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Table of contents is here .


LAST TIME ON EMII:

This time, Johnson's expletive was almost shouted. "No! No way, man! I said I was dead before, but this... I'm not going to commit suicide!"

CJ shrugged his shoulders and stood up. "Your loss," he said, and turned as though to walk away.

One step.

Two steps.

Three.

Then... "Wait!"

CJ turned on his heel, a calculatedly slow movement. He looked down at Johnson, at his battered face, his beseeching eyes.

"What... what would I have to do?"

NOW READ ON...


CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO


The silence in the small apartment was oppressive, Lois thought. Or maybe that was just her. After all, the dark-haired officer with the camera – Plotnek, she remembered – seemed to have no problems with waiting patiently. Since Henderson's warning, he had just kept his right eye pressed against the viewfinder of the Nikon and watched the world go by.

There was a rustle of paper as the officer with the tape recorder flipped over a page of the dog-eared novel he was reading. She couldn't quite make out the title from where she was sitting, but from the illustration on the cover, which was comprised of silhouettes of a gun and a body, with a profusion of red splatters over them both, she assumed that it was a particularly sensational thriller. It wasn't her sort of thing at all.

Henderson, himself, was concentrating on the Daily Planet's crossword. From the look of things, he seemed to be doing fairly well, although three down remained stubbornly blank. She was tempted to ask if he needed any help but decided against it. For one thing, she doubted that she could do any better. For another, even she wasn't that bored. Yet.

She had just begun to draft the opening paragraphs of an article in her head when Plotnek suddenly spoke. "Heads up guys. I think we're in business."

Henderson quickly put the crossword to one side, looked at his watch, and said, "They're early."

Plotnek grunted an affirmative. "It's just Carnes and a man in a black Fedora at the moment. Wait a minute... The man... It's Luthor!"

"What?" snapped Henderson. "Are you sure?"

"Come and see for yourself."

The officer in charge of the recording equipment, whose name Lois had either missed or forgotten, flipped a few switches, and a crackle of dialogue burst out from a speaker.

"... a table for three." The voice was female and rich with a patronising superiority. Carnes, Lois presumed, and she wondered whether the woman was looking down her nose at the waitress as she spoke.

If so, the waitress was doing a good job of refusing to be bothered by it. Perkily, she said, "Certainly. Would you like smoking or non-smoking?"

"Non-smoking."

"This way, please."

Lois got to her feet, determined also to have a look. She hovered impatiently while Henderson took his own sweet time staring through the view finder.

Then he straightened and allowed Lois to take a turn.

By the time Lois got to see what was going on, Luthor and Carnes were seated at their table, one of about twenty inside a very chic café. The decor was modern, all white walls, hard chairs, chrome and stripped wood. That everything was visible through floor to ceiling glass windows was an added bonus, at least as far as the police were concerned. Clearly, it was aiming at the kind of people who put style above taste or value for money; Lois suspected that it served imported bottled beers, nouvelle cuisine and coffee at seven dollars a cup.

Behind her, Henderson cleared his throat. Lois took the hint; she was obviously pushing her luck, hogging the camera for so long. Reluctantly, she allowed Plotnek to return to his post, and she had to rely on mental images to accompany the live soundtrack.

The next few minutes of conversation was desultory and dull, although Lois supposed that it wasn't everyone who found out that Luthor didn't think much of decaffeinated coffee, liked extra cocoa on top of his cappuccino and preferred artificial sweeteners to real sugar. Carnes apparently liked her coffee thick and black, and ordered a double espresso.

After the waitress had set their drinks down with an alarmingly cheerful "Enjoy!" things began to get more interesting.

Luthor's voice lowered, making it difficult to hear, and the sound man had to work his dials and switches to boost the signal coming in from the remote microphones. After thirty seconds or so, words blasted out of the speaker so loudly that Lois jumped.

"... Allen. Someone from Benton's office must have talked, and I want to know who."

Lois had only ever heard Luthor talk at public functions or on television. She'd never realised how much menace he could put into his normally smooth tone. A shiver of trepidation crawled up her spine, making her fear for Tierney's safety because Luthor was quite right. Someone at Benton, Miller, Nowak and Associates had been talking, and he couldn't be expected to realise, or to care, that the leak had had nothing to do with the discovery of the plot to corrupt the jury.

"What are you going to do about it?" asked Carnes. There was something in the way she asked the question that was both sibilant and hungry, and that made Lois think of a snake poised to strike.

