Sitting down in her office chair with a tired half-grunt, half-sigh, Emily massaged her forehead for a while, then gave in and rummaged through her desk for the painkillers. Tossing two down her throat she followed them with a bottle of water from the cooler integrated into the desk, draining the entire thing then crushing the plastic container with a vicious squeeze and throwing it across the room. It bounced off the wall and landed in the waste bin just as the door opened to admit Mike Renick, who paused and followed the sound with his eyes, before looking back to her with an eyebrow up. Closing the door he moved to the chair next to her desk and sat at the silent invitation made with one finger.

"Long afternoon?" he asked calmly.

She glared at him, but without much heat. He was an old colleague, he got it, he knew how hard this damn job was, and to be honest she was running low on energy to make snippy comments right now.

And, of course, she was going to need all she could muster to fend off Costa-Brown when that insufferable woman finally deigned to call and scream about not getting her own way.

Honestly, the bitch was like a moody teenager sometimes, in her opinion. Much less mature than someone like, for example, the Hebert girl was, for all the latter was only fifteen or so.

She had seriously impressed Emily, and made her feel even more strongly that the PRT owed her a pretty large debt. Five million was the least of it in her opinion. It wasn't a huge amount of cash, as Carol Dallon had rightly pointed out, compared to the whole budget of the PRT, and in any case would ultimately come out of federal funds specifically earmarked for the inevitable fuckup of this nature. As much as she would personally prefer not to make such fuckups, she knew full well that they happened even in the best run agencies, and despite all her effort and those of people she knew did all they could too, the PRT was never going to be accused of being the best run agency. Not even close.

Parahumans made everything more complicated and it's not like governmental work was smooth sailing even under ideal circumstances…

"It was better than it could have been, and worse than I'd have preferred it, but under the circumstances we got off lightly," she finally replied to her deputy, who was watching her face as if he was evaluating her thoughts from her expression. Might well have been doing that, in fact, as he'd known her for a long time and was pretty good at that sort of thing. "Mr Chambers is not nearly as sanguine about it, of course. I explained that for all intents and purposes he got exactly what he was ordered to get but for some reason this didn't appear to sink in." Emily shook her head with a long suffering sigh. "Man's very good at the Image part of his job, but he seems to fail at the common sense part. At least when he's out of his comfort zone…"

"I expect he's getting heat from head office," Mike replied. She nodded, pulling out another bottle of water, then looking at him enquiringly. He indicated his acceptance so she handed that one to him and got another for herself. Opening it, she took a few swallows, before putting the thing on the desk in front of her.

"Undoubtedly," she agreed sourly. "Head office is always making demands. Many of them completely impractical especially as they mostly fail to provide the resources we need to even partially succeed."

"What was the final outcome?" the man asked after sipping his own opened bottle. "I assume they agreed to settle?"

"They did. It was more than I'd hoped for but well within reason, and to be completely honest, far less than they'd have got if they'd turned us down. Five million cash, half each to the Barnes and Heberts, full medical for life for Emma Barnes, expedited transfer to Arcadia for Taylor Hebert, and an assurance that Hess is done for and won't get 'recycled' into another identity." She made sarcastic little finger quotes around the word with a grimace as she spoke, causing him to produce a wry grin. "In return they'll sign the standard identity protection NDA, and Carol Dallon's people are drawing up a separate one covering this entire affair. Which will be invalidated if our side doesn't stick to it to the letter."

He nodded slowly, thinking over her words. "I see what you mean. Much less than they'd have got in court, almost guaranteed, and it avoids publicity about the whole damn thing. I can't see what else head office could have wanted in the end. Five million is peanuts compared to the damage if it went to court."

"I know that. You know that. Armsmaster knows that, and damn sure the Dallon woman and her clients know that. But will Costa-Brown accept that?" She shrugged as he looked thoughtful then annoyed. "That woman is a class A control freak, and that's me saying it. Never on my worst day have I been as bad as she is on a good one."

"Well…" he began with a smirk, getting a finger pointed at his face.

"Do not finish that thought or I will lose my currently cheerful mood," she growled, scowling. He grinned but didn't continue. Inwardly she was mildly amused, and not actually angry. He was one of the very few people she could more or less relax around, even if she didn't normally show it.

Oddly enough, considering her own well-understood internal biases, both Miss Militia and Armsmaster were two others. Not that she generally let them realize that. She might not like Parahumans deep down, but that pair she respected as people because they were very, very competent at their jobs aside from anything else, and dedicated to the fight against chaos.

