“Is there anything in particular we can do to help? Of course you have the full resources of my office at your disposal; fire, police, you name it.” Reynolds said. “We can start by getting the police department to go through shipping records, get plain clothes guys on the docks. Tom, you can convene an emergency disaster planning meeting, we can start working on different evacuation scenarios, God forbid it should come to that…” He looked at his wife and winked “Eddy…you can make some coffee…”
“The hell I will, you chauvinistic dinosaur!” she hit him again, light heartedly “But I’ll have some made” she laughed, but her smile never touched her eyes as she then made a discreet phonecall for refreshments. She was worried about him and this situation, Supergirl realised.
“We’ll alert the medical authorities in nearby towns and cities to gear up for casualties, we can treat it as an exercise. We’ll keep the visible police presence to a minimum for now though, don’t want to panic her into moving or setting it off.”
“All that sounds good, but best if I search for her physically on my own, with my …abilities I can cover more ground, but by all means have undercover officers looking out for anything suspicious, we only have a few days before the 21st so every help is welcome.” Supergirl interjected. “But I agree, equally we don’t want to tip our hand, frighten her into anything rash. At the moment she is overconfident, happy she has outsmarted us. Let’s keep her in that misconception. One thing I would like, though, is to use your office for a moment, if I may, for a quick word with Mr Wilson?”
“Oh….oh yes, by all means. Eddy, Tom. Let’s go have a word with those two clowns outside” the Mayor answered, slightly surprised. He and his retinue moved towards the door, before he turned back. “Oh, could you hand me that trophy, honey?” he gestured to Supergirl. She picked it up off the desk and walked over to hand it to him.
“Thank you, my dear” he smiled broadly before speaking in a low tone between his unmoving lips “<Don’t trust him>”. Wilson, still some 15 feet away, leaning against the window sill, was oblivious to the warning. Supergirl eyed the Mayor with a new respect, and mouthed the words ‘Thank you’ accompanied by a faint half smile that was answered by a beaming grin from the Mayor.
“Tom, Eddy. Let’s give them a few moments. Take as long as you want, honey.” They left, the Mayor closing the door behind him. Briefly his raised voice was heard. “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TWO PLAYING AT?”
Supergirl turned to Wilson. “So?”
“So what?” Wilson remained unmoving.
Supergirl folded her arms across her shapely chest and, head bowed in thought, walked stiff-legged, slowly over to where he was leaning. When her progress had taken her to within a few feet of him, she stopped, raising her gaze to his face but not raising her head.
“Sooooooo…that briefing was for them, not for me. That file of hers…not even a date of birth. No firm chronology what so ever…’she started studies at St. Peter’s College, Oxford University , England in the late nineties’ …not even course dates for her.
You don’t mention her age and you don’t mention how long her courses took nor when she completed them. My guess is, that’s because you are supressing something, some other actions she took. After her initial degree in Geology, you describe a ‘Combined Course’ , very clever the way you put it in capitals to just make it seem like it’s an innocuous academic subject, but I reckon that’s the key to all this. Mr Lewis mentioned she was a prodigy. Geologists don’t build bombs…I suspect she graduated in…physics, maybe? Electronic engineering? Genetics? Something that would allow her to be a very real and credible threat when given the right materials. And we know she had access to the right materials, don’t we Mr Wilson? But there is something else. You are used to dealing with terrorist threats, this is no different, on the face of it. You’ve had two weeks, since you realised she wasn’t coming back, to hunt her down with the Police, SWAT teams or government agents. You must have hundreds of people quietly involved by now. Why would you need me, now? Unless you needed someone with my special abilities. Physically, she is just an ordinary woman. So that would imply that she has something else, something you want back. Some kind of secret device, perhaps? So what does she have of yours, Mr Wilson? That is what I meant by ‘So?’ “ she looked at him long and hard.
He blew through his teeth “Whee-ew…you’re very sharp , honey”
“Don’t call me ‘honey’.” She said tersely.
“The Mayor did” Wilson answered.
“That’s different. I like him.” She countered. “The biggest give away though is that the file never mentions her Doctorate degree - just the Masters in Geology. So it’s fairly obvious you aren’t telling me the whole story. Not good enough, Mr Wilson. I need to know what you know, and I don’t. So, what else is it that you aren’t telling me?”
“Just as you say; that she took some of those extra courses; that the dirty bomb is very real. There is no secret ‘device’ though.” Wilson said. “But we need her knowledge, we need her alive. SWAT aren’t exactly known for that, so it was felt you’d be the best chance of a successful outcome. And of course, she has threatened you. So …it’s in both our interests to stop her.”
She stared at him, for a long moment. He didn’t flinch, but met her gaze. Finally she spoke.
“I can see your heart rate quicken just a touch… see the jittering little extra pulse as the blood shoots through your veins…your pupils dilating of course…only slightly, but enough of a tell…I can see your body temperature fluctuate…minutely, but it’s there. There are other changes to your body that only a Kryptonian could pick up on, Mr Wilson, and all these tell me that, although you are trying to hide it really well, you are in fact lying to me, Mr Wilson. And that’s not nice.”
