Disclaimer: This story is based on the television series "Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman." The recognizable characters and settings in this story are the property of D.C. Comics, Warner Bros., December 3rd Productions, and anyone else with a legal right to them, and I have no claim on them whatsoever, nor am I profiting by their use. The story, however, is a product of my own imagination, and it's mine, I tell you. Mine! Mine! Mine!
This is the sequel to Lessons.
Games People Play: 1/3 or 4 (most likely)
By Nan Smith
From "Lessons":
Outside there was a sudden roar of voices, and Lois looked through the window in time to see Superman streak across the sky. Then he was gone. An instant later, the window of the conference room opened and the familiar figure in blue floated to a touchdown next to Lois. "Ms. Lane, I believe I promised you a quote."
"Yes, you did." She smiled at him. "Come on into the other conference room. This shouldn't take long." Lois was aware of Cat's gaze on her and on Clark as she led him toward the other room, but she didn't look back.
Seconds after Superman had flown away, the door to the stairs opened and Clark stepped through. Whistling softly, he descended the ramp to the newsroom floor. "Did I miss anything?"
"Just Superman saving the world," Lois said. "I'm writing it up now. How are you feeling?"
"All right," Clark said.
"I guess your memory is back?"
"It seems to be," Clark said. He didn't elaborate, but Superman's remark about him owing her something popped into her mind, and she wondered exactly what he had meant. Maybe, someday, when she let him know that she had guessed his secret, or, more ideally, when he told her, she could ask him.
"Good," she said. "I knew you'd bounce back pretty fast. But Clark, you and I need to talk about what happened to me last night. Remember how you've said a couple of times that you don't trust Lex? Well, I think you might have a point...."
**********
The door to Conference Room One closed behind them. Lois locked the door and turned to her partner. "You were right about Lex," she said baldly. "I found out the hard way."
Clark's heavy brows snapped together. "What do you mean?"
"Do you remember when I got that phone call last night?" she asked. At his nod she continued. "It was Lex. He said he wanted me to interview him about Lex Corps' intentions of helping survivors if the asteroid hit us. That wasn't really what he was up to, though."
"What did he do?" Clark asked. He had lost his smile and looked surprisingly grim. In fact, he looked very much like Superman and Lois was thankful that she had decided to tell him the story here in the conference room, and not where people could see him.
In as few words as she could, she told him the story of what had happened to her in the hidden bunker beneath Lex Tower, and saw his expression grow grimmer and grimmer. Hurriedly, she concluded with Superman's timely rescue.
"Anyway," she said, "now I'm not sure what to do. If I report it, Lex will find some way to wiggle out of it, claim that he had nothing to do with it, even though I know he did. Nigel made it pretty clear when he was talking to that guy in the store room that Lex knew what was going on."
"I agree," Clark said. "In fact, I'm not sure he won't come after you, knowing what you know."
Lois shook her head. "I think I'm going to call him and tell him what happened to me, and let him give me some kind of explanation," she said. "I'm sure he'll be able to come up with something. And I'll believe every word of it, too."
Clark's lips twitched. "I'll bet you will," he said.
"But we're going to investigate him all the same," Lois added. "I want to know what you know about him. You obviously know something, or you wouldn't have been so suspicious of him all along."
"Well," Clark said cautiously, "a lot of it was circumstantial."
"Just like this last thing," Lois said. "We'll talk it over after I've talked to Lex. I don't want him to do anything stupid that I'll regret."
"Good idea," Clark said.
"I'm glad you agree," she said, reaching for the conference room phone. "Let's get this over with."
The voice that answered the phone was very familiar. Nigel St. John's accent wasn't one she was likely to mistake. "Mr. Luthor's office."
"Hello, Nigel," she said. "This is Lois Lane. Is Mr. Luthor available? I need to speak with him. It's urgent."
"Ms. Lane?" There was a faint note of surprise in St. John's voice.
"Yes," Lois said determinedly. "I need to talk to Le -- to Mr. Luthor right away. Something happened to me yesterday when I left Lex Tower that he needs to know about."
