Kingdom of Heroes (34 page)

She chuckled. “You’re a knight if I ever met one. Or maybe a queen.”

“I’m sure you meant that in how the queen is the most powerful piece.”

“Nope.” She laughed again. “I just like to mess with you.”

He smiled. “Here I am, fighting tooth and nail just to come to your rescue, and you’re going to call me a lady. Maybe I should just leave you there.”

“You probably should, but you won’t. Like I said, you’re a knight.”

“How many guards?” he asked, finding himself tempted to roll down the window and stick his head in the rain, just to improve the visibility.

“Two when I was brought in,” she answered. “Both just outside of the room, posted at the door.”

“Any in the room with you?”

“No one in here but me.”

“Sounds lonely.”

“Not really.” He noticed the slightest twinge of happiness in her voice. “I’ve got you to keep me company.”

“Can you read the guards?”

She sighed as her voice returned to its previously despondent tone. “Nope. They seemed to be equipped with the same anti-telepathy The Agent has always used. Matter of fact, everyone in the building must be using it. Far as I can tell, as far as being able to telepathically sense anyone else, I’m the only person in the whole place.”

“At least the place isn’t on fire.”

She chuckled ever so lightly again, just barely above a whisper. “I’m sure you’ll take care of that when you get here. The last two places you’ve been to have both burnt to the ground once you got there.”

“It’s a talent,” he replied with a small laugh of his own. “And for the record, I didn’t start either of those fires.”

“Just like you didn’t steal that truck?”

“Exactly. These things just seem to happen to me. I’m cursed with horrible bad luck and exceedingly good looks.”

She laughed, and he appreciated the sound. For some reason, he found it comforting. He knew he shouldn’t. After all, she had lied to him throughout this whole process, telling him whatever she had to in order to get him to where she, and by proxy, The Agent, needed him to be. But somewhere deep inside, down deep where his instincts and natural intuition lived, he knew she was telling him the truth now, having only lied to him in order to save her life. In the end, he couldn’t blame her. He would have done the exact same thing if his life was on the line. God knew, he had done so much worse.

“Anything useful in there?” she asked.

The Detective had been running his finger across the print on the journal’s pages, using his exaggerated sense of touch to read with his fingertip while he drove. There was plenty of information in the book: personal notes, news clippings, magazine articles, transcripts of videos and recordings, all kinds of useful little tidbits, but nothing on how to kill The Agent.

“Adam managed to hack The Agent’s personal computer,” The Detective replied. “The Agent had files on me, the rest of The Seven, even you, but there’s nothing in here on any weaknesses The Agent may have.”

“Me?” Emily asked.

“Yep. Even you. So much for your sister keeping your telepathy secret. Rogers knew all about it; he just chose to let Fire think she was keeping it from him.”

“The Agent sucks ass.”

He chuckled. “I’ve been trying to tell everyone that for years. So did you figure that out before or after he kidnapped and threatened to kill you?”

“Before,” she answered with an obviously angry tone. “I knew it well before any of this. It just makes me feel better to say it to someone else.”

He hadn’t mentioned it, but he had found something interesting in the journal, interesting but not useful, not yet at least. Somewhere around page fifty or so, he had found an envelope stuck in between the pages. The outside of the envelope had been addressed to Adam with no return location. Inside was a letter, a simple letter with a single line, that same line that kept coming back over and over, the line now, after reading some of Adam’s personal recollections, that made perfect sense: They’re not the family you deserve.

The Agent had obviously ordered Psychosis to leave the phrase in the boy’s mind as a key to unlock his memories, just in case The Agent ever had a need for Adam to remember what had actually happened. When Adam read the letter, all of those memories came flooding back. No wonder, The Detective thought, the kid wanted to kill them all. Now, more than ever, he couldn’t blame him.

On the letter itself, The Detective found two separate fingerprints. One was Adam’s. His prints were all over the notebook. The second was a complete mystery. It wasn’t one he had encountered, not yet at least. But, he had at least one more likely suspect.

As he slid the envelope and letter back into the notebook, he remembered something else he had kept. With one hand on the steering wheel, he reached into his pants pocket with the other hand and pulled out the suicide note he had found at Adam’s apartment almost a day ago. He slid it into the journal alongside the envelope, feeling that it all deserved to be together.

“Do you really think The Agent sent it to Adam?” Emily asked from thoughts. She had obviously been eavesdropping.

“Maybe,” he answered. “Probably. Wouldn’t doubt it a bit.”

“Why would he do that to his own son?”

“It’s The Agent. Why wouldn’t he?” The Detective thought of another question, and as much as he didn’t want to ask, he still felt the need to know. “Did you know about Adam, about what happened to him when The Seven found him, about his family?”

For a few seconds, there was nothing but silence until she finally spoke again. “I knew. Pammy accidentally told me a few years ago; I caught her thinking about it when she didn’t know I was around. She explained the rest. I found out, but I never wanted him to know.”

“Why not?” The Detective asked in a confused tone. “Didn’t he have the right to? I would want to.”

“You didn’t know him the way I did. I didn’t want him to have to live with that moment. Sometimes a happy lie is better than the painful truth. I never wanted him to blame himself for all of that. It wasn’t his fault. He never asked for any of that.”

“It came out anyways; things like that always do.”

“Like that thing that happened to you with the two waitresses in Vancouver,” she said in an obvious attempt to change the subject.

He smiled. “What I did on my days off was my business.”

