[CHAPTER 7]
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If what you seek is Truth, there is one thing you must have above all else… an unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong. -- Anthony de Mello
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Saturday
The ringing of the phone next to the bed beckoned Lois from the sweet pull of slumber. Squeezing her eyes tighter, she tried to ignore the sound.
“Lois, answer it,” a voice mumbled.
“Lucy!” Lois sat up in the bed with a start, pulling the covers off of her sister. “What are you doing in my bed?”
Lucy patted around blindly until she grabbed the phone. “I couldn’t find mine,” she muttered, pulling the phone from the hook. She seemed happy to have stopped the ringing because she left the portable handset on the dresser.
Lois arched over her sister in order to get to the phone. “Your room is right down the hall. You had to pass it to get to mine,” she said.
“Shhh. ‘Mm seepinnin.”
Lois groaned and climbed out of the bed, taking the phone with her. “Hello?” she asked softly, leaving her bedroom and closing the door behind her.
“Lois Lane,” a deep voice greeted. “Good morning.”
“Ben, this early on a Saturday morning, it’s either Lois or Lane - not both.”
The district attorney chuckled. “I’m just saying it the way you always do.”
Lois rolled her eyes as she entered the kitchen with coffee on her mind. “Yeah, the way I say it when I’m introducing myself- oh, never mind. What’s up?”
“I have news,” Ben answered.
She tucked the phone between her shoulder and chin as she situated a coffee filter in the machine. “Really? What is it?”
“I want you to have dinner with me.”
Lois sighed. They’d had this conversation before. Many times, actually. “Ben, you know what I’m going to say.”
“Come on, Lois. You scratch my back, and I scratch yours.”
Lois smirked to herself. Ben was a friend and he was harmless – even if he wanted to date her. Teasing him would incur no bad feelings. “What, so you give me tidbits on the story, and I… scratch your back?”
“Watch it, lady. You’re moving too fast for me. I just want dinner.”
“If it were just dinner that you wanted, we might have a deal. But it’s not.”
On the other end of the line, Ben groaned. “We could try. You could debrief me on your investigation – leaving all the illegal stuff out, of course – and I can drop hints.”
“Hmmm.” Lois picked up her favorite blue mug from the mug tree and set it next to the coffee pot. “We could do those same things in your office and have coffee and a scone.”
“Do you deliberately suck the joy out of everything?”
“When I can arrange it, yes,” she answered, laughing.
Ben sighed. “Well, in that case, I might as well give you the news over the phone,” he said grudgingly. “We’ve got our witness.”
Lois straightened from the leaning position she had assumed while waiting for the brew to percolate. “Kwolek?”
“We got him into protective custody last night. An anonymous call led us right to him.”
“Ben, that’s great!”
“Yeah, and there’s more. The order has come down for Richardson’s assets to be frozen. You may want to keep an eye on his camp when the news comes out. Desperate people do desperate things.”
Lois smiled. “I’m already on it, Coop. You might want to take your own advice. I’ve come across some information that says he may already have dealt with the asset issue.”
Ben swore under his breath. “Do you think he moved it?”
“Switzerland. That’s all I got so far.”
“Yeah, well that may be enough. I better move on this. How about 8 o’clock tonight, are you free?”
“I’m not having dinner with you, Cooper.”
“Lois, this is prime real estate here. I’m not going to keep asking.”
Lois watched the drops of dark brown liquid drop into the coffee carafe. “Yes you will.”
Ben began laughing. “You’re probably right, but as long as you’re not dating someone else, I know there’s a chance for us.”
“And on that note, I have to go. Thanks for calling! We’ll talk soon.”
“Count on it.”
~.~
“What do you mean? I thought you had it in your possession?” Clark said into the phone. He was sitting at his desk at the Daily Planet, having come in early to make some follow-up phone calls.
“I’m sorry, sir,” a woman with a European accent replied. “I thought we had the manuscript but it appears that it wasn’t on the estate charter after all. It’s doubtful that it even exists.”
Clark sighed and ran a hand through his hair in frustration. It had taken all of this time to get in contact with the people who ran Anthony West’s estate, and now they were essentially telling him that they could be of no help.