"One moment," St. John's voice said. The phone went silent and Lois thought that he must have put his hand over the receiver. Listening closely, she thought that she could hear the murmur of voices, but she couldn't tell what they were saying.
She glanced at Clark and noted that his head was tilted slightly, as if he were hearing something that she couldn't. Of course, she thought. Superman was listening to whatever was going on at the other end of the line with his super-hearing. Something as simple as covering the phone was unlikely to prevent him from being able to overhear it. Briefly, she was slightly envious of the ability.
Suddenly there was sound again on the line. Lex's voice, warm and friendly, emerged from the speaker. "Lois, my dear! Nigel tells me that you needed to speak urgently with me. Is anything wrong?"
"Kind of," Lois said. "Do you remember when I came over to your penthouse last night?"
"Of course I do." Was there the faintest hint of wariness in his tone? "I understand that Superman has reappeared and that Nightfall is no longer a danger to Earth. That's a great relief to us all. How can I help you?"
"I needed to tell you what happened after I left the penthouse," Lois said quickly. "I was in the elevator, and two men kidnapped me."
"Kidnapped you?" The shock in his voice certainly sounded genuine. If she hadn't heard enough during her escape to convince her that Lex knew all about her abduction, she might have believed him. "In the penthouse elevator?"
"Yes," Lois said. "It was the weirdest thing. I got away, but since it involved your -- special ark, I thought I should let you know so you can investigate. I'd rather do it in person so there's no chance of being overheard. Could I come over and tell you what happened?"
"Certainly," Lex said. "Fortunately, with all the disorganization over the asteroid, I have no meetings scheduled for this morning. Where are you?"
"I'm at the Daily Planet."
"Nigel will pick you up in twenty minutes," Lex told her. "You aren't hurt, are you?"
"No. I'm fine."
"That's a relief," Lex said. "I'll be waiting for you."
Lois hung up. Clark was frowning. "You're going over to Lex Tower? Are you sure that's a good idea?"
"It's the only way I can think of to convince him that I don't suspect him," Lois said. "If I'm willing to go over to his penthouse alone it should help convince him, but do you think you can contact Superman and have him hang around nearby, just in case?"
"I'll sure try," Clark said. He hesitated as if he were about to say something else, and closed his lips together tightly. "Be careful," he added after a pause.
"I will. It's important, or I wouldn't take the chance," she said. At his skeptical look, she added, "I *wouldn't!* I may take chances for a story, but this is really important! If he'd kidnap me for his ark, think what he might do if he thinks I suspect him! I *have* to convince him that I think it was someone on his staff that's out to get me for some other reason!" She added, "And, when I'm finished, we're going to go back to your place and you're going to tell me *everything* you know, don't forget! So you'd better start getting your notes together."
A little smile. "I'll do that."
Lois glanced at her watch. "Nigel is picking me up in eighteen minutes. I need to change. You get busy and call Superman." She jumped to her feet and hurried out.
**********
Clark looked after her for several seconds and then shook his head. Lois was definitely on a tear this morning, even given the fact that she had apparently spent the night escaping from Lex Luthor's hidden stronghold. Well, he could sort out all the questions he had thought of during her story later. Right now Superman needed to be hovering over Lex Tower, just in case his partner ran into trouble.
As he exited the Conference Room, Perry's voice stopped him. "Clark! Where are you off to?"
Clark paused. "I need to get hold of Superman. Lois is headed over to Lex Tower to talk to Luthor."
"*What?* After that business last night? Is she crazy?" Perry stopped. "Never mind. Get goin', son. Make sure she has some backup. How are you doin', by the way?"
"I'm fine," Clark assured him. "I'll tell you about it later, if you really want to know." He headed for the stairs at just under a run, and completely missed the sideways look that his boss cast after his retreating form.
**********
Lex Luthor was waiting when Lois stepped off the elevator into his luxurious penthouse, a slightly concerned expression on his handsome face. He held out his hand to her at once.
"Lois, my dear. Are you sure you're all right?"
"Pretty much." She gave him a little smile. "I managed to skin my knees during my escape, but other than that there's no damage. Perry suggested that I tell you right away what happened to me. Whoever was behind it has access to your ark, and he knows I got away. We thought you might be able to give me some idea who to check into."
