Taylor Hebert: PRT Operative

[Ack]

Taylor Hebert: PRT Operative

Part One: Brand New Day

[A/N 1: This story is a direct sequel to Taylor Hebert, Medhall Intern.]

[A/N 2: This chapter commissioned by @GW_Yoda and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]



Saturday, October 9, 2010

Hebert Household

Taylor

"It's been three days."

Greg said it, but I'd been thinking it, so I couldn't exactly snap at him.

"Yeah, I know." I put down the book I'd been trying to read for the last thirty minutes, without getting past the first two lines. This was kind of scary; I liked reading. "We didn't imagine the whole thing, did we? That all happened, right?"

He raised one finger, and a globule of liquid black metal flowed out of his sleeve and spun on the tip of his finger. "Well, unless we both imagined the same thing, and I'm imagining this right now, I'd go with 'yeah'." A moment later, it flowed back out of sight again.

I sighed. "Okay, so it happened. Then what's going on? Why hasn't she contacted us?" At first I'd thought being a secret undercover cape for the PRT would be cool and exciting, but the lack of anything at all going on was paradoxically making me jumpy.

Greg's face expressed the same sentiment as his spread hands. "No idea. She wouldn't have just forgotten about us, would she?"

I snorted indelicately. "We uncovered and mopped up the Empire Eighty-Eight in a day." Well, the Protectorate and PRT had had a hand in that, but not a huge one. "Nobody's gonna forget that in a hurry."

"Especially not Kaiser." Greg chuckled. "The look on his face when Armsmaster was putting the cuffs on him was amazing. And to think I wanted to grow up to be Max Anders."

"Yeah." I leaned back in my chair. "I think I wanted to grow up to be Ms Harcourt. Say 'do this', and people would jump to do it." Willingness to work with Nazis aside, her command tone had been impressive.

"That woman was legit scary." Greg shook his head. "And not in a good way. I can't believe she was willing to kill Tracey just to protect Medhall, even knowing she was working for Nazis."

"Yeah, well, she's going down too. The footage of her attacking Tracey put the nails in that coffin." I got up from the table where we'd been pretending to study. "Want some juice?"

"That'd be nice, thanks." Greg reached out and briefly grabbed my hand on the way past. "If I was gonna get powers and be a cape, I'm glad it was with you."

I grinned mischievously over my shoulder at him. "Me too. Even if Brian is majorly good looking."

"And I'm not?" He clutched his chest in the general region of his heart. "Agh! A fatal wound!"

"Dork." I rolled my eyes as I poured his glass of juice. "Brian might have muscles on muscles, but he doesn't have what we've got. He never loaned me his phone on a bus when I was stressing out about calling Tracey. He never crash-tackled a psychotic bitch in the certain knowledge that he'd lose, just to save me from two more bitches. You were willing, on zero explanation, to come sneak me out of Medhall through the walls. And you took down Shadow Stalker, something he was never able to do."

"Oh. Wow." He blinked a couple of times as he accepted the glass from me. "Damn, you're making me sound like some kind of action hero, even before I got powers. Keep talking that way, and I won't be able to fit my head out the door to go home."

"You were pretty damn impressive after you got powers, too," I reminded him, turning back to the bench to pour my own glass. "Just saying."

He saluted me with his glass. "Says the girl who figured out who the Empire was. And figured out the plan to get back in and save Brian's folks."

"That first bit was Tracey. I just—" The phone on the wall rang. I froze, then carefully put the juice bottle down. "Shit, is that her?"

"Either that or it's your dad calling to say he'll be working late." Greg made a go-on motion. "Well, it's your phone. You answer it."

"Yeah. Yeah." Leaving the juice bottle on the bench, I ducked across the kitchen to where the phone was. "Hello, Hebert residence, Taylor speaking."

"Good afternoon, Miss Hebert." Director Piggot's voice was unmistakeable. "Am I correct in assuming that Mr Veder is there as well?"

"Uh, yeah, he is." I glanced involuntarily at Greg. "So, is this … are we …" I trailed off, unsure of the exact wording.

"I have a task for you, yes. An unmarked car will be outside your house in precisely five minutes. You and Mr Veder will get in this car. The security password is 'bratwurst'. Another vehicle has been dispatched to fetch Ms Grimshaw. Do you have any questions?"

"N-no, ma'am. Five minutes. Password is 'bratwurst'. Got it."

"Good. Four minutes fifty seconds." The call ended. Director Piggot, it seemed, was not big on extended goodbyes.

By now, Greg was on his feet. "So, what'd she say? Are we on? Say we're on."

I went back over to the bench and finished pouring myself the glass of juice. "We're being picked up. We've got four and a half minutes to be outside."

"Awesome!" He checked his watch, then closed the book he'd been staring at the same page of for the last three-quarters of an hour and stuffed it in his backpack. "Should I leave my bag here, or take it with?"

I shrugged. "Leave it here, I guess. Even if they drop you off at yours, you can come over tomorrow and pick it up." I put the cap back on the juice bottle and returned the bottle to the fridge. Then I started on the glass, drinking it down as fast as I could without spilling or choking.

"Okay, um, what if your dad comes home and we're not back?"

I hated that he was right. "Yeah, good point." I finished the juice, put it in the sink to rinse, then grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled a note:

Going out for a while with Greg. I'll call and let you know if we're going to be out late. Taylor.

"That'll do," I decided, dropping the pen on top. "Let me just grab my sneakers and we can go."

Greg checked his watch again. "Two minutes. Might want to put your sneakers on in the car."

"True." I headed through the living room into the entrance hall, flicked a shadow-blot to the top of the stairs, and teleported up there. Another shadow-flick got me to the end of the corridor, to where my room was. My sneakers were right where I'd left them, so I grabbed them and repeated the process to get back down to Greg.

"Damn," he said admiringly. "That took fifteen seconds, tops."

I grinned, soaking up the praise as was my due. "It's all in the wrist."

We headed outside and I made sure the front door was locked, then I sat down on the steps and started putting my sneakers on. Just as I was doing the laces up, a car came rolling along the street. It wasn't sleek and black with heavily tinted windows (which would absolutely have drawn unwelcome attention) but it was about as anonymous as a car could get; a neutral brown in colour, there were no stickers, dents, scratches or other identifying marks on it. Walk past it on the street and you'd never even remember it was there.

I nodded toward the car as I stood up. "Bet you ten bucks that's our ride."

"No bet." Greg followed me down the path. "I was gonna say exactly the same thing."

The car came to a stop at the curb and the passenger side window lowered itself. Strolling over, I leaned down to look inside. "Hi. Can I help you?"

"Sure." The driver held up a PRT badge. "Password 'bratwurst'. I'm Lieutenant Forrester. Let's go."

"Excellent." I got in the front, while Greg climbed into the back seat. Barely had I closed the door and put my seatbelt on than Forrester started the car moving again. "Is there anything you can tell us about what the Director wants us for?"

Eyes still on the road, he shook his head. "Sorry, kid. I don't even know who you are. Operational security. Understood?"

"Ah. Yeah. Totally." It made sense once he said it, and I could've kicked myself for not seeing it sooner.

"Wait, 'bratwurst'?" That was Greg in the back seat. "Is that the Director telling us that we're brats and we're the worst?"

I waited for Lieutenant Forrester to deny it, but he merely looked thoughtful. "You know, I'm not even going to get into that one. The Director has reasons for everything she does."

Now, that I could believe.

<><>​

Greg

The PRT undercover garage was familiar to Greg, but this time around things felt much more relaxed as he and Taylor got out of the car and looked around. Not bothering to wait for the PRT lieutenant, Taylor caught Greg's eye and headed for the elevator. He followed along, of course; his personal policy of 'when in doubt, let Taylor take the lead' had served him well more than once.

Just as they got there, the roller-door rumbled upward and a second car entered the parking garage. To Greg's discerning eye, it looked just as carefully anonymous as the one that had conveyed them there, and he waited to see if his suspicions were correct. Beside him, Taylor had a slight smile lurking in the corner of her mouth, which said to him that she'd had the same idea.

They were proven correct when the car door opened and Tracey got out. "Taylor! Greg!" The pleasure in her voice was evident as she started in their direction. "It's good to see you again!"

"You too." Taylor met her midway with a rib-squeezing hug. "Did the Director say anything more than to come in?"

"Nope. You too?" Released from the hug, Tracey gave Greg a smile and a side-hug. "Sounds about right."

"It does," agreed Greg, returning the gesture. Tracey had been nice to Taylor from day one, long before they'd figured out what Medhall really was, and he held her in just as much regard as Taylor did. "What say we go up and find out what that is?"

