After the Golden Age (Golden Age 1)

“They’re newspaper clippings; I verified them all,” Celia said. “The Hawk just left the clues, but we’re drawing our own conclusions. That’s what we have to trust.”

“All right, then,” Suzanne said. “What do we know about Anthony Paulson?”

“He’s got a son on the police force,” Celia said, unable to keep the bite out of her voice.

“He’s on his second term of office, and is running for a third,” Arthur said.

Warren leafed through the clippings. “Arthur, have you ever read anything off him?”

“I’ve never tried. I can’t recall ever being in the same room with him. You three always handle the public appearances.”

“Maybe you ought to arrange a meetin

g.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“It’s time to pull his file up on the computer,” Warren said, indicating the back hallway, which led to the Olympiad’s command room. The others agreed and started to move on. Suzanne collected the file folder.

This was in their hands now, and Celia ought to have been happy to wash her own hands of the responsibility. Except she wasn’t. She sat in the kitchen chair and grit her teeth, gathering the courage to just stand up and follow them. It shouldn’t have been that difficult.

Arthur leaned on the back of her chair and whispered at her ear. “Come on, Celia. You’re invited.”

The wave of relief she felt shouldn’t have been strong enough to start tears pricking in her eyes. She blinked them away and hurried to follow him.

The wood door at the end of the hall looked like every other door they’d passed, the ones leading to bedrooms and bathrooms. But this one had a security keypad by the doorknob. Suzanne punched in a code, and a scanner read her thumbprint. The door slid aside, rather than swinging open.

The Olympiad command room was everything a starry-eyed admirer of superhuman vigilantes could hope for. The cavernous space offered secret elevators and passages to different parts of the building, including the hangar in a warehouse a block over that housed some of the team’s vehicles. Computer banks made up an entire wall: keyboards, indicator lights, printers, scanners, and analyzers. One of several screens showed a map of the city, and a radio monitored police frequencies. A gleaming steel table and chairs occupied the middle of the room. This was where the Olympiad had formed hundreds of plans, hunted hundreds of foes. Sparsely lit—only the table and computer banks shone brightly—the place was a den of shadows.

Celia had seen it before, but not for years. Disconcertingly, it hadn’t changed at all. There might have been some new equipment, upgraded computers and communications systems, but the hardware blended in with what had been there before. She felt sixteen again. The others walked right in; she stopped and stared.

When she was growing up, if she wanted to find her parents, she checked her father’s office first—his normal office, for his job running the normal company. She checked the command room second. She’d been frightened by it. It was slick, steel, all gleaming surfaces and intimidating equipment filled with buttons, dials, screens flashing between a dozen scenes from closed-circuit cameras all over the city. The place hummed with the constant noise of hard drives and cooling fans at work. She’d call them on the intercom, and they’d open the door for her. She’d find her parents leaning over some monitor or printout, piecing together clues from the latest crime spree or tracing the Destructor’s whereabouts. Invariably, her question of “Can I make some popcorn?” or “Can you sign this permission slip for school?” seemed to pale beside whatever they were doing.

A couple of times she’d sat at their conference table for a debriefing, telling her side of whatever kidnapping she’d been involved in, recording her story for posterity. She couldn’t remember ever sitting at the table as an equal. Or as something resembling an equal—as someone who actually had something to contribute.

Warren said, “Why did the Hawk give this to you and not us?”

“I asked him the same thing,” she said. “He said you weren’t at the top of your game anymore. That you needed to hand things off to the younger generation.”

“How do you like that?” Robbie said with a laugh.

“The younger generation? He didn’t mean you, did he?”

Celia’s face flushed. She knew this was how this conversation would go. “I would think maybe he meant Typhoon or Breezeway. Block Buster Junior. One of that crowd. I told him I didn’t have any powers. Then he said, neither did he.”

During another long silence, Celia wished for a moment she was Arthur, so she could know what the others were thinking.

—Or not.—

She glanced up and caught him looking back at her. She blushed and quickly looked away. He’d been prying. Or she’d been thinking too loud. He said that happened sometimes.

Suzanne went to the computers. “Let’s run the mayor through the database.”

The database retrieved and cross-referenced Mayor Anthony Paulson’s information, producing the standard biography and a detailed listing of policy decisions and political records. Anthony Paulson was something of a Commerce City folk hero, a hard-luck case made good, an orphaned child adopted into a middle-class family and risen through the ranks of the city’s elite through his own hard labor. His policies were moderate, he was fiscally conservative, pro-labor, pro-education, and antisocialization. He was a politician everyone could love, and the greatest buried scandal of his life involved a college liaison with an underage girl—he’d been eighteen, she’d been two days from sixteen. The scandal died a quick death—the girl was Andrea, and the couple married three years later.

“We’ve got nothing on this guy,” Robbie observed. “He’s clean as a whistle.”

“If we’re not entirely wrong,” Warren said. “There’s got to be another connection. I still think Simon Sito is behind this somehow.”