"Do? Nothing... at the moment. However, when I find out who has been talking..." Luthor paused for just the right amount of time to inject the silence with the maximum amount of menace. "Then I think we will have to pay whoever it is a visit."

"And I'll look forward to it," breathed Carnes.

*****

By the time Felipe returned, CJ had extracted more secrets from Johnson on the pretext of needing the information if he were to approach one of his contacts in the DEA. If he had enough bait on his hook, he would be able to persuade an agent to come and rescue Johnson from this anteroom to Hell.

The Bolivian guide led CJ back to the prison entrance, waved him a cheerful good-bye and picked up another tourist to take around.

CJ tilted his head back, took a deep breath and sighed. Then he found a little café, sat down and gently massaged his temples. A pretty waitress came over to take CJ's order. In stilted Spanish, he asked for a coffee and, a couple of minutes later, she brought it over to him.

He drank it slowly, reflecting on his meeting with Johnson. The conversation had taken far more out of him than he'd expected, but the return had been worth it. Johnson knew more than CJ had believed possible about Luthor's illegal activities; he most certainly had had no moral qualms about involving himself in them as fully as possible. If Luthor had played straight with him, CJ had no doubt that Johnson would be refusing to help him now, but desperation made men do strange things, and CJ had no doubt that Johnson was a very desperate man.

CJ thought that Johnson was utterly despicable, but he had to admit that he was going to be a very useful weapon in the campaign to bring Luthor down.

CJ leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

"You okay, senor?" the waitress asked, more curious than sympathetic, and CJ realised that she had come over to clear away his cup and saucer.

"Yeah," lied CJ. "I'm just feeling a little..." He made a vague hand gesture, unable to quite describe his symptoms.

"Es el soroche," she said. Then at CJ's blank look, she tried again. "It's the... como se dice... mountain sickness. All the tourists have it. You must stay a few days to... aclimatarse?"

"Acclimatise," said CJ vaguely, noting but not voicing the impossibility of what the waitress was suggesting. How could he, who had flown up into the stratosphere, be suffering from altitude sickness at a mere twelve thousand feet?

He looked at his watch and decided that it was time he went home. He paid the bill, said a polite good-bye and headed out.

*****

"Here comes Benton now," announced Plotnek from his position by the window.

His words were followed almost immediately by the sounds of high heels clicking and chairs scraping across the floor.

"Good afternoon, Lex." Although Lois didn't recognise the voice, she knew it had to be Benton. Then, with a noticeable chill, she added, "Monica." Lois wondered whether Benton's obvious dislike for the other woman was born of natural antipathy or jealousy over Carnes' close relationship with Luthor, or whether it was a mixture of both.

"Sit down," said Luthor abruptly, dispensing with small-talk altogether.

Another scraping of chairs indicated that Benton had done as commanded.

"So what I can do for you today?" Benton asked.

She sounded... Lois groped around for a suitable word and was torn between subservient and sycophantic. She seemed to have been cowed by Luthor's lack of welcome. Had Tierney been right about her wanting to resume an intimate relationship with Luthor? Lois wasn't convinced, because Benton seemed more fearful than lustful. She wondered what kind of hold Luthor had over her.

"First you can tell me how you managed to make such a mess of the Allen trial."

"Me?" Benton asked, incredulity temporarily pushing fear aside. "All I did was organise the the list of names you wanted. It was you guys who were doing the actual dirty work!"

"It had to have been someone from your office who tipped off Lane."

"No," replied Benton flatly. "No-one in my office would be that... that..."

"Stupid?" suggested Carnes. "Lane must have had help. She might be intelligent, but I'm betting she needed to be told about the voir dire process, and only someone intimately involved with the legal system could have done that."

Benton ignored the second part of Carnes observations, but she did grudgingly admit that "stupid" was an appropriate word.

"Are you sure that nobody in your office could have talked?" That was Luthor.

"As sure as I can be," answered Benton.

"And how sure is that, exactly?" asked Carnes.

The silence that followed as Benton failed to answer was painful in its intensity. Maybe it was Lois's imagination, but she thought that there was an unspoken threat hovering in the air.

When Luthor next spoke, it was as if the exchange hadn't happened. He sounded friendly, almost warm, as he said, "Could you update me on the other matter?"

"The take-overs of ExTel and MaxiComm, you mean?" asked Benton, although Lois suspected that the question was unnecessarily.

Maybe Luthor nodded, but as Lois couldn't see, she didn't know for sure.

"Would you care to order, ma'am?" The perky waitress was back.

