“Or lack thereof, I do hope,” Reed said, wheeling away from him. “He’s too dangerous. Kill him now and get it over with.”
“I’m still sitting right here,” Sovereign said. “And I just offered to die if you want me to.”
“Great, so you won’t complain if we just get that out of the way right now,” Reed said.
I frowned at him. “You’ve never been in favor of capital punishment before. We’ve argued this, remember?”
“My position is evolving on this issue,” Reed said. “He’s too dangerous. We can’t exactly stick him in a glass cell and hope it holds him as he taunts us endlessly while waiting to unfold some diabolical scheme. There’s no prison on earth that could keep him in.”
“Oh, but there is,” Sovereign said.
“Bullshit,” Reed said. “And all this ‘word is bond’ crap is worth as much as wet toilet paper in a tornado. There is no guard and no jail that could contain you.”
“Yeah,” he said, “there is. Your prison in Arizona could do it, if you had the right guard to keep watch.”
“Huh,” Scott said. “How thick would the walls have to be in that place?”
“Thick,” I replied, realizing that neither of them had tumbled to what he was suggesting yet. “But do you actually think you’ll get the guard you’re hoping for?”
“I don’t know,” he said, his features carefully neutral. The corner of his mouth turned up, just slightly, to let me know that he knew I’d caught on. “What do you say? Are you willing to watch me sit in a cell for the rest of my life?” He leaned forward in the chair. “Because as your brother said, if my word isn’t good for anything, then you’re the only one who could keep me from getting away if I chose to leave.”
Chapter 35
“Who do you have guarding him?” Foreman asked, at the opposite head of the conference table. Li sat next to him, arm in a sling and partially immobilized.
“No one,” I answered, and watched the expressions change around the table. Reed shot me a “Told you so” look and then he politely averted his eyes by rolling them. Everyone was present except Janus, who was still in the hospital. Kat, Scott, Zollers, Ariadne, Li, Foreman and Reed were all in a rough oval around the conference table, all in varying states of disbelief over what I’d just said. “What’s the point?” I asked. “He could kill any human or humans we set out to guard him, or mind-control them with his telepathy, or—”
“So you’re just going to let him walk out anytime he wants?” Li asked. His jaw locked into place in a scowl that I suspected had nothing to do with any arm pain he might have been feeling.
“I can’t watch him twenty-four-seven, even if we did have a prison that could contain him,” I said. “I’m open to other solutions.”
“Kill him,” Reed singsonged.
I gave him a look like … well, I don’t know what it looked like, honestly. “Your strongly held beliefs about the death penalty vanished awfully swiftly.”
“The guy is a walking holocaust if he wants to be,” Reed said, his face dark. “We still don’t know what phase two is, but you know he’s at the core of it, which means he’s got the kind of power that could lay the world to waste. To me, this is like … nuclear disarmament. Just be done with it already and make the world a safer place.”
I glanced at Foreman, who was studying the table. “I don’t hear anything from you on this subject, Senator.”
“Me?” Foreman asked. “I’m not here, officially or otherwise.”
“Plausible deniability?” Reed snarked. “Wow. I’m totally shocked, given that you’re a—”
“This has little to do with politics,” Foreman said, and he looked a little put out. “I’m civilian oversight. I can’t give you orders even if I was officially here.” He nodded in my direction. “You’re part of the executive branch, and you have a duly appointed head of agency to answer to.”
That provoked another moment of silence, as everyone realized I’d just been handed a live grenade with the pin pulled. “Lucky me,” I breathed. “I get to absorb the blame if it all goes horribly wrong.”
Foreman shrugged. “That wasn’t why I brought you here, but it’s a not-unanticipated side-effect of your taking the post. Shit rolls downhill in Washington, and there’s a major septic malfunction heading this way. Rapidly, by my reckoning.”