5. The Office Raid
(set in the middle of ch. 8)

Moments after Chat Noir transformed, he spotted Ladybug swinging around the side of the building, bag of fake Miraculous things at her side. She somersaulted gracefully into the room, then straightened and raced over to join him. Halfway there, she paused and frowned, glancing around the large room. For some reason, her gaze lingered for several seconds on the open bathroom door.

"That's funny. I would have thought that Adrien would be at home today," she commented. She rounded the couch and stepped over to join Chat Noir. "I mean, it's convenient that he's not here because this is the easiest way to get in, but..."

"Maybe he's over at a friend's house," Chat Noir suggested, steering Ladybug out of the room. He didn't know how familiar Ladybug was with his civilian side- comments she had made before made him suspect that she might know him in person- so it would probably be better if they didn't linger in his room for too long. "Nathalie just stepped out, let's go!"

They ran across the atrium, kwamis zipping after them. Chat Noir threw open the door to the office and dashed in with Ladybug hot on his heels, though she paused for a second to shut the door behind them. He went right to the computer, trying his best to ignore the fact that his father would be furious if he ever found out about this.

"Sweet, it looks like he was already using the Miraculous account!" Chat Noir exclaimed after he wriggled the mouse and Locking Research came up on the screen. According to Plagg (or, rather, according to Nooroo), that was the name of his father's Miraculous account. He typed in the password quickly. "And he was using the Internet, so it isn't gonna be totally out of left field that he might get a virus."

"Does he have anti-malware?" Ladybug asked. She and Pollen were already throwing open the safe, carefully emptying one shelf at a time into an empty bag and then refilling it with the decoy scrolls. Wayzz had settled down with one of Mr. Agreste's journals and was paging through it, a look of interest on his small face.

Chat Noir checked. "Yup. Turning it off."

He plugged the first of the huge flash drives into his father's computer and started moving the first of the series of folders on his father's account onto it. He swore quietly as the transfer worked with agonizing slowness.

Thank goodness Nathalie was going to be gone for a while. If she had been in and out, he would have had to hide behind his father's desk and try to do the transfers without her noticing.

And Nathalie was really observant. She would have noticed. He would have gotten into trouble.

"What's wrong?" Ladybug wanted to know. She glanced over, looking anxious. "Is there some security thing that we didn't know about?"

"No, these files are just really, really large. They're going to take forever to move from the computer to my flash drives." Thank goodness he had gotten several flash drives with the largest capacity he could find. He would probably need the storage room. "I just hoped that this would go faster."

Ladybug glanced over his shoulder, and her eyes went wide. "Is that one file? Holy crud!"

"It's a folder full of files," he corrected. "From the name, it looked like maybe it has the scans from the book."

"Oh, no wonder, then," Ladybug said, looking relieved. "Chat Noir, there are hundreds of pages in that book! That'll probably be the biggest folder, unless the book files are split up into sections."

Chat Noir just shrugged. He hoped that Ladybug was right. Otherwise, they were going to be here all day.

"Why don't you come take pictures of the journal pages while that transfers?" Ladybug suggested. She pointed to the camera she had pulled out. "Then we can get more done-"

They both froze as the door clicked open and Nathalie strode in. She paused in the doorway when she caught sight of them, both incriminatingly frozen in front of the open safe. The kwamis dove out of sight.

It only took Nathalie a moment to compose herself. "Good morning," she said politely, striding towards her desk. "Don't mind me, I just need to get my purse. I'll be gone in a minute."

The superheroes just blinked at her, wide-eyed in fear. This had been what they had been worried about, being caught in the act by Nathalie. Why hadn't Fu warned them that she was coming back in?

"You do know that there's security cameras all over the place, right?" Nathalie inquired as she dug behind her desk for her bag. "There's one in this office, and another in the atrium, and a few others outside. Do you need any help getting them disabled?"

She got a blank stare in reply. Chat Noir wasn't even certain that his ears were working right, or maybe it was his brain that was misinterpreting her words. Wasn't she going to call the police, or at least his father?

