Episode 4.06

by Suz

I've been spending more time with the dictionary lately than with my quote books. Maybe to try and define the mess my life is these days. I don't know, maybe it's just ego, like pretty much everything else I've ever done. A waste of time. Or at least a whole lot more work than I ever counted on having to do. Hell, I spent my formative years avoiding school, jobs, even expectations. I was gonna bypass the conventional if it killed me. And I'm wondering if I've gotten my wish. I'm stuck. Stuck with a life filled with dangers I never could have expected.

A life that's frustrating. Scary. Pointless.

Maybe even worthwhile. And probably prematurely fatal.

Maybe. Just... maybe... it'll be worth it.

It's hard to think of 'life' as worth anything, most of the time. Especially lately. But in my random hours with Webster, there've been a few definitions that keep coming up in my poking around for the meaning of it. Well, the meaning of mine, anyway. And there's one word that describes my strange little world: community. Which, according to my dictionary, is a group of people with common interests, fellowship, and shared participation. It sorta sums up the way I feel about the people I work with. The question ends up being; what happens when 'community' isn't enough?

Helene rolled over onto her stomach and handed her companion the bottle of sunscreen lotion. While technically, sun exposure wasn't a particular threat here, the Community had been built with the same concern for its inhabitants as any other hothouse. The dome that acted as both shelter and prison was lined with fiber optics that transmitted daylight from wherever the outside world was overhead, and piped it inside. It had been a clever solution to the problem of seasonal mood disorders among the inhabitants exposed only to artificial light in the Community's early days.

While very few of that old guard, the spies of the Cold War days, still remained alive and under the care of the Agency of Sequestered Seclusion, the Community stilled hummed along, housing its population of voluntarily - or otherwise - retired super-spies. She smiled as Ron Lucas, her newest conquest, and one of the last veteran intelligence agents to get out of Russia before the final collapse in 1991, smoothed the lotion over her back, unfastening her bikini top to make sure she was uniformly protected. She smirked into the crook of her arm at the small intimacy, knowing she wouldn't have to exercise too many of her well-honed CTS skills to achieve her goals with this new resident.

It made life interesting, she had to admit, and kept her skills from going completely to seed, practicing the more enjoyable elements of her former profession on newcomers to the Community. And it wasn't as if they didn't know they were being played, and maybe playing their own game, as well. She'd only had one failure in the time she'd been here, and she still suspected that her quarry at the time, one Robert Hobbes, was gay, his protests - and his partner's amusement - to the contrary notwithstanding. Why else would he have failed to succumb to her wiles?

She smiled enchantingly up at her escort as he refastened her top. "Thank you so much, Ronnie," she cooed, batting her lashes at him. His grin told her that he was totally aware of her game and enjoying playing along.

A lift of his slivering eyebrows accompanied the even, white smile. Ronald Lucas might not be James Bond, but he wasn't all bad, either. She smiled back.

His head dipped towards hers, the intention clear. She tipped hers back to meet him, lips parted sweetly, and....

A shriek cut the warm air around the pool, the low conversational murmur and the splashing of swimmers shocked to silence, the instincts of the gathered population far from dormant.

As the last echoes of the scream died out against the dome overhead, nearly every person present headed towards the source, one of the myriad walkways leading to the pool. If weapons had been permitted in The Community's pool area they would have been drawn and in every ex-agent's hand.

Helene and her erstwhile swain were at the side of the pool closest to the source of the cry, and she and Lucas had been in motion before the first voluble howl had faded to echoes. So they were among the first to arrive at the scene, scrabbling to a bare-footed halt at the scene of the crime.

And a crime it was. The furled umbrella had been driven through 'Steed's' abdomen, the old-fashioned bowler hat kicked across the pathway and crushed under an uncaring, even vicious, foot. The corpse resembled nothing so much as a mutilated Magritte painting; the Saville Row suit dirtied, torn and bloody. The profound surprise on the face of the old spy made Helene's stomach knot in fear.

It had happened again. An attack on one of the most harmless of their number. Certainly, back in the day, 'Steed' had been a legend. But the past 30 years had taken their toll. He'd entertained - or bored - new arrivals with his exploits, the memoirs of the Cold War out-dated by the reality of espionage in the latter quarter of the 20^th century. He'd been among the oldest of the residents. The single-minded violence of the assault nauseated her.

The heretofore calmly idyllic existence within The Community had been rocked not once, but three times with murder. As far as anyone here knew, there'd never been multiple murders in a closed community of former espionage agents before this. And it was a guarantee that there would be very little in the way of a quiet night's rest for any of the inhabitants until the murderer was identified.

The Official eyed the balance sheet his assistant had just placed in front of him glumly. "Eberts."

"Yes sir?" Albert inquired calmly.

"We're seriously overdrawn. Again."

"Yes sir." This time it was agreement rather than a question.

"All the tenants are current?"

"Yes sir."

The Official glared at the figures on the paperwork as if he could frighten them into a more desirable sequence. "We need another source of income," he conceded eventually when the numbers stubbornly refused to improve.

"Yes sir," Albert agreed again.

"I wish Monroe had asked before she saddled us with this white elephant of a building," he muttered. "The property taxes are eating us alive."

"Yes sir."

"Eberts. Try and expand your vocabulary."

"Yes sir," Albert said contritely, earning a frown of disapproval from his employer at the unintentional flippancy. "I've looked into refinancing the building, but the impending increase in the prime rate, as well as an improving economic forecast for the San Diego metropolitan area has ruled that out as a cost-saving move." He tugged his little PDA from the breast pocket of his suit and scrolled through the menu, selecting the desired file with the small plastic wand. "I obtained quotes from a full range of mortgage lenders, both local and online, and none of them could offer us anything significantly below what we're currently paying. And without a decrease of at least .6 percent, the cost of refinancing would more or less offset any reduction in monthly payments we currently make-"

"Eberts," the Official held up a hand to forestall what threatened to turn into a lengthy monolog on lending practices. "We need a way to improve our income to outgo ratios."

"Yes sir," Albert agreed yet again, then winced as the Official glowered at him accusingly. "We really need to reacquire our stipend from the Agency of Sequestered Seclusion," he sighed. Since the move to their new building, the quarterly payment they had received without incident for almost two years had suddenly dried up, and none of his or the Official's efforts to discover why had resulted in any answers.

Borden harrumped, clearly thinking the same thing Albert was: they were being taken lightly. The deal the Official had made with the head of ASS had been disregarded.

"I haven't succeeded in reaching anyone at ASS since the last payment was missed," Eberts reminded the Official. "None of my calls have been returned."

"Mine, either," Charles Borden admitted grumpily.

Eberts nodded, knowing this. It was a snub, and it rankled, in spite of the fact that the 'arrangement' the Agency had had with ASS smacked of extortion; their silence in exchange for a small percentage of the ASS budget. The Agency of Sequestered Seclusion had a vested interest in keeping the location of their 'retirement' community utterly secret. It was far too tempting a target for foreign intelligence agencies with axes to grind. It was essentially the most extreme form of witness protection possible, and to be effective, it had to retain its top-secret status, or the life of every ex-spy in the place was at risk.

"I-" Whatever he was going to say next was interrupted by the ring of the phone on the desk.

The Official lifted the receiver, settling it against his ear. "This is him," he answered gruffly.

Long practice allowed Albert to recognize his employer's reaction, betrayed only by a slight wobble of wattles. "So now you're returning my calls?" Borden grumped sharply, and Albert perked up his ears as he returned the PDA to his breast pocket. He'd long since mastered unobtrusive eavesdropping, and even one-sided phone conversations had potential tidbits to be gleaned.

The Official's snort of cynical amusement was both promising and problematic. Albert tucked his hands behind his back, exercising all his patience.

"As a matter of fact, I was just discussing the situation," Borden announced with the sort of smugness that told Eberts the upper hand belonged to his employer. There was a slight pause before the Official went on. "That's need-to-know," he said, his expression resembling a cat with a dish of cream. "Let's just say your... delinquency... has been noticed."

Albert felt an eyebrow escape his control and arch towards the ceiling in surprise. Unless he very much missed his guess, the caller was none other than an ASS representative. An odd bit of serendipity indeed.

"Pardon me? I'm not sure I heard that correctly," the Official remarked. Another pause, then he continued; "A favor. And what makes you think I'm inclined to grant you one?" He leaned his considerable bulk back in his desk chair, the familiar self-satisfied smirk beginning to twitch at the corners of his mouth.

Eberts felt the other eyebrow crawl up his forehead to join the first. A favor? They had the audacity to ask for a favor after reneging on the agreement with the Agency? In the immortal words of Lewis Carroll, 'curiouser and curiouser.'

The Official listened attentively but with growing satisfaction to whatever was being said, hearing out his caller. When whatever the request was had been thoroughly explained, he smiled. It was a wicked expression, in Albert's opinion, and boded ill for the person on the other end of the line. "You realize this will require a renegotiation of our 'arrangement'?" Borden asked contentedly, and mentally, Albert rubbed his hands together in glee. He was hard-pressed not to smile as the sudden possibility of being able to resolve their current monetary difficulties appeared like a lighthouse beacon on the formerly gloomy financial horizon.

"Very well. Arrange it." With that, the Official hung up, the worry gone from his formidable brow. He glanced at Albert smugly. "Eberts, call a meeting."

Darien swigged the last of the noxious seaweed-and-lawn-clippings nutritional shake the Keeper had given him the instant he'd set foot in the door of the Keep for his weekly physical, wrinkling his nose at the taste. "Bleech, Keepy. You think you could make it chocolate flavored or something?" he whined, chasing it with a large mouthful of clear water from the glass Claire handed him.

"I added over a tablespoon of honey to this batch," she informed him somewhat primly, as if he were insulting her cooking abilities.

Darien rolled his eyes. "Oh, that made all the difference, Claire. A real gourmet treat, lemme tell ya."

She scowled at him. "I'm sorry you don't like the flavor, Darien, but honestly... Isn't it better than counteragent?" she wanted to know.

Darien eyed the liter bottle that had held his morning power breakfast, a small pool of grass-green sludge gathering in the bottom, as if trying to decide which the lesser evil was: the drug to which he had been addicted for two years, or the glop he was currently required to swallow three times daily to keep his suddenly hyperactive metabolism fueled and functioning.

Claire swatted him on the arm as she realized he was teasing her. "You are terrible," she scolded. "Come on, roll up your sleeve," she ordered, turning to drag her instrument cart closer to the examining chair he sat on, long legs dangling over one side. He shoved the long black rib knit sleeve up as far as he could, and offered up his left arm, watching as Claire wrapped the rubber tourniquet around his biceps. She waited patiently, syringe in hand until his veins popped up like little blue earthworms under his skin. The familiar prick of the needle was a reminder that counteragent or not, the gland was still messing with his body in ways no one understood.

He let his attention wander away as yet another in the endless collection vials slowly siphoning away his bodily fluids was filled with blood. "Claire?" he spoke as she finished up and released the tourniquet.

"Yes?" she replied, marking the sample with the date and his name and whatever test code number it was she was running this time.

He ran a hand through his hair, setting it on end even more than it had been. "You ever find anything with all these tests?" he asked, and she tucked the collection tube into the waiting rack and sat down on the rolling stool next to his chair.

Her frustrated sigh was really all the answer he'd expected. "I find a lot of things with these tests, Darien," she said, "and none of them really explain what's happening to you at the moment. Your white blood cell count is slightly elevated, along with the level of histamines -- intermittently, at least, and your tissues have developed a certain level of insulin resistance along with hypoglycemia when you don't keep your blood sugar up. I just don't understand it at all. "

"Yeah." He dropped his gaze to his suede desert boots pensively. "Just like everything else with this stupid gland," he muttered unhappily. "So I guess asking if it's normal to wake up everyday feeling like I've gotten run over by a truck is kinda pointless, huh?"

Her expression was sympathetic, worried, even. "No, it's not normal, sweetheart. It's not normal for an apparently healthy man in his thirties to have low iron and testosterone levels, normal thyroid levels in combination with a metabolism that lays waste to your food intake in absurdly short periods of time, an elevated basal temperature, or to have the sort of joint discomfort you've been complaining about since the beginning of February. None of those things make sense, and there's nothing obvious linking the symptoms you're having, even though it's clear that there is some sort of common cause." She smiled a little sadly. "Darien, I promise you, we will find out what's going on."

"Yeah, but will you be able to fix it when you do?" he asked rhetorically. They looked across the small distance and the vast doctor-patient gulf that separated them, silently staring at each other.

"Everyone outta the pool," came a welcome call from the Keep entrance as Bobby Hobbes sauntered in, resplendent in his favorite red polo shirt and black slacks, his cocky swagger dispelling some of the gloom Darien felt. "Fat Man wants us in his office, pronto," his partner announced.