Over the negotiations that followed, Lois mused, "ExTel and MaxiComm... I'm sure I've heard something about them recently."

Henderson chuckled dryly, more a wheeze in the back of his throat than anything else, almost as if his body wasn't used to producing laughter. "So you should have done, if you read your own paper."

"What do you mean?" asked Lois confused.

Henderson elaborated, uncharacteristically forthcoming in the face of Lois's lack of knowledge. "It's been all over the business pages for the last week. There are rumours of some secret buyer grabbing all the shares."

That description rang bells for Lois. "Douglas Pearson's column, right?" she asked, not bothering to disguise her lack of interest.

"His stuff's good, Lois. He's an expert on the stock market."

"You follow the market, Henderson?" Lois asked with unflattering surprise.

"Sure. It's a hobby of mine," he answered without rancour. "Plus it helps to supplement my income." He paused, then added, "What can I say? Some people take bribes. I dabble in stocks. We've all got to make ends meet somehow."

It occurred to Lois that, despite the dry, almost monotonic delivery, Henderson was making fun of himself. She found it rather endearing, and she chuckled appreciatively. Henderson almost smiled in return. Lois had never suspected him of having a self-deprecating sense of humour before; then again, she'd never spent time locked in a room with him before, either. Prolonged exposure to another, she supposed, could bring the strangest secrets out into the open.

Plotnek hushed them and said hurriedly, "The waitress is going."

"Now, where were we?" Luthor's voice echoed out of the speaker again. "Ah, yes. ExTel and MaxiComm."

"As you know, the matter is being handled through my brother-in-law's stockbroking company. He assures me that the ExTel shares will be in the hands of your agents by the end of the week. However..." She hesitated, then took the plunge, delivering news that she had to know would displease him. "They are having some difficulties with regards to the MaxiComm shares."

"What kinds of difficulties?" asked Luthor, and Lois noticed that the dangerous edge was back in his voice, nudging it down a tone or two in pitch.

"The chairman – a Beppe Pagliano – doesn’t want to sell," explained Benton, "and since he holds fifty-one per cent of the stock..."

"Then he must be persuaded to sell."

"He won't be persuaded."

"Everyone," said Luthor, "can be persuaded. It's just a matter of finding the right... leverage."

"There isn't much in the way of leverage and he's stubborn."

"Explain," Luthor commanded imperiously.

"Pagliano loathes his two ex-wives. The feeling is entirely mutual, I might add. He has three kids, and he hates them, too. Quite honestly, if anything happened to any of them, he'd be more likely to thank us than anything else. He's beginning to tire of his current wife, too. She's already tired of him, but she hasn't walked out on him yet because she signed a prenuptial agreement and won't get a cent if she leaves. If we threatened her, he'd be quite likely to tell us to go through with whatever we suggested. However..."

"However?" said Luthor, a note of hopeful interest colouring the three syllables.

"I have it on good authority," said Benton, "that were anything to happen to him, she would inherit everything. His current will names her as sole beneficiary and, while he's been talking about changing it, he hasn't done so yet."

"And how, precisely, do you know that?"

"His wife and I belong to the same health club," answered Benton. Then, to make it clear that this wasn't simply a happy coincidence, she added, "I joined two weeks ago. Sylvia Pagliano spends most of her time in the members' bar. She gets quite talkative after a few spritzers. I gather," continued Benton, "that she would do more or less anything to get hold of some money."

The unspoken suggestion hung between them. Then Luthor said, "Hypothetically speaking, if Mrs Pagliano got hold of a few shares in MaxiComm, would she sell?"

"Yes, she would. Hypothetically speaking. So what do you want me to do next?"

"Nothing," answered Luthor. "I think we can handle it from here."

There was another pause, then Carnes said in her silkily patronising way, "You may go now."

If Lois had been in Benton's shoes, she'd have wanted to claw Carnes' eyes out for dismissing her like that, so she wasn't too surprised when Plotnek commented, "Wow. Benton looks pissed."

"Lex?" Benton asked, seeking confirmation.

"I'll be in touch soon, my dear."

"I'll look forward to it," said Benton, seemingly mollified at having been thrown a crumb of politeness by Luthor.

Lois heard Benton get up from the table, receding footsteps, and then Carnes' voice again. "So?"

"So, I say we pay a visit to Mr Pagliano. Let me look at my diary..."

There was the faint rustling of fabric, and Lois imagined Luthor pulling something out of his breast pocket. Another couple of seconds passed, punctuated by the crackling of pages being turned.