“I don’t know what you mean” he said unconvincingly.
“You said you were here to answer any questions I had after the briefing…but the truth is, you were only here to make sure I bought into that cover story, right?” she challenged.
“You don’t need to know any more” Wilson said, now uncomfortable, finally shifting his weight, stepping away from the window sill to stand facing her. “You just find her…use your- whatever- to subdue her, tie her up, we grab her that’s it. You really don’t need to know any more.”
“Oh, but I really, REALLY do, Mr Wilson” Supergirl stared at him sternly. She wandered over to the large balcony window doors behind the Mayor’s desk, opening them wide and sticking her head out into the soft, white sunshine. She felt the glow of the energy warm her and closed her eyes briefly in delight , drawing in a deep breath of fresh air before turning back to face the shadowy government man once more. “If you expect me to risk my life, I intend to be fully cognisant of the facts.”
“It’s classified. That’s all you’ll get from me.” Wilson said rising “I don’t have to tell you squat. Now hadn’t you bette-“
With a blur of speed she was behind him, wrapping him up in her arms in a microsecond. An instant later they were streaming through the window as she hurtled out and then up with him, rising some several hundred feet above City Hall before she hovered. “Oh look, I can see my house from here!” she said distractedly, playing with him.
“O-h, oh God!” was all Wilson could utter.
“Nice up here isn’t it?” she said playfully. Wilson didn’t answer. He was wide eyed and white faced, staring between his dangling feet at the ground, far, far below him.
“Cat got your tongue?” she asked, secretly delighted by the fear she could feel rippling through him. She suspected he had caused much the same reaction in many, many others in his time. Time now for a dose of his own medicine. She had met men like him before. They wandered a dark road. And they covered all their options. She was in no doubt that, somewhere, he had a government facility building those Kryptonite chains the doctor had asked for. ‘Yes, let’s make him squirm a little’, she decided.
“ C-cut it out.” He stuttered unconvincingly, trying to sound in control of the situation. “We both know you’re bluffing. Y-you won’t drop m-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEE!” he cried as she let go.
She let him fall for a few seconds, whilst she inspected her nails, casually, then pretended to see him for the first time plummeting to earth and swooped to gather him up again. He was a shaking mass of flailing limbs.
“You sure about that?” she asked innocently, hovering once more. “Now, Mr Wilson, I’d still like a quick word. And ‘velocity’ just won’t cut it. So how about you telling me, what you just can’t tell me, hmmn?”
“Okay! Okay! P-please…back in the office?” He had barely finished the sentence before a moment later they were there. He let out a long sigh of relief. He was shaking.
She stood arms folded, waiting, after first setting him back on his feet.
“I-I’m not cleared to brief you on this…” he said, short of breath.
“We could go for another spin round the block? Or above it.” she smiled sweetly.
“NO! NO! “ he breathed heavily, trying to re-gather his composure. “Alright. We both know you wouldn’t have dropped me…but you do deserve to know what you are up against”.
“Actually…I probably would’ve dropped you, juuuuuust a little bit …”she pinched the air with her thumb and forefinger , narrowing her eye to pretend to squint through the little gap. She was enjoying wrong –footing him. She took a half step towards him and smiled secretly as he startled. “Strange. Most guys are longing to be in my arms…” she added mischievously.
He straightened out his tie and jacket. His aloof persona was shattered. Wilson walked over to stand before a map of the continental United States mounted on the wall.
“Alright. Alright. W-we…we’ve had a…a device.. a prototype…for many years…a sort of camouflage machine we’ve been developing. It uses a selection of rare and unique materials that, when activated in the proper way, some by electrical impulse, some by magnetism, some just by proximity to each other, creates a sort of…bubble…a distortion of reality…that makes an object seem to vanish but it is actually still there moving at a quantum level within the bubble…so fast a person can’t see it. It’s kinda like your super speed, but without the blur that tells of your path. One instant it would be over by the door say, the next it would have disappeared and then just ‘appeared’ alongside you, seemingly without moving in between. But used on the larger …objects…there were problems…a distortion of the bubble… instability…massive amounts of energy required…it was very problematic, shall we say. There were... difficulties…we went through a LOT of prototypes over the decades…and there were problems not just with our test subjects but also with accidental civilian incursions into the testing zone…”
She looked at him long and hard before she spoke. ”These larger objects…they wouldn’t be objects such as…ships or aircraft, perhaps?”
Wilson nodded glumly. “That’s right. As you’ve probably guessed…we’ve been testing it for years…” he turned to face the wall then swept a hand, still shaking slightly, across a section of the map. Over the sea, north east of Cuba, off America’s eastern seaboard. “Around this area here…” his hand swept casually on as he hesitated, almost embarrassed, “off Bermuda…” he looked guiltily up at her and coughed nervously. Supergirl felt she didn’t need to say anything. Wilson went on. “Willoughby was working on a much smaller version of the device. She’d solved some of the instability problems and reduced the power consumption levels. She was working on a version of the device that could be worn…as a belt.” He paused, awaiting a reaction.