Taylor grinned. "Sounds like a plan."

<><>​

Taylor

As we stepped into the elevator, Lieutenant Forrester handed out visitor tags. He also gave Tracey a high-vis vest. "For you, ma'am."

Greg and I glanced at each other in confusion; the visitor tags were one thing, but the vest didn't seem to belong. "Uh, what's that for?" I asked.

"Teacher's aide." Lieutenant Forrester hit a button on the panel, then keyed his radio. "Bratwurst, coming up."

Teacher's aide? The look of puzzlement was shared between all three of us this time, but Tracey put the vest on anyway. As Greg and I already had, she slung the visitor tag around her neck.

The elevator opened onto a hallway as a line of chattering kids strung past, all wearing visitor tags, and accompanied by a couple of adults in the same high-vis vests. Oh, I realised as the penny dropped with a deafening clang. Protective camouflage. I stepped out of the elevator and merged with the group, with Greg following (of course) and Tracey bringing up the rear. Lieutenant Forrester emerged last and moved up past us as though he had someplace important to go.

The tour group seemed to utterly ignore the fact that two new kids and a teacher's aide had joined the herd; they wouldn't so much as meet our eyes. In fact, even the chatter seemed entirely artificial and meaningless when I actually paid attention to it. There was a red-headed kid in the middle saying, "blah blah blah" over and over, while apparently nodding in agreement with the guy next to him.

Lieutenant Forrester headed up to a door marked 'Conference Room C' and opened it. Casually, he stepped inside, leaving the door open. Tracey met my eyes as well as Greg's; we both nodded in silent agreement. As the 'tour group' passed by the door, we drifted to the back then stepped inside.

Inside the room were Director Piggot and Armsmaster; at Piggot's gesture, Forrester left once more, closing the door behind him. Greg, Tracey and I moved forward by unspoken agreement, pulling out chairs to sit down. "Interesting charade out there," Tracey observed. "Are you so sure you've still got moles?"

"I don't know that we haven't." The Director had lost none of her dour intensity. "Which means I have to assume that some are still active."

"And thus, the pretend tour group." I nodded. "I'm guessing those were the Wards."

Greg straightened a little in his chair. "The Wards? I thought that was a real tour group."

I ticked points off on my fingers. "They never paid us any attention. That one kid was literally just saying 'blah blah blah'. And Lieutenant Forrester called ahead before we went up in the elevator. Pretend tour group. Where can you find a bunch of teenagers in this building who can be guaranteed to follow orders? The Wards. QED."

Director Piggot's lips tightened fractionally. "The PRT would prefer you kept that knowledge to yourself."

"Sure." I laced my fingers together. "So, if it's not to find the rest of the moles, what do you need us for?" I knew this had to be the case, because she would've called just me in if it was about any more moles in the building.

"Coil." She said the name bluntly. "He had people inside this building until you unearthed enough of them that we were able to find the rest, and we uncovered his true identity as well."

The set of her jaw and the glint in her eye gave me the hint, and I followed it up. "He was one of yours, I'm guessing. The one you were talking about, just before we went up onto the roof? Calvert?"

"Yes." The admission clearly pained her. "Not totally surprising; the man had about as chequered a career as anyone could have and not wind up in Leavenworth. He had the good fortune to be off sick that day. Raiding his home got us nothing except a lot of questions."

"And you want us to find him." Tracey wasn't saying it as a question. "He still poses a problem to you, and you need him located."

Piggot slowly nodded. "You'll have access to all the files we had on him, many of which we suspect have been altered after the fact. He also did a little damage before we shut him out for good, so you're going to have to piece some of it together, then determine what's viable and what's been made up out of whole cloth."

Greg cleared his throat. "This is probably a stupid question and I'm almost certainly going to wish I hadn't asked it, but why the focus on him now that he's been outed?"

Before the Director could answer, Tracey did it for her. "Because of what he knows. Not the day-to-day passwords and such—I'm pretty sure those were changed within the hour—but his familiarity with the deeper institutional procedures and information that outsiders just don't get access to. Plus, he's probably got dirt on a lot of PRT personnel that he hasn't used yet. Given enough time, he'd probably rebuild his mole network and go straight back to what he was doing before."

"Ms Grimshaw is correct." Director Piggot's expression suggested that she'd just bitten into a lemon. "We're on a time crunch right now. We need to find him and bring him down before he insinuates his tentacles back into our system."

I leaned back in my chair. "Well, if that's the case, we're going to need to bring Tattletale in on this." Under the table, I took Greg's hand and squeezed it. The answer to his question might have been obvious to us, but it had still needed to be asked.

The Director's hypothetical lemon appeared to become extra tangy all of a sudden. "I'd really rather you didn't."

"And I'd really rather we did." I faced up to her without blinking. "I'm good at seeing patterns in what's there. Tattletale is good at piecing together what's not there. If anyone can help us get an insight on Coil, it's her."

Armsmaster, silent up until now, stirred from his place by the wall. "Ma'am, while Tattletale can be irritating, and possibly poses a security risk, she's very good at what she does, and is still less of a security risk than Calvert himself."

She shot him a side-glance—Et tu, Bruté?—then looked back at me. "Fine. Bring her in."

"Yes, ma'am."

<><>​

Undersiders Base

Grue

Brian gave Lisa a dubious look. "How can you be so certain they'll call on us today?"

Her grin was a masterpiece of smugness personified. "Because they're the good guys and we're the bad guys. First day, they would've been all 'we don't need them, they're villains'. Second day, it would've been 'figure out a way that we can do this without them'. And on the third day, 'okay, fine, but don't let them know how much we need them'."

"Okay, I'll bite." Alec didn't look up from the widescreen TV as he blew away his opponents with electronic rifle fire. "How do you even know they're going to need us?"

Lisa never hesitated. "Because we've already worked for them, and every problem looks like a nail when all you've got is a hammer. Before you ask, 'but what if they don't have any problems?', they'll have a problem because the PRT always has problems. And the very moment one crops up that Piggot's in-house team can't cover, that's when she'll start thinking about the amazingly versatile group that cleaned up the Empire for her. Even if she's unwilling to admit it to herself."

Brian frowned. Her logic sounded good, but she'd talked herself down more than one rabbit-hole before. "I dunno. Piggot did not like having us there. Personally, I think she'd need a gun to her head before—"

Lisa's phone rang. The look she gave Brian as she swiped to answer made her previous smugness look downright humble and self-effacing by comparison. With the tap of her finger, she put the phone on speaker.

"Hello, Tattletale speaking."

"Hi, Tats. It's Taylor here." The voice was both familiar and cheerful.

"Oh, hi, Taylor." Lisa put on an artificially bright tone. "How are you doing today?"

Now Taylor sounded amused. "Just fine, how about you?"

"We're all fine, even Brian." She ignored his indignant Hey! "So how can I help you today?"

Taylor sighed. "I'm at the PRT and we kinda need a hand here."

The look Lisa gave Brian could've launched a rocket to the moon, powered by sheer told-you-so energy. "Oh, you do? Really? The PRT?"

"Yes, the PRT." Taylor paused. "What's up? Why are you repeating what I'm saying?"

"Because someone didn't believe the PRT was going to call us today." Lisa was enjoying this far too much.

"Wow, this is the first time I've ever heard someone roll their eyes before. And it's not really the PRT. I'm the one who insisted on calling you in. So, do me a favour and don't make me or Director Piggot regret this."

As Lisa's shoulders slumped a little, she steadfastly avoided Brian's eyes. "Ah, okay. So, what's the deal?"

"It's about what you probably expect. Director Piggot has given me a problem and I'm thinking you're the best person to help me unravel it."

Lisa brightened. "Well, of course I am. What's the problem?"

"Ah, sorry, the Director just gave me a note saying, 'no details, opsec'. I guess that means you have to come in before we tell you anything about the situation."

"She does realise that I could probably solve it over the phone if I had enough details, right?" Lisa had regained some of her poise and all her self-confidence.

"As far as I can tell, she doesn't give a damn. She wants everyone who's working on this to be directly under her eye."

"Plus, she doesn't trust me." Now, Lisa sounded amused.

"I'd like to say that you're wrong, but we both know I'd be lying." So did Taylor.

"Well, at least we're all on the same page. So, how are we gonna do this?"

"Okay, the Director just handed me another note. You can be masked but not in costume. Give us a location near to you, and we'll have a car there in thirty minutes. You will hand over all phones and other electronics as soon as you get in the car. I'll be in the car to make sure everyone plays nice. Sound okay?"

Lisa grinned. "I'm guessing that last bit was you, not the Director. And she's not thrilled about it."