After a moment or two, he asked, "Has the Chief Director called you yet?"

"No. Chambers and his people locked themselves in the Image department office and are probably trying to work out how to break the news to her without getting fired. Most likely by putting the blame squarely on us. That's how it normally goes. Once she's built up a good head of steam she'll call and vent like usual." Emily shrugged again. "May get fired, but then she'd have to find someone else nuts enough to take this fucking position without instantly retiring and I doubt anyone is quite crazy enough to do that. Not even Tagg."

Mike winced. "Jesus. If he ended up here we'd have all out war inside forty eight hours flat."

"If we were lucky," she agreed gloomily. "That man is a menace and should be locked up for everyone's best interests. Brockton Bay would eat him alive, which I'd almost pay good money to see, but it would kill a lot of innocent people in the process so it's not something to be wished for."

"No," he nodded. "So what's next?"

"We wait for the paperwork from Carol Dallon. Sommers is handling that part, and the standard NDAs. Everyone at the meeting signed it already, so it's just the other Barnes girl to go, then that part is done at least. Once we've signed off on the other one, and paid the Hebert and Barnes families, with any luck they'll move on to absolutely ruining the day of everyone else involved in this clusterfuck and leave us well out of it so we can get back to the normal insanity." She grinned somewhat viciously. "I shall watch how they nail Winslow and everyone involved to the wall with considerable joy, I suspect."

He looked darkly amused. "I don't blame you at all. If they'd actually done what they were paid to do we probably wouldn't have been in this situation even with Hess and her handler."

"Quite." She picked up one of the reports waiting in her inbox and looked at it for a moment. "Hess is in front of the judge in Boston in two days, I see. That probably won't take more than an hour or two then with any luck she's out of our hair for good. I'd prefer never to hear from or about her again as long as I live."

"Funnily enough quite a few people seem to feel the same," he noted with a nod. "Myself included. That idiotic girl was far more trouble than she was worth. She could have completely ruined the Wards program at a minimum, even leaving aside the people she murdered. Which will put her away for a couple of decades at least."

Emily signed the last page of the document and dropped it into her out tray. "That'll do for now."

A tap at the door made her look up, then call "Enter." It opened to reveal Armsmaster, who strode in, closed it firmly and approached her desk. He was holding his anti-eavesdropping unit, she noticed, and glanced at Mike, then her. "Go ahead," she answered the unspoken query. With a nod he put the device on the desk and turned it on.

"By your expression there's a problem," she commented with a sinking sensation in her stomach.

"Calvert has, I fear, vanished," he replied heavily.

No one said anything for a few seconds, as she felt that sinking sensation intensify.

"He ran?" she finally asked, leaning forward intently. "Did he find out we were onto him?"

The Tinker looked somewhat bemused. He shook his head slowly. "As far as I can determine, Calvert had no inkling that we knew about him," he responded. "As far as I am able to ascertain we completely successfully siloed all the information we discovered, and he was not aware of our interest in him or our location of his informants and data taps. To the best of my ability to tell he was proceeding about his business entirely normally, until sometime most likely either last night or early this morning. His data sources that we left active and were feeding with carefully curated data were performing exactly as we had seen to date, and there was absolutely no indication that anything was amiss."

"But…?"

"But within the last twenty four hours all activity we can associate with Calvert, or any resource we've linked to him, stopped. Completely. No access to the data taps, no access to his financial records, no indications of any form that he's doing anything whatsoever. Which is a complete break with his established pattern of operation. He appears to have completely shut down his operations, all of them, at the same moment. Any ongoing process completed normally as far as I can tell but no new ones have been started. There is no indication that he's at his home, or any of the other locations on record that we know he frequents on occasion."

"Did he somehow find out and rabbit?" Mike asked, listening intently. "Maybe entirely accidentally? Even the best run operations can be fouled up by bad luck after all."

Armsmaster shrugged slightly. "I have spent the last hour very carefully checking every conceivable method of allowing Calvert to leave the city, and Dragon has helped although she is not aware of precisely why we're interested. Neither of us can find a single trace of him absconding by road, air, sea, or rail. No cameras have picked up anything relevant at any checkpoint or traffic intersection, no aircraft have left our airspace in the required period, no water vessels as best we can tell have left the port other than fishing boats which all returned again… A teleporter is plausible but all the ones we know about I traced and their activities are all well outside our area. Neither have any of the Rig's exotic energy detectors spotted anything relevant. I can come up with a number of methods to flee the city that we wouldn't be able to spot or stop but all of them are either extremely unlikely, hard to set up, or require resources that he would have trouble arranging without at least some traces."