"I can't make tomorrow at all, I'm afraid," he said. "I have to visit my Paris agent, and that's likely to take all day. I'm sure it will be very dull; he's a very dull man, and his breath reeks of garlic."

Lois felt faintly nauseous at the casual way in which Luthor was discussing... What was he discussing, precisely? The scheduling of a murder? He hadn't said so, not in so many words, but the implication was there, nonetheless.

"If you can't wait, I'm sure that I can handle this myself," said Carnes.

"I'm sure that you can, but, as you know, I like to keep my hand in. Friday... No, Friday is out, too. Meeting of the board of directors of LexChem and, given the crisis there, I can't afford to miss that one. Damn Saxon, anyway! Add him to my 'to do' list. Lane, too, come to think of it."

"To do?" Lois's lips shaped the words silently as her eyebrows climbed. She didn't like the sound of that. She hadn't got around to phoning Saxon between getting Jack's earlier message and meeting Henderson; she'd have to do it as soon as she got back to the Planet. Not only did she want to hear what he had to say, she also wanted to warn him that he might be on Luthor's hit list.

Luthor was still talking. "Then the rest of the day is taken up with that fund-raiser in New York, followed by an evening of opera at the Met." Lois could hear him turn over the page. "Saturday... No. Ah! Sunday looks good. I have a window between ten and three; see if we can schedule Mr Pagliano then."

"Very good, Lex."

"Anything else we need to discuss before we get back to the... office?" The way Luthor said "office" made Lois think that it was a euphemism for something else, a supposition that was supported by Plotnek's exclamation. "He's got his hand on her thigh!" Lois noticed that Plotnek was suddenly taking a lot more pictures. "They're getting up," he said. "Luthor's got his hand on her butt."

"The limousine's this way, Lex," cooed Carnes.

"Then let's not delay." There was the sound of the front door opening and closing, and they were gone.

"That's it, then," said Henderson. "You can start packing up now."

"What?!" exclaimed Lois indignantly. "Aren't you going to arrest him?"

"Not yet," replied Henderson flatly.

"But you heard him! He told Carnes to kill someone!"

"No, he didn't. All he said was that they should pay a certain Mr Pagliano a visit. No mention of killing anyone."

"Well, then. He's implicated in... in perverting the course of justice, at the very least!"

Henderson nodded sombrely. "I know. And if it were anyone else... But this is Luthor. If we're going to get him, we need to be absolutely certain that we can make the charges stick."

"And despite having got him on tape, you think we can't?" asked Lois aghast. How much evidence did Henderson need? How much evidence did anyone need? Lois felt a surge of frustration, just as she had done on Sunday, when CJ had told her that Luthor's environmental wrongdoings weren't enough to bring him down. It wasn't fair! she thought. Just because Luthor had money, power and influence... "You mean he's going to get away with it?"

"No. I mean we continue with the investigation, then when we have enough hard evidence, we arrest him. The more evidence we can get, the better." Henderson's eyes narrowed. Lois could almost see his brain working. "Just out of interest," he asked carefully, "what else are you and your pal Kent working on? Anything else I might like to know about?"

"Nothing definite," Lois answered. "Not yet, anyway."

"But there might be?"

"Maybe. With luck." Lois held up her right hand with her first two fingers crossed.

Henderson frowned and said, "I'd be... grateful... if you could keep me informed."

To her surprise, Lois found herself promising that she would.

*****

It was just after dusk, and the land below him was a grey and ill-defined blur. It was, CJ thought, just as well that he was heading home because the return to Metropolis should be a more easily navigable trip than the outward one had been. He wouldn't have liked to have made that flight in the dark. He shifted an uncomfortable crick out of his neck, allowed himself the luxury of closing his eyes for a few moments and thought longingly of a long, hot bath.

Funny, he thought. He didn't seem to be making much headway, almost as if he was crawling along, not flying. It shouldn't be taking him so long to reach the sea, should it? But the undifferentiated landmass stretched endlessly below him.

It had to be his imagination, he decided. That the night-time view held little interest must be making time drag, and that was why this felt like such an effort...

Such hard work...

Gosh, but he felt tired.

And that was when he began to fear that something was seriously wrong.

*****

Lois planted her elbows on the table in the conference room and massaged her temples. Since arriving back at the Planet, she'd talked to Dr Saxon, and had made an appointment for Friday afternoon. She'd written up her notes on the stakeout, but had then been forced to put that story aside. The final article could only be written when that particular part of the Luthor investigation was complete. Now, between trying to make some more progress with regard to past Planet exclusives, looking for angles that their original authors might have missed, and going through some papers that Jack had given her, she'd managed to work up a major headache.

