"I think I'm going to have to pick a new alias," Beth said to Caitlin as the limo waited nearby with the trunk opened, even though each of the three women standing on the sidewalk had told the driver that Caitlin only had the one bag.

"How would you feel about Anna?" Caitlin asked with a smile.

"This is you punishing me for calling you Elsa, isn't it?"

"What? It's a perfectly good name," Julia said, "And Caitlin did almost turn you into an icicle once, so it sort of fits."

"Plus, I never had a little sister, or an older sister for that matter. And that's sort of how I think of both of you now, as my sisters," Caitlin said.

"I fucking knew you were going to start crying," Beth said to Julia, as the tears welled up in her best friend's eyes and overflowed.

"You're not exactly dry-eyed yourself," Julia answered as she hugged Caitlin around her neck, her tears mingling with Caitlin's.

"It's not a terrible idea," Beth said as Caitlin exchanged Julia's arms around her neck for Beth's, "I have to get a different wig anyway. How would I look as a redhead?"

"You'd look like Kate. Or Trish," Julia said.

"Shit. Well, it was just a thought. Maybe a jet-black mohawk."

"Jesus. Did you get hit on the head last night?" Julia asked.

"It was technically this morning, and no."

They had been walking slowly towards the Cadillac XTS as they talked. Caitlin handed the driver her single bag, which he placed into the cavernous trunk before closing it and opening the rear door.

"Send me pictures when you narrow it down. I'll show everyone at home and send you our vote."

A final set of hugs all around, before the door closed, Caitlin Snow, occasionally known as Killer Frost, on one side and Elizabeth Kane, formerly known as Alice, currently nameless, and Julia Pennyworth on the other side.

The two women stood in the street for a moment while they watched the shiny black vehicle drive away before they turned and walked back into the lobby of the historic building on 51st Street.

Trish had departed first, her suit and equipment packed into Beth's large gym bag, which was just large enough to contain everything without endangering a seam or the zipper. The same thing could also be said about the clothes that Trish had borrowed from Beth for the short journey to her own home. Beth was taller than Trish, though only by an inch, Trish was more muscular, and it was those muscles (mostly) that strained the seams of what on Beth would have been loose clothing.

"Never would have believed four people could have slept in here," Beth said as she looked around at the apartment/operations center/secret lair.

"Not sure how well some of us slept," Julia said, "but it was fun. Kind of like a superhero sleepover."

Beth smiled as she picked up the garbage bags that klinked with the sound of empty wine bottles, and the rustling of empty pizza boxes.

"Well, let's take our superhero trash to the chute and go home. I think we are both due a few hours of sleep in our own beds."

Trish had not bothered to stop on the sixth floor but had gone straight to apartment 908 before dropping the over-packed gym bag onto the floor and stripping off the clothing that had attracted too many male (and a fair number of female) eyes.

Thank God, she thought as she pulled the too-tight shirt over her head, shimmied out of the shorts, and headed straight for her shower.

She still had to clean her suit and liner, and she had heard the distinctive whine from her harness that told her she had a pulley that needed tending. But right now the first thing that needed tending was Trish's back muscles. She had slept, though not well, on the futon bed at Beth and Julia's command center, and her back was still chastising her for not switching to the floor and letting Caitlin have the futon all to herself. Beth and Julia had managed to arrange themselves on the small bed such that they had both fallen asleep quickly, aided, as they all had been, by a fair amount of red wine.

Trish also had a collection of cell phones that she needed to check. The one she had carried last night/this morning, the one she had crammed into the back left pocket of her borrowed jeans, was still quiet. Only Jess was likely to contact her on that one, and she was probably still asleep. The phone Trish used for "work", the one that Kyle Richmond, or one of his minions, would use to contact her, was still turned off, and in the metal safe that made it hard to ping, or track. It was right next to the phone that she was using for her work in Chicago. Trish knew better than to turn either of those phones on until she had showered and rested. She was expecting a moderately severe shitstorm from Kyle about her going off the reservation and uncovering all the details that Kyle had wanted to be kept secret, and for then doing a runner and leaving Chicago. Worse still was that she had not made any effort to contact him in the twenty-four hours she had been back. He probably wouldn't give a shit one way or the other that she had picked up where she had left off on her list of targets. And while he would have been surprised, and interested, to learn who Trish had met at last night's target, there was no fucking way Trish was going to tell him about Alice.

Trish took a moment before she stepped into her shower to consider what she was going to do next. She continued to consider that question as the hot water ran over her aching back.

Three thousand miles away Hank was dealing with the mess she had handed him the day before. God only knew what he was doing with it, but at least he wasn't starting out from a dead stop, assuming that their weapon was loaded like the one in New York. Trish realized that she should tell him to ask Doreen to stop by the parking garage on Lower Wacker and collect the car, and everything in the trunk, that she had stashed there in case Trish and Annelie had to use their escape plan. One way or another Trish didn't think she was heading back to the Windy City any time soon. That thought made her sad, which was stupid. Nobody was dropping off the face of the Earth, and if she wanted to see Sara or Annelie, again she knew how to get in touch.

