A storm of absolute malevolence battered and terrorized Seattle. Streets were flooded, and asphalt collapsed into dangerous sinkholes both downtown and in parts of the outlying suburbs. Boats moored in harbors all up and down the waterfront collided again and again with their own docks or with other vessels close by, and several smaller craft had already gone under. Power lines were down from one end of the city to the other, and only scattered pockets of neighborhoods still had lights as 9:00 p.m. neared.

Captain Dane Casey rubbed his jaw absently and watched the vast interactive city map on UNCLE’s oversized wall monitor, and as each new block turned dark, indicating outage, he thought that Seattle looked like it was slowly dying, one organ at a time. His mind wandered on the seeming randomness of the outages. What made one part of town lucky, and another cast into darkness?

Maybe those are the people that put lamb’s blood on their front doors, he thought.

He looked over at the communications center again. Agents were taking plenty of incoming calls, from city departments looking for information or assistance, or from citizens who just thought to call the most high-profile government agency in town in the middle of a natural disaster. None of these were the call he was waiting for.

He checked his watch for the eighth time, got up, and started walking the main office. Watching the monitor was making him crazy. Not because of the storm itself and the emergency they were all facing because of it, but because the storm had to happen tonight. Tonight, with everything else going on. There was a certain dramatic resonance to it that both seemed right and annoyed the hell out of him.

His commander, the head of UNCLE Seattle, stepped from his office. Commander Edward Castillo’s eyes took in the main office and found Dane right away. There was economy in every motion he made. Serious almost to a fault, he wasted nothing…movements, time or words. Tonight he was even more grim than normal.

“Anything?” he asked, his voice, as ever, quiet but powerful.

“Nothing, sir,” Casey said. “We’re getting phone and radio from all over the city, but Jackson’s waiting for…anything relevant. He’ll get me. There’s just so much going on. Everyone’s stretched thin. I don’t know how we’re supposed to get help on this.”

Castillo lowered his head in thought, and half-raised it again in that way he had. His stony eyes would rise up to meet you, as they did now to Dane.

“We make due,” he said. “We wait.”

“Sir, I need to be out there,” Dane said, his frustration plain. “I’m just…I’m sitting around the one place in the city I know neither of them are. I need to do something. Anything.”

“We wait,” Castillo said again, calmly, that steel gaze of his locked on Dane. “There’s nothing you can do out there without the facts. Especially with the storm. Keep monitoring communications. Check in with Thorpe again. Keep me informed.”

Exhaling through his teeth and running his hands over his close-cropped blond hair, Dane closed his eyes and nodded. He knew Castillo was right. “Yes, sir.”

Castillo turned and stepped back into his office. Inside the door, he paused, and turned his head. He spoke to Dane over his shoulder.

“I know how you feel.”

He disappeared back into his office. Dane watched him go, then turned around and took in the frenzied scene in the office again. And again, he checked his watch.

8:59 P.M.

 

---

 

 

Lucy Toy—her Tinker costume hidden under her still-drying trench coat—looked up as the overhead fluorescents in the waiting room flickered again. There were generators, of course, to handle this kind of situation, and it looked like they’d be seeing use sooner or later. But that wasn’t comforting news to any of the nervous, lost people sitting around her, most of them probably waiting on news of loved ones. How many of them, she wondered, were waiting on news of a child, too?

The thought caused her eyes to moisten again, and she tried to choke the emotion back down. It was as waste of time that wasn’t going to do anyone any good. She needed to work the problem. That’s what she did best, right? What she was supposed to be so good at? But her mind was everywhere, dancing up and down the emotional barometer, her thoughts changing direction and scattering like the winds outside.

She got up and walked out of the waiting room, trying to divine her next action, disliking the echoes her steps cast on the hospital linoleum. She looked down the hall to her left, and she saw Cliff—Special Agent Cliff Rohm, former Seattle P.D. and current F.B.I.—walking toward her, cell phone to his ear. She picked up her pace, causing louder echoes, and met him halfway.

“Okay, thanks,” he said into his phone, then disconnected it and turned his attention to Lucy.

“Anything we can use?” she asked him.

“No,” he said, but there seemed to her something funny in his voice. But with everything happening tonight, maybe that was normal. “I’m still working on it.”

She absently stared at a medical chart hanging on the wall, but the words there might as well have been ancient Egyptian for all the attention she gave to processing them. “Where would he be, Cliff? Come on, he was your partner.”

“And he’s yours now,” Cliff countered. “I don’t know any more than you do. If he doesn’t want to be found, we probably won’t find him.”

“We’ll find him,” Lucy said defensively. She looked down reflexively at her watch, not a normal watch at all, but a modified (by her) version of the old Forte communicators. “Damnit, why won’t he answer?”

“We both know the answer to that,” Cliff said in a low voice.

She started to snap at him, but she saw a woman come walking around the corner. Cliff followed Lucy’s gaze and saw her too. They both trotted toward her.

