Taylor Hebert: PRT Operative

Part Two: Deep Thinking

[A/N: This chapter commissioned by GW_Yoda and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

Taylor

Tracey held up her hands in a time-out gesture. "Seriously, before we get carried away with our own cleverness, I really think we should take a step back and consider the factors we haven't really covered yet. For starters, Tattletale, you've alluded to his powers twice. Do you know for a fact that he has powers?"

"Or were you hoping one of us would connect the dots for you," asked Greg thoughtfully, "so you could tell yourself you weren't sticking the knife all the way into his back?"

I didn't say a word; it was far more effective just to look at her and raise my eyebrows. Greg and Tracey had covered what I wanted to say anyway.

Lisa grimaced. "I don't know for a fact what they are, but I've seen them in action … I think. Sometimes when he talks to me, I get the impression he's considering consulting me about them, which suggests he himself isn't one hundred percent sure how they work, but he hasn't opened up yet."

"Well, okay. Seeing them in action is better than nothing." Tracey leaned back in her chair. "Tell us what you do know. If there's anything we're ridiculously good at, it's brainstorming."

Greg smirked. "And kicking Empire ass, but there's no Nazis in the room, so I'm willing to settle for brainstorming." It wasn't all that witty, but I gave him a low-five anyway.

Lisa took a deep breath. "Okay, so before he coerced me into working for him, I was living more or less on the streets. But I was totally aware of the dangers—teenage girl, nobody I could trust, et cetera—so I never took the same routes twice, never scammed the same people twice. I was careful. But he still tracked me down, had his people waiting where I would be."

Armsmaster shook his head. "The Director could accomplish that, just by spreading enough people around. Not evidence of power use."

Lisa looked like she wanted to argue the point for a moment, then visibly dropped it. "Okay, granted. He's got enough people working for him. Maybe I was careless and didn't realise it. Anyway, so I'm face to face with him and he pulls out a quarter and starts flipping it. He's talking to me at the same time, which means he's absolutely not focusing on flipping it a certain way. Ten heads in a row. I watched, and checked the coin a couple of times to make sure he hadn't slipped in a ringer. Honest flips, honest coin."

"Okay," I said thoughtfully. "So that's a thing. Like you suggested, reality manipulation? Making sure his men would be where they needed to be, making sure the coin flipped heads each time."

"However it works," Greg mused, "it's got limits. Maybe the number of times he can use it per day, maybe how much reality he can shuffle around in a given time. Because someone who's willing to kidnap a teenage girl and force her to become a villain for him isn't going to lurk in some underground bunker if he can make bullets miss him in midair."

"I've never heard of him doing that," agreed Lisa. "But the operations he sends us—the Undersiders—on are always successful. Never a bad call, never bad intel. The heroes never get the jump on us. Same goes for the things he sends the mercenaries out for. Sure, there are snags, but never of the type that call for aborting the op."

"Okay, now you've lost me," I confessed. "That doesn't sound like the same kind of reality manipulation you'd use to flip ten heads in a row. People aren't coins. Unless he's massively changing the landscape of Brockton Bay, and our memories with it, he can't arrange for heroes not to be there, or for bad intel to magically become good intel."

"Wait." Tracey seemed to be thinking hard. "Are you saying every single time you went out, you just had the red carpet rolled out for you?"

Lisa shrugged. "The jobs he sent us on, sure."

"Oooh." Greg gnawed on a knuckle, a sign he had something almost in sight. "Oooh. Did he send you on a mission every time you prepped for one, or just some of the time? And when he flipped the coin, did he just do it bam-bam-bam-bam, or did he spend time talking between flips? Because you said he talked."

"Yeah, sometimes he's called off missions. And no, he didn't flip the coin ten times straight away. Why? What've you figured out?" Lisa looked at Greg curiously.

Greg leaned back in his chair. "I think he's a precog. He's got maybe a couple of hours up his sleeve, but he can ask himself, 'what happens if I send the Undersiders to rob this convenience store?' or whatever, and if it turns out badly, he can just not send you. Same with the coin flips. He would've been asking, 'what's it going to be?' and if the answer was tails, he just didn't flip. Waited a few seconds or changed hands, and asked again. Does that fit what you know of him?"

