Chapter 26: Discoveries
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Captain Marvel turned to me as we listened to the soldiers entering next door.
"What do we do now?"
"Find Pete Ross."
"But how?" Gypsy asked.
I smiled and held up the invisible plane held it between my fingers. "With my invisible plane."
"We can't fit into that," Gypsy complained.
"We don't have to," I told her. "Invisible plane, locate President Peter Ross and then return here as quickly as possible."
"Acknowledged," came the tiny voice and the plane zipped out of my hand and through the hole in the wall that Gypsy was disguising. The soldiers on the other side, of course, did not notice it.
I turned to the others. "Now we wait."
"It'd better not be for long," warned Gypsy. I nodded. Events were moving rapidly towards a denouement. If we were to influence the outcome, we needed to act quickly.
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The senior senator from Georgia looked up into the concerned gazes of his colleagues.
"What happened? Where am I?"
"Take it easy, Phil, you took a bad spill. And if it hadn't been for that young lady, you'd probably be dead."
The senator's eyes went round. "I would? What young lady?" He got, rather unsteadily to his feet. "This isn't the Capitol."
The others looked nonplussed. The senator absently scratched at the back of his neck. Finding a bump he didn't expect, his fingers – almost of their own volition – dug in and tore off the false skin.
One of his colleagues noticed. "Hey! That looks like the mind control device they found on the dead HDC soldier!"
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The Mad Hatter led Robin, Zatanna and Jason Blood into an adjacent room. In a corner, on a stool and wearing a tall dunce's cap, Jakeem Williams was staring at a pen filled with pink phosphorescent ink and muttering, over and over again, "Say you, say you."
He saw the Mad Hatter and jumped up from the stool, knocking his hat off in the process. "What did you do to me, you #&$?" he demanded.
The Mad Hatter took a step back. Robin grabbed Jakeem by the shoulder before he could throw himself at the Mad Hatter. "Calm down, Jakeem."
"You don't understand. The last thing I remember is this ##$& putting this silly hat on me and now the Thunderbolt won't listen to me."
"Listen to me: Antiestablishmentarian Goodfellows."
"What the #$? Hey, what's the matter with me? I've been using his old name, not his new one! So cool!"
The Thunderbolt leaped out of the pen. "Hey, Jakeem, what kept you?"
"#$ if I know. You see that $##er?" He pointed at the Mad Hatter. "I want you to ..."
"Wait!" Robin jumped in front of Jakeem. "We have more important things to do. We need the Thunderbolt to find President Ross and bring him here."
"President Ross? What happened to President Luthor?"
"It's a long story. Will you please tell him to get Ross?"
Jakeem looked mutinous, but said, "Ah, #$, sure, go do it Johnny."
In a flash of pink lightning, the Thunderbolt vanished. The Mad Hatter looked around nervously. "We must flee," he stated, "ere the Jabberwock returns." Everyone ignored him.
Zatanna turned to Robin. "So Batman didn't steal away the Thunderbolt?"
Robin shook his head. "No, he planted a post-hypnotic suggestion which could be triggered remotely through a subcutaneous receiver. Oracle triggered it when Jakeem went missing."
Jakeem looked indignant. "You mean Batman and Oracle did this to me? I'm going to take those two #$#'s and ...."
"I wouldn't advise it," Robin told him. "Either one could take you and your Thunderbolt apart, if they really wanted to. And you would have been Luthor's puppet if they hadn't."
"Luthor? I thought Ross was president now?"
"It's a long story, Jakeem."
"A story," said the Mad Hatter anxiously, "best told elsewhere. We should be gone ere the Jabberwock appears."
"Who is this Jabberwock character he keeps talking about?" demanded Jakeem.
"I believe he means me," a familiar, mocking voice said from behind them.
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I opened my eyes as they set my stretcher down. The pain was less and I felt better for my short rest. I turned my head and saw that I was indeed in a command center of some sort, although all the monitor screens were black. A man stepped over in front of me.
"I'm John Jones, Secret Service."
I looked up at him in surprise but, no, J'onn was still back in Atlantis, trying to convince his body to stay together.