"Wow, it's almost like you've got the power to figure out stuff from minimal cues or something." Taylor's sarcastic drawl should've left scorch marks on the phone. "So where do we pick you up from?"

Lisa's lips pursed for a moment. "Corner of Parker and Brock. Opposite the convenience store." It was a couple of blocks from the hideout: close enough to be walked easily, far enough that she couldn't be backtracked.

"Okay, got it. See you soon."

"See you soon." Lisa ended the call, then raised her eyes in Brian's general direction. "So, are you going to say it, or do I have to force it out of you?"

"Force what out of me?" He met her gaze, stare for stare. "You were wrong. They didn't waffle for three days before asking you. Taylor called you as soon as they brought her in on it."

"But they still called on us after three days." Lisa's air of superiority could've bounced bullets right then. "Doesn't matter how or why. Three days. I was correct."

"Just give up now." Alec still hadn't looked around from his game. "You know she'll never admit it."

As much as Brian hated to admit that he was right, Lisa had that set to her jaw that told him she'd argue the point until Doomsday and forever afterward. "Fine, whatever you need to make yourself feel better. Now, you'd better get going. I doubt they'll wait too long for you if you're late."

She gave him that same irritating smile as she picked up her domino mask from the coffee table. "Well, they already waited three days. Mwahahaha." And then she was out the door.

Gritting his teeth, Brian debated banging his head against the wall a few times. At least it would be less painful than arguing with Lisa. "Is it just me, or has working for the PRT made her even more of a pain in the ass than normal?"

Alec shrugged. "I can't see the problem. Now they've got to spend hours dealing with her."

Brian considered that. Yeah. Good point.

<><>​

PRT Building ENE

Greg

It was quiet in the conference room. Director Piggot had left shortly after Taylor had, citing a need for her presence elsewhere. Armsmaster remained, still standing against the wall.

"Uh, hey, you know it's okay to sit." Greg motioned to one of the chairs. "We won't tell anyone."

"I appreciate the offer, but those chairs aren't rated for my armour." Armsmaster smiled briefly. "Thanks for the consideration, though."

"Allow me." Greg grinned as he let the metal he'd been wearing flow out of his sleeve and onto the chair. Wrapping around the legs and plastic seat, it turned the mundane piece of furniture into a stylish (and extremely sturdy) work of art. "Voila; one Armsmaster-rated chair."

Tracey stared at him. "Wait, you were carrying that with you all this time?"

"Well, yeah." Greg shrugged. "To me it's as light as foam padding. I'm never gonna be caught without the ability to make basic armour if I can help it." He turned to Armsmaster. "Go on, try it out."

"Hm. Very well." The armoured hero lowered himself onto the chair, which didn't so much as creak. "I knew your darksteel was strong, but I'm impressed. Thank you. I can lock my leg joints to stand for a long period of time, but sitting is more comfortable."

"Can I ask you a question about Director Piggot?" Tracey leaned back in her chair with her fingers laced in front of her.

Armsmaster paused for a moment before responding. "You can ask. I might not answer."

Tracey nodded. "That's fair. It's just that when she was talking about this Calvert guy, it sounded like it was about more than just a PRT officer betraying his oath. Like it was personal between the two of them."

Greg frowned. "Yeah. She said he had a really chequered career, whatever that means."

"Ah." The Protectorate hero hesitated for a moment, then seemed to come to a decision. "This is all in the files you'll be looking at, so I don't see the harm in telling you ahead of time. Commander Calvert was one of the two survivors of Ellisburg. The Nilbog event. He was a lieutenant at the time."

"Whoa," breathed Greg as dots connected inside his head. "I remember Mr Gladly covering that in World Affairs. He was there?"

Tracey tilted her head slightly. "And not only him. You said there were two survivors. Would the other one have been Director Piggot?"

Armsmaster nodded. "It's a matter of public record. However, while the Director fought to the last, Calvert shot his captain in the back so he could get up the ladder onto the helicopter faster. In the aftermath, he was dismissed from the PRT, but because they decided there were extenuating circumstances, he wasn't legally banned from having anything to do with the service again. He became an analyst contracting to the PRT, then managed to slide his way back in as a strike squad commander."

"And at the same time, he was doing the supervillain thing." Greg shook his head in wonder. "Gotta say, the man seems like a real dick."

The door opened and Director Piggot entered, carrying three folded laptops and a stack of folders. "I'm going to assume you're referring to Commander Calvert. I never liked him, and I never trusted him. But there's many people I don't like or trust that I still have to work with, so that wasn't actually a factor in my treatment of him." She nodded to Armsmaster, who had risen as she entered. "Lieutenant Forrester just got back with Tattletale and Miss Hebert." A moment later, she paused and looked more closely at his chair. "… ah. Mr Veder's work?"

"Yes, actually." He lowered himself into the chair again. "It's a useful field test, and there aren't many chairs in this building rated for my armour."

"I see." The Director placed her burden on the table, then sat down. "I'll brief you all in a moment, when Miss Hebert and Tattletale get here."

Greg nodded. "So, just making sure that we're all on the same page, as soon as we locate Coil, we're going after him, yeah?" He was pretty sure that was the case, but it was always a good idea to make sure.

Also, it was so weird to say that sort of thing in total seriousness.

Director Piggot looked around. "Yes—"

The door opened and Tattletale (wearing a visitor badge to go with her mask) burst in dramatically. "Never fear, the answer to your problems is here!"

Taylor followed her in, grinning. "Hey, all. Yes, she's been like this the whole way over. Now she's your problem."

The Director didn't quite roll her eyes, but Greg suspected that it was a close-run thing. "Thank you so much. Sit down, Tattletale."

"Sure thing." Tattletale grabbed a chair, spun it around, and sat down with her arms crossed over the back. "So, what's got everyone's undergarments in such a knot that you had to pull me in on it? Is the Director's morning Sudoku giving problems?"

"No." The Director stood and handed Taylor, Tracey and Tattletale a folder and laptop each. Greg didn't mind being excluded from the immediate selection; he worked better as a sounding-board for Taylor, anyway. "The other day, after you teleported to the Medhall building, we followed up on the clues Taylor had unearthed. Among other things, we discovered Coil's secret identity. Specifically: Thomas Calvert, a PRT strike squad commander."

It was clear to Greg that Tattletale was trying to hide her reaction, but even her domino mask couldn't conceal the widening of her eyes, much less the sudden tension in her posture. Her voice, when she spoke, was filled with apparent nonchalance. "Okay, so you figured this out. That's cool. What do you want us to do about it?"

"For shame, Tattletale." Director Piggot's voice was slightly drier than Death Valley at noon during high summer. "You're supposed to be the one with all the answers. I need him located and captured, before he can make use of his inside knowledge to cause more problems for us."

"… right." Tattletale's eyes flicked around each member of the group before returning to the Director. "He's got a rep for being slippery as hell. Did you have any leads on what his powers might be?"

<><>​

Taylor

"Powers?" Tracey leaned forward intently. "This is the first I've ever heard of him having powers. What have you heard?"

I wasn't sure what she'd seen, but I was pretty sure the Director had picked up on Tattletale's change in attitude, just as I had. With all of us paying her more attention that she'd probably bargained for, Tattletale seemed to wilt a little. "Uh … maybe reality alteration? Also, he's apparently got an underground base, like an Endbringer shelter, and he's got a bunch of mercenaries working for him."

"I'm impressed." Director Piggot didn't sound impressed, but her sarcasm didn't seem to be the 'facetious' type. Tattletale flinched, indicating that she'd noticed it too. "Your power is no doubt supplying you with all sorts of details now, that you didn't know before. I'm assuming you didn't know them before, because if you had, the reasonable thing to do would be to fill us in as soon as you learned we were going after him."

"Okay, okay, okay." Tattletale held up her hands in surrender. "You got me. I work for him. Or rather—"

The Director's voice could have shaved steel. "Armsmaster, place Tattletale under arrest immediately."

"Whoa, whoa, wait a minute." Tracey held her hands up in protest. Greg and I echoed her words.

Director Piggot stared at us; I got the impression that if it had been just one of us, she would've ignored the reaction, but as it was, she stopped. "What? She's literally in his pay. The man we're seeking to bring down."

"But she didn't even know about that until we brought her in here." Tracey spoke urgently: I knew that every word counted. "Can you just hear her out? Please?"

The Director gave Tracey a hard look, then favoured Tattletale with one that should've given her a medium sunburn. "Talk fast."

Tattletale took a quick breath. "The Undersiders currently work for Coil. But I'm totally willing to pull that ripcord if we can be certain of grabbing him and shoving him into the deepest, darkest hole you've got access to."

