St. Regis Hotel, New York City

Cabs came and went keeping the concierges busy. Hotel guests scurried across the red carpet eager to reach to the warm lobby and their rooms. Across the street from the hotel, Connie and Dianara walked with easy self assurance.

Connie smiled. "I loved the look on Ross' face when you were making your goodbye thank you speech."

"It was entirely truthful," said Dianara. "I simply had nothing complimentary to say about him."

"You were his prized agent in Europe. One little mention would have sufficed."

"I would have said something if I could wipe the memory of the not so subtle passes he's aimed in my direction over the years."

"What? You should have reported him."

"I was a green trainee. I couldn't make waves," said Dianara. "Besides, he made a pass and that's where it ended. He didn't press the issue."

Connie stopped suddenly. She stared at a car a short distance away. She began to walk faster towards it. Dianara followed. As they got closer, she realized what or rather who had aroused Connie's curiosity.

Connie knocked on the window. The door was unlocked with a loud click. She slipped into the passenger seat. Dianara got into the rear. In the driver's seat, Frisco shook his head in disbelief.

"What's going on, Frisco?" asked Connie.

"Simple surveillance."

"Of who?"

"My charge - Chase Masters."

Connie paused for a moment. It seemed as if she were counting mentally. "Why may I ask?"

"The guy ticks my radar off. And I had ... have a reason to suspect something IS going on," said Frisco.

"I asked you to investigate Tim's death. Is this connected to that?"

"No."

"Then why are you here?"

"I accompanied Masters to a meeting today. One of the people he met with is someone I KNOW is connected with Cesar Faison."

"Not that obsession again," said Connie.

"Excuse me for thinking that the bad guys ought to pay for their crimes. Faison's NEVER paid for anything. Nada," said Frisco.

"You and Robert are fixated on this guy. You're both too close. It's personal."

"Damn right it is! That madman kidnapped my wife not once but twice. He'd nearly succeeded in spiriting her away if Mac hadn't found her in time," said Frisco. "And what he's done to Anna and Robert and Andrew is ... is endless."

"You may be making connections and inferences based on subjective personal data," countered Connie.

"Maybe I am and maybe I'm on to something here," insisted Frisco.

"He may be seeing a ... a lady friend. He's single and quite a charmer, believe me."

"I don't think so. He took a typical zig zag anti-surveillance route over here from his hotel. And he took his briefcase with him. How many men going to see a woman takes their briefcase?" said Frisco. "He's meeting someone and he didn't want anyone to know about it."

"He didn't know you were tailing him?" asked Dianara watching the hotel's front door.

"I wasn't tailing him." Frisco smiled wolfishly. "I put a tracer on his briefcase."

"You're kidding me," said Connie. "What if he finds it? He's no fool."

"I'll sweep his case tomorrow and take it off. He'll never know," said Frisco. "I wish I'd put a microphone on it though."

"So, are you on a case for Robert- wait, Dianara, can you give us a few minutes."

"Don't bother. She's on the team, Connie."

Connie groaned. "I keep telling Robert to stop recruiting. When did he get you - before or after the engagement?"

Dianara chuckled. "Before I even started dating Mac. It was unavoidable. When did you join up, Connie?"

"You could say I was a charter member," said Connie. "I wouldn't mind the recruiting but Robert keeps getting my best people. It's like he uses the world's military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies as his ... his personal farm from which he harvests the ones he wants. Damn him!"

"Maybe some of us get tired of the field work bureaucracy," said Frisco. "To answer your question, no, I'm not on a job for Robert. This hunch is all me," said Frisco.

Dianara added, "As for me, I'm not on a job for Robert. I'm working for Anna."

"I have to worry about her now?" asked Connie.

"Don't cross her and she's your best ally, next to Robert," said Frisco.

"I've known Robert for years. I can predict what he'll do. I can't say the same about Anna. She's known to be independent and headstrong," said Connie. "I can feel my ulcer growing. What are you doing for her? Is it something I can officially ignore?"

"I snooped around the archives earlier looking for records that haven't been entered into SIMON. I didn't find any though."

"Why do you want old records?"

Dianara looked at Frisco then Connie. He nodded and Dianara said, "We have evidence that there's now a mole in the Bureau. Someone controlled by Faison."

"What?" yelled Connie. "Are you sure?"

"Yes. We believe that the mole has been in place at least since the early 90s. Maybe earlier. Given Faison's skills with hypnotherapy, we believe that the mole has no conscious awareness of being the mole."

"What proof do you have?"

