Project Northwoods (73 page)

“Then we have to stop them before they can get a shot off,” Stair said.

“There is no ‘we’ in this situation, Stair.”

“I don’t know, Art,” Mast said. “She saved your ass the night the heroes abducted everyone.”

“How did you…” The revelation hit him halfway through his sentence: she had been the one on the earpiece he had found under the sofa. She smiled. “I thought you couldn’t get involved.”

 “Officially, no,” she said. “But I can stick to the shadows and help.”

“Some help.” He took a step toward Mast and jammed his finger into her shoulder. “We could have used you at the Fortress.”

“I never would have put you there in the first place.” Mast jabbed a finger at him. “You’re the one who thought appealing to the Capones was a good idea.” It wasn’t an insult or accusation, merely a statement.

Arthur couldn’t argue with that, but still felt irritated. “At least they did something.”

“Yes, well, the Italian Mob has always been the paragon of virtue, hasn’t it?” Mast smiled curtly, clearly growing tired of this conversation.

“Alright, stop it!” Stair shouted. Arthur and Mast looked at her. “A lot of people are going to end up dead if you two start arguing.” The following pause made Stair visibly uncomfortable as it stretched on. “There aren’t a lot of places we can turn to.”

“She’s right,” Mast said, golden eyes flashing. She produced her shades again and placed them on the bridge of her nose. “There are barely thirty remaining registered villains still at large. If we’re going to do anything, we have to do it together.”

“Ari…” Arthur said to himself. “Has Ariana been captured?”

Agent Mast shook her head. “Not as of this morning. Neither has her father.” She unconsciously brushed a strand of hair out of her face. “But it’s not like we really know where anyone is. Heroes have been searching for them for days. And Arbiter has all but shut the BVH out of whatever intel they’ve gathered.”

“Ariana grew up nearby, I think,” Arthur offered.

Stair nodded, turning to look at Mast. “We came back here. Maybe she went home, too.”

“It’s a good place to start. I’ll look it up,” Agent Mast said with a nod. Arthur turned and ducked back into his bedroom. She cocked an eyebrow as he disappeared around the corner. “Where are you going?”

“If we’re going to do this right, we need our secret weapon.” He brought out the laptop and opened it toward the Agent. The screen flickered and turned on, revealing a blue iris which kind of swiveled in place. “In the interest of full disclosure… Agent Mast, this is Mollie.”

“Hello,” the computer greeted. “Please do not kill me.”

She smiled politely and waved, the iris dimming slightly in acknowledgment. “You kept it.”

“By the time I was ordered to destroy her, she knew what it meant to die.” Arthur stared unblinkingly. “I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

“Do not be mad, ma’am,” Mollie piped. “He almost never lets me out.”

“Almost,” Mast said with a smirk. “I figured as much.”

Stair cleared her throat. “I don’t think we’d be able to do anything without her. If they’re using Arthur’s technology, she’s our only hope at cracking it.”

Agent Mast looked at Stair, then back at Arthur. She wetted her lips and pointed to the counter. “Set it down, then. We need to figure out what we’re going to do before we try to do it.”

THE WORLD

JULIA SAT AT HER FATHER’S DESK IN HIS STUDY,
her set of lock picks rolled up and resting on the corner surface. The curtains, pulled wide to let as much sunlight into the dark room as possible, were a deep red with golden accents. As far as aesthetics went, they smartly complemented the rest of the room. Countless books, from history to philosophy to the art of warfare, lined the dusty shelves. A locked trunk, covered with a velvet blanket and a few pillows, sat under the large window as kind of a combination storage unit and sofa. Behind her, in a glass case, her mother’s jewelry sat undisturbed and pristine. The only piece missing was the necklace that Julia now wore. The weight of it was conspicuous, falling low on her chest and hovering over her heart.

The jewel itself was hidden under her ‘NYC Adjudicators’ t-shirt, back from her days on the University basketball team. Jeans completed the ‘average’ look that she adopted whenever she had a long enough time between work to enjoy not being in uniform. Her hair was pulled back into a bun, lacking any of the excess she put into it normally. It was an effort to feel as little like a hero as possible, to buck the responsibility she knew she had.

Her father had kept this room locked most of the time, declaring that its contents were either of no use to anyone or too great a danger to risk any of his family stumbling into it. Only now, well after his death, did Julia see fit to pick the lock and search through it, discovering nothing that could even be considered mildly dangerous to anyone. Apparently, he had kept her mother’s jewelry close to him when he was home so that he could retain some small part of her in his life. His desk was stuffed more with bills and ledgers of financial data than anything else. She suspected that it had all been an act, a ruse to keep his daughter from knowing how human he could be.

It would have worked, had he not also kept a stack of letters he had written his wife decades ago. Tucked into his desk drawer, buried beneath leather-bound fiscal documents of past years, she had found the bundles, bound together with a single piece of twine. There were love letters, rhetorical tirades on philosophy and the nature of justice, and poetry. Oh, the poetry. It lacked much of the smoothness and beauty of a professional, but in its ham-fisted way, it was sweet and encouraging, a note of humanity in an untouchable hero.

Interspersed within the letters were matching ones from her mother. Although not dripping with saccharinity like some of the ones her father wrote, they still expressed the longing her mother had felt while he had been hunting a villain or when she had been on a business trip elsewhere. It was encouraging to know that, even in some of the darkest days, love could feasibly win out.

Julia set down the fourteenth letter she had read that morning. Her eyes trailed to the window, to the bright and clear day just beyond those walls. She had always resented growing up without a mother, like she had lost nature’s lottery. It was like a fundamental part of her had been erased, or that her personal instruction booklet on life had large chunks of its pages removed. The photographs and oral histories her father had given her were not enough to generate anything solid for her. The few times Arthur spoke about her were usually generalities, himself having been too young to really know the woman.