Tracey shared a quick glance with me, then spoke up. "Director Piggot, that kind of attitude change is something I'm really familiar with. I'm willing to bet it's not because she discovered in the last thirty seconds that Coil's equivalent to Kaiser. There's something else going on."

That was my cue to jump in. "What'd he do? To you, I mean. I could assume you were loyal to him, but the moment Director Piggot called you on it, you pivoted straight to 'he can die in a fire'. That means he had some kind of hold over you. So, what did he do?"

Tattletale searched my face, then glanced at the Director, who paused for a long moment then gestured back at me. "Answer the question."

Tattletale's shoulders sagged slightly. "He more or less put a gun to my head. Made me an offer I couldn't refuse. Then he proved he can spoof my power. Sometimes I know he's about to pull a gun and shoot me, and he doesn't. I can't plan a way around him, because he always knows what I'm about to do, and I never know what he's about to do."

There was an immense amount of subtext behind what she was saying. With her pride, she hated being someone else's catspaw, so she hammed it up hard while in costume to give the impression it was all her own idea. Her pride also factored into her pure hatred of Coil; she liked to be seen as the smartest person in the room, and she knew she was smarter than him, but his power could outmanoeuvre hers all day long. Finally, she was still scared of him, but his loss of the Calvert identity had weakened his position, so she was betting on us being able to bring him down for good before he had someone put a bullet in the back of her head.

At least, with his moles gone for the moment, she was safe inside the PRT building.

Director Piggot gave her a hard glance. "I'd have more sympathy for you if you hadn't already chosen to be a villain before he ever coerced you into his service. Now, that information you were holding out on us before. How many mercenaries, where is his base, and what's the easiest way to get in?"

"Please," I added. "You did say you'd help us."

"And this is your best chance of getting out from under his thumb," agreed Greg.

She wrinkled her nose. "If it was just Director Hardass there, I'd tell her to shove it and take my chances. But you make some good points, and you did say please. So, at the last count he had fifty mercs with laser undermounts for their rifles, and I can give you map coordinates and make a good effort at sketching out a floor plan. I'll even give you the pass codes for each of the entrances, or at least the ones I've been given. No guarantee that they haven't been updated since."

"Just a quick question." That was Tracey. "How are the rest of the Undersiders going to react to you turning against Coil?"

Tattletale grinned. "They honestly won't care, so long as you don't actually tell them that he's our real boss. I've been the go-between all this time, but Grue's the leader. That way, when he's talking to other groups, he can't accidentally let slip who's really paying our bills. He never could lie worth a damn."

I shook my head. "Huh. So we didn't even need all these files and laptops and stuff. All we had to do was call you in and ask a few questions."

"Hardly." Tattletale snorted. "I knew where his base was, and information about it. His name and cover were new to me, but if he was moonlighting as a PRT strike squad commander, he had the pretence of a normal life. That means a house of record. Which you've already raided, yeah?"

The Director nodded curtly. "We have. Go on."

"From the general air of pissiness when you're talking about it, you got nothing. It was clean as Scion's bodysuit. Barely any furniture, bed slept in maybe once a week. So what you raided was a decoy house, which means he's got a second one."

"That doesn't necessarily follow," objected Armsmaster. "He could be living out of his base."

"Could be, but I doubt it." Tracey's tone was thoughtful. "I've seen pictures of Coil in the Medhall induction document. Head to toe morph suit. That, and the fact that he's maintained a supervillain career for the last few years while also holding down a job as a PRT strike squad commander, tells me that he's somewhat paranoid and extremely detail-oriented. There's no way in hell he'd give the rank and file a look at his face—mercenaries are at least as greedy as the rest of us, by definition—so he wouldn't drive his car there, or walk in unmasked. Tattletale, where is this base, anyway?"

"Downtown, under a half-constructed office building." Tattletale didn't seem inclined to interrupt Tracey when she was on a roll.

Tracey nodded, as though this had been what she expected. "For want of a convenient volcano to build it into, right. Basically, a hop, skip and a jump from here. His decoy house is in the suburbs, and I would bet my non-existent employment chances that his gas mileage reflects driving out there and back every day. As Tattletale said, what we're looking for is a second house, one that's very much lived in."

"Exactly." Tattletale gave her a round of light golf applause. "And the clues to where it is are hopefully somewhere inside that pile of information you just handed us. So, shall we get to work?"

I shrugged. "Well, I'm convinced." Handing the folder off to Greg, I opened the laptop and started looking over my options.

<><>​

Greg

"… and pages thirteen through seventeen are also made-up crap." Lisa shook her head. "Honestly, did nobody audit Calvert's access to your system? He was flat-out making blatant changes to your records about him, and inserting sheer bullshit wherever he felt like it."

As Greg went through Taylor's and Tracey's folders to remove the offending material, he noted that Armsmaster looked distinctly uncomfortable. Director Piggot had departed once more to carry out her duties as Director, leaving him holding the bag. There was a feeling of camaraderie—they were all very much on the same side—but Lisa's scornful assessment of PRT security procedures had Greg feeling somewhat embarrassed on his behalf.

"It's not really their fault." He felt his experiences at Medhall gave him some insight into the matter. "Sure, he ran rampant through the system once he was in, but he was legitimately given the position of a strike squad commander. It's not like he faked his credentials. That bit's on whoever let him back in, not on Director Piggot."

"Greg's right." Taylor raised her head from the laptop she was currently combing through. "Once you've got the clearance, you're assumed by definition to deserve the clearance. Even when you've got the best of intentions, having to stop every five minutes to get permission from above to do anything of note would drastically impact efficiency and make it impossible to get anything done in a viable timeframe. Basically, at some point you have to trust your people not to be bad actors. And talking about bad actors, I think I've found something."

"Well, that's more than I have." Tracey looked across at her. "Share, please."

"Incoming." Taylor clicked the menu option that shared her screen across the other two laptops (and, Greg had learned, with Armsmaster's HUD), then used her mouse to highlight a line. "See that? That payment shows up several times, over a series of weeks. Always the exact same amount to that contractor, except for the very last one. I tried to chase down the contractor, but they don't exist. There's no hint as to the service they actually supply. And the total amount paid would about cover the cost of a house."

Lisa frowned. "It could be something, or it might just be standard military contractor bullshit."

Taylor made one more mouse click. "Have a look at the invoice numbers. They're sequential. Separated by weeks."

Tracey shook her head as she smiled. "Haha, yeah. That's a thing he does, isn't it?" Reaching across, she gave Taylor a high-five. "You go, girl."

Staring at the numbers, Lisa facepalmed. "And I was looking straight at it. Goddamn it."

Greg could feel the answer to the problem tickling his brain. "I know there's a way to find his house from that, but I just can't add it up."

"I can." Armsmaster was now sitting up, his gauntlets making typing motions in the air. "Accessing house sales in Brockton Bay over that period, cross-referencing with the total price … three houses, one of which is too close to Downtown, and one which has had numerous noise complaints of dogs barking in the yard morning and night. The third is the correct distance away, and has had no disturbances. It's also within line of sight of the decoy house."

Taylor and Tracey glanced at each other, and Taylor spoke first. "He wouldn't draw attention to himself. No barking dogs."

Tattletale nodded. "No, he's very much a 'security by obscurity' sort of personality. He's in the quiet house, for sure. And the line of sight would let him see if someone was raiding the premises."

"I concur." Armsmaster smiled. "A search of DMV records just got me his fake ID. The photo is literally Calvert with a moustache and a beard."

"Excellent." Taylor stood up and stretched. "So, let's go gather the troops and hit the house. If he's there, we've got him. If not, he'll be in his base."

Armsmaster's satisfied smile morphed into a frown. "Why the house first? Hitting it will almost certainly alert him, and put his base on alert. If you're going to hit a fortified location, it's best if they don't know you're coming."

Tracey nodded. "Also, if we hit the house and he's not there, what's stopping him from leaving the base before we can get there, and going on the offensive with his mercenaries?"

Taylor raised her eyebrows. "There's a quote I read once: 'if the enemy has an impregnable stronghold, see he stays there'. If he wants to lock himself away in an underground concrete bunker, then who are we to argue?"

Greg grinned. Taylor had the best plans.



End of Part One

 

[Zeushobbit]

Taylor raised her eyebrows. "There's a quote I read once: 'if the enemy has an impregnable stronghold, see he stays there'. If he wants to lock himself away in an underground concrete bunker, then who are we to argue?"

Click to shrink...

I see Taylor has been studying her Tacticus.

 

[Lokdal75]

Woo! Been waiting for this continuation. Best Taylor/Greg interactions by far.