"Especially as we have been explicitly looking for that sort of thing just in case," Emily noted.

"Exactly. Since the disappearance of the container ship, I have significantly increased the number of instruments monitoring everything I could think of that might have been involved, and none of them had anything trigger them," he agreed.

"So… What are the alternatives? If he didn't find out and run for the hills, where is he?" Renick was tapping his fingers on the water bottle he was still holding, thinking hard.

"Unfortunately there are a number of possibilities, some which we can check and some we may not be able to," Armsmaster replied. "One is obviously that he did run but had a method we can't detect. If that's the case, he's likely gone for good. I'm not discounting it but by the very nature of the problem it's almost impossible to prove or disprove."

"He might be holed up somewhere being very quiet and waiting for us to get bored and stop looking," Emily suggested, frowning.

"If that's the case he'll likely turn up again sooner or later," the Tinker agreed. "Eventually. But if that is true he still found out we were onto him somehow and I'm at a loss to determine exactly how."

"His power, perhaps. Whatever the hell it is."

"Perhaps."

"Maybe he just didn't look both ways crossing the street and a bus got him," Mike put in with what was almost a smile. "Or he got mugged by one of our near-infinite supply of street criminals."

"I have alerts set up for anyone matching his description at any of the hospitals and legal medical clinics in the city, and a number of the less legal ones as well," Armsmaster replied immediately. "Just in case, although I think it a low probability that we'll find him that way. He's careful despite his less salubrious qualities and one must remember he is a trained former special forces operative. A common mugger wouldn't stand much of a chance against him unless they shot him in the head at range. Which admittedly is possible. So I also have alerts in every mortuary and funeral facility in the city as well."

"Damn it." Emily scowled ferociously at her desk, trying to come up with any plausible approach they could take and failing. Armsmaster had already done everything she'd have done herself, and without any leads to go on they were somewhat stuck. "I do not want that bastard to get away."

"Neither do I, Director," Armsmaster said, his voice even but very angry. "That man is directly responsible for far more deaths than I like to consider as well as being implicated in a vast number of our past and existing problems. We need to capture him, or failing that be absolutely certain he's no longer an issue. But unfortunately I cannot immediately think of anything else we can try other than what I have already initiated, and simply waiting to see what happens next."

She nodded, rather reluctantly. "Agreed. I hate it, but agreed."

None of them spoke for a little while, the hiss of the device on her desk the only thing audible, until finally Mike said, "If he doesn't pop up again in the next couple of days, perhaps we should take that opportunity to roll up all his assets. Either he's onto us and doing that doesn't give anything away at this point, or he isn't and when he does resurface he'll have nothing left to fall back on. And it's possible that having his network shut down will flush him out of whatever hole he's fallen into assuming he's not stone cold on a slab somewhere, or sipping drinks in Hawaii."

Thinking the suggestion over, and glancing at Armsmaster who seemed to be doing the same, Emily eventually replied, "I suppose we probably don't have any other plausible route aside from simply waiting indefinitely at this point. And you're right, we might find enough information one way or the other to locate the bastard. Either way we still need to determine who was on his payroll outside the ENE because I'm fucking sure someone was."

"We will still have to proceed with care, but I agree, Director," Armsmaster commented, nodding. "I would suggest we hold for a further forty eight hours just in case he's waiting for us to lower our guard, then begin a staged and careful dismantling of his known organization. We will undoubtedly find other links to further assets as we go and we don't want to accidentally give our operation away until we're in a position to retrieve them as well."

"All right," she agreed. "Keep your eyes open for the bastard, but we'll work on the basis that either he's beyond our reach or is hiding deep underground or whatever. If we don't see any activity in two days, we start tearing his network out by the roots."

"Of course, Director. I will keep you informed as to my progress," Armsmaster replied promptly, picking up his widget and poising a finger over the power switch. "If I discover anything I will immediately inform you." He turned the thing off and put it back into his armor.

"Good," she said, feeling very annoyed about the Calvert situation but knowing that right now they were at an impasse and it would be best pushed to the back of the queue for the moment.

"Has the Chief Director contacted you yet?" he inquired.

