After the Golden Age Read online

  That added a new loop to the knot, didn’t it?

  So the pardons were Mayor Paulson’s idea? But why? Was there a reason other than funding? Where was the conspiracy, except in her own mind? And wasn’t that healthy?

  She called Mark. The phone rang and rang; either he wasn’t around, or he was still screening calls from her. She left a message.

  “Hi, Mark. It’s me, whether or not you want to hear from me. If you’ve got the time I’ve got some research for you. I think I have the connection between all your Strad Brothers and Baxter Gang suspects. They all received pardons from Governor Snyder, at the suggestion of Mayor Paulson. Maybe you can figure out what your father was thinking. Look up these articles from the Banner.” She gave him the dates and references. Mark was a smart guy. Surely he’d give her a reasonable explanation for the so-called coincidence.

  When she set off for West Plaza an hour later, she took a cab. It was much later than she’d intended; the research had drawn her in. She’d get lectured for it. Maybe she could distract her parents with the information she’d dug up.

  The guard sitting at the front desk was a young man with an earnest expression. She leaned on the granite surface of the desk.

  “Can I help you?” the guard said.

  “Can you tell me when Damon Parks comes on duty?”

  “Who?”

  “Damon Parks. The security guard who works the evening shift here.”

  “Oh, the old guy. I’m sorry, ma’am. He handed in his resignation today. Is there something I can help you with?”

  Parks had planned it this way all along.

  “Do you have a home phone number for him or something? I really need to get in touch with him.”

  “I’m not sure I can give out that information—”

  He’s the Hawk, goddamn it! she wanted to shout, but didn’t.

  “Celia?”

  That reflexive chill she always got at the sound of her father’s voice crawled up her spine. She repressed the shiver and turned around. Warren West, looking shockingly normal in a gray business suit, had entered the lobby through the front door and was walking toward her.

  The security guy stood at attention. His eagerness cranked up about ten notches, which Celia hardly thought possible.

  “Mr. West, sir, welcome back, sir!”

  “Thanks, Joe.” Warren smiled warmly at the security guard, who seemed to be on the edge of actually swooning. The smile fell when he looked back at Celia. “Robbie says you have a story to tell.”

  “Um, yeah.”

  “I’ll walk you upstairs.”

  In silence, they entered the private elevator that went straight to the penthouse. As the elevator began its ascent, she stole sideways glances at her father, who focused his gaze intently on the digital numbers flashing the changing floors.

  He wasn’t going to believe what had happened. None of them would. Well, Arthur would.

  She closed her eyes and calmed herself. Her father chose that moment to speak.

  “Are you all right?”

  She needed a moment to process the question. She wasn’t used to him sounding so genuinely … concerned.

  “Yeah,” she said at last. “It happened so quickly it barely registered.”

  “Good, I’m glad. I mean, I’m glad you’re all right.”

  “Thanks.”

  The elevator stopped and opened.

  The penthouse doors swung in from the elevator lobby. Warren walked with her into the foyer and around the corner to the kitchen. They were there, the whole Olympiad. All wore civilian clothes. It might have been a casual supper party. Suzanne paced along the edge of the kitchen. Robbie leaned against the counter, his arms crossed. Arthur Mentis sat at the table. He smiled at her.

  Suzanne’s expression melted when Celia appeared. Celia met her mother halfway and hugged her, before she could burst into tears.

  “Celia, we expected you hours ago! Are you all right? Are you hurt? What happened?”

  “Shaken, not stirred,” Celia said weakly. “I’m fine.”

  “Have you eaten? I can heat up some lasagna—”

  Of course she could. “That sounds great. Thanks.”

  So the meeting of the Olympiad commenced at the kitchen table, over lasagna.

  “I’ve walked on that grate a hundred times,” Celia said. “Who knew it could even move? The whole thing was planned to the second. Even if you’d gotten down to the tunnel, I wasn’t there anymore. He moved me into a side room.”

  “I know,” Robbie said. “I did get down there.”

  “Do you know who did it?” Suzanne said.

  Celia took a deep breath. “It was the Hawk.”