The letters were the closest she had gotten to knowing her, and even then it was just one side. She argued fiercely for understanding while her father grew increasingly adamant about villains’ inability to be human. But this alone provided a fraction of her personality, a shard of what she once was. Even the countless doting letters devoid of arguments were only a fraction of her, a tiny piece of the puzzle.

As close to her father and mother as she felt in that moment, she nevertheless felt conspicuously distant. She felt more like a historian than their daughter, less the product of a union between two disparate people and more an impersonal analyzer of their personal affects. It was frustrating, deeply so. So much that she couldn’t help but feel the tingle of rebelliousness that welled up from time to time in the rather strict household when her father had run things.

Her eyes drifted to the locked trunk under the window. She considered what she was planning for a mere moment, then grabbed the set of lock picks from the corner of the desk and glided toward her target.
It may be breaking in… but doesn’t it make me closer to him?
Besides, she had to install her own lock on her door, considering his own faulty concept of privacy. Further, to complete the rationalization, her father was dead, making his stuff officially hers.

Kneeling, she unfurled the lock pick set onto the floor, taking out the torsion wrench and one of the simpler picks. It didn’t seem too difficult, just slide the pin in, feel around to make sure the tumblers were in place, twist and…

Wait
. This wasn’t a standard lock. There were additional tumblers that shouldn’t be there… security tumblers. Julia made a face and began to extract the pin before she felt resistance. Her heart sank at the sensation. Her father, in his attempt to secure the trunk, decided that he would make the lock inaccessible if someone failed to open it. If she stopped, there was no way to open it without the key. A key she didn’t feel like finding.

Slowly, very slowly, she worked the pick inward, pushing the tumblers up before sliding the torsion wrench further in and managing to keep the lock from shutting her out. It was several breathless minutes before Julia had realized she was actually smiling. Focusing on something other than herself, her father, the world, or anything important, was refreshing. When the moment finally came that she was confident the lock would give, she gave a whoop of triumph she was immediately thankful no one heard.

“Found something good?” The statement coupled with the creak of floorboards behind her made her snap around, a prickle of fear spreading down her back when she recognized the figure in the doorway. Claymore stood, slumped and exhausted looking. He hadn’t changed out of what she presumed was the uniform he had on when she called him last night. A smile, the same ingratiating one he always had, crossed his face, prompting an annoyed tic.

She rose from the chest and dusted herself off, half-smiling insincerely. “Do you normally just barge into people’s houses?” she growled as she crossed back to the desk.

The smile faded from his face. He took careful steps forward as she began to collect the papers spread out on the desk. “I tried knocking.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t think the doorbell works, either.”

Julia looked back at him and stared for a moment. She shook her head. “And instead of thinking I wasn’t home or didn’t want to talk…” The sentence was punctuated by the force of her irritation.

He made a face halfway between ashamed and indifferent before it went completely to the latter. “I thought you were asleep. I knocked on your room door…”

“You what?” she cut him off, anger and panic in her voice. “You did not break into my room…”

His hands shot up defensively. “Whoa, calm down. When you didn’t answer, I assumed you were somewhere else.” Julia’s heart dropped from her throat back to where it belonged. She must have visibly relaxed, for Claymore took another step forward. “I am not the bad guy, Gunslinger. Whatever you’re going through right now, I am not the cause of it.” The pause between them was only broken by the shuffling of paper from Julia. “I’m sorry about the Fort.”

“Are you?”

“For heroes’ sake, yes.” He wasn’t shouting despite Julia’s attempts to goad him into it. This served to annoy her further. “I was right, wasn’t I?” he said, bringing his hand up. “We all lost pieces of ourselves, didn’t we?”

She looked up at him and felt a wave of guilt, minor but still there. “Okay, fine. It was… stressful.” With a gesture to indicate both of them, she continued: “But what we have is a professional relationship, alright? There is no ‘us’ outside of work.”

To her surprise, Claymore nodded. “I’m alright with that.” She suspected it was a lie, but he seemed surprisingly earnest. Maybe having an appendage lopped off was the solution to a dangerously high libido. “I
am
concerned about you, you know.” He neared the desk and leaned on it, bringing his head to her eye level. “You haven’t grieved since your father’s death, or even talked about it as far as I know.”

Julia puffed a half-hearted laugh out of her nose. She broke eye contact and looked down at the desk. “You’re right. But I don’t think this is the time to think about it.”

“And that’s why you’re here, right?” he said with a cocked eyebrow, his head gesturing to the room. “To not think about your father.”

Julia couldn’t help but smile awkwardly like a kid with his hand in a cookie jar. “You’re right.” She chuckled sheepishly. “He always kept this room locked. Since he’s no longer around, I thought I’d just take a peek.”

Her guest pushed himself off the desk. He shoved his tongue between his gums and lips, took a look around, then returned to looking at her. “Anything interesting?”

She gestured to the papers in front of her. “My father and mother wrote a lot of letters to each other.” She scratched absently at her forehead. “It’s the closest I’ve ever been to having the two of them in the same room.”

He took a step forward. “What happened to her?”

“Cancer,” she said simply, not looking up.

The pause was suitably long. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” came a quick response. She looked up at him. “My father said it was quick. She wasn’t Bestowed, so it didn’t drag out as long as it could have.”

Another pause, but it was clear that it was unwelcome. Claymore shifted awkwardly in place, gazing at nothing in particular. “I think I’d almost prefer that… you know, seeing your death coming. Having time to prepare for it.”