"Oh, joy," Darien snarked, forcing himself to return Hobbes' cockiness with a little of his usual smartass-ness. "What is it this time? Some other hand-me-down case even the FDA took a crack at?" he retorted as he hopped down off the exam chair and slouched his way towards the door.

"Dunno. I wasn't on the 'need-to-know' list, there, pal. Claire, he wants you upstairs, too," Hobbes added, directing the later comment to the Keeper, who looked surprised.

"Very well," she said, and walked the collection vial to her lab refrigerator for storage until she could get back to her tests. Stepping between them in the doorway, she slipped an arm through each of theirs and smiled brightly. "Shall we go? His highness awaits."

The Official was ensconced behind his desk as usual when the trio entered the office, Eberts standing at attention behind and slightly to one side. Not for the first time, it struck Darien as oddly 'American Gothic' in a weird way. All the tableaux needed was a pitchfork. Oh, and the Official could stand to drop about 200 pounds, as well. The thought made him grin.

"Take a seat," the Official ordered shortly.

Hobbes and Fawkes took up their usual positions front and center, and Claire assumed hers in the chair closest to the window. Somehow, Eberts had managed to locate a pair of vinyl-covered ‘70s era desk chairs that could have been the twins to the noxious orangey ones that had graced the Official's office in the Harding building, pre-earthquake. Well, except this pair was an avocado green that rivaled the former goldenrod ones for obnoxiousness.

"So what is it this time?" Darien asked sarcastically as he pretended to examine a hangnail. "Another case of rabid skunks in Balboa Park? No, let me guess: seagull patrol down at the amusement park again." The last eight weeks hadn't exactly been fraught with excitement in the old work department, what with Fish and Game wanting the 'rent' paid in exceedingly tedious ways. Right now, he was restless enough to need some serious distraction from the nagging worry that was becoming an increasing part of his life at the moment, and an adrenaline rush or two would go a long way in that regard.

Bobby's snort of stifled amusement constituted agreement. He didn’t even have to glance at his partner to know that, by now.

"Actually," Eberts piped up, "skunks have too high a body temperature to actually contract rabies, which is why they are such a dangerous vector for the disease," he started, making Darien wonder where on earth the accountant had come across that particular factoid.

"We have a case," the Fat Man interrupted the Wild Kingdom moment. There was no mistaking the smug satisfaction in his voice, and Darien glanced up, interested. The same smugness was on his face, making him resemble Jabba the Hut even more than usual. Even Eberts was struggling to squelch a grin. He straightened in his chair, intrigued. Beside him, he felt Hobbes do likewise.

"A case," Fawkes repeated, hoping the prompt would spur an explanation.

"A case," the Official confirmed.

"Pardon me, sir, but that's what you said when you sent us into the park to trap skunks for a week with the Parks and Rec Department," Hobbes said, clearly not having forgiven that particular incident.

Neither had Darien. Not the wretched week spent playing great white hunter in search of the stinkiest prey in San Diego, or the quarts of tomato juice he'd forced Bobby to soak in for an entire weekend before he - and the rest of the Agency, for that matter - would let Hobbes come within 30 feet of the McKinley building.

"You're being sent in to trap a different kind of skunk, this time," the Fat Man assured them.

Darien could see the wary bob-and-weave Bobby was doing, trying to screw himself up to ask just how smelly this particular case was going to get. He made a preemptive strike. "Four legs? Or two?" he asked, having a glimmer of what was headed their way. An adversary of his own species would be a welcome relief after the plethora of creatures he and Hobbes had been pitted against recently -- and not always come out on top against.

"Two," the Official's nod of approval at Darien's guesswork stilled the anxiety attack Hobbes had been brewing.

"So, what sort of vermin are we going after this time?" Darien asked cynically, not willing to let his relief show too much.

"You're being sent in to investigate a murder," the Fat Man informed them, practically gloating.

"Three, actually," Eberts spoke up.

"Uh, 'in' where?" Darien asked, leery of the barely concealed glee the Official was displaying.

"The Community," Eberts filled in, allowing the Official to lean back into his chair, the satisfaction practically radiating off him.

"Whoa-whoa-whoa," Hobbes balked. "Wait a frickin' minute, there, Eee-berts. The Community? As in that 'Truman Show' knock off Fawkes and me got locked into? Nuh-uh. No way."

"It's not open to negotiation," the Official interrupted. "ASS came to us for a favor. It's in our best interests to grant it."

Darien scowled, by now familiar with the Official in full manipulation mode. "What aren't you telling us, boss?" he asked. "Since when do we owe those creeps so much as the time of day? The deal we made was, we stay away from that espionage biosphere of theirs, and they make a contribution towards our operating costs."

The uncomfortable silence from both Eberts and the Official set off alarms. He narrowed his eyes. "Right?" he prodded.

The slight face Eberts made could only be interpreted as rueful. "Apparently, ASS felt their return on that investment was... insufficient," he began.

"Shut up, Eberts," the Official's habitual command brought an end to the attempted explanation. "We're in a position to renegotiate that arrangement, gentlemen," he informed them.

Bobby frowned and Darien leaned back in his chair, putting together the unspoken clues. "They backed out of the deal, didn't they?" he asked keenly. Eberts' wince was confirmation enough.

"Well, that explains why the men's room is always out of toilet paper," Hobbes muttered darkly.

Eberts' glance at the Official, who didn't so much as bat an eyelash, was apparently enough to secure permission to continue. "When we were forced to abandon the Harding building after the earthquake last November, the quarterly stipends we were receiving from ASS suddenly stopped. The Official and I have been unable to determine why."

Darien snorted. "All those little surveillance gizmos we left behind when we moved have anything to do with that?" he asked cynically.

The sour look on the Official's face spoke volumes.

"Call me a cynic, but they probably decided there wasn't much point in paying for something we were giving away for free, and since they couldn't ride herd on us to make sure we were keeping our traps shut any more, I'll bet they figured they didn't have to worry about sending along that little extortion payment."

"Yes, well, Darien, whatever their reasoning, they suddenly find themselves in need of outside assistance. And we find ourselves in a position to demand reinstatement of that contribution to our budget," Eberts said contentedly. "With interest."

Darien raised a skeptical eyebrow. "So they need our help, huh? Why can't they have their own guys investigate?" he wanted to know.

"Maybe they don't want to pay the dry-cleaning bill when their goons get blood all over those fancy linen suits of theirs," Bobby snarked.

Darien shot him a grin, and they exchanged their ritual low-five before he returned his attention to the Official and his lackey. "Why us? I mean, we aren't exactly CSI around here. Or the FBI, either," he remarked snidely.

"We are, however," Eberts responded tersely, "the only other agency who is aware of their full brief - and knows about both the general location AND the purpose of the Community. We are the only logical choice for outside assistance."

"Which you still haven't explained why they need," Claire spoke up for the first time.

"Yeah," Hobbes and Darien agreed simultaneously.

"Why is that, boss?" Bobby asked ironically.

"Because ASS thinks it's an inside job," Darien guessed, the reasoning hardly a stretch.

Hobbes nodded agreement. "The o-o-o-ole' Benedict Arnold ploy," he suggested in his best W.C. Fields impression.

Darien parroted it back with the same inflection, and they shared a sage nod.

"Yes. Well, they have requested our help to determine who is responsible for the murders of three of their 'protectees.' The two of you will be going into the Community to investigate," Eberts said, doing his best to ignore the irreverent tone from the pair of agents.

"With a 'get out of jail free card' this time, I hope," Hobbes spoke up. "Don't wanna be climbing out no ductwork this time."

Darien grinned. "Well at least you won't have a QSM partner right behind you," he teased. He'd been mere minutes from full madness by the time they'd found their way back to the surface when they'd escaped from the Community last time.

"You'll be removed from the habitat as soon as the culprit has been identified," the Official confirmed tersely.

"When do we go in?" Hobbes asked, crossing his arms against his chest.

"Today," Eberts told them, glancing at his watch. "In 45 minutes." He clasped his hands before him, silent punctuation that proclaimed the briefing over.

"One last question, sir?" Claire inquired from her chair. "Where do I come into this?"

Fawkes and Hobbes exchanged looks and then focused on their employer. "Yeah. What's the Keeper gonna be doin' while we're playin' 'junior G-man' inside?" Bobby asked, tone protective.

"Dr. Keeply will be monitoring your progress from the observation unit of the complex," Eberts told them. "Her opinion of the autopsy reports and a possible examination of the bodies will hopefully determine whether the perpetrator is inside or outside of the main habitat."

"She'll also be keeping an eye on Fawkes," the Official added shortly, refusing to meet Darien's eyes. "We can't afford to let his physical... problems... interfere with a successful conclusion to this investigation."

"You mean, interfere with your paycheck," Darien groused cynically.

"I mean with your paychecks," the Official snapped back. "Let me make it perfectly clear, gentlemen. Without that budget assist, this agency is looking at insolvency. As in no paychecks for anyone. No benefits. Unemployment. We will be forced to close the doors of this operation."

"So what else is new?" Hobbes muttered under his breath. Darien snickered.

"Dismissed, gentlemen. You have half an hour to pack a bag." With that, the Official picked up the next file on his desk, tuning the rest of them out as they rose from their respective seats and made their way out of the office.

They say it takes a village to raise a child. But when there's murder involved, I guess it takes a Community to catch a killer. Or an Invisible Man and his partner, anyway....

Darien held up the packets of powdered greens for Claire, whose frown brightened a tad.

"Good, that should be enough to hold you for a few days, at least. I have more with me as well, so if this drags out, I'll arrange to get it to you," she assured him, and he made a face.

"Gee, thanks, Claire," he whined.

She ignored his petulance as she fished her overnight bag out from the back of the ASS SUV that had driven them this far.

"Hey, not so tight, there, pal," Hobbes protested as one of the cream-suited ASS agents blindfolded him, then slipped a black microfiber hood over his head, tugging a drawstring lightly closed around his neck to prevent Hobbes from getting so much as the tiniest glimpse of where they were going.

"Watch the hair," Darien warned as they repeated this procedure with Claire and then himself. "I don't get what's with the executioner's get-up," he complained. "What's the big mystery? We've been here before," he reminded their escorts.

"Not awake, you haven't. And not this route," he was told shortly. "You may be here to do a job, but I'm here to do mine."

With that, Darien found himself urged none too gently across the parking lot and guided into another vehicle that pulled up in front of them with a slight squeal of a slipping fanbelt. He banged his forehead on the door frame of the car and cursed, rubbing the bump through the suede-like cloth hood covering his head. "That's gonna leave a mark," he muttered.

"So's this," he heard the ASS agent reply, then felt the unexpected prick of a needle in the back of his neck.

"Hey! Wha-" his question never made it past his lips as the rapid-acting anesthetic knocked him out faster than a broken light bulb.

He came to on a bed. It took several minutes before he could pry his gummy eyes open enough to tell any more about his surroundings than that. His muscles felt bruised, locked into immobility. He blinked three or four times trying to clear his vision, and slowly the ceiling came into some kind of focus overhead. Concrete, he realized vaguely. He moved his eyes as far as he could to the left, catching sight of familiar brick. "Wha-" he attempted to complete the word that he'd had on his tongue when he'd lost consciousness.

"Fawkes!" the familiar - and worried - voice of Bobby Hobbes impinged on his ears. "How ya doin', partner?"

Darien attempted to work up enough saliva to get his vocal chords to work. He felt Hobbes sit down on the bed beside him and tried valiantly to turn his head towards his partner. "Wha' happ'n'd?" he managed after several swallows.

"Bastards drugged us," Bobby informed him, leaning over the bed, and thus into Darien's line of sight. "How ya feelin'? I was startin' to worry about you. You been out for almost six hours."

"Where?" he asked groggily.

Hobbes cast an ironic glance around. "'There's no place like home, Fawkesy," he said with a quirk of an eyebrow.

Darien groaned. "Again?" he complained.

"Hey, at least you've still got a home away from home, pal. Mine's a pile of rubble." Bobby shifted slightly and pried one eyelid up all the way to peer into Darien's eye with concern. "Still dilated," he informed Fawkes. "They hadda call the Keep in to make sure they hadn't OD'd you," he went on. Darien could hear the quiet anger in Hobbes' casual comment. "I ain't seen her that pissed off since the 'Fish pulled his BS on you when she gave you the cure," he admitted.

"Nuhhggh" Darien responded inarticulately. "Feel like crap," he added unnecessarily.

"Yeah," Bobby commiserated, prying the other eye open. He ran a casual hand through Darien's hair, offering awkward comfort. "Claire said you would. Some kinda reaction to the drug. You and that little buddy in your brain make for some interesting moments, lemme tell you," he smiled down at Darien.

