By this time, Hank was used to spending a lot of time in hotel rooms; the bane and the benefit of his position. His services were increasingly in demand around the country, sometimes around the world, and that required extended stays. He was intimately familiar with every pillow mint mankind had to offer, every trial size of shampoo, aftershave, toothpaste, and other personal effects. At one point, during a dreary stay in New Jersey, he had even amused himself with soap bar measurements and foam analysis. The Jefferson-A Loews Hotel in Washington DC was so familiar to him that the staff knew him by name.
And yet, for all the familiarities, there were so many differences. This time he was sharing the suite with Isidro, and they were both the guests of the US Government, important witnesses to what was turning out to be a very, very complex breach of national security. This time there were plainclothes agents everywhere, infiltrating the staff right from upper management down to housekeeping. This time there were cameras in the rooms, and countersurveilance cars parked outside. The bath was the only place either man had any privacy at all. And the bath was where Hank was at the moment.
"You know she's due here any minute, right, Hank?" Isidro called.
Hank shut off the electric razor. "Yes, I know. But considering the rate at which my hair grows, I need to keep this in check before I turn into either a werewolf or a computer programmer."
Isidro laughed. "All the coders I know are clean-shaven."
There was a knock at the door, followed by familiar feminine voice. "Everyone decent in there?"
Hank stepped out of the bathroom as he called, "We're clothed, at least."
Agent Gloria Angstrom opened the door and walked into the room, closing the door behind her with accustomed swiftness. Though relatively young when lined up against her peers, she was pushing 40 that year, and the laugh lines were starting to show. Almost old enough, as she so put it, to be Isidro's mother. And counting her "apprenticeship" in high school, she had been in the FBI for as long as Isidro had been alive. She was dressed professionally, in a dark, street length skirt with coordinating blouse and blazer. Her gun was hidden in there somewhere.
She glanced at the drawn curtains and sighed. "You pay through the nose for the view, and you have to keep the place shut up tight as a drum. Sometimes I hate this business."
She moved to the table along with the two men. Hank held out her chair, and even offered to call up for coffee, which she declined.
'I've had enough coffee to negate three whitening treatments by now," she said, her polite smile beginning to fade.
"Oh-ohh...." Hank pushed her chair in gently. "This sounds like we may be extending our stay further, depending on what you found...."
She sighed. "I don't think there's much more information we can wring out of the two of you right now, especially on this subject, but I'm going to try anyway. Have you ever heard of something called 'Project Wideawake'?"
Hank took his seat. "Wasn't it one of Stryker's projects?" She nodded, and he continued, "It wasn't the project, was it? The one that initiated this whole morass last year?"
She shook her head. "No, that was titled 'Cerebro II'. Stryker had a lot of pet projects floating around, it seems, and I have reason to believe some of them are so black they may actually qualify as earth-based singularities. But we can't get into his hard drive."
"You can't get in?" Hank repeated, disbelieving. "I don't understand. Did someone run some sort of virus on the machine between the 'visit' and your looting of Stryker's office?"
Her face twisted into something between a grimace and an ironic grin. "There's plenty who claim Xavier's people framed the good colonel for the entire Cerebro II incident and deliberately bollixed his hard drive to cover your tracks."
"If you were among them, I doubt we'd be having this polite conversation."
"Well, in my opinion, plenty of people are idiots. The problem with their comfortable little theory is that we did find collaboration between the hard and soft files, and we were able to crack Stryker's codes and start to pull things out. And then, mysteriously, the entire hard drive went missing. The hard drive, the backups, the hard copies. Everything. Whoosh. Gone."
Hank felt a cold shiver go down his back.
"Yes," Gloria continued. "How strange that it all disappeared in one of the most secure labs on the face of the free world. A more cynical woman would think someone upstairs had a few things to hide." She paused. "And a more loyal agent would never have mentioned these things to you."
Isidro leaned forward and rubbed his head. He was sweating already. "Please, dear God, someone tell me this was a break in."
"I wish I could, Mr. Delgado. But there are some things I'm just not willing to lie about. So I'm going to ask you, Mr. McCoy; do you know anything about Project Wideawake? At this point, I'm praying that you did something utterly illegal and made copies to cover your own interests."
Hank sighed. "I don't know a thing about Project Wideawake, Ms. Angstrom, but I'm going to see if anyone else does, as soon as I leave here. It seems that I may be back sooner than I expected."
Gloria gave a slight nod and a smile. "You may have made my year, Hank. You just may. And since you'll be leaving tonight, I have something for you to take back." She reached into her blazer and pulled out a blank, sealed envelope. "Inside this you will find full American citizenship for Kurt Wagner, right down to the social security number. We've even put in his permanent address at Xavier's Institute for Gifted Youngsters."
Hank hesitated, noting to the slight emphasis Gloria put on the word "permanent". Then he took the envelope from her hand.
Isidro gave a relieved sigh and leaned back in his chair, staring up at the ceiling. "And here I was afraid he'd be deported."
Both Gloria and Hank looked back at him with stony calm.
"He doesn't understand, does he?" she asked in a conversational tone.
"Apparently not," Hank replied. "I'll leave the explanation to you."
Ms. Angstrom sat in her seat, primly folded her hands in her lap, and leaned forward. "Mister Delgado, in many ways it would be much better for your friend if he was deported. What I handed to Hank isn't freedom: it's a leash. Despite the fact that Mr. Wagner was operating against his will, under the most extreme duress we've ever seen, he still has the ability to waltz into any sensitive area by sheer will alone. Because of him, we've got a few million dollars worth of 'redecorating' going on at the Oval Office. Those of us with brains have been thanking God that Stryker didn't simply want the President dead, because in that case Mr. Wagner would have been able to get in and out without being intercepted or seen.