 

[macdjord]

Woo! Sequel!

 

[Crazael]

Well, I look forward to seeing what Taylor decides to do about Coil.

 

[Ostentatiousnessness]

Fucking spectacular work, Ack. I just finished the MedHall one and you did outstanding work on that and I can't wait to see where you go with this.

 

[Ack]

Taylor Hebert: PRT Operative

Part Two: Deep Thinking

[A/N: This chapter commissioned by @GW_Yoda and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]


Taylor

Tracey held up her hands in a time-out gesture. "Seriously, before we get carried away with our own cleverness, I really think we should take a step back and consider the factors we haven't really covered yet. For starters, Tattletale, you've alluded to his powers twice. Do you know for a fact that he has powers?"

"Or were you hoping one of us would connect the dots for you," asked Greg thoughtfully, "so you could tell yourself you weren't sticking the knife all the way into his back?"

I didn't say a word; it was far more effective just to look at her and raise my eyebrows. Greg and Tracey had covered what I wanted to say anyway.

Lisa grimaced. "I don't know for a fact what they are, but I've seen them in action … I think. Sometimes when he talks to me, I get the impression he's considering consulting me about them, which suggests he himself isn't one hundred percent sure how they work, but he hasn't opened up yet."

"Well, okay. Seeing them in action is better than nothing." Tracey leaned back in her chair. "Tell us what you do know. If there's anything we're ridiculously good at, it's brainstorming."

Greg smirked. "And kicking Empire ass, but there's no Nazis in the room, so I'm willing to settle for brainstorming." It wasn't all that witty, but I gave him a low-five anyway.

Lisa took a deep breath. "Okay, so before he coerced me into working for him, I was living more or less on the streets. But I was totally aware of the dangers—teenage girl, nobody I could trust, et cetera—so I never took the same routes twice, never scammed the same people twice. I was careful. But he still tracked me down, had his people waiting where I would be."

Armsmaster shook his head. "The Director could accomplish that, just by spreading enough people around. Not evidence of power use."

Lisa looked like she wanted to argue the point for a moment, then visibly dropped it. "Okay, granted. He's got enough people working for him. Maybe I was careless and didn't realise it. Anyway, so I'm face to face with him and he pulls out a quarter and starts flipping it. He's talking to me at the same time, which means he's absolutely not focusing on flipping it a certain way. Ten heads in a row. I watched, and checked the coin a couple of times to make sure he hadn't slipped in a ringer. Honest flips, honest coin."

"Okay," I said thoughtfully. "So that's a thing. Like you suggested, reality manipulation? Making sure his men would be where they needed to be, making sure the coin flipped heads each time."

"However it works," Greg mused, "it's got limits. Maybe the number of times he can use it per day, maybe how much reality he can shuffle around in a given time. Because someone who's willing to kidnap a teenage girl and force her to become a villain for him isn't going to lurk in some underground bunker if he can make bullets miss him in midair."

"I've never heard of him doing that," agreed Lisa. "But the operations he sends us—the Undersiders—on are always successful. Never a bad call, never bad intel. The heroes never get the jump on us. Same goes for the things he sends the mercenaries out for. Sure, there are snags, but never of the type that call for aborting the op."

"Okay, now you've lost me," I confessed. "That doesn't sound like the same kind of reality manipulation you'd use to flip ten heads in a row. People aren't coins. Unless he's massively changing the landscape of Brockton Bay, and our memories with it, he can't arrange for heroes not to be there, or for bad intel to magically become good intel."

"Wait." Tracey seemed to be thinking hard. "Are you saying every single time you went out, you just had the red carpet rolled out for you?"

Lisa shrugged. "The jobs he sent us on, sure."

"Oooh." Greg gnawed on a knuckle, a sign he had something almost in sight. "Oooh. Did he send you on a mission every time you prepped for one, or just some of the time? And when he flipped the coin, did he just do it bam-bam-bam-bam, or did he spend time talking between flips? Because you said he talked."

"Yeah, sometimes he's called off missions. And no, he didn't flip the coin ten times straight away. Why? What've you figured out?" Lisa looked at Greg curiously.

Greg leaned back in his chair. "I think he's a precog. He's got maybe a couple of hours up his sleeve, but he can ask himself, 'what happens if I send the Undersiders to rob this convenience store?' or whatever, and if it turns out badly, he can just not send you. Same with the coin flips. He would've been asking, 'what's it going to be?' and if the answer was tails, he just didn't flip. Waited a few seconds or changed hands, and asked again. Does that fit what you know of him?"

"It would, yeah." Lisa seemed to be tasting the words.

"So, where are the limits?" Tracey nodded toward Greg. "Suppose he uses his precog to check out a robbery, figures out there are heroes or cops in easy intercept distance, so … what? He says no go, doesn't just check out another location? Just a simple precog like that, you'd never get a no-go call. He'd just say, 'hit this other target instead'. Did that ever happen?"

Lisa was already shaking her head. "No, it didn't. He usually wouldn't call on us again until the next day."

"Some kind of cool-down effect," I realised. "Maybe he can't precog the same interval of time twice in a row, or something."

"More likely he gets Thinker headaches, like I do." Lisa tapped the side of her head. "If I overwork myself, it's migraine central." She frowned and shook her head. "Not Thinker headaches. I'd pick it up. So Taylor's probably got the right idea, some kind of cool-down."

"Okay, then." Tracey dusted her hands off. "It's a good working theory. Tattletale, is there anything you've seen or heard that would invalidate the idea? Anything at all?"

"I think I might have something." Greg shot me an apologetic glance. "If he can see the future well enough to give a robbery a go/no-go call, why isn't he just betting on racehorses and stuff, and absolutely rolling in money for no effort at all?"

He'd made a very good point, I realised immediately. "Uh … maybe he can't see fine details, like who won a race? Just 'it went bad' or 'it went well'? Or maybe he just likes doing crime? I mean, he had the money to bribe people to build him a whole Bond villain base. What if he is that rich, and being an asshole supervillain's just his hobby?"

Armsmaster's head came up. "I don't know Commander Calvert well, but in my limited experience, he didn't come across as someone who was slumming it, and could walk away from the job tomorrow." His jaw hardened in a grimace. "Of course, he was active as a supervillain while also playing the role of a strike squad commander, so the man had serious deceptive capability."

"When he was flipping the coin, he would've needed to know whether it was going to be heads or tails." Lisa looked around at us. "That's a pretty fine detail, right?"

"Dammit, you're right." I ran my hands through my hair. "Okay, so how do we reconcile being able to read a coin with not being able to read sporting results? Or are we going with 'mega-rich asshole villain hobby'?"

"Give me a moment," Armsmaster said. "I'm going to consult with the Director. She knows him better than I do."

As he mumbled to himself, Tracey looked at Greg and me. "It's got to be some flavour of precog. Too many factors point toward it. But like Taylor said, what exact limitations would prevent him from calling a horse race while allowing him to call a coin flip?"

Greg was gnawing on a knuckle again. "Maybe … he can only precog stuff around people or things he's been in direct contact with? Has met personally? If he's never been near a racehorse in his life, he couldn't call the race. But he's met Tattletale, and he's in contact with his mercenaries all the time."

I snapped my fingers. "And that's what's stopping him from raking it in on the lotteries. He's not actually physically present when the numbers are called."

Tracey nodded slowly. "I think you've got it. Tattletale?"

"Yeah." Lisa echoed the gesture. "Yeah. Everything fits. He needed to meet a member of the Undersiders so he could precog for us all. I've been on every mission. That's gotta be it."

Armsmaster cleared his throat. "Director Piggot concurs he's not playing the role of a supervillain for the fun of it. Her exact quote was: 'if he was that rich, he'd be either sitting in the Mayor's office, or in mine'."

"Well, that simplifies matters a lot." I frowned, thinking. "So, do you think it's possible he's got precog capabilities for his house and his base, just because he's spent time in both places?"

"Doesn't need 'em." Greg spoke up just before Armsmaster could. "He could have remote alarm systems in both that feed to his phone."

"No." I shook my head. "Precog, allowing him to know ahead of time if someone's about to hit his house or his base. Electronic surveillance is a given."

"Even if he could, I doubt he would," Tracey observed thoughtfully. "If he can't survey the same time interval twice, or he's got any other type of cool-down, I suspect he wouldn't be using it willy-nilly for that purpose, especially when electronics are almost as good."

"So … he's not at his home of record." I reached into my backpack and took out a pen and pad. As I spoke, I scribbled notes. "He'd know for a fact you've just raided it. While he might consider himself safe in his real house, I'm thinking he'll feel more secure in his base, just in case we stumble on the other location by accident. Or, you know, use logic and computer skills to figure it out anyway. Tattletale?"