"It came from Faison himself. If you want to know more, you'll have to ask Anna."

"I don't believe this. What CAN you tell me?"

"We think the mole is fairly high up in the organization," said Dianara.

"How high?"

"High enough to make sure orders and assignments are to his or her liking."

"Do you know what you're saying?"

"Yes. It could be a Bureau chief." Dianara looked at Connie. "It could be you."

Connie was struck speechless.

Frisco shook his head. "It's not her, Dia."

"How can we be sure?"

"Connie passed the test."

"Test?" asked Dianara.

"Old fashioned loyalty test. Robert used it on us early birds. Ask him about it sometime."

"I will," said Dianara.

Connie rubbed at her forehead. "Brief me. How were old records supposed to help?"

"It could help us trace orders and accountability from the 90s onward. If he or she was smart, they would have made sure that anything incriminating would not be in SIMON. Or he or she could have changed what DID go into SIMON to cover his activities," explained Dianara. "If we had old files, we could do some comparisons and analysis."

"Logical," said Connie. "Let me think for a minute. We scanned at least ninety percent of files into SIMON. The other ten percent were obsolete files. Mostly administrative busy work. They were mass incinerated years ago."

Dianara sighed. "Well, it was worth looking for. I'll tell Anna that I've found nothing."

"Wait! Old records were not always on paper. We still used magnetic tapes back then. DAT tapes is what Tim used to call them."

"DAT?" asked Frisco.

"D-A-T. They were like cassette tapes but smaller - the size of a pack of cigarettes," said Connie. "Before SIMON, Tim made monthly backups and brought them home for security. In case we lost HQ, he could restore systems from another location with the tapes. Knowing Tim he probably never threw them away."

"Is his home still intact?" asked Frisco. "Has it been swept and cleaned out?"

"Yes, but they may not have noticed his hiding place or even knew what the tapes were." Connie smiled. "Most of our people are young enough to not know what a cassette tape looks like. That's how he hid them in plain sight. He stacked them in his audio cabinet among piles of audio cassettes. The clean up team turned in what they found and I don't remember seeing the tapes in there."

"Who's responsible for his home now?" asked Dianara.

Connie closed her eyes trying to recall the information. "His sister. I talked to her at the funeral. She didn't know what she was going to do with the house yet. I'll call her tomorrow and let her know that someone would like to talk to her and look in the house."

"Better wear a disguise, Dia," said Frisco. "A good one."

"Eyes in the shadow?" asked Dianara.

"Always assume you're being watched," said Frisco.

"This means I stay over another day."

"Worried that Mac will get into mischief without you around?"

"A little mischief would be good for him. He needs shaking up," said Dianara. "Actually this trip is last minute. Even with Maxie's help there's a lot to do for the wedding. I've been so busy with training Tania and making sure she's in sync with the DVX team that I haven't even picked out a wedding dress."

"Oh, please. You could wear a sack and look stunning," said Frisco. "All Mac's going to care about is that you're there and you say I do. The marriage is the thing not the ceremony."

Connie yawned. "I'm leaving you to it, Frisco. Debrief me in the AM if you have something. Dia, I'll give you a call about Tim's sister."

"Will do," said Frisco.

Connie stepped out of the car and walked briskly away heading for home. Dianara slipped into the passenger seat to keep Frisco accompany during his vigil.

In a suite of the St. Regis, Chase and Sean concluded their meeting. Sean shuffled the thick documents scattered on the desk into one pile. Chase's briefcase lay in front of him. A dark flat square beside the tiny rubberized "feet" on the underside of the case caught his eye. He'd seen that stamp before. He'd led the operation that placed tracers just like it on a pallet of illegal arms. Sean's eye went from the case to the window. The curtains remained drawn shielding the them from inquisitive eyes but not necessarily from other kinds of electronic surveillance.

"I think we got everything," said Sean to Chase who was unplugging his laptop power cord from the wall. "I'm impressed with what you've put together."

Chase smiled. "Thank you. It's not as detailed as your long-term plan but we think it's workable."

"More than workable. There are some areas that have to be vague out of necessity."

Chase looked up. "Vague? Where?"

Sean inhaled slow and deep. He pulled a short stack of paper from beneath the pile. "This one. The Minerva Project. The project status hasn't changed in a few years. I remember canceling it myself. I was surprised to see it in the packet and active then years of no activity. Are you funding a ... a dead project?"

"That's a special case, Sean," said Chase. He opened his case and began to put away his laptop and the rest of the documents.