"And that has us all very, very nervous, Isidro. Here we have a foreign national, capable of evading capture and bypassing national boundaries at his whim, without even many records from his home country, thanks to his gypsy upbringing. And now that he's gone to ground, we'll never find him again. Or will we? Why, yes; yes, we have. In fact, he's at the same spot that the very worrisome 'Cat Who Walks Through Walls' is staying at as well: a certain university in Westchester, and he seems comfortable enough to stay there. So let's encourage it.
"The public has not known about Professor Xavier's school until recently. And with any luck, we've squashed that as flat as we can. However, certain members of the 'inner circle' have known mutants were being schooled there for over a decade. It would have driven Stryker into a rage if he realized that the President of the United States knew something about the school by the time he'd approached him.
"Until last year, everything was in a state of equilibrium. We had concerns that combat training might be going on here, but we also knew that a well-placed daisy-cutter or MOAB could balance the equation. Even the ones who didn't trust mutants had to admit it was nice to have a single spot to watch." She sighed and rubbed her left temple. "Colonel Stryker didn't see it that way, so he took a page from General Lemnitzer's book, with one big difference. Once Kennedy found out about Operation Northwoods he put Lemnitzer on a short leash; Stryker didn't give us the chance. And this little Black Op spread much, much farther than Cuba.
"But as Professor Charles Xavier has been uncommonly forthright with us, I think it's only right that we compromise as well. He didn't have to show up with Mr. Wagner in the Oval Office during that announcement, nor did he have to mention Katherine Pryde's influence. Some see saber-rattling: others see a polite notification that two security threats are now contained in his school, and can be monitored by anyone who cares to look. It's all how you see things, gentlemen. In any case, the last thing we can afford is out-and-out war with part of our own population." She stood up, and the other two men stood with her. "Besides: to justify a war with the so-called 'X-men', we'd have to give a reason, which would lead to Stryker's manipulations, then Alkali lake, and eventually we'd have to explain where Stryker's funds came from, and why his machine attacked millions of foreign nationals as well. And that would be such a sticky geopolitical situation...."
Hank cocked an eyebrow. "Surely everyone else has noticed the casualty figures radiate out from one particular spot in Canada?"
"Oh, yes, they have, but so far they don't have the proof that this had either mutant involvement or official sanction, so they're keeping their grumbles to a minimum."
"And if that proof ever surfaced, mutants wouldn't be the only ones on the chopping block," Isidro finished softly.
Gloria patted Isidro on the arm. "You learn fast, young grasshopper."
"I wish I didn't," Isidro replied. He was having a difficult time meeting Gloria's gaze. "This makes me feel like I need a shower."
"And that revulsion is what's going to make you a damn fine cop when you graduate."
"You... you still want me to go into the force? Even with my...." He gestured helplessly with his hands. "Mutant experience?"
"We have millions of police that have no mutant 'contamination', but precious few with first person experience. And unless we can reverse those numbers, what happened in Boston last year will only be the start of the kind of urban unrest and damage unseen since the Watts riots. You're going to finish your law enforcement training, and then you're getting placed where you're going to do the most good, because despite what the FOH thinks, we need people like you."
She gently steered him to the door, where Hank was already waiting. "Now, we've got a dinner date that I know Henry has been looking forward to for a while."
"Indeed!" Henry said. "I've been hoping to speak with Moira on a few of her theories for a while now."
He opened the door for his two comrades.
"And I assume you'll leave poor Nathan out in the cold again?" Gloria chided playfully.
"Let's just say he isn't nearly as cute."
All out. Door closed.
------
And down the street, in another hotel room with drawn curtains, a cleaning maid sat on the bed with what seemed to be a small transistor radio in her hand, listening in with a single earphone.
"Contact Mr. Sinister," the voice finished. "Advise of situation. Extraction necessary."
She lifted the small, disguised transmitter to her lips. "Acknowledged," she replied softly.
She sighed, shook her head, pulled out a cell phone from her pocket and dialed something much more complex than even an international phone number. Despite the ease with which roving calls could be intercepted, this was one conversation that would remain private.
It rang once before being answered by a modulated, serene, androgynous voice. "State the emergency"
"Sir, it is believed that you are in immediate danger of discovery."
Pause. "What leads to this assumption?"
"First, it appears that Stryker's files did have backups out of our reach. Apparently, Xavier managed to copy the hard drive. They're not sure how, sir."
"This was a known possibility, and not enough to warrant this conversation."
"Yes, sir. However, someone is also launching an assault on our servers. They began by using passwords assigned to roving base three, which has been incommunicado for over 36 hours now."
"Where was roving base three assigned during that time?"
The maid drew in a deep breath. "They were doing a shakedown of Unit 6, when they detected interference by the X-men. Unit six' cockpit was all that the hounds could send back, and there wasn't much left of it, either."
There was silence on the other end of the line.
"A lot of our email server was compromised before they shut it all down," she went on. "MIS guarantees that your involvement will be traced. It's just a matter of when they can relay the information to the right people."
Despite the modulation, the androgynous voice actually sounded a bit stressed. "What are they proposing?"
"An extraction, sir. Before Henry McCoy can contact Xavier and exchange information."
"And this will be the precise extraction we previously discussed?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Do it."
End conversation. The maid placed the cell phone back in her pocket, then turned the tiny communication relay to a local station and reclipped it to her lapel. She pulled the vacuum cleaner off her cart, and began to clean the room.
TBC....