  They stared at her.

  “Are you crazy?” her father said.

  “How do you know it was him?” Suzanne asked.

  She produced the gauntlet from her attaché and laid it on the table before them.

  Warren picked it up first, studying every inch of the leather, fingering the embroidered hawk. The leather was worn, stained with sweat and age, the stitching around the fingers frayed, and scuffed patches showing around the thumb and pads of the palm. The embroidery was also frayed, loose-colored threads poking up. The glove was old, used.

  “Could it be a fake?” Arthur asked.

  “It’s something the Hawk would have done,” Celia said.

  “He hasn’t been active in twenty years,” Warren said.

  “I believed him,” Celia said. She didn’t have to reveal who he was. They’d all assume he’d been in costume, with the mask. “He gave this to me.”

  She produced the folder with the newspaper clippings. Her parents and Robbie gathered around the open file, sorting through the clippings, their expressions growing more confused as the moments passed. Arthur didn’t bother looking; he watched her. He could learn everything he needed to from her roiling thoughts. She tried to stay calm, for his sake.

  Celia said, “It’s the connection between the robberies we’ve been looking for.”

  “But it doesn’t go anywhere,” Robbie said. “Does it? It’s a coincidence. It has to be. Unless you’re saying Snyder is the mastermind?” The possibility seemed ludicrous. Governor Snyder came across as being harmless, if ineffectual.

  Arthur crossed his arms, which made him look hunched-in and thoughtful. “These names—they’re all suspects that have been arrested in connection with the spate of robberies. They have no other prior relationship to each other. They weren’t part of the same gang before, they didn’t serve prison time together. They’re not second cousins. The one commonality are these pardons. The idea of Snyder being involved in this—it’s improbable, not impossible. We have to consider it.”

  “Not Snyder,” Celia said, “Paulson.” She showed them the last article she’d discovered, and the buried information that Paulson had been the one to suggest the pardons as a way to help balance the budget. But she wondered if he might not also have suggested the names of inmates to be pardoned.

  The group needed a moment to process this. Celia waited.

  “It might not be him,” Suzanne said. “It could be someone associated with his office. Someone else pulling the strings.”

  “Do we trust the information?” Arthur asked.

  “They’re newspaper clippings; I verified them all,” Celia said. “The Hawk just left the clues, but we’re drawing our own conclusions. That’s what we have to trust.”

  “All right, then,” Suzanne said. “What do we know about Anthony Paulson?”

  “He’s got a son on the police force,” Celia said, unable to keep the bite out of her voice.

  “He’s on his second term of office, and is running for a third,” Arthur said.

  Warren leafed through the clippings. “Arthur, have you ever read anything off him?”

  “I’ve never tried. I can’t recall ever being in the same room with him. You three always handle the public appearances.”

  “Maybe you ought to arrange a meetin
g.”

  “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.

  —Or not.—

  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 bi
ological 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?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. We collected everything we could about him. As much good as it did in the end. Why?”

  “No reason. Curiosity.”

  “Something to do with one of your sources?” Arthur said. He’d be perfectly justified in telling on her. He had to know what she was thinking. Either it was a measure of his trust that he said nothing—or he thought the idea was as outlandish as she did.

  “Something like that,” she said.

  “You’ll need access to the computer. You should have access to the computer, if you think it’ll help.” Suzanne gazed at Celia, bright-eyed and earnest.

  She meant the Olympiad computer. As much raw computing power as Warren West’s fortune could buy, and the Olympiad database, which held information available from no other source. She meant free access to the command room to use the computer.

  Suzanne glanced at Warren, who pursed his lips, and while he didn’t nod or give wholehearted assent, he didn’t argue. Didn’t say no.

  “Okay. If you think it’s best,” Celia said, a little breathlessly.

  “You might need something, and if none of us is around—” Her mother smiled. It was like she’d been waiting for years to give Celia access to the command room. To initiate her into the club.

  No one was protesting.

  Suzanne brought her to the main terminal and had her put her thumb on a scanner, to record her print, to confirm her authorization. The computer accepted her with glowing green lights.