Something was wrong.

Lois could feel it. It was similar to the sensation she got when she went out, certain that she had forgotten something, but had no idea what it was, only this current feeling was magnified a hundredfold. It was a nebulous sensation, with no discernible cause, but there, nonetheless. She could feel it as a prickling of the hairs on the nape of her neck and down her spine, a clamminess in her palms, a tendency towards light-headedness and an inability to concentrate.

Lois stared blankly at the papers in front of her, a summary, according to Jack, of Luthor's personal business accounts. She had to take his word for it, though, because the numbers were jumping around in front of her eyes, blurring and merging into one another.

Maybe, she thought, it was stress. After all, there had been an implied threat in Luthor's comments earlier, and she was wise enough to know that Luthor's threats were not to be dismissed lightly. Then again, she'd been threatened enough times in her life to know that she only really had to start worrying when she could see the whites of her erstwhile assailant's eyes or a gun pointed in her face. But, if that wasn't what was wrong, what was?

She didn't know. All she knew for sure was that she felt vaguely and continuously sick.

*****

A burst of turbulence buffeted CJ, tossing him around. Funny, but turbulence had never been a problem before... and wasn't the ground closer to him than it had been earlier? It was almost as if he was losing height, as if gravity was dragging him down.

But gravity had never been a problem before, either.

CJ felt a tingle of panic crawl up his spine. What day was it? he wondered. Wednesday. Wednesday, May seventh, which meant... He counted backwards. It meant that he'd been back in his own world for a week, and in turn that meant...

No! His powers couldn't fail him now!

Please, please... he thought. I've got to make it back to Metropolis. At least last out that long!

CJ gritted his teeth, forced his body to stay afloat, and put every ounce of strength he possessed into carrying on.

*****

Lois decided to take a couple of headache pills. If they didn't help, she was going to give up on work for the evening and go home. Maybe an evening of peace, quiet and mugs of warm milk might help.

She hated warm milk.

She wondered how CJ was getting on, and when he was likely to get back. For a moment, she felt dizzy and the room around her lurched unpleasantly, almost as if she was having an attack of vertigo.

"You okay, Lois?"

She must look bad, she thought, if Jack actually sounded concerned. She managed to nod, and said, "Just feeling a bit under the weather."

"Can I get you anything?"

"Please..." she murmured. Were her worlds slurring or was it her hearing that was playing up? "A glass of water would be great."

Jack got to his feet and said, "One glass of water coming up," and vanished through the door.

*****

CJ had never imagined that it was possible to be so grateful to see land.

He'd felt particularly vulnerable flying over water. What would have happened if his powers had failed him, dropping him in the middle of the ocean? At night, and with nobody to know that he was lost, he would almost certainly have been doomed.

He veered west, so that he was flying over Florida, then north over Georgia. He spotted the raised line of the Appalachians and aligned himself above then, using them as a navigation aid, needing all the help he could get.

God, he felt dizzy!

He couldn't hold himself up much longer... He was never going to make it...

His mind was working sluggishly, his brain was fogged with fatigue. It took him several minutes to realise that if he didn't land now, his only choice might be to crash. However, he wanted to try to avoid landing over forest if he possibly could. If he couldn't make it back to Metropolis under his own steam, he needed to get himself to somewhere where there would be other people to help him, somewhere with good transport links.

And for that, he had to make it to a town.

Had to.

He could see Chesapeake Bay off in the distance, to his right. If he went east, he thought, away from the mountains, he would find towns and roads. He needed to go east.

It took too much effort, but he turned and flew on.

*****

If the pills had helped, she couldn't tell. Her head thumped and her limbs felt leaden. She wondered whether she was going down with something, but she dismissed the idea quickly. First, she was determined not to be sick; she didn't have time for that. Second, there hadn't been anything going around the office recently, so she didn't see how she could have caught anything in the first place.

If she didn't leave soon, she thought, she wasn't going to be able to get home under her own steam. The only problem was that she wasn't sure that she could summon up enough energy to move.

*****

His body was trembling with the effort of staying aloft. He had reached, and passed, his limits, and he had used up the last of his energy reserves.

A scream was wrenched from his lungs as he felt himself tumbling, plunging downwards. "No!!!!" He was going to die, he thought, but he couldn't die, not until he'd seen Lois again, and not even then, because they had too much to live for. They had a future together, and he couldn't give up on that now.

The ground rushed up to meet him.


TBC