"Base, for sure." Her tone was confident. "The other house would be a tripwire. A warning for him to go to ground. The moment that front door got kicked in, he would've grabbed his go-bag and jumped in his car."

"So … we ignore the other house?" asked Greg dubiously.

"Haha, nope." Tracey shook her head emphatically. "While he would've done his best to wipe it clean of anything remotely incriminating, there's a lot Director Piggot's forensic techs could find there. All they'd need is a search warrant. Armsmaster?"

"It's in the pipeline," he reported. "As soon as we have it, I'll be taking troopers to surround the house and, as you say, kick the front door in. Do you have any insights about that, or the base?"

"Only two," I said. "First, are you certain he hasn't booby-trapped the house to remotely detonate once you're inside?"

He paused. "No. But I can jam all incoming signals before we go in. Next?"

"This one's for Tattletale." I pushed the pad across the table. "Please give me a rough floor-plan of the base, and of the exits you know about."

She raised an eyebrow, but began drawing anyway. "You think there's more?"

"I think Coil's sufficiently paranoid he wouldn't tell everyone all his secrets, and that includes exactly where all the exits are to his secret underground base." I watched as the image grew under her confident strokes.

"Ooh, I just had a thought." Greg sounded unhappy. "Everyone Coil's been in contact with, he could've precogged to find out our plans before we've even made them."

Armsmaster stood up. "I've definitely been in contact with him. I'll be leaving now, and sending someone else in."

"What about me?" asked Tattletale. "If Armsmaster's got a problem, then I definitely do."

"Finish up the floor-plan, then go," I advised her, then turned to Armsmaster. "Has Calvert been in the habit of socialising with the troopers from other strike squads?"

I saw his lips tighten. "Not that I'm aware of, but he could've made a point of meeting each of them at one time or another." He paused, then the tension left his posture again. "I know exactly who to call in. Someone Coil's guaranteed to never have come face to face with."

"Really?" asked Greg. "Who?"

Tattletale grinned, suddenly looking very smug indeed. "I bet I know."

"Don't say it." Armsmaster held up his hand in a 'stop' gesture. "If Coil has precogged you or me, we don't want to give him any extra information."

"Fine, spoil my fun." She rolled her eyes, but completed the sketch anyway. "Okay, done. All yours."

"Excellent, thanks." I accepted the pad back as she got up from the table. "You heading back home now?"

"Not yet." She shrugged. "He hasn't called me since we took down Kaiser, but that's probably because he precogged what I'm up to, so he knows I've jumped ship. I think I'll stay right here in the building until I know he's in custody." Giving me a fingertip-wave, she headed for the door behind Armsmaster. "Wreck his day for me, will you?"

I grinned. "That's the plan."

The door closed behind them, and Greg looked at Tracey and me, the question evident in his eyes. We shrugged in near-unison, as much in the dark as he was. Whatever Lisa had known, she had access to information we didn't.

That was when the screen taking up the entire wall at the far end of the room came to life. We all turned to look at it, and at the face which had shown up on it. It was a woman's face, masked, but I had the faintest suspicion that it was computer-generated all the same.

Maybe it was the sheer normalcy of her visible features, with no defining characteristics. An everywoman, who could walk past on any street from London to New York to Sydney, and not be out of place. Or maybe I was just looking too hard for something out of the ordinary.

"Hi," she said cheerfully. "In case you were wondering, I'm Dragon. I hear you've got a plan to capture Coil?"

<><>​

Coil

Something was amiss. More than the current situation, even.

When the alarm went off to alert him of the raid on the decoy house, he'd done his best to clear the area. Unfortunately, his car had been pulled over by a PRT checkpoint, where an alert trooper had recognised him. So, he'd had to drop that timeline and revert to the one where he'd been in his base all night. It meant losing a night of sleep, but that was hardly a first for him.

It also meant he hadn't been able to arm the proximity switches for his home office (these were very much analog tech, for safety reasons) so he was going to have to trigger the explosives remotely. That was fine: the booster for the radio signal had been installed months before, disguised as a component of the electricity meter. All he had to do was dial a specific number, already saved on a burner phone in his desk drawer, and the issue would be solved.

He hadn't done it yet because he didn't want to draw attention to the house. There was still a strong possibility the PRT knew nothing of it, and he was damn sure Tattletale was equally in the dark regarding its existence.

He growled under his breath when he thought about the betrayal perpetrated on him by that ungrateful little bitch. Days earlier, his moles had reported to him on how the Undersiders had sought refuge with the PRT, along with Taylor Hebert and her little coterie of escapees from the Medhall building. This had come just before his moles started being exposed, and he himself was forced to drop the timeline where he'd even been in the building at all.

The fact the Undersiders weren't arrested on the spot led inescapably to the conclusion that Director Piggot had found another use for them: a conclusion borne out by the sudden cessation of all activity by Empire Eighty-Eight capes anywhere in town. Bad news travelled fast, even when mixed with good news. The Empire has been captured, the grapevine said. The white supremacists are behind bars. But who's next?

While he would've been thoroughly interested in getting his hands on Tattletale and interrogating her in depth with regards to what was going on in the PRT building, Calvert had had his own problems to deal with. Mainly, he'd been working on moving all the things he didn't want to part with from his house to the base, while maintaining a timeline that would allow him to not be caught on the back foot. Any attempt to grab her, or even just check to see how closely the PRT were guarding her, would involve use of timelines he couldn't spare right then.

Some may have seen it as short-sighted to prioritise his own skin and possessions over access to a powerful Thinker like Tattletale. He saw it differently; his experiences in Ellisburg had left him with a deep and abiding need to never be without an exit strategy ever again. Besides, he could always retrieve her later, once everything had calmed down somewhat and he was ready to start expanding his operations once more.

This wasn't to say he was about to reward Tattletale for such a minor act of loyalty, of course. That sort of thing was expected of villainous minions, and Tattletale had better damn well remember her place, or he'd know the reason why not. He decided he'd probably only torture her lightly in the alternate timeline instead of going all-out; she'd earned that much, at least.

As it was, he was safe in his base, there were cameras watching every exit, and he was ready to blow the house as soon as the first PRT or Protectorate boot crossed the threshold. Nobody suspicious had come sniffing around over the last three days, which suggested Tattletale had balked from betraying him that far. There hadn't even been an overly-fit dog walker or jogger.

So why was there an itch in the back of his mind no amount of rational thought could scratch?

<><>​

Taylor

I examined the sketch Lisa had left us. It was pretty damn detailed, and showed Coil's office as well as the exits, with neat little notes showing where they came out to. "Dragon, can you see this?"

"I can," she confirmed, and threw an image of it up on the screen to prove it. "Is this to plan our attack?"

"It's part of it." Tracey was still on the same page as Greg and me. "He's got to have a bolt-hole somewhere. Can you correlate this to the street map, and maybe utilities?"

"I can." A satellite map of Downtown appeared on the screen, then zoomed in to a specific area. Then she overlaid a standard street map as a transparency so that we could see details of both. Finally, the sketch appeared on top of that, rotated slightly, then clicked into place. "The tunnel exit on the construction site appears to correlate to this hatch here." The view zoomed in to show a metal hatch on the aforementioned construction site. "Which means the parking garage exit would correlate to this wall."

"Bingo." My eyes searched the sketch. "Zoom in on his office. If he's got a secret way out, then it'll be from there."

The map shifted, then steadied. We were looking at the penned-in square marked 'Office', with buildings and a street nearby.

Greg frowned. "Would he use this exit regularly, or is it a get-out-of-Dodge situation?"

Even before I could ask the question, I realised where he was going with it. "A regular exit implies a building, that he can just walk in and out of without any questions asked. Emergency exit would require something less involved."

"Sending query to Armsmaster," Dragon reported.

"Wait, no, no!" Tracey threw both hands up to stop her. "He can't hear the question!"

Dragon blinked. "Please explain."

I took a deep breath. "Okay, so we've brainstormed Coil's power, and the odds are that he's a precog. Given the observed limits of the power, we've figured out that he can only use precog on people that he's actually met. He's met Armsmaster, but he's never met you … has he?"

"No, he has not." She sounded quiet, contemplative. "I suppose there are benefits to my situation."

Tracey grimaced. "The problem is, he's also met Tattletale. So, if we communicate with her and he's using his precog on her—and to be honest, why wouldn't he be—he'll know what we've just learned. And it's a really bad idea to assume your opponent won't figure information out from first principles, such as how we're planning to deal with him."

