She smiled slyly, probably knowing full well the effect it had on Danny. “They’re not angry about the operation, Commander. Right now, they’re just irritated with each other. Honestly, it wasn’t that hard of a push. And by the way,” she continued, cutting him off before he could interrupt, “that Forrestal guy is pretty scared, just being in the room with us. Your CIA boss, there, though, he’s nice enough.”
Danny slumped down into his chair. “Jesus, Maggie. Why would you go and do that?”
“We made contact with someone today. Someone new. He slipped us a little note,” she replied, lowering her voice.
“While you were under surveillance?” Danny asked incredulously.
“And who was the one who did that?” Frank countered.
Danny sighed; it was going to be one of those conversations. “Not me. You can take your guesses. What did the note say?”
Maggie recited from memory: “‘You are not alone. We are Empowered, like you. You can be free. We will help you.’”
The words hung in the air for long moments. “Dammit,” Danny said finally. “They made us.”
“The Russians?” Cal asked, sitting up straight. “They know who we are? Thought we got off clean in Turkey. If they’ve made us, what happens? What about my family?”
“Who else?” Danny replied. “It was like they were waiting for us in Istanbul. That’s why we have to get our hands on INSIGHT. Hate saying it, but we’re at an intel disadvantage here.”
“How do we even know it’s the Russians?” Maggie asked. “Maybe it’s, I don’t know, some kind of independent group.”
“They did capitalize the E in Empowered,” Frank added. “Kind of like the way you capitalize the name of a baseball team, isn’t it?”
Danny looked at Frank and Maggie incredulously but thought better of an immediate retort. They’d obviously had time to hash this out before bringing it to the rest of the team. Cal and Ellis looked stricken — both of them had families, after all, and if the Russians found out who they were, those pressure points could be easily leveraged. Frank looked worried too. But Maggie almost seemed excited — but with the tiny cues she gave off, it was damned hard to tell. It made sense, though, that she’d perk up at the prospect of finding more Variants. That was one of the things that drove Danny, after all — finding others like him.
But an independent group?
“Look, we have to assume it’s the Russians. Far as we know, they’re the only game in town. Yes, there are ways Variants could track each other down,” Danny ventured. “My Enhancement allowed me to find all of you, after all. But there’s also good old-fashioned footwork. Newspaper reports of strange phenomena, for example — we have a team on that right now.”
“Or y’all got a leak in your ship,” Ellis said.
Cal nodded in agreement. “Mr. Longstreet here could be right. All them scientists out at Area 51. All them soldier boys. And you got people here in Washington who may know pieces of this. No such thing as a real secret nowadays.”
In for a penny, Danny thought. “Look, I shouldn’t be telling you this, so we’re going to keep all this between us, all right? We still have the mobster in custody. He hasn’t given us anything, and we’ve been working very hard to be… persuasive. In fact, we’ve considered flying Maggie back out to have a crack at him.”
“Why haven’t you?” she asked.
“Well…” Danny started, and then took a breath. Screw it. “Because we think the guy we picked up in Istanbul is a Variant, and it’s been determined that we don’t want you all around him right now. Anderson is keeping them in the same facility to maximize our security and keep the need-to-know down.”
The silence around the table was expected. Danny was committing any number of court-martial offenses by revealing this information, but the obligation to his fellow Variants — the people he himself recruited — seemed more important. He’d become increasingly conflicted lately about the line he’d been straddling. Whose side was he on? There were times when he regretted being so forthright with his superiors about his Enhancement — usually after talking with Secretary Forrestal. His patriotic fervor didn’t seem like such a high priority in the face of unreasonable fear and a closed mind.
“You know? Screw this,” Ellis said. “I’m done. You can lock me up, whatever you want, but we got Russians tailing us, we got the Soviets with Variants now. You’re keeping way too much from us, and I don’t like it one bit. You’re putting us in real danger, and that ain’t what I signed up for.”
“And what the hell, locking up Variants like that?” Maggie added. “That Russian is one of us. We can show him what we’re doing. Get him to switch sides. He’s one of us, Danny!”
“The only us I care about is this team!” Danny shot back. “I have bent over backward to shield you from the worst of this. There are people, important people, who still think we should be locked up. All of us. Put down a hole and buried. You’re here because I’m trying to find a better way for us. And you know what? That Russian used his Enhancement against you. Now you want to be pals? If he’s not interested, what then? He goes AWOL and that only gives people another reason to lock us up!”
There was an uncomfortable silence in the room for several moments while Danny calmed himself and gathered his thoughts. “We thought the Russians were clueless. They’re not. They have Variants, and they probably have the other anomaly. It’s not like the nukes, where they can’t get theirs to work yet. They’re on par with us here — they may even know more about Variants and what caused this than we do. And if you want to find out more about what happened to us and why we have these abilities, then you’re going to want to go to Prague and get Yushchenko. We can find out what the Russians are up to, who your mysterious contact was today, what the hell is going on. And we’ll do it without some paranoid son of a bitch trying to lock us away for not playing ball. Understood?”
Danny stood up and left the four members of his team behind. Outside, in the hallway of the Foggy Bottom office building, it seemed Forrestal and Hillenkoetter had mended fences — or at least walked away from each other, because they were nowhere to be found.
It never even occurred to Danny to tell either of his superiors that they had been under the influence of a Variant.
“I’m telling you, Hilly, she had us under her goddamn spell or something,” Forrestal said, a mix of frustration and pleading in his voice. “I’ve never wanted to actually hit you until today.”
Hillenkoetter sat behind his desk and smiled at his colleague and adversary. “Well, Jim, I’ve wanted to hit you pretty much every goddamn day I’ve known you, but I will say that today’s the first day I came close to throwing the punch. And for no good reason.”
“Exactly!” the defense secretary said, his hands spread. “That girl is dangerous. She assaulted us, basically. She needs to be locked up. Throw away the key.”
“Jim, she’s the most effective agent we got. Her Enhancement works at range, for one, and she can pretty much kill a man with her mind. And then there’s the interrogation applications she brings to the table. You try to bring her in line, you either get her pissed enough to let loose, or you drug her up so she’s useless. I don’t want her useless.”
“She’s dangerous,” Forrestal insisted.
“They all are. That’s the risk we agreed to take.”
Forrestal leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “What do you think they’re doing in there?”
“Talking about us, probably. Or maybe about the other Variants out there in Soviet hands. It’s healthy for them to be able to have the freedom to speak amongst themselves. Not too many others have the same kind of experiences.”