“But the handcuffs, wasn’t that a bit cliché?”

“When you’re a cop, they’re always laying around somewhere. Besides, I warned you about going too deep into my thoughts. You never know what you might find in there.”

“You are not kidding,” she added with the slightest of laughs.

He wanted to ask if she had known that it was Adam in The Iron Knight suit that morning when her sister was attacked, if she had known when the two of them had talked at the hospital, but he figured it was all moot at this point, none of it really mattered. If she had known, what could she have told him? What information would have made him do things different? Would he have even done things differently if he had known? Probably not, he thought to himself, even as he noticed that she hadn’t chimed into his internal monologue yet. He figured this wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have, so he did what he knew she wanted him to do: he let it go.

The Detective continued to drive the truck through the storm; he could see The Agent’s massive white tower in the distance, brooding ominously over the city. The tallest building in Metro City, standing at an even one hundred floors, it had become Rogers’ home and base of operations since The Seven won the war. Rumors said that no one other than The Agent himself had entered the living quarters on the top floor in years; supposedly, he lived in there alone, standing guard over the country alongside his thousands of television monitors, each connected to the millions of surveillance cameras scattered throughout the land. It was told he had immediate access to any of the cameras, showing him instantly what was happening on any street corner, any hallway, every house, and every apartment in the country.

The Agent had become a hermit in his building, nothing more than a disembodied voice giving orders and commanding his troops to do his bidding, his dirty work, while he sits there, alone, contemplating the machinations that kept the country under his thumb.

The Detective wondered if The Agent had the cliché long beard and overgrown toenails that despots in self-exile usually developed. The Detective hoped so, if for nothing else, just for the comedy factor alone. He loved a good joke.

“Would you really laugh at him?” Emily asked. “To his face?”

“Probably,” The Detective answered. “I’d laugh as hard as I could, right before he killed me, at least.”

“You’re quite optimistic about your chances of success.”

He smiled. “Just being realistic. Without a weapon that can work against him, some kind of a trick, an escape plan, something, I’m kind of walking in to a no-win situation here.”

As if on cue, the phone in the glove box began ringing. The Detective reached over, opened the box, and took out the phone.

“You’re not going to answer it again, are you?” Emily scolded him from his thoughts.

“Why not?” he said in return, flipping the phone open and preparing to hit the button marked send. “It’s probably just that guy you mentioned earlier, just wanting to know why I stole his truck.”

She laughed from beneath her breath. “I knew you stole it. You can’t borrow if you have no plans to bring it back.”

“How do you know I wasn’t planning on taking it back? Maybe I had planned on a grand return trip where I scoured the country to find the one true owner of this truck. I mean, it’s highly unlikely, but it is possible.” He hit the button to talk and placed the phone next to his ear. “Hello,” he said as calmly and normally as he could.

“
Hello, Detective,
” said an electronic, computerized voice from the other end of the phone.

_______________________________________________

“Well, hello Adam,” The Detective said in return. “If it isn’t my favorite disembodied, robot, mass murdering, killing machine. Are you wanting to just say hi or is this a business call?” He could hear Emily gasp from his thoughts. He did everything he could to block her out of the conversation; some things she didn’t need to hear. The digitized voice of her dead best friend was probably one of those.

“
I’ve been tracking you, Detective,
” the mechanical voice answered. “
There is a tracer in one of your interior coat pockets; it has allowed me to follow your every movement.
”

The Detective reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny piece of metal surrounded by circuitry. He held it up in front of his face and turned it from side-to-side, giving it a good once over. “You sneaky bastard. You put that in there after you knocked me out.” He crumpled the tracer in his hand, rolling the metal into a ball. He rolled the driver side window down a smidge and tossed the ball onto the wet street.

“
Destroying my tracer won’t do you much good now, Detective. I know where you are and where you’re going. The question now is why, why are you heading to The Agent’s tower? Whose side do you stand?
”

“Look,” The Detective said in return, beginning to feel the slightest bit of anger over having his motives questioned. “I found your journal, and I read through it. I completely understand your reasoning for hating The Seven; I have my own set of reasons to want to see this regime brought down, but, and let me say this as clearly as I can so we both understand my meaning: I’m not on any side in this little one-man war of yours. I am where I have always been, the odd-man out looking in.”

“
Then why did you return to the city?
” Adam’s voice asked from the phone. “
You had every opportunity to leave the situation, to remove yourself from this, as you say, one-man war.
”

“Oh robot-boy, I have so many reasons: revenge, kicks and giggles, overwhelming sadomasochistic tendencies, the list goes on and on. Which reason do you want?”

“
The reason that would cause you to give up a sure chance at escape to return to a certain death.
”

The Detective cleared his throat, making sure what he was about to say came across loud and clear as it possibly could. “Emily.”

“
What?
”

“Emily,” The Detective said again. “The Agent has her, and I came back to keep him from killing her.” The Detective decided to leave out all of the details concerning any lie she may have told to get him to make that decision, not that it would have changed his mind or affected his choice. Either way, he would be on this same path, hell bent to get to that tower, determined to rescue her from The Agent’s hold. “He’s using her to lure me into a trap. He needs me at his tower, not sure of the why’s or the what’s, but I know that part of his master plan is getting me into that building. And he will kill her if I don’t show up; I have no doubt on the subject.”

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone before the robotic voice spoke again. “
Then, I guess I am in your debt, Detective.
”