A/N: Please pardon the interruption, I just wanted to take a moment to put in a request.
We are about to embark upon some additional scientific mishmash in the upcoming chapters, and as I know there are medical and scientific professionals in the community, I would like to ask for a little leeway. I don't have a background in either of those areas, so I'm banking on author's prerogative and the fact that this is fiction to cover the possibility and plausibility of how alien genetics might lead to cloning, etc. In essence I guess what I'm saying is that I've suspended disbelief a little in order to make things work - hopefully you'll be able to do the same 
[CHAPTER 16]---
The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse— who can understand it? -- Jer. 17:9---
SundayClark landed onto Lois’s terrace and knocked on the glass. He laughed lightly when he saw her walk to the front door. She frowned after looking through the peep hole and he knocked again.
Lois turned at the sound and laughed, crossing over to the patio door and unlocking it. “I guess I should get used to that.”
“Sorry, I hadn’t changed yet, and I thought this would be less noticeable than Superman asking to be buzzed into your apartment building. I figured it was safe to change out here.” He gestured at the trees surrounding the balcony. They effectively provided seclusion from peering eyes.
“Yeah,” Lois agreed, moving aside so he could step through the door. “That’s just what we need: tabloid coverage. I’m pretty sure that’s not the type of publicity Perry anticipated for the Hottest Team in Town.”
“Well, Superman’s not part of that.”
“Right.”
Clark nodded curtly and put his hands in his pockets. “Right.”
Lois slid the door closed and turned to face him.
Clark released a breath. He couldn’t help but feel a bit discomfited. He had shared quite a bit about his background with Lois and during his time away, the doubts and concerns about being that vulnerable to someone else had returned tenfold.
“How’s Jory?” he asked, breaking the awkward silence that had fallen on the room.
“He’s fine. He’s in his room sleeping. You’d be amazed with the number of toys that he found a way to hide in his bag. I know I was. You want to see him?”
Clark nodded and followed her into the hallway. He hadn’t missed the fact that Lois had referred to the room as ‘Jory’s’ room. Part of him admired the way Lois was able to attach so easily, but the other part wanted to warn her against doing so. He glanced in the room at the child sprawled across the bed and smiled.
“Thanks,” he said, stepping back from the door.
“Were you able to find Lana?”
Clark gestured toward the hall. Nodding, Lois followed him back to the living room and they both sat down.
“I picked up the trail in London and for the past few days I’ve been following it. I’ve been to Washington D.C., to Canada… every time I picked up something up – a sighting, anything – it just ended. The last place was Las Vegas, then nothing. She’s disappeared.” He reigned in his frustration. This wasn’t quite the way he wanted to approach this.
“Vegas?” Lois asked. Her brow was furrowed in thought. “When was she in Vegas?”
Clark frowned. “Early 2004.”
“There’s something I need to show you,” she said, jumping to her feet and leaving the room.
Clark slowly got to his feet and followed her to the dining area where her laptop was sitting on the table.
“Jason Trask was a government sponsored alien conspiracist who went off the reservation. Dr. Klein told me that when the feds still had Trask under control, he was the head of a group of scientists dedicated to foreign organisms. Over time he became obsessed with proving the existence of an alien being on earth. When he couldn’t convince his colleagues and superiors – he went rogue.”
Lois pulled out the chair in front of the laptop and gestured for him to sit down. “One of the projects he was working on was cloning what he claimed to be intergalactic bacteria.”
Clark looked up at her with a furrowed brow. He could sense there was a connection but wondered what the extent was that she was trying to infer.
“The bacteria he was testing was supposedly linked with the 1977 meteor shower.”
He felt himself automatically stiffen as she reached around him to tap the laptop’s touchpad and activate the keyboard mouse.
“I did some research on the EPA commission of meteor rocks taken from the gully in Smallville. The 1977 shower spurred a new batch of conspiracy reports about Area 51.” She pointed to the screen. “Some time before his death in 2002, Trask had been taken in for questioning by authorities associated with Nellis Air Force Base.”
Clark looked at the map on the computer screen. “I’m afraid I don’t understand how this all ties together. Lana was in Vegas in 2004. Trask died in 2002. He had something to do with the collection of the meteor rocks...”
“And Lana just happened to have one on hand when she attacked you. She went to school in D.C. It’s not a far cry to think she could have been recruited by a deranged scientist who believed the world was in the midst of an alien invasion.”
Clark’s expression clouded. Alone, Lana Lang was dangerous… the fact that someone else had bankrolled her delusions was worse.
“You think she was part of his team.” He leaned back in the chair and rubbed his jaw. The idea that the government was aware of his secrets was scarier than anything else. It was a callback to some of the nightmare scenarios he’d been taught to avoid since he was a child.
