The Protectors Read online

  I feigned surprise at the word evolving.

  “Diego? What’s happened to him?”

  Tucker opened the second folder and I saw the grinning face of a man who swore he’d never look me in the eyes again.

  “Diego Mendoza. Blaster. Body capable of generating massive electrical energy and channeling it into bursts. Energy blasts six times more powerful than a lightning bolt,” he recited.

  “Thanks for the biography, but I roomed with the guy for a year. I know what he could do then. What can he do now?”

  “Blaster is able to transform his body into energy. Completely. He can travel at the speed of light, and when in energy form, requires no food and no air. A wonderful boon to the Department of Defense, but this . . . evolution . . . makes him incredibly difficult to monitor or control, for obvious reasons. The Agency believes he’s off-world at the moment.”

  “Are you kidding me? I’m impressed. Sparky was an unbearable prick before he could travel through hyperspace—I can only imagine what he’s like now.”

  Tucker gave the barest flicker of amusement. “He’s everything you’d assume. Insufferable on a cosmic level.”

  At least we agreed on something. I pointed to the third folder.

  “Well, if Diego is cruising the galaxy, I’m guessing you need my help with . . . her.”

  “Yes, indeed. Her.” He opened the last folder.

  The picture looked up at me. Dark hair, olive skin, perfect high cheekbones, full lips, and a delicate, dimpled chin. The black-and-white DoD photo did no justice to her most striking feature—her eyes. I’ve had a girlfriend or two refer to my blue irises as “stunning,” but Lyla’s eyes rewrote the definition. A mixture of green and amber, with yellow flecks spiraling out from the center, so bright they seemed to radiate light. She was devastatingly beautiful, which most people assumed was a good thing.

  It wasn’t. Emphasis on the devastating.

  Just looking at her picture brought back the feeling of being near her, of locking eyes. A beauty so all-encompassing it was like a black hole, sucking everything away from you—reason, willpower, even self-control. It left you bare, except for an empty ache . . . throbbing to the point where you wanted to reach inside your body and massage it away—only you couldn’t reach deep enough. The only thing I knew to call that feeling was soul pain, and it never went away. Not fully. It had taken five years to fool myself into believing I was free, and now one glance at a three-by-five photo threatened to wipe away whatever serenity I’d managed to scrape together. The lesson was painfully simple: when she was done with you, it felt like nothing was left.

  “Lyla,” I whispered. I could feel Tucker watching me.

  “Lyla Ravzi. Aphrodite,” he said.

  I was overwhelmed by the urge to reach down and touch the picture, but managed to stop myself. Looking like a lovesick puppy in front of Tucker seemed inadvisable. He barely glanced at the picture before he twisted the folder back around.

  “The Goddess of Love,” he scoffed while flipping to her service record.

  “Not impressed?”

  “Not my type.”

  “Then you’ve obviously never been in her presence,” I told him. “If you had, I doubt you’d be able to flip past her picture so easily.”

  Tucker’s face was still buried in the folder, but his eyes peered up at me from the page.

  “I was told early on that risk assessment of Ms. Ravzi would be best accomplished with a large amount of personal detachment.”

  “Sound advice.”

  He sat back and clasped his hands together in thought.

  “Did you know they had far more difficulty testing her powers than any of you? They suspected her power came from a mixture of voice, gaze, and pheromones, but she was impossible to pin down. I assume you know why?”

  “Of course. Are you asking me? I’m sure it’s all in the folder.”

  “Humor me,” he said. “I was working in the Sudan back then. CIA files tend to be a little dry. Your take would be far less . . . clinical, I’m sure.”

  “Fine. It was impossible to test Lyla because the researchers would all fall in love with her. They’d report back whatever she asked them to report. They’d rig the testing equipment, keep all of the DoD minions in the dark.”

  “Yes. Quite frustrating, I’m sure,” Tucker said.

  “Cry me a river. You’ve never been a lab rat.”

  He brushed my complaint aside. “How did the DoD try to cope?”

