right here, I’ll see you soon, OK? Maybe I’ll get a chance to introduce you to Abyssinia before I kill you.”
He lifted up off the ground, rising high above the rooftops, and then he let the wind take him.
Air Force One touched down at Joint Base Andrews a little after two. The stair truck was there immediately to meet it. Six minutes later, President Martin Maynard Flanery emerged, the wind lifting his hair, playing with his tie, flapping his jacket.
He tried keeping the jacket closed over his gut as he descended. He didn’t like the wind, and he didn’t like stairs. He preferred air conditioning and elevators. There was no one on the ground to greet him, just the usual soldiers and Secret Service agents and the huge, armoured Cadillac they called the Beast. The photographer was there, too, taking snaps from ground level. This irritated the hell out of Flanery, as he knew damn well that every single one of those snaps would add a couple of chins to his jawline.
He reached the bottom of the stairs and got into the Beast without even glancing at the photographer. Wilkes got in after him.
“I want the photographer fired,” Flanery said the moment the door was closed. “Get me a new one. A better one. One who knows how to take a good picture.”
“Yes, Mr President,” Wilkes said, nodding. “Of course.” He tapped on the glass partition, and the car started moving. “We have a couple of things to get through, sir, starting with—”
“Hold on,” Flanery said, cutting across him. He could feel that old familiar rising tide of anger. “Where’s Lilt? You found him yet? Hey? And I don’t need any more excuses from you. I’ve had enough of excuses. Excuses don’t get me what I need. Are we understanding each other?”
“Yes, sir,” said Wilkes.
“So? You found him?”
“I’m, ah, waiting for a call, sir.”
Flanery locked eyes with the wilting man. “You’re waiting for a call? You’re waiting for a call? Let me tell you something. Let me tell you something because I don’t think … What is it, three years? Three years you’ve been working for me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Three years. You’d think you’d have picked this up after three years. When you wait on a call, I wait on a call. You see that? See how that works? When you wait, I wait, and the President of the United States of America does not wait. I do not wait, Wilkes. I tell you to do something, I tell you to speak to someone, or find someone, or get something, or go somewhere, then you do it. I want it done. I want it done immediately. If I have to ask you to find out why Parthenios Lilt has suddenly gone dark on us, my time is already being wasted. But you know what is unacceptable? What’s unacceptable is having to wait on you to get me an answer. I do not accept that.”
“I am sorry, Mr President. My contact is checking with—”
Flanery held up a hand. “Details. Details, Wilkes. What have I told you about details?”
“You don’t need to—”
“I don’t need to hear them. They don’t interest me. Results interest me. Answers interest me. Details? I don’t give a damn about details.”
Wilkes’s phone buzzed in his hand, but Wilkes didn’t look down. Flanery almost wished he would. Then he’d have something else to get angry about.
“Check your damn phone,” he said sharply.
Wilkes did so. A single glance.
“My contact has been in touch,” he said. “We’ve located Lilt.”
“He better have a good story,” said Flanery. “His story better be great. Better be magnificent. He’s missed two calls. Two. No one misses calls with me. Martin Flanery is not the kind of man to call back later. I’m not that kind, Wilkes. Where the hell is he?”
Wilkes hesitated. If there was one thing Flanery hated more than time-wasting, it was hesitation.
“Spit it out, for God’s sake.”
“Parthenios Lilt has been arrested,” said Wilkes.
Flanery froze. “What?”
“Apparently, it happened three days ago, sir.”
“Who was it? Us or them? Who was it arrested him, Wilkes? Normal people or freaks?”
“Oh,” Wilkes said. “Them, sir. Freaks, sir.”
The anger in Flanery’s chest was a distant memory. Now Flanery was a volcano. Flanery was the goddamn atom bomb. Upon explosion, Flanery would flatten every town and village in the land.
But he couldn’t explode. He had to be calm. Just like his father had taught him.
“What’s the charge?” Flanery asked, keeping his voice low.
“Sir?” Wilkes said, leaning closer.
“The charge. What’s the charge? What has Lilt been charged with?”
“Oh,” said Wilkes. “I don’t know, sir.”
“Find out. Get on that phone and find out. By the time we reach the White House, I want answers. You hear me? You understand me?”
“I understand, sir. But there are other issues we—”
“Forget about everything else. I don’t care. I don’t care about policies or regulations or the House or the Senate or anything. Don’t care. Only thing I care about is what Lilt is charged with and what impact that has on me. You get that? You understand?”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“Then get it done.”
“Yes, sir, Mr President.”
Idiot.
There was no other word for it, really. Only idiot summed up the magnificent stupidity that Omen was capable of displaying at any moment and in any situation. Only he could have hitched a ride from relative safety to absolute jeopardy without actually needing to, at all, in the slightest. He had been fired, for God’s sake. Skulduggery Pleasant himself had told him to leave all this danger stuff to the professionals. He was no longer involved in whatever the hell was going on.
And yet who had teleported, with a man who had already tried to kill him, moving in the span of an eyeblink from beneath a bed in the dormitories of Corrival Academy to the cold floor of what appeared to be a prison? That would be Omen Darkly, yes, sir, it would. No one else could have managed something like that. The Boy Most Likely to Get