"Paul Ramirez, FBI." My voice was stronger, steadier. I didn't think I could get up off the stretcher without help, but that was still something.
"I understand you think you can help."
I nodded. "They have a Luthor clone."
Jones' eyebrows shot up at that. "You sure?"
"It looked like Luthor, talked like Luthor, could walk without assistance, although it had bandages on its chest where Luthor was burned. The real Luthor is still confined to a hospital bed, isn't he?"
"Yes. I'm in touch with his guards via walkie-talkie."
"Walkie-talkie?"
"All internal communications and security systems are down. Hell, everything connected to a computer is down."
That wasn't part of the plan. Neat trick, though.
"We tried," Jones continued, "doing a complete reboot of the entire system, reformatting all the hard drives and then reloading key software. But the virus just shut things down again. It must be on some computer we don't control that's been tied into the network. Every time we restart, it just loads itself into the system. Until we find and isolate that computer, we're stuck."
Suddenly, things clicked into place. Luthor must have planted a virus on the fake videodisc. That would be in character for him. Then Robin must have used his laptop to infect the White House computer network with it. Smart boy.
Jones had moved on to other things. "If they have a Luthor clone, maybe is whole thing is a set-up. They create a crisis to force the passage of the Emergency Powers Act. Then they set their clone up as puppet ruler of the United States."
I smiled. He had got it in one, even if he was mistaken about who 'they' were.
Jones looked at me. "What metas did you see with the clone?"
Sorry Superman, I thought, but if there are any Bizarros around, I have to implicate you. "Superman, Mad Hatter, Scarecrow, Dr. Moon."
"Not Wonder Woman?" he asked sharply. "She was reported to have entered that room."
"Didn't see her," I lied, "but I wasn't tracking too well towards the end."
"Hmm. I need our security systems up! We're running around blind!" He looked at me again. "There's some sort of ... force field ... around the broadcast control room. You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?"
I shook my head. "But I could take a look at it. I've seen a few strange things in my career. Maybe I'll recognize something about it."
Jones hesitated, then shrugged. "Sure, why not? Most of these HDC troopers are doing nothing useful, anyway. A couple of them can carry you over there. Take a walkie-talkie."
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The miniature invisible plane returned.
"It has found Pete Ross!" I told the others. "Gypsy, since the corridors are teaming with soldiers, you will have to hide us. I will carry you and Captain Marvel will follow close behind."
They both nodded. I picked up Gypsy and we started out.
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The Thunderbot returned, carrying the President of the United States. He lowered Ross to the ground and looked at the limp bodies on the floor, then over to the corner where Jakeem Williams sat.
"What happened to them, Jakeem? And why do you have that silly hat on?"
Jakeem turned his dead, soulless eyes on the Thunderbolt and intoned, "So Cool."
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The invisible plane guided us to a room containing a great deal of medical equipment with an examination couch (fitted with restraints) in the center. The Scarecrow and Dr. Moon were standing around the table, looking stunned. There was no sign of Pete Ross.
I pulled out my lasso and dropped a loop over the Scarecrow. "Was President Ross here?"
He nodded. "Until a moment ago. Then there was a flash of pink lightning," he giggled, "and he disappeared."
"That's the Thunderbolt," Captain Marvel informed us.
I nodded. "This is either very good news or very bad."
"In either case," Captain Marvel replied, "I see no point in leaving these villains conscious to cause more trouble." He reached out a hand towards Dr. Moon and, with a flick of a finger, knocked him out cold. I applied a nerve pinch to the Scarecrow and he dropped like a ton of bricks.
"Locate Jakeem Williams," I told the invisible plane, "and lead us to him."
Author's Notes: The Mad Hatter's victims are generally shown as having no memory of what they did while under his control. Jakeem Williams controls the Thunderbolt by saying its name backwards. Since the name consists solely of consonants, vowels can be randomly inserted without causing problems. In the "Justice For All" trade paperback, the original Thunderbolt merged with another of its kind, so its backwards name changed from "Say you" to "So cool". Jakeem had a foul mouth in "Justice For All". That pretty much disappeared when he joined the JSA, but I thought he might revert under stress.