The Wolves are back! Thanks to everyone who has been PMing me asking about them. I really appreciate your interest, you all helped keep me going!

I also need to thank my beta carolinagirl919 for taking the time out of her busy life to read this over and correct my mistakes. Lord knows I make a lot of them.


Chapter 1 Fight Club

In the basement gym in one of Finch's many safe houses, Taylor stared across the mat at his mother, sizing her up as a sparring opponent for the first time in his life. She wasn't very tall, 5' 4" at most, which meant she only came up to about his chin. He had the advantage of reach and size on her. He had been watching Shaw and John spar, he knew the moves. While Shaw was extremely fast and agile, John was bigger, stronger and had a longer reach, so he won most of the rounds. Taylor figured his match with his mother should go the same way. This shouldn't be too tough; no wonder John had picked his own mother for his sparring partner his first time out.

Joss smiled at him. Taylor returned the smile and hoped he didn't accidentally hurt her.

Wearing only a pair of running shorts, John Reese stood in the middle of the mat, a light sheen of sweat covering his body from his earlier match with Shaw. He looked at each one of the combatants in turn.

"Ready?" he asked. They both nodded. "Then GO!" He stepped off the mat out of the way.

Joss and Taylor slowly approached each other. Taylor was careful to keep himself balanced on the balls of his feet and keep his center of gravity low as he had been taught by John and Shaw.

By contrast, Joss approached him almost casually, as if she was out for a stroll. There was no readiness in her stance that Taylor could see. She was even still smiling at him.

Deciding he was close enough and that his mother was unprepared for his attack, Taylor lunged at her. She ducked to one side and spun away under his arm, her speed catching him off guard. To add insult to injury, she gave him a swift kick in the butt as he went by; causing him to do a face plant into the mat. He went down hard.

Shaw, watching from the weight bench snorted, but a dirty look from her Alpha prevented her from making any of her usual derogatory comments.

Taylor, irritated with himself now for making such a basic mistake, climbed to his feet and turned towards his mother who was now standing in the center of the mat, still smiling. Taylor approached her carefully this time, determined to not make the same mistake again.

He didn't; he made a different mistake.

This time he was able to lay a hand on her, but he let his center of gravity get too high. So when Joss dropped and rolled while hanging onto his arm, he was flipped over her in rather spectacular fashion. He landed flat on his back and everyone in the gym heard his grunt of surprise as the air was knocked out of his lungs.

"You alright?" John asked the teen as he lay on his back panting for air.

"John, I just got my ass handed to me by my own mother. No, I'm not alright," Taylor shot back when he was finally able to speak.

Shaw snickered from her perch on the weight bench. "You're lucky, kid. First time I sparred with Hersh he broke my arm to teach me a lesson."

"What lesson was that? That he was an asshole?" Taylor snapped as he gingerly rolled over and climbed to his feet.

"Pretty much," Shaw said as she resumed her arm curls.

"You want to go again, baby?" Joss asked sweetly.

Taylor rotated his shoulder and grimaced. "Give me a minute here," he sighed.

Joss grinned evilly at him. "Just remember this next time you decide to break curfew."


Control looked up as Analyst Jacques Legault entered the plush office. She frowned as she caught a glimpse of the cocky smile on his face, his white teeth showing up brightly in contrast to his dark skin. Some days she wanted to slap that grin right off his face.

But Legault was good, very good. He wasn't much to look at. He was thin, bordering on scrawny, with large think glasses that made him look rather owlish, and he had a slow southern drawl left over from his childhood in New Orleans. However, Legault was the best investigator the intelligence service had right now. Legault's ability to connect disparate and seemingly unrelated dots meant that Control would tolerate his cockiness as long as he was useful to her.

"Ma'am," Legault nodded.

Control inclined her head in acknowledgment. "What do you have for me, Legault?"

Legault laid the folder he was carrying on her desk in front of her and flipped it open to reveal a photo of a middle aged man with spiky hair, thick glasses, and a striped tie knotted neatly at his throat.

Control snorted. "Who's the dweeb?"

"Harold Martin, former employee of IFT. I believe he is the man who created The Machine."

Control raised an eyebrow at her minion. "It wasn't Nathan Ingram?"

Legault shook his head. "Weeks and Corwin never believed that Ingram had the smarts to develop something so revolutionary. They always felt he was just the face man, but the real genius was kept hidden for reasons unknown."

Control leaned back in her chair and regarded Legault. During the development of The Machine, Weeks and the Special Counsel had briefed her frequently on its progress. They had felt Ingram had been holding something back, that there were more people who might know about The Machine than he let on, but their investigation turned up nothing. There had been rumors for years that Ingram had a silent partner in founding IFT, but Ingram had been adamant that there was no one else. That son of a bitch had lied; it all made sense now.

"Tell me," she ordered impatiently.

"After The Machine vanished from the Oregon facility, I didn't have a lot to go on since Hersh was so fast on the trigger and killed the operator before he could be interrogated."

Control pressed her lips together in a thin line. Hersh was her man; he didn't take a crap without her OK. He had been following orders, her orders, to leave no witnesses behind. She knew now that order had been a mistake, but that didn't mean she had to like having her mistake pointed out to her.