"Come into my study and tell me what happened. I want to launch an investigation into this as soon as possible," Lex said, leading her toward the study door. "I'm just thankful you don't suspect me of instigating it, since it apparently happened here."
"*You?* Don't be silly," Lois said. "You're just not the kind of person to do anything like that. And even if you were," she added, "I'd think you would have too much to lose to even think about it. I'd guess that it has to be someone with some kind of axe to grind against me, or even against you. I doubt you got where you are without making some enemies along the way."
"You'd be right," Lex said. He opened the door and let her precede him into the luxurious study. "Won't you sit down? Now, tell me all about it. I've told my people that we aren't to be disturbed except for an emergency."
Lois settled into one of the overstuffed chairs and Lex seated himself at right angles to her, leaning forward with a concerned expression. "This is very serious," he said. "I fully expect my business rivals to attempt to outmaneuver me professionally, but to attack you seems somewhat over the top."
Lois shrugged. "I'll let you be the judge," she said. "After I left the penthouse yesterday, I took the elevator down. It stopped somewhere on the way, and two men got on --"
She told the story briefly, leaving out any parts that would incriminate him, and when she got to the point of Superman's arrival, she stopped. "You know what happened after that," she concluded. "Of course, I wouldn't have started a fire in the basement if I had realized it was your basement. I put the pieces together afterwards, after I found out I had been in your ark all along. What do you think?"
Lex was frowning. "This is extremely serious. You realize, of course, that someone must have had your apartment duplicated exactly, without my knowledge?"
At her nod, he continued. "I will certainly launch an investigation into this at once. The culprit will be found, I promise you, my dear. Assure Mr. White of that. My guess is that it is an attempt to discredit me by one of my business rivals. I imagine all of Metropolis knows of my admiration and respect for you."
"Me?" Lois said.
"Don't tell me you weren't aware of it," he said with a smile.
"I knew you liked me," Lois said.
"Liking doesn't describe it at all," Lex said. "We'll leave it at that for now, but rest assured that I'll spare no effort to discover who caused you this inconvenience."
"Thank you," Lois said. She glanced at her watch. "Perry's expecting me back," she added. "I feel better, knowing you're taking what happened seriously."
"You're very welcome," he said. "I'll escort you down myself, to be certain something of the sort doesn't happen again. And thank you for having faith in me."
"Of course I do," Lois said. "You'll let me know what you find out, won't you? I have a personal interest in this particular investigation."
"I certainly will," Lex said. "I'll call you when I know more."
"Thank you," Lois said.
**********
When she stepped off the elevator into the newsroom, she glanced around for her partner. He was nowhere to be seen, but at that moment the door to the stairs opened and Clark emerged. "Hi. How did it go?"
"Pretty good," she said. Why hadn't he been in the newsroom, she wondered. With Superman's speed, he could have easily arrived here before her, even if he had been flying over Lex Tower during her meeting with Lex. "I think I convinced him."
"I hope so," Clark said. "I was just talking to Superman, and he says that after you left, Luthor called St. John and they headed down that elevator into his bunker. It's lined with lead -- at least the top layer is, so Superman couldn't see where they went after that."
"We need to get down there, ourselves," Lois said. "I want to explore it a little. There must be some reason besides Nightfall that he had it built. I want to find out what it is. But --" She took his arm. "First, we're going to go somewhere private and you're going to tell me everything you know about Lex."
"Okay," Clark said. "Where do you want to go?"
"How about your place?" she suggested. "I don't know about you, but just knowing that Lex's people have been inside my apartment -- which they must have been, to make such a perfect copy of it -- makes my skin crawl."
"Yeah," Clark agreed. "I don't blame you." He rang for the elevator as he spoke. The doors opened almost immediately, and they stepped inside. Lois pushed the button for the first floor with her thumb.
As the car began to drop, Clark said, "I guess I haven't thanked you for everything you did for me yesterday."
"You remember everything?"
