Operation Clean Sweep began on the evening of August 1st. It was a top-secret initiative of the FBI that had surprisingly taken only a couple of weeks to set up. Preacher Armstrong led the action, under the authority of Deputy Director Monk who was still in San Francisco digging into data on Damon Brown.

Preacher grew up in the inner-city streets and was accustomed to inner-city warfare as a way of life, unlike many of the well-coiffed suits in the upper echelon FBI. He knew how people in the "Hood" thought. He knew their patterns. As a minister, he had tried to alleviate some of the conditions that drove young men and women to be less than they could be. As a cop, he tried to keep compassion in mind while still enforcing justice. It was not always an easy line to tread because he could not rest easy knowing there were dangerous criminals still on the street. Part of him was ready to take down anyone who meant mischief and stick them in jail. The other part wanted to rehabilitate whoever he could. At least that is how things normally ran. Not this time.

Preacher was dead set on taking down anyone who had something to do with the death of his family – particularly Sammy Miller. Yet, he was raised with truly Christian mores and had sought to live what he preached for his entire adult life, so he was at a point where he was desperately trying to suppress any conflict he felt in his heart. The best way he knew to do this was to just 'be a cop' in the approach to the case. This involved researching the evidence well, and involving others when he needed assistance. He had to discipline himself to not launch out like the Lone Ranger, knowing his emotions might get in the way of his final goal. If anyone were to evaluate how he were doing in that regard, knowing the case history, they would have to be impressed.

The first person he reached out to was Adrian, who had been closer to the evidence than he was by several weeks. The one thing that Monk wanted him to find out was who provided the chatter that Sharon Grier used to launch the whole investigation. Adrian suspected he knew, but needed Jedediah to confirm. The second thing Monk and Abramson wanted to find out was how Kennedy's safe house was compromised. That too proved to be relatively easy to find out.

In the first area, the answer came from an encrypted hard drive in Sharon's safe. They had discovered the drive when they found Kennedy's personal FBI file prior to sending him to the safe house, and had been working on de-encrypting it from that point in time. It took a good two weeks after Kennedy's death before they unlocked the data, and now, in the comfort of his workspace at FBI headquarters, Preacher Armstrong opened up a treasure trove of information that likely had been expected to be destroyed, but for some reason Grier had held onto. Emails, blueprints, addresses of terror personnel were all there in that tiny metal box that would be used to take down the entire Enterprise.

Armstrong carefully made notes of key people and places for future use, and then read through the emails to "Blackbird" from "Apollyon" which were her instructions for each step of the venture. After the first attack in Boston, she received an email which detailed the places that were expected to be affected. She was instructed to call it "chatter" because Apollyon wanted to enjoy playing a little game with the Feds to see if they could figure out which actual place would be the target. He especially wanted to see how long it would take Adrian Monk to figure things out as he prepared him for the grand finale in San Francisco.

Preacher made a note of the email address, but knew it was likely not traceable and he made a note – "Chatter never existed. Was the setup" so he could tell his boss when he reported to him later that day.

As to Kennedy's demise, this came through a different channel that proved surprisingly fruitful. It seems that Kennedy wasn't the only one placing bugs in cell phones. Grier had seen to it that Kennedy and his family were also bugged, as were leaders of the various core groups that were handling their part in the mission. Kennedy's daughter's cell phone was what gave their location away – a fact that Preacher vowed to never reveal to the girl who still had a long road ahead of her to recover, now as an orphan.

After reviewing the hard drive, Armstrong made contact with the police stations in the areas already hit in order to identify the whereabouts of the rogue operations in their cities, apprehend those responsible, and perhaps find additional clues that would be the key to laying open their entire network. This was the kind of intelligence he was used to and it had been his feeling from prior experience that ofttimes the Feds were just a little too cocky in their jobs to go seeking after it from someone as lowly as the boys in blue. Their loss was his gain. It took a couple of days, but through diligent effort, the use of Grier's hard drive information and a lot of cooperation from the locals, they were able to locate the individual parties that they believed responsible in Boston, New York, Missouri, Chicago, and Orlando. And now, on the evening of August 1st, Abramson and Preacher were able to speak with Monk via private communication and let him know that Operation Clean Sweep had gone off with greater success than expected and without a shot. Also, they let him know that 'the birds are singing' which was, pun intended, music to his ears.


Up until that point Monk and Natalie, and when he was able to step away, Leland, had taken each afternoon to go through the arduous task of reconstructing the life of Damon Brown. At times, this entailed mind-numbing reviews of newspapers and caselaw. Other times it involved speaking with people who knew Brown from his teen years on up. By the time Operation Clean Sweep went down, they had compiled quite a biography of the man, and Monk began to get a true picture of what made him tick. He still was still unaware of why Brown was so fascinated with the Monks, nor did he have any idea of where the man and his 'Comrades' were going to strike next. But, he could clearly see that Brown fancied himself a social justice 'warrior' and he looked for him to strike in areas where these leanings could be displayed in their full glory. Would it be a government building? If so, Sacramento would have been the better choice. A school? Not exactly a place where social justice issues were ignored. Where could it be?

On the afternoon of August 2nd, they were just about to wrap things up for the day when, as it so often happens, a breakthrough came. Natalie was combing through some of the pictures one more time from the anti-nuke protests at Berkeley, mainly as a diversion because she enjoyed seeing their pal Leland looking so expressive as he tried to hold back the angry mob. She was just about to turn the page when she spotted something that made her mouth drop open.

"Honey! Over here! Look at this!" she said.

Adrian was deep in thought reading through a peer-reviewed journal which featured Brown's writings, and was slightly bothered at the interruption; but, he dutifully did the right thing, marked his place, and walked over by Natalie's side to see what she had found.

"Whatcha got?" he asked, fatigued from hours of study.

"This picture. Do you see anything interesting?" she asked.

Unwilling to play guessing games, he barely gave the photograph a glance and shrugged it off. "It's a picture of Leland with the Nuke mob. What about it?"

Natalie was tired too and picked up on her husband's insubordination. She backhanded him in the gut and told him to look closer. Adrian rolled his eyes but obeyed her command, leaning in to take a closer look. As he reviewed the crowd his mouth dropped open and he blinked several times to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was. He looked up at Natalie and became uncharacteristically speechless.

"You see it?" she asked.

He just nodded his head yes. He saw it. There in the picture, in the third row towards the left behind Leland, standing with the protestors, were a young Damon Brown, Sharon Grier and Trudy's murderer, Ethan Rickover.