Fawkes did his best to smile back, but his muscles refused to cooperate fully. "How long?"

"Before you feel better?" Hobbes filled in the blanks with the instincts born of long practice. "You should be back on your feet by morning. The headache should be gone by then, too."

Darien did his best to nod, but the stabbing pain through the back of his skull short-circuited that move almost instantly. "Ow," he managed,, eyes squeezed shut against the sharp agony.

"Yeah." Hobbes' warm palm against his scalp was oddly reassuring. "Go back to sleep, my friend. I'm gonna go scope out the joint and see what I can find out. Give us a place to start in the morning. I'm not real keen on you bein' stuck in this underground fishbowl for any longer'n necessary."

"Nnhuh." Fawkes couldn't help but relax under the friendly touch. "Me either." He smiled slightly at the fond little ruffle Bobby gave his hair. He loved it when his hair got played with. Even by his slightly psychotic partner. Maybe more than slightly psychotic, he amended the thought. Not that Hobbes would ever rival his hairstylist in scalp massage techniques, but friendship counted for a whole hell of a lot. He could tolerate a crap-load of psychoses if there was a pizza and a cold beer to go along with it at the end of the day. He closed his eyes again and let the darkness that crowded his vision sweep over him.

Bobby watched Fawkes until he was sure his partner had slipped into a restful sleep. Stepping out of the copy of Darien's loft the Community had left in place since their last stay here, he glanced around the empty palm-lined walks, wondering where everyone was. If he remembered correctly, the main pool and social areas were not too far away, so he headed off in what he hoped was the right direction.

He passed several residents on his trek, nodding politely and trying to ignore the wary, suspicious looks thrown his way. He couldn't really blame them, though it triggered some of his low-grade anxiety. He discretely shook out a prescription pill and dry swallowed it with familiar ease.

It was hard to believe a place this restful was also this violent, he mused to himself as he made his way into the main courtyard/public area of the Community, scanning the deceptively normal scene that met his eyes. Only his instincts and experience allowed him to sense the tension that ran like low voltage through the air. The residents were adhering to the 'safety in numbers' school of coping, knowing it would be far harder for their unknown assailant to pick them off in a public space. And like a herd of gazelle on the plains of Africa, every ear, every sense was turned towards him, as a sudden and potentially threatening stranger.

This was going to be harder than he'd figured on, he realized, taking a quick look around in the hopes of spotting a familiar face. It wasn't like he and Fawkes had been exactly the lives of the party on their last visit, but at least they'd been on speaking terms with a few of the locals. That would hopefully act as an icebreaker this time around.

"Robby?" a familiar female voice inquired behind him.

"Bobby," he corrected as he turned, a little embarrassed that of the people he'd met here, she would be the first one he'd come across. "Agent Lowe?" he greeted her a bit awkwardly.

Helene Lowe was clad in a skimpy turquoise bikini, full breasts as tempting as the golden skin, a darker honey than her longish blonde hair, which, if memory served, streamed midway down her shapely back. "I thought that was you," she said, smiling. "What brings you back to the Community again? I hope you're not planning on leaving so quickly this time," she flirted outrageously, her companion, standing a few feet away, frowning unhappily at the apparent competition.

Hobbes would have had to be deaf, blind and dumb to miss the relief in her eyes and voice, though, and he smiled hesitantly, gauging it carefully to fall somewhere between platonic pleasure at seeing her again and noncommittal uncertainty. He shrugged, lending emphasis to his unspoken plea of ignorance. "I guess it depends on how long it takes my partner and me to finish up what we came here to do," he told her, knowing she would be able to easily infer his reason for being here again.

Her gaze sharpened, and suddenly he could see the keen intelligence she usually hid behind the languid sensuality of her femme fatale professional persona. "They brought you in to find out who's behind the killings, didn't they?" she asked softly, pitching her voice to be heard by him alone.

He nodded minutely.

The relief was far more evident, this time. "Well, can I at least invite you over for a little dinner?" she asked liltingly, and her companion sidled closer, the frown gone openly hostile as he glared at Hobbes possessively.

"Can I take a rain check?" he suggested. "I've got babysitting detail tonight..."

"Oh, but we have such a lot to catch up on," she insisted, tucking an arm through his and leaning against his side. "At least come have a drink with me," she batted long eyelashes at him, and he cringed inwardly, hoping suddenly that Claire wasn't watching all this on some monitor somewhere. Still, he might as well start with Helene, he supposed, in the old investigation department. She certainly seemed to think that she had something to tell him. Maybe she was even right.

"'Lane, weren't we supposed to-?" the man behind her protested.

"Oh, Ron, don't be like that, it's just a drink for old time's sake. Robby and I are old friends," she turned the full force of her high-wattage CTS skills on him, releasing Hobbes' arm to pat her friend's shoulder comfortingly. "I'll join you for a late supper," she wheedled. "My place? Say, 8 p.m.? Candlelight and champagne? I have a really nice Veuve Clicquot I've been meaning to open," she suggested winsomely.

Hobbes kept his expression as unreadable as he could, though he allowed himself a private moment of awe at her talent for manipulation. He pretended to ignore the vacillations 'Ron' was gyrating through, scanning the pool area casually. One thing about having Helene's attentions focused on him was, it removed him from the list of immediate threats in the minds of the rest of the residents. Good. That would probably make investigating at least a little easier.

When Helene had succeeded in getting rid of her companion, he offered her his arm, which she proceeded to wrap herself around as they made their way to the open air bar at the far end of the pool. They took a table and ordered their drinks, making small talk until the beverages had arrived.

"So, what's your take on what's been going on around here?" Hobbes asked quietly as he sipped his Singapore sling.

Helene shook her head slightly, and Hobbes could see the anxiety in her eyes. "I wish I knew. The first murder was four weeks ago..." she sampled her own mai tai as if nervous. "Nora Blake. She was old school, got caught in the mess around Iran Contra and ended up stuck in here when her cover got ripped wide open after Ollie North testified. She wouldn't have harmed a fly, Robby. It was horrible."

"Bobby," he corrected again. "Did you see the body?" he asked, hoping for first hand testimony.

The delicate shudder was answer enough. "I didn't get there first, but yes, I saw her. She'd been stabbed with her sharpening steel."

"Sharpening steel? You mean like what you use on your kitchen knives?" he asked, perplexed. "Why not just use one of the knives?"

Helene shook her head. "I don't know. It was... gruesome. Same with Lionel Spaulding He was garroted by a wire from his own piano." She shivered again and gulped another swallow of her drink. "His cover was as a touring musician. He was there when the Wall came down, playing in a West Berlin nightclub nights and running a counterintelligence cell, days."

Hobbes sipped his beer again. "What about the last one?"

To his surprise, tears gleamed in the blue eyes. It had to have been bad for a hardened agent to lose emotional control like this, he thought grimly.

"'Steed'," she choked, and he felt his jaw drop.

"No," he said, shocked. 'Steed' had been an espionage legend. At the height of the cold war, he'd been the crème de la crème of agents. "How?"

"Stabbed," she whispered. "With his umbrella."

The umbrella had been the agent's hallmark, and in a way, the reason he'd been forced to retire, since he refused to give it up and become too easily made by that little quirk. It had also been the weapon with which he'd made his most memorable hit. Ricin-laced micro beads injected into the calf muscle of an unsuspecting target using the pointy end of his umbrella, a target who had died a painful death before he could be debriefed by the Soviets to whom he'd defected.

"Geeze," Hobbes winced. This smacked of some kind of personal agenda. Revenge was a powerful motive, and this was looking to be more intense than even the usual vendetta.

Helene nodded, agreeing with his unspoken assessment.

He took another pull on his draft, and put the glass down on the table. "You think of anything else that links 'em?" he asked.

"It looks like payback to me," she replied grimly. "Rob - Bobby, I'm glad you're here," she added after several moments. "This is seriously freaking people out, and if you can't find out who's behind it, I'm afraid this place is going to go off like a bomb. You have no idea how tightly wound these people are," she told him, and he could tell she was genuinely worried about the explosive situation. "The only thing keeping us here is the fact that there are more people outside trying to kill us than inside."

"Me'n Fawkes will do what we can," he assured her solemnly.

The wistful look she cast his way surprised him. "I wondered if it was him," she sighed. "But you can't blame a girl for trying," she smiled faintly.

It took a split second for him to realize what it was she was referring to, and he felt himself blushing furiously. "Uh, no, you've got it wrong," he stammered. "Fawkes and me, we're partners."

"I know. That was obvious pretty quickly," she said.

"No, not 'partners,' partners!" he defended his masculinity, flustered, and knowing Fawkes would have been laughing his ass off right now. For the second time in an hour and a half, he prayed that Claire wasn't watching or listening to this somewhere.

"I understand," she smiled faintly. "It's not exactly acceptable practice to develop an emotional relationship with your partner. I've been there, believe me. Why else do you think I'm here?" she asked.

He opened his mouth to speak, but simply couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't make the situation worse. It was a moment or two before he could proceed. "You'll let me know if you think of anything else?" he managed, at last.

"Of course," she reassured him as she clinked her mai tai glass against his pilsner, and leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek fleetingly.

He did his best to stifle the primal male interest that move generated and got to his feet. "Then I'll see you around," he said and made his way out of the bar, heading towards the path that had brought him there in the first place. He had a lot to think about while he waited for Fawkes to recover from his little chemical nightcap. He walked the path towards Fawkes' place, the place he was stuck sharing for this little mission, and pondered the situation the whole way back.

He was so wrapped up in his speculations that he was nearly in front of Darien's door before he realized he was being watched. He did his best to feign a lack of awareness as he meandered his way the last few yards, hoping to entice his stalker into a move.

He wasn't disappointed: the knife at the juncture of jaw and throat told him he'd been convincing.

"Bobby Hobbes. I didn't figure on seeing you in here again anytime soon," the familiar voice whispered softly against his skull. The knife's blade caressed his jugular in a most unnerving fashion.

"Oh, crap," he answered, gulping. "Jack."

Darien woke again about two hours later, mouth still dry, head still aching, but at least able to move. The call of nature got him stumbling to his feet and he made his way more by instinct than sight to 'his' bathroom.

Having relieved at least one discomfort among many, he next hobbled to the kitchen, opening cupboards in search of a water glass. He found one in the third place he looked and stood by the sink, drinking glass after glass of water in the hopes of restoring some life to his brain and body. He knew dehydration when he felt it, and it wasn't much fun. When his tongue had stopped sticking to the roof of his mouth, he went and sat on the generic couch that had replaced his own in this replica of his apartment, wondering where his partner had gone. His gaze wandered absently around the copy of his loft, taking in the furnishings that had apparently been borrowed from the local Motel 6, if the dingy upholstery he sat on was any clue. He was glad they'd refrained from gutting his home again this time, though he saw odd bits and pieces from his first visit still scattered through the room like sand tracked in from the beach.

Absently, he picked up the TV remote and clicked it on, the set humming to life. He was caught off guard by the ASS logo that appeared like a network bug at the top of the screen, a digital menu below, offering a listing of all the myriad selections available to the denizens of the Community. "Damn... This is way better than the cable at home," he mumbled to himself, and started cruising the main menus for the sports submenu, making note of several other prize channels along the way, like the Playboy Channel, the Cooking Channel and the History Channel. Hobbes'll be glad to know that one is available, he thought absently. "Wish I'd known last time. Would've made this place a lot more fun," he said, settling back to flick past all the various sports available: soccer, skating, basketball, baseball, even the X-games.

He was just about to select that particular option when the loud thud of something hitting the door of 'his' apartment jerked him out of the drugged torpor, adrenaline surging through him wildly. So wildly, he even lost partial control of the Quicksilver for the split second it took him to sprint across the four yards separating him from the door, snatching up the Louisville Slugger that still rested against the wall near the doorjamb. He threw it open, the knob bouncing off the wall and sending the wooden slab careening back into him, barking his shin.

"Crap!" he squawked, the sharp pain distracting him just enough that he couldn't get his bat deployed in self defense in time to avoid the vicious right hook to the jaw that sent him sprawling backwards to land in an ungainly heap on the floor. "Oooof," he grunted, the air knocked out of his lungs and the blotchy Quicksilver knocked off his skin, stars swimming in front of his eyes. With his vision darkened as it was, he couldn't make out who it was who landed with what felt like both feet in the middle of his belly, staggered with a bitter curse, then dashed at top speed across the room to dive headfirst out the unopened window nearest the bed in a crashing, flashing rain of glass.

"Geeze, Fawkes! You OK?" the welcome sound of Bobby's voice gave him something to focus on other than the roaring in his ears and the frantic attempts to suck air into cramping lungs.

