GEN13 - Version 2.0 (19 page)

Roxy opened her mouth to lash back with an equally cutting retort, but stopped when Kat caught her eye and shook her head.

“Over time,” Ivana continued, “I’ve found that I prefer my soldiers without a lot of independent thought getting in the way. Simple, slavish obedience is far more satisfying.”

Bobby reacted indignantly. “So what, you just lobo-tomized a bunch of kids?”

“Lobotomized?!” Ivana looked genuinely offended. “Where would be the point in diat? Do you honestly believe that I would create a new generation of superpowered operatives, merely to have them wander around aimlessly, drooling oatmeal? Please. I didn’t have to lo-botomize them. It’s far more effective to raise them that way.”

“You
raised
them?” Sarah said, surprised. Even though she was still a bit groggy, the notion of a maternal Ivana seemed more than a little ludicrous. It was a little like picturing Lucrezia Borgia at a PTA meeting.

Ivana brought a hand to her lips in false astonishment.

“Oh, my! Don’t tell me that, with all my predictable ways, I’ve actually surprised you!” Her lips curling into a selfsatisfied smile, Ivana patted Sarah’s cheek. “I’ve cultivated and reared these children from the finest in fourteenth-generation, gen-active DNA. I hate to be the one to tell you, dear, but you and your Gen
¹³
friends are outdated. How does it feel to be obsolete?”

“ ‘Fourteenth-generationRoxy said. “So they
are
our kids!”

Ivana laughed. “I’m sorry. You must have misheard. I said the
finest
in gen-active DNA. I wouldn’t let your gutter-rat genomes anywhere near my prize creations.” “But then, how ... ?”

Kat nodded, understanding. “We’re not the only thirteenth-generation gen-actives.”

“Threshold and Bliss,” Lynch said.

Threshold and Bliss were the dark shadow of Gen
¹³
. They’d been abducted by I.O. as children, a full fifteen years before Kat and her friends. All of those years with Ivana and her crew accounted for their much finer control over their powers. Not to mention their sociopathic tendencies, or their utter lack of anything resembling a conscience.

Roxy recoiled with a shudder.
“Ewwww!”
she said. “But—but Threshold is, like, Bliss’s brother! Gross!”

“I think she’s talking about cell samples and test tubes, Roxy,” Kat said.

“So? It’s still totally gross!”

“Hey, Sarah!” Grunge exclaimed happily. “You’re an aunt!”

Sarah shot him a withering look. It was true. Although she hadn’t known it for most of her life, Sarah shared a father with Threshold and Bliss. But it didn’t mean that she liked to be reminded of it.

“Even with accelerated aging, it must have taken years to set this up,” Lynch said to Ivana. “But I never heard a whisper of it. Craven and the rest of the brass at I.O. had no clue that this operation existed, did they?”

“It’s remarkable what one can accomplish with a bit of diverted funding.” Ivana replied. “A decommissioned NORAD facility, some ‘missing’ technology, a small number of hand-picked technicians.... Of course, they’re all long dead now, the poor dears. It’s really quite tragic.” “So even while you were running the Genesis Project to develop Gen
¹³
for I.O....”

“... they had no idea that I was already a full generation ahead of them.”

A silence descended over the room as the implications of Ivana’s statement sank in. It wasn’t just that Ivana had succeeded in creating her personal army. It wasn’t just the thought of what Gen
¹⁴
was capable of doing at Ivana’s command. It wasn’t even the fact that, with Gen
¹³
imprisoned, there was no one who stood a chance of stopping her.

It was that, in all the time they’d opposed Ivana, none of them—including Lynch—had ever suspected that anything like this was going on simultaneously.

Of course, they knew that Ivana always made sure to have an extra ace or two up her sleeve. But the idea that she could have concealed a shadow operation of this magnitude for so long without a trace ... that she could have actively overseen the millions of details undetected, despite the constant security checks that everyone at I.O. endured ... that her long-range planning had been so many steps ahead.... It was staggering. But not as staggering as the big question it all raised:

If they had never suspected the existence of Gen
¹⁴
, then what
else
might Ivana have waiting in the wings?