Stephanie Fields—who was Stephanie Banks for a few years of her life—looked shell-shocked. The sleeves of her green blouse were in tatters, and bandages had been wrapped around her forearms. A bandage was on her forehead as well, where stitches had been needed.

Cliff reached her first and she threw her doctored arms around his neck. He held her tightly and rocked her back and forth. Lucy hung back, feeling uncomfortable. These two had history. She and Stephanie had relatively little.

“They get you fixed up, Steph?” he asked, pulling away from the hug once she let him go.

“Yeah,” she laughed bitterly, like it was something not even worth mentioning. “Just some burns. It’s nothing.”

Lucy stared at the wrappings, and her stomach roiled. Burns. Images of her parents’ and brother’s faces flashed across her mind. No matter how many years and how much therapy, that reaction was never going to go away, was it?

“It’s not nothing,” Cliff said, checking out her bandages. “You had to let them work on you. You need to be healthy for all this, right?”

A tear, one of many that she’d spilled in the past three hours, rolled down her cheek, and she wiped it away with her bandaged wrist. She sniffled. “I just checked again,” she said. “He’s still in surgery. They don’t have anything to tell me.”

“They will,” he soothed. “They need time to do the job right. He’s getting the best care.”

Lucy tried to look for some comforting words, too, but was distracted by the sight of two armed UNCLE agents watching from around the corner Stephanie had just come from. They were keeping their distance, but their mission was clear. They weren’t letting Stephanie out of their sight. One of them, a woman with her hair pulled back into a tail, was scanning the hall with trained eyes.

Stephanie must have seen Lucy looking, as she turned around and looked at them too.

“I don’t understand this,” she said, turning back to Cliff. “Where’s Jared? Where did he go?”

Cliff looked away uncomfortably. “We’re working on that, Steph.”

“I don’t understand any of this.” Stephanie’s frustration was raw and jagged. “Why is this happening? Who was that…that…” Rage and a sort of helplessness broke her voice. “…Animal? And what does he have to do with Jared? What does he have to do with me and…with Gabriel? Why are federal agents guarding us?”

Her voice was getting louder as she went on, and Lucy felt ashamed at her compulsion to quiet the woman. She was dancing close to familiar secrets. But what did any of that matter at a time like this?

Cliff stepped closer to Stephanie and lowered his voice, obviously thinking the same thing Lucy had been. “Steph, it’s complicated. Jared…Jared has enemies—”

“What enemies?” she shot back. “He’s not a cop anymore. He’s corporate security! What kind of enemies do you get doing that? And how could you get enemies in flying armored suits?”

“I told you, it’s complicated—”

“And I ask you again, what does any of this have to do with me and Gabriel?”

Cliff swallowed and looked at the ceiling for a moment. “We think this guy attacked your house to get back at Jared. We’re…we know he did.”

Stephanie stared at him, trying to make any kind of sense of it. Lucy wanted to help, wanted to explain all of it to her, all the things Jared had never told his ex-wife. It wasn’t fair. She deserved to know it all. Hadn’t she paid for that right with what she was going through, as a mother? But that wasn’t Lucy’s call to make. More of the secrets. More of the trappings of their business. It was all madness.

“Get back at Jared for what?” Stephanie asked him.

Cliff sighed and pinched his fingers at the inner corners of his eyes. “This man holds Jared responsible for a woman’s death. A woman this man was involved with.”

“What?”

“Jared had nothing to do with it,” Lucy said, though she hadn’t expected to speak. “This man just thinks—”

“Wait, wait,” Stephanie said, raising her bandaged arms in a fending off gesture, overwhelmed by everything she was hearing, everything that was happening. Her New York accent, dulled by years in Seattle, seemed to return in proportion to her anger. She turned to Lucy. “Who—who are you?” Obviously, Stephanie knew who she was, as they’d met on several occasions…but that wasn’t really her question, was it? “Jared said he works with you? What is this? Works with you doing what? Are you involved in this?”

Lucy leaned back a little, caught off guard by the venom in the other woman’s voice, though she shouldn’t have been surprised by it. She wondered if she was actually turning red with the shame washing over her. Shame at all the secrets. She wasn’t involved directly…but wasn’t she? Weren’t they all that played this hero game? “I think…it’s better that Jared—”

“Why are you here?” Stephanie nearly yelled. Heads at the nurses’ station nearby turned. “Where is Jared? Why did he leave?” She spun on Cliff. “Where did he go, Cliff? His son, my baby, is in surgery, with a collapsed lung, and a—” Tears broke loose from her red eyes again. “And…what’s going on, Cliff? What the hell is he doing?”

Cliff looked the floor, hands on his hips. He spoke bluntly, giving up the sugar-coating he’d been attempting. Such graces were unnatural to him anyway. “What do you think he’s doing, Steph?,” he asked quietly. “What do you think Jared’s doing out there, knowing what this guy did to you and Gabriel?”