He couldn't quite manage to speak yet, but he mustered a weak nod, the cold concrete against his back a relief by comparison to the fire searing through his abdomen.

"OK, just take it easy, there, ace." Hobbes crouched beside him, checking him over, feeling for broken limbs, then hiking Darien's shirt up to his armpits to take a look. "Gonna have a coupla size nine bruises by the look of it, kid, but hopefully nothing worse than that," he assured Fawkes when he'd finished his quick exam.

"Who-" Darien whispered, not enough air in his lungs yet to get any volume.

Hobbes' expression was a study in -- something. Disappointment? Anger? Shock? Fawkes found it disconcerting that he couldn't tell what his partner was feeling.

Then a wet, red smear along Bobby's neck below the jaw line caught his attention, and he levered himself up on one elbow, reaching to touch it with the free hand. "Hobbes -- you're bleeding!" He might not have had the lung capacity to shout, but the urge was certainly there.

"Whoa, pal. No harm done: it's just a scratch. Bobby Hobbes has taken way worse in this line'a work, remember?" Hobbes dismissed the worry, giving Darien a hand getting to his feet.

Fawkes let himself be escorted back to the couch, needing the steadying hand under his elbow and hating that his apparently injured partner was the one who had to provide that assist. "Hobbes. Who cut you?" he demanded as a little more air seeped into his chest and he could expel a few more words.

Bobby grimaced, obviously reluctant to answer.

"Hobbes!" Darien's voice was strong enough that Bobby flinched.

"Carelli, OK? You happy?" he snapped defensively, then looked sheepish when Darien simply stared at him accusingly.

"What would've happened if I hadn't opened the door, man? He could've killed you!" Darien scolded, the unexpected additional anxiety doing nothing to improve a mood that was bad to start with.

"Well, for starters, buckwheat," Bobby responded, patting Fawkes' belly with the lightest of touches, "you coulda avoided being mistaken for a trampoline," he suggested wryly.

"Hobbes," Darien's tone was a warning that Hobbes would be well advised to heed. But no, the stubborn little agent was still attempting to defend his former partner, to Darien's profound annoyance.

"Oh come on, Fawkesy, Jack's been out of the game for over 10 years. Bobby Hobbes has moves he's never seen. I'd'a been fine. Would ya stop worrying?"

"Then use some common sense, Hobbes, so I don't have to, OK? Carelli, your long-lost partner, is even crazier than you are!" He glared at Hobbes, who at least had the good sense to look apologetic. "Last time we were in here, he tried to kill us both! And it looks to me like that agenda hasn't changed in the last two years."

Hobbes vacillated non-verbally, his body literally quivering between old and new loyalties. "It's not like that, Fawkes..."

Darien played his trump card. "Hobbes. Maybe you don't care if he kills you, but if he does, then how the hell am I supposed to get out of here?"

Hobbes' jaw clenched. "The Keepy's here; she'll pull you out if it gets hairy," he defended himself.

Darien felt his mouth drop open in disbelief, his feelings genuinely hurt by this apparent lack of concern. "OK, fine. 'Least I know where I stand, I guess. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out," he snapped and heaved himself off the couch, moving towards his bed stiffly, now nursing physical and emotional bruises in addition to the drug hangover.

"Fawkes! It ain't like that, man, it's just..." Hobbes was on his feet, attempting to offer support to Darien's halting progress towards his bed. Darien shook him off, furious.

"It's just, he was your partner first, right? Yeah, I thought so. Go. Go rescue that nutcase-whacko-has-been," he snarled. "I don't need you. I've got the Keeper. In a box, somewhere over my head. Where she can really help me out." He let every ounce of bitterness drip into those words, calculated to hurt.

"Dammit, Darien," Bobby snarled back, circling around, grabbing him by both upper arms. "You think I ain't done the same for you? How many times have you come after me all red-eye-crazy? I ever hold that against you?" Hobbes demanded, the use of Darien's first name getting his reluctant attention.

Darien just stared at his partner in disbelief, the nearly two years he'd lived with the nightmare of harming his friend while in the throes of Quicksilver Madness flashing across his psyche. "There's one big difference, Hobbes," he said at last, voice rough and still weak, but as firm as he could make it. "Jack Carelli hates your guts. And he doesn't have a gland in his head that used to make him go insane." He stepped around Hobbes and finished his trek to his bed, easing himself down onto the mattress to lie staring up at the concrete beams and panels over his head. He steadfastly ignored Hobbes, who stood silently where he'd stayed, midway between the couch and the bed.

Finally, he heard Bobby head softly towards the open front door. "I'll try and track down someone to fix the window," Hobbes said unhappily as he left, closing the door behind him.

"Yeah. You do that," Fawkes muttered.

Claire had finally finished her review of the autopsies, nothing out of the ordinary having presented itself, considering the bizarre ways in which the three former agents had been murdered. Two stabbings and a strangulation. The only really noteworthy thing was the fact that all three means of execution related to some aspect of the ex-agents' favorite undercover personas. So far, that was the only thing she'd found to link them. In any other community, the killings wouldn't have necessarily been recognized as related, since the cause of death was different in each case. But here, with a captive audience, as it were, three murders in less than six weeks logically had to be connected.

She'd gone through every file ASS had on the dead agents looking for commonality of some kind, and the means of each murder was the only one she'd found, so far. She handed the files to the ASS agent assigned to her, and moved on to the morgue drawers, prepared to personally examine all three corpses to see if anything more than met the eye was going on.

The medical staff assisted her in getting the first exam set up, Claire remaining silent, watching what was done and by whom with keen interest. She had been far from impressed by the judgements that had led to Darien's unexpectedly bad reaction to the anesthetic used on them without their knowledge or permission on their way into this assignment. She was still plagued by the lingering headache, and knew Darien would be considerably more inconvenienced by the effects of the drug. She had several theories on why that was, but knew all of them were irrelevant until she had more data.

So, she drew samples, examined wounds, evaluated the evidence, and did everything in her power to narrow down who had done these evil deeds. After a solid four hours, she was no wiser than she had been at the outset. Clearly, whoever the perpetrator was, he was well versed enough in forensics to know how best to foil the investigation. There had been no trace evidence collected on any of the bodies except that belonging to the victims. No hair, no fibers, no soil traces or other contaminants not indigenous to the immediate area around the victims. Even a lab as extensive as the FBI's would have been hard-pressed to develop any significant physical evidence based on what she saw here. In fact, the crime scenes had been more than just short on evidence, they'd been completely bereft of it.

"Is there some way to contact Agents Hobbes and Fawkes?" she asked as she closed the last file folder and handed it back to her assigned flunky. "I'd like them to examine the scenes of the crimes."

The ASS agent scowled at this request. "It's against procedure," he informed her.

"So, I imagine, is murder," she pointed out impatiently. "And if you recall, your agency is the one who came to us for help. Besides, I've visited the compound once today already."

"Let me see if I can clear it with the Director," he said and headed for a wall phone, picking it up and speaking quietly into it. She wasn't able to overhear much of what he said, so all she could do was hope the head of the asylum would have more sense than this particular agent seemed to.

He hung up a moment later and turned to her. "We can get a message to them. That's the best we're willing to offer," he informed her. "A face to face is just too risky."

She opened her mouth to protest this foolishness only to have his upraised hand forestall her complaint. "But she says you can have access to the monitor room and all the video archive files for the days of the murders. We've been over them, but there may be something we missed."

"Does that include the on-going real-time monitoring you're currently doing?" she asked cynically and was surprised to receive a nodded 'yes.' "Very well, then, lead the way."

Claire gazed around the high-tech video surveillance room, impressed and trying not to show it. The walls consisted of banks of monitors, all the latest, top-of-the-line flat screen LCDs, each showing different views of the Community compound. A half-dozen ASS agents, cream suits and all, were keeping tabs on what each screen showed, several of them manning joysticks that presumably controlled the radio-controlled miniature helicopters and their onboard cameras used to patrol the grounds. "Very impressive," she observed to her escort, who nodded with a trace of forgivable smugness.

"Agents McGillicuddy, French and Tennyson are on the remotes," he introduced her to the trio with the joysticks. "They keep their eyes peeled for anything suspicious using the RC 'copters. Agents Borrick, Donaldson and M'benga handle the fixed position surveillance."

"Gentlemen," she nodded at them, meeting eyes hurriedly cast her way and noting the return nods, appraising looks, and in one case, barely veiled hostility directed her way.

"Doctor, we have a station over here for reviewing the video archives. Just have M'benga cue up the recordings for you when you're ready," her official escort instructed. "I'll leave you in their hands. Have one of them page me when you're ready to leave," he added, and with that, departed through the featureless stainless doors they'd entered by.

Claire ignored the speculative silences and the suspicious glances that followed her around the control room as she moved from station to station to get a preliminary idea of what parts of the Community were actively surveiled, and which parts passively. Midway down the bank of screens, she caught sight of Hobbes talking to a grizzled-looking inmate and paused, wondering if there was any way to hear what was being said. Before she could ask, the picture shifted to a bucolic pathway lined with palms, ferns adding visual fluff along the edge of the gently curving walkway. "Wait! Go back!" she requested of the Agent -- Borrick? -- at whose back she stood.

Hobbes managed to track down the Community's maintenance offices after 20 minutes of wandering around, locating it just as the retired agent currently manning 'fix-it' detail was closing up shop for the evening.

While the walk had given him time to think, nothing could have prepared him for the home-made rifle pointing at him as he opened the office door. The casual menace of the weapon, handled with chilling expertise by its wielder, was every bit as unwelcome as his recent encounter with Carelli, and considerably less expected. He froze in the doorway for a split second, one foot literally in midair, as training and experience flashed possible reactions across his mind's eye. The gray-haired man looked back, dead eyes emotionless as any killer's. It was that 1000 yard stare that gave him his first clue.

Bobby had read Fawkes' report after their last incarceration here, and he thought from the description his partner had given this had to be Kro, an ex-assassin who had made Darien's acquaintance at the end of a homemade rifle barrel and had probably taken five years off his partner's life out of sheer startlement. "You the man I see about a broken window?" he asked casually, stepping the rest of the way into the small office littered with power equipment, tool boxes and basic construction supplies.

The ex-agent lowered the gun to a less threatening position, an expression on his face that would have intimidated someone with less experience than Hobbes. "Do I know you?" he asked coldly.

"You met my partner, I think. Couple years back," Hobbes replied. "We ended up here after a... misunderstanding with ASS. Bobby Hobbes," he introduced himself, offering a hand, which the man ignored in favor of setting his rifle on the floor, stock on the concrete, barrel resting against the desktop at which he sat for easy access. Bobby dropped it awkwardly, clearing his throat. "You remember him?" he inquired hesitantly, lifting one hand a foot and a half over his head to indicate Fawkes' lofty stature. "Tall kid, hair up to here, dresses like a refugee... According to his report, he ran into you while he was scoping out the perimeter for a way outta this sand trap. You had a do-it-yourself popgun -" he jabbed a forefinger at the rifle"- that scared him outta year's growth. Not that he needs another inch on him..." Hobbes trailed off.

The man ignored him, turning his swivel chair away to face the laptop on the tabletop as he typed out a rapid log-off and shut off the machine's power.

"You are 'Kro', aren't you?" he asked persistently. This got him a glance and a single nod of confirmation, but no verbal reaction. "So. You the man I talk to about a broken window?" he repeated his initial question, giving up on small talk and introductions.

"Depends. If you're looking for some plastic sheeting and two by fours, yeah. Anything more substantial, I put in a requisition with the men upstairs," he responded finally, poking a finger up at the ceiling to indicate the mysterious presence of the eyes in the painted 'sky'. Kro folded the laptop shut, switching off the desktop light, and rose from his chair. "But since weather isn't an issue around here, I'd just wait until the ASS-wipes get in here for the routine repairs. Which unit? I'll put in the paperwork."

"Coconut Grove building, unit 101," Bobby gave him Fawkes' address. He watched Kro fill out a standard form in triplicate. It made him flash on the several unhappy experiences he'd had as Eberts' file clerk. "Looks like even in here, you can't get away from the bureaucracy," he observed dryly.

"Got that right," Kro snorted as he rolled the form and shoved it into a clear plastic canister resembling a pipe bomb, then tucked the whole thing into a clear Lexan standpipe that led to the ceiling. He closed the little trap door and hit a large red panic-type button.

"Jack Carelli did a half gainer through my partner's window an hour ago. You know Jack?" he inquired as Kro turned towards him again.

"Yeah, I know Jack. Testy bastard. Not real keen on being in here and real keen on letting anyone who'll listen, know about it." With a sibilant whisper, the canister shot upwards in the pipe to disappear out of the office.

