"I'm so glad I never went to high school," Parker mumbled as she shovelled Chinese into her face. "It's weird."

"Not going to argue with you there," Abby replied. "Did any of you finish high school?" she queried as an afterthought, gesturing for Hardison to pass the rice.

"I did," Eliot declared, grabbing the rice off the hacker and passing it along the table no his niece. "Nate did," he continued then paused to look at Sophie; he wasn't sure about her. No one was really sure of anything about Sophie.

"Yes and no," Sophie informed vaguely as she reminisced about days gone by. "A story for another time."

"Hardison?" Abby asked, passing the rice back up the table.

"Never graduated," the hacker confessed. "Probably because I spent most of my senior year hacking rather than doing any actual school work. Don't think I even went to school half the time," he added as an afterthought, laughing slightly.

"I have such great role models," Abby stated sarcastically as Nate's phone rang, sitting on the table next to the dinner plate in front of him. "You gonna get that?" Abby asked after the device rang for a few times.

Nate held up a finger and let the device ring a few more times before he finally picked it up. "Lawson," he declared.

"Hi, it's Kirk Mouser," the man declared over the phone.

"Ah Mr Mouser," Nate smiled. "So you thought about my offer then?"

"Yes; I, uh, I want in."

"Good, that's good to hear. But I'm, ah, going to need some sort of, ah, indication that you can do what you can say you do," Nate instructed as he took a bite of a piece of broccoli on his plate.

"But you already know what I can do," he stated. "Otherwise why would you have come to me?"

"I know what you can do, not how. I need to see your methods," he explained.

"Then after, I need to see your methods," Mouser demanded.

"Naturally," Nate agreed. "So tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow," Mouser agreed and hung up the phone.

"With any luck," Nate said to Abby. "Tomorrow will be your last day at that school."

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

"So Mouser show me how this is done," Nate exclaimed waiting patiently in the mark's office for him to do his thing. They needed him to move the money so Hardison could do his geek thing and trace it and get back the stolen money for the victims.

"Okay," Mouser mumbled as he shovelled a doughnut into his face. "The first thing we do is figure out some reason for the student to be let go or expelled or whatever."

"And how do you do that?" Nate enquired.

"The school has a zero tolerance for drugs," he began as he wiped the sugar from around his mouth. "Plant a joint into their locker and an anonymous tip into the office, they'll be, ah, gone before you can blink."

"Elegant," Nate admired. "How long until…" he began but trailed off at hearing the commotion at Abby's end of the comms.

XXXXXXXXXXXXX

"That's not mine," Abby exclaimed as one of the admin staff held up a small zip lock bag containing two small joints.

"Has anyone else had access to your locker?" the admin asked.

"No but-"

"Then it must have been you," she interrupted without the slightest notion of condolence or remote interest in Abby's plea in her voice.

"It wasn't me!" the teenager continued.

"I'm sorry miss," she continued, her voice still filled with apathy. "You're well aware of the rules."

Numerous teenagers now formed a ring of shame and excitement around Abby and the admin and, even though she knew it was part of the con, she couldn't help find herself growing angry at the injustice of it all.

"But it's not mine!" she exclaimed once more. "Why would I-"

"Abby let it go," Sophie suggested. "This is what we want."

Abby rolled her eyes and let herself be led by one of the faculty members through the crowd of teenagers. Out of the corner of her eye and through the judging stares of her would be peers, she noticed Alan and his two friends leaning smugly against the wall as they sarcastically waved her goodbye.

She was marched through the corridors and past Mouser's office, where Nate gave her a reassuring nod as she walked by before he turned back to the mark.

"Elegant," he admired once more. "When does the money get transferred?"

"It's transferred already," Mouser smiled as he stood up and simultaneously hitched up his belt.

"Aready?" Nate raised a questioning eyebrow and Mouser nodded proudly. "Won't they notice it's been transferred before the kid's actually been kicked out?"

"They won't notice," Mouser replied. "They don't notice. So what now?"

"Hmm?"

"What now? I showed you what I can do, now it's your turn," he clarified.

"First I need the money to launder," Nate fake laughed, trying to push things along.

Mouser pulled a pen out his poorly kept front pocket and scribbled some numbers on a sticky note. He coughed in an unsanitary manner before handing it over to Nate, who took it with intrigue and slight disgust.

"What's this?" Nate queried.

"The account where the money is kept," he explained. "You're sure you can get it to me clean?"

"Positive," the mastermind reassured. "I wouldn't be here if I wasn't." Mouser shrugged in agreeance.

"Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some money to clean," Nate said walking out the door, already snapping a picture of the note and sending it to Hardison so he could start working his magic.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

"Hardison I just sent you the details to Mouser's account. I'm going to assume you can do something with that?" Nate asked rhetorically as Hardison spun uselessly in his chair in his alias' office.

"With that, I can do anything!" he exclaimed happily, flexing out his fingers and cracking his neck in preparation.

"Can you build a dinosaur?" Parker exclaimed excitedly from the van. "How about a time machine? Space whales? Anti-gravity boots! Ooh…"

"On the computer? Sure," he indulged knowing the thief was extremely bored. He turned his attention back to the task at hand and keyed in the numbers Nate had sent him.

Hang on? They looked familiar?

The hacker paused for a moment to think.

Dang nabbit, the others weren't going to like this.

Okay, okay, he'd learnt how to deal with this by now. He just needed something to soften the bad news.

Like the money; what he was meant to be finding in the first place.

He set to work, searching for anything useful. He was half an hour into his search when he came across more bad news.

It was another five minutes before he finally decided to break the news to the team.

"Uh guys we gotta problem." Hardison declared cautiously.

"What?" Eliot growled.

"I don't think Mouser was the mastermind behind this."

"Dammit Hardison!" Eliot swore.

"How are we just finding this out now?" Nate asked.

"You know how we decided that he was the guy…."

"You," Sophie interrupted. "How you decided."

"Fine," Hardison huffed. "How I decided that he was the guy because he was the only one who had access to the money and it was transferred into his account."

" Yeah?"

"Turns out the money was then withdrawn from his accounts three days later…"

"Which we already knew," Nate pointed out.

"The account that Mouser gave us? It's where he's keeping the money before it's withdrawn. Not where he's putting it after. We got nothing."

"Why does that mean he's not the guy?" Parker enquired.

"So after I couldn't find the money, I dug a little deeper into where it could have been and where it might have been spent and there's no record of him spending any of the money," Hardison explained. "No large transactions, no holidays, cars, he didn't pay off his mortgage."

"How the hell did you miss that?" Eliot enquired.

"I didn't have time," he confessed. "We did just sorta jump into this con."

"What does that mean?" Abby asked.

"It means we don't have the mastermind behind this," Nate declared. "Mouser's not our guy."

So I think I owe you guys an explanation.

I had gotten back into writing, everything was going good, awesome even. When, low and behold, my laptop decided to break.

But I did not fret, as had saved the story to my Hard Drive and also had a back up in the cloud.

So, I was forced to use a laptop from the mid 2000's to write, and write I did.

Until stupid open office decided to corrupt my story. All 70,000 words of it.

But worried I was not, because I was smart and backed it up to the cloud.

Alas, when I looked, it turns out the last time I'd saved it to the cloud was early January.

Long story short, I lost 20,000 words of my story and am now slowly rewriting it.

BUT, thanks to SweetyKinz, I still had a fairly recent version of this con so, that's why it's taken me so long.

I'm back on a modern day laptop now and am writing off the cloud so I never have to worry about losing it.

Anyway, thanks for your patience, let me know what you think =)

Thanks again SweetyKinz! you rock!