It dawned on her in the passing of a moment, and her face went white. “He’s gone to kill him.”

Cliff didn’t meet her gaze, but instead looked away, down the hall.

“Oh, that’s great,” she said, and more tears trailed out. “That’s wonderful. Same old Jared. Rage over reason. What’s he supposed to do against someone like that? Huh?”

Lucy fought off another compulsion to explain. Would that really matter?

“Just great. His son’s up there fighting for his life, and Jared’s off trying to make him an orphan. He’s going to get himself killed. Where’s Gabriel going to be then, huh?”

“We’re trying to find him, Stephanie,” Lucy said. “We’re not going to let him—“

“Shut up!” Stephanie did yell this time. A nurse looked around like she meant to get security, but saw the UNCLE agents, who just stared back at her. The nurse quietly sat down. “Just shut up! Both of you! Just get away from me!”

She backed away from them, her eyes accusing, glaring at them both. But her anger quickly melted into sorrow again, and she put a hand to her mouth and started crying. Lucy felt all the woman’s pain like a spike in her heart.

“I’m going to check on my son,” she said, her voice cracking. She turned from them and hurried off, past the pair of agents. They let her pass, not making eye contact. After she was by them, they looked at each other and started to follow her.

Cliff closed his eyes and shook his head. He looked at Lucy, and they stood there wordlessly for a moment. Then Cliff slowly started following after Stephanie.

Left alone in the hall, Lucy put her thumb and forefinger on her temples. The tension of that moment had given her a headache and a terrible knot in her stomach. The knot quickly turned to a burning as Stephanie’s anger fueled Lucy’s own.

“This is not going to happen,” she muttered to herself.

She turned and stormed down the hall. Coming to a women’s restroom, she all but kicked the door open. Not breaking stride, she marched across the room, slamming stall doors open to make sure she was alone. When she confirmed that she was, she pressed a tiny button on her watch. The device planted in her ear that acted as both transmitter and receiver gave a faint hum that indicated signal.

“Davis, what’s going on?” she said, pacing in front of the row of sinks. “I need that information now.”

 

---

 

Davis Alexander, wearing the monstrous, rocky form of Rainier, was standing in the executive office of Tether International in downtown Seattle. The full-length windows dwarfing the desk he stood before were cascaded with sheets of storm water. The lights were still on. Tether had already gone to generators.

“Uh, I’m working on that now, Tinker,” he said, awkwardly.

“Work faster,” the voice in his ear said. He wasn’t used to hearing this tone in her voice. “We don’t have time for this. You’re eight feet tall, Davis. Try intimidation.”

“Yeah…” he said uncomfortably, regarding the man sitting at the desk in front of him. He pointed to his ear to indicate he was talking into a radio, not to himself. “As I said, I’m dealing with that now. I’ll have to get back to you.”

“Just do it,” she told him, and the signal cut off.

Lightning streaked down outside the window, and the building shook with a roar of thunder that followed almost immediately after. Davis was still busy thinking about Lucy’s voice. She was definitely on edge. Normally, in their little quartet, a group that had now been through two years of ungodly trials together, he could count on her to be, along with him, the voice of reason and control. Her starting to lose it now just underscored how bad things were.

“Forgive me, Mr. Tether,” he said. “Radio call.”

“I understand,” the distinguished old man said. He was seated in his leather chair, his phone pulled close to him, within reach. He’d been on it a great deal since news of this tragedy had reached him, Davis knew. “Is there anything new?”

“No,” Rainier said. “It’s just…as I was saying, sir, things are desperate, and we really need that information.”

“And as I was saying,” Tether said, quietly, “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do for you. I wish there were.”

“Sir,” Rainier said, carefully, “I realize that you didn’t design the Seahawk suit yourself. But you know a great deal about it. And you can call in your engineering team. We know that because of its stealth design it can’t be tracked by conventional means. But I concur with Tinker. I have to believe that your people designed some means of following it in case of…well, of any unseen emergency. A hidden frequency, something. Anything we can use to find Jared.”

Tether sighed, sounding very tired, physically and emotionally. “Mr. Rainier. I sympathize with what you’re doing. I completely understand. Jared is a more than a valued employee to me. He’s a good friend. It breaks my heart—” He placed his hand over his chest to illustrate, and the pain in his voice was very real. "--To think what he must be going through, and what that poor child is going through. I’ve already taken steps to assure that the boy will receive the best care available in his recovery, the best in the world. This is the least I can do for my friend.”

“Yes, I know, and I know Jared will appreciate it, sir. He’s my friend, too. A better friend to me than I think he even realizes. And this is why I need to find him before he does something he’ll regret for the rest of his life. Wherever he is, he’s not thinking clearly. How could he be? How could you or I, if it were us?”

Warren Tether nodded, listening patiently.