“I know it exits,” he offered. “Mr. West mentioned it in a few different interviews.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt he wrote a book that never got published, I’m just saying that it’s possible that the manuscript was destroyed at some point. I don’t expect every idea he ever wrote down to have been saved.”
“Could there be any other stash of his belongings- maybe another party who might have had access to his things?”
“Potentially,” the woman answered after a moment of thought. “But for all that matters, he was considered an only child. The other children of H.G. Wells, and in turn their children, would not have had access to Mr. West’s belongings. He was considered to be a product of an illegitimate relationship. The families pretty much remained separate.”
Clark’s eyes rose to the ceiling.
“Sir, might I ask you what was so remarkable about this manuscript?”
“The history behind it, I guess,” Clark answered dejectedly. “In the interviews, Mr. West claimed that it was his first book. He never talked about what he wrote in it, but rumors circulated that it was an account of his father’s… travel.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound too controversial.”
“No, I suppose not,” Clark said. He didn’t clarify to the woman on the phone that the type of travel Anthony West was supposed to have written about was intertemporal. “Thank you for trying. I’ll keep searching.”
“Best of luck to you,” the woman said. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.” Then the line went dead.
Clark hung up the phone and lifted his hands to his face. He had been so close to finding his answers. The missing manuscript from Anthony West was supposed to detail the encounter his father had in the future during one of his temporal leaps. As the rumors went, West had been determined to publish the book as non-fiction, but no one believed him. Eventually, instead of staking his literary reputation on a story the world would only accept as science fiction, West had locked the manuscript away, never to be seen or talked about again.
Clark had learned of the myth during his international travels. The details varied according to the teller, and at first Clark had also dismissed it as a regional yarn. It wasn’t until one old timer had explained some of the futuristic aspects that Clark had become interested. When he’d gone to the future, H.G. Wells had met a man who could fly and shoot lasers from his eyes. Clark didn’t know what to believe about H.G. Wells’ ability to manipulate time, or about Anthony West’s ability to tell tall tales, but he did know that he needed to see that manuscript.
There was very little that Clark knew about his origins. Puberty was a confusing time for most teenage boys, but for him, it had been mind-blowing. In the years that followed his introduction to manhood, strange things began happening to him: his vision allowed him to see through things, his hearing locked in on sounds miles away, he ran so fast that he lifted from the earth… and fire shot from his eyes.
His parents had shown him the vessel that they found him in and relayed the amazing story of how he had seemed to fall from the sky. He was fifteen years old when all of this had been revealed to him, and when he opened it, the ship held only a blanket and a large spherical object – a sphere that awakened at his touch and gave him five brief messages.
Clark had learned that he was born on another planet, that his biological parents were Lara and Jor-El, that he had been named Kal-El, and that he had been sent away to escape the death of a planet.
With as much as he had learned, most of his questions were still unanswered.
~.~
Lois walked to her desk with a brisk pace. Seeing that Clark’s desk was empty she sighed.
“You just missed him,” a voice informed her.
“Perry!” Lois exclaimed, turning to face the man who had addressed her, “we need to talk.”
Twenty minutes later, Perry leaned back in his chair and studied Lois thoughtfully. “What’s your angle here, Lane?”
Lois lowered into the chair across from him. She had already made her plea, now she just needed to wait for the judgment. “No angle. I’m playing you straight.”
Perry rubbed his chin but didn’t respond and his hesitance made Lois launch back into selling mode. “You have to agree that this last series is really good.”
Perry nodded. “There’s already been Kerth talk in some circles,” he said.
Lois flushed with excitement – she hadn’t known that. “See! Now, there’s no question that I’m good by myself… but with these latest articles…” She looked at him pleadingly, begging him not to make her say it.
Perry clasped his hands together, unwilling to give her a break. If this was what she wanted, she was going to have to go the distance to get it.
Lois sighed, realizing what it was going to take. “With these last articles, I’ve been better than ever.”
“You want a partner?”