Ivana drank in the looks on her prisoners’ faces with a self-satisfied air. “Now, if you’ll excuse me,” she said, smugly, “as lovely as all this catching up has been, I have a diabolical master plan to execute.”

“Wait!” Kat said. “Now that you’ve won and you’ve got these kids, aren’t you even going to tell us what you’re going to do with them?”

Ivana looked amused. The ploy to keep her talking was so obvious as to be iaughable. How stupid did this child think she was? “No, I don’t think so. Goodbye, children. It’s been absolutely no pleasure at all knowing you.”

Ivana spun sharply on her heel and started for the door, a jaunty spring in her step. She did so enjoy winning.

“But things didn’t work out quite like you planned, did they, Ivana?”

Ivana stopped in mid-stride at the sound of Lynch’s voice. She turned slowly toward him. She did her best not to show any reaction, but while the smile remained plastered across her lips, it had left her eyes. “What?” she asked.

Lynch regarded her with narrowed eyes. The others could almost see the wheels turning in his head as the pieces of the puzzle slowly came together. “Things didn’t work out like you planned,” he repeated.

Ivana gave him an icy look. “The last time I looked, you were chained to a wall and I was in charge. How, exactly, would you conclude that things didn’t work out as I planned?”

“You were working on Gen
¹³
and Gen
¹⁴
simultaneously, hoping that at least one of them would pay off. But the only downside you foresaw was the possibility that one of the projects might fail to produce results. When you were tallying up the projected gains and losses, the loss column never went much beyond a few extra corpses and a delayed timetable.

“You never expected that one of the strike teams you created would rise up to oppose you so effectively. You never expected someone like me to train them and protect them from your schemes. You never expected them to bring your tidy little position at I.O. down around your ears.”

“Oh?” Ivana said, a testy edge in her voice.

“You thought you’d still be running the sci-tech division at I.O. to this day. You never pictured the gravy train ending. But thanks to these kids—your own creations— you suddenly found yourself out on the street, with none of your old ‘friends’ daring to admit they even knew you. Your access to those fat government pocketbooks was gone in a snap, like a little girl whose allowance got cut off.

“That’s what all this is about, isn’t it?”

Ivana glared at Lynch without saying a word.

“I don’t get it,” Bobby said.

The edges of Lynch’s lips crept up. Now it was his turn for a self-satisfied smile. “Ivana’s broke,” he explained. “You kids beat her once too often. So now, she’s got all these grand plans, but none of the resources she needs to deliver on them.

“She needs that government funding back. She needs that position of power. She needs I.O. reunited under her, bigger and better than before.”

“That’s nuts!” Roxy said. “Who’d be crazy enough to let her do that?”

“I can tell you who wouldn’t,” Lynch replied. “Among the House and Senate committees that set budget allocations, there were several key players who never would have backed Ivana or gone along with rebuilding I.O. Martin Cheswick. Charlene Sturmer. Evan Lowenthal.” Lynch inclined his head toward Ivana. “What was the phrase Sturmer used in I.O.’s budget review a few years ago? ‘Science-fiction storm troopers?’ ”

Ivana bristled, but said nothing.

Lynch took her silence as confirmation. “All of them opposed I.O. funding, even before the problems and scandals. They certainly wouldn’t have changed their minds about the organization—or Ivana—now. So over the past few months, Ivana had Gen
^!4
eliminate them, one by one. Each at a different time, each in a radically different way. A typical accident here, a splashy murder there. If you weren’t looking for a connection, it wouldn’t jump out at you. But if you knew what to look for, the signs were all there in plain sight.”

“Phew. That’s cold,” said Grange. “So with them dusted, Iyana just breezes on into I.O., huh?”

Lynch shook his head. “Not on a bet. After all the problems around I.O., backing Ivana would be political suicide. There’s not a person on the Hill that would be caught within a mile of her.”

Bobby frowned. “So what’s the point? It wouldn’t work anyway.”

Lynch continued, undeterred. “No, it wouldn’t. Not under the status quo. That’s why the status quo had to change.”

“I don’t get it,” Roxy said.

“Neither did I,” Lynch admitted. “I knew there had to be a link, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what it was. Until just now.”

“Shut up,” Ivana said quietly.

