A new chapter just in time for the holidays! I hope you enjoy! XOXO

Chapter 8

Central City, S.T.A.R. Labs, 8:30 pm

Felicity and Oliver scrambled over to the cortex at Cisco's frantic holler.

"What is it?" Oliver asked as Cisco hurriedly passed the wireless keyboard to Felicity.

"It looks like Barry has gone further on this case than we thought," the engineer said as he indicated the ancient laptop behind him with his thumb. "And then, there's that," he stated as he pointed at the hologram that was showing warning boxes that were repeatedly screaming ALERT!

Felicity quickly looked over the information from her sniffers as she took her seat in front of the main console. Her sniffers were running real-time and they were reporting aberrant network activity. "I think we have a live one," she said as her fingers started working her keyboard. Several windows began to pop-up all over the holographic display as she started calling up her own arsenal. If this was in any way related to Barry's attack, she thought, whoever this was better watch it.

"What do you need?" Cisco asked, itching to join in the action.

"I don't know how long this payload has been here so I need you to start scouring all the memory dumps and hibernation files you could get your hands on," Felicity said as she continued to work. Then to Oliver, she said, "Oliver, honey, I need you to call Detective West."

Central City Police Department, 8:30pm

Joe had just come back to his desk after speaking with Captain Singh about giving provisional network access to S.T.A.R. Labs. The captain was hesitant about hiring out the critical parts of the investigation when one of their own was involved. He had made a case for expediency and the captain had reluctantly agreed, but limited it to on-site access. He had been about to call Cisco when Eddie walked by his desk.

"I asked them to run it twice," Eddie grumbled as he took a seat in front of his desk. "No hits."

Joe shook his head as he smooshed his hand on his face. He sure as hell thought their luck was turning. After their witness had rendered a life-like image of a possible person of interest, he hoped that they would get a hit with facial recognition. This case would try even the patience of a saint. He sighed. Well maybe, his other team can work this and get something they could use.

"All databases?" the senior detective asked.

Eddie nodded. "I've even called in a favor to check the DMV database on the down-low. This woman, whoever she is, doesn't have a record, doesn't have a driver's license – she's either dead or a ghost," he groaned as he dragged himself back up. "I'll put out a BOLO. See if something turns up."

Joe nodded his head and reached the phone Cisco had urged him to use whenever he needed Team Flash. Time to call in the cavalry.

Central City, S.T.A.R. Labs, 8:33 pm

"Catch!" Cisco said as he threw his phone to Oliver. It was his version of the Arrow phone. Joe had a similar encrypted unit with him.

Oliver easily snatched the phone in mid-air with his right hand. But before he could even do anything with it, the phone started to ring. It was the detective. He quickly swiped his thumb against the screen to take the call.

"Cisco," the detective said by way of greeting.

"No, Detective. It's Oliver. We –"

"Is everything okay?" Joe immediately asked, cutting off Oliver in the process. He had heard alarms in the background.

"Barry's fine but we have a situation," Oliver said, "I'm putting you on speaker." He then placed the phone between Felicity and Cisco – both of whom were busy unleashing their fingers on their respective keyboards.

"Detective," Felicity said, "I'm sorry I had to break into your network before you gave me access, but it had to be done. I just caught the tail-end of an executable file calling home," her voice was taut and uneven. She had since turned off the grating alarm but there was still a lot to be done.

"Wait, what?"

"Joe, your network has been breached after all. We need more time to know just how much of it was compromised," Cisco butted in, knowing how difficult it could be for Felicity to simplify technical jargon while trying to concentrate on coding on the fly. "But for now, you're going to have to hold all chatter on this network or divert it to another more secure one."

At this, they heard Joe called Eddie back into his office to hold the BOLO.

"We may have to go low-tech on this," Felicity commented as she recognized the makings of a possible shadow network within the CCPD's existing infrastructure. She returned to the network map she had on the screen earlier and promptly reviewed it for possible alternatives. "It looks like you have a separate fax line. You can use that temporarily," she concluded before she went on to relay her contact information.

"Okay, I'll tell our techs to pull the plug –"

"No!" Both Cisco and Felicity exclaimed. Felicity then hurriedly interjected as she typed line upon line of code, "If you do that, we might alert the intruder that something's up. I'd rather lull him into a false sense of security."

"Let me talk to your techs later," Cisco said as he continued to acquire memory dumps from the infected network, "I'll walk them through sandboxing this threat."

"Until then, Oliver will update you with what we have so far," Felicity said as she passed the phone back to Oliver and quickly returned to her screen.

"Detective," Oliver said as he switched off the speaker function.

"Wait, hold on," Joe said as he spoke to whom Oliver assumed was his partner. The detective quickly apprised Eddie of the situation and gave additional directions on how to issue the BOLO and a warning to keep communications on this case to a minimum. When that was done, Joe asked, "So, what's new?"

Oliver relayed all their new findings: the possibility that Barry had been drugged with scopolamine, the cure Caitlin is working on and the data on Barry's hard drive that they haven't even touched. It was only when Joe was convinced he was fully caught up on those that Oliver ventured to ask him about one more thing, "Have you seen Barry's phone? I mean, could it have been left in his lab when he collapsed? It could make filling in the blanks in his timeline a lot easier." He may have forgotten to ask Caitlin but it wouldn't hurt to put the same question to Joe.

He heard a rustling of paper before the detective spoke again, "It's not on the evidence log, but I'll go check his lab again. Anyway, the witness was able to provide us with a sketch. I'm faxing it over to you guys right now."