Nathalie clearly wasn't waiting for an answer. Instead, she sat down at her computer and looked at the security feeds. She glanced down at her screen, and then her eyes widened. "Oh! You already have the inside cameras on loop, great. Just be careful when you're leaving. I would suggest going out that window there, and then dropping straight down and going over the side wall. You'll keep out of sight of the cameras out there."

Chat Noir's brain was slowly coming back online. Nathalie was... helping them?

"Once I get back from this errand, I can review the footage while Mr. Agreste is getting freed and try to edit out anything that accidentally gets on tape then, but avoiding showing up on camera in the first place would be best." Nathalie got back up and glanced over at them. "...what?"

"You aren't going to call the police on us?" Ladybug questioned, still rather pale. "When we're stealing from your boss?"

Nathalie scoffed. "If you were stealing his personal belongings, then yes. But I know perfectly well that everything in that safe is related to him being Hawkmoth and that he stole most of it. Take it." Her eyes fell on the bag of fakes, and a small smile slid onto his face. "Are you replacing everything with fakes? Even better. I won't have to deal with his temper tantrums for losing that stuff then."

"So you do know that he's Hawkmoth," Ladybug accused. Nathalie looked unbothered by the accusation in her voice.

"Of course. Do you really think he'd be able to get away with slipping off to that lair of his for hours without me noticing? He's threatened me to keep me quiet." Nathalie didn't look pleased about it. "I'd love to see him taken down. Also, he has a scroll in his desk that he's been working on translating, not that he's gotten very far. Most of what he knows about past users comes from old legends he's found." She walked over next to Chat Noir and crouched down to unlock one of the lower drawers with a key on her lanyard. She pulled it open and pulled out a scroll.

"Just try to arrange the sticky notes in the same way," Nathalie warned as she handed the scroll over to Ladybug. "The drawer will automatically lock when you close it. And he does have scans of the book and the scrolls on his computer-"

"We're taking care of those," Chat Noir assured her as he found his voice again. Nathalie looked impressed.

"Fantastic. And I take it you have some way to hide that the files just deleted themselves?"

"Of course."

Nathalie looked pleased. "Good. Fantastic. Oh, before I forget- there's a flash drive with backup scans in the second drawer down- yes, that one," she said as Chat Noir yanked open the drawer to find it full of flash drives. "And it should be labelled, Mr. Agreste labels everything."

Chat Noir dug for a couple seconds and then emerged victorious with a flash drive labeled Miraculous. "Just the one?"

"Correct."

"Thank you," Ladybug spoke up from where she was frantically peeling off and reattaching sticky notes from the scroll Nathalie had gotten for them. "We hadn't known about those."

"Did you know about the second Miraculous Mr. Agreste has?" Nathalie asked. Her phone beeped with a message, and she sent a slightly harried look at it. "The peacock?"

"We've switched it out with a normal pin that looks just like it," Chat Noir assured her.

"Great." Nathalie stepped towards the door, then paused again. "Also, if you could- please don't tell Adrien about this yet, or let him know that you're here. He doesn't need to worry about his father getting arrested on top of everything else he has to do. Just steer clear of his room, okay?"

Chat Noir mentally groaned. Why did she have to mention him? Now Ladybug was going to wonder about where he was.

"Does Mr. Agreste have a plan for what would happen to Adrien if he got arrested?" Ladybug asked. She looked concerned, and Chat Noir's heart gave a little jump. She was so worried about him, and it was almost too much for his little kitty heart to bear.

Nathalie snorted. "Of course not. He always says that he doesn't need a plan for that, because he doesn't plan on getting caught. So I wrote up a plan that would have Adrien's bodyguard and I caring for him in the even that Mr. Agreste cannot, and I just stuck it in with the rest of the forms that Mr. Agreste had to sign. He didn't even notice." There was a honk outside, and Nathalie glanced over her shoulder. "I have to go. Will you be forcing a final battle soon, or...?"

"It might be a couple weeks," Ladybug said. She shrugged at Nathalie's look. "We want to be sure that we'll be ready to face him without people getting hurt."

"Understandable. Let me know if I can help in any way in the future, but for now I have to run." Nathalie glanced around the room one more time, nodded at them, and then left.

