“No, I get nothing. And the Embassy has not been compromised. No imageer at any base can get a reading. No empaths can feel anything. Well, from the screen. We have empaths down already from the stress around them.”
Was suddenly glad that the blockers were here, if only because it meant Jeff wouldn’t be at more risk, though we’d both have taken the risk and more to get everyone back safely. “Chuckie, could they have sent an imageer blocker in along with the viruses?”
“Maybe, ask Stryker.”
“On it,” William said. “The computer lab is on with us as well.”
“I hope you’re all having fun discovering that you can’t tell where we are.” The woman speaking was either holding the video camera or staying behind the cameraman. “Don’t want this show interrupted, after all.”
“Christopher,” Reader snapped. “What do you have? Can you get a lock on anyone?”
Christopher turned around, shooting Patented Glare #5 at everyone. “No. I can’t lock on them.” He looked right at me, lost the glare, then looked down. “I . . .”
Why he was ashamed was beyond me, but I didn’t want anyone haranguing him to do something he no longer could. “Christopher’s Surcenthumain boost is gone, other than that he can still run at Flash levels. Someone find a picture of anyone in the room. Let’s try this the old-fashioned way.”
Chuckie pulled out his wallet, took out a picture, and handed it to Serene. She could “see” someone if they were in range. Normally she wouldn’t need to have a picture if it was someone she knew, but with everyone this stressed it was a good idea to make it as easy as possible.
She touched the picture and shook her head. “My range is still only about fifty miles. They aren’t within that radius.”
“Well, that tells us something.” Had to stay Polly Positive, because things were not looking good in the room with the captives. There were two people in with them, though, because the camera was still panning from the center of the room, but as it went around again, it was clear that the captives had been roughed up, more so than when we’d first seen them. “Christopher, what do you get?”
“Nothing relevant to the situation. We get what the person’s done up to the point of the picture. Not what they’re doing right now.” He handed the picture back to Chuckie. “She was really happy.”
Risked a glance. It was a picture from their honeymoon. Started to get extremely angry. Good. Went nearer to the big screen. “Where’s Walter? Where are the Barones?”
“No idea,” Jeff said.
“Can we track them? And the others? I know that’s normally done out of the Science Center, but can anyone else give it a go?”
Heard a lot of cursing. “Kitty, more bad news,” Stryker said. “All tracking is offline.”
“Bring it up online, Eddy.”
“Can’t. I mean it’s gone. The chips are deactivated.”
CHAPTER 42
THAT SAT ON THE AIR for a few long moments. We could hear the sounds of people being hit and trying not to let on that they were being hit.
“That’s impossible,” Jeff said finally. “They’re all internal, and the only way to deactivate them is to remove them.”
“Or dissolve them,” White said quietly.
“And that’s what we think was done,” Stryker said. “NASA Base has done the confirmations.”
We were all quiet again. More sounds of abuse coming from the room, and as the camera panned again, the team again looked worse for wear. “Well,” I said finally, “at least the chips didn’t self-destruct.”
“Failsafe,” White said.
“Yeah, you’re big on them, I remember.”
“Now that I have your full and undivided attention,” the woman in the room with our friends and family said, “I want you to listen to me very carefully. I’m going to do terrible things to one of your friends here until I get what I want.”
Something caught my eye, but the camera went out of range. “William, Eddy, someone, are we recording this?”
“Yes, Ambassador.”
“Great. Toss the recording up onto our many other screens. I need to see something that needs a freeze frame.”
“Kitty, it’s Henry. Yuri and I have some vocal confirmation. Female speaker is likely from South Florida.”
“You and Omega Red rock, Henry. Okay, that means this is Raul the Pissed Off and Now Dead Assassin’s chick, Annette Dier, who is also an assassin.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” Jeff said.
“Yes, actually, I can. I have my Megalomaniac Girl hat on and everything.”
“This is her area of expertise,” Chuckie said curtly. “Let her work.”
“Thanks. William, Eddy, someone rewind on a non-main screen to right when she was threatening a few seconds ago. I don’t need the audio, just the visual.”
Dier went on talking as a couple of the smaller screens in the room rewound. “We’re going to start with the human.” Serene sobbed and Chuckie put his arm around her again.
“Why Brian?” Jeff asked.
“Because he can’t regenerate and he has no fast healing. William, slow down the forward on my special view, will you?” The frames slowed down. “There! I thought I saw something.”
What I’d seen was Michael Gower. “What’s he doing?” Claudia asked.
“He’s working to get his hands free using hyperspeed. The camera only caught the start, when he was moving at human speeds.”
Couldn’t be sure, of course, but it looked like Michael was going to manage to get his hands free.
“Their feet aren’t tied,” Chuckie said. “Just their hands. He gets free, he has a real shot at doing something.”
“How can he get out when the others can’t?” Adriana asked.
“He’s an astronaut, so he’s in incredible shape, he works with us all the time, and for all I know he and Caroline do interesting things in the bedroom. But either they didn’t tie him as well as they thought, he knew what he was doing, or he got lucky, because I think he’s going to get free.”
There was no way anyone, not even an A-C, could be this close to getting free in just a couple minutes. Meaning they’d been wherever they were for a while. Our enemies had had plenty of time to get anywhere in the world and tons of mind-controlled A-Cs to help them get there.
“Kitty, we’re still unable to trace the feed,” Stryker shared. “It’s being bounced all over the world, but we can’t get a reading on the origination point.”
“They’re in the tunnels. Exactly where Mahin thought they were.”
“How can you be sure?” Reader asked. “Letting her work, Reynolds, stop shooting me the death glare, just need the confirmation of how she’s making these leaps.”
“During Operation Destruction video went out of the tunnels with no problem, but no empath or imageer could read through them. They’re not sending via one of our cameras, so we can’t trace it. And they told Mahin that’s where they were going.” Heard Tito quietly explaining who Mahin was for those who’d missed the outdoor entertainment.
“The tunnels are worldwide,” White said. “We’ll have a challenge finding them in time.”
Dier moved into camera range. She was blonde. She also had a knife. A very nasty, very sharp-looking knife. Aimed at Brian. Went for the crazy and sent a text to Buchanan and my dad.
“I think we’ll start with the smaller things first,” Dier purred as she did the Typical Bad Guy Knife Move and ran the flat of the blade against the side of Brian’s face. “Fingers. Toes. Eyes. Parts that will ensure you’re no longer a man.”
Brian blanched. “You’re a crazy psycho.”
Dier laughed. “You wish. No, I’m a professional.”