“He needs us to think for him right now,” Rainier went on. “I know he wants to find Stingray, I know he wants to kill the man. We’re trying to find Stingray first. Our team is looking, UNCLE is looking, we have the FBI involved, as much as they all can be with all this going on outside. But in case we can’t find him before Jared does, we must find Jared. We have to bring him in. And Tinker believes you can help us do this.”

Again, the white-haired man sighed. “I would do anything for my friend, Mr. Rainier. But many things come with friendship. One of them is respect. And above all else, I respect what it is he’s feeling right now, and what he feels he has to do.”

“You can’t mean that, Mr. Tether. He’s going to kill him. He’ll murder him. We can stop that.”

“And is that our right, to stop this? I consider you a friend as well, Mr. Rainier, and I have respect for you, too. I respect what you’re trying to do for him. You’re doing what you think is best, out of love for your teammate. But I don’t think you can truly understand. Unless I’m mistaken, you’ve never faced the horror of atrocities committed on your loved ones. I have. We come from different times, you and I. I’ve seen firsthand what evil men can do. I’ve seen it, and I’ve known loss.”

“I know, sir,” Davis said quietly. “Jared and I have discussed this.”

“And Jared and I understand each other because of this. Our friendship is strong because we are same-thinking men. We both understand the need in this world for justice. Justice has failed in these latter days. In my time? We understood that vengeance and justice are not so different. That for a world to be just, the unjust must face retribution. This is the right of the wronged, to bring this retribution. This monster, this Stingray, attacked Jared’s family, those he loves. The boy Gabriel fights for his life. Because of this man. As a father, is it not Jared’s right to seek what is rightfully his?”

“Sir,” Davis said, patiently. “Stingray will see justice for what he’s done. We’ll all make sure of that. But not this way. Not at this cost. If our friend does this, Mr. Tether, then we’ve lost our friend.”

Tether shook his head, slowly. “It’s a hard thing, a situation like this. And you and I may even be able to agree that Jared and his family would be the better if the justice you speak of was the one that ended it. I’ll tell you the truth, I hope it is. But I have no right to stand in his way. The right of retribution is his. As his friend, as a man, as a father, I have to respect this. What he does with it is his own choice to bear.”

“Is there a frequency, Mr. Tether?” Rainier asked again, not sounding hopeful.

Tether looked up at him, quietly.

“Is it that there isn’t one, or that you won’t give it to us?”

“As I said,” Tether said sympathetically. “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do for you. I’m sorry.”

9:24 P.M.

 

---

 

 

“Max?”

It was hard to hear Lucy in his ear with the storm raging around him, with the wind throwing pieces of Seattle at him for spite, but it finally clicked. He was in the middle of pulling an old woman out of her nearly submerged car. How the situation happened was obvious to him when he’d flown by and come across the car—in the darkness, she hadn’t been able to see how deep the waters flooding the street were. Her car had stalled in the center, and the frigid waters had begun rising quickly, trapping her.

“Hang on!” Max yelled.

“I will!” the elderly woman yelled back. He hadn’t actually been talking to her, but that worked out okay anyway.

Crouching on the roof of her Buick, he lifted her from the open driver’s window and took her into his arms, as the rain beat down mercilessly on them. She clung tightly around his neck as he took to the air, a short flight that carried them from the danger to a covered bus stop up the street.

“Oh, thank you, Max,” she blubbered as he sat her gently down on the bench. “God bless you. God bless you.”

“No problem, ma’am,” he smiled. “Just wait right there, I’ll get your car out.”

He didn’t bother flying, as it was close enough for him to run at his greatly increased speed. Already soaked, he went ahead and waded through the water, reaching through her window and changing the car’s gear to neutral.

“Sorry, Lucy,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“What’s your situation?” she asked.

“Uh, still at it. But right now I’m getting a car out of a sinkhole.”

“Max, you’re supposed to be looking for Jared.”

“I know,” he said, wading back to the rear of the car. He put his hands on either side of the trunk and started pushing the car against the stubborn resistance of the water. With his strength, it wasn’t much of a fight. “But I keep running into people in trouble. What am I supposed to do?”

“I know, Bobby, I know.” Man, she sounded tired. “Have you had any luck?”

“None,” he said, trying to keep his footing on the remains of the street below him. “I’m looking everywhere. I keep trying to think where else he’d be, but I’m just stumped.”

“Just keep trying. And keep doing what you can out there.”

“This storm had to happen tonight, right?”

“Yeah.”

“How’s Gabriel?”

“We don’t know. He’s still in surgery. Stephanie’s out of the ER. She’s okay.”

“Thank God.”

“Have you tried the pier again?”

“Yep. No sign. You realize with the armor, he could just be underwater. Maybe he’s looking for Stingray there.”

“I know.”