  “Like morons. They brought in another crew of scientists to work with her—five women and a gay guy. Took about an hour to realize Lyla’s abilities weren’t gender-specific. The women reacted no differently than the men. They immediately started swooning when she turned it on. The gay one drove home that night and broke up with his partner of ten years . . . insisted he’d gone straight.”

  “A little awkward . . .”

  “You think? General Barrington had to come down and promise Lyla three weeks’ leave before she agreed to release the poor guy.”

  “Release. That’s what she calls it?” Tucker asked.

  “Yes. ‘Embrace’ when she’s made you hers; ‘release’ when she’s let you go.”

  “Embrace,” he sneered. “Makes mind control sound so tender.”

  He sounded a lot like the general, which made me both wary and sad.

  “Tucker, Lyla isn’t evil. She didn’t make people worship her on a whim. It was about protecting herself or stopping someone from hurting others. In fact, you should thank the heavens every night it was Lyla who received those abilities, as opposed to someone more . . .” I struggled for the right words. “. . . personally motivated. You have no idea what she could have become.”

  “Enlighten me,” Tucker said.

  I hesitated.

  “Y’know, it’s always bothered me a little when people talk about what I can do and call it ‘power.’ I make people fall asleep. Woo-hoo.” I gave him two thumbs up and a fake smile. “But I rolled with it. If people thought I was special, so be it. Even let it go to my head a little.”

  Tucker’s No, really? expression made me wish there weren’t several M-16s in the room.

  “Amazing, I know. But after I met Lyla, I realized the truth—I was nothing compared to her. I had a useful ability, an amusing parlor trick, something to entertain the media. If I went off the rails and became an immoral bastard, what exactly could I do? Get rich? Rob banks. Maybe steal a few secrets. Not exactly the stuff of legends.

  “But Lyla? She had power. Someone with her abilities could do almost anything . . . gain allies, sway governments, decimate an enemy’s will to resist. Christ, someone like that could rule nations. Conquer others. You think Diego or I could do anything like that? We’re pawns, Tucker . . . Lyla’s the queen. Just be glad she’s a benevolent queen, with no interest in ruling anything, because if she did want power?”

  I shook my head and leaned back.

  “There isn’t a damn thing you could do to stop her.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Tucker stared at me as silence hung in the air. Finally, he exhaled and clapped his hands together in slow, measured applause.

  “Bravo, Mr. McAlister. Bravo. I could not have said it better myself. You and I happen to share the exact same assessment of the strategic and tactical risk Ms. Ravzi brings to the table. Does that surprise you?”

  “Not really. You seem like a smart guy.”

  “Thank you.”

  “For a government stooge.” M-16s be damned, the guy just plain irritated me.

  Unbothered, he flipped to a tabbed section of the folder and turned it around.

  “Well, be that as it may, let me entertain you with some comedy. As any good stooge would.”

  The page in front was from the New York Times, dated one week ago—“North Korea Unilaterally Suspends
Nuke Program,” with a smaller section below reading, “Agrees to hand over existing weapons for dismantling, UN to revoke sanctions immediately.”

  “Yeah, I watched the coverage on CNN. Sanctions work, apparently.”

  “No, Mr. McAlister, I don’t believe they do.” Tucker turned the page over to reveal a collage of long-range surveillance photos. “These were taken two days before the announcement. That’s the courtyard of the presidential palace in Pyongyang, from almost a mile away . . . needless to say, these photographs were incredibly difficult to obtain.”

  The photos were black-and-white shots, grainy due to the extreme length of the telescopic lens, but still viewable. There were several time-coded shots, but in the first, it was easy to make out the portly figure—the recently promoted son of the largest pain in the ass in the United Nations’ brief history—with a large group of military advisors flanking him. As the pictures progressed, a smaller group approached and the two sides shook hands. One shot near the bottom of the page caused me to lean forward and bend close. The picture isolated the Outstanding Leader himself and the central figure of the smaller group. Even at a distance, I recognized the shape and the hair. The final picture was at maximum magnification and showed her profile, exactly as I remembered. Tucker tapped the picture twice.