"It would, yeah." Lisa seemed to be tasting the words.

"So, where are the limits?" Tracey nodded toward Greg. "Suppose he uses his precog to check out a robbery, figures out there are heroes or cops in easy intercept distance, so … what? He says no go, doesn't just check out another location? Just a simple precog like that, you'd never get a no-go call. He'd just say, 'hit this other target instead'. Did that ever happen?"

Lisa was already shaking her head. "No, it didn't. He usually wouldn't call on us again until the next day."

"Some kind of cool-down effect," I realised. "Maybe he can't precog the same interval of time twice in a row, or something."

"More likely he gets Thinker headaches, like I do." Lisa tapped the side of her head. "If I overwork myself, it's migraine central." She frowned and shook her head. "Not Thinker headaches. I'd pick it up. So Taylor's probably got the right idea, some kind of cool-down."

"Okay, then." Tracey dusted her hands off. "It's a good working theory. Tattletale, is there anything you've seen or heard that would invalidate the idea? Anything at all?"

"I think I might have something." Greg shot me an apologetic glance. "If he can see the future well enough to give a robbery a go/no-go call, why isn't he just betting on racehorses and stuff, and absolutely rolling in money for no effort at all?"

He'd made a very good point, I realised immediately. "Uh … maybe he can't see fine details, like who won a race? Just 'it went bad' or 'it went well'? Or maybe he just likes doing crime? I mean, he had the money to bribe people to build him a whole Bond villain base. What if he is that rich, and being an asshole supervillain's just his hobby?"

Armsmaster's head came up. "I don't know Commander Calvert well, but in my limited experience, he didn't come across as someone who was slumming it, and could walk away from the job tomorrow." His jaw hardened in a grimace. "Of course, he was active as a supervillain while also playing the role of a strike squad commander, so the man had serious deceptive capability."

"When he was flipping the coin, he would've needed to know whether it was going to be heads or tails." Lisa looked around at us. "That's a pretty fine detail, right?"

"Dammit, you're right." I ran my hands through my hair. "Okay, so how do we reconcile being able to read a coin with not being able to read sporting results? Or are we going with 'mega-rich asshole villain hobby'?"

"Give me a moment," Armsmaster said. "I'm going to consult with the Director. She knows him better than I do."

As he mumbled to himself, Tracey looked at Greg and me. "It's got to be some flavour of precog. Too many factors point toward it. But like Taylor said, what exact limitations would prevent him from calling a horse race while allowing him to call a coin flip?"

Greg was gnawing on a knuckle again. "Maybe … he can only precog stuff around people or things he's been in direct contact with? Has met personally? If he's never been near a racehorse in his life, he couldn't call the race. But he's met Tattletale, and he's in contact with his mercenaries all the time."

I snapped my fingers. "And that's what's stopping him from raking it in on the lotteries. He's not actually physically present when the numbers are called."

Tracey nodded slowly. "I think you've got it. Tattletale?"

"Yeah." Lisa echoed the gesture. "Yeah. Everything fits. He needed to meet a member of the Undersiders so he could precog for us all. I've been on every mission. That's gotta be it."

Armsmaster cleared his throat. "Director Piggot concurs he's not playing the role of a supervillain for the fun of it. Her exact quote was: 'if he was that rich, he'd be either sitting in the Mayor's office, or in mine'."

"Well, that simplifies matters a lot." I frowned, thinking. "So, do you think it's possible he's got precog capabilities for his house and his base, just because he's spent time in both places?"

"Doesn't need 'em." Greg spoke up just before Armsmaster could. "He could have remote alarm systems in both that feed to his phone."

"No." I shook my head. "Precog, allowing him to know ahead of time if someone's about to hit his house or his base. Electronic surveillance is a given."

"Even if he could, I doubt he would," Tracey observed thoughtfully. "If he can't survey the same time interval twice, or he's got any other type of cool-down, I suspect he wouldn't be using it willy-nilly for that purpose, especially when electronics are almost as good."