“We need to find Stingray, Lucy. If he’s only here until tonight, we can’t let him get away. After what he did—”

“Focus, Max. We’ll catch him. We’ve got people trying to track him down. You need to find Jared.”

Max got the car out of the water, and walked back around to the window. He reached in with his right hand and steered as he parallel parked it beside a curb. “Maybe we shouldn’t. I mean, if it was my kid—”

“Bobby, stop it,” she ordered. “You can’t think like that, and you know it. You want Jared ending up in prison?”

“No,” he agreed, sullenly. “I’m just…I don’t think I’ve ever been this mad. Gabe’s such a cool little kid. Part of me wants to kill this guy myself.”

“I know how you feel, okay? But nobody’s going to kill him. He’s going to jail. That’s what we do. We’re the good guys, right?”

“Right,” he sighed. He opened the Buick’s door, pulled the keys out of the ignition, grabbed the woman’s purse, and rolled up the window. Locking the door, he closed it tight.

“Okay. Just keeping trying. There’s nothing else we can do right now.”

“I will. Keep me updated.”

“Okay, Bobby.” Her signal cut out.

Max ran back across the street, hoping that no one would see him—or worse, snap of picture of him—carrying a purse.

“Sorry about your car, ma’am,” he told the waiting woman. He handed her purse and keys to her. “It’s not going to start once it gets water up to floorboards like that. It’s probably a goner. You’re going to have to call for a tow tomorrow. I think a lot of people will.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s just a car. I’m just happy to be out of there.”

“Do you live around here?”

“Yes, I was almost home. I’m a few blocks that way.”

“Well let me fly you home real quick, and then I’ve got to get back out. There’s a lot of other bad stuff going on out here tonight.”

A lot of it.

9:37 P.M.

 

---

 

Nightsable appeared out of thin air and into the darkened living room of the original Forte base. Only minimal lighting came from niches near the ceiling, as was normal for nights in this perpetually unoccupied headquarters. The new Forte, at least for now, had a new Forte base. This one still languished much of the time, kept timeless by cleaning robots and air filters and climate control. The structure was always under its own power, so no outage would be knocking out its few living lights tonight, the ones that cast long shadows across the floors and walls.

“Jared?” she shouted, realizing she sounded—and was—frantic. There was no answer. Just a lingering feeling in this quiet place like she had just yelled out in church, or a funeral parlor.

She ran, crying, to the computer and security room. She pulled up the main system and checked all the logs. Her teleportation into the base had been captured and recorded by the sensors. Previous to that, no one had been in the building for two weeks.

This just made her cry more. She needed any ray of hope, anything to tell her she was on the right track, something to take her mind off the sight and the thought of Gabriel laying on that table as nurses cut away his bloody and torn clothing. He looked so pale, so broken and lifeless. It wasn’t that long ago that she was playing Monopoly on Jared’s boat with him, laughing with him, thinking how the already handsome nine-year old had his father’s smile. She’d been nervous, spending that much time with him, wondering what he’d tell his mother about his father’s young woman visitor. She remembered being warmed by the fact that Jared, playing the game with them, didn’t seem to care about that. It had been a wonderful evening. Gabriel had been so funny, and so sweet.

And now he was in a scary white room, opened up, with strangers trying to sew him together.

She let herself give in to the hopelessness for a moment and just wept there in the glow of the bank of computer monitors.

“Sam?”

She jumped, having missed the telltale tone, because of her sobbing, that announced the incoming radio call in her ear. She recognized Lucy’s voice right away. She also recognized from the way Lucy’s voice had trailed off that Lucy had chimed in and heard her crying.

“Lucy?” she said, trying to collect herself. All of a sudden, she was filled with dread. Was there news? Bad news, about Gabriel? Or Jared?

“Honey, are you okay?” Lucy asked kindly.

“I’m okay,” she lied, snuffling.

“Where are you?”

“I’m at the old base. I thought maybe if he wanted to be alone, he might have come here. But he’s not here either. I don’t know where he is.” She realized she was crying again.

“It’s a big city, Sam. It’s okay. You’re doing your best.”

“I’ve been to the boat three times. To the other base. Rooftops we sometimes rendezvous on before patrolling. I’m running out of ideas.”

“You’re doing good. I’m trying to get some better information for us, but in the meantime, you’re doing the right thing. The more places we know he’s not, the fewer places he could be.”

“Is Gabe okay?” Sam asked, her voice one of childlike hope, as if wishing could make it so.

“We’re still waiting. Nothing new. You know he’s a tough kid.”

Sam sobbed a little more. “Jared blames himself.”

“I know.”

“I think he blames himself so much he’s trying to get himself killed to atone, Lucy.”

“We’re not going to let him do that. We’re going to find him.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

Sam sniffled and laughed. “God, listen to me. I’m sorry, Lucy, I’m a mess.”

“We all are.”

“I’ll be okay. I just need to keep moving.” She wiped her eyes and breathed deeply, trying to at least manufacture some strength and resolve.