"I think so," he said. "You let me stay at your place, and you took me to see Dr. Friskin. You did everything you could think of to help me remember. You have no idea how much I appreciate that."
Lois squirmed a little. The fact that she had known he was Earth's last chance had contributed to her efforts, although she couldn't tell him that. But wouldn't she have tried to help anyway? She thought so, although she couldn't know for sure. Still, she had come to know a lot more about Clark as he really was in the last couple of days. He was a good guy, and that wasn't something she could say about many of her male acquaintances. If he had been just an ordinary man, he would still have been worth her friendship.
"What's the matter?" Clark asked. "I didn't mean to embarrass you."
"I just did what any friend would have done," she said. "You don't have to thank me."
"Even friends should say thank you," Clark said. He smiled at her. "And now I know why I felt so good about you when I couldn't remember anything else. I should have known that I was going to be okay with Lois Lane fighting in my corner."
She could feel the heat rising in her cheeks and looked at the toes of her shoes. "I'm glad I was able to help. But that's still not going to get you out of telling me all you know about Lex."
"Not a chance," Clark said. "Would I dare hold out on Mad Dog Lane?"
"You'd better not!" she said. And the uncomfortable moment passed.
Fifteen minutes later, a cab dropped them off in front of Clark's apartment house. Clark paid the driver and the two of them ascended the steps of his unit. Clark unlocked the door and let her enter first. "Want some coffee?"
"Do you have any?" she asked, dropping her shoulder bag onto the nearest chair.
"Just let me turn on the coffeepot," Clark said. "Make yourself at home."
Lois had already flopped down on his battered but comfortable sofa as he said this, and was in the process of kicking off her high heeled shoes. She had changed into the spare outfit she kept at work for emergencies a short time before. Little had she guessed when the idea had first occurred to her how prescient it would turn out to be. Still, making an appearance at Lex Luthor's penthouse in jeans and jogging shoes would certainly have looked very odd. She could clearly visualize Lex's raised eyebrows were she to show up in the things she had been wearing this morning.
It was funny, she reflected, as she flexed her toes, free at last from the confining leather of the footwear, how comfortable she always felt in Clark's company. It was if there was nothing that she could say to him, or do, that he wouldn't understand and accept. Unlike Lex. That must mean something, but she didn't want to analyze it further. It was enough for now that he was her best friend.
Superman's best friend, she thought, almost amazed. For some reason, Superman, who was really Clark when he wasn't on stage, so to speak, had chosen to make her his best friend. Then, she recalled her reasoning of the night before, and thought she understood. He wanted a girlfriend, not a groupie, and a friend generally learned your faults as well as your virtues and so was less likely to idolize you. She suspected that Clark was uncomfortable with the adulation with which many people seemed to regard him and liked it even less from her. She was going to have to severely alter her behavior when it came to Superman -- not all at once, but a gradual change would probably work.
"The coffee will be ready in a few minutes," Clark said, dropping down on the chair opposite her. Lois almost jumped. Enough with the introspection, she decided, straightening up on the couch. Time to find out what Clark knew about her other suitor.
"Good," she said briskly. "So start talking, Kent. What do you know about Lex that I don't know?"
Clark dropped his gaze to his hands, and Lois saw that he had clasped them tightly in his lap. He was silent for a long moment. She waited.
At last, he looked up. "Where should I start?"
"The beginning is always a good place," Lois said. "What made you first suspect him -- and when was it?"
"It was something Antoinette Baines said," he said unexpectedly. "Do you remember when she had us chained up in that hangar. You asked her why she sabotaged Messenger, remember?"
Lois cast back in her memory. "Yeah, I remember."
"And she said her reason was profit. 'Outer space is no different from any new frontier. It will belong to those who get there first and seize the high ground,'" he quoted.
Lois felt her eyebrows rise. She had been operating on an adrenaline high that night, and the memory of the conversation with Dr. Baines was probably one of those things that she would never forget.