Trish's mind stayed on Chicago, where Sara, Laurel, and the rest of the Nighthawk security team were keeping watch over Annelie Bodin. If their Sunday morning had gone to plan they would have shot their interiors from the museum before it opened and then moved to the rural location. She still wondered if anyone had notified Kyle that she had left, and how long she was going to be able to afford two apartments in this building if Kyle fired her.

Trish made sure she had rinsed all the soap off of her skin and out of her hair before she turned off the water and grabbed the towel from the nearby towel bar.

None of those questions were going to be answered any faster if she skipped her well-earned morning nap.

"I'm gonna need both of you for a while longer," Rita was saying to Sheila Gideon and Raul Espinoza as the pair stood in front of Rita's desk. Rita's first stop was the hospital and the three men who were still patients there and would continue to be there for several days. Rita had not been surprised to find Michael Woodruff already sitting in his partner's room when she arrived. None of the three wounded men would want company during their hospital stays, though the traffic was especially heavy this morning as all the brass and bosses chose the same time to show their faces.

"He's going to be alright though. Right?" Shelia Gideon asked.

"They're all going to be alright. There's just no telling how long they'll be out."

James Kilik had fared worst by far. The ESU sergeant had a through and through and could have probably gotten away with just a couple of band-aids. The 9mm round had just caught a flap of skin after shattering the ballistic front plate of his vest just underneath his arm. The ER room doctor had spent most of his time digging out fragments of reaction-bonded boron carbide from the shattered plate, and the small bits of cloth from his vest and clothes from the entrance wound. The detective from the 4 - 12 shift, whose name Rita had finally remembered was Charlie Potts, had continued the long tradition in the 15th squad of someone being shot in the ass during a raid. The fact that it had been a ricochet, combined with the considerable mass of his ass, meant that he would be sitting on an inflatable cushion for the near future, but that he would make a full recovery, though he had four holes to show for the one flattened out bullet that found him during the raid.

James Kilik had been shot at the point where the protection of his vest ended and the Velcro closure above his shoulder began. He had a broken collarbone, and possibly some nerve damage, but they had gotten him into surgery quickly, reassembled his shattered bone and muscle with a shitload of small metal plates and screws and anchors and used a laparoscope to clean out any debris that they could find. He was out for at least eight weeks, after which...well, they would just have to see.

One million doses of black market Fentanyl, and enough cash that it was still being counted. Three dead perps, eight more in custody. Three officers shot, a few more injured by flying debris or shrapnel. It was a hell of a night, and Rita didn't want to think about how it could have turned out if those four men had decided to stand their ground and fight it out.

"What do you want us working on?" Raul asked.

"I want you catching cases. You're in the normal rotation as of now. But I want you learning the job. You'll be with Woodruff once he's back. He's senior in the squad. Archer and McGuire are good teachers, and I may mix and match you for a day here and there, but right now I want you as a team."

"Got it, boss," Sheila answered as Raul nodded his head in agreement. Neither one of them had the wardrobe that would be needed if their temporary assignment went on for more than a couple of weeks, and Rita fully expected both of them to be visiting the less expensive clothing shops and second-hand stores in their leisure time. But they made a good-looking soft clothes couple, the sort that used to be common in anti-crime, and Rita had some ideas on how she might use that to their advantage.

Rita sat at her desk and began to review the notes that she had taken at the bar in Harlem the evening before but she couldn't get her mind to focus. For some reason her mind kept going back to the moment during the raid when her Glock was in front of her face, her eye still on her target as she ejected the empty magazine and replaced it with a fresh one before she resumed firing. It was the first time in her life that Rita had performed a combat reload while under fire (she had done it more times than she could count during training), and she had relived that moment in slow motion many times afterward, the smell of gunpowder still in her nose and mouth despite all her efforts to wash it away. The only reason she wasn't sitting in the waiting room at Lefrak City was because it was already filled to capacity with everyone else who had been involved with last night's raid.

Almost everyone. Rita had not forgotten about the two figures standing on the roof across the street, and the text message that had mysteriously appeared on her phone, which her ACR should have rejected but didn't, that led them to the four men who had fled. Four men who had had the shit beat out of them, just like most of the others they had found after receiving untraceable calls and texts. Something about those two figures was ringing a bell in Rita's head, but she couldn't place it, and at this point, she didn't care. She still didn't like vigilantes, but she had to admit that it was better to have them on her side working with her instead of against her.

OK, I take back some of what I said about them, maybe 25% of it. 40% tops.

"I think you have some 'splaining to do," Kyle said to her as she sat in his office.