“Good. Good. I’ll keep in touch, okay? I’ll let you know everything that’s happening. You just keep poofing.”

“I will. Thanks, Lucy.”

The connection cut, and Sam was alone again. Crying wasn’t going to do her any good. Worrying about Jared and imagining what he must be going through wasn’t going to make him magically appear. She had to keep trying.

She rose to her feet, wiped her face again, and vanished.

9:40 P.M.

 

---

 

Misery Love noticed her cell phone vibrating on her belt. She usually kept it in the pocket of her leather trench coat, but she’d discarded the coat and left it lying over a dusty crate. She was in faded jeans and a tee shirt now, the sleeves of the shirt rolled up over the taught, hard muscles of her dark upper arms. The coat had been getting in the way of her work.

“Looks like you got a breather,” she said to the man before her, and backed off two steps. She turned around and snatched up her phone.

“Misery Love.”

“Misery, it’s Tinker,” Lucy’s voice said.

“Just the woman I was going to call. Fancy that.”

“Do you have something?” Lucy asked anxiously.

“Well, not some thing. Some one.”

She turned and glanced at the greasy man tied to the chair. The blood on his face was black in the darkness of the abandoned building. Rain fed in from multiple holes in the aging roof and puddled on the floor. The puddles were fast joining, and the whole floor would be flooded soon.

“My usual snitch wasn’t much help, but he pointed me to someone that might be.”

“And?”

“He’s talking. Took some coaxing.”

“I hope you mean with money.”

“Do we have time for that?”

Lucy sighed into the phone. “God, Misery.”

“I’ll take a rain check on the lecture. You want to hear this?”

“Yes.”

“Our friend here’s a bad little monkey. I know his name. He’s involved in a lot of deals and trafficking. Rumor has it he has a hand in selling little Korean girls off the boat. He and I are going to talk about that later. But he kindly volunteered that there’s talk of a big deal going down tonight, one the weather’s not going to stop. Somebody was hiring freelance muscle for security.”

“Where? Where?”

“I don’t think he knows. I plan to make sure, though, don’t you worry. The contact point’s a waterfront bar off Pier 70. Barnaby’s. I’m headed there next. Rowdy place. I’ve been there before. Sounds like a good lead.”

“You need some backup?”

“I don’t think you good hero types want to be around for it. Trust me. Leave it to the P.I. This is what I do.”

There was a pause before Lucy spoke again. “How soon will you know?”

“Just need a little more quality time with Mr. Big Crime here, and I’m headed right over. Probably twenty. Any word from the man?”

“No.”

“You sure you want to get in his way? I’ve seen him like this. I don’t know if you have.”

“We need to get there first, Misery.”

“Okay. Just asking.” She watched her prisoner. “I’ll check in when I know more.”

“I’ll do the same. Misery? Thank you.”

“He’s my friend. It’s no thing. Keep a happy thought.”

“You, too.”

“Don’t think I have any of those tonight.”

She disconnected and replaced her phone, and took a moment to readjust her twin shoulder holsters that cradled a pair of .45’s. The president and sole employee of the Misery Love Company strolled back toward the chair, and the man bound to it tried to shy away.

“Please,” he pleaded over his split lip. “That’s all I know. I swear to God.”

“Don’t bring God into this, little man,” she said, standing over him. Her braids jostled as she stretched her neck. “And that had better be all you know. If I find out you’re holding back? The likes of you, a child-selling piece of shit? God’s got nothing on what I’ll have in store for you.”

Just to make her point, and just on general principle, she knocked out two of his teeth with one punch.

9:53 P.M.

 

---

 

A woman and her daughter walked into the restroom, and so Lucy vacated it. She looked around and wandered the hall until she found an unoccupied room. Both beds were empty, and the room was dark, save for the occasional burst of lightning outside the window. She made sure she wasn’t being watched and stepped inside, closing the door behind her.

Back on her radio, she placed a call.

“Yes?” Rainier’s voice responded.

“What’s happening?”

“It’s not happening. If he knows, he’s not telling. I’m back on the street. I’m sorry, Lucy. I don’t intimidate as well as I should.”

It was pretty much what she’d expected. “It’s okay, Davis. You tried. You’re where?”

“About 5th and Union.”

“I want you to head over to Pier 70. We may have a lead in that area. If it happens, I need you close.”

“Done. I’ll unrock and ride over, if my bike hasn’t washed away yet. Any details?”

“Still to come.”

“Are you okay? You were sounding a little unhinged before.”

“It passed. Thanks, Davis.”

“All right. Call me when I’ve got an address. I’ll find a good spot and wait.”

“Okay. Out.”

She sat down in the dark on the unsheeted bed next to her and watched the trees outside bend to the wind. She ran all the variables through her head, which, to her relief, was starting to clear up. After a couple of minutes of this, she was keying her radio again.

“Dane?”

