaves back, the MASER takes much longer to excite the molecules. The fluid acts as a reflector or speeds up the molecules in some way that cuts the time down. Think of it as a blender with two speeds. Without the drug, it’s on low, with the drug, it’s on high.”

“And?”

“And, well, they could zap the area. Mendelssohn would blow up first before anyone else did.”

“And so when he goes pop, they just stop the gun before anyone else does. Okay, I’ll grant you that. But you still haven’t told me anything about this organization and why they have an army.”

I got back up and went to a chalkboard. “Let’s look at this like a murder case. For a murder conviction to stick, you need three things: means, motive, and opportunity, correct?” I took up a piece of chalk and wrote the three words across the top. “But we have three murders.” I wrote Tangie, Stalin, and Mendelssohn down along the side. I filled in MASER for all the spots under means.

“Rigging my experiment was a way for Mr. X to test a theory, to see if my microwaves could kill. But not only that, it discredited the project. In doing so, the microwaves were branded too dangerous, and they could go about making the MASER. It’d be years before microwave radar would be ‘fixed’ and by then, they were well ahead of the curve.”

I wrote The Test under Tangie’s opportunity.

“So why did Mr. X want the weapon? And why hasn’t it been used before Stalin?”

“Ah, two questions for the price of one. And the $100,000 answer is …” I let him hang for the moment to build suspense. I might have let him hang a moment too long as his brows furrowed and he started looking annoyed. “Hitler.”

The general sat up. “What?”

“Yes, the organization behind the MASER wanted it to stop the war. They couldn’t afford to let Hitler win Europe. He would set his sights on America or Russia next. That wouldn’t help them reach their goal.”

“Which is?” He was clearly annoyed at my roundabout explanation. I knew this, but I was still perfecting this theory as I went along. I didn’t have all the answers, just enough to get his attention and the attention of those above him. I needed to sound like I knew more than I did, which is, of course, what got me into this to begin with.

“Not yet, General. I’ll get you there. I have to convince you if I’m going to convince anyone else.”

I swear the man growled at me. I wrote Stop WWII under Tangie’s motive. I liked it. I knew why Tangie died now. But I still needed to prove it.

“Only, we beat them to the punch. We won the war without Hitler’s assassination. Confound it if the Yanks didn’t mess up their whole plan. But since it was what they wanted anyway, they waited.”

“Twelve years?”

“Yes.”

“For what? Another war?”

He was catching on. He reached for his cup again, put his hooks on it, but then as he tried to follow my logic to its conclusion, he pulled his fingers away. He needed all his faculties for thought, and I’m sure the coffee would be cold before he would actually have the concentration to drink it.

“Yes, only Korea wasn’t big enough for their plans. They needed another world war. Things are ripe for a conflict with Russia. The Communist Block, the Iron Curtain. Stalin itching for a fight. The time was almost here.”

“But killing Stalin stopped the war. If he’d lived another six months, we’d be at war with them now.”

“True, but it wasn’t quite time. Stalin was pushing a war too soon. Russia wasn’t ready. Their people, resources, and military weren’t ready for another prolonged war, plus they were missing one key element.”

That one he got without prodding.

“The bomb.”

I nodded. “While they successfully created a nuclear explosion in ’49, they didn’t have the control of a hydrogen bomb. Now they do.”

I wrote Political Struggle under Stalin’s opportunity and Delay WWIII under his motive.

Archdeacon shook his head, reached for the coffee, committed to it, and brought it up to his lips.

“Glass, this doesn’t make sense. That would mean that Mr. X has people in the Russian government, even KGB. You’ve already implied Mr. X has people in our government. Are you saying they’re playing us against each other? For what means?”

“The total destruction of modern society.”

When the general spilled his coffee, I believed I had finally made my point.