Scott flew a hovercycle back to Felix's temporary home. Winters met him at at the door, looking very much as if the past two days had taken a toll.
    "You do me a favor?"
    "Yes?"
    "There's a pond out back. Would you go diving?"
    "If you wish, why?"
    "Just look around the bottom of the pond." Her grim expression told him what she expected to find.
    He handed her the files he had brought and slithered into the pond. And ran across a body. Male, naked. He hauled it to the surface.
    "Shit," Winters breathed.
    "This your officer?"
    "Vincent Gallante. It's him." She exhaled a carefully controlled breath.
    "I found out who one of the other people in Javelin's head is," Scott said cautiously.
    "Who?"
    "After they rebuilt him, they called him Spider."
    She went utterly still and stared at him. "You are shitting me."
    "No."
    "The Spider who used to routinely beat up Wildcard?"
    "Yes. He told us. Remember, he said he used to watch himself on TV...."
    "Fought the angels once, oh you son of a bitch!" She stalked an angry circle. "Okay. You want to know what I think happened?"
    "Okay."
    "Somehow, locked up in here, he got out of his straitjacket. If he actually was Spider, or someone else, you said he had seven people in there, he probably popped his shoulder and got out. There's blood all over the jacket buckle, and also all over the wall, and the lock. It's fairly clear the lock was roughly picked from the inside. I think he probably had a paper clip or some other lockpick embedded in his arm. He used the buckle from the back of the straitjacket to slice his arm open, get it out, secondary lockpick, opens up the door. Waits until the guards change, the guy who's on right now told me he came in, said hi to Vince, walked over to go the bathroom, came back on, Vince had said he was in a rush to leave. Saw that Vince wasn't there, figured a minute and a half didn't matter."
    "He grabbed Vince, locked the door..."
    "Snapped Vince's neck, from the look of it..."
    "Took the uniform and walked out the front door."
    "That's my guess," she finished.
    "Did you get a chance to take a look at that while I was underneath?"
    "Mm-hm. Who's responsible for this?" She leafed through the file.
    "Albert, for the most part."
    "Excellent penmanship. So this really was all a setup," she went on after a moment. "Whoever it was, made sure that the chemicals were here, for him to be able to do this, to take out Ellis, and Washington, and, or...?"
    "And/or some combination thereof."
    "I hate to say this, but your theory is starting to make more sense. Next time I get a tooth punched out I'm going to stick it under my pillow and see if I get a quarter." Silence. She sighed. "I've already put out a full alert on Javelin, hopefully we can find him before he does anything else."
    "Think he's going to go after the lawyer again?"
    "I don't know, I've already got him in protective custody—serious protective custody, about the same level we had last time. What I don't understand is, he'd been here for years, and he didn't break out until just now. What was he waiting for? Unless he was afraid that something else was going to happen to him."
    "I don't know."
    More quiet.
    "Where are you staying right now?" she asked after a while.
    "I've got an apartment that I rented for Dr. Scott. I don't need much other than the occasional light fixture."
    "I understand that."
    The uniformed men in the area were starting to get restive about his presence, Scott noted. "I should probably be going."
    "Yeah. How's the rest of the team holding up? The worst part is there doesn't seem to be anything to hit. We need a good giant monster for you guys to beat up."
    "I bet you're not going to get a good giant monster," he predicted.
    "What makes you say that?"
    "Because it would be a pretty positive image boost."
    "Good point."
    Scott took his leave.

That conference room with four men in it.
    "Let me see if I have this," the leader said carefully. "We sent someone to kill him and he had already escaped."
    "Um, yeah."
    "You want to please explain to me exactly how you allowed this fuck-up to happen?"
    "It was—it's the—we." He stuttered to an unhappy halt.
    "You have no explanation, then." He tapped his fingertips on the table. "He's out there. Armed. Free. He was supposed to be eliminated, you see, so that he couldn't talk, you did grasp that important part of the plan?!"
    "It's not my fault," the junior found his tongue at last. "He'd been there for years, how were we supposed to know he was capable of getting out?"
    The leader tossed a thick folder at him. "Better read that dossier."
    "Why?" He picked it up gingerly.
    "Because it's the dossier of the guy who just got out. You'll notice that in the big folder there are seven smaller folders."
    "Yeah."
    "Read it. And then get your people together and figure out where the hell he is, and where the hell he's going, and then get there before him, and bomb the building. Blow it up. And I don't care how many people die when the building blows up, as long as he is gone. Is that understood?"
    "Yes."
    "He is a pawn," the man went on precisely. "We use him, we expend him. You have just let him get to the other side of the board, where he has defected and started working sideways! I hate loose cannons. Speaking of which, have you found this Prentice idiot yet?"
    "Um. No, sir," another spoke up reluctantly.
    "Where are the primary targets?" he asked, evidently keeping his temper only with great difficulty.
     "We haven't been able to locate Lucky, she pops in and out, just disappears."
     "Disappears. The other ones?" Almost resigned now.
    "We give a high probability that they finally ended up at the android's father's house."
    "That would make sense. Get someone into position, start watching them there, track who goes in and out. If Lucky shows up there, get someone else on her, follow her back to wherever it is she's going. The android's staying there?"
    "Yeah."
    "What about the other two?"
    He consulted notes. "Um, Promethean keeps flying around the city, and people throw stuff at him, and he doesn't care. He doesn't seem to be doing anything about stopping crime, because there's no real crime to stop at the moment."
    "Well at least that's going right."
    "Yeah, public opinion's pretty high for the way the police department's handling it, we've maneuvered certain things so it looks like we can get the Senate to hire that Paranormal Investigations and Tactics Squad."
    "The people operating out of Rhode Island?"
    "Well, they operate in Rhode Island. But they're small, and they only do variant activity; as long as we keep our crime nonvariant, normal police can handle it. We know how to deal with normal police situations."
    "Good, good." He seemed more pleased by this report. "Drop some numbers, throw some things in that direction, make sure they move on that. That's the best of all possible worlds, everyone thinks they're nice and safe. Find out what this Hans guy is doing, the back and forth flying, his dossier's thin, but it probably has something to do with his parents. Get a move on there, and..." He paused suddenly. "Is he a primary target?"
    "No, we have no reason to keep him."
    "The other ones?"
    "The other ones we can use, in one way or another. Him, he's a blank slate."
    "Good. Demoralize them. Make him an example."
    "Are you sure that's the wisest idea sir?" another spoke up.
    "I don't recall asking your opinion, Mr. I Let This Guy Get Away," he snapped. "You're supposed to be reading."
    "But won't that just focus their—"
    "Shut up! You concentrate on that. This was moving so smoothly," he muttered. "All it takes is one little thing. Something's going wrong and I don't know what." He collected himself and resumed giving orders. "Make sure that we have a press gauntlet ready in case any of them does anything foolishly large in public. Make it spectacularly bloody. It's no good if all this just fades away. They have to be crushed, and the city has to never want them or their ilk back."
    "Right."
    "Get some hitters together, move on the example. Go."

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