"Luthor said something very similar to me at the White Orchid Ball, about Alexander the Great," Clark continued. "You were there. He said that Alexander's strategy was to always control the high ground. Then, just as we escaped the hangar, the helicopter exploded. The next day, you discovered the bomb in the Messenger rocket. Dr. Baines couldn't have planted it; it would have been discovered if it had been there since the night before, which meant that somebody put it there during the final inspection of the ship. That was when I was certain that someone besides Baines was involved, and the most likely person was Luthor."
"How did you figure that?" she asked. "You barely knew him at the time."
"I know," Clark said. "But Dr. Baines wanted the space station to fail so she could 'seize the high ground.' What good would it do her unless she could replace the station with one that she controlled?" Clark looked back at his clasped hands. "And that led back to Luthor, again. The only possible replacement for Prometheus was Space Station Luthor. That was when I realized what kind of person we were dealing with. To make his plan succeed, Luthor was willing to sacrifice the lives of every colonist on board the Messenger. But he never intended to share the profits with Dr. Baines. She was a liability, until the convenient helicopter 'accident.'"
Lois swallowed. Put that way it made a lot of sense, especially after what had happened to her the night before. "I see."
He glanced quickly at her and then went back to studying his hands. "After that I watched him," he continued. "I saw a lot of strange coincidences that -- in spite of the laws of probability -- always seemed to benefit Luthor, but the evidence was hard to pin down."
"What were they?"
The coffee timer beeped in the kitchen, and Clark got to his feet. "I'll get the coffee."
She followed him into the kitchen. "The coincidences you were talking about," she said. "What were they?"
Clark found a pair of mugs in a cupboard and proceeded to pour coffee into them with the care of an alchemist compounding the elixir of life, she thought, somewhat amused. Clark was definitely uncomfortable telling her this. "There's some packets of artificial sweetener and creamer in the drawer behind you."
Lois retrieved them and turned back in time to see Clark dump four heaping teaspoons of sugar into his coffee and follow it with a generous helping of real cream from a carton in his refrigerator. Naturally Superman wouldn't think about his weight, she thought. He probably burned calories like crazy with all the stuff he did. In the back of her mind, she wondered how many calories it might take to land an airliner like the one he'd brought in at Metro Airport three weeks ago, or how much it might have cost him to shove Nightfall out of its collision course with Earth. No wonder Clark never worried about getting fat.
She took an experimental sip of the coffee. Like all the coffee she had sampled at his place, it was excellent, of course, but she didn't intend to get sidetracked. "What coincidences?" she repeated.
Clark led the way back into his living room and settled into his chair. "Well, there were the tests of Superman," he said. "Not long after he appeared. You probably remember Jules Johnson and Monique Kahn, right after the bomb in the bank? Those were tests of Superman's powers. Superman figured out that Luthor was behind them. And then there was that business with the Smart Kids. There was a mystery donor who funded Dr. Carlton's work -- I was never able to identify him, of course -- but he must have been pretty well off."
"Lex again?" Lois asked.
"Probably. And we know he funded Miranda when she developed the 'Revenge'. I doubt that was a coincidence."
"And the nuclear plant," Lois said slowly. "It nearly drove Superman away."
"Which," Clark agreed, "would have benefited Luthor. He knows Superman is watching him, and he's tried to chase Superman out of Metropolis before by threatening innocent people."
"When was this?" Lois asked quickly.
"Superman confronted him over the tests. Luthor suggested the tests would continue, and would threaten innocent lives, unless Superman left Metropolis."
"Superman told you that?" Lois asked.
He nodded. "There have been a few other things here and there, but those are the main ones that I can think of," he said. "And then last night he tried to make you a 'guest' on his Ark."
"Yeah," Lois said. "A lot of things are beginning to make sense that didn't before."
"So what are you going to do?" Clark asked.
Lois smiled without mirth. "I'm going to go on dating him, and I'm going to use the relationship to investigate him. And you're going to help me."
"Don't think I'm going to date Luthor," Clark said. "He's not my type."
"You're not his, either," Lois said, rigorously suppressing the temptation to smile. "Do you think Superman would be willing to help us, if we needed him?"
"Probably," Clark said. "What do you have in mind?"
"Nothing, yet, but that won't last long. I'll let you know when I come up with an idea that looks like it has a chance ...."
**********
tbc