"Not yet." She looked at the time. "My best guess is that she'll be calling for a pleasant chat at about half past eight, based on the last time she decided to remind everyone who's boss."

"Would you like me present for the… meeting?"

She turned her gaze to him. "I am all too well aware of the attitude of the Chief Director, Director, and if you require… moral support, I believe is the term, I am more than happy to provide it. This matter is one in which the PRT ENE has done nothing wrong and we are only in this situation due to pressure from above. If they had taken notice of the warnings all of us gave at various points about Miss Hess's outlook on life, we likely wouldn't have ended up where we have." He met her eyes from behind his visor, she could feel it. "I am prepared to say exactly that to the Chief Director. Who is, after all, not my direct superior." He almost smiled for a second. "Legend may wish to discuss the situation with me as well but to be frank he is far easier to deal with."

Emily leaned back and regarded him closely, realizing that he was not only serious but entirely on her side despite their occasional differences. Oddly enough she felt rather pleased about that.

"If you would like to sit in on the meeting as an observer in your role as the head of the ENE Protectorate I feel that would be completely reasonable," she finally responded evenly, noticing that Mike was suppressing a grin. "I expect Mr Chambers and his people will also be required to be present, so a show of unity from this command most likely wouldn't go amiss."

"It would be my pleasure, Director," he said with a dignified nod, then turned on his heel and left. When the door closed behind him, Emily and Mike exchanged a glance.

"He's learning how to human almost by the week, isn't he?" Mike commented with a snicker.

"Don't go too far, but yes, he does have his moments sometimes," she said, chuckling, before they moved onto discussing some of the less annoying but still highly irritating problems Brockton Bay was so effective at producing on a daily basis.

"OK, we've got everything set up, I think," Lisa said as she looked around, then down at the clipboard in her hand on which was a check list she'd drawn up with the aid of both her power and some of the dock workers who had the relevant knowledge. "Plenty of power from the shielded generator, running into the room over here through the new fittings." She checked off an item well down the list. "Got the cameras set up too, just in case." Another item ticked. "Double checked no signals can get in or out, again just because we're both paranoid and careful." Yet another check mark went on the paper, as Taylor listened and nodded. Matt was in the background also watching, everyone else having wandered off for now as nothing exciting had happened yet.

Running down a few more items, Lisa finally put the clipboard down on the bench under the window and turned to her friend. "We're ready. I'd guess he probably had a UPS or two running all his computers, so we might even get lucky and find they're all working when you put them back in there."

"Big thing with lots of batteries in it, like small car batteries?" Taylor queried after getting a faraway look for a moment.

Lisa nodded. "That's it."

"Yeah, there are two… no, three of them, all connected to the rest of the stuff," the other girl reported.

Rubbing her hands together Lisa smiled widely. "Excellent," she chortled. "I believe we will find out some interesting things. For the Glory of U.N.I.O.N.!"

A burst of laughter came from Matt, making both of them look at him and grin. "You two are definitely made for this. Poor Danny."

"Meh, he loves it deep down. Deep, deep, deep down," Taylor giggled.

"I assume you've checked everything for booby-traps?" he asked, still smiling.

"Yeah. Found a bomb like the one in the truck right in the middle of the computer stuff, and I'll leave that behind when I bring everything else back," she replied, turning to look through the window. "This room is larger than his office was, so I can drop the entire contents of that in here in one shot, I think. Hang on…"

She concentrated, Lisa watching with fascination and her power doing the same, apparently finding this all incredibly interesting and enormous fun. "Hmm… OK, I think that's… Ah. Yeah, got it. Here we go." Taylor did whatever it was she did and the room was suddenly full of computers and a number of other things which appeared like a glitch in reality. Lisa was once again stunned by the effect but got over it immediately in her excitement.

"Wow. That's amazing to see. And holy shit that's a lot of computers…" She gazed at the eight six foot tall racks full of servers which must have represented multiple millions worth, never mind a desk with an incredibly large monitor on it, along with lots of smaller ones on a couple of tables to one side. There were all manner of other electronic devices scattered around as well, the entire setup looking like Coil might walk in any moment and had only stepped out for a second.

Of course, he'd stepped out for rather longer than that, which highly amused her and gave her a hell of a lot of satisfaction.

Quite a lot of lights were blinking away on various systems showing they were running, and through the microphones inside the currently sealed and isolated secure room they could hear frantic beeping sounds. "Yeah, that's the UPS units freaking out about the power failure," Lisa commented, letting her power go to work on the scene. "Nothing I can see as likely to call out, or be dangerous, though. Without a network connection none of that is able to contact anything else. Got anything yourself?"

