Hello? Is anyone still there? I hope everyone is keeping safe. Again, my apologies for the over year-long delay. My life has not been easy the past year and just when I thought I was on the way to better days, the pandemic hit and here I am on the frontlines. Anyway, I hope this finds all of you well and safe. XOXO
Chapter 21
Starling City, Thea's Apartment, 1:15 am
Thea sighed. She'd just finished catching up with Roy a few minutes ago, but Baby Sara had woken up and demanded to be fed. The baby had been sleeping soundly when they both left the Arrow cave after a quick text to everybody that she was going to be staying with her Auntie Thea for the night. With how the night had been shaping up, Thea didn't want Sara surrounded by all that stress.
She reached for her phone.
"Oliver," she said as soon as she heard her brother's voice. "I told Roy about what happened with the White Sharks. He said that they don't really like it when they're double-crossed."
"Yeah, I figured… but would they try to make a move?" He asked.
"From what Roy tells me, the heat won't necessarily deter them from going after our perps, especially after a botched buy. They might wait to strike though."
"What's their threat level?"
"Above The Hoods but way below the Bratva," she answered.
Oliver was silent for a second, "Thanks, Thea. You okay having Sara with you?"
"Yep," she said as she gently rocked Sara's carrier. "We'll be fine."
Central City, Joe's Place, 1:15 AM
"Felicity, I'm all clear," Barry said as his call came through. The officer who escorted him home had finally left. "So, what's the plan?"
"Do you have the comms package I sent you?" Felicity asked. "The one I gave you for Christmas to keep specifically for home use?" She had given the cases to every friend of hers who's in the know about her nighttime activities. That way, whenever they needed her assistance, she was just really a call away, with a Felicity-grade secure connection to their devices at the ready.
Barry went to his closet safe to find the compact briefcase she was talking about.
"Yeah, I got it here," he said as he inputted his security code and thumbprint before opening the latch.
"In the lower right hand side, there should be a thing there with an Ethernet port on one end and a USB port on the other?"
"Found it," he said as he retrieved it.
"Okay, I also need you to get the black flash drive in the middle."
Barry looked at the array of color-coded USB sticks in the case and fished out the black one. "Got it!"
"Okay, here's what you need to do," she said as she gave him directions about how they were gonna pull off the most daring hack she had ever tried with zero prep time and no margin of error.
Starling City, Abandoned Airfield, 1:20 AM
Lyla followed the man into the recently decommissioned hangar where he proceeded to take a seat on one of the tables in what looked like the main office.
"So, why the visit?" he asked.
"Remember Harley Quinn?"
"How can I forget?" he answered.
David Ferreira used to head the A.R.G.U.S. outpost in Corto Maltese and was in charge of the clean up on the Hasaragua debacle. But since his team, through no fault of their own, failed to recapture or terminate Harley Quinn, he was recalled to the States and was essentially demoted. Such an experienced operative and an agent of his caliber essentially becoming a paper pusher meant that Fereira got the very short end of the stick.
"You've been tracking her?"
"As far as I know, she hasn't shown up anywhere near A.R.G.U.S.'s radar after South America," he answered.
"What if I told you that I've got a bead on her now?"
Ferreira smirked. "Then what the fuck are we waiting for?"
Central City, Undisclosed Secondary Location, 1:20 am
"I think we've had a breakthrough," Tommy said, as his audiovisual stream flickered into Oliver's screen. He'd been monitoring all comms, while Felicity worked on the Central City grid with Barry.
"What are we looking at?" Oliver said as several clippings and a few pictures began to filter in. Old ones by the looks of it..
"We've been sifting through Woodrue's life," Tommy said as the last of the data came through, "and I think we found out how he's involved in this."
"See this?" Laurel said as she pulled a photo to the fore. "See anyone familiar?"
Felicity went over to the screen in front of him to look. It didn't take her long. "The woman right there at the back."
Oliver's eyes zoomed in. Horn-rimmed glasses, mousy brown hair , he thought as he catalogued the woman's features. "I don't get it," he said, frowning.
"Take out the glasses. Turn the hair red, give it a little gloss and let it all fall down in vixen-y curls and I think we have our perp," Felicity said.
"Pamela Lillian Isley — Dr. Pamela Lillian Isley," Laurel caught herself as she read through the woman's file, "Got her PhD in Advanced Biochemistry from Gotham University… was about to get her second PhD in Astrobiology but lacked a few credits in guess what?"
"Botany?" Felicity shrugged. It was the only logical conclusion.
"Advanced Botanical Biochemistry," Tommy emphasized. "She was part of Woodrue's team in the first expedition..."
"That can't be right!" Laurel said as her eyes scanned further down the file. "It says here she was listed as one of those killed in South America."
"What?" Felicity asked, as Tommy started calling up a few more files on her console.
"Is there anything on her file that looks deeper into her relationship with Wooodrue?" Oliver asked. There was something about this that didn't sit right with him.