"So … he's not at his home of record." I reached into my backpack and took out a pen and pad. As I spoke, I scribbled notes. "He'd know for a fact you've just raided it. While he might consider himself safe in his real house, I'm thinking he'll feel more secure in his base, just in case we stumble on the other location by accident. Or, you know, use logic and computer skills to figure it out anyway. Tattletale?"

"Base, for sure." Her tone was confident. "The other house would be a tripwire. A warning for him to go to ground. The moment that front door got kicked in, he would've grabbed his go-bag and jumped in his car."

"So … we ignore the other house?" asked Greg dubiously.

"Haha, nope." Tracey shook her head emphatically. "While he would've done his best to wipe it clean of anything remotely incriminating, there's a lot Director Piggot's forensic techs could find there. All they'd need is a search warrant. Armsmaster?"

"It's in the pipeline," he reported. "As soon as we have it, I'll be taking troopers to surround the house and, as you say, kick the front door in. Do you have any insights about that, or the base?"

"Only two," I said. "First, are you certain he hasn't booby-trapped the house to remotely detonate once you're inside?"

He paused. "No. But I can jam all incoming signals before we go in. Next?"

"This one's for Tattletale." I pushed the pad across the table. "Please give me a rough floor-plan of the base, and of the exits you know about."

She raised an eyebrow, but began drawing anyway. "You think there's more?"

"I think Coil's sufficiently paranoid he wouldn't tell everyone all his secrets, and that includes exactly where all the exits are to his secret underground base." I watched as the image grew under her confident strokes.

"Ooh, I just had a thought." Greg sounded unhappy. "Everyone Coil's been in contact with, he could've precogged to find out our plans before we've even made them."

Armsmaster stood up. "I've definitely been in contact with him. I'll be leaving now, and sending someone else in."

"What about me?" asked Tattletale. "If Armsmaster's got a problem, then I definitely do."

"Finish up the floor-plan, then go," I advised her, then turned to Armsmaster. "Has Calvert been in the habit of socialising with the troopers from other strike squads?"

I saw his lips tighten. "Not that I'm aware of, but he could've made a point of meeting each of them at one time or another." He paused, then the tension left his posture again. "I know exactly who to call in. Someone Coil's guaranteed to never have come face to face with."

"Really?" asked Greg. "Who?"

Tattletale grinned, suddenly looking very smug indeed. "I bet I know."

"Don't say it." Armsmaster held up his hand in a 'stop' gesture. "If Coil has precogged you or me, we don't want to give him any extra information."

"Fine, spoil my fun." She rolled her eyes, but completed the sketch anyway. "Okay, done. All yours."

"Excellent, thanks." I accepted the pad back as she got up from the table. "You heading back home now?"

"Not yet." She shrugged. "He hasn't called me since we took down Kaiser, but that's probably because he precogged what I'm up to, so he knows I've jumped ship. I think I'll stay right here in the building until I know he's in custody." Giving me a fingertip-wave, she headed for the door behind Armsmaster. "Wreck his day for me, will you?"

I grinned. "That's the plan."

The door closed behind them, and Greg looked at Tracey and me, the question evident in his eyes. We shrugged in near-unison, as much in the dark as he was. Whatever Lisa had known, she had access to information we didn't.

That was when the screen taking up the entire wall at the far end of the room came to life. We all turned to look at it, and at the face which had shown up on it. It was a woman's face, masked, but I had the faintest suspicion that it was computer-generated all the same.

Maybe it was the sheer normalcy of her visible features, with no defining characteristics. An everywoman, who could walk past on any street from London to New York to Sydney, and not be out of place. Or maybe I was just looking too hard for something out of the ordinary.

"Hi," she said cheerfully. "In case you were wondering, I'm Dragon. I hear you've got a plan to capture Coil?"

Coil

Something was amiss. More than the current situation, even.

When the alarm went off to alert him of the raid on the decoy house, he'd done his best to clear the area. Unfortunately, his car had been pulled over by a PRT checkpoint, where an alert trooper had recognised him. So, he'd had to drop that timeline and revert to the one where he'd been in his base all night. It meant losing a night of sleep, but that was hardly a first for him.

