Tom Strickler was surprised to see Emily Foran show up at the Fox Diner. Given what had happened during the day, he didn't expect her to show up. He could have just paid someone to sit there of course but if Emily saw anyone but Tom there when she came looking, she might decide to bury the truth about what happened and he couldn't have her do that.

"I'll be honest Em, I didn't expect you to come here tonight." Tom greeted his associate.

"Yet you waited for me anyway. I should be flattered." Emily replied.

"So what did you get out of him?" Tom asked.

"Nothing that wasn't already recorded on camera," said Emily. "I've got a date and a place. That's it."

"So you arranged a meet with him," Tom laughed. "You're good. I'll give you that."

"What are you talking about?" said Emily.

"You let him play you in there so that you could play me." Tom's smile grew wider. "I'll admit I didn't see that one coming."

Emily frowned. "We're meeting so that I can profile him. Isn't that what you wanted?"

In the field, when you work with a partner or in a team, you have to maintain open lines of communication at all times. It makes it easier for you to call in backup if you get into trouble but it also makes it harder for you to make your own play, knowing that your every move is being watched just as your target is being watched.

The camera that Tom had set up for Michael's "interview" wasn't just there to for Tom to read Michael's face; it was also Tom's line of communication with Emily. When the camera was switched off, it allowed Emily to change the operation without Tom's knowledge.

"If you were trying to profile him, you would have done that already." Tom shook his head. "You wanted a private meeting with him. Now if I didn't know any better, I'd think that you were trying to hire him for something."

"What? And become a client of his?" Emily shot back. "I'd shoot him before I worked with him."

"Even if you got close enough to him to pull a gun, you'll be out cold before you can pull the trigger." Tom gave his assessment of her odds.

"I wasn't planning on using a gun," said Emily.

"So you are going to try to kill him then." Tom stared at Emily, his eyes showing fear for the first time.

"You really want him that much?" Emily demanded. "How many jobs have I done for you? And now the one time that I need something done, you won't back me up on it."

"That depends," Tom chose his words carefully. "You haven't given me a good enough reason to want him dead more than I want him alive."

"You really want to work with him," Emily smiled.

"Of course I do. I wouldn't have approached him and then tried to woo him for the past month if I didn't want to work with him." said Tom.

"So you would be willing to work with someone who used a ten year old child to get to her family?" Emily demanded. "You would work with someone who got a person orphaned and then tried to have her thank him for it?" Emily's confession took Tom Strickler by surprise.

He'd known her backstory of course. He didn't have people running errands for him who had skeletons he didn't know about. It just turns out that he didn't know the whole story. He had known that her father was a diplomat stationed in Europe. And that he had been betrayed by his own daughter. He just didn't know that the middle man was Michael Westen.

"That was Westen?" Tom smiled to mask his surprise.

"I knew you wouldn't believe me." Emily replied, fuming.

"No, I'm not doubting you," Tom tried to explain. "It's just that Michael Westen has done a lot of things but I've never heard of him using children to achieve his objective."

"That doesn't change the fact that he destroyed my life." Emily stood her ground.

This revelation did answer one of the nagging questions that Strickler had had since Foran began to work for him: How does a woman with a promising career in catching criminals wind up a professional con artist herself?

When she came to him, a fresh graduate with absolutely no real experience in espionage, he thought that she was nuts. In the three years since, she had leant her expertise in a number of his operations and proven a worthy operative to have around.

It turns out that she had been waiting for this "chance encounter" with Michael Westen all along. Knowing how connected Strickler was in the intelligence community, she was sure that Westen was bound to show up on his radar at some point. It was the longest con that anybody had ever played on him. Yet somehow he wasn't angry about it.

"If Michael did do what you said that he did. Then it won't be enough for you to just kill him." said Strickler.

"What do you suggest then?" asked Emily.

When a worker deviates from their work, any manager will know that there are basically two ways that you can motivate them to get back on track. You can threaten them, which in the case of Emily wouldn't work because she's already had everything taken from her as a young child, or you can promise them a reward.

In Tom's case, he had to make sure that a reward where Michael is kept alive sounds more appealing than a reward where he is eliminated.

"Killing him gives him a way out," Tom tried to explain. "If you want to get back at him, you have to make him feel what you felt for all these years. He took away your world, you have to take away his."

"How do I do that without killing him?" said Emily.

"Just do what you were supposed to do in the beginning. Profile him. Find out who are the people that make up his world and I can make some arrangements to make sure that they get eliminated."

"You already know who his friends and family are," said Emily. "Why do you need me to profile him?"

"Not all friends and family are equal, Em," Tom shook his head. "I've got an uncle and a cousin in DC but if someone tried to get to me through them, they'd be wasting their time. I hate 'em."

"Fine we'll do it your way." Laura begrudgingly agreed. "But you have to promise me something."

"Go on," said Tom.

"When you take away his world, make sure that he sees it with his own eyes." Emily tried to negotiate her terms. "He should learn what it feels like to be a witness."