"That's one down, I believe we have five to go, but I need a nap," I muttered.

[Aside: Scott]

    Scott called while we were still en route.
    "Good morning," Scott said.
    "Morning. Good night."
    "Um, Reilly's on his way out. Should be here, probably like an hour or so."
    "Why is Reilly on his way out?" I asked with a sinking feeling.
    "Do you remember State Senator Jacobs, used to be part of the triumvirate running the...."
    "I'm detecting the past tense."
    "There seems to have been an unfortunate structural flaw in the office of the accountant, that he was checking over the books with, the ones about where our money was going? Unfortunately, there seems to have been residue of orangutan hair in the room."
    I closed my eyes for a second and whispered, "Son of a bitch." Continued, "Okay. I'm going to go stand under cold water for a few minutes, if you could ask Dawn to make some coffee. Really strong coffee."

[Aside: At Base]

    As soon as we got home I suited action to words and turned on the cold water, gritted my teeth and jumped in. Got my blood moving, at any rate, and cleared a bit of the all-nighter fog from my thoughts. Dragged my clothes back on, went downstairs, nodded to Reilly and made a beeline for the coffee pot on the side table.
    "I'm not sure what the hell happened yesterday," Talon told us. "I actually don't remember most of it."
    "It tasted good," Scott informed him.
    "It's on television," Reilly added. "Hang on." He'd brought the tape, cued it up for us. "We have this bit with you gettin' beat up by a Smurf, and then there's a bright flash of light, and you collapse into unconsciousness after being punched by the Smurf." End of tape.
    "And after vaporizing the Toy Man," I added.
    "Oddly enough, that scene isn't getting much play."
    "So, how much was Holly paying the editors last night?" Scott inquired.
    Reilly shrugged and didn't attempt to argue the likeliness of the accusation. "Hard to say."
    "I suppose we're lucky, that, well Lucky's not around."
    "You did, to all intents and purposes, vaporize a suspect," Reilly pointed out more gravely to Phoenix Talon.
    "Not really a suspect...."
    "Well, we pretty well knew he was a villain," Scott remarked.
    "He hadn't been convicted of anything," I reminded them.
    Thunderbolt pronounced, "He was an evildoer."
    "Yeah, okay, I'll back the evildoer thing," Reilly sighed. "Still, I get caught up on the word 'vaporized.'"
    "Well, it's kind of hard to prove he's dead...." Scott put in.
    Phoenix Talon held up two fingers. "We don't know he's dead. And I thought law enforcement officials were permitted to defend themselves with lethal force if necessary."
    "Well, there's no one to press charges," Reilly shrugged.
    "If we have to go through the whole official inquiry and dot all the i's and cross all the t's, that's fine," I told Reilly. This is not like the Don Guiliani thing, no reason to be terribly worried. "But we also have bigger problems right now."
    "Yeah," he agreed.
    "Can we prove that he has a criminal record, that this is the old Toy Man?" Talon wanted to know.
    "Not really," Scott replied.
    Reilly nodded at me. "Just on her say-so."
    "We can't prove it," the robot concluded.
    "You could make a strong argument. Besides, he did just launch a potentially lethal attack against a member of law enforcement."
    "And one of his minions tried to taze me," I added.
    "Yeah."
    Scott agreed. "And we can prove fairly well that he was behind all the stuff that he'd done this time around."
    "Since he was bragging about it on national television," Reilly nodded. "Still, there is all that footage of him cutting Scott in half, and knocking you backward, and beating you up with a Smurf...."
    I shrugged. "It's not the first time we've looked bad." And it almost certainly won't be the last.
    "What about the dawning realization seconds? Are they getting played on TV?" Talon wanted to know.
    "Those tapes never made it," Reilly told him. "As I told Scott earlier...."
    About time we got down to business. "Yes, I heard. Rue Morgue. She's going to find a way to pin this on us, isn't she?" I realized.
    "Almost certainly, really," Scott sighed.
    "Hard to say," Reilly equivocated.
    I reminded him, "This is Holly we're talking about."
    "Granted, she doesn't like you much. Although she does seem to have mellowed. She did have a commentary yesterday, in which—oddly enough, on her show, all the footage was shown, so that she could then say 'Here we see a member of the Revolution, obviously dazed, vaporizing a target.'"
    "And an office, and a wall beyond that, part of the building beyond that," Talon replied placidly.
    "Right."
    "Certainly this time there was no one in his blast path other than his target?" Scott pointed out.
    No more digressing; Reilly went over what they knew about Jacobs' meeting with Wittelsbach and their "accident."
    "The newspapers are looking at it as, 'my God, what a terrible loss.' Holly is no doubt going to raise some questions on her next show, but it has derailed things for the moment. Fortunately they were able to save the majority of the papers and the work that Wittelsbach had done. From the notes that are on that, it looks as if Wittelsbach was making the claim that the money was being shuffled off into the local criminal organizations, that somehow Vincent is responsible for this. This is being suppressed from the media because of what the forensics team found when they looked over the area."
