The Reckoning: Quantum Prophecy Book 3 (5 page)

Yvonne said, “My point is that you can’t just phone people in the middle of the night and expect them to be waiting for your call.”

“Whine, whine, whine. How are things back home?”

“They’re fine.”

“No sign of Dioxin breaking through your memory block?”

“No. And even if he does manage it, it’s not like there’s anyone in Lieberstan who’ll be listening to him.”

“True. We’ve just arrived in Satu Mare. I’ll be heading back to the States in a couple of days, by which time Colin Wagner will be on our side.”

“You’re certain you can persuade him?”

“Absolutely. Now tell me what happened on the island.”

Yvonne paused. “What island?”

“Isla del Tonatiuh. Check your computer.” Victor heard Yvonne yawning, then tapping on her keyboard.

“I see it,” Yvonne said. “We had a huge cache of supplies there.
Had
being the operative word. The New Heroes destroyed it a couple of hours ago.”

“Good.”

“Good? Why is it good? Victor, this is the fifth time they’ve deliberately targeted the Trutopians.”

“I know. Who do you think is feeding them the information? You really should be keeping an eye on the larger picture, Yvonne. We trick the Sakkarans into going on these little missions, and they’re not going to be around to do normal superhero stuff.”

“And the point of that is…?”

“The ordinary people know that there are superhumans again, and they’re beginning to realize that these superhumans aren’t working for them: They’re working for the military. The public backlash will begin very soon.”

“Spurred on by you, of course.”

“Naturally. All right, we’re here.” Victor opened the car door and stepped out into the afternoon sunshine. “Time to meet Mr. Wagner and start the conversion process.”

Yvonne said, “Victor, if he kills you, can I take over the organization?”

Cross replied, “You
may
take over the organization. Whether you actually
can,
well, that’s a different matter.”

“I’m thrilled you have so much faith in me.”

“Go back to sleep, kid. I’ll call you if I need you. Which I won’t.”

•  •  •

The first thing Colin Wagner did when he arrived at the hotel room was to fill the bath with hot, foamy water, strip off his clothes and lower himself in.

Now, two hours later, he was still in the bath, eyes closed, listening to Alphaville on his new MP3 player.

The last track on the album came to an end and Colin popped out the earphones and set the player down on the floor.

I could get used to this.

The phone beside the bath rang. Colin grabbed for it with a damp hand. “Hello?”

“Colin? It’s Harriet. Mr. Kinsella has just arrived, and he’d like to talk to you. When you’re ready.”

“Sure. I’ll be down in a couple of minutes.”

Colin hung up the phone and stepped out of the bath. He didn’t bother using a towel to dry himself; he just increased his body temperature until all the water evaporated from his skin.

In the bedroom, Colin looked through the spare clothes Harriet and Byron had given him, and chose a plain black T-shirt and a pair of jeans.

So what do I tell this guy? I could string him along for a while, make him think that I might just change my mind. Then I get to stay here.

He dismissed this idea almost immediately.
Better not. For one thing, it’d be wrong. For another, I’ve got things of my own to do.

He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on one of his new pairs of socks.
Should thank him for all the stuff at least.

Colin looked at the cell phone that he’d left on the bedside table.
I could phone my parents…No. They’d only try to persuade me
to go back to Sakkara, and that’s something I’m not going to do as long as Max Dalton is still there.

Once he’d put on his new boots and tied the laces, Colin grabbed the room’s key-card and made his way down to the lobby.

The red-haired woman—Harriet—was waiting for him. “All clean and shiny?”

Colin nodded. “Yeah. Thanks. I’d nearly forgotten what it felt like to not be covered in dirt.”

“Mr. Kinsella’s in the restaurant, if you’re ready to meet him.”

“I’m ready.”

Even though it was now lunchtime, the hotel’s restaurant was almost completely empty. At the only occupied table, Byron was talking to a tall, slightly overweight bearded man.

So that’s him, Reginald Kinsella,
Colin said to himself.
The leader of the Trutopians and one of the most famous men in the world, and he came all the way here just to see me.

