Beck slowly put his coffee down as he stared slack jawed at his assistants laid out in their quarters. He heard the door open up on the balcony.
Oh, hell.
He padded silently and swiftly to the side room, the room with all concrete walls, the room with his equipment. Once inside, he delicately maneuvered the door to a closed position. Then he stood breathing heavily.
He had a Moment of Truth.
Fight or flee?
Then it was decided.
xXx
Peter clung to the wall, looking over the nearly empty warehouse. Looking for Beck.
He saw a gleam of reflection, and he looked again. Draped in a cloak, Mysterio stood on the balcony looking down over the room, with a prime view of the front door. Peter scowled under his mesh and closed in.
If Mysterio knew he was there, he gave no sign. Peter silently rose to his full height behind the dome. Then he snatched him by the cloak—
With an empty poof sound, the dome on top of the cloak seared a brilliantly painful light, like a huge flashbulb. As Peter tore the cloak away, there was a ripple of muffled cracks, and minibombs went off that were attached to the figure beneath. Blind, Peter staggered in the midst of a confetti storm.
Not good not good—
A steel bar crashed against his face, and he felt his skull warp with the force of the blow, only his springy bone tissue allowing his face to reform without getting bashed in. He hopped to the side, and another blow slammed across the other side of his head; he heard his neck cartilage crack as he spun and crashed against the railing. The bar slammed down across his shoulders, driving him to his knees.
His senses, not in top shape to begin with, could not cope with the afterimage that filled his eyes or the confetti that swirled around, hiding movement.
Then Peter discovered that the bar was a spear as it rammed into his left shoulder joint. He kicked back, toppling over the railing and falling gracelessly to the floor below. Every blink was more painful than his landing, and he continued to blink trying to clear his seared eyes. He scrabbled out toward the middle of the room, surrounding himself with open ground.
For a moment the only sound was the pattering sift of confetti settling to the ground and Peter's harsh, labored breathing. He squirted web over his shoulder as he felt blood slide down his ribs from his shoulder wound. He moved his arm and felt cracked bones shift. Damn. Damn.
"Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, plus bonuses, for a little cat burglary," Mysterio intoned. "But you had to do it the hard way." The deep, echoing voice rolled around the room like a living thing.
"The answer was, is, and will be no. Why is that the hard way? I would think coming after me again and again with ever more annoying thugs would be the hard way. So why wouldn't I say yes to your boss then run? Your thugs sure as hell couldn't catch me, and finding me would be pretty tough too."
"You have people you would not want to leave to the fate they would meet should you abandon them while they still mean something to you," Mysterio said. "Admirable. Dangerous for you and them, but admirable."
Beck maneuvered on the balcony, trying to figure out how he wanted to cross the open space to Peter, or whether he wanted to.
"Where is Beck?" Peter asked, his voice tight. "What's his real involvement in all this?"
"Perhaps one day you'll find out," Mysterio murmured, low and nasty. "Beck is not a nice man."
"So why are you here? Why didn't Beck just frame me, why'd he even bother hypnotizing me to steal the diamonds?" Peter dabbed blood from his mesh with the back of his hand. His mouth and nose were bleeding a little.
Beck stood transfixed, looking down at Peter. Little pain in the butt. How did he get around every scheme? How did he find out about the hypnosis? How did he get to the bottom of this little puzzle so fast, before it had time to unwind? Beck struggled with fear, frustration, and rage as he stared through the helmet at the wounded young man on the floor.
"You're good," Mysterio breathed. "Very clever."
"Then answer my question," Peter said.
"If you were genuinely guilty, then you could not bring your incredible talents to bear on clearing your name. Your sense of guilt would lead you to accept your criminal action, to choose between overcoming the mistake or profiting from it. Other parts of the plan would encourage you to the latter." Mysterio moved to the best position to strike at the spider ghost from the balcony. "You had to be guilty. You had to make the choice yourself. If it was thrust upon you, you would not accept it. You would have sought to clear your name."
"You just don't get it," Peter said. "I can't live like you." He kept blinking, far more rapidly than a human could blink. "No matter what I did, it wouldn't drive me into the arms of whatever syndicate you represent. It's never too late to go for redemption. Never."
Once again Beck found himself with nothing to say. His resolve wavered. He felt a powerful urge to unscrew the helmet and go down to meet Peter Parker, to apologize, to try to make right the deliberate dismantling of the poor kid's life.
Instead he gritted his teeth and leaped from the balcony in a plume of narcotic smoke. Peter's vision had returned enough to see this coming, and he darted out of the way as Mysterio landed in a cloud of his own making.
The wall flared with color; an LCD projector hooked up to Beck's hypnotic screen saver. Peter grinned to himself and ignored it, safe from its effects. He fired a web into the smoke and tugged hard. Mysterio sailed out, the web stuck to his arm greave. Peter kicked at the helmet, not gently.