"I think that makes two of us," she said to him, her voice, and almost every muscle in her body, exhibiting an edge that Kyle Richmond did not fail to notice.

"You work for me, not the other way around. I don't have to explain anything to you."

"We can fix that situation right now. I quit."

It took the wealthy man a moment to reply.

"No, you don't. You're just pissed at me for not sharing every tiny fucking detail with you."

"Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. I'm pissed, and I quit. I'm talented, I can do two things at once."

"Oh, for fuck sake, don't be a crybaby. Since when have you been a fan of Sabermetrics? Since when have you wanted to know every fucking detail?"

"Since it could have helped me do my fucking job. Since if I had known who was behind it, I could have backchanneled her and convinced her to stop."

"What the fuck do you think I've been doing all this fucking time? Sitting around with my thumb up my ass?"

Trish didn't know what to say in response to that.

"Ekaterina Sokolova hired Maksim Orlov and his bunch of mercenaries to kidnap Annelie. That's who you've been snatching up all this time, members of The Orlov Group. I've been looking for him while I've been trying to get a message to her to knock it the fuck off. He's busy killing civilians in Syria. She's traveling between fortified camps in Russia, and she's not taking messages."

Trish took a moment before she replied.

"You should have told me anyway."

"Why? What would you have done, gone into Syria and killed Orlov? I've already got people on that, I don't need your fucking help. Anyway, you're not an assassin, you said that yourself."

"I think I could have gotten it up for the occasion, after what this asshole's people did."

"Thank you very much, but I have the heavy wet team on it. They'll muddle through without your help."

That got a serious pause from Trish as her mind summoned up the image of men in powered assault armor as they repelled out of a Nighthawk heavy lift vehicle onto some dusty patch of ground in the Middle East.

"No shit."

Kyle's voice was once again calm as he spoke.

"No shit."

There was a moment of silence while both Trish and Kyle looked at each other and breathed slowly.

"I'm sorry I called you a fucking asshole," Trish said.

Kyle's brow furrowed. "When did you call me that?"

"I'm sorry that I thought to myself that you were a fucking asshole."

He was a pretty attractive guy when he smiled like he was doing now.

"I'm sorry I didn't share every fucking detail of my life with you."

"Excuse me, what was that word you used? I think it started with an S ?"

"Oh, fuck you."

Trish's heart rate began to slow as her body and mind transitioned out of combat mode.

"What is it?" Kyle asked her.

"What do you mean?"

"I know you well enough that I can tell that you have something in mind, and you want to run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes it."

"Well," Trish began as she looked at her hands for a moment and adopted the coy mannerism that she knew got Kyle's own flag pole to salute, "I do have something in mind since you brought up the topic."

It was unusual, but not unheard of, for Cap's Bar and Grill to host private events on Monday nights; so no one driving past Luke's establishment would have been too surprised to see the lights on, and several cars parked out front.

"Thank you all for coming back," Rita said to the man and women who had spread out in the main dining room, "I'd like to go back through what we discussed yesterday and build a timeline."

Jessica recognized the documents that Rita had in front of her. It was the report she had given to Misty, which Mercedes Knight had forwarded along. Trish also recognized the same documents, which she had gotten from Dakota North. And while neither Julia nor Beth had seen them before, they had heard the details that they contained the previous day.

"Where do you want to start?" Trish asked.

"At the beginning."

"That would be 2016," Jess said, "The year Annelie and Ekaterina began seeing each other."

"I'll put on some coffee," Luke said as the women seated at two different tables listened to Jessica review the report.

"There's a couple of things I should add," Trish said, "things that aren't in the report, things I just found out today."

Rita flipped to a fresh page on her notepad and nodded to Trish.

"Sokolova hired Maksim Orlov to kidnap Annelie. Everyone we picked up works for The Orlov Group."

"Well, that explains a lot," Beth said.

"You know him?" Rita asked.

"I met him once, about ten years ago, in Serbia. He was working for Rastko Vlahović back then. But Orlov was too unpredictable, even for Vlahović, so he redeployed him ."

"Redeployed?" Rita asked.

"He paid somebody in Kyrgyzstan to hire Orlov and his goons. I guess it was cleaner than just killing them."

"What were you doing in Serbia?" Jess asked.

"I was working for Rastko Vlahović too," Beth said before looking at her hands and going quiet. When Julia leaned over and hugged her best friend and whispered in her ear the rest of the room took their cue and did not pursue the topic.

"I'll pass it along to INTERPOL," Rita said as she continued to scribble on her pad.

"Don't bother. Kyle's sending the Nighthawk heavies after him. He'll be dog food soon enough. Don't write that on your pad. Nobody in this room heard me say that."

A collection of open-mouthed faces stared at Trish before Rita found her voice first.

"What's the second thing?"

"A friend of mine is tracking Ekaterina Sokolova's movements in Russia. I plan to go and get her, and I could use some help."