“Yes and no,” Lois answered, moving to sit in a nearby chair. “Yes, I think she was working with Trask, but I think she was using him more than she was helping him. Think about it. Trask was a man who had the connections and the funding to allow her to do whatever inane experiments she wanted to. She had proof of what he was searching for, and yet he never found it. I think she strung him along just enough to make sure she had the facilities and the support she required.”
Lois clasped her hands together on the table’s surface. “The one thing that has troubled me continuously is that she brought Jory to you – well, to you through your parents. She took your DNA in 2001, but didn’t create a clone until *after* Trask was out of the picture.”
Clark sneered. “Maybe she didn’t have the process right until then.”
“Possible – and very likely – but it’s not just the timing that doesn’t fit for me. It was never publicized where Trask had his private lab, and it’s my guess that they never found it. I think there was a silent partner involved – someone just as crazy as the two of them who would finance these fanciful projects. Whoever it was would have enough power and pull to keep certain names out of the limelight.”
Clark sighed. “Another mystery identity to uncover – as if this wasn’t complicated enough already.”
Lois nodded in sympathy. “I know, but I think it actually can help us center in on something else: the voice.”
“The voice – as in the one that’s been testing me?”
“That’s the one.”
Clark thought about it for a minute. They had discussed before that whoever was able to broadcast onto the special frequency that only Superman could hear would have to be commanding some pretty impressive machinery. They had also concluded that no known government agency would be behind the use of innocent people to bait Superman into compliance. “It’s someone local,” he stated.
“My thoughts exactly,” Lois agreed. “Local or spends a lot of time here. So I figure the next step is to figure out who would have enough money and thirst for power to want to control Superman. I mean, the country certainly doesn’t suffer from a lack of billionaires… Bruce Wayne, Oliver Queen, Bill Church, Simon Stagg, Dick Branson, Doiby Dickles…”
Clark’s eyes narrowed, as he finished the list for her, “… and Lex Luthor.”
As Superman, Clark had a few run-ins with Luthor that had left him wary of the man but there was never anything sinister that could be tied back to him. It was just a strange feeling Luthor incited in him. It wasn’t clear, but Clark had felt that Luthor was somewhat offended that Superman had descended upon the city. Even as he had presented Superman with great honors and awards, Luthor had seemed to be calculating… Now Clark realized that it wasn’t curiosity that was behind Lex Luthor’s gaze.
It was threat.
“Luthor owns a hotel in Vegas, doesn’t he?”
“The Luxxor.”
Clark met Lois’s questioning gaze. “I bet he spends a lot of time there.”
“I bet he *pretends* to spend a lot of time there,” Lois retorted.
Clark smiled, thankful that she always seemed to be on the same page with him. He slid his chair back and stood up. “I think I’ll go take another look…”
“Wait a minute. What about Jory?”
Clark turned to face her – he was almost halfway across the living room. “If the trail leads me to Lana, like I think it will, she should have the information we need to save him.”
“No,” Lois said, crossing the room to stand in front of him. “I meant, who is going to watch him?”
“Oh… Well, if you can’t keep him tonight …”
“You think that I’m going to let you confront that woman alone?”
Clark’s eyebrows rose in surprise. He hadn’t even considered taking her with him. “This is not…”
“If you finish that sentence with the words ‘your’ and ‘problem’…” Her eyes narrowed and he took an involuntary step backwards. “Just don’t.”
He closed his mouth silently and frowned, crossing his arms over his chest. It was his Superman pose – it indicated that he meant business. “This is something I have to do.”
Lois crossed her arms, matching his posture. “I’m not saying that it isn’t. What I *am* saying is that you’re going alone.” She gave him a hard look. “She almost killed you once.”
“Nevada’s a big place and we don’t know where to look yet.”
Lois was unfazed. “We’re talking about a billionaire that needs to get to and from a hidden lab from his hotel in Las Vegas without it looking suspicious. That means no chartered flights and no train tickets. My money’s on the location being within a one hundred mile radius from the Lux.”
His jaw tightened as he gritted his teeth in thought. “I’d be faster without you.”
One of her eyebrows inched higher than the other. “Some things are better when they’re done slow.”
Clark blinked twice – her response catching him off guard. He blinked again. He was reading too much into it.
Lois uncrossed her arms. “Look, I’m the only one – other than your parents – who knows what she’s capable of. I think you could use some backup.”
Clark gazed at the front door of the apartment for a moment before facing her again. “Could you take Jory to my apartment? I’m going to go and bring my mother from Smallville so she can watch him.”