It cracked. The helmet jerked at the socket that held it on. In a simple swipe Mysterio shredded the web that held him to Peter, and he leaped back. He hurled an ampoule of fear gas at the floor between himself and the spider ghost—
Peter sailed over the tinkle of glass and plowed into Beck with his forearms. The two of them tumbled back, far out of range of the gas, Peter bitten by the steel edges in the costume, Mysterio desperately and hopelessly fighting to free himself.
Peter hauled Mysterio up by his shoulders and slammed him down. The helmet shattered well and truly, exploding.
Peter looked down in utter shock.
Mysterio… was Beck.
"You son of a bitch," Peter said softly.
Beck lay on his back, not struggling, breathing hard, drinking in the look on Peter's face as though it were poison that might successfully kill him. He had nothing to say.
For a long minute they just looked at each other. Peter trickled blood from dozens of sharp, shallow cuts. His mesh hung in tatters. He freed himself and stood looking down at Beck.
"Who do you work for," Peter said, his voice dead.
"I can't tell you," Beck said.
"Then leave me alone," Peter said, and his eyes meant it. Peter turned and slowly walked out of the warehouse.
Beck lay still on his back for a long while after Peter left. Then, he eventually clambered to his feet. He stripped off the costume, hung it up neatly, and dressed in his street clothes.
"Time to go meet Fisk," he said softly.
xXx
"I expected your report last night," rumbled Fisk. "I take it you failed."
"Yes, but not until this morning," Beck said, strangely subdued. "Who is your new friend?"
The boardroom was sealed against sunlight, empty but for the four men at Fisk's desk. Fisk looked over at the middle aged dumpy man with shocks of white hair and wire rim glasses. The pudgy man had the benign look of a country preacher.
"This is Harlan Faber, a new associate I met on my travels. But that doesn't help you at all, does it?" Fisk growled. The lean man behind him smiled, an unpleasant look. Beck glanced at him only briefly.
"Glad you could make it, Ledge," he said. "Did Japan agree with you?"
"Cut the crap, let's get this show on the road," Ledge said.
Beck tossed a briefcase on the table. "In that you'll find copies of video tapes, photographs, transcripts, and all sorts of physical evidence that links thugs to lieutenants, and lieutenants to you. There's enough in there to give somebody with some determination a sledgehammer to take down your wall. I have five more primed to go to different law enforcement and media outlets. You let me go, I let you go. You nail me," Beck shrugged, "I give somebody the hammer to nail you."
The room was dead silent.
Fisk chuckled.
"You have a deal," Fisk said merrily, "on the condition you can get out of the building alive. You are gravely mistaken to think that anybody, with any evidence, is going to come after me. Ledge," he said sharply, "use my new weapon to end Beck's life."
"Sir," Ledge said. "You got it."
Beck threw a kick, and a graceful one with some power at that. Ledge was effortlessly out of the way, and he sunk a knuckle in Beck's jugular. Beck flew back, and Ledge was on him. Gripping him by the wrist and lapel, Ledge twisted and Beck was off his feet, in a tight arc through the air, and crashing heavily to the ground. He was groggy as Ledge hauled him up to his feet and dusted him off.
"One pulverized flunky, comin right up," he grinned. "I'll be right back."
Fisk nodded, and Ledge dragged the half-conscious Beck out of the room.
"Whu," Beck managed, prying at the iron grip Ledge had on his shirt.
"You'll like it. It's a fun game called Chutes and Ladders. The trick is, there aren't any chutes or ladders." He chuckled. "I crack myself up. And I crack you up. Here we are."
He had escorted Beck down a hall, and at the end of the hall was a fire door.
"But—" Beck said, "we are way high off the ground!"
"Bingo," grinned Ledge. He kicked the fire door open and Beck paled at the drop all the way down to the garden, hundreds of feet below.
"No!" he shouted hoarsely, kicking up a wild struggle.
Ledge grappled with him, then pounded a savage blow into his face. Beck went limp and slid backwards out the door, falling.
Ledge watched with a grin.
Then with a sound like a casting fishing pole, an unreeling of something hissed through the air. Ledge blinked as the webline shot down past him and snagged Beck's ankle.
"No you don't," Ledge said, whipping a shuriken out of his belt and flinging it through the thin web strand. The strand parted, and Beck let out a healthy scream as he resumed falling.
A shadowy figure dove past Ledge, ribbons of webbing slithering in the wind as he shot straight down through the air after Beck. Ledge leaned forward to watch, fascinated.
The dark figure caught Beck, fired web at a wall, tugged over to it and wheel kicked off to bleed momentum. Then a few whirls later, the spider ghost had brought himself and Beck to a halt on the wall, a mere three stories from the broken, rust-colored concrete below.
Then the spider ghost was in motion, moving up the wall like a speedy force of nature. Ledge watched, amazed, his jaw slack, as in a matter of fifteen seconds the spider ghost had bounded all the way up to the top of the building, only one bound from escape.
"Destiny," Ledge breathed to himself with a grin. "I'm gonna get to throw down with that." He let his smile grow. Then he realized he had let Beck get away.
"Aw, crap," he muttered. He went back to Fisk…