"Pretty handy trick," Hobbes approved as the pneumatic hiss faded. "That the only way to get a message out of this place?" he asked.

Kro nodded slightly. "It's primitive, but it works. And it keeps the handlers and the zoo animals separate," he replied, the cynicism fairly obvious.

"Not too keen on being here, yourself, huh?" Hobbes asked, curious as to the general opinion the inmates of this place had about their incarceration.

"Beats the alternatives," Kro shrugged a response. "You said you'd been in here two years ago? So how'd you talk your way back out of this display case we call home?"

Hobbes exhaled slightly, relieved that the initial reserve the other agent had been exhibiting was beginning to thaw. "Like I said; first time in, it was a misunderstanding. This time, we're here to try and get a handle on your murders."

This little tidbit generated some interest. "So ASS called in outsiders, huh?" Kro asked keenly. "Someone upstairs must finally have gotten their boxers in a bunch big-time. I've been trying to tell them they need to find out what's going on in here, or they're gonna have a mutiny on their hands. And there's enough tactical training in this place to make that real, real ugly if we decide to blow this pop stand and take our chances in the outside world," Kro shook his head irritably at the obtuseness of upper management. "Us stuck in here? It's like shootin' fish in a barrel."

Hobbes nodded agreement. "So, who's your pick for the perp?" he asked, figuring he might as well start comparing notes with the various residents.

"Mole. From the targets, I'd say maybe KGB, or whatever they're calling themselves now. Former iron curtain for sure, or I'll take repair duty for a month. Probably sent in to take care of some open files back at the Kremlin. The Russians will go a long way for payback," he stated.

"Personal experience?" Hobbes asked, interested in what this ex-agent's story was.

Kro's snort was one of laughter this time. "Oh, plenty of that, pal. Plenty of it. I went head to head with some of their best wet ops teams and I beat them at their own game every damned time. Which pissed 'em off. Made tagging me their priority. Barely made it out the last time, cuz my target turned out to be a set-up, and a whole squad was staked out around the place waiting to take me down. I nailed half of them and made it to my drop point and got the hell out of Dodge as fast as I could. Two weeks later, I was here," he waved a hand expansively around the room, as if showing off his kingdom. "Pretty much everyone in here has the same basic sob story."

Bobby considered this. "Makes sense, I guess. So far, all the vics are old guard. That fits, according to your theory," he agreed. "So who're the newbies? Who came in around the time the first murder happened?" Hobbes had memorized the list ASS had provided for him and Fawkes as a starting point at their pre-insertion briefing, but he wanted to hear it confirmed by a resident.

"Donny Sullivan; spent four years undercover in the IRA for MI6 as a CIA plant," Kro held up a finger. "Got both the Brits and the Micks pretty P.O.ed at 'im. Hannah Feinberg. Worked with the Mossad to try and take out radical Palestinian terror cells. Arafat put a bounty on her a year ago," the finger went up again. "Jordan Oaks. Intel op whose partner crossed the line and came after him when a mission went south. Rumor has it, he and his partner forgot the golden rule in this game," he went on a bit snidely as he lifted his middle finger this time in a universally recognized gesture.

Hobbes cringed inwardly. "Golden rule?" he repeated.

Kro grinned, a nasty, lascivious look about it. "Business and pleasure don't belong in the same bed," he said with a wicked bounce of the eyebrows.

"Fished off the company pier, huh?" Hobbes shook his head, dismayed.

"And got hooked," Kro snickered, then sobered, the prurient gleam fading from his eyes. "This game is hell on relationships," he sighed. "Considering it's pretty much impossible to have anything like a normal life if you spend all your time in deep cover, it's no wonder half the people in this place made the same mistake at least once or twice in their careers."

Hobbes nodded, wanting to get off that particular subject. "Who else?" he asked, trying to get Kro back on topic.

"Shareem Jackson. Youngest agent we've ever had in here. He was working with an anti-gang taskforce in east LA until they got tipped to the infil and came after him. He brought down one of the biggest gang-banger prison drug rings in DEA history, and got himself targeted by every gang in the country. Those kids are worse than the mob. They'd kill their own grandmothers for lookin' at 'em funny."

"Yeah. Hell of a country we're tryin' to protect, here, huh?" Bobby agreed. "Any others?"

"Yeah," Kro replied and went on to give Bobby the names of the other three agents he had on his agenda.

"Got any favorites on the list?" Hobbes asked when he was finished.

To his surprise, Kro shook his head slowly. "That's what makes this so dicey," he explained. "None of the new blood would be at the top of my list. But why would one of the old guard suddenly go whacko on us and start picking us off? 'Fraid I don't have a working theory. If I did, you can be damned sure that 'big brother' would'a heard about it."

Hobbes contemplated this as he looked absently around the room. "None of the victims were recent inductees, right?" he mused aloud.

"Right. Long-term residents. They'd been here upwards of 10 years or more," Kro confirmed. Before he could go on, the door to the little office opened again and a wispy-looking man no taller than Hobbes stepped in, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose to settle them more securely. He had to be in his 50s, and Hobbes found himself wondering what someone this vanilla had done to end up in protective custody here at the Community.

"Hey, Wally," Kro greeted the newcomer.

"Anthony," the milquetoast returned the greeting, and Bobby dutifully ignored Kro's flash of annoyance at the revelation of his given name. "I'm glad I caught you before you left. I wanted to requisition a new batch of printer cartridges. The last one just self-destructed - again," he replied, holding up inky fingers.

Kro nodded and handed him a form in triplicate. "You know the drill," he said. "Hobbes, this is Wallace Wolbrom," he added, by way of introduction. "Wally, meet Bobby Hobbes. He's new."

"Repeat customer, actually," Hobbes corrected and shook the limp hand offered him, resisting the urge to wipe his palm on his slacks afterward.

That brought both of Wally's graying eyebrows crawling well up his forehead towards his receding hairline. "Pardon? I thought this destination was a one-way ticket," he said with barely concealed eagerness. "That sounds like a story I should hear!"

"Wally's kind of the unofficial biographer around here. He's been working on a book for -- what -- five years now?" Kro filled in.

Wolbrom ducked his head, discomfited. "Eight," he mumbled.

"Whatever," Kro waved a hand dismissively. "He's been collecting tall tales from some of the old blowhards in here and writing them up for 'posterity'. Although I don't know who he expects to sell it to, since all of us are dead to the outside world -- if we ever officially existed in the first place," he added with a hint of bitterness.

"Yes, well, I'm sure once the Freedom of Information Act allows, I'll be permitted to have it published," Wally defended his labors.

Kro's opinion of this bit of cockeyed optimism was expressed with a snort. "Uh-huh. Keep telling yourself that, Wally-Wol," he opined as he tucked the form Wallace handed him into another of the pneumatic canisters and shoved it unceremoniously into the vacuum tube, sending it on its way.

Hobbes caught the frustrated scowl on Wolbrom's face, the pursed lips disapproving, and was unable to resist offering his own experiences up for the record. "A book, huh? Bet you've never heard of Santa Ruego," he started, jonesing for an invitation to regale Wolbrom with some of his many exploits in the field.

"South American nation, bordered on the west by Venezuela, and to the south by Brazil," Wally replied as if reading from a cue card. "Principle crops; coffee and bananas. Historically, a military dictatorship with a recent trend towards democracy. The current prime minister is the son of the former dictator, but he has strongly allied himself to the US by deploying his country's missiles in ways that conform to our interests in the region," he concluded like a schoolboy reciting a lesson.

It was Bobby's turn to raise an eyebrow. "I thought you'd been in here for eight years," he remarked, startled.

"Oh, I've resided in the Community for over 12," Wallace responded. "But we have internet access here, for research purposes. We may not be allowed to communicate with the outside world, but it can communicate to us," he revealed.

Hobbes knew enough about computer networks to have a glimmer of how difficult it must have been to set up one-way firewalls that even the most brilliant hacker couldn't find a way through, but would still allow ex-agents to keep abreast of world events. He added that to his mental list of things to follow up on. "You're right about the missiles," he confirmed, preening a bit. "Me'n my partner were the ones that made that little political coup happen," he informed the writer.

"Really," Wallace said with a noticeable lack of interest. "The southern hemisphere really isn't my particular field of interest, Mr. Hobbes." His expression went intent as he continued. "But I would certainly appreciate hearing about your previous sojourn within the sheltering walls of the Community -- and why they released you. It's a first, as far as I know." The watery blue eyes were fixed on him, and Hobbes fidgeted, reluctant to go into it. Trying to come up with something that was even remotely plausible and didn't involve blowing Fawkes' cover was more than he wanted to tackle at the spur of the moment.

"Chalk it up to a misunderstanding," he said vaguely.

"A misunderstanding?" Wolbrom queried persistently.

"Let's just say that ASS jumped the gun. My Agency wasn't finished with me and my partner yet," he said un-informatively.

A small frown of concentration furrowed the mild-mannered biographer's brow. "Your partner is here, too? Mistakes like that are not the sort of thing ASS is known for," he pressed. "Perhaps we can schedule an interview, and you can tell me a bit more about it?"

"Erhm," Hobbes cleared his throat. "Get back to me in a few days, when I've had a chance to settle in," he suggested, fearing Wolbrom's persistence was going to become a headache of major proportions if not handled carefully.

Wolbrom beamed happily, having gotten what he was after. "Certainly, Mr. Hobbes. What unit have you been assigned?"

"Uh, I haven't, yet. I'm bunking with my partner for a few days 'til all that gets sorted out." He cringed inwardly at revealing even this much. It wasn't until then that he realized his reaction to Wolbrom was every bit as visceral as his reaction to Eberts. They were two of a kind; the kind that grated on his nerves and left him on the defensive, as well as perversely convinced that they had no idea what was involved in actual field work and were in no position to judge his actions. "So, Wallace, " he said heartily, deciding that a good offense would be his best defense, "how'd you end up in here?"

It worked like a charm. The unctuous interviewer faded back into a squirming paper-pusher as Wolbrom hemmed and hawed a non-answer. "What with one thing and another, it was decided I'd be better off in protective confinement," he said, visibly unhappy at being on the receiving end of the uncomfortable questions for a change. "Well," he said with false brightness, "it's been a pleasure to meet you." he turned to Kro, who merely lifted an eyebrow. "Anthony, I know you were just leaving, so I won't keep you any longer," he said and smiled weakly, then let himself out of the office.

Hobbes shuddered.

Kro chuckled. "Yeah. He has that effect on people," he agreed with Hobbes' unspoken reaction. "There's a pool going on who's going to be the one to find out what he did to end up in here," the ex-assassin confided with a sharky grin.

"Bored someone to death, most likely," Hobbes theorized, eliciting another laugh from Kro.

"Most likely," Kro agreed with a snort.

Darien was too restless to remain in his quarters, so in spite of the headache that still throbbed dully in the back of his skull, he'd gotten up only 20 minutes after Hobbes had departed. Consulting his mental list of the most recent newcomers to the Community, he decided that he'd start by talking to them. And right about now -- he glanced at his wristwatch, the shimmer of the green snake on the skin beneath the band vaguely reassuring -- everyone should be home having dinner. Besides, the walk would hopefully improve his mood.

He also intended to see if he could track down Jack Carelli's address in this maze-like compound, just so he knew where his personal prime suspect dwelt. However frustrating it was to have Hobbes still apparently harboring reservations about his former partner's motives, much less guilt, the fact that Carelli had already tried to kill both of them once and had made another stab at Hobbes only hours into their second tour of duty here put the ex-CIA agent at the top of Darien's list of 'most likely to.'

He let himself out of 'his' apartment and headed down the pathway now bathed in the reflected, piped-in glow of the sunset outside the habitat. He took note of where he was, consulting the discreet signage that directed pedestrians to various destinations, and headed off for the first retiree on his mental list. If he recalled correctly, Jordan Oaks resided at 103 Reflection Pool Place across the compound not far from the main pool. He'd start there and work his way back. He figured he ought to be able to cover all of the new residents, at least in a preliminary way, well before 10:00 p.m. If Hobbes bothered to return, he'd discuss his findings with him then. Until that happened, though, he considered himself on his own.

Darien rapped on the door at a polite volume, shifting his weight from one foot to the other while he waited for it to be answered.

And waited.

And waited. Even three knocks later, there was no response, and he gritted his teeth. It wasn't like there were a lot of restaurants or nightclubs to choose from, but apparently, Jordan had elected to spend his evening elsewhere.

Feeling especially irritable, he landed a kick on the solid wood of the door - and was shocked when it shivered open a crack to stand like a condemnation - or an invitation. He chose to accept the invitation and pushed it open slowly. "Uh, Jordan?" he announced his intrusion. "Hello? Anyone home?" then spotted the corpse sprawled nude facedown on the glass and steel coffee table.

