Heroic Measures (continued)

“What if they are here?” he asked. “Hidden?”

Red’s head moved from the side to side as he surveyed the rooftops. “It’d take a long time to take apart every A/C unit on every building across the city.”

“What if we could activate them? So we could locate them?”

Vivian seemed to turn pale at the suggestion. Even Isabel looked uncomfortable.

“How do we do that?” Red asked, sounding tired and irritated. “Good ol’ Doc Zing needed a whole apparatus to activate the one we found.”

“Yes,” conceded Walter, but he was not finished. “But it was somehow activated when we were inside the warehouse. Remember?”

Red frowned thoughtfully, as if he had forgotten that event. “We never did figure out how that happened . . .”

“Something activated it,” Isabel said, interjecting herself into the conversation.

“But what?” Red countered. “We didn’t find any kind of power source.”

“Did we look for one?”

Walter turned and looked at Isabel. He intended to be incredulous. As he considered his answer, though, he realized that her question had not been one steeped in sarcasm. Slowly, his head turned toward Red.

Red’s lips worked, forming odd shapes as he thought about it. Walter dug through his memories of that day at the same time.

Had there been a power source?

He did not remember Red disconnecting or slicing through any wires, but there had been a lot joining on that afternoon, and—he had to admit—he had not been paying particularly close attention.

Finally, Red shook his head slowly, for some reason reminding Walter of a horse shaking away flies.

“I don’t remember,” he admitted quietly. “I don’t think so, but I don’t remember there being one.”

“There wasn’t,” Isabel stated firmly.

She had everyone’s attention now as they all turned to look at her. Her expression was almost smug as she began to explain.

“Not in the usual sense, anyway,” she said, glancing toward Red. “There wasn’t one there,” she went on. “Until we brought it.”

This statement earned her a confused look from everyone present. Her smile told Walter that she had not only been expecting that, but was also thoroughly enjoying building the suspense. Red appeared to be mildly irritated that Isabel was dragging this out, but seemed willing to let her have her fun—at least for the moment.

Isabel’s head turned slightly and her eyes fixed on Walter. Her insistent gaze unnerved him and he wanted to look away. There was something in the way that she stared at him, though, that he felt he should understand.

He tried to remember what equipment they had brought with them to the warehouse that day. There had not been much. It had chiefly been what they had carried on each of their belts. As far as he could remember, there had not been any power sources.

The batteries in the flashlights?

No, he decided. There couldn’t have been enough juice in those to power that antenna—certainly not from a distance. Heck, I can generate more energy than that just by sneezing . . .

His eyes locked with Isabel’s. From the small change in her smile, he knew that he was right.