"Got it." Greg snapped his fingers. "Give me a second, here." He pulled out his phone and woke it up. "Just checking to see if I saved her number … yes, yes, I did. Okay, let's see now …"

I watched with interest as he carefully typed out a message, backing up and editing it a few times before he was finally satisfied. "Well, don't just leave us in suspense," I said half-jokingly. "If you've got a genius idea, feel free to share it with the class."

He gave me the Greg Veder smile that was really beginning to grow on me. "Ask, and ye shall receive." Then he showed me the phone screen.

To my confusion, it was all emoticons. First was a sleeping person (with little z's hovering over him), followed by a DNA strand. Then there was a tree, a dollar bill (actually a little green rectangle with the dollar symbol on it), a very obvious spy in sunglasses, fedora and trenchcoat, and an open door.

I read the whole thing through again, and all I got was 'something something sneaky door'. "Okay, I don't get it. Dragon? Tracey?"

"You've lost me," Dragon admitted candidly. "Some kind of steganography?"

Tracey raised her eyebrows. "Greg, I know your mind works in mysterious ways, but you've outdone yourself here. Mind explaining for we mere mortals?"

His grin merely widened. "Doze. DNA is coiled. Make like a tree and leave. Buy. Secret. Door."

Tracey facepalmed. Dragon looked like she wanted to headdesk. I just grabbed Greg and kissed him hard, leaving him looking dazed. "You're a genius. My boyfriend is a certified genius."

"Whoa. Okay. Wow." He shook his head, apparently to clear it. "Did not expect that. So, good to send?"

I nodded. "Hell yes, it's good to send."

"Excellent." He hit the correct icon, and the message was launched into the electronic ether. "Okay, so what else do we need to do while we're waiting?"

Tracey pointed at the screen. "Well, if it's a regular affair, we can check the ownership of those four buildings. But if it's a one-and-done … is that a manhole?"

Dragon zoomed the image in. It was indeed a manhole cover, right there near where the office showed up on the overlay.

I nodded slowly as the scenario came together. "If he made sure to have a car parked nearby, and moved occasionally, he could climb out of the manhole, get in the car, and be gone in seconds."

"Or walk out of a building and do exactly the same," agreed Tracey. Greg's phone pinged, and she looked expectantly at him. "Is that her?"

"It is." He flicked the screen to open the message. "A fire, a thumbs down and a red traffic light. Sounds like a no to me."

Tracey nodded. "The manhole it is. Though, I'm curious about how fire comes into it."

He smirked. "It's a regular meme. The best way to un-want something is to set it on fire."

I rolled my eyes as the last piece of the puzzle fell into place. "Because of course you and Tattletale use the same memes. Okay, then. We're all agreed on the plan of attack?"

Tracey nodded again, as did Greg. Dragon's face, on the screen, registered puzzlement. "Plan of attack? I thought we were still getting to that."

Greg frowned. "We've been discussing it the whole time. We block everything except the parking garage exit and bottleneck them that way. And we do it after Armsmaster and the PRT hit the house, to see how he reacts."

Dragon shook her head. "You didn't mention any of that until just now."

Tracey chuckled. "Sorry, we're used to thinking on the same channel as each other. Most of the time, anyway. That's why we got the information on all the exits, so we could lock them in. And if he's not there at the time, their morale's gonna nosedive as soon as we do it."

Dragon didn't look totally convinced. "And what about the mercenaries? I understand that they carry rifles with undermount lasers that can cut through steel."

I spread my hands. "That's what Grue's for. He's never met Coil, and his darkness stops all light, including Tinkertech lasers. And if they want to shoot ordinary old bullets at us, Greg and I can return those to sender, all day long."

"And if he's not in the base?" Dragon raised an eyebrow. "We have to address that possibility too."

Tracey took up the ball. "As Tattletale said, if he's on foot, we can track him. Armsmaster and the PRT are going to be hitting his house shortly before we hit the base, so if he's there, they'll get him. If he's not in either the house or the base, it'll mean he's at large but we'll have deprived him of a huge chunk of his resources." She nodded toward the screen. "And I'm sure you'll be able to comb through his computer system and deal with the rest of them. Precog or not, he won't be able to do a hell of a lot without his base, his mercenaries, or his bank accounts."

"Exactly," I said. "He'll go from a fully equipped supervillain to one on the run. And as soon as he starts doing anything with a pattern to try to rebuild what he's got …"

"Boom." Greg smacked his fist into his palm. "We'll be on him like aggro on a tank."

Dragon seemed to ponder that for a few moments, or maybe she was trying to figure out his gaming slang. Finally, she nodded. "Alright then, let's do this."

<><>​

Coil

Thomas Calvert considered himself a hard-headed realist. Had anyone uttered the phrase 'it's too quiet' in his hearing, he would've scoffed at it and them. Yet … it was too quiet.

Days had passed since his moles had been uncovered as a serendipitous outcome of the Empire's actions. The trail had inevitably led back to him, and his decoy house had been raided … but nothing had happened since. And while this was technically a good thing, it was also problematic.

Emily Piggot, despite her many shortcomings, was not a stupid woman. Anyone lacking in intelligence would have been long since overwhelmed by the ongoing crime in the city (especially with his behind-the-scenes manipulations making it harder for her to handle matters). Likewise, Armsmaster was no slouch at investigation.

Long story short, they should have been doing more, but … weren't. And he didn't like it in the least. The feeling he got was that a very large, very heavy shoe was due to drop at any moment. And that the longer it delayed, the more devastating the impact would be.

He was running two different timelines, of course. In one, the base was on full defensive alert; sentries prowled the exterior perimeter in plainclothes, masquerading as ordinary citizens while keeping a sharp lookout for incursions. In the other, the mercenaries were packing to roll out as soon as the order was given, while a sharp eye was kept on the exterior cameras.

The longer he waited, the more insistent the itch between his shoulder-blades became. His usual precaution was to be in two different places at once, but that presupposed the existence of two equally safe locations for him to bunker down in. His big problem was, he couldn't move anywhere with the mercenaries and hope to keep it under the radar. Likewise, if he headed out on his own, there was a moderate chance they would assume he was abandoning them to save his own ass (which he absolutely would, if the need arose) and their morale would collapse.

There was one bolt-hole he could technically seek refuge in. It wasn't so much a secondary site as a storage dump for supplies that he hadn't yet had the chance to ferry into his main base. While it lacked the facilities to handle fifty people, one person could subsist there quite well, though the crates of MREs would likely become very boring after a while.

He wasn't enamoured of the 'ready to evacuate' posture, mainly because it put the idea of defeat and escape into the minds of the mercenaries, and they might just jump the gun and disappear into the tall timber at the slightest provocation. Even though the security of the base was more symbolic than actual—Calvert had no illusions about the ability of the PRT and Protectorate to winkle him out of his lair once they got the idea to do so—nothing wore away at morale faster than the idea of being forced to abandon a prepared fortification.

Still, it was one of the very few options he had, so he kept walking among the men, allowing himself to be seen, while the people watching the outside cameras had orders to alert him the instant a PRT vehicle came into view. In the other timeline, morale was actually higher, with sandbagged positions set up covering each of the exits. Sheltered by the sandbags were heavy machineguns and all the ammo he'd stockpiled over the years. Between the machineguns and the undermount lasers, anyone attempting to mount an attack would be bottlenecked and cut down before they made it any distance into the facility.

Taking one last glance over the defenses, he nodded and strolled unhurriedly back to his office. The door slid shut behind him as per normal; the fact that he immediately locked it behind him was not so normal, but this would only become apparent if someone came looking for him. Moving with careful haste, he stripped out of the bodysuit and put on blue-collar working gear from where he had it stored. As a final touch, he added a hardhat and a high-vis vest.

It was only when he was halfway along the corridor to the manhole exit that his phone pinged with an alert that the door alarm on his house had just gone off. He'd been half-considering the idea of swinging past on the way to his intended destination, but this was no longer an option. Stopping just inside the swinging slab of concrete that would let him out into the storm drain, he accessed the camera images for the house. Still frames were all he was going to get, he knew, given that the house had been wired to blow at the first sign of incursion.

Instead, he found himself watching live footage of Armsmaster prowling through his living room, followed by PRT troopers who were splitting up to check individual rooms.

What? No, this can't be right.

Pulling up another specialised app on his phone, he accessed the bomb's remote circuit … or tried to. Despite the fact that there was a booster nearby, when he requested a ping-back from the electronic detonator, there was no reply. Frowning, he tried again, with equally negative results.

