Chapter 10

Secure Room

So I run to the window and call, "We're in SOAP Procedure, Superboy! Nobody on or off this island!"

"Huh? What?" Kon doesn't understand. "No landing? You know there's a helicopter coming in, right?"

"Oh, grife!" So I run out of the warden's office and vibrate through Susanna's door and sprint up the hallway and up all the stairs, and I'm running around the heliport on the roof of Alcatraz and waving my arms to stop the helicopter from landing 'cause even though it has U.S. MARSHALS markings now I know that Crosscut's insider might be inside the copter, but I'm just waving my arms and not making a whirlwind 'cause the JSO people inside the copter could be good guys after all, and I'm wondering how long I should keep the helicopter—

WHOMP!

"Dude! You're embarrassing us."

Kon's thick arms are around my chest, and now that he's grabbed me his tactile telekinesis won't let me vibrate away, and I can't even wriggle around to look at him, so I calmly explain:

"Crosscut has a helper! They blocked Robin's voicemail from a café! They took the psychologist lady, and now they might be up there!"

"Uh, yeah." But Kon's not letting go, and the helicopter's right over our heads getting in position to land, and he yells in my ear, "Does Vic know all that?"

"Of course he knows! He was right there!"

"Does Robin know?"

"Yeah, he—"

"So you can calm down, right? Play it cool."

And usually I don't think very long about anything Kon says, but this time he makes me remember that a smart detective would pretend that he hasn't deduced Crosscut had an helper inside the JSO so that insider couldn't know that the detective was on their trail, which Robin and I will be as soon as we figure where that trail is. So I stop wriggling, and Kon stops squeezing me, but he leaves one hand on my shoulder, and he's still using his annoying TTK, and finally the helicopter is touching down on the helipad, and the wind makes me think maybe I should have put goggles on my Kid Flash uniform, too.

And then three people come out of the helicopter. There's a lady with short gray hair and blue sunglasses and a blue suit, and there's a man with a brown crew cut and leathery skin and a bulge under his armpit that I deduce is a big handgun, and there's another man with straight black hair and silver sunglasses and a thick black briefcase in each hand. Plus I spot a pilot with a short gray beard inside the helicopter, still working on the controls to shut down the motor. None of them looks like Crosscut's helper, but of course that's just what an insider would look like.

As the lady walks by us, she says, "You fellows with the Titans?"

"Yes, ma'am," says Kon. "Kid Flash here was just making sure the helipad was clear."

"Oh, is that what he was doing?" asks the marshal with the crew cut, and he gives me a smirky look as he passes, and I want to say something nasty back, but Kon squeezes my shoulder and I can't think of anything to say anyway.

And by that time the warden and Vic are coming out of the stairwell, along with two guards in body armor carrying shock guns, and the warden says, "I'm Sam Easton, and this is Cyborg, head of the Titans."

"Janice Rawlins, Chief Marshal, Head of Regional Operations," says the lady, and she puts out her right hand to shake, and I wonder what Easton's going to do since he doesn't have a right hand, but then he grips Rawlins's right hand with his left, and the lady keeps talking as if that's ordinary. "Deputy Chief Marshal Frank Alioto. Marshall Gil Montez."

And each marshal nods at his name, and Cyborg and the warden nod back, and the warden says, "Frank," and the marshal with the crew cut says, "Sam," and by now they're all striding into the stairwell, and Kon and I follow after the marshal with the briefcases.

"I set up a command center in the secure room," says the warden, leading the way onto the top floor.

"Sounds good," says Rawlins. "Sorry about your guys."

"Sorry about yours."

"We're marshals, Warden," Rawlins snaps. "We don't give up looking for anyone until we see a body."

"Then let's get to work," says Easton, and he leads Rawlins and all of us into a big room on the floor above his office. It's got a big table and white boards on the walls like other meeting rooms, but it's also got no windows and armored electric cables, and a whole wall of television monitors showing Alcatraz from a dozen different angles, and four people in Alcatraz uniforms working on different computer controls.

Kon goes up to Vic and asks, "Do I need to be here? I could be out flying and helping Cassie find—"

"You sit down until you get an assignment," Vic orders, so fierce that I sit beside Kon in the seats along one wall.

And everybody else is finding seats around the table or standing near the screen, and Susanna the warden's assistant brings in a stack of papers that she hands to one of the guys in uniforms, and the marshal named Gil is pulling a laptop and another machine out of his briefcases and hooking them up, and the helicopter pilot comes in and sits down in one corner, and then Susanna leaves, and the guards shut the thick doors after her and lock them tight—and I look around and don't see Tim. For half a second I'm really worried, but then I deduce that Tim's still back at the warden's office fooling around with the warden's computer.

Kon is muttering real low to me: "I don't get why Vic's so pissed at me today. But what good can we do stuck in here?"

"What can we do? We can listen for clues about what Cross Cut's up to," I tell him, "and use those to figure out where he's going." Since Kon hasn't been working on this case as long as I have, I explain: "Anything might be a clue, and Robin says part of being a detective is spotting what's important—Oooh!"

And right then I realize how the Titans need a detective at this meeting, and since Tim is off playing computers, I can be that detective, and I can gather the facts and spot the clues and deduce where to find Cross Cut. I already helped to figure out how he wanted to come to Alcatraz and almost why he did, so how hard will the rest of this case be?