Taylor was studying the massive trove of hardware with a narrowed gaze, switching her eyes from rack to rack, but finally shook her head. "No. Only that one bomb, which was in that rack there, in the middle," she replied, indicating the second one from the right. "It was full of ball bearings so I guess it was some sort of fragmentation thing to destroy all the hardware if he got attacked. Other than that, as far as I can tell it's all safe. But it's way past what I know about computers."

"I think I can probably work out enough to get us going," Lisa replied happily. "We'd better connect the generator before it shuts down though or that might get a lot harder."

"Simple enough," Matt, who had walked over to gaze into the room with raised eyebrows, said from behind them. He pointed. "That's a three phase power connection right there, and we've got a matching extension cable that'll reach it." Going over to the newly added part built into the wall and exiting into the courtyard beyond the outer door, he swung open the panel and rummaged around inside for a moment, coming up with a heavy cable that had a multi-way socket on the end. "Here, go plug that into this, and I'll start the generator," he added, handing the end of the cable to Lisa. Taylor was already undogging the door into the main part of their anti-Coil room.

Lisa dragged the cable through the opening when Taylor opened it, then between them they quickly plugged the main power cable into the new one. "We're ready, Matt," Taylor called.

A second or two later there was the muffled sound of a diesel engine starting up just outside. "Power's on," Matt shouted back.

A number of displays on the racks changed even as he spoke, and the alarms all stopped one after another. Lisa inspected the hardware, nodding in satisfaction. "Everything's charging again, and nothing shut down. My power tells me it would have gone into a failure mode in about ten minutes and done a deliberate shutdown sequence, but powering it up again aborted that. We're good. OK, then, Mr Calvert, let's see what you were doing here…" She cracked her knuckles and sat in the luxurious leather swivel chair behind Coil's former desk. "Ooh, I want one of these. This is really comfortable," she went on, grinning as Taylor laughed. "Nice. He had all the best toys."

"Guess crime does pay if you go big enough," Taylor joked, making Lisa snicker as she studied the heavily built and armored desk, then started opening drawers.

"Huh. Locked," she complained when she hit the lowest and largest one.

Taylor squinted at it. The lock clicked. "Not any more."

"I have to learn that trick," the other girl chuckled, pulling it open and peering inside. "OK, gun, ammo, another gun, more ammo, a knife, two more guns…" She kept taking things out and putting them on the desk as she spoke. Matt came through the door and walked over to watch. "Machine gun. Second machine gun. Jesus, this guy was a gun nut, wasn't he? Night vision gear. Emergency rations. Chemical lights. Flares. Smoke grenade. Tear gas grenade…" By now the desk was quite cluttered and Taylor's eyebrows were rather high. Matt was shaking his head. "Radio. Huh. This one is an encrypted PRT-issue radio. I bet they'd be pissed to know he had that and now we do."

"Might come in handy at some point though," Matt commented, getting a nod as she kept poking around.

"PRT secure tablet. PRT secure phone. Half a dozen containment foam grenades. Fuck me, did he just help himself to everything he saw?"

"Probably. It seems to fit his personality," Taylor snorted.

"Says Agent Gimme," Lisa giggled as she dug deeper. "Aha! This is more like it." Removing a stack of folders she shoved all the weaponry to the side with one elbow and dumped the things in front of her. Matt had left the room and come back with a large plastic crate a moment ago and busied himself making all the weapons safe and loading them into the crate, although he was listening carefully. "Let's see now, what do we have here…?"

Flipping through the folders, she froze when she spotted something she didn't expect. "Oh, fuck me, this fucker was a fucker."

"What's that?" Taylor queried, looking over her shoulder curiously.

"Something that could get people killed," Lisa said quietly, staring at the document she was holding, and feeling her face was pale.

Taylor and Matt exchanged glances, then both bent over her shoulders and read the top page.

"Jesus Christ on a scooter," Matt breathed. "Is that what I think it is?"

"If you think he was building a dossier on the real identities of capes in Brockton Bay, it's what you think it is, yes," Lisa said grimly.

"Kaiser is Max Anders? Medhall Max Anders? One of the richest people in the city?" Taylor growled with enormous irritation. "That smarmy bastard is a Nazi?"