“Tinker?” asked the familiar voice in her ear. Dane Casey was more than just a Captain with UNCLE Seattle. He was the official hero liaison to Forte, and had history with them right from the new team’s inception. They trusted him, and, as such, had provided him with his own Forte radio. Just for occasions like this.

“How are things on your end?”

He exhaled. “We’ve got as many people as we can spare on this. Agents are chasing leads. We’re rousting places. We’re swapping intel with other agencies. I’m following it all, but I don’t have good news yet. You?”

“Maybe. Misery has a bar to check. We may have someone hiring security for a transaction.”

“I’ll get a team right down there. I’ll get down there. Where?”

“I think we’ll have better luck with Misery than a squad of uniformed agents, Dane. That’s not very subtle.”

“And Misery is?”

“She knows the place, and this is her area. Let’s let her go with it, okay?”

“All right. I just want something to do. I feel useless.”

“I know. I’m feeling the same way here. Stephanie’s out—”

“I know. I’m in contact with our people at the hospital. I’m getting reports on Gabriel every quarter hour.”

Lucy winced again at just the mention of his name. She felt the sudden need for an update, too. “Imagine if your people knew it was Seahawk’s son, huh?”

“Knowing Stingray tried to blow up the house of a woman and child is enough to get everyone pissed, don’t worry. Doesn’t matter…about the other part.”

He paused, and she picked up that he was walking away from other people and heading somewhere private. Probably his office.

In a couple of moments, he was back. “I’m going to do everything I can to keep the connection out of the case, Lucy. Me and Castillo both. But if we catch Stingray and put him away, I don’t think he’ll be shy about spilling Jared’s secret to whoever will listen.”

“I know. But I can’t think that far ahead right now. We’ll face it when it comes.”

“Not that Jared’s been to great about keeping the Seahawk thing to himself, anyway. I know, Castillo knows, you guys, Misery, Tether…”

“Yeah,” she said. “Everyone but his wife and son, it seems.”

“Well,” Dane said, sounding diplomatic and cautious, “his ex-wife. And Gabriel’s pretty young for this kind of thing. I’m sure Jared’s just trying to protect them.”

“She had right to know, Dane. This is exactly why.”

“Jared didn’t know that Stingray found out—”

“It doesn’t matter. She had the right to know it was possible. Gabriel’s with his Dad half the time. She deserved to know.”

Dane rode out the uncomfortable silence. “Well, hey, you’d know better than me, right? You guys are the heroes.”

“Yeah. That’s what we are.”

More silence.

“Listen,” she sighed. “It doesn’t matter. We need to think this through. There’s something we’re missing.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s run through what we know. Stingray tries for the theft. Jared gets wind and stops him. He gets away, we find out the deal on the goods. We find out Yoshikazu is the interested buyer.”

“But we have no evidence,” Dane joined in. “Just speculation. Not enough to charge, hold or even accuse him.”

“Stingray tries again when the goods are being moved. Seahawk goes after him, alone.”

“Because with this guy, it’s personal for Jared. They have history.”

“And because Jared still doesn’t trust his friends. A fight ensues. Stingray’s new partner and lover, Ice Storm, gets accidentally killed. The rest of us show up before Stingray can kill Seahawk, Stingray gets away with the goods.”

“He goes deep under. We put the heat on Yoshikazu. We get evidence, and Yoshikazu disappears. But he’s not gone. He and Stingray are both still in Seattle. Yoshikazu wants the goods bad enough that he’s going to chance the deal. Stingray wants the cash. This is the score of his lifetime, his retirement. He’s not small time anymore. Unless he blows this deal. His ego won’t let it go, even through his grief.”

“He wants vengeance. We can assume now that he spent all that disappeared time doing everything he could to track Seahawk. Somehow, he does it. He finds out Seahawk is Jared Banks. He finds out everything he can about Jared Banks. He finds out about Jared’s ex-wife and son. He attacks their house and tries to kill them both, to get payback. He makes a big show of it so Jared will know who did it.”

“We turn one of Yoshikazu’s people, we find out Yoshikazu is leaving the country tonight. But he’s going to make the deal. Stingray’s actions suggest he’s leaving, too. He knows every hero in the country will be after him for what he did, once it gets out. This thing with Jared’s family is his last bit of business before making the deal and disappearing. We know the exchange is going to happen, but we don’t know where. We’re all over Yoshikazu’s people, but we’re getting nothing. You know, that makes sense, the thing about him hiring freelance security instead of using his own people. He’s covering his ass, not giving us any bread crumbs to follow.”

“And we know the deal will happen before midnight, and then they’ll both be gone forever.”

They both looked at their watches. It was 10:13 P.M.

“The only good news is,” Lucy continued, “if we don’t know where Stingray is, neither does Jared.”

“We hope,” Dane added.

“So we need to know where this exchange will take place. We find that, we find Stingray and Yoshikazu both. Are we missing any avenues to this?”