It also meant he hadn't been able to arm the proximity switches for his home office (these were very much analog tech, for safety reasons) so he was going to have to trigger the explosives remotely. That was fine: the booster for the radio signal had been installed months before, disguised as a component of the electricity meter. All he had to do was dial a specific number, already saved on a burner phone in his desk drawer, and the issue would be solved.

He hadn't done it yet because he didn't want to draw attention to the house. There was still a strong possibility the PRT knew nothing of it, and he was damn sure Tattletale was equally in the dark regarding its existence.

He growled under his breath when he thought about the betrayal perpetrated on him by that ungrateful little bitch. Days earlier, his moles had reported to him on how the Undersiders had sought refuge with the PRT, along with Taylor Hebert and her little coterie of escapees from the Medhall building. This had come just before his moles started being exposed, and he himself was forced to drop the timeline where he'd even been in the building at all.

The fact the Undersiders weren't arrested on the spot let inescapably to the conclusion that Director Piggot had found another use for them: a conclusion borne out by the sudden cessation of all activity by Empire Eighty-Eight capes anywhere in town. Bad news travelled fast, even when mixed with good news. The Empire has been captured, the grapevine said. The white supremacists are behind bars. But who's next?

While he would've been thoroughly interested in getting his hands on Tattletale and interrogating her in depth with regards to what was going on in the PRT building, Calvert had had his own problems to deal with. Mainly, he'd been working on moving all the things he didn't want to part with from his house to the base, while maintaining a timeline that would allow him to not be caught on the back foot. Any attempt to grab her, or even just check to see how closely the PRT were guarding her, would involve use of timelines he couldn't spare right then.

Some may have seen it as short-sighted to prioritise his own skin and possessions over access to a powerful Thinker like Tattletale. He saw it differently; his experiences in Ellisburg had left him with a deep and abiding need to never be without an exit strategy ever again. Besides, he could always retrieve her later, once everything had calmed down somewhat and he was ready to start expanding his operations once more.

This wasn't to say he was about to reward Tattletale for such a minor act of loyalty, of course. That sort of thing was expected of villainous minions, and Tattletale had better damn well remember her place, or he'd know the reason why not. He decided he'd probably only torture her lightly in the alternate timeline instead of going all-out; she'd earned that much, at least.

As it was, he was safe in his base, there were cameras watching every exit, and he was ready to blow the house as soon as the first PRT or Protectorate boot crossed the threshold. Nobody suspicious had come sniffing around over the last three days, which suggested Tattletale had balked from betraying him that far. There hadn't even been an overly-fit dog walker or jogger.

So why was there an itch in the back of his mind no amount of rational thought could scratch?

Taylor

I examined the sketch Lisa had left us. It was pretty damn detailed, and showed Coil's office as well as the exits, with neat little notes showing where they came out to. "Dragon, can you see this?"

"I can," she confirmed, and threw an image of it up on the screen to prove it. "Is this to plan our attack?"

"It's part of it." Tracey was still on the same page as Greg and me. "He's got to have a bolt-hole somewhere. Can you correlate this to the street map, and maybe utilities?"

"I can." A satellite map of Downtown appeared on the screen, then zoomed in to a specific area. Then she overlaid a standard street map as a transparency so that we could see details of both. Finally, the sketch appeared on top of that, rotated slightly, then clicked into place. "The tunnel exit on the construction site appears to correlate to this hatch here." The view zoomed in to show a metal hatch on the aforementioned construction site. "Which means the parking garage exit would correlate to this wall."

"Bingo." My eyes searched the sketch. "Zoom in on his office. If he's got a secret way out, then it'll be from there."

The map shifted, then steadied. We were looking at the penned-in square marked 'Office', with buildings and a street nearby.

Greg frowned. "Would he use this exit regularly, or is it a get-out-of-Dodge situation?"

Even before I could ask the question, I realised where he was going with it. "A regular exit implies a building, that he can just walk in and out of without any questions asked. Emergency exit would require something less involved."

"Sending query to Armsmaster," Dragon reported.

"Wait, no, no!" Tracey threw both hands up to stop her. "He can't hear the question!"

Dragon blinked. "Please explain."

