Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.

Stemwinder 2, Part 3

Billy came back shattered, dusty, and furious from his final appeal with Lee. Not even during The Memorable Incident of 1978 had she seen him so incandescent with fury.

Based on his rumblings as he paced his office, he'd been double crossed in his attempt to meet Lee — double crossed by their infuriating, cigarette-holder-using, "C'est la guerre"-ing, straw-headed jackanapes of a director and his squad of handpicked goons in agency cars. Clearly something had gone horribly wrong, but she was hesitant to ask for details for fear that Mount Melrose would erupt.

Had she thought that multiple bank accounts under various ridiculous pseudonyms had been a problem before? Now she had to deal not only with a terse ad with horrifying implications, but also with the full might and experience of a government agency channeled into hunting down one of their own.

No, not one of their own. Two. One of whom was a mother of two boys.

If they wanted to get Amanda back home to her sons, something had to happen — and fast.

She had gotten everyone she knew on it while Billy was out. She asked around, discreetly and flirtatiously. She got in touch with the moles and snitches, the eyes and ears all over Washington.

Now, with Billy having paced out his excess of energy and now staring glumly through his blinds, she waited to tell him her news as he began to speak with grim deliberation and no small amount of bitterness.

"You know, this could be a bullpen full of CPAs or an ad agency. Except that these perfectly normal folks come to work to spy on people, to kill them, to topple their governments."

They didn't have time for philosophy, and Lee and Amanda certainly didn't have time for gloomy introspection. She cut him off.

"Billy, please," she begged. "Billy. Don't go getting all moody on me, okay? It's just a setback." She wondered when she had become an optimist. It felt unwelcome, like sand under her skin, so instead of forced cheer she settled for tense practicality with a side of coaxing. "Why don't you try giving yourself some of your own best advice? I mean, you do it to me all the time."

He sighed heavily, turning away from her even as he agreed. "Stick to what you know instead of what you think you know. Fine." He sighed again as he sat down. "What do we know? That shouldn't take long."

She hated that he was right. "Okay," she conceded, reaching for the envelope she had brought with her. "So we don't know a whole hell of a lot, but let's add this to our short list. I asked my, uh, snitch at the task bureau to do me a drawing of the man who tipped him."

She saw the tiniest glimmer steal into Billy's eyes, and he clarified her meaning immediately.

"The tip we followed to find Lee at the gourmet supermarket?"

"Right," she said, handing him the charcoal sketch and a black and white photo. "A lot older, a lot grayer."

"Alexi Makarov," Billy breathed, hope shining in his eyes again for the first time in what felt like weeks. "Right here in DC. Chalk one up for Lee," he said, and reached for his phone.

She went down to see Ernie while Billy made some phone calls, and found that he had made no more progress on Lee's finances.

"Fine," she told him. "Forget the finances. I want you to check into this for me, all right? Find this man, here, in any surveillance footage you can get your hands on. Soviet embassy stuff, drops, ball games. Anything in the last year, OK?"

She met up with Billy in the hall and found him accompanied by a man whose presence at that moment was far less welcome than that of the Devil himself.

"Stetson trusted me. I can't betray that," Billy was hissing, and Dr. Smyth merely smirked in his face.

"Stetson no longer has agent status; Mrs. King never did."

Was it an asset in Washington — this snide ability to utterly disregard the point?

Horrified and flabbergasted, Billy stammered a little. "It's — it's not a matter of status."

"No, Melrose," Smyth agreed, still unbearably smug. "It's a matter of time. Either we grab Scarecrow before he takes a walk on us, or you and I'll be dusting off our résumés. I find job hunting so déclassé. Don't you?"

He set off down the hall, with the air of a man who knew full well that he had had the final say, regardless of whether he had in fact won the argument at all.

She stepped in front of Billy's murderous eyes before he could explode, with the best approximation of a "mother look" she could give.

"Okay, Francine." It was something between a huff and a growl. "Don't give me that look. I won't blow my top just yet. We can do more for Lee and Amanda on the case than we can off."

In a world of chaos and fear, at least they knew that that was true.

It wasn't much.