"Sure looks like it," Lisa sighed, flipping through the document. "The evidence hangs together and my power agrees. I mean, I could probably have worked it out if I'd put some effort in, sure, but he's already done that work. He's got… Krieg, Kaiser's two bimbos, Cricket, Victor, Othala… huh, she really is Victor's wife, I'd wondered about that… Hookwolf too. Not Rune or Alabaster although that guy isn't exactly able to hide himself anyway, and nothing on Purity, Night, or Fog except a few preliminary notes." She dropped the document on the desk and stared at it, feeling a growing sense of fury.

"This is what that shitbag wanted me for, I bet," she snarled. "He wanted to use me to learn everyone's real IDs. God knows what for but it wouldn't have been good." She shuffled through the documents, finding another one with data on the Merchants, and one that her power told her was on the Wards. She didn't open that one, not really wanting to know. "He could have used this to start a gang war like this city has never seen. Or blackmail god knows how many people into doing things for him. Capes in general are kind of upset if you let their IDs slip. Doing it like this on purpose…" She shook her head. "He's got balls, I'll give him that, but god he's completely insane. How the hell he thought he'd survive all this coming out, especially if he kept going, I have no idea."

"What's all the rest of this?" Taylor asked, pointing at a few much thicker folders. Lisa took a quick look.

"Seems to be a lot of information on the non-Cape members of the ABB and the E88, with random other data on various people of interest. Oh, look. There I am." She pulled that much thinner document out and scanned it with a sense of resigned irritation and annoyed curiosity. Sure enough, the bastard had her real birth name and the address of her parents in a document that contained far too many other things she'd thought she'd managed to leave behind for comfort.

"Anyone got a lighter?" she asked with a distinct growl in her voice.

Matt wordlessly held one out. She took it and set fire to the pages in her hand, watched them burn with dark glee for a few seconds, then dropped them on the floor. Moments later the paper was ash.

Taylor, who had apparently quite deliberately not looked at the paperwork, put her hand on Lisa's shoulder and squeezed gently. "Feel better?"

"A little, yeah," Lisa sighed. "Sorry. That brought back some very unpleasant memories."

"What do we do about the rest of it?" Matt asked. "I mean, it might come in handy at some point. Knowing this sort of data could save someone's life."

"Or be the reason for losing it," Lisa grumbled. "I for one don't want to get the E88 riled enough to have them go completely nuts."

"On the other hand, U.N.I.O.N. might have to do some preemptive self defense sooner or later and it could be useful to know who the enemy really is," Taylor pointed out quite reasonably.

"Can't deny there's a lot of truth to that, yeah," Lisa nodded. "OK, for now, just stash this away safely, OK? We don't need it right at the moment and it's just a distraction." She closed the folders and stacked them in front of her in a pile, which silently vanished. "Thanks. If I get involved in thinking about that can of worms we'll never get anywhere with all this," she continued, waving at the servers. "I wonder if he put that data on here too? Depends on whether he was paranoid enough to only keep paper copies…"

Picking up two smaller notebooks she'd put to one side while they examined the folders, she flipped the top one open and leafed through it. "Ah. As I thought. Encrypted, but he didn't know how good I am at working this sort of crap out," she smiled, feeling her power looking over her shoulder and more or less grinning with the face it didn't have.

"What's in it?" Matt asked.

"Passwords, account numbers, all sorts of goodies," Lisa replied with an anticipatory smirk. "Let's see now… Speak to me, oh document of future profit and ruination of all Coil's plans…"

Taylor started laughing again and Matt joined in a moment later. Feeling like she'd found the exact place she needed to be right now, Lisa set to work, picking up Coil's really expensive pen, which was now her really expensive pen as far as she was concerned, and grabbing a pad off his desk.

"What the hell happened, Director Piggot?"

Emily looked evenly at the face of a woman she really didn't much like, even though she respected her position as her ultimate superior. Rebecca Costa-Brown was glaring at the conference room from the large monitor on the wall they were all facing, her and those associated with her to one side and Glenn Chambers, who looked uncomfortable under a veneer of impassiveness, with his legal team a few seats to the other side.

"In which context do you mean, Chief Director?" she replied as calmly as she could.

Costa-Brown's expression darkened. "Don't try to play games with me, Piggot. I'm not in the mood for that. I'm very busy and don't have time to deal with all the problems my own command suffers from, never mind those in places like yours. I have you for that. So, just so we're all on the same page, how did a simple case that should have been dealt with in hours end up costing the PRT five million dollars? Never mind all the other conditions you agreed to? This should have been shut down and everyone involved bound by NDAs."