I took a deep breath. "Okay, so we've brainstormed Coil's power, and the odds are that he's a precog. Given the observed limits of the power, we've figured out that he can only use precog on people that he's actually met. He's met Armsmaster, but he's never met you … has he?"

"No, he has not." She sounded quiet, contemplative. "I suppose there are benefits to my situation."

Tracey grimaced. "The problem is, he's also met Tattletale. So, if we communicate with her and he's using his precog on her—and to be honest, why wouldn't he be—he'll know what we've just learned. And it's a really bad idea to assume your opponent won't figure information out from first principles, such as how we're planning to deal with him."

"Got it." Greg snapped his fingers. "Give me a second, here." He pulled out his phone and woke it up. "Just checking to see if I saved her number … yes, yes, I did. Okay, let's see now …"

I watched with interest as he carefully typed out a message, backing up and editing it a few times before he was finally satisfied. "Well, don't just leave us in suspense," I said half-jokingly. "If you've got a genius idea, feel free to share it with the class."

He gave me the Greg Veder smile that was really beginning to grow on me. "Ask, and ye shall receive." Then he showed me the phone screen.

To my confusion, it was all emoticons. First was a sleeping person (with little z's hovering over him), followed by a DNA strand. Then there was a tree, a dollar bill (actually a little green rectangle with the dollar symbol on it), a very obvious spy in sunglasses, fedora and trenchcoat, and an open door.

I read the whole thing through again, and all I got was 'something something sneaky door'. "Okay, I don't get it. Dragon? Tracey?"

"You've lost me," Dragon admitted candidly. "Some kind of steganography?"

Tracey raised her eyebrows. "Greg, I know your mind works in mysterious ways, but you've outdone yourself here. Mind explaining for we mere mortals?"

His grin merely widened. "Doze. DNA is coiled. Make like a tree and leave. Buy. Secret. Door."

Tracey facepalmed. Dragon looked like she wanted to headdesk. I just grabbed Greg and kissed him hard, leaving him looking dazed. "You're a genius. My boyfriend is a certified genius."

"Whoa. Okay. Wow." He shook his head, apparently to clear it. "Did not expect that. So, good to send?"

I nodded. "Hell yes, it's good to send."

"Excellent." He hit the correct icon, and the message was launched into the electronic ether. "Okay, so what else do we need to do while we're waiting?"

Tracey pointed at the screen. "Well, if it's a regular affair, we can check the ownership of those four buildings. But if it's a one-and-done … is that a manhole?"

Dragon zoomed the image in. It was indeed a manhole cover, right there near where the office showed up on the overlay.

I nodded slowly as the scenario came together. "If he made sure to have a car parked nearby, and moved occasionally, he could climb out of the manhole, get in the car, and be gone in seconds."

"Or walk out of a building and do exactly the same," agreed Tracey. Greg's phone pinged, and she looked expectantly at him. "Is that her?"

"It is." He flicked the screen to open the message. "A fire, a thumbs down and a red traffic light. Sounds like a no to me."

Tracey nodded. "The manhole it is. Though, I'm curious about how fire comes into it."

He smirked. "It's a regular meme. The best way to un-want something is to set it on fire."

I rolled my eyes as the last piece of the puzzle fell into place. "Because of course you and Tattletale use the same memes. Okay, then. We're all agreed on the plan of attack?"

Tracey nodded again, as did Greg. Dragon's face, on the screen, registered puzzlement. "Plan of attack? I thought we were still getting to that."

Greg frowned. "We've been discussing it the whole time. We block everything except the parking garage exit and bottleneck them that way. And we do it after Armsmaster and the PRT hit the house, to see how he reacts."

Dragon shook her head. "You didn't mention any of that until just now."

Tracey chuckled. "Sorry, we're used to thinking on the same channel as each other. Most of the time, anyway. That's why we got the information on all the exits, so we could lock them in. And if he's not there at the time, their morale's gonna nosedive as soon as we do it."

Dragon didn't look totally convinced. "And what about the mercenaries? I understand that they carry rifles with undermount lasers that can cut through steel."

I spread my hands. "That's what Grue's for. He's never met Coil, and his darkness stops all light, including Tinkertech lasers. And if they want to shoot ordinary old bullets at us, Greg and I can return those to sender, all day long."