Lois paused a beat before replying. “Not for everything. I’m not dependant on him or anything… It’s just, I think we could work well together.” When her boss didn’t immediately respond, she tried again. “He’s too good to be working freelance, Chief, and you know it. Everyone needs a home eventually.”
Perry unlaced his fingers and tapped the surface of his desk. “Is that all it is, Lois?” he asked carefully. He cared for Lois Lane like he would care for a daughter. Something troublesome was tickling his intuition, but he didn’t want to place assumptions blindly.
Lois’s expression turned to one of genuine surprise as she got the underlying gist of his question. She seemed thoroughly caught off guard at the hint. “Of course – It’s strictly professional. Chief – you know me.”
He fixed her with a hard look. He did know her. Sometimes he thought he knew her better than she knew herself. If she was willing to vouch for this Kent character, then he was probably better than Perry had given him credit for being. That was the truth on one hand.
The truth on the other hand was something Lois apparently couldn’t see coming.
Still… the quality of those articles was too glaring to ignore. The Kerth rumors weren’t the only award related ones circulating…
“I’ll have HR draw up an offer,” the editor finally said.
Lois’s face brightened behind a wide grin. “I’m going to go find him and let him know.”
Perry fought a grin at her excitement. “Don’t you want to wait ‘til Monday?”
“Do you want me wait until Monday to turn in our next article?”
Perry suddenly sat forward in his chair and pointed a finger at her. “I came into the office on a beautiful Saturday afternoon with the express purpose of expediting that article to publication. Don’t try to brow beat me, Lois. I’m out of your league.”
Lois’s eyes widened in mock fear as she stood and backed toward the office door. She knew she was the only one who was granted certain leeway with the editor and used it to her advantage.
“Lane!” Perry bellowed when she had ducked out of his office.
Lois stuck her head back through the frame. “It’s already in your in-box, Chief.”
Growling, Perry reached for the short stack of shelves that sat on his desk.
Lois’s voice sounded from somewhere within the newsroom. “E-mail!”
Muttering to himself, Perry patted his chest pocket in search of his glasses so he could see the computer screen. After failing to find them, he squinted and opened the document attached to Lois’s name.
‘Court Rumors Heavy Fines and Retribution: Employees gather as sharks begin to circle.’
Perry reached for the phone to make the call to HR. He might have just discovered the Planet’s golden egg.
~.~
Lois’s mood was bright regardless of the dreary surroundings created by Suicide Slum at night that encroached upon her. Her talk with Perry had been successful and she was on her way to inform Clark of the *amazing* opportunity to work at the Daily Planet that he was being offered. Why Clark insisted on staying at the Apollo Hotel – one located in the worst part of town – she didn’t know, but she wasn’t overly concerned for her safety. She’d worked these beats with her sources before.
As Lois was walking purposefully down the sidewalk, a woman darted out of an alleyway ahead of her and almost knocked her down. “Hey!”
The woman kept moving and Lois turned to watch her run away. From her state of dress, it was apparent that the nameless woman was a ‘lady of the night.’ As she ran awkwardly in her heels, the woman whimpered and clutched her purse to her chest.
The sound of a voice coming from the alley drew Lois’s attention from the retreating figure. “I don’t want to hurt you!”
Recognizing the voice as Clark’s, Lois narrowed her eyes and crept toward the opening, pressing close to the side of the nearest building to remain unseen. When she glanced into the darkened passage, she gasped in surprise. Clark was cornered by two thuggishly dressed men, one of whom was holding a large knife. In this circumstance, Clark’s brash declaration seemed remarkably inadequate.
“You shouldn’t try to be a hero, man. You stuck your nose in, now we got losses to recoup,” the man with the knife said.
The pieces suddenly fell into place in Lois’s mind. The prostitute had probably been attacked by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Clark, being Clark, had jumped in to help. She really wasn’t all that surprised to find him in situation like this one. In her mind, he was a naïve boy scout whose determination to help other people would inevitably get him in over his head. Luckily, she was there to save him.
She silently slipped around the corner and into the shadows unnoticed. Half the battle of an ambush was finding the right opportunity to pounce.
“You should put that down,” Clark stated grimly. “Someone could get hurt.”