  “It appears as though Aphrodite is exercising some of that power you say she doesn’t want.”

  I grinned. I tried not to, but I wasn’t strong enough. “Son of a bitch,” I whispered.

  “According to our North Korean assets, she stayed just over two hours, then left with her party. Two days later, backdoor channels to the UN magically open up, and the Korean Central News Agency makes their announcement. I find it highly unlikely these events are unrelated. Would you agree?”

  “Oh, I most wholeheartedly agree.”

  “Which brings us to the reason for my visit. We have a problem.” Tucker closed the folder. I slowly rose and turned toward the kitchen sink, choking off laughter as I looked out the window at two nervous soldiers peering back. So she’d decided to get in the game and make the world a better place—my first thought was Good for you. Give ’em hell, Lyla. Unfortunately, my second thought came from the cynical bastard within: The world tends to beat the shit out of Good Samaritans. Which made the smile easier to hide.

  I turned back to Tucker with folded arms.

  “So let me get this straight . . . your big problem, the one that caused you and Mr. Sleepy over there to fly halfway across the continent, is that Lyla single-handedly removed one of the world’s biggest threats to peace and stability? At a cost of zero dollars and zero collateral damage? Is that about right? Because honestly, I’m surprised you didn’t ask her to do this yourself a long time ago.”

  “If we had asked Ms. Ravzi, I’d shake her hand, thank her for the service, and send her on her way. But that’s the point. We didn’t ask. We don’t even know how to contact her. She went off the reservation a long time ago. And while this little ‘Save the World’ stunt looks good on paper, I get paid to look at the big picture—what gets affected down the line. And I’m very concerned about what happens down that path, as are the CIA and the Department of Defense.” The unflappable Mr. Tucker started to raise his voice. “And the fact that you’re barely hiding your glee at what she’s done, frankly, pisses me off.”

  I heard metal clacking and shuffling footsteps as the soldiers grew more alert. Tucker was on a roll and saw no need to put them at ease.

  “You think she’s done the world a favor? Fine. I’ll agree with you. But what does she do next week? Now that she’s seen what a little lovey-dovey visit with a world leader can accomplish, where does she go next? Because I promise you, she won’t stop with North Korea. She’s gotten a taste of true power—world player style—and that sort of thing changes everyone. If I’ve learned anything as an intelligence operative it’s this: people become ravenous once they’ve had a taste of power . . . even the ones who swear they have no appetite for it. I’ve seen it in pencil-pushing, family-man diplomats who get control of some shit-pot hovel in Africa. Big on promises, bright future, freedom and liberty for all . . . and in five years, The Hague wants them for genocide. And did any of them have even a thousandth of the power Lyla Ravzi has?”

  “Lyla is nothing like those dictators,” I said.

  “No. She’s worse. Not just because of what she can do, but because of who she is.”

  He thumbed through the thick folder, letting the pages zip between his fingers.

  “It’s all over her psych profile—the one analysis she actually let us perform—she’s always been the riskiest of you all. You know why? Because she’s an idealist. Ms. Ravzi sees the world as it should be, not as it is. She has grandiose ideas about equality and justice, but neither the patience nor the practicality to understand concepts like compromise. That may sound fine to naïve purists, but trust me, compromise is the one reason this planet is not a giant glowing cinder after the last half century.”

  His assessment scared me a little because he was so damn correct, more than he even knew. Lyla was almost childlike in her black-and-white view. It was one of the reasons I’d been so taken with her—but when you extrapolated her value set upon the entire world, Tucker’s fears looked a lot less paranoid.

  “Just think,” he continued. “What’s to stop her from paying a visit to the president of the United States, thirty or forty senators, and a handful of governors? She’s always hated violence—maybe she decides, ‘Gosh, we don’t need guns anymore, time to ditch the Second Amendment.’ Funny, right? Well, the joke’s on you, America, because Aphrodite can make it happen.”