"And if he's not in the base?" Dragon raised an eyebrow. "We have to address that possibility too."

Tracey took up the ball. "As Tattletale said, if he's on foot, we can track him. Armsmaster and the PRT are going to be hitting his house shortly before we hit the base, so if he's there, they'll get him. If he's not in either the house or the base, it'll mean he's at large but we'll have deprived him of a huge chunk of his resources." She nodded toward the screen. "And I'm sure you'll be able to comb through his computer system and deal with the rest of them. Precog or not, he won't be able to do a hell of a lot without his base, his mercenaries, or his bank accounts."

"Exactly," I said. "He'll go from a fully equipped supervillain to one on the run. And as soon as he starts doing anything with a pattern to try to rebuild what he's got …"

"Boom." Greg smacked his fist into his palm. "We'll be on him like aggro on a tank."

Dragon seemed to ponder that for a few moments, or maybe she was trying to figure out his gaming slang. Finally, she nodded. "Alright then, let's do this."

Coil

Thomas Calvert considered himself a hard-headed realist. Had anyone uttered the phrase 'it's too quiet' in his hearing, he would've scoffed at it and them. Yet … it was too quiet.

Days had passed since his moles had been uncovered as a serendipitous outcome of the Empire's actions. The trail had inevitably led back to him, and his decoy house had been raided … but nothing had happened since. And while this was technically a good thing, it was also problematic.

Emily Piggot, despite her many shortcomings, was not a stupid woman. Anyone lacking in intelligence would have been long since overwhelmed by the ongoing crime in the city (especially with his behind-the-scenes manipulations making it harder for her to handle matters). Likewise, Armsmaster was no slouch at investigation.

Long story short, they should have been doing more, but … weren't. And he didn't like it in the least. The feeling he got was that a very large, very heavy shoe was due to drop at any moment. And that the longer it delayed, the more devastating the impact would be.

He was running two different timelines, of course. In one, the base was on full defensive alert; sentries prowled the exterior perimeter in plainclothes, masquerading as ordinary citizens while keeping a sharp lookout for incursions. In the other, the mercenaries were packing to roll out as soon as the order was given, while a sharp eye was kept on the exterior cameras.

The longer he waited, the more insistent the itch between his shoulder-blades became. His usual precaution was to be in two different places at once, but that presupposed the existence of two equally safe locations for him to bunker down in. His big problem was, he couldn't move anywhere with the mercenaries and hope to keep it under the radar. Likewise, if he headed out on his own, there was a moderate chance they would assume he was abandoning them to save his own ass (which he absolutely would, if the need arose) and their morale would collapse.

There was one bolt-hole he could technically seek refuge in. It wasn't so much a secondary site as a storage dump for supplies that he hadn't yet had the chance to ferry into his main base. While it lacked the facilities to handle fifty people, one person could subsist there quite well, though the crates of MREs would likely become very boring after a while.

He wasn't enamoured of the 'ready to evacuate' posture, mainly because it put the idea of defeat and escape into the minds of the mercenaries, and they might just jump the gun and disappear into the tall timber at the slightest provocation. Even though the security of the base was more symbolic than actual—Calvert had no illusions about the ability of the PRT and Protectorate to winkle him out of his lair once they got the idea to do so—nothing wore away at morale faster than the idea of being forced to abandon a prepared fortification.

Still, it was one of the very few options he had, so he kept walking among the men, allowing himself to be seen, while the people watching the outside cameras had orders to alert him the instant a PRT vehicle came into view. In the other timeline, morale was actually higher, with sandbagged positions set up covering each of the exits. Sheltered by the sandbags were heavy machineguns and all the ammo he'd stockpiled over the years. Between the machineguns and the undermount lasers, anyone attempting to mount an attack would be bottlenecked and cut down before they made it any distance into the facility.

Taking one last glance over the defenses, he nodded and strolled unhurriedly back to his office. The door slid shut behind him as per normal; the fact that he immediately locked it behind him was not so normal, but this would only become apparent if someone came looking for him. Moving with careful haste, he stripped out of the bodysuit and put on blue-collar working gear from where he had it stored. As a final touch, he added a hardhat and a high-vis vest.