“Or what? You’ll kill me?” Lynch said with a wicked grin. “You’re going to do that anyway, Ivana. Don’t you want to dazzle us with the brilliance of your plan first? You needed a crisis—one so big that when you swooped in to the rescue with Gen
¹⁴
, every political toady in Washington would be falling all over each other to jump on your bandwagon.”

“That sub that sank!” Kat exclaimed.

“Sinking one sub would get some attention. But not enough for the kind of crisis Ivana needed,” Lynch replied. “No, the sub was just a step. The important thing was the nuclear missile she stole from it.”

Bobby gaped at Ivana. “She stole a nuke?!”

“Shut up!’’
Ivana’s fist lashed out at Lynch’s jaw. It carried a speed and strength that could only have come from the carbon steel bionics that lay beneath the artificial skin covering her arms.    ■

Bound as he was, Lynch had no way to dodge the strike. But he could turn his head to ride with the blow and reduce its impact. Instead of tearing his head off or shattering his jaw, the punch merely left a trail of blood streaming from his lip.

Moving as one, all of Gen
¹³
lunged toward Ivana to defend their mentor. But the power-draining shackles

crackled with energy as they held them tightly in place.

Lynch spat a bit of blood from his mouth and grinned at Ivana once more. Her reaction just proved he was on the right track. He’d struck a nerve. “Ivana needed something bigger than just a lost submarine. She needed a crisis so big that no one could ignore it. Something that would leave the whole country cowering in terror. Something that would affect everyone. So she settled on what her twisted brain told her was the perfect answer. What crisis could be bigger...

.. than
World War HIT'

The color drained from the kids’ faces. They had no words.

Lynch had to be wrong. Ivana was cold, sure. She only cared about herself. They’d even seen her kill her own men in cold blood when she was angry.

But World War III? Would Ivana start a war just to make herself look good? With the potential it carried for world devastation? Would she risk the fate of the entire world?

Lynch just kept talking. “What’s the intended target, Ivana? Russia? No, that would have been it a few years ago. Back then, an anonymous American missile in the heart of Moscow would’ve started the bombs flying in a heartbeat. But there’s too much cooperation between the U.S. and the Russians now. They’d belieye the President’s denials, and the two governments would work together to bring the missile down before it could hit.

“You need someplace that’s more of a flashpoint. Iraq? Libya? Iran? Yes, one of those would do. Those maniacs are primed to release biological weapons at the drop of a hat. Not to mention Pakistan’s nuclear capability. Nuke one of those countries, and the others would all be targeting America before the bomb hits the ground.

“But if Gen
¹⁴
got there in time ...

“If they took out the enemy leaders before they could give the order for reprisals ...

“If they ended the war before it began ...

.. you’d be the great savior. You could write your own ticket. They’d hand you the keys to the Pentagon—if not the White House.

“Because nobody would know that you were the one who started the whole thing in the first place.”

Gen
¹³
waited for Ivana to deny it. They wanted desperately for her to say that Lynch was wrong. That he was miles off base.

But she didn’t.

Ivana stared silently at Lynch, back in control once more. She held her head high, but the bravado didn’t ring true this time. The shadow that clouded her face made it all too obvious that there were emotions seething beneath her cool exterior. The only question was whether it was regret over the course things had taken or anger that someone else could have unraveled the workings of her elaborate scheme. There was no way to tell which it was.

“You should have stayed with me. Jack,” Ivana said quietly. “The things we could have accomplished together ...”

‘There was just one problem,” Lynch replied. “I had a conscience.”

Ivana slapped his face and stalked to the door.

Before she left, Ivana turned to face the group. Once again, she was the Ivana they all knew and recognized. “Incidentally,” she said, “by all means, feel free to attempt a daring, last-minute rescue.

“It’s useless, of course. Even if those restraints didn’t render you powerless, events have already passed far beyond the point of no return. However, I would be deeply disappointed if you didn’t try.

“It will make my victory that much sweeter when you fail.”    '    ’

Once she was on the other side of the door, Ivana issued a few terse orders, then strode off with a brisk, purposeful gait. The windowless halls were painted in the drab, two-tone shades of gray so typical of government facilities.