  He paused only long enough to run his fingers through his short hair.

  “And I assume you know about her other problem. After she ‘releases’ someone.”

  “No,” I lied.

  “Our scientists call it the ‘hangover.’ Severe depression with feelings of emptiness and longing. There’s an entire section devoted to it,” Tucker said while letting a fifty-page chunk of the file ruffle through his fingers. “Since almost every scientist personally experienced the effect, their descriptions were quite detailed. Nauseatingly so.” He closed the folder and pushed it aside like a trashy romance novel. “Her control doesn’t last forever, and whether she does it on purpose by letting go, or it simply . . . wears off . . . the hangover can be brutal. How do you think our new friend in North Korea will react when the bill finally comes due on what Ms. Ravzi has done? How smart is it to make men with the capacity for global destruction into the equivalent of wounded, heart-stricken teenagers? Is it still funny to you, Mr. McAlister?”

  It was so tragically unfunny, I felt nauseous. My initial delight in seeing the all-powerful CIA puppet masters upstaged by a five-foot-six, 120-pound brunette had vanished. Tucker was a complete and utter jackass, but also an intelligent jackass—because he was right. Not about fantasies of Lyla undermining the Constitution or throwing a democracy into turmoil—it took too many people and left far too much to chance. But a totalitarian state was different. Lyla’s effect didn’t last forever, and no matter how good she was at manipulation, putting nuclear-equipped dictators on the edge of emotional collapse was worse than irresponsible. It was criminal. And Tucker was spot-on when he said she wouldn’t stop, because I knew if she was willing to take on the North Koreans, her own birthplace wouldn’t be far behind. Her next stop would be Iran, a home she hated—and embracing one person wouldn’t be enough this time. She’d need the president, the mullahs, the Ayatollah . . . so many potential problems, each one a fuse that could spontaneously ignite once her power wore off.

  Dammit, Lyla, it’s so YOU—everything is simple, do the right thing, change the world. No thought beyond the immediate goal, no plan for the future.

  A furrowed brow and wandering eyes broadcast my thoughts. Tucker dropped his bluster.

  “You know I’m right. I
can see it. Scott, I’m not the bad guy here . . . I want what you want,” he said.

  “Let me guess: a better, safer tomorrow for all Americans. The CIA was always big on that.”

  He looked like he smelled a skunk.

  “I don’t give a damn about a safe world, because it will never be. I’ll settle for the next-best thing: a predictable one. An active, idealistic Aphrodite makes the world far too unstable to predict anything. Which is why we need you.”

  I found my chair again and slumped into the seat.

  “You want me to stop her,” I said quietly.

  “Don’t be so dramatic. We need you to find her . . . talk to her. She respects your authority, your wisdom—or at least she used to—and that’s far more than we have in our pocket right now. Once you achieve contact, make every effort to bring her back into the fold. Ms. Ravzi could be wondrously effective if used in a focused, targeted manner—rather than this ‘civilization’s Good Samaritan’ ridiculousness.”

  “I hope you’re willing to settle for less than that,” I said.

  “Yes, I can imagine she’d be unwilling to join us again. Trust me, we’d be satisfied if she’d merely abandon her quest, however far-ranging it may be.”

  “What if I can’t find her?”

  “Then we’ll have to take other measures to solve this problem.”

  “What kind of measures?” I said, struggling to stop my fists from clenching.

  “The kind that offer a zero percent chance of Ms. Ravzi being useful in the future. That’s the reason we came to you first. You succeed, everyone wins. You fail, well then . . . we’ll still win, but certainly not in an optimal way.”

  I chuckled. “Terminating Lyla might be a lot harder than you think.”

  “With all due respect, you are not the only meta-human vulnerable to a sniper rifle.”

  I couldn’t stop from making fists after that. He was right. He knew I’d do whatever I could to find her, if not for the world’s sake, then certainly for hers. He’d read the psych and behavioral files well, and knew there was more to me and Lyla than just the bond between teammates—something we’d gone to great pains to conceal. No matter.