“Maybe you ought to arrange a meeting.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“It’s time to pull his file up on the computer,” Warren said, indicating the back hallway, which led to the Olympiad’s command room. The others agreed and started to move on. Suzanne collected the file folder.
This was in their hands now, and Celia ought to have been happy to wash her own hands of the responsibility. Except she wasn’t. She sat in the kitchen chair and grit her teeth, gathering the courage to just stand up and follow them. It shouldn’t have been that difficult.
Arthur leaned on the back of her chair and whispered at her ear. “Come on, Celia. You’re invited.”
The wave of relief she felt shouldn’t have been strong enough to start tears pricking in her eyes. She blinked them away and hurried to follow him.
The wood door at the end of the hall looked like every other door they’d passed, the ones leading to bedrooms and bathrooms. But this one had a security keypad by the doorknob. Suzanne punched in a code, and a scanner read her thumbprint. The door slid aside, rather than swinging open.
The Olympiad command room was everything a starry-eyed admirer of superhuman vigilantes could hope for. The cavernous space offered secret elevators and passages to different parts of the building, including the hangar in a warehouse a block over that housed some of the team’s vehicles. Computer banks made up an entire wall: keyboards, indicator lights, printers, scanners, and analyzers. One of several screens showed a map of the city, and a radio monitored police frequencies. A gleaming steel table and chairs occupied the middle of the room. This was where the Olympiad had formed hundreds of plans, hunted hundreds of foes. Sparsely lit—only the table and computer banks shone brightly—the place was a den of shadows.
Celia had seen it before, but not for years. Disconcertingly, it hadn’t changed at all. There might have been some new equipment, upgraded computers and communications systems, but the hardware blended in with what had been there before. She felt sixteen again. The others walked right in; she stopped and stared.
When she was growing up, if she wanted to find her parents, she checked her father’s office first—his normal office, for his job running the normal company. She checked the command room second. She’d been frightened by it. It was slick, steel, all gleaming surfaces and intimidating equipment filled with buttons, dials, screens flashing between a dozen scenes from closed-circuit cameras all over the city. The place hummed with the constant noise of hard drives and cooling fans at work. She’d call them on the intercom, and they’d open the door for her. She’d find her parents leaning over some monitor or printout, piecing together clues from the latest crime spree or tracing the Destructor’s whereabouts. Invariably, her question of “Can I make some popcorn?” or “Can you sign this permission slip for school?” seemed to pale beside whatever they were doing.
A couple of times she’d sat at their conference table for a debriefing, telling her side of whatever kidnapping she’d been involved in, recording her story for posterity. She couldn’t remember ever sitting at the table as an equal. Or as something resembling an equal—as someone who actually had something to contribute.
Warren said, “Why did the Hawk give this to you and not us?”
“I asked him the same thing,” she said. “He said you weren’t at the top of your game anymore. That you needed to hand things off to the younger generation.”
“How do you like that?” Robbie said with a laugh.
“The younger generation? He didn’t mean you, did he?”
Celia’s face flushed. She knew this was how this conversation would go. “I would think maybe he meant Typhoon or Breezeway. Block Buster Junior. One of that crowd. I told him I didn’t have any powers. Then he said, neither did he.”
During another long silence, Celia wished for a moment she was Arthur, so she could know what the others were thinking.
—
She glanced up and caught him looking back at her. She blushed and quickly looked away. He’d been prying. Or she’d been thinking too loud. He said that happened sometimes.
Suzanne went to the computers. “Let’s run the mayor through the database.”
The database retrieved and cross-referenced Mayor Anthony Paulson’s information, producing the standard biography and a detailed listing of policy decisions and political records. Anthony Paulson was something of a Commerce City folk hero, a hard-luck case made good, an orphaned child adopted into a middle-class family and risen through the ranks of the city’s elite through his own hard labor. His policies were moderate, he was fiscally conservative, pro-labor, pro-education, and antisocialization. He was a politician everyone could love, and the greatest buried scandal of his life involved a college liaison with an underage girl—he’d been eighteen, she’d been two days from sixteen. The scandal died a quick death—the girl was Andrea, and the couple married three years later.
“We’ve got nothing on this guy,” Robbie observed. “He’s clean as a whistle.”
“If we’re not entirely wrong,” Warren said. “There’s got to be another connection. I still think Simon Sito is behind this somehow.”
Arthur rubbed his chin, considering. “That’s our problem. We have too many explanations that are possible but unlikely.”
“Isn’t that always the way?” Suzanne said.
A photo of Paulson smiled at them from the monitor. That’s what Mark will look like when he’s older, Celia thought. Not a bad-looking man at all. He even had an intriguingly wicked glint in his eye, like he knew very well how to use the power he’d acquired.
Something in his eyes made her stomach go queasy. She’d looked him in the eye before, at the symphony gala, and the dinner at the mansion. But he’d been in a more personable state both times. This photo was from his last campaign; here, he was predatory. Celia recognized the expression. She hadn’t noticed it right away because she’d never expected it. Not in this context.
He looked like a young Simon Sito. He had that glint in his eye that the Destructor always showed before he pressed the button.
“Celia, what is it?” Mentis watched her closely.
She’d been hypnotized by that image without realizing it, gazing into that man’s eyes and falling back in time, even more so than when she stepped into the command room in the first place. She must have looked lost, staring blank-eyed at the screen.
“I don’t know. Just … thinking.” She couldn’t say it out loud. It would sound ridiculous. Sito had nothing to do with this current crime wave. He wasn’t masterminding anything anymore.
Paranoia. It was just paranoia.
Fortunately, Mentis was too polite to press the question.
Warren, Captain Olympus, took charge. “Mentis, see if you can get close to Paulson and read anything off him. We need other leads to confirm this. If he’s behind the gangs, he has to be paying them. We have to be able to trace the stolen items back to him.”
It sounded like accounting to Celia. “I have some sources I might be able to check on.”
“I thought you weren’t working,” said her father.
She was too preoccupied to glare properly. “Public records are public, one way or another.”
“You don’t have to help. Thanks for bringing us this, but it’s not your responsibility.”
“I spent a lot of years in college learning how to do this kind of thing. Let me help.” She hated begging. She ought to just walk out and go back to her ice cream.
The others waited for Warren’s cue. Why couldn’t any of them stand up to him? Because he was the Captain. If he didn’t want her to help, they wouldn’t argue.
“Fine,” Warren said at last. Grudging for no other reason than to be grudging.
The planning continued. Robbie appointed himself for surveillance duty. Suzanne would consolidate information from the captured gang members, to try to learn who had hired them.
Celia continued to think, half-distractedly. Anthony Paulson was adopted. Sito couldn’t possibly be his biological father. That explanation was so mundane. So simple.
And if it were true, it meant Mark was Simon Sito’s grandson. Confirming the relationship should be a simple matter, if she could find Paulson’s original adoption records—fifty years old and certainly sealed. A paternity test would also do the job.
“Mom? Does the computer have Sito’s DNA on file?”