They stayed silent until they heard the large front doors of the mansion close.

"Wow," Chat Noir breathed, a small smile starting to appear on his face. "Wow. Okay, I wasn't expecting that. I know Plagg said that he thought that she was being forced into silence, but he wasn't positive."

"Do we trust her, though?" Ladybug asked. She glanced around. "What do the kwamis think?"

Wayzz popped out of the wall. "I trust her," he reported. "She was startled at first, but there were no malicious vibes coming off of her. She was relieved to find that you knew about Mr. Agreste."

"Agreed," Trixx said, appearing from the safe. "The tripping over herself to help you was entirely genuine. That's nice to know that there are adults here with their heads on straight."

Chat Noir let himself smile. Trixx was right; it truly was good to know that Nathalie wasn't evil. That was a comforting thought, at least.

"Chat Noir, the file finished moving," Pollen reported. He jumped and spun back to the computer. Ladybug went back to the safe.

They worked in silence for a few more minutes. Ladybug finished her switch-out and moved on to taking pictures of the notes and pictures in Mr. Agreste's folder while Chat Noir moved the remainder of the (thankfully much smaller) files onto his own flash drive. Pollen and Wayzz helped Ladybug by moving pages that she had already photographed out of the way, speeding up the whole process.

"All files are moved," Chat Noir reported five minutes later. He pulled out the flash drive and flashed a smile over his shoulder at Ladybug. "Now time for the virus."

"You sound eager," Ladybug said with a laugh. "Is that something you've been long forward to?"

"Definitely."

A minute later, the Max-made virus was ripping through the computer. Chat Noir smirked, pocketed all of his flash drives, and went to go help Ladybug.

"I can use the camera on my staff," he suggested, sliding out one of the notebooks. "Dunno how we'll get it onto Master Fu's computer, but I suppose we can figure that out later."

Ladybug just nodded, too focused to respond. Trixx zipped over to Chat Noir's side to flip pages for him.

"How many of these journals did Master Fu want us to scan?" Chat Noir asked. He desperately wanted to read some of the pages he was photographing, but there wasn't the time for that now.

Well. Okay, technically there was. Nathalie and the Gorilla would be gone for the better part of an hour, probably, but they probably shouldn't dawdle. Besides, there was the ever-present threat of his father getting impatient with being trapped and simply transforming and cutting his way out of the elevator.

"Just the last couple, I think," Ladybug said. She looked almost done with her first one. "Since they would be the most likely to have accurate information about the temple and about Mr. Agreste's wife."

"Got it."

Chat Noir photographed every page in the journal in record time. He could see his mother's handwriting on some of the pages, and he was desperate to know what she had written. Ladybug was putting her second journal away as he closed his and put it back at the bottom of the stack in the safe.

"We've been here for nearly half an hour," Ladybug said anxiously, glancing towards the window. "And we've done three journals, plus the folder. I think we should clean up and get out of here. Mr. Agreste is super-impatient, I wouldn't be surprised if he gets fed up and cuts his way out."

"He's definitely been cursing a lot," Trixx piped up. "I didn't even know some of those words existed!"

Chat Noir cringed. That was a bit embarrassing.

"Okay, let's do that. And we've got all of the original scrolls?"

"Yup!" Trixx said cheerfully. "There aren't any ancient artifacts left in that safe. We can comb the rest of the room while you two make sure everything is in order."

Two minutes later, the safe was convincingly rearranged and the kwamis hadn't found anything else of interest. Chat Noir made sure that he had all of his flash drives and Ladybug made sure that her bag was securely zipped shut. They raced out while Wayzz and Trixx stayed back to put the cameras back to normal.

"Wait," Ladybug said suddenly, freezing outside of Adrien's door. "Nathalie said not to disturb Adrien, but he isn't here."

"Maybe he just snuck out," Chat Noir suggested, hoping that she didn't notice how his voice had suddenly gone up in pitch. "He's done that before, right? Maybe he just decided to take advantage of none of the adults being home to check on him."

Ladybug relaxed and laughed. "Yeah, that's true. You're right. Let's go, Kitty. I'm sure Master Fu is waiting to hear how things went."