Harriet said, “Mr. Kinsella? This is…”

Kinsella stood up, and offered his hand to Colin, a big cheesy grin on his face. “Oh, I know who it is! You two take a break. I want to talk to this young man alone.”

Byron and Harriet nodded and left the table.

“Sit,” Kinsella said to Colin. “You must be hungry.”

“I’m OK. I ate in the car. I don’t need to eat very much anyway.”

Kinsella dropped down into his own chair. “Is that one of your superhuman abilities?”

“I suppose so.”

Kinsella nodded. “I read something about you developing similar powers to your mother. I’ll tell you,
that
caught everyone out. We all expected you to take after your father.”

“So did I.”

A waiter darted over and placed a menu in front of Colin. “The special today is—”

“The special today is whatever this young man wants.
Anything
he wants. Do you understand me?”

Colin felt the blood rush to his cheeks. He glanced quickly at the menu. “The lasagna looks nice.”

The waiter nodded. “Certainly, sir.” He bowed and darted away.

Kinsella sighed. “I hate that. I hate it when people think I need special treatment just because of what I do, or that I’m going to fire them for dropping the bread rolls.” He glanced at Colin. “What about you? Is that why you left the New Heroes? Didn’t want the fame and fortune?”

“There’s fortune?” Colin shrugged. “No, I just…There were reasons.”

“Understood. You don’t want to talk about it.” Kinsella placed his elbows on the table and rubbed his temples with his fingers. “Colin…Let’s be blunt here. You and me are probably the two most influential people in the world. You do realize that, don’t you?”

“I don’t see myself like that.” Colin picked up a breadstick and began munching on it.

“No, you don’t. And that’s one of the things I like about you. You’ve got extraordinary abilities, but you’re still just an ordinary kid. My people compiled a very detailed report on
Sakkara. Butler Redmond is an ass. Daniel Cooper…Between you and me, I think he’s dangerous.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because of his father. His
real
father, not Façade. If what I’ve heard is true, then Quantum had visions of the future. Visions that eventually drove him mad. And Danny’s inherited Quantum’s speed, so it stands to reason that he might also inherit his visions.” Kinsella paused. “That worries me.”

Colin didn’t know how to respond to that.

“And Renata Soliz…I met her, did you know that? I offered her a chance to join us, but she turned me down. So that leaves you.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Kinsella, but I’m not going to join the Trutopians.”

“Right. I don’t suppose you’ve been following the news over the past four months?”

“It’s not really been possible.”

“Dioxin’s reappearance scared a lot of people. If you hadn’t stopped him in Topeka…” Kinsella shuddered. “I don’t even like to think about that. But a lot of people realized that they needed greater protection than the police or the military could provide. They joined the Trutopians. Now…We’re not perfect, and we’ve never claimed to be. But our people know that they can trust us, because we believe in one thing above all: the truth. There are no secrets among the Trutopians. If anyone wants to find out anything about me, all they have to do is ask. If there are no lies, there are no secrets. Without secrets, no one can deceive the people. The details of
everything
we do are available to the public.”

“Don’t you
need
to hide the truth sometimes?” Colin asked.

Kinsella shook his head. “No, you don’t.”

“What if my parents had told everyone that they were Energy and Titan? Their enemies would have known how to get to them. By keeping the secret they weren’t just protecting themselves, they were protecting me and everyone else they knew.”

“Right. But suppose the Trutopians are successful, and we do manage to—for want of a better way of putting it—take over the world. No superhero would
need
to keep a secret identity, because if everyone always told the truth, then no one would be able to hurt them. In an ideal world—”

“But we don’t live in an ideal world, Mr. Kinsella.”

Kinsella smiled. “Not yet.”

S
HORTLY AFTER DAWN
, R
ENATA
, B
UTLER
and Danny walked in to Sakkara’s infirmary to find Warren Wagner—Colin’s father—waiting for them. A former paramedic, Warren was currently filling the role of Sakkara’s chief medical technician.

In one corner of the large room, Max Dalton was working at a computer station.

Only one other person was in the room: In the bed closest to the window, Mina looked as though she were asleep.

“So how’d it go?” Warren asked.