He stopped dead in his tracks. "Oh crap," he breathed in dismay.

Claire hung over Borrick's shoulder, watching the silent interaction between Hobbes and the other two men in the office. It was evident to her, after several years of practice in reading Bobby Hobbes' body language, that the agent was discomfited in some way by the small, weedy-looking one. Even with only the somewhat grainy image onscreen to go by, whoever the short, graying man was, he had the posture of a stalking cat. There was no mistaking that he considered Hobbes his prey. She jabbed a finger at the screen, pointing him out. "Who is that?" she asked.

"The next Tom Clancy, or so he thinks," Borrick responded snidely. "His name's Wallace Wolbrom. He's an ex-NSA analyst. He's also a first class pain in the ass," he added under his breath.

"How so?" she inquired, curiosity piqued. It seemed Bobby wasn't the only one who responded badly to the small man's intensity. In some respects, it was reminiscent of Hobbes himself when he became focused on something. Which might well account for the reaction. She smiled slightly at the thought.

Borrick shrugged. "He's made kind of a nuisance of himself, what with wanting to interview all the other residents for his so-called book. We've got dozens of complaints on file about him," he finished.

"Book? I can't imagine that he'll be allowed to find a publisher," Claire commented.

"That doesn't stop him," Borrick replied. "He's got some bug up his --" he caught himself before completing the colorful description. "Uh, he's somehow convinced himself that he'll be able to release it under the Freedom of Information Act, once the events he's documenting are declassified."

"That would rather compromise ASS's sanctuaries, wouldn't it?" she nodded understanding.

"Rah-ther," Borrick agreed, adopting her accent.

"Do you have the compound wired for audio surveillance?" she asked, her curiosity satisfied on the Wolbrom score.

"Selected areas," Borrick confirmed. "There are mikes in the common areas, like the cameras. But we don't surveil the residences themselves. Gotta maintain some basic privacy for the zoo animals... It'd have been nice if we had even just one of the killings on tape, though," he concluded with some regret.

"That would have been helpful," she agreed, wondering if every ASS agent was as disaffected as this one seemed to be. She considered the possibility of someone from outside the compound itself having found a way to come and go from the habitat without detection. That disturbing thought triggered her next question. "What happens if someone needs medical assistance? Or something breaks down inside? There must be a way in and out of there that doesn't involve the method Agents Fawkes and Hobbes used to end their last stay here."

"Yes, there's an airlock system, a secure elevator and a double gated entrance into the compound we use for routine maintenance, medical emergencies, and all that sort of stuff," he assured her. "Anyone going in there has to be at or above clearance level Beta, so that means pretty much no one goes in who isn't at least 3 star-rated in self defense and counter espionage," he went on. "Some of the inmates would rather take their chances on the outside, but because they're privy to too many classified operations, we can't risk them being captured and debriefed by the enemy." None of this was news to her. She'd been through the 'front door' earlier in the day to check on Darien when he was slow to regain consciousness. But it still didn't answer the question of whether some other, 'unofficial' entrance existed.

Claire didn’t bother to ask the question that hovered on her lips. 'Enemies' these days seemed to be more and more plentiful and more and more nebulous in identity. "What about the earthquake last November?" she inquired instead, thinking perhaps some sort of damage might have occurred that would compromise the isolation of the Community.

Borrick snorted. "This is a nuclear-hardened facility, doc. It's also seismically stable on solid bedrock up to an 8.9 on the Richter scale. We had some minor cosmetic damage, and some of the personal breakables were a loss inside the dome, but overall, no serious structural failures. We went over it with a fine-tooth comb, though, just to be sure. The whole structure is rigged with sensors, so it'd be pretty easy to spot any weaknesses."

"What happens in the event of a power failure?" she asked, impressed at the level of planning that had gone into this quarantined retirement community. Clearly, the government was taking no chances with the secure containment of the residents.

"Back-up generators." Borrick scrolled through the rest of his camera positions quickly before returning to the one showing the interior of the office Hobbes and his companions had occupied. The lights were now off, and the room was empty. "Kro must'a closed up shop for the night," he observed.

"Can we locate Agent Hobbes?" she wanted to know, oddly lonesome suddenly, now that Bobby had disappeared from view.

"I'll try the cameras in a 40 yard radius around the maintenance office," he offered and proceeded to do so. None of them turned up Hobbes, though.

However, across the monitor room, Agent M'Benga cursed loudly. "Damn. Looks like we've got another one," he called out as he triggered an alarm. The klaxon was deafening, and Claire clapped her hands over her ears to reduce the assault on her tympanic membranes. As abruptly as the noise had started, it was cut off when the sirens were shut down in favor of the red glow that now illuminated the security room. "I've implemented full lockdown until the forensics team can be called in. Damn. This is not good. Not good at all."

Claire hurried towards M'Benga's station, the rest of the security officers following suit, and stood peering over his shoulder at the screen in front of him. On it, a gangly-limbed Darien was attempting a frantic-looking pantomime, complete with melodramatic self-strangulation impressions and grimaces of pseudo agony, all punctuated by sharp jabs of his forefinger off screen.

Tennyson hurriedly returned to his own station, seating himself as he gripped his joystick firmly. On the screen in front of him, the view tilted crazily as the radio-controlled helicopter was sent to investigate. "Lemme see if I can get a look," he said grimly, directing his airborne camera towards the location of the fixed one Darien was performing in front of.

Claire moved to a position behind the ASS agent, the view slightly unnerving as the miniature 'copter made its way through the compound, camera lens conveying with sickening accuracy the dips and dodges of the flight through tropical foliage. She was just about to become motion sick when the camera arrived at the little public square Darien occupied. It was decidedly peculiar to be able to see him from two different camera angles at the same time, front and back, the helicopter's camera distorting things into a fisheye perspective that did nothing to settle Claire's stomach.

When Darien realized the airborne camera had arrived, he switched his attention from the one mounted on the wall to the mobile one, leading the way across the little square to one of the apartment doors. He opened it, stepping aside to let the 'copter in, and Claire watched in horrified fascination as the body came into view.

Hobbes pushed his way through the gathered residents, having spotted Darien's spiky hair-do towering above the crowds of lesser mortals. "Fawkes!" he called out, trying to catch his partner's attention. "'Scuze me," he added as he stepped on someone's instep accidentally. "Hey, partner! -- pardon me, can I get through, here?" he said, dividing his attention between Fawkes and the mass of agitated people standing between them.

Finally, Darien looked up, having heard him at last, and he waved his lanky partner over. Fawkes waded into the edge of the gathered on-lookers and helped clear a path for him. "Hobbes," Fawkes acknowledged him, apparently still working off the squabble of earlier if his tone was any indication.

"What happened? It's all over the compound that the killer hit again," he told Darien, peering past his partner to catch a glimpse of the room at whose door they stood. "You the one who found the body?" he asked.

Darien nodded. "He's been dead a while," he informed Bobby with distaste. ""He's all... blue in the face."

"You examined the body?" Hobbes scolded. "We need a doctor for that! We need Claire in here," he added, more to himself than to Fawkes.

"Hello? Reality to Hobbes; we're in here, she isn't. No other doctors in this place, either, as far as I know. So yeah, I checked to make sure he was dead, OK? And that's all I did. I know better than to mess around in a crime scene, you know," Darien snapped petulantly. "I secured the scene and did my impression of a mime for the nearest security camera. The boys upstairs sent one of the toy helicopters to check it out. So I'm assuming they'll have their in-house science geeks swarming all over this pretty damned quick."

Hobbes made a face. "Sorry, pal. I know you can handle yourself around a crime scene," he apologized. "So...d’you spot anything?" he asked, doing his best impression of Darien's puppy dog eyes. Darien rolled his own eyes, recognizing that trick.

"You mean besides the economy pack of condoms he had stuffed in his mouth?" Darien grimaced. "No. I figured I'd better get clear before I hurled all over the body," he admitted.

"Good call," Hobbes agreed dryly.

A hubbub from the outside edge of the crowd drew their attention. A cream-suited ASS agent appeared like some wild west sheriff, accompanied by what could only be the crime scene team. The three investigators, two men and a woman, were decked out in white jumpsuits and surgical masks, carrying forensics kits and photography equipment, a sort of bizarre posse. However, even the white jumpsuit, mask and the uncharacteristically upswept hair couldn't disguise the gray eyes of the Keeper. The wink directed at them let them know she was there on sufferance and that it might be wise to ignore her. Darien caught Hobbes by the elbow to steer him to one side, ignoring his partner's imitation of a landed fish as Bobby tried to come up with some sort of suave opening line to introduce himself to the forensics team.

"Hobbes," he urged, attempting a distraction. Bobby kept his eyes fixed on Claire's slender figure even as Darien hauled him aside. Fawkes was afraid he would give himself whiplash at this rate. "She's our ace in the hole, man. Don't blow her cover, will ya? Just cool it!"

The scolding got Hobbes attention, the wounded look he directed at Darien expressive. "Hey, I'm a professional, Fawkes," he complained, hurt.

"Then start acting like it," Darien snapped. "She's got a job to do, and so do we. Doing the lovesick puppy routine isn't on the list."

Hobbes gaped at him.

Darien sighed. "Hey, I call 'em like I see 'em. You still want me to believe she isn't anything more to you than a coworker? Then get with the program. We've got a murderer to catch."

"This is about Carelli, isn't it?" Bobby responded, annoyance tingeing the wounded pride.

"This is about doin' the job," Darien contradicted. "This is about focus, Bobby. And you can't fool me with this teenaged angst routine, man. I know you. You've got the focus thing down. So start acting like it, will ya?"

Darien watched his partner's expression, the annoyance giving way to determination.

"I still say this is about Carelli, Fawkes. I don't care how far underground this place is, it's still part of the US of A. Innocent 'til proven guilty, right?"

Darien couldn't help the cynical snort. "Yeah. Whatever you say. That's why I ended up with a third strike conviction for aggravated assault on top of burglary. That's why I ended up with this thing-" he smacked a palm lightly against the back of his skull "- in my head. Innocent 'til proven guilty. My personal mantra, Hobbes."

Hobbes scowled, acknowledging the accuracy of this little rant. "I've learned a lotta things, workin' with you, Fawkes. And top of the list is; things ain't always what they seem. Yeah, Carelli wants me dead. Maybe. Maybe he even wants you dead. But that don't mean he had anything to do with these murders."

"Then I say we ask him," Darien replied tersely. "I say we eliminate him as a suspect, if you're so sure he wouldn't have iced these people."

It was a dare of sorts, and clearly, Hobbes knew it. "OK, ace, lets track him down and see who's right." With that, he turned on his heel and waded into the crowd of onlookers before Darien could even relish his victory.

He hustled after his partner, catching up to him on the far side of the gathered residents. "Hey, wait up, Hobbes," he said as he jogged after him.

"You're the one with the long legs, stretch," Bobby pointed out, not looking back. "I just want to get this cleared up as soon as possible so we can get the hell outta here," he added under his breath.

"That makes both of us," Darien concurred.

Claire followed the two ASS investigators into the apartment, glancing around the space with an eye open for anything that appeared out of place. She circled the perimeter of the room, treading carefully, examining surfaces, knick-knacks, shelves, anything that might have taken a print other than the owner's. When she'd completely circumnavigated the room, she spiraled into the center, watching as her associates photographed the remains of a once heartbreakingly handsome man and dusted for fingerprints on the glass table. She stayed silent, knowing she was an unwelcome addition to the investigators' routine.

The pair of agents moved methodically, but without the care Claire would have taken. Finally, when one too many samples had been collected in a less than standard manner, she stepped in.

"Excuse me, gentlemen. But a luminol spray will tell us if there are any bodily fluids present, and that will make your swabs irrelevant. I suggest that we check that first before collecting any more samples that may or may not include anything of interest," she proposed, ignoring the glares from both agents.

"Who put you in charge?" one of them snarled unpleasantly.

"You did, when you demonstrated an appalling lack of basic knowledge regarding forensic procedure," she returned fire. "That, and my assorted medical degrees make me what passes for an expert around here," she finished, and both her companions looked chastened, if surly.

"Take it away, sister," one of them said,, stepping back with a sweep of the hand over the scene to stand at the end of the couch, arms crossed belligerently. Claire glared back at him, stepping forward to pull the spray bottle of pale blue liquid from the man's kit where it sat on the sofa. She spritzed the glass coffee table carefully, covering the surface with a fine mist, then donned the protective goggles as she turned on the black light to shine the beam over the table. There was a pair of violet circles glowing in the uneven shape of coffee mug rings, probably soup, as it was proteins the luminal reacted with, and there, just up under the body's chest, a scattering of tiny droplets. She switched off the light and pushed the goggles back up her forehead intently, removing a fresh swab from the kit she had taken over, and snapping it free of its protective plastic capsule so she could take a sample.