The man with the knife laughed. “You hear this chulo?” he directed to his partner in crime. “He’s a bad ass, eh? *Someone* could get hurt,” he mocked.
Lois inched closer and waited for her moment. When the man suddenly yelped and dropped his knife as if he’d been burned, she knew she had her opening. She launched at the other man and took him down from behind.
“Lois! What are you doing here?”
“You looked like you could use a hand,” she said in between pants while she blocked the swinging arm of her target.
Clark turned his attention to his thug, who had shaken off the pain in his hand and the surprise of Lois’s appearance. He was now angrily advancing on Clark.
Clark distractedly deflected the attacking man as he tried to gauge how Lois was faring. When she finally got the upper hand and delivered an incapacitating blow that sent her guy to the ground, Clark hit the knife-wielder with enough force to make him drop to his knees bewilderedly.
“What would make you do something so dangerous?” Clark demanded angrily looking over to where Lois was holding her side.
Lois gave him an odd look. “Was it less dangerous when you jumped in to help Lady Heather?” Wincing she turned to find where her purse had been thrown.
“It’s different,” Clark growled, watching as Lois picked up the cell phone that had fallen to the ground.
“Typical,” she muttered. “Man wants to save the world but doesn’t want any help.” She futilely pressed buttons. “Damn, it’s broken.”
She flicked a glance to the guy she had taken down. Noting that he was still groaning, she turned to address Clark. The guy Clark had hit had gotten to his feet as was moving toward him from behind. A flash of light near his hand alerted her to the fact that he had recovered his weapon.
“Clark!”
Her warning came too late as the man collided with Clark just as he turned to face him. The thug grunted in pain as Clark doubled over the man’s thrusting arm. Shocked into action, Lois ran to Clark’s side while the thug moved to his friend and helped him up. Lois was too preoccupied with seeing if Clark was okay to worry about the fact that the two muggers were getting away.
She moved to stand in front of him as he straightened. “Are you…? Where did he…?” she asked, frantically moving his suit jacket out of the way.
“I’m okay,” Clark offered, trying to block her searching hands with his own. “He missed.”
With wide eyes, Lois met his gaze as her hands stilled. “He missed?” she asked incredulously.
Clark’s jaw tightened. The fingers of Lois’s right hand were poking through a hole in his shirt.
Lois blinked and looked down at his shirt again. Frowning, she pulled the shirt from where it was tucked into his pants and lifted it. The undershirt had a matching slit. When she reached to lift the garment, Clark took a step backwards, effectively moving out of her reach.
“There’s not even a scratch…”
“The knife must have slipped. I was lucky,” Clark replied.
Lois’s eyes flicked to the ground. The broken hilt of the knife lay at her feet – its blade a mess of shattered metal surrounding it.
Clark’s gaze followed hers and his brow creased angrily. “You shouldn’t have come here.”
“How did… What happened to the knife?” Lois’s eyes were wide with unprocessed information.
“I told you it didn’t hit me,” he answered, briskly walking over to where Lois’s purse lay abandoned. He leaned down to pick it up for her. With any luck, he could encourage her to be on her way.
“Just like you didn’t stop that bus.”
Clark stiffened, but he forced himself to slowly turn to face her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said with a forced chuckle.
Lois ignored his deflection. “And you didn’t save that worker in Ilium Heights.” Her eyes began to flash with excitement as the puzzle came together. “Oh my God.”
Clark’s eyes narrowed. “We should leave.”
Lois continued as if she hadn’t heard them. “I didn’t think they could be coincidences, but I’d have to have been crazy,” she muttered to herself. “Cairo – 2003 – the assassination attempt on the ambassador… You didn’t just report that, you were the one who jumped in!” She snapped her fingers together. “Oh! And the tsunami survivors in Peru…”
Clark’s head tilted and his nostrils flared. “I don’t know…”
“That’s how you do it,” she said, excitedly stepping closer again. “That’s how you got the story all those times. You are the story!”
“You investigated me?”
“I…” Lois’s words stuttered to a halt and she tried to recall everything she had said in the last two minutes. She tended to speak before thinking when she got excited. “I checked your articles.”