It was only when he was halfway along the corridor to the manhole exit that his phone pinged with an alert that the door alarm on his house had just gone off. He'd been half-considering the idea of swinging past on the way to his intended destination, but this was no longer an option. Stopping just inside the swinging slab of concrete that would let him out into the storm drain, he accessed the camera images for the house. Still frames were all he was going to get, he knew, given that the house had been wired to blow at the first sign of incursion.

Instead, he found himself watching live footage of Armsmaster prowling through his living room, followed by PRT troopers who were splitting up to check individual rooms.

What? No, this can't be right.

Pulling up another specialised app on his phone, he accessed the bomb's remote circuit … or tried to. Despite the fact that there was a booster nearby, when he requested a ping-back from the electronic detonator, there was no reply. Frowning, he tried again, with equally negative results.

It was possible that the ping-back wasn't showing up for any one of a number of reasons, so he pressed the override icon, sending out the detonation signal. Then he flipped back to the camera app, and was gratified to see that the camera was no longer transmitting an image.

Yes! Got you! He didn't mind admitting, after the fact, that he'd been a little worried. But it had only been an equipment problem, easily bypassed. With a slight smile on his face, he checked for the last images of the Protectorate and PRT personnel who had been caught in the blast … and saw, on the screen, Armsmaster's halberd very close indeed.

Hastily, he flicked through each of the other camera feeds; they were all down, their final images showing how they'd been destroyed.

"Well, shit." The words echoed hollowly in the corridor. As he tucked the phone away and swung aside the slab to let himself out into the storm drain, he thought hard about what they would find there.

Not a huge amount, he decided. Nothing that would lead them directly to his base. There was quite a bit of material that would serve as proof of his criminal activity, but they already had that. As far as he could recall, there was nothing that would give them new information.

Still, it would've been nice to blow the house anyway. I wonder how they did it. Jammer?

Still musing over that, he climbed the ladder and pushed open the manhole in the middle of the sidewalk. His clothing was the next best thing to an invisibility power; as soon as anyone saw the hard hat and high-vis vest, he would no longer be an oddity. Climbing out, he let the cover drop back over the manhole, then strode toward the car parked at the side of the road.

The car wasn't there all the time, of course. Sometimes it was another car. There was another one that he kept in the parking garage. Every few days, he would have one of the mercenaries take one out on a snack run, park on the street, and drive the other one back. This ensured that he'd always have a getaway vehicle (his keyring had a key for each car). The snack run aspect, on the other hand, ensured that he always had ready volunteers for the chore.

The car unlocked as he pressed the fob button on the key itself, and he removed the vest and hard-hat before climbing in. Now, he was just an ordinary man in an ordinary car. Starting the car, he eased out onto the road and drove off, scrupulously sticking to the speed limit. Nothing to see here.

With the window down, he could listen to the outside environment; no choppers, which was good. Likewise, there were no cars, unmarked or otherwise, following him. He hadn't been certain that there were no clues to the location of the base within the house, but this seemed to bear that assumption out. The way was clear to head to his off-site storage area, check it out, then decide what he was going to do from there.

Taylor

When my phone rang, I checked the caller ID. It read GRUE. Thumbing the answer icon, I held it to my ear. "Taylor here. What's the news?"

He sounded both impressed and respectful when he answered. "You called it. He climbed out of the manhole that you pointed out, got in a car, and drove away. Bitch and Regent are following him now."

I had no problem with that. They'd been given careful instructions that boiled down to 'follow, do not engage, report where he goes to'. Unfortunately, due to her association with Coil, Lisa couldn't be in on the shadowing aspect, but Rachel was an intelligent person. She understood clear instructions. Alec was more of a wild card, but he was invested in making himself useful to the PRT, now that Coil's operation was teetering on the edge of disaster. I trusted him to attend to his own self-interest, if nothing else.

The good thing about Rachel's dogs was that they could trail him on the rooftops. Also, once Coil got to wherever he was going and left the car, they could get his scent and have the dogs trail him that way. None of which involved confronting him: while such a scenario could still happen, I wanted to find out what else he had going on before jumping on him with both feet.

