Robert Crane - Untouched

“I’m sorry,” I interrupted again. “But you guys had a chance to go a few rounds with him down in South America, as I recall, and it’s all well and good that you captured him, but it seems like the nuclear option wasn’t on the table for him back then, for whatever reason. Now it is.” I turned around to find Bastian staring at me, along with Parks, while Kappler glared and Clary looked on with a kind of cluelessness. “If you couldn’t take him down then, when he wasn’t up to using his full power, how are you going to do it now?”

Bastian turned to Parks, the wizened guy with his long, gray hair and goatee that looked like it was almost white. “This time,” he said in a gruff voice, “we get to kill him instead of playing the capture game, ma’am.”

“Oh, good,” I said, “you get to try and kill the walking nuclear bomb. That won’t piss him off at all.”

“We’ll kill him, ma’am.” Bastian’s voice was filled with conviction. Too bad it didn’t convince me. “With the kid gloves off, my team can take him down.”

“Glorious.” I’m pretty sure the wearying effect of the drug I’d been taking leeched any chance of me pulling off false sincerity, so I didn’t bother. “Couldn’t you maybe…I don’t know, lay the situation out for Kat and see what she thinks? She might consider it an acceptable risk to jump through his hoops for a bit to keep him from blasting the city into rubble.”

Old Man Winter’s reply was like a crack of thunder. “Placing her into that situation is unacceptably risky.”

“For her? Or for the city of Minneapolis?” I leaned forward, tossing all caution aside. “You’re playing a hell of a game here. You’re placing the survival of an entire city on the idea that these guys—no offense,” I waved vaguely at Kappler, who was still glaring at me, and the rest, sitting behind me, “can kill him before he can go critical. That’s a pretty big risk considering he dropped me off in the countryside, flew back to the detonation site and I bet he wasn’t there for more than ten seconds before he went off. That means if they err even slightly, a lot of people die.” I saw no change in any of the faces around me, except maybe Ariadne, who had grown slightly paler. “More than I let die, that’s for sure.”

Old Man Winter’s cold gaze burned over my head to Bastian. “You have your orders.”

I bit my lip and wrenched myself to my feet. “I sense my presence is no longer needed here. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go find a quiet place to hide until the atomic apocalypse is over.” I didn’t exactly storm out, but I did break the door behind me. Because of my super-strength, not because I was in a snit. Well…maybe a little bit of both.

I seethed in the hallway and all the way down to the lobby, which was quiet save for a few guards standing around. Different than agents, they wore tactical vests and held submachine guns slung across their chests. A few of them had stood guard outside my door back when they held me in the basement room where Kat was currently residing. I wondered where they recruited all these yahoos. They should have given them all red shirts.

I started toward the front doors, intent on leaving, on running far, far away, wanting to go someplace where I’d never again have to be put in a position where all I could do was sit back and watch a massacre take place. I slammed into the glass doors at the front of Headquarters, sending them rattling open on their hinges. I would have been far more satisfied if they had broken, but apparently they were designed to be abused by metas, because they started to pull shut on their own.

I stood outside, sucking in the cold air. It all came down to power—it always did. With Wolfe, I didn’t think I had the power to face him, to beat him. It turned out I did, but I didn’t know that at the time. Now, with Gavrikov…I was really unsure. It wouldn’t take him much to vaporize me if he got pissed, that was certain after what I saw him do in Glencoe.

But what if Kat was with me? I thought about it a little harder. He wanted to save her, to keep her safe, more than anything. If I took her to the rendezvous point, I could get close to him, maybe stop him. I stared at my hands. It didn’t have to be for good, just long enough to get him contained again. I cringed. In another one of those boxes. Surely I could keep him out of sorts until the Directorate could find a way to crate him up again. I didn’t like that option, but I liked it better than the thought of him waltzing away with Kat, who didn’t even know him, or letting M-Squad and that assclown Clary take a crack at him, or worse, letting him level Minneapolis.

To save the city, to make amends for what I had let happen with Wolfe, I was going to have to consign Aleksandr Gavrikov to a fate I was all too familiar with—confinement in a coffin-like containment chamber. A box of his very own.

I cursed the irony of the whole situation, of how it had all played out. I turned back to Headquarters, studying it and wondering how I was going to make this work, when I heard the scuff of a shoe behind me and turned, ready to strike—

Scott Byerly stood there, hands in front of him. “Whoa, I’m just here to visit Kat,” he said, circling around me toward the Headquarters building.

What was it he had said about writing me that note? “Hey,” I said. “You have family in Minneapolis?”

He stopped, turned back to me. “Yeah, my whole family is from around here. Why?”

I steeled myself for what I was about to have to do. “Just thought you might want to know—the guy that blew up the science lab?”

He furrowed his brow. “Gavrikov, wasn’t it? Russian guy?”

“Yeah,” I said. “He just nuked Glencoe, you know, that town west of here.”

Scott’s face paled, his dark complexion going white. “I heard about that earlier. I didn’t know it was him.”

“Yeah, well…” I tried not to belabor the point, but I wanted to draw him in a little, “…I was there when it happened. He did it as a warning to us—to show us what would happen to Minneapolis if we didn’t bring Kat to him by tomorrow morning at six.”

“Excuse me?” The reaction was immediate. His jaw clenched, he took a step toward me, his fist balled up. “He threatened the city?”

“Said he’d nuke it to the ground,” I said. “Bye-bye, City of Lakes.”

He turned without saying anything else, started to stalk off. “Where are you going?” I asked.

“To stop him,” he tossed back.

I ran after him. “Wait. You can’t just attack the guy, he’d turn you into the stuff you find in the bottom of a microwave.”

Byerly stopped, but the fury was still evident on his face. “What, then?”

“Well,” I said, “M-Squad and the boys have a kill order—”

“Not good enough,” he said and started to walk again. I reached out and grabbed his arm, keeping my grip firm enough to catch his attention but not enough to spin him around. He did that on his own, looking like he was ready to explode on me, his face red, his eyebrows locked into forty-five degree angles, and his mouth in a thin, downturned line.

“Whoa!” I held my hands out in a gesture of peace. “I’m with you on this one. I think M-Squad is gonna foul it, big time. I mean, if you heard about how things went for them in South America, or you’ve had five minutes to consider that Clary is the linchpin of their strategy, you recognize that giving them this shot means that you’re basically comfortable with turning Minneapolis into a burning wasteland. Which I am not,” I said, trying to reassure him and dislodge his angry face. “But you can’t just charge after him without a strategy.”

“I have a strategy,” he said in a kind of roar. I took a step back, more out of concern for his safety than mine. “I find Gavrikov and I drown his ass.”