“Fine,” Danny said. He and Renata had agreed not to mention what they’d found on the island. “Any word from the people in Hungary?”

“Nothing yet,” Warren replied. “We’re not even certain that the sighting is reliable.”

“We should be trying to find him,” Renata said.

“We
are
.”

“No, I mean
we
should be. Me and Danny, you and Caroline. We know Colin better than anyone else. We can persuade him to come back.”

Danny glanced toward Max Dalton and quietly said, “Col won’t come back as long as
he’s
still here.”

Butler yawned and said, “This gonna take long?”

“It takes as long as it takes,” Warren said. “But you can go first. Get behind the screens and strip down to your shorts.”

While Butler was being examined, Renata and Danny walked over to Mina’s bed.

“God…. Poor thing,” Renata said. “Four months in a coma.” She reached out to stroke Mina’s blond hair, which had now grown to shoulder-length.

“I wonder if she’s dreaming,” Danny said, examining the plastic bag of liquid connected via a tube to Mina’s arm. “She probably is. I just hope they’re not nightmares.”

“She
is
dreaming,” Max Dalton said, appearing behind them. “At least, according to the EEG readings. And she’s not really in a coma. She’s just asleep. She moves from time to time, just like everyone does when they’re asleep.”

He doesn’t look well,
Danny thought. Max’s hair was now completely gray and his once-handsome face was haggard and drawn.

Renata asked, “So the wake-up message didn’t work?”

“Obviously not,” Max said. For weeks, Max and his team had been scouring through thousands of hours of Sakkara’s audio logs, searching for recordings of Yvonne’s voice, and singling out the snippets of her voice where she appeared to be using her mind-control. The idea was that they would compile pieces of Yvonne’s orders into a “wake-up” sentence for Mina. “It looks like Yvonne’s hypnotics can only work when they’re issued live. That definitely indicates that it’s more telepathic than vocal.”

“So what are you going to do now?”

“We’ve taken X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, ultrasound images…There’s nothing there. Short of performing exploratory brain surgery, there’s nothing else we can do. Not directly. This is where
you
come in, Danny.”

Danny looked down at Mina. “What can I do?”

“You can tell us everything about how you regained your powers.”

“I don’t think I ever really lost them. I think it was the shock of what happened to my arm. I just sort of shut down.” To himself, Danny added,
That, and my vision of the future.

“But the powers came back. If we can figure out how, then maybe we can trigger the same thing for Mina. You said that your powers returned when Renata was trapped in the computer room, after Dioxin’s men shot her, right? You’re sure there was nothing else before that?”

Danny shook his head. “No.”

“Façade said that during Dioxin’s attack you insisted on coming back here instead of going to the safe house. Why?”

“I just didn’t want to be left behind. I thought I might be able to help.”

“And why
did
you think that?”

“Just a feeling,” Danny said, shrugging.

Max absently fingered the scar on his neck. “That’s how it started for your father. He used to get ‘feelings’ about things, or he’d know something he couldn’t possibly have known. And then the visions started to come.”

“Don’t ever talk about my father, Dalton. He’s dead because of you.”

“I know, but…” He stopped. “Look, we’ve already had two cases of superhumans effectively losing their powers and then regaining them, and that’s you two.” To Renata, he said, “Your recovery can be tied directly to the power-surge from Victor Cross’s machine—”

“You mean
your
machine.”

“Right. But that’s not something we can replicate here. Even if we were to build another one, the power-surge was an unrepeatable accident.”

He’s never even apologized for kidnapping me and Colin,
Danny thought. He glanced at the stump of his right arm.

From the far side of the room, Warren called, “Renata? You’re next.”

They looked up to see Butler pulling on his T-shirt as he left the room.

As Renata walked over to Warren, Max said to Danny, “You’re still blaming me for what happened, aren’t you?”

“Who else should I blame? You funded and ran the whole operation. Because of
you
I’m going to spend the rest of my life with only one arm.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Max said. He led Danny to his computer station, and called up a program. On screen, a three-dimensional model of a mechanical arm rotated slowly. “I’ve been making some modifications to Razor’s design.”