~.~
Lois stumbled a bit after Clark set her on the ground in the desolate landscape of the Nevada desert. She wasn’t naturally prone to air sickness, and had even clocked some hours in flight school, but they had been forced to fly fast and low to avoid detection – especially since they were heading this deep into air force country.
She leaned over and braced against her knees as she waited for the nausea to pass.
“Sorry about that,” Clark offered.
Lois opened her eyes and looked up at him. They were both wearing khaki-colored clothing in order to blend in with their surroundings. She waved dismissively and swallowed. “What? That? I’m fine. Just catching my breath.”
She blew out a breath and straightened. For as far as she could see on both sides, there was no sign of life or activity in the area. Other than the dirt and brush – and the creepy crawlies hidden below the surface – they were alone on a deserted stretch of highway named, amazingly enough, the Extraterrestrial Highway. Fate had a sense of humor.
While Clark had gone to Smallville to explain the upcoming trip to his parents, Lois had done some quick cross-referencing and source-calling to try and get an absolute location for Lana Lang’s lair. One of her sources – a man Lois secretly referred to as Crazy Dan – was a conspiracy theorist, and in response to her questions had supplied her with some aerial views of the air force base famously known as Area 51. Obviously, government intelligence agencies wouldn’t allow civilians access to scans of the actual base, which was fine because it wasn’t the base they were interested in – it was the area around it.
With all of the connections between Trask and the Nevada military, and Lex and the Las Vegas scene, it was pretty clear to Lois that Trask’s place of operation, and thus Lana’s current location, was not far from the place where the work all began. The only thing of interest Crazy Dan’s images had shown was a broken down car on the side of the ET highway. When Lois had pointed that out to her source, he had suggested abduction.
Lois didn’t buy the abduction theory – in this case, at least – but she had taken a closer look at the area. The insignia on the side of the car was from a private security company often linked to LexCorp.
At that moment, she and Clark were standing where the abandoned vehicle had once been. Now they just needed to figure out where it had been going.
She placed her hands on her hips and took a long look in each direction the road was going. Just like in the old western films her father enjoyed, the highway seemed to disappear in both directions in a ripple of heat. “This is one lonely road,” she commented. She could only imagine how it looked at night. If aliens were going to abduct someone, this would be just the place to do it.
“There’s some kind of fox trench about 100 miles North East of here,” Clark announced, peering off in the direction he had indicated.
“A fox trench? Like the things they use in wars?”
Clark nodded. He frowned as his eyes narrowed. “It’s some kind of small building that’s been mostly hidden in the ground. It doesn’t look like anything more than a sand dune, which explains why it didn’t stand out on the satellite scans. It’s hard to tell, but it looks heavily armed.”
“The ground?” Lois repeated, looking down. At this elevation, they were as close as ever to the earth’s core. There was a reason developers in this part of the world refrained from creating buildings with basements. A guard shack hidden just underground was one thing – there was no way an entire lab could be under there as well. “Are there any cars?”
“No,” Clark answered, his vision still attuned to the scene miles across the desert. “I’m not seeing any roads or fences either.”
“No. That would just give evidence that there was something out here - and that’s the last thing they’d want.” She sighed. “They wouldn’t be out here guarding nothing. The lab has to be close by. Do you see anything else? Maybe a bigger hill?”
Clark blinked and turned to look at her. “No, not a bigger hill,” he said. “A mountain. About another 20 miles further inland from the guard stand.”
“Wow. I don’t suppose we can just walk up and ring the doorbell, huh? Do mountains have doorbells?” Lois threaded her fingers through the strands of her ponytail and sighed. “But before we even think about getting *inside*, how do we even get to the door? I mean – 100 miles is too far for most intelligence systems, but what about cameras?” Her eyes grew wide. “What if they are watching us right now?”
“I scanned before we landed. There are no cameras, antennas, or receivers out this far. I think they would be too afraid of what would happen if they were found. No evidence is good evidence.” Clark bent down and picked up a fistful of sandy dirt. “But I think I have an idea for how we can make it to the mountain without the guards seeing – cameras and all.”
Lois looked at the dirt that was streaming from Clark’s hand quizzically. “And after that?”
“After that?” Clark repeated. He brushed his hands clean. “After that, I guess we ring the doorbell.”
Lois smirked and stepped closer when Clark stood. It wasn’t much of a plan –and usually plans came out better when they were thought through, but then there were times like these when risks had to be taken. Considering the importance of the information they had come out here to find – risk was warranted. “You take the lead.”
Clark nodded curtly and reached out for her forearm. “Whatever you do, keep your eyes closed. When it starts blowing, sand is like glass.”
~.~
tbc ...soon