Taking a quiet deep breath, Emily suppressed the urge to tell the damn woman exactly what her true thoughts were, then as calmly as she could manage, replied, "Chief Director, that was never going to be possible." She peered sideways for a moment at Glenn Chambers, who was watching and listening, then returned her attention to the screen. "Despite what Mr Chambers' orders may have been, there was no feasible way to prevent us having to agree to some sort of settlement to the other party. And this is hardly setting precedent as it's by no means the first time the PRT has had to handle a major legal case. As I have repeatedly commented to Mr Chambers, we got off lightly. Purely based on the merits of the case and past lawsuits, my own legal experts fully expect that if this had gone to court we would have lost hard. We'd be on the hook for at least five times as much, at an absolute minimum, along with a PR hit that would take years to recover from."

"I feel I must point out, Chief Director," Lee Sommers put in when she finished talking, respectfully but firmly, "that one thing you may be overlooking is that we don't have a leg to stand on, legally." Everyone turned to look at him, Costa-Brown not appearing at all happy but listening. "Sophia Hess did everything she is accused of and we can prove it. More damagingly, the other side can prove it too, and would quite happily do that in court. We would lose, and we cannot cover up a crime of this magnitude with a non disclosure agreement. Not only would it fail to be legally binding but merely trying would open us up to further charges I have no doubt Carol Dallon would have capitalized on instantly. The damage done by trying and failing to suppress this case would far outweigh any possible damage caused by settling. Director Piggot is completely correct, we got off as lightly as we could ever have hoped for, and in the opinion of the ENE Legal Department, Mr Chambers has achieved everything he was sent here to do. If not quite in the way he clearly hoped for."

"The Heberts and the Barnes' have agreed to sign both the ID protection NDA and a binding contract preventing them discussing this entire case as far as the involvement of the PRT, Sophia Hess, or any other related matter goes. Unless we break it, that deals with the horrific mess this becoming public would create," Emily added when he stopped. "Five million dollars and the all the rest is a bargain considering what we're getting out of the deal."

Costa-Brown was silent for a few seconds, staring at them, although she looked thoughtful if still annoyed. Emily always had trouble working out exactly what the other woman was thinking, but based on past performance it was probably not completely appreciative of the situation. She always wanted her way or nothing, which wouldn't have been nearly the problem it tended to be if she'd provide the ENE command with the resources they desperately required to meet that way. Which, of course, didn't happen.

In her darker thoughts Emily sometimes wondered if the city was being left to fall apart with minimal aid as some bizarre experiment, although she knew in her heart no one would be that fucking stupid. It still felt that way more often than she liked even so.

"I am not happy about all this," the Chief Director finally replied, her voice calm but clearly showing she was being truthful.

"With all due respect, Chief Director," Armsmaster commented from next to Emily, "I fear that no one is happy about the situation, from Shadow Stalker through her victims to you. Unfortunately we will all have to live with the situation as it currently exists. Trying to alter something we cannot usefully affect is an inefficient use of time and effort which would be much better spent on dealing with the multitude of problems we can usefully affect."

"Thank you for your input, Armsmaster," Costa-Brown grated, giving him a look that merely bounced off. Emily had mild difficulty suppressing a small smirk for a moment, and the woman turned the look on her as if she'd noticed. It wasn't an entirely pleased expression, and Emily was fairly sure her superior was going to be even more difficult than usual in the near future.

It was going to be a long meeting, she thought with resignation.

She was right.

It was.

But when it was over she still had her job, the deal was still intact since Costa-Brown had finally admitted she couldn't do anything but accept it, and with any luck Emily wouldn't have to deal with her again for some time.

When she eventually and with great relief finally climbed into bed that night, far later than she liked, she spent some time lying in the dark wondering just why her ultimate boss was so invested in the whole Shadow Stalker situation in the first place. Why was she so keen on making all this go away without the settlement deal having happened? The problem was a bad one, sure, but it was by no means unique as much as she'd like that to be the case.

Rolling over with a grunt, she gave up trying to work out the motivations of a woman who seemed to always have hidden reasons for anything she ever did. There were more important things to worry about as far as her own job went, and at least Sophia Fucking Hess was not her problem any more.

That fact alone almost made all this crap bearable.

Not quite, but almost.

