Surely there was another cargo plane somewhere in the world that had plush ergonomic seating in buttery white leather, beautiful carpeting and fancy paneling with gold accents. Big screen television sets and a minibar in the corner.
Elliot hadn’t seen the bedrooms or the gourmet kitchen or the promised, specially-loaded lab. But after seeing this particular room, he had no doubt they were somewhere on board. The sitting room was at least located directly next to the bridge, so Elliot could see and hear Daria chortle happily to herself from the pilot’s seat.
“Might want to strap in,” she called back, cheerful and excited. “I have no idea how this is going to go.”
Elliot quickly sat across from O’Leary. “I thought you said this thing has autopilot.”
“Autopilot,” scoffed Daria.
O’Leary smiled fondly. “As if I’d deny her the chance to fly my new toy. Do be careful, Daria. Destroying one plane is quite enough for the week.”
“Sorry,” called Daria. She didn’t sound repentant in the least.
Elliot frowned. “You mean the jet? That was DVM property.”
“You really think your government is going to pay for a private jet for an agency they won’t even admit exists? No, don’t answer that question. You also think the DVM is good.”
“We are,” insisted Elliot.
O’Leary gave Elliot a wearying glance as the plane’s engines began to warm up. “I thought DVM analysts were meant to be clever.”
Elliot frowned. “How’d you know I’m an analyst?”
O’Leary shook his hand. “You have that look. Though you’re quite a bit more assertive than I would have thought.”
The plane paused for a moment, vibrating gently with the normal engines, an entirely familiar sensation that still had Elliot somewhat nervous.
Then Daria started the thrusters she’d been so excited to use. They were enormously loud and powerful; the entire plane shook with the force of them. Blowback from the flames skirted red and orange at the edge of the windows.
The plane shot forward with a jerk, faster and faster, until it zoomed right out of the landing bay. Sunlight flooded the cabin, and the plane itself dropped some twenty feet before curving straight up into the sky.
Daria let out an excited shriek from the cockpit, while Elliot’s knuckles went bone-white as he gripped the arms of his seat.
“This is fucking awesome!” she yelled.
“I hate your definition of awesome!” Elliot yelled back.
They were airborne—clouds whipping by the windows until Daria leveled them off. Elliot assumed it was at 30,000 feet. He didn’t know, didn’t care, and didn’t plan to remove his seatbelt long enough to check.
He only stopped looking out the windows when the tray appeared in front of him. O’Leary set down a tumbler of amber liquid, complete with ice and a cherry on a stick. “You look like you could use a drink,” he said, his own drink in hand.
Elliot ignored the drink. He unlocked his seat, mentally thanking Anthony for teaching him that trick, and spun to face O’Leary head-on. O’Leary was already watching at him, as if he anticipated Elliot’s interest. Half his drink was already gone.
“Why did you want to come along?” asked Elliot.
O’Leary raised an eyebrow. “You wanted to arrest me. Perhaps I’m curious why.”
Elliot snorted. “Because you’re funding Cicero?”
“Am I?” asked O’Leary mildly.
Elliot’s eyes narrowed. “If this is a ploy to get me to tell you how much I know—”
O’Leary chuckled. “You are clever. All right. Perhaps it is. Perhaps I just want my photograph back.”
He motioned to the photograph sitting on Elliot’s lap. Elliot glanced down and a few dozen schoolboys looked back at him.
Winston.
“How well did you know Winston Eames?”
“Oh, Winston,” mused O’Leary. He sat back. “He was my first roommate in school. Only for a few weeks, understand; he moved back to the United States after a single term. But good man, Winston. Even by your standards.”
“My standards?”
“The DVM’s of course. Say what you like about Winston, everything he did, he did for the betterment of the world.” O’Leary took another drink.
“And you were chums with Cicero, too?”
O’Leary gave him a sharp look. “I’d have thought you’d known all this. Seeing as how Winston was one of you in the end.”
“Maybe I don’t,” said Elliot. “Maybe I’m just guessing that you three were collaborating for years, and I’m hoping you’re going to call my bluff and tell me everything. Or, maybe I know every single fucking detail of your entire life and I’m just checking to see how willing you are to cooperate. You’ll find out which it is eventually.”
O’Leary chuckled. “Oh, I suspect it’s somewhere in between. No matter. The truth shall set you free and all that, don’t you agree? Syl and I went to school together. Not that we were friends, mind you. But we knew of each other. It would have been impossible not to know Syl. Of course, he was just garden-level mad then. The worst he did was typical boarding school shenanigans. Filling the teacher’s lounge with water balloons, rigging the school’s intercom to play Disco Inferno every hour on the hour, changing all the grass to neon pink the day before Founder’s Day... that sort of nonsense.”
It sounded like things Cicero might have done, even. “None of that sounds evil.”
“Of course not. We were boys. His only goal was to disrupt the drudgery of boarding school life. To make all of us laugh with his whimsey and intelligence. And he did—he was very good at that.” O’Leary leaned back, smiling fondly. “We all predicted great things for him. But ten years later, when we had a reunion—he didn’t appear. None of us had heard a word about him. I was curious. Bored. So I went looking.”
O’Leary took a drink; Elliot filled in the rest. “You found him.”
“Of course I did. He was living in some hovel in the back of beyond, because he couldn’t keep a job for antagonizing his superiors. So I brought him under my wing. After all—you nurture genius, and say what you will about Syl—he’s a genius. I gave him a place to devise his ideas, money to buy his supplies... and the promise that he would always give me his ideas first, before implementing them.”
“And you used his ideas to make your fortune,” realized Elliot.
“Not everything he invented could destroy the world. It only needed someone to see the potential for good,” explained O’Leary. “I curbed his more dangerous impulses, and his ideas made me rich. It was a very symbiotic relationship.”
Was. “And then Winston showed up again,” said Elliot. “Did he find you, or did you find him?”
“A little of both, I imagine,” said O’Leary carefully. “I might have been Winston’s roommate, but he and Syl were closer. It was a bit of a shock for Syl, to realize that Winston might not approve of his more... destructive tendencies.”
“But you tried to reign him in,” said Elliot. “I saw video where you and Mastermind talked about controlling him—”