Sean stood up and made to pour himself some coffee from a carafe set on the dresser table. The further he could be from the tracer the better. If Robert or Anna was tracking Chase, wouldn't they have told Sean? Were they growing suspicious? He forcibly put aside the wild theories careening in his head. He had to focus on the moment right now. He could afford no distractions. "How special if you don't mind my asking?"

"We've had to change the ... the parameters. The concept for the project is a good one and I can see why you cancelled it. We simply did not have the technology or the expertise to do it properly."

"And you do now?"

"We think we're on the right path but nothing is instantaneous is it?" Chase closed his case with a loud click. "We've had some success in the field. Some of our test cases have been operational for some time, years in fact."

Sean hid his surprise with a feigned smile. "That's amazing! How did you overcome the, uh, obvious limitations?"

"The human factor, yes, that was a big problem but a solution dropped into our laps, literally," said Chase. "Your project had the right idea though."

"My memory is rusty. I just remember how complicated it was and we kept running into issues."

"Hypnotherapy WAS the right approach. The problem was that innately humans are a stubborn species. We needed a way to make the subjects more susceptible and malleable to hypnotherapy. We found that method with the Compound series."

"I saw some references to a Compound A. Is that what you're referring to?"

Chase nodded. "We didn't develop it in-house. It was pitched to us and we bought the licensing and first access rights on future versions. It was one of the last deals that my father did before he retired. We've refined the process little by little over time to what we have today."

"Through Eve? She's the test case in the project brief."

"No. She was the pitch case. Unfortunately, she died in a car accident shortly after the end of the case. But we enough data to know that the compound worked as advertised. What else was more important than that?"

"I'm not up on hypnotherapy but I thought that we were reaching way back when in trying to change people's natural inclinations. Did the group get that particular expertise along with the compound?"

"That came from our friends in the DVX."

"Friends?"

Chase laughed. "We haven't jumped into bed with them. We keep them at arm's length. They came to us. Well, one of their shadow departments did. They needed cash and quickly. They sold a pallet of documents and research notes from the mind control project run by your counterpart Cesar Faison."

"Kindly do not put my name next to his," said Sean not bothering to hide his disgust.

"Won't happen again, Sean," said Chase. "I just thought that-"

"Don't think. Cesar Faison is ... is a non-factor. The last time I saw him he was teetering on the edge of sanity. He's a loose cannon that the group is better off far, far away from," said Sean. "That's my two cents of advice. Take it for what it is."

"Advice noted and taken," Chase said. "We studied the documentation. Some of the theories and the test cases were out there. I mean like anyone can hypnotize someone using one word or wipe someone's memories out using some set phrases. That's just wishful thinking. The core techniques were sound. We combined that with the compound and, voila, Project Minerva was reborn and the result is the Minerva Process - the balanced use of hypnotherapy and pharmacology to achieve the desired results."

Sean's hand tightened around his coffee cup. "And thriving?"

Chase nodded. "We've got the basics down and tested. I want to accelerate the project."

"In what way?"

"I want to accomplish YOUR goals, Sean."

"The ideal double spy. There's no such thing. At least not the way I envisioned."

"We're more than halfway there. But the ultimate goal is a long term deep cover operative that's visible yet not what they really seem and entirely owned by us."

"Now that's wishful thinking," said Sean.

"Are you challenging us, Sean? We love a challenge. You saw to that."

Sean shook his head and chuckled. "Not at all. I'm just ... just amazed that you've pushed the project this far. I ... I really thought it was done and over with."

"You're the one that said worthwhile projects don't get cancelled just postponed," said Chase. "We're working on a new sub-phase that we believe will be even more beneficial to the Gem Group in the long run. It's in the, ah, baby stage right now but we can be patient. You taught us to value patience."

"The students have surpassed the teacher," said Sean. "Well done."

Chase smiled. "Thank you, Sean. Listen, I'm getting a lot of requests for, um, a personal visit or lecture from you to the group. It's one thing to read words on paper but another to hear it from the original source."

"Hey, I'm flattered. You're doing a great job as you are," said Sean. "I'm behind on everything. What could I talk about? I don't even know where your headquarters is these days."

"Milton Keynes. It's a city far west of London. You can talk about anything you like. We'll give you a tour and a full brief. How about it?"

Sean pursed his lips. "Overnight trips are one thing. I, ah, don't like to be far from home these days. I'll have to persuade my wife on this one."

"I'm sure you can," said Chase. "Why not bring her along and your daughter, too. Leave them to us. We'll make sure that they both have a fantastic time."