It was possible that the ping-back wasn't showing up for any one of a number of reasons, so he pressed the override icon, sending out the detonation signal. Then he flipped back to the camera app, and was gratified to see that the camera was no longer transmitting an image.

Yes! Got you! He didn't mind admitting, after the fact, that he'd been a little worried. But it had only been an equipment problem, easily bypassed. With a slight smile on his face, he checked for the last images of the Protectorate and PRT personnel who had been caught in the blast … and saw, on the screen, Armsmaster's halberd very close indeed.

Hastily, he flicked through each of the other camera feeds; they were all down, their final images showing how they'd been destroyed.

"Well, shit." The words echoed hollowly in the corridor. As he tucked the phone away and swung aside the slab to let himself out into the storm drain, he thought hard about what they would find there.

Not a huge amount, he decided. Nothing that would lead them directly to his base. There was quite a bit of material that would serve as proof of his criminal activity, but they already had that. As far as he could recall, there was nothing that would give them new information.

Still, it would've been nice to blow the house anyway. I wonder how they did it. Jammer?

Still musing over that, he climbed the ladder and pushed open the manhole in the middle of the sidewalk. His clothing was the next best thing to an invisibility power; as soon as anyone saw the hard hat and high-vis vest, he would no longer be an oddity. Climbing out, he let the cover drop back over the manhole, then strode toward the car parked at the side of the road.

The car wasn't there all the time, of course. Sometimes it was another car. There was another one that he kept in the parking garage. Every few days, he would have one of the mercenaries take one out on a snack run, park on the street, and drive the other one back. This ensured that he'd always have a getaway vehicle (his keyring had a key for each car). The snack run aspect, on the other hand, ensured that he always had ready volunteers for the chore.

The car unlocked as he pressed the fob button on the key itself, and he removed the vest and hard-hat before climbing in. Now, he was just an ordinary man in an ordinary car. Starting the car, he eased out onto the road and drove off, scrupulously sticking to the speed limit. Nothing to see here.

With the window down, he could listen to the outside environment; no choppers, which was good. Likewise, there were no cars, unmarked or otherwise, following him. He hadn't been certain that there were no clues to the location of the base within the house, but this seemed to bear that assumption out. The way was clear to head to his off-site storage area, check it out, then decide what he was going to do from there.

<><>​

Taylor

When my phone rang, I checked the caller ID. It read GRUE. Thumbing the answer icon, I held it to my ear. "Taylor here. What's the news?"

He sounded both impressed and respectful when he answered. "You called it. He climbed out of the manhole that you pointed out, got in a car, and drove away. Bitch and Regent are following him now."

I had no problem with that. They'd been given careful instructions that boiled down to 'follow, do not engage, report where he goes to'. Unfortunately, due to her association with Coil, Lisa couldn't be in on the shadowing aspect, but Rachel was an intelligent person. She understood clear instructions. Alec was more of a wild card, but he was invested in making himself useful to the PRT, now that Coil's operation was teetering on the edge of disaster. I trusted him to attend to his own self-interest, if nothing else.

The good thing about Rachel's dogs was that they could trail him on the rooftops. Also, once Coil got to wherever he was going and left the car, they could get his scent and have the dogs trail him that way. None of which involved confronting him: while such a scenario could still happen, I wanted to find out what else he had going on before jumping on him with both feet.

At the same time, of course, I fully intended to separate him from his base and everything in it. Allowing a snake like Coil to retain access to money or armed mercenaries would be a mistake of the highest order, so I had no intention of doing it. This was one of the reasons I'd had them schedule the house raid before the base raid, to see if we could stampede him out of his own base.

"There he is," Tracey noted, slowing the car and pulling over to the side of the road. Brian wasn't immediately recognisable as Grue, but there weren't a huge number of six-foot-plus buff black guys in Brockton Bay, so even wearing a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, he wasn't hard to spot in general.

Greg and I were in the back seat by choice—it was easier to hold hands that way—so he got in the front. I'd already made sure it was all the way back, because he had the longest legs I'd ever seen. Making him sit with his knees up around his ears would be a funny prank once, but there was a time and a place for that sort of thing, and this wasn't it.

"He should be far enough away by now." I took out my phone and rang Alec's number. Rachel had a phone, but she tended to 'forget' it at every opportunity.

"Taylor, hi." Alec sounded as cheerful as he ever got. In the background, I could hear the steady, repetitive sound of gigantic dogs galloping across rooftops. "Nothing weird to report."

"Excellent. Has he turned back toward the base?" This was important. We needed him far enough away that if he was keeping precog tabs on any of the PRT troopers slated to hit the base, it would be too late for him to turn around.

"Nope. He's headed for the industrial areas. Man with a mission, that's him." He had to be feeling comfortable for that kind of snark to creep in.

"Excellent. Call me if anything changes." I ended the call. "Good news. He's not reacting to anything we're about to do."

"Neat. So, Operation Sardine Can is a go?" Greg already had his phone out.

Tracey sighed. "I'm pretty sure we're not calling it that, but yes. It's a go."

"Excellent." Greg glanced at me. "Can I make the call, or do you want to?"

His eagerness was almost palpable. I grinned and shoulder-nudged him. "Oh, what the hell. You do it. The plan's mostly yours, anyway."

"Sweeeeet." He called up a number on his phone and tapped the icon. "Yeah, hi, it's us. Elvis has left the building." He paused. "Yes, that means Coil is out of his bunker. Sorry, I thought a code phrase would sound cooler."

I grinned, shaking my head. With all of his competence upgrades—and he'd come a long way since our first days at Medhall—Greg would always be a dork in some ways. But that was okay: he was my dork.

"Okay, yeah, we're waiting for everyone else to move in. Right, gotcha." Greg looked up as the call ended. "She says the first truck will be coming past in two minutes. We'll tuck in behind them."

I nodded. "I'll keep in touch with Regent." We didn't think Coil would do anything untoward, but there was thinking and then there was making sure.

There was only one person we could really trust to run this mission: Dragon. Armsmaster knew her well enough to make the case that she could coordinate the men to assault the base in the way we'd planned, and Director Piggot trusted Armsmaster enough to sign off on the idea. That way, even if Coil was precogging any of the officers involved, he'd only get a small part of the picture, not the whole strategy.

The Undersiders (minus Lisa) had been in charge of watching to see which way Coil would jump once Armsmaster and the others had hit his house. It had triggered him into going somewhere, and we wanted to know where. This in turn had opened the way to go all-in on denying him the base (and everything in it) altogether; if we managed to fully take it, they were authorised to swoop in and grab him up.

Still, we were almost literally playing with fire. Coil was an unknown factor in many ways; for all I knew, we'd totally misread his power and were depending on protective factors that didn't exist. The idea of a cape sandbagging with his powers to throw his enemies off-guard was so pervasive that at least two cape sitcoms had been written around the concept.

But I didn't think that was the case. Coil was hugely ego-driven, and I doubted very much that he would hold back on any aspect of his power that could possibly make him look more powerful or get him more money. If he could leverage his power in a way to get an extra advantage, he'd absolutely be doing it that way.

However, the fact of the matter was that we were committed now. The plan was going ahead, and it was our job to make sure that it worked. If imperfect information was all we had to go on with, that was what we'd use.

It was time to kick the doors in, and let the dice fall where they may.



End of Part Two

 

[Ash Craig]

It's pretty funny how wrong they are about why Coil has the limitations he does, but to be honest, bringing Dragon in isn't exactly a problem if they're wrong, so it's a win win! Also, getting around a precog by communicating via emojis and memes is both an original and hilarious idea.

 

[Robert Stadler]

Would somebody mind posting a summary of the powers of the new trio (Taylor, Greg, and Tracey)? Or a link to an existing summary, if there is one.

Their powers are complicated enough that I had trouble following the descriptions in the first story.

Thanks.

 

[macdjord]

This wasn't to say he was about to reward Tattletale for such a minor act of loyalty, of course. That sort of thing was expected of villainous minions, and Tattletale had better damn well remember her place, or he'd know the reason why not. He decided he'd probably only torture her lightly in the alternate timeline instead of going all-out; she'd earned that much, at least.

Click to shrink...

This makes no sense. Did you mean 'act of disloyalty'?

 

[Ack]

This makes no sense. Did you mean 'act of disloyalty'?

Click to shrink...

Dammit, good catch. Will fix.

 

[Crazael]

It's pretty funny how wrong they are about why Coil has the limitations he does, but to be honest, bringing Dragon in isn't exactly a problem if they're wrong, so it's a win win! Also, getting around a precog by communicating via emojis and memes is both an original and hilarious idea.

Click to shrink...

It's fun when the all the guesses are wrong, but still correct enough to reliably predict outcomes.