Aside: Phoenix Talon]

    Brandeis came forward, clapping. "You guys are great! That was wonderful, and no one was really seriously hurt. How much do I owe you?"
    "We're paid by the city, sir," I told him.
    "Get a donation out of him," Phoenix Talon hissed at me before calling the Coast Guard; the other two boats had been found, robbed.
    "Oh, paid by the city, I understand. Taxes. But... this was the last one, right? You mean to tell me that Ralph and Lou and George and... so when they show up for the party...." He broke into a broad smile, realizing that he alone of his little rich bastards club had escaped unscathed. "Have a drink. This is a wonderful day. You guys did a great, great job."
    "Sorry, I'm feeling a little seasick," I muttered. Phoenix Talon accepted a beer.
    Scott called the Mariner Corporation.
    "Mariner Corporation, Sparky speaking."
    "This is Scott Silver of the Revolution."
    "Oh hi, neighbor, how's it going?"
    "All right. Do you have any familiarity with somebody calling themselves Manta Master?"
    Pause. "Describe him."
    "Billowy cape, seems to fly through the water, leaps out, sharks at his beck and command...."
    "Emmanuel. Dammit!"
    "I think he's coming for you. We'll be heading over as quick as we can."
    "Glad to have the support."
    "He's got a bunch of henchmen riding rocket-powered surfboards."
    "Well where the hell did he get those?"
    "1-800-HENCHMEN. We're heading over."
    "Okay, thanks a lot."
    "I called the Mariners, they're expecting visitors," Scott told us. "I said I'd head over, anybody else want to go?"
    "Of course, this is our job. Put that beer down, Phoenix Talon," I frowned.
    He finished it quickly and found time to give his phone number to the models who had been eyeing him earlier before we left.
    The Mariner Corporation's new East Coast headquarters is going up on the island that has seen so much activity from the Wuxia and the League of Nations. I was looking forward to meeting them, remembering Steven's enthusiasm for the group, and I wasn't disappointed (nor have I forgotten about Steven, but none of my poking about on his behalf has yielded any good leads yet). J.T. Leonard and crew are an impressive lot. Pushing sixty, J.T.'s eyes still glitter with intensity, and he's not someone most people would want to take on in a fight.
    "So I understand you had a run-in with Emmanuel Masters," he said.
    "Oh, is that his name?" I wonder if there's any correlation between being born with a name like "Masters" and eventually trying to be one.
    "That would be our guess. He was one of our technicians and oceanographers for a while, but then he got paranoid, psychotic, said we were stealing all of his ideas."
    "Were you?" Talon asked.
    "No," was the frosty reply.
    "Just asking."
    "We had thought he had died, but you know how these things are."
    "How long has he been missing?" I asked.
    "About six months. Ever since he tried to sabotage our Indian Ocean dig. Actually I want to show you some of this stuff. Come on in." We followed him into the mostly-completed building, which is a lot nicer than ours. Scott seemed to be bouncing more than usual; he was meeting a real live pulp hero, and getting a guided tour of their headquarters was close to being in heaven. "We don't have the serious equipment here, we do have the trophy hall over there, but down here is the information we've gotten off of the Indian Ocean dig. It certainly looks as if there was some sort of—if I didn't know any better, Egyptian culture down there."
    "The Indian Ocean?"
    "M-hm. Strange, as if the island sunk or something like that. Take a look at all of this. Of course there's going to be a display of all of it, sometime in, I think we're arranged for September at the archeology museum?"
    "Yeah, September," another of the Windjammers concurred.
    "Displaying it for a couple of weeks, donation to the city," J.T. went on.
    We looked around at what certainly looked like Egyptian artifacts to me, along with diagrams of sunken pyramids.
    "I'll have to ask our staff Egyptologist about this," Scott noted.
    "You have a staff Egyptologist?" J.T. asked.
    "Well, I have a very small staff, but one of them is in fact an Egyptologist," he admitted.
    "Always good to have something on hand, I guess. You think that Masters is going to come and strike here?"
    "He said he was seeking revenge on you, I believe," I told him.
    "Yeah, that sounds like him."
    Scott piped up, "Something along the lines of, this is our next to last stop and after this the Mariners will be destroyed."
    "He called us the Mariners?" one of the crew said indignantly.
    "He always got that wrong," another replied, disgusted. "It's Windjammers!"
    "Guys, focus," J.T. rumbled.
    "Apparently he was robbing yachts in the harbor," Scott went on.
    "Might have been just to get money," Phoenix Talon pointed out.
    "He needed funds, I suppose they can't really open up investments and try and—wait a minute, Sparky mentioned something about '1-800-HENCHMEN?'"
    "Yeah, he called up 1-800-HENCHMEN and hired a bunch of our old enemies, the Blood Boards," Phoenix Talon explained. "Bunch of punks. We cleaned the floor with 'em."
    "It's apparently a staffing agency for supervillains," I said.

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