Fleming, let’s get these zombies back to A.I. for Tex to examine. Flash—call the team together, no later than midnight tonight. Tell them this is big.”
“Roger.”
“And where’s that plane headed?”
“He headed out over the ocean, then dropped down below radar coverage, probably to turn and throw us off track. I’m trying to connect with satellite lookdown radar now, but I may have lost him. ”
“Roger,” Cap said quietly.
Leila raised her voice loud enough for all to hear.
“I don’t care what police procedure is, these men need immediate and sophisticated medical attention! Dr. Uriah West is the finest neurosurgeon in the world. Ask any doctor above the rank of arrant quack!”
Fleming cleared his throat. While his eyes drank in the curvacious Leila Weir, his attention drifted from the subject of brain surgery. He shook his head after a moment and said, “I can’t release these men to anyone but qualified paramedics. Those guys.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of two red ambulances.
Leila smiled, excused herself, and strolled over to the gawking paramedics.
“Ready to roll!” Rock hollered. He bent the left front fender away from the tire with his thick, bare hands. The wheels pointed straight and the engine idled unharmed. The tires had a few bullet holes in them, but that made little difference: instead of air, they kept their shape by means of rigid sidewalls and closed-cell plastic foam, almost as light and cushiony as air, but safe from blowouts.
Even in its battered shape, the van possessed power and speed. Its engine roared into life, making a sound subtly different from an ordinary automobile engine.
Captain Anger laid a hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. “You’d better be getting back to your parents.”
“They’re in Europe,” he said. “Besides, I have a right to see what’s on that disk.”
Cap nodded. “All right. You’ll fly in my jet.”
“Sweet!” Johnny said with awe.
Leila’s voice murmured in Cap’s ear, “The paramedics know where to take the patients. Let’s hit the road.”
“Agreed,” Cap said.
Cap and Rock exchanged places, Cap maneuvering the van onto the street and Rock in the back with Leila, checking the condition of equipment. Jonathan sat in the creme-white passenger’s seat and watched the extraordinary man to his left perform the ordinary act of driving.
Captain Richard Anger handled the vehicle with supreme ease and quiet efficiency. He gave as much concentration to it as he did to flying an aircraft or piloting a ship. It was his nature to use his abilities to their utmost in any endeavor, even when events split his attentions three ways and more.
The act of driving calmed him. The constant forward motion, the awareness of heading somewhere, of adventure laying ahead of him, brought him peace.
Jonathan Madsen wondered how such a man could exist in the world of today. All he had ever seen in the few years of his life had been men and women of compromise: school teachers more interested in silence than in curiosity; store employees who viewed every teenager as a potential shoplifter; celebrities and even presidents whose confused personal lives tabloid magazines exposed with morbid glee.
Here he sat next to a hero whose name he had never heard before. A man who could follow him out a second-story window and land on his feet. A man who could crack a safe yet asked a kid’s permission to take its contents. A man with friends as quietly competent as he, who apparently traveled the world yet who—without hesitation—interrupted their personal and professional lives to give aid to strangers, to battle enormous evil without so much as a thought of the risk. A man and companions who thrived on danger, who sought it out where others would flee.
The only hero Jonathan had known in his life had been his grandfather. Julie also hearkened to another age, an earlier time when a man could still live a life heroically without bowing to the pressures all around him.
In the driver’s seat, though, sat a man one-third Gramps’s age who embodied all things heroic from ages long past. He was the last of the heroes, Jonathan marveled. Or perhaps, he thought with hope, the first of their return!
Chapter Twelve
The Gathering
Two sleek black jets soared over the ocean’s shore and shredded inland at a dizzying speed. Jonathan Madsen stared out of the cockpit at the blur of golden sands and green-brown sea cliffs that raced by below. The sun, squat on the horizon and red as a ruby, gave up the last of its light to the haze of Los Angeles. That city, off to the right, began to glow as lights inside skyscrapers winked on.
Below their jets, though, spread mountainous and rugged terrain. Only a few wealthy mansions dotted the landscape here and there, and at two thousand feet altitude, the small and superbly crafted jet engines barely whispered to anyone on the ground.
The jets slowed and descended gently to a small runway. Though the sophisticated electronics on the aircraft would have permitted a landing in total darkness, the strip adjacent to the Anger Institute sparkled with
green and white landing lights and the cool blue glow of taxi lights. Cap and Leila followed these to the hanger where they disembarked to leave the jets in the able hands of Jack, the mechanic. Jonathan Madsen followed Captain Anger, Rock, and Leila to a chamber in one of the hangers.
The chamber housed a smooth, stainless-steel cylinder about the length and width of a mid-sized automobile. Cap ushered them inside and sealed the hatch. An invisible hand shoved Jonathan back in his seat as forcefully as the acceleration of the jet had.
Floating on a field of magnetic levitation, the vehicle raced underground through its tunnel, speeding beneath the airfield at over two hundred miles per hour. The trip to the nearby Anger Institute took less than a minute.
Captain Anger stood before one of the wide, large windows of his office. Taking up the entire fifth floor of the Anger Institute’s administration building, it constituted the tallest point on the sprawling campus. It served as more than an office, housing Cap’s own computer and communications center, living quarters, exercise studio, and meditation retreat.
At the moment, it served as a meeting room for five of the most remarkable people in the world.
Of them all, Captain Anger was the most impressive, standing in front of the darkened window gazing out at the softly illuminated complex of laboratories and offices comprising the Anger Institute for Advanced Science. His tall figure, dressed now in a fresh, clean duplicate of his black flight suit, stood silhouetted against the night sky, silent and pensive. If he wanted to, he could have melted into the night without a trace. For now, though, he stood quietly while his aides assembled.
Leila and Rock had arrived at the office before him. Leila— clad in a creme-white, business-style jacket and skirt that accentuated her pale skin and jet-black hair sat in a deep, burgundy-hued leather chair. Rock, wearing a crisp white lab coat over blue slacks and a khaki shirt, paced around the room. Jonathan Madsen had showered and received expert treatment for all his wounds. Clean, bandaged and wearing hospital greens, he sat on another of the plush leather chairs and watched in curious amazement as three newcomers arrived.
Phil “The Flash” Hoile arrived. Slender, dark-haired, and youngish, he looked only a few years older than Jonathan—in his early twenties at best.
He carried with him a small black box, which he placed on the expansive walnut desk at the far end of the room.
The second man to enter was an opposite of Flash in nearly every way. Physically huge at six-foot-five, he