"I decided to go back to the creator, or the person we had previously thought was the creator. After studying Ingram for a while, I was sure that Corwin and Weeks were right; Ingram could not have possibly built the machine on his own. He was a good engineer, but not a great one. The person who built the machine wasn't just great, they were revolutionary. So then the question was, who really built the Machine?"

"You think it was the nerd here?" Control tapped the picture in front of her.

Legault nodded. "If you will recall, when Ingram approached us about building the Machine, Special Counsel insisted that they get rid of any non-essential IFT personal before development could begin. Harold Martin was one of the few employees that remained after IFT purged most of the payroll."

Control folded her arms, frowning. "I need more evidence than that," she sniffed.

"There is more, Ma'am. We broke into Ingram's Manhattan home, now owned by his son Will who spends most of his time out of the country on some hippie dippy save the world crusade. We found photographs of Ingram with this man dating back to Ingram's undergrad days at MIT.

"We also studied the security camera footage from the ferry dock the day you ordered Ingram's assassination. Martin was with him on the boat."

Control glared down at the picture. "So this is the silent partner in IFT. We always knew there was someone, but we could never figure out whom."

"Most likely. But there is a catch…" Control glared at the man across the desk from her, and Legault swallowed. "Harold Martin doesn't exist," he said.

"Don't toy with me, Legault," Control snapped.

"Believe me, Ma'am I know better than THAT," Legault said. "It's just that the only records we can find of Martin are his employment records at IFT, and even there the information appears to have been scrubbed. We could find no driver's license, no bank records, no student records at MIT. Harold Martin only existed inside the walls of IFT with one exception."

Control sighed. "And that was…?"

"A memorial service after the ferry bombing, organized by a woman claiming to be his fiancée. Grace Hendricks identified several of Martin's personal affects that were fished out of the water, but there was no body."

"A lot of bodies weren't found. How can you be sure Martin is still alive?"

"Hersh saw him at the facility in Oregon, in the empty server room. He was in the company of that hacker chick Root, Hersh's ex-agent Sameen Shaw and Mark Snow's ex-agent John Reese."

Control looked like she had been sucking on lemons. The fact that not one but two agents she had ordered "retired" were still alive stuck in her craw. "Interesting company. Good work, Legault."

"Thank you, Ma'am. I believe that finding Harold Martin is the key to finding the Machine."

"It's the best lead we have so far. How do we find the wayward geek?"

Legault flipped a few pages in the file until he found a picture of a smiling, red haired woman. "The fiancée, she's the key. If we go after her, we can flush Martin out."

Control nodded. "Thank you, Legault. Be prepared to give Hersh a detailed briefing in an hour."

"Yes ma'am." Legault picked up the file and left the office.

Once outside the office, Legault dropped all pretense of cockiness and sagged against the wall in the hallway while he tried to calm his racing pulse. Frankly, Control scared the crap out of him. He had unfettered access to the nation's most secret files and in the course of his job over the last several years he had pieced together the sordid story of Control's rise to the top.

Control was, to put it bluntly, vicious and smart‒ a deadly combination. She had risen to the top intelligence job in the United States after 9/11 because she was so willing to pull the trigger. And the men in charge, reeling in shock from the intelligence failures that lead to that dark day, thought that a cold-blooded, die-hard patriot was exactly what they needed to counteract the threat to America they had previously disregarded.

As it turned out, Control was a lot worse than they realized. Once she was in the top slot, she had swiftly eliminated anyone she considered competition, using her faithful attack dog George Hersh. She ruled the intelligence services with an unforgiving hand. Failure to carry out a mission meant death. Knowledge she didn't want you to have meant death. Challenging her authority meant death. Asking questions she didn't want asked meant death. Control was the living embodiment of the old saying, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." She had developed a God Complex, convinced that she was the only thing standing between the USA and anarchy.

And woe to anyone who tried to challenge her hold on the top spot in the intelligence services. Control was a modern day J. Edgar Hoover; she had the dirt on everyone. Every time a politician challenged her power, she would smack them down by releasing their most intimate secrets. If they didn't have any juicy skeletons in their closet, they met with an unfortunate "accident".

Control was untouchable and everyone in DC knew it.

By Legault's count, after a decade and a half in bloody power, Control's body count wasn't running very far behind Al Qaida's. The problem was Control, just like Al Qaida, honestly thought she was doing everything for the greater good. There was no reasoning with a True Believer.

Legault was fully aware that very few people who had ever known about The Machine were still alive. Renegade hacker Root had killed Denton Weeks and Alicia Corwin, but everyone else who knew the secret had been murdered by Hersh on orders from Ma'am. Legault was pretty sure Hersh would have gotten around to Weeks and Corwin eventually; Root had simply saved him the trouble. Knowing about The Machine was hazardous to one's health.

Legault knew that the clock was slowly ticking down on his own life. He had to find a way out before his time was up. Legault was trapped like a mouse in one of those glue traps and if he thought about it too much, he had a panic attack. Right now he was living off antacids during the day and sleeping pills at night.

However, Legault had a plan. With his usual methodical thoroughness, he had carefully researched and planned his escape from Control and his certain death. He had set the plan in motion, now it was up to "Harold Martin" and his team to execute it.