"Semen?" the second, less hostile agent inquired, interested.

"I doubt it," Claire replied, finishing her swab and lifting the cotton-tipped wand to eye level. "No, it looks like blood."

"Hunh. Well, what's with all the condoms, then?" he asked, flicking a glance at the scattered drifts of open packets. "And his, uh, his..."

Claire lifted an eyebrow at this unlikely bashfulness. "Erection?" she supplied. "It's a well documented phenomena in cases of strangulation, actually. Nitrogen levels increase in the bloodstream, and blood vessels relax and fill. Strangulation to near unconsciousness is actually used as an aphrodisiac by some..." she trailed off, her attention caught by something. She crouched beside the table to examine the indentation in the skin around the waist. "It appears he disrobed either immediately before his death, or he was stripped post mortem," she observed, intrigued. "The elastic marks from his boxer's waistband are still present." She looked up at the two ASS agents, instincts twinging. "Take samples from the rings on the table, then let's roll him over," she directed.

The two agents did as she'd directed, and then helped to turn the rigored body onto its back. Claire examined the bluish skin of the chest and abdomen, looking for what she assumed had to be there. It was small, but she found it. Just below the collarbone, slightly to the left of the hollow of the throat. A wound. Slight, but there. She extracted a magnifying glass from the kit on the couch beside her to examine it. "Knife wound. Very slight, in fact, it barely pierced the skin." She looked up at them, a slight frown between her brows. "I don’t recall seeing multiple wounds on any of the other victims," she mused aloud. "Excluding Nora Blake, who had two puncture wounds mid thorax, neither of the others had more than the single injury, one that was the cause of death." She paused as she went back to peering through her magnifying glass. "Hmm. Not deep; in fact, quite superficial," she said, cataloging the injury's characteristics to herself. "Apparently made with the tip of an exceedingly sharp knife."

She rocked back on her heels, contemplating the awkwardly laid out corpse on the table in front of her. "So... where are his clothes?" she asked of no one in particular.

The two agents exchanged glances.

She tapped the handle of the magnifying glass against her cheek absently. "That, gentlemen, is the question of the moment," she continued, eyeing them speculatively. "I suggest you locate them. Or determine whether they've been removed from the premises."

She saw the faint dawn of comprehension on the faces of the pair, and shook her head ruefully. No wonder these murders hadn't been solved more quickly. ASS clearly didn't include investigative training in the indoctrination regime of its agents. Or much in the way of standard forensics, either, she included as an afterthought.

Darien tagged after Hobbes, trying to insinuate himself into his partner's personal space so he could step up to Bobby's side, but Hobbes was having none of it. He kept to the dead center of the path, which didn't allow Fawkes to do anything but follow.

"You know where we're going, right?" he asked for the third time.

"To Carelli's place," Hobbes repeated as he had each previous time.

"Which is where?" Darien prompted, irritated.

"Across the compound," Bobby replied stolidly.

"Thanks for clearing that up," Darien snarked. "How'd you find out where he lives?" he wanted to know.

"I asked," Hobbes answered succinctly.

Darien was quiet for a few more steps as he considered this. "OK. I know how this is gonna sound... but I'm gonna ask anyway. How do you know they were, uh, you know," he faltered awkwardly.

"Know what?" Hobbes retorted ironically. "They were telling the truth? Geeze, Fawkes, and you call me paranoid."

This silenced Darien for a second or two. "And all of a sudden, you're not? Hobbes, you're kinda worrying me, here. I mean, Carelli's tried to kill you - twice! Not to mention me." He chewed over his next words, wanting to find some way to call Hobbes' apparent blind faith in his ex-partner into question without triggering Bobby's knee-jerk defensive mechanisms. "So what's really goin' on here?"

Hobbes was silent, but the sudden tightening of his shoulders told Darien his instincts weren't totally shot when it came to Bobby after all.

"Bobby. It's me, man. Talk to me," Fawkes prodded gently, sidling a little closer to his partner. He heaved a silent sigh of relief as Bobby unconsciously eased over to allow him to draw even.

The quiet between them stretched on for a moment. Darien let it, reassured that perhaps he and Hobbes weren't so far apart, communication-wise.

"Fawkes. I've screwed up. So many times, it's not even funny. I shouldn't even still be playin' this game, you know?" Hobbes made no effort to meet Darien's eyes, head down, focused on the path now illuminated underfoot by the low-to-the-ground modern garden lighting that had slowly intensified as twilight deepened into dusk.

"Only reason I'm still here is the people I've worked with. You, Monroe, a whole lotta others... even Carelli." Hobbes trailed off, apparently thinking.

Darien let the silence follow their footsteps along the concrete walk, knowing by now when Hobbes was brooding.

"Remember last year, when that whole doppleganger bank robbery thing happened? And I, uh, I..." Bobby's voice betrayed his state of mind.

"Blew it?" Darien filled in, the lingering resentment that incident still triggered suddenly minimal in the face of his partner's residual distress.

"Yeah." A single word, accompanied by something like a shiver, only so subtle, Fawkes felt it rather than saw it.

"Hobbes. Arnaud made sure there was no way anyone was gonna believe me when I said I didn't do it," he reminded at last. "Stop worrying about it, OK?"

"You haven't," Hobbes said quietly.

Darien gritted his teeth, knowing Hobbes was right - or would have been, a few months ago. And abruptly, the last traces of that breech of faith thinned and faded like mist. "Yeah, actually, I have," he answered and was relieved to hear it in his own voice.

Hobbes must have heard it as well, because he turned his head to glance at Darien, questioningly. "Yeah?" was the tentative reaction.

"Yeah. Hobbesy," he found himself grinning, his step lightening a bit. "We're cool. Really. So tell me what this whole deal with Carelli is all about, huh?"

The remaining hesitance in Bobby's step had vanished, the usual firmness and determination back in force. "Don't wanna make the same mistake twice," he said grimly. "Carelli got screwed. It wasn't my fault, but it was, know what I mean?" he cast a sideways look at Fawkes.

Darien was forced to nod, understanding now exactly what was going on with his partner. "White man's burden," he commented, almost to himself.

"Huh?" Bobby queried, head cocked in confusion.

"Sorry. It's something I heard once," Fawkes shrugged. "I think I means something like; you've screwed someone, even if you didn't mean to; and you've watched other people screw 'em over, and it all ends up landing on a poor schmuck who never saw it comin'. So you make it your responsibility not to do it to anyone else."

Hobbes nodded vehemently. "Yeah. Exactly. And Carelli is the one who ended up with the dirty end of this stick. I kinda wanna make it right," he confided.

Darien couldn't help the quiet laugh. "Bobby, that's what I love about you, man. You wanna make it right. Even when it's not your fault. You ever think about the fact that it was Doc Barry who put Jack in this place? You did what you were supposed to, partner. You reported as ordered for your psych appointments. You showed up stateside on schedule for your annual evaluation. It wasn't your fault Carelli ended up stuck in this lame excuse for a super spy retirement home. I mean, he could just as easily have ended up dead," Darien reminded.

"That supposed to make me feel better?" Hobbes eyed him warily. "'Cuz it ain't workin', pal."

"Sorry, Hobbes. All I meant was, if the CIA hadn't figured out Barry was the leak, Carelli wouldn't have made it out of Berlin alive."

"I guess you got a point, Fawkes, but the only reason he was compromised in the first place was cuz'a me."

"No," Darien repeated stubbornly, "It was because of Barry. And I hope that bastard rots in hell for it, too."

Hobbes remained quiet as they walked, and Darien let his elbow bump Bobby's arm companionably.

"We there yet?" he asked brightly, slightly mocking, five minutes later as they skirted the small auxiliary swimming pool that bordered the outermost path circling the Community's dome. Hobbes led the way to a vaguely familiar dead-end section of path, Darien following curiously, wondering why he recognized it.

"What are you, five?" Hobbes teased. "According to my source, Carelli's in the unit six doors down from his. Which is right - here," Bobby said as he waved up at the occupant who sat on the balcony overhead, polishing the barrel of a homemade rifle. "Kro," he hailed the resident. The porch light gleamed on the deadly looking gun, the last of the twilight finally having faded to darkness.

"Hobbes," Kro acknowledged. "So, who bought it?"

"Jordan Oaks, according to Fawkes, here. One of the new guys."

"So much for my theories, I guess," Kro answered grimly, sighting along the barrel of his gun to check its alignment. "What brings you to the outskirts of so-called civilization?" he asked.

"Jack Carelli," Hobbes responded, cocking his head to peer up at Kro, who went on with his weapons inspection.

Kro grunted, and Darien couldn't tell if it was confirmation - or surprise. "You think he had something to do with this?" the ex-assassin asked flatly, giving the rifle barrel a last polish with a grimy rag.

"He tried to kill me'n Hobbes the last time we were in here," Darien informed him sharply. "And he took another whack at Bobby earlier today."

That got Kro's attention, and he hesitated a moment before setting the rifle down, leaning it against the deck railing. "Maybe you'd better come in," he suggested.

Darien and Bobby exchanged glances, Fawkes none too sure this was a wise idea, but he followed his partner back down the walk that led to Kro's front door.

Claire removed the latex exam gloves with a satisfying 'snap', tucking them into the pocket of her white jumpsuit. "Bag it," she directed her associates, who obediently stuffed the pair of white cotton boxer-briefs into an evidence bag. "You're sure none of his other clothing turned up?"

"We're positive," the formerly surly ASS agent assured her. "Everything in the hamper is in the collection bags, so if his duds are here, we've got 'em. If they aren't, then maybe we've got a connection to our killer."

"I assumed you checked the bathroom and under his bed? As well as the floor of his closet?" she asked, sounding schoolmarm-ish even to herself.

The more friendly of the pair grinned. "Yes'm," he replied with sarcastic good humor. "We even checked the stuff hanging in the closets and in his dresser to make sure it hadn't been worn. Just in case."

She found herself smiling. "Excellent work, then, gentlemen. Let's get this back to the lab so I can take a look."

She returned the pair of boxer-briefs to their evidence bag thoughtfully. The minimal traces of bodily fluids were consistent with them having been worn for less than a day, unlike the three other pairs found in the bottom of the hamper. So odds were, this was the pair the victim had been wearing at his death, or immediately before.

None of the other clothing they'd collected bore any trace of blood, or anything else suspicious, either. Which meant that in all probability, the murderer had removed the clothing from the apartment because it could potentially link him to the victim. Or at least Claire assumed it was a 'him.' Perhaps unfairly, given the sate of undress Jordan Oaks had been found in...

She'd sent her two assistants back into the dome to investigate all the public trash receptacles in the Community. The waste removal system included what amounted to an elaborate compound-wide trash chute leading from all waste cans to an incinerator system, which reduced anything leaving the Community to ash before it reached the outside world. She'd made sure the scheduled nightly emptying of public and private trash collection bins had been delayed to allow the team to search for the missing clothing. While this also meant that residential trash would remain in place, she doubted the wisdom of launching a door to door search for the garments until they had narrowed down the suspect list to something more manageable than the entire population of the Community. She would simply have to hope that the murderer was complacent enough that they would have a chance to find them.

Claire put the bag back into the cardboard box that held the rest of the evidence gathered at the scene of the crime and placed the whole thing into the locker, securing it. Her next duty was the examination of Jordan Oaks' body, far from her favorite activity as the de facto medical expert on scene. She'd always hated cadaver work in school, preferring her patients alive and cantankerous to dead and biddable. She only hoped she'd have something useful to give Bobby and Darien at the end of it that would help them locate the killer before anyone else died.

She conducted her visual exam first, starting at the feet of the dead man and working up from there. She reported her findings self-consciously into the mike hanging above the morgue table. "Victim is impeccably groomed," she observed, noting the perfect condition of both finger and toenails, the precisely trimmed mustache, the elegant cut of the thick brunette mane, and even the tidy, well differentiated eyebrows. The clouded blue eyes must have been stunningly beautiful in life, and she used the lighted magnifying lens mounted beside the table to examine them in detail. Bloodshot whites and telltale pinpricks in the rear surface of the eye near the retina bore mute testimony as to the cause of death. "Petechial hemorrhaging of the eyes tentatively confirms strangulation," she intoned, then moved the magnifying lens, concentrating on the bruising and abrasions that ringed Oaks' throat. It had a peculiar pattern, one she could only liken to a knotted rope, yet there were no other marks to verify that assumption. She'd never heard of a garrote with more than a single knot, though she would be the first to admit it was far from her area of expertise. "Further evidence of strangulation in the ligature marks around the throat," she added. "It might have been caused by a knotted rope, or other cord, but there is no fiber evidence or other striations consistent with standard twisted rope..."