"Okay," Oliver said before he tapped Felicity's shoulder and gestured that he needed her phone. At her inquiring frown, he mouthed the word "fax". That had her unlocking her phone and calling up her fax service app.

Joe started to recap his and Eddie's progress, "The sketch was made by the witness himself – the kid prides himself as being an artist and said he wouldn't be able to forget a face like that. It's a pretty clear sketch but we didn't get any hits from our databases…"

"Uh-huh," Oliver said as Felicity handed him her phone. "Wait, I just got it," he muttered as he opened the incoming message. The woman in the drawing was stunning and looked oddly familiar. "Okay, go on," he said as he forwarded it to his own inbox.

"The kid says that he saw this woman approach Barry while he was in line to get his slushie," Joe continued. "She's a redhead about 5'10-5'11" tall, and wore a dark hoodie."

"Like our ghost," Oliver said as he proceeded to walk back to Barry's treatment room.

"Uh-huh," the older man agreed, then asked, "Has Barry told you anything about seeing someone?"

Oliver's eyebrows rose. He was probably the last person who Barry would have spoken to about that. "No, why?"

"The witness said this woman and Barry apparently shared a kiss."

"So, he knew her?"

"We think so, but I never really thought Barry would go for edgier girls."

"How do you mean?" Oliver asked, even as he reviewed what he knew of Barry's history with women – namely Iris, Felicity and he suspected, Caitlin as well. Joe may be on to something, he thought. When it came to women, Barry tended towards the conventionally pretty – not tall exotic redheads.

"Nah, I just couldn't see him going for a woman who puts some weird green lipstick on when it's not even close to Halloween," Joe said in an offhand manner.

At that statement, Oliver was hit by a stronger feeling of déjà vu. He knew in his gut that he had seen the woman before. "So Cisco had been right on the bucket from day one – the perp's a woman with a deadly kiss," he remarked as he tried to place her in his memory.

"Looks like it," Joe huffed. "Anyway, I was hoping you guys can run it. See if you can match the face to a name. In the meantime, I'm asking CCPD Vice about that drug before I head up to Barry's lab and see about his phone."

"Okay, I'll let you get to it. Uhm, and Felicity's telling me tell you not to touch Barry's computer," Oliver said as he relayed what Felicity was shouting from the cortex.

"Roger. Out," came the detective's abrupt and terminal reply before the call clicked off.

S.T.A.R. Labs, Biomedical Wing, 8:35 pm

S.T.A.R. Labs' Biomedical Division had its own sublevel that housed fully equipped labs and procedure rooms. Caitlin remembered that one of their most active projects back then involved experiments in the transplantation of lab-grown organs – hearts, kidneys, livers and skin – into non-human primates. That had her dragging Digg to the said wing because for what she wanted to achieve with this cure, she needed special equipment that she didn't have in the treatment room.

"What are we looking for?" Digg asked as Caitlin handed him a pushcart. They had finally reached their destination after roughly ten minutes of walking. They were in the division's own supply kiosk – all five thousand-square feet of shelf upon shelf of medical supplies and equipment.

"Anything we would need to perform a field dialysis," Caitlin answered as she began to search the shelves for what she needed. She could feel Digg's curious stare. After all, she had vetoed the procedure just a few minutes ago. "We have a limited amount of Ray's stuff, so I'm thinking of fixing a third of it with the dialysis solution, using that as a homing beacon for the toxin. That way, we can control where the nanotech goes and won't risk diluting it in Barry's blood or it leaking out of his vascular system," she explained as she continued to rummage through the stocks. One consequence of anaphylactic shock was that blood vessels became leakier – if they didn't address that, the nanotech would not be able to circulate and instead get stuck in tissues where it wouldn't be doing any good.

"And still ensure that the toxin is trapped and can be flushed out," Digg nodded as he understood what she was trying to do. He then held up a couple of catheter tubes for her approval. At her nod, he placed it in the cart.

"Then once we flush the dialysate out, we can uncouple the nanotech from the toxin and reuse it," she said as she carefully unloaded an armful of specially marked IV bags into the cart. "I'm worried about the side-effects though." She was more than a little bit worried. More could go wrong than right.

Digg posed the rhetorical question that had been playing non-stop in the back of her mind, "What choice do we really have?" He understood her apprehension. It was part of a physician's job to consider the ramifications of every action they took. He was just relieved that his training in the Army had made him more pragmatic – at least in the medical sense.

He was right, Caitlin's heart thought as it tried to convince her brain. They didn't really have a choice in the matter but she couldn't help the anxiety she was feeling. A lot of doctors would balk at using experimental technology on their patients. "I know. But this is the first time that I'm going to use something on Barry that I'm not totally familiar with…" she pondered. After a thoughtful pause she said, "But you're right. This gives him at least a shot." And that, at the end of the day, was something she could hold on to.

S.T.A.R. Labs, Treatment Room, 8:40 pm

Oliver kept staring at his phone after his conversation with the detective and took a few minutes to run through all the clues they had so far: 1) They were dealing with a biological, possible botanical toxin; 2) Barbs similar to leaf trichomes were embedded in Barry's neck; 3) Scopolamine, which is a plant-derived drug, was contained in said barbs – and then it clicked! He had a clearer idea now where he had seen the woman whose picture he had been staring at for what seemed like forever.

Could it be possible? He asked himself. It wouldn't hurt to check.

So he held his breath and dialed a number he thought he won't ever use again. "Hello, Jessica! Yes, it's Oliver Queen."

Happy Holidays, everyone! Kisses!