At the same time, of course, I fully intended to separate him from his base and everything in it. Allowing a snake like Coil to retain access to money or armed mercenaries would be a mistake of the highest order, so I had no intention of doing it. This was one of the reasons I'd had them schedule the house raid before the base raid, to see if we could stampede him out of his own base.

"There he is," Tracey noted, slowing the car and pulling over to the side of the road. Brian wasn't immediately recognisable as Grue, but there weren't a huge number of six-foot-plus buff black guys in Brockton Bay, so even wearing a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, he wasn't hard to spot in general.

Greg and I were in the back seat by choice—it was easier to hold hands that way—so he got in the front. I'd already made sure it was all the way back, because he had the longest legs I'd ever seen. Making him sit with his knees up around his ears would be a funny prank once, but there was a time and a place for that sort of thing, and this wasn't it.

"He should be far enough away by now." I took out my phone and rang Alec's number. Rachel had a phone, but she tended to 'forget' it at every opportunity.

"Taylor, hi." Alec sounded as cheerful as he ever got. In the background, I could hear the steady, repetitive sound of gigantic dogs galloping across rooftops. "Nothing weird to report."

"Excellent. Has he turned back toward the base?" This was important. We needed him far enough away that if he was keeping precog tabs on any of the PRT troopers slated to hit the base, it would be too late for him to turn around.

"Nope. He's headed for the industrial areas. Man with a mission, that's him." He had to be feeling comfortable for that kind of snark to creep in.

"Excellent. Call me if anything changes." I ended the call. "Good news. He's not reacting to anything we're about to do."

"Neat. So, Operation Sardine Can is a go?" Greg already had his phone out.

Tracey sighed. "I'm pretty sure we're not calling it that, but yes. It's a go."

"Excellent." Greg glanced at me. "Can I make the call, or do you want to?"

His eagerness was almost palpable. I grinned and shoulder-nudged him. "Oh, what the hell. You do it. The plan's mostly yours, anyway."

"Sweeeeet." He called up a number on his phone and tapped the icon. "Yeah, hi, it's us. Elvis has left the building." He paused. "Yes, that means Coil is out of his bunker. Sorry, I thought a code phrase would sound cooler."

I grinned, shaking my head. With all of his competence upgrades—and he'd come a long way since our first days at Medhall—Greg would always be a dork in some ways. But that was okay: he was my dork.

"Okay, yeah, we're waiting for everyone else to move in. Right, gotcha." Greg looked up as the call ended. "She says the first truck will be coming past in two minutes. We'll tuck in behind them."

I nodded. "I'll keep in touch with Regent." We didn't think Coil would do anything untoward, but there was thinking and then there was making sure.

There was only one person we could really trust to run this mission: Dragon. Armsmaster knew her well enough to make the case that she could coordinate the men to assault the base in the way we'd planned, and Director Piggot trusted Armsmaster enough to sign off on the idea. That way, even if Coil was precogging any of the officers involved, he'd only get a small part of the picture, not the whole strategy.

The Undersiders (minus Lisa) had been in charge of watching to see which way Coil would jump once Armsmaster and the others had hit his house. It had triggered him into going somewhere, and we wanted to know where. This in turn had opened the way to go all-in on denying him the base (and everything in it) altogether; if we managed to fully take it, they were authorised to swoop in and grab him up.

Still, we were almost literally playing with fire. Coil was an unknown factor in many ways; for all I knew, we'd totally misread his power and were depending on protective factors that didn't exist. The idea of a cape sandbagging with his powers to throw his enemies off-guard was so pervasive that at least two cape sitcoms had been written around the concept.

But I didn't think that was the case. Coil was hugely ego-driven, and I doubted very much that he would hold back on any aspect of his power that could possibly make him look more powerful or get him more money. If he could leverage his power in a way to get an extra advantage, he'd absolutely be doing it that way.

However, the fact of the matter was that we were committed now. The plan was going ahead, and it was our job to make sure that it worked. If imperfect information was all we had to go on with, that was what we'd use.

It was time to kick the doors in, and let the dice fall where they may.

End of Part Two