“Is that all?” she asked and Wilson nodded. This time she believed him. What she couldn’t believe was that successive governments for - what, eight decades?- had funded such an incredible scheme. And that people were dumb enough to believe messing with the fabric of the universe didn’t have consequences.
“We aren’t sure if she completed it or not…but it seems likely. But it could only be used for very short periods, a few seconds at a time. Needless to say, you can’t tell anyone about this.” He added superfluously.
“But the human brain is suspended in liquid…it’s not designed to move and stop at speed, which technically would be how it would appear to the user of such a device – the world in slow motion as they moved through it…but when they come back to normal phase movement, the pressure on the cortex would be immense…It would probably cause nausea, severe headaches, even brain damage with prolonged use.” The Kryptonian commented.
“Yeah…we think that’s what happened to the good Doctor” Wilson offered. “Tipped her over the edge.”
‘So that was it’, she thought to herself. She was up against an opponent who to all intents and purposes, could match her super speed but was also armed with Kryptonite. And a ‘dirty bomb’ to boot. And was quite likely brain damaged. It just got better and better.
“You got anything else to say to me?” she closed one eye in the sunshine streaming through the window as she looked at him.
“For whatever it’s worth…good luck, Supergirl.” He said earnestly. For once, she believed him.
A short while later, Supergirl was soaring over the dock basin, carefully scrutinising each vessel she encountered. There were many. A sweep completed of all the larger vessels and their contents showed that nothing was amiss on any of them, so she turned her attention to the smaller private ships in the marina.
After many hours she had still found nothing. She hovered in the evening air, the sun’s fading warmth allowing a cool breeze to flow delicately over her thighs, between her legs, tugging gently at the hem of her short skirt, of her cape.
She closed her eyes, for a moment, enjoying the sensation, recharging herself, gathering her thoughts before she pressed on again. She was sure the Doctor had to be hiding out here, in this city harbour, somewhere below her. If not the docks or harbour, then perhaps she was on a riverboat. Though she only took a few minutes to herself, when she opened her eyes night was falling. The city of the night was coming alive, bright lights replacing bland concrete and glass. Streets alive with festive lights, glinting in red, yellow, blue and green. The city’s Christmas tree was a riot of colour in the main square. In the harbour, the lights played on the water, stretching and spreading out in long yellow and white lines, reaching out towards her across the inky blackness of the water. A blackness that was temporarily wiped out, just to appear again, seconds later, by the sweeping light of the light house out on the sandbar, some 2 miles out to sea. She turned slowly to follow the light home as she remembered something. The lighthouse was being repaired after storm damage last winter. It was now replaced, temporarily, a few hundred yards further out, by an automated, semi-permanently anchored, lightship.
Supergirl smiled to herself as she sped through the darkness, intermittently dazzled by the beam for a few moments, towards a date with destiny.
She circled the ship, scanning it several times to be sure. The light vessel L.V. Compass Rose. She became convinced it was the right vessel. There were only two visible crew on board, and as it was supposed to be an unmanned, automated ship, that alone rang alarm bells. They were both below decks in make-shift cabins. One was pleasuring himself with a magazine, much to her disgust , whilst in another room an older man, rather bizarrely, seemed to be building a wooden model of ‘Old Iron Sides’ herself, the U.S.S. Constitution. But it was the several rooms in the centre of the ship that she couldn’t see, that really convinced her she was in the right place. She couldn’t see them because they were lined with lead.
‘So that was where the Doctor had spent her money.’ She thought. She scanned the rest of the superstructure and found nothing amiss, before landing on the foredeck. What she didn’t notice, dotted around the ship, were small lead boxes, each one open at one end and housing a small video camera. They were trained to cover all approaches to the ship and were invisible when viewed from above, as she had seen them. Only looking directly at the lens would have allowed the Maid of Might to realise their significance. But as she landed on the deck her attention switched to more immediate problems.
There were dozens of anti-personnel booby traps scattered throughout the ship. Small and designed to maim rather than kill, they could never harm her, but none the less would alert the occupants of the ship to her presence. But Supergirl was completely unaware that in one of those lead lined rooms below her, Doctor Willoughby was already aware of her intrusion, and was watching her every move.
“That’s right, honey. Come down an’ see me. Got some nice little games lined up for you to play. But you should know… I play for keeps…” Willoughby said quietly to herself, as she watched the grainy image on the monitor of the beautiful young girl, carefully working her way through the outer doors to step inside the dark interior of the deck housing. Willoughby hit the send button on her mobile, alerting the two men on board silently to proceed with the pre-arranged plan, to rendezvous with her in this make-shift control room, ready to welcome the visitor. She smiled to herself. “Come in to my parlour…” she said softly.