"How's it going?" Taylor's father said after he ducked through the doorway into the secure room and stood staring at all the humming computers. Taylor turned from watching Lisa read the pages of notes she'd made, scribbling alterations here and there, and smiled at him.

"Pretty well, I think," she replied as he joined them. "Lisa's cracked his code, which seemed to be based on words and letters on specific pages of particular books. It's quite cool, really. Luckily all the books were on that shelf over there." She waved at the bookcase across the supervillain's relocated office contents from the desk. Half a dozen volumes from it were on the desk, open to various pages with slips of paper shoved in them marking others. Even as she spoke, Lisa reached for one, flipped through it, then ran her finger down the page until she stopped. Tapping the word under her nail she nodded, writing with her other hand.

"Excelsior. Good. So that means this is a nine, and this therefore is the word dragon, which means this is Pi to five significant digits," her friend mumbled, writing frantically for a few seconds. "And if we… yeah, that's right… OK, yes, I know, stop saying it…"

Taylor, Matt, who was leaning on the wall listening, and her father all exchanged glances.

"I think her power is getting a bit talkative," Taylor whispered behind her hand, grinning. Her dad snorted.

"You know I can hear you, right?" Lisa muttered, not looking up.

"Are we nearly there yet?" Taylor helpfully asked, still grinning.

The other girl wrote some more for about thirty seconds without replying, then stared at the result. She flipped back a page, read a bit of that, returned to the original text, and very carefully wrote down a number of long alphanumeric sequences. Finally, she leaned back in the chair and spun it to face them with a very smug look of pleasure on her face.

"Yes."

"You've got his passwords?" Matt queried, walking over to stand next to Taylor's dad.

"I have."

"You're sure?" Taylor asked with a smile.

"Of course I'm sure." Lisa looked mildly offended, before grinning. "Pretty sure anyway. My power is sure. And I mostly trust it." She spun the chair back and grabbed the notebook. "This is the master password and authentication for his main encrypted keychain, which stores all the other passwords. These ones are the login, root password, and backup password for those servers, and this last one is the password for this computer right here." She waved grandly at the enormous monitor in front of her, which was displaying a screensaver of a snake sliding around the screen eating random pictures of Protectorate heroes.

"So I do this," she went on, grabbing the mouse and wiggling it, which made the screensaver vanish in lieu of a prompt asking for a password on a black background, "then type this one in like so…" Keys rattled for a moment. She poised her finger theatrically over the enter key, grinned over her shoulder, and stabbed downwards.

The screen immediately cleared to show a desktop covered in icons.

"And that happens," she finished with deep satisfaction. "Righty, then, dear Thomas, let's see what you have hiding away in here, shall we?"

The other three gathered around the monitor and watched as Lisa started working, referring to her notes as she went. Within five minutes they were all staring at a spreadsheet that entirely filled the screen.

There was a very, very long silence.

"Holy fuck that's a lot of money," Matt eventually said very quietly.

"It does seem that way, yeah," Taylor's father commented, sounding stunned.

"And look, he's helpfully got all the account details, bank codes, passwords, and everything else needed right here in this other document," Lisa put in, her grin so wide it was in danger of separating the top of her head from the bottom by the looks of it. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Agent Gimme?"

"I think so, Agent Thinky, but where are we going to get a bucket of glue, five cats, and half a ton of blueberries at this time of night?" Taylor immediately responded with a laugh. Lisa chortled while Taylor's father and Matt exchanged worried glances.

"The question is how do we avail ourselves of our dear friend Mr Calvert's so helpfully organized finances without the PRT noticing?" Lisa tapped her chin thoughtfully. "Tricky."

"But can you do it?"

"Of course I can do it," the girl replied to Taylor's question with a wide smirk. "But it might take me a little while to think it through."

"Oh, god, this is going to get even weirder, isn't it?" Taylor's father sighed, pushing his glasses up his forehead and massaging the bridge of his nose.

"Look on the bright side, Danny," Matt said cheerfully, slapping him on the back. "U.N.I.O.N. has a decent budget to clean up this city now. And all sorts of other toys too." He grinned. "And this was just one super-villain. Think how much we can loot from the others."

Taylor and Lisa nearly fell over laughing as her dad turned a very dark look at the other man, then pointed accusingly. "Stop encouraging them!" he growled. "U.N.I.O.N. isn't a thing!"

"Yet!" the other three chorused, making him put his hand over his eyes and start mumbling in despair, which none of them paid attention to as all the other files Lisa was now finding were much more interesting...