"I'm tempted," said Sean. His eyes swept across Chase's hopeful face, the case in his hand and then the curtained windows. He took a sip of his coffee to calm himself. "I'll discuss it with Tiffany and I'll call you. All right?"

Chase shrugged on his coat. "I'll take that as a maybe. Seriously, Sean, you're one of the last generation. We need your knowledge and your experience. We want to learn. We want to succeed at the goals that you, my father and the rest of our fathers and mothers laid the groundwork for. We can do that but only with your help. Convince your wife and come see us. You won't regret it."

Frisco's IPhone beeped. The display changed to a radar-like display. A small red dot was flashing and moving across the screen.

"He's moving," said Frisco. He handed the phone to Dianara then started his car.

Dianara craned her neck establishing a visual check of Chase. "I see him. He's by himself heading towards Central Park."

"Hmm, back to his hotel," said Frisco. He pulled into the light nighttime traffic. "I wish I knew who he met with but I couldn't risk too close a surveillance and being spotted."

"Patience is a virtue," said Dianara.

"Not necessarily," said Frisco. "I'll drop you off at your hotel."

"Only after we know that Chase is settled for the night."

"Watchdogging me? Did Anna or Robert put you up to this?"

"Not exactly. I wanted to get a chance to talk to you on a personal level," said Dianara.

Frisco tensed. "About Maxie?"

"Yes. If you don't want to talk just tell me and I'll stop," said Dianara. "I've gotten to know her in the last few months. Since I will be her stepmother, I want to make sure that you and Felicia don't have problems with that."

"I'll make this quick for both of us," said Frisco in clipped tones. "We don't have any problems with you. None whatsoever. We're both happy for you and Mac."

"And Maxie?"

Frisco sighed. "That's something we ... I can't avoid anymore especially as we're going to be in the same place."

"She does love you, Frisco."

"I don't know about that. Felicia, sure, but me? I don't think so."

"Your absence has hurt. No question. But I know that deep inside she wants to get know you," said Dianara. "It may be too late to have a true father and daughter relationship with her but you could be friends. Don't you want that?"

"I do but I don't think she'll let me. Too much has happened over the years."

"But you will try won't you?"

Frisco swallowed then said, "I promised Felicia that I would. But it's not up to me is it? It's up to Maxie."

In his suite, Sean packed in a hurry. He had planned to stay overnight but finding the tracer had changed those plans. If someone was following Chase, he didn't want to be around to be the target of further investigation.

He arranged a pair of spectacles on his face and a cap on his head. For good measure, he wrapped a scarf about his neck hiding as much of his face as possible. He picked up his suitcase and left taking the stairs down. He avoided the lobby and walked out.

He continued walking for another four blocks watching for any kind of surveillance. When he was sure that he hadn't been followed, he hailed a taxi. He would be in the airport soon and home in a few hours. He took off the scarf and tried to calm his breathing and heart rate.

In the back of the cab, Sean's face lost their earlier mask of impassivity. The creases of tension and stress showed fully. His eyes were troubled. He massaged his face easing the tension. He rolled his neck all the way around a few times. He flexed his shoulders. Reflexively, he checked the rear view mirrors for a possible tail.

"Home. I have to get home," he muttered to himself. "Then I can think. Think my way through this mess. I HAVE to THINK."

Thoughts he had kept a tight leash on finally erupted in his mind. His hands clenched and unclenched at his sides. Feeling faint, he opened the window an inch. The air soothed his flushed face yet did nothing to quell the growing volume of his inner thoughts.

What the hell am I going to do?

They have operatives in the field. How many? Where? For years! They could be anywhere! Eve is the proof of the success of the Minerva process. They really did it! They think she died years ago. What does this mean for Robin?

They better stay away from Faison. Anna will make any bargain she has to with him if it keeps Andrew safe. She's done it before. She'll do it again. I have to make sure they don't find out what Andrew can do. That's the best way to keep my friends safe. It's the only way.

This is all my fault!

They're ruthless. Nothing will stand in their way. Nothing and no one! They'll steamroll over any opposition. I need to go to London. I need to know more. Find out their weaknesses. Everyone has a weakness.

My lovely Belle. I love you so much, sweetheart. You're not safe around Andrew. I have to find a way to get you away. Tiffany, my love, I know you hate secrets, especially mine. I'm sorry. You can't find out about my trip. I won't have you near them. I'll make it up to you when all this over. I promise.

I'll keep you both safe. I will find a way. I have to.