"She was one of his research assistants. But nothing really jumps out here, so far," Tommy said, as he tried to breach Gotham University's servers.
"Any outstanding warrants?"
It was Felicity who answered him this time, "No outstanding warrants. Not even a ticket." She sighed, as she took her glasses off. She was beginning to get a headache. This case just had too many dead ends.
"Any disputes between her and Woodrue?" Oliver prompted.
"None so far," Laurel said, as she cross-referenced known associates between Woodrue and Isley in the other databases they were tapped into. "But it looks like they weren't just colleagues…"
"What do you mean?" Felicity asked, as she sent their preliminary materials over to Cisco.
"Aside from a number of papers they collaborated on, there's a mention of them in the Gotham Gazette, with a picture of them looking cozy in a feature for a charity gala benefiting the University arboretum," Laurel answered.
"According to his personnel file, it looks like they also figure in a complaint that accused Woodrue of quote 'bestowing undue favor towards his senior research assistant' end quote," Tommy said as he finally broke through the University's firewall. "The University dismissed it, due in part because the accuser never surfaced, that a senior research assistant usually got first dibs anyway and because Woodrue was known for being a prolific collaborator."
"So how does this factor into everything?" Oliver pondered.
"We'll have to sort it out later. We're getting audio from S.T.A.R. Labs," Felicity said, as she piped in the audio from her earpiece to the speakers.
"Tommy, I want you guys in on this," he said, as he directed Felicity to stream the same audio to them.
Central City, S.T.A.R. Labs, 1:30 am
"Don't get too comfortable," Joe said over the PA system. His voice morphed into a growlier, grittier version of Oliver's Arrow persona.
The woman didn't even flinch.
He had pondered his approach.. If anything, no one could deny that this woman was methodical. She struck ruthlessly, and without hesitation. She's committed.
"Drugs. Kidnapping. What else you got your fingers in?"
Their perp stayed silent.
"No, no, no. You, you're too smart. Aren't you? Always 10 steps ahead. Nah, not any of that will just do. Too easy. Not challenging enough."
He remembered the crimes they'd linked to her. It wasn't just the thrill or the omnipotence that got her going. There was a whole lot of anger there and Joe was betting that setting off that powder keg is what he needed to blow this case wide open.
Before he spoke again, Cisco had passed him his phone and whispered, "From our friends…"
On it was a bird's eye view of one Pamela Lillian Isley's life. There were a couple of items that jumped out to him — things he thought he could exploit to rattle the cool out of their perp.
Central City, Main Power Grid, 1:30 am
Barry had made his way into the Main Grid having sped through to the other side of the city at Felicity's prompting. All they had were old plans pilfered from the haphazard online public records from the early 2000s. They didn't have any time to plan something more elaborate.
The modern look and feel of the equipment he saw caught him off-guard. Of course, he mentally sighed as he double-checked his steps against the map Felicity had him commit to memory.
"The equipment looks more modern than the plans suggest," he whispered into the comms. At least they were lucky that whatever modernization that happened in the interim didn't change the general lay-out of the place. The programmable logic controllers were still where they were supposed to be.
"Then this is gonna be easier," she said. "Do you see the ports?"
He took a quick look at the array in front of him before he answered, "Yeah, I see them."
"Good, all you have to do is connect the devices like I told you."
Barry quickly assembled the stuff as instructed and plugged it in. He waited for the red indicator light on the device to turn. "We're green."
"Hang tight." It took a few beats before Felicity reported, "I'm in. But I'll need you to lay low until we have what we came for."
Somewhere in Central City, 1:35 am
A double-beep signalled an incoming call. "Go ahead," he directed as he pushed into his earpiece.
"It looks like Central City Main has been breached," the smooth, low-pitched voice said, as the speaker's screens were mirrored onto his display. The schematic showed multiple glowing red dots in various sectors where silent motion sensors have been tripped almost simultaneously. "Something to do with your developing situation, perhaps?" the speaker continued in his distinctive cadence.
"Hmmm," came his non-committal response. He'd been closely following the surge of Twilight Mist, a relatively novel drug that has ravaged several cities, including his own. Its recent change in composition, coupled by the sudden increase in deaths associated with its distributors, had been a constant source of frustration over the last few weeks. All he knew was that these murders involved women whom the lowlife snitches he'd terrorized have begun to call the Sirens. What he had by way of evidence was too thin — so thin that he had to quickly devise a way to put up a lab as cover after having received a tip that the White Sharks were looking to score Twilight Mist in Central City this week.
Having witnessed the instant reforestation of formerly barren land and the discovery of another masked vigilante had just sucked him even deeper into this mystery. "Maybe," he grunted. "Keep an eye on it but don't intervene. Inform me if anything changes. Anything on the Sirens?"
"I thought you'd never asked," the voice said, as it droned on about what it had found.
I know I haven't really been able to respond to the comments but rest assured I have read them all and am really deeply grateful for the time you spent leaving a comment for this little fic of mine.