Clark’s expression hardened. “What else?” he demanded.
Normally, Lois was a master at lying to cover her ass but the angry look in Clark’s eye unnerved her. She knew she had been found out – it was only a matter of admitting it. Maybe she should have listened to Jimmy…
“What else,” he asked again, startling her from her introspection.
At her apologetic expression, he pursed his lips together and dropped her purse onto the ground.
Lois’s eyebrows rose in surprise as he turned and stalked out of the alley.
“Clark!” she exclaimed. She scooped up her purse and ran after him. “I’m sorry! Listen…” she tried, but when she got to the end of the passageway, he was nowhere to be seen.
~.~
Sunday Evening
Lois sat on the couch staring at the television unseeingly. After Clark had run off on her the night before, she had gone to his hotel to try and explain. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been there. After a twenty minute wait in the seedy lobby, she had decided to go home. Clark needed space in order to cool off.
She would just see him on Monday – they had an article to write.
She sighed and wondered how she had managed to get through Sunday dinner with her family. Amazingly enough, her mother and sister hadn’t pushed her on the Clark issue when she once again told them he’d declined the invitation. Thankfully, the dinner conversation had been dominated by talk of Lucy’s impending departure, and Lois was grateful that her mother had instituted a rule about no work talk at the dinner table years earlier – it had saved her from having to talk about her investigation.
It also gave her an out once dinner had ended. No one would dispute that the investigation was ongoing.
Unfortunately, the extra time to herself had left her plenty of time to brood – which was what she was doing at that moment.
The sound of locks being turned alerted Lois to the fact that Lucy was home. When her sister walked through the door, Lois looked up and smiled brightly.
Lucy narrowed her eyes at the smile and studied her older sister for a moment. “You really high-tailed it out of Mom and Dad’s tonight,” she commented lightly.
Lois winced. “A little suspicious, huh?”
“Well, yeah, when you add the fact that you’re ‘investigating’ on your couch at home alone,” Lucy said, using her fingers to create air quotes. “*And* the fact that you are nursing a bruised rib.”
Lois’s eyes widened and Lucy snorted. “Your dad is a doctor and your mother practically runs a hospital by herself.”
Lois put a hand over her face. “What did they say?”
Lucy just arched an eyebrow in response. “What did you do?”
Lois’s gaze flicked to a Fed-Ex box that was sitting on the coffee table in front of her, but she didn’t reply.
Curious, Lucy walked into the living room and picked up the package. “Express delivery,” she read before meeting her sister’s eyes. “On a Sunday? Why haven’t you opened it?”
Lois sighed as she took the package from her sister and studied it. “I’m trying to ignore what having this says about me.”
Lucy eyed her big sister with a confused expression. “I’m not sure what that means.”
“Nothing,” Lois said, waving a hand distractedly. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“If you say so,” Lucy said breezily. “I have to go pack.”
“You don’t leave for two more days,” Lois said with a chuckle.
Lucy shrugged innocently and began walking toward the hallway. “I want to be thorough.”
Lois chuckled as her sister disappeared and sat thinking for a moment before comprehension dawned. Tossing the box aside, she leapt from the couch. “Wait… I need to see what all you’re packing!”
Later that night, Lois sat in her bed propped with enought pillows so that she was sitting upright. The package sat unopened on her lap.
She ran her fingers along the address label that spelled out her name. Lois had called in a number of favors and had hunted down this item in record time. The success of the find had been so thorough that she even impressed herself.
A contact who worked at the Smithsonian Institute had helped her gain access to locked historical records under the auspicious reputation of the revered organization. A few arm twists, white lies, and grand promises later, she was now in possession of the fabled Anthony West manuscript that had made up one third of Clark’s secret investigation.
His earlier reaction to finding out that she’d looked into his background had not been lost on Lois. The fact that she was merely looking at the package and not tearing the box open was a testament to just how aware she was of the line she had crossed.
Curiosity was a double-edged sword. It either killed the cat, or led it to food.
With a sigh, Lois turned the package on its side and tore off the pull tab.
~.~
tbc