“Um, Yoshikazu’s people are covered, by us and by F.B.I. I’ve got all we have on Stingray, history and psych profile. He’s small time by nature, not a leader, so the place will be picked by Yoshikazu, who’s a control freak. It won’t be anywhere we’d look, no place connected with him. Could be on a boat, maybe?”

“I’ve got Captain Compass keeping an eye out for anything along those lines, but he’s pretty busy with sea rescues right now.”

“We’ve got the possible waterfront bar angle. Local muscle. That makes me think it’ll be on land. Probably waterfront. My guess is Yoshikazu leaves by boat or ship, since he’ll know we have the airports covered. Maybe that’s how we’ll catch him leaving. Look for the boat stupid enough to head out in this mess.”

“But that’ll be too late. Stingray will be long gone by then.”

“Agreed. So where? Hang on, I’m pulling up the city map on my computer.”

Lucy got up and walked to the window. She leaned an arm on the cold glass. With the room’s dim light, she could just make out her reflection.

“He leaves nothing to chance, so he’ll want a location he can trust,” she said, more to herself than Dane. “But his own places are compromised. So what does he do? What can he use that he can control? He’s not going to meet Stingray at some random location and walk in there blind. He’d want it covered, checked out. But he can’t use his people, because we’re on his people. So how does he do it?”

“You can’t trust hired thugs for that kind of work. They’re protection only.”

“He’s got help.”

“He does have a lot of friends. But the word’s out. He’s tainted. No one’s going near him.”

“Unless that friend has something to gain. Something big.”

Lucy froze in place. Runnels of rainwater poured down her transparent reflection.

“Tinker?”

“That’s it. Dane, that’s it!”

“What? What’s it?”

“The restaurant.”

“Restaurant?”

“When we first confronted Yoshikazu after the second theft. He was having lunch, by himself.”

“Right.”

“Dane, who else did we run into there?”

The radio line fell silent for a moment. “Ares?”

“Nick Ares was there. Having lunch. By himself.”

“Well, it’s an upscale joint, Tink. Businessmen frequent it all the time. That could just be coincidence.”

“When do men like Ares and Yoshikazu ever have lunch alone? That’s their prime business time. They use every lunch for meetings, schmoozing, whatever. That’s how they stay billionaires.”

“So…” He was trying to work it through.

“So what are the chances of both of them being at the same restaurant and both having lunch alone? Chances are zero, because they weren’t lunching alone. They were meeting there.”

“That’s still a big jump, Tinker. I know your feelings about Ares. I have the same ones. But—”

“Dane, it was a meeting. Yoshikazu knew after the second theft, when Stingray screwed up, that everything had gone wrong, and that we were building a case for his involvement as buyer. He and Ares are rivals in theory, but they’ve worked together in the past. On the Hyrdodyne project, for one, just two years ago.”

“Really?”

“Yoshikazu was reaching out to Ares at the restaurant. He was looking for help to get out of this and make it all work. He was already planning his exit strategy. Remember how Ares made such a big deal out of saying he was dining alone, how he tried to avoid me before I spotted him?”

“I do. So, if this is the case, what does Ares get out of it? Yoshikazu’s still the one making the deal, and the one getting the goods.”

“Who knows? Maybe Ares gets a cut of the profit. Or maybe Ares plays at that when he’s really planning to double-cross Yoshikazu. The point is, he turned to Ares for help on his exit, and to complete the deal.”

“And if Yoshikazu can’t use any of his own places—”

“Maybe he’s using one of Ares’.”

“Son of a bitch,” Dane marveled. “It makes sense. I mean, it’s still a stretch, but—”

“But I’m right, and I know it. It’s happening at a place that belongs to Ares. And one down on the waterfront. It may be going on as we speak. Dane, we need to find every building owned by Ares or his subsidiaries down there.”

“That could be a lot,” Dane said, but she could already hear him getting to his feet and running out of his office. “The man owns half the city.”

“We don’t need to cover the city. Just the waterfront. That cuts it down substantially.”

“It’ll take time.”

“We’re out of time.”

“I’m going to clear this with Castillo and get our people here working it. I’ll have them get the info to me en route. I’m taking a team to the waterfront so we’ll be close and ready. When we get a list, we’ll do some elimination, then start hitting the likely ones one by one.”

“And you’ll get that list to me as soon as it comes through, and we’ll be splitting it up with you.”

“Done. I’ll get back to you, Tinker.”

“Got you. Out.”

Lucy hammered her fist on the thick glass in triumph. No more groping in the dark. She had tools to work with now. It was going to come together.

But would it come together in time?

She clicked another setting on her radio.

“Max? Max, I want you to get to Pier 70. Davis is on his way there. Find him, hook up with him, and wait for word from me. We’ve got a lead, so be ready to go in a heartbeat. We’re going to do this.”

Part 2

 

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