    "So our funds are going to...." Phoenix Talon's eyes widened.
    "Pay the League of Nations operations in Boston."
    "Son of a bitch!"
    "It almost wouldn't be worth it to do that, because eventually this is the sort of thing that somebody will find," Scott mused.
    "Vincent has much more reliable income," I had to agree.
    "The sum total of human vice?" Reilly suggested with a shake of his head. "Vincent's not worrying for money."
    "Since that unfortunate accident his former rival had..." Scott recalled.
    Reilly raised an eyebrow. "The car bomb?"
    "Unfortunate mechanical failure."
    "We are obviously not letting the press know, at the moment, that the Revolution funds have for the better part of a year been being funneled into an international criminal organization which due to the evidence that Thunderbolt's girlfriend has given us, seems to be operating in the general Boston area... what?" he asked, noticing Thunderbolt's grimace.
    "So, it's official?" Talon prodded with a grin.
    "Go on," Thunderbolt sighed.
    "You didn't see the rest of today's paper?" Reilly asked.
    "We just got back, we've been looking for Albert," I told him.
    "What's it say? Does it have a picture of the place I vaporized?"
    I'm already getting worried by Talon's enthusiasm for this new ability.
    "No," Reilly told him. "It's more on the news and rumors section, it's not on the front page."
    "Oh, did they get a photo of you from the dance?" If a robot could grin, Scott would have.
    "Someone mailed this photo to the paper." Reilly handed it over.
    "Told you to get a room," Talon chided.
    "She certainly looks like she's plastered all over you," our liaison remarked.
    I looked at Scott. "Larry?" I couldn't see Felix snapping that; he seemed to agree.
    "In any case, she certainly seems to know something that's going on with the League of Nations. Wasn't she the one who helped you pinpoint that Mort was directly involved? She then pointed out where... this leads me to believe that she's probably some sort of international operative," Reilly concluded, "which is why we don't have any records of her in the city, who's carrying a grudge over from Europe. If there's any way you can make contact with her, it's entirely possible that she has inside information about their organization."
    "I think we could do that if we tried hard," I said solemnly, trying hard not to laugh.
    "I'll see if Interpol has anything, with that sort of faerie-related name, at least that's what other sources have told me. She's probably from Ireland."
    "Yeah. Ask them," I replied.
    "Why are you all looking like there's a joke here I'm not getting?" He glanced around the table.
    "Later. We will look into that end of the question. In the meantime...."
    "We've stepped up our surveillance on Mort and the weapons facility, in hopes that we'll be able to locate something else. But with the funds that they've been drawing off from you...."
    "They've apparently got a lot of money," Scott remarked.
    "Twenty-two million dollars over the last year."We all sat there for a moment, stunned. Reilly was quick to add, "A large chunk of the money that was coming in was also supposed to be diverted to police resources."
    "Like a jail that can actually hold variants?" Scott noted.
    "Yes. So that we don't have ship them down to Harborview instantly, so that we have a facility that will prevent people like General Motors and the Postmaster from simply mailing themselves out. As well as setting up police forces trained to deal with this for the other cities, faster response time, all the rest of it—all this money's just been disappearing. And it didn't help that we had Holly, who is now fire and brimstone for making sure that the money isn't stolen, complaining from word one that the money existed at all. It was a degree of low expectations that had been built up, that obviously you will be operating under a shoestring budget. The funds that were supposed to materialize, didn't. And apparently even the money that's come in from Agglomerated MegaCorporation has been diverted. Lord knows how much of a presence League of Nations has in the greater Boston area right now."
    "Is there anything to say that they were here before Promethean showed up?" Talon asked. "Or did it start then?"
    Some of us reminded him of Mort, who has lived in Boston for years as far as anyone knows.
    "It's entirely possible that they've been doing this since word one," Reilly shrugged.
    "I can get the records pulled and find out how long that weapons depot has been there," Scott offered.
    "And Promethean was all a coincidence?" Talon frowned.
    "He probably just happened to end up in the right or wrong as you want to look at it place."
    "Did Promethean have any contact with Mr. Mort?" Reilly asked suddenly.
    "Yeah," Talon told him. "That night when they went over there. That was it."
    "When the unfortunate incident happened," he recalled.
    "The night of the butterflies." I tried not to sigh at the thought of how much trouble we could have saved ourselves that night. We hadn't met Mort himself that night, but given the mess that followed he would probably have been paying more attention to us than before.
    "Mort might have recognized him then," Scott suggested. "Just sent word that this guy's just shown up."
    "Called in additional reinforcements," Reilly nodded thoughtfully.

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