Switching her attention from his neck to his mouth, she used a pair of forceps to pull the first of the condoms protruding moistly from Jordan's oral cavity free. To her surprise, the first was tied to a second, to a third, and so on, until a total of 10 of the latex sheaths had been removed from Oaks' mouth like a string of sausages. Wrinkling her nose, she deposited the rubber into a collection dish. "Well, that explains the ligature marks," she sighed. "Strangulation appears to have been the result of 10 prophylactics that have been knotted together to form a length of latex, then tightened around the victim's throat, cutting off the airway. The 'cord' was then inserted postmortem into the victim's mouth. I'll check the latex for prints next." Shutting off the mike, she gathered the stainless steel specimen dish and headed for the microscope across the room.

"It's not Carelli," Hobbes said flatly.

"Oh, come on, Hobbes, at least you gotta consider the possibility," Darien insisted, setting the long-necked beer bottle on Kro's coffee table with exasperated thump.

"You think I haven't?" Hobbes replied impatiently. "I'm not sayin' he isn't capable of killing those people, I'm sayin' there's no motive for him to!"

"Uh, how 'bout insanity?" Fawkes argued. "I mean, he went after us the last time we were in here, and he tried to stick a knife in you earlier this afternoon," he pointed out. "As far as I'm concerned, he's crazy enough to do anything. Or anyone."

"Yeah, he did. I'm not sayin' he didn't, Fawkes. But he has a motive to kill me. What's he gonna get by suddenly deciding to start icing a buncha ex-spies?" Bobby asked, annoyed.

Darien opened his mouth to argue, then thought better of it. He racked his brains to find a way to describe his nagging suspicion of Hobbes' former partner when the glaringly obvious smacked him between the eyes and he stared at Hobbes. "Maybe it's not about them, Bobby," he started, groping for words.

"Huh?" Hobbes' quizzical look spoke of confusion. Even Kro looked uncertain of the point.

"Maybe he's not killing them because of anything about them, Hobbesy. Maybe he's killing them because he wants us to think he's nuts." Darien asked, directing this to Kro, whose raised eyebrow told of an idea that hadn't occurred before.

Hobbes frowned, eyes narrowing.

"Listen to me, Hobbes. What if he figures the only way to get out of this giant aquarium is to go publicly nutso? That gets him topside, locked into some nuthatch somewhere. It's just gotta be easier to break out of the looney bin than it would be to get outta here," he hypothesized.

"You two apparently managed it without much trouble," Kro pointed out sarcastically, harking to Hobbes' earlier confession, his expression revealing both his skepticism and his reluctant admiration of that feat.

Darien cleared his throat self-consciously as Hobbes fidgeted uncomfortably.

Kro laughed at both of them. "Don't worry. I won't ask how you did it. I have a feeling I may not want to know," he reassured them.

Darien shot him a grateful glance as he tried to pick up his train of thought again. "Seriously, Hobbes. What if these murders are just a way to snag a season pass to the cuckoo's nest?"

Bobby considered it, and Darien could see the unwilling acknowledgment of this possibility. "Alright, you've got a point. Maybe. But why do these murders if he doesn't do something wrong enough to get caught? Your theory is full'a holes without something to link Jack to the crimes."

Darien thought about this for a moment. "Then maybe we just haven't been looking in the right place," he suggested. "Maybe what we need is a little B&E recon in your ex-partner's pad."

Reluctance gave way to resignation as Hobbes was forced to agree to the logic of this course of action. "Let's at least find out if he's home, first, OK?" he grumbled unhappily. "I'm not wild about you goin' in there if he's as far around the bend as you think."

"Hey," Darien protested. "I'm a professional thief, remember? I know how to stay under the radar," he reminded, miming a diving plane with one hand.

"Maybe so, but I'd still be happier if we make sure the coast is clear," Hobbes insisted.

"I don't know when they started recruiting out of the state penitentiaries, but your partner's right. I don't care how good a thief you are, this is a tougher crowd than your average suburban neighborhood," Kro spoke up. "Not that theft has been an issue around here, but you're dealing with a bunch of professionals. Most of us know how to stop someone like you in your tracks."

Darien couldn't help the smirk. "I wouldn't be so sure of that in my case," he allowed himself a moment of self-congratulatory smugness. "There's more to me than meets the eye. Or maybe that's less," he added.

"Modest, isn't he?" Kro inquired of Hobbes, whose sour expression spoke volumes.

"Yeah. He goes outta his way to be subtle," Bobby agreed dryly. "Fawkes, you eaten anything since you woke up this afternoon?" he prodded.

Darien grimaced. "Like what?" It's not like they left the fridge in my place stocked with all the best junk food, or anything," he pointed out. "Besides, I've only been on the vertical for four hours, tops."

"What about one'a your mean green smoothies?" Hobbes forced the issue, ignoring the revulsion on Darien's face.

"Bleech," was Fawkes' commentary on that idea.

"You're not doin' anything 'til you've got some fuel to work on, pal. I know how you get when you forget to eat, remember?" Hobbes said firmly, arms crossing over his chest stubbornly.

Darien made a face at his partner, but obediently tugged one of the packets Claire had made up for him out of his pants pocket. "There, you happy? Meals unfit to eat. Just add water," he snarked.

Hobbes turned to Kro. "Mind if he borrows a glass of water?"

Kro looked from one to the other of them, clearly trying to decipher the unspoken subtext in this peculiar conversation. "No problem," he said as he got up and went to get a glass.

Fifteen minutes later, Darien peered through hands cupped against the window, gazing into the dark interior of Jack Carelli's apartment.

From what Bobby could see, there was no sign of life, no lights, nothing to indicate anyone was there at all.

"I really think the coast is clear, Hobbes. Can I go now?" he asked, not for the first time in the past five minutes.

Hobbes, similarly positioned, strained his eyes for some glimpse of his former friend, dreading sending his current partner into this situation alone. "I don't like it, Fawkes," he said unhappily.

"You don't have to like it, you just have to let me do my job," Darien sighed. "It's either that, or we have to build us a bunk bed at my place, cuz we'll be here an awfully long time."

Hobbes didn't argue the point as he dropped his hands, stepping away from the window and back out of the planter in which they'd been standing. In fact, he made no response at all, instead, heading down the walk for Jack's front door. He heard Fawkes, caught off guard, rustle his way out of the ferns after him like some overgrown retriever, and resolutely, he came to a stop in front of the door. He rapped loudly, ignoring the squawk of protest from Darien behind him.

There was no response, and Hobbes stepped aside with an overblown gesture of presentation, allowing his partner access. "Take it away, Houdini," he said.

He heard Darien's muttered: "It's about frickin' time," but chose to ignore it, more concerned with positioning himself to block as much of what happened next from prying eyes as possible. His partner the cat burglar unobtrusively handled the locks with the slender picks he generally had secreted about him somewhere, and as he opened the door, Quicksilver flowed over Darien like spilled paint. He flickered into invisibility, sliding through the barely opened door, then easing it discreetly shut after himself.

Hobbes debated with himself over whether to stand guard at the door or take a seat on the oriental-inspired bench that sat along the wall near the main walk as if waiting for Carelli to return. Deciding that sitting would look at least nominally less suspicious than standing, he parked himself on the concrete bench, doing his best to look casual, while every sense was tuned to the apartment a few feet away.

He'd nearly decided that something must have happened to his partner when the front door opened just far enough to allow his still invisible friend to leave. He got up, scurrying over to the door as Darien let the chill metallic coating flake away. "So?" he asked anxiously, not even letting Fawkes close the door first, unsure he really wanted to know what Darien had found.

Whatever Fawkes was about to say was rendered moot as the edge of a knife's blade was suddenly pressed hard against his Adam's apple, a black-clothed arm wrapped around his neck from behind, forcing his chin up.

Without thinking, both agents exchanged slightly panicked looks and spoke in perfect unison: "Oh, CRAP. Jack."

"So. Bobby. Here you are again. Imagine that. And your invisible friend, too," Carelli commented softly as he steered Darien out of his doorway and further out onto the front stoop.

Bobby matched each of their forward steps with a backward one of his own, keeping the same relative distance between himself and his two partners. "Jack, put down the knife," he suggested as calmly as he could manage.

"Oh, I don't think so, not quite yet, anyway," Carelli refused, tightening his grip on Fawkes for emphasis. "Leverage is leverage, and something tells me, your skinny friend here is more leverage than the rest of the spooks in here put together." The ex-CIA agent turned slightly to direct his next comment into Darien's ear. "That little disappearing trick of yours alone makes you quite the bargaining chip, doesn't it, 'my friend?'"

Hobbes watched Darien swallow, the movement of muscles under the knife blade making Bobby's stomach ache with tension. "If you're right about that, Jack, there's no percentage in hurting him," he warned sharply.

"I think you're wrong there, 'partner,'" Jack grinned wolfishly over Darien's shoulder. "I'm in what's commonly known as a no-lose situation. I can use the scarecrow, here, to bargain my way out, and even if something 'unfortunate' were to happen to him in the negotiations, his blood on my hands is going to get me a court date, at the very least," Carelli gloated. "Once I'm out of this bad excuse for a zoo exhibit, I'll take my chances on being able to break out of any prison they put me in. And even solitary confinement will be better than this place," he snarled.

"I wouldn't count on that," a new voice interjected, the gleaming muzzle of a homemade rifle settling against the back of Carelli's skull as Kro stepped out of the open doorway at his back.

Bobby felt his knees wobble with relief and reached out one hand to snatch at Fawkes' elbow, pulling him forcibly out of Carelli's grip. Darien wasn't looking to be in much better shape than he was, Bobby realized, and they leaned against each other, holding each other up. "You OK, there, hotshot?" he asked Fawkes, who was looking a bit green.

"Dandy," Darien answered weakly. "Didn't I say? Next time I tell you something, are you going to listen?"

"You were right, I was wrong. That what you wanted to hear, pal?" Hobbes admitted readily enough, too relieved to hold a grudge at the self-righteousness in Fawkes' voice. "Carelli's our man, and I oughta've listened to you."

Kro nudged Carelli forward towards them, and they separated, stepping off each side of the path to allow the two to pass between them. "I think we'd better take this inside before the villagers show up with pitchforks and torches," the former assassin suggested, marching his prisoner down the path back towards his own apartment.

"How'd you know Carelli was around?" Darien asked, following behind, with Bobby bringing up the rear.

"Saw him go by right after you two left my place," Kro replied. "Figured you were going to need backup, so I brought Betsy, here," he flexed one elbow and the rifle stock jounced ever so slightly against his cheek, "and came to the party. She's the prettiest girl at the dance, don'tcha think?" he asked, amusement coloring the sarcasm.

"Definitely," Darien agreed, and Hobbes nodded, not caring that Kro couldn’t see the gesture.

"A knock-out," Hobbes concurred, edging ahead to open Kro's front door as they arrived at the assassin's address.

The quartet entered single file, Darien shutting the door after himself, and Kro directed Carelli into the living room. "Hobbes, there's some climbing line in the kitchen drawer next to the sink. Hack off a chunk and tie your friend up, will you?" he directed.

Bobby did as he'd been asked, returning with the requested rope and securing his ex-partner's wrists together behind Jack's back with a few efficient knots.

"I think it's time for true confessions," Kro said as he laid a heavy hand on Carelli's shoulder, forcing him onto the couch behind him, where he landed with an awkward thump. "Why kill Steed?"

The rest of them took seats in the occasional chairs facing the sofa, an impromptu inquisition.

Carelli blinked in unmistakable surprise. "Steed? You think I had something to do with his death?" he gaped up at the rest of them, genuinely surprised.

Kro's snort was anything but amused. "Steed, Spaulding, Blake - and now Oaks. Tell me, Jack, where were you a few hours ago?"

"Oaks? Jordie is dead, too?" Carelli paled and the abrupt absence of bravado in his expression registered with the rest of them.

"I found him strangled to death on his coffee table about an hour and a half ago," Darien said grimly. "He'd been dead a while before I found him. At a guess? I'd say since this morning sometime. Noon at the latest, probably."

Carelli stared straight ahead, visibly chewing on this revelation. "I was at the main pool," he said flatly. "Doing my laps before lunch. Fifty people must have seen me there," he added defensively.

"Anyone in particular?" Kro asked.

"You're telling me I need an alibi?" Jack snapped, anger replacing shock as his position as most likely suspect became crystal clear to him.

"That's exactly what we're telling you," Darien confirmed.

"Why the hell would I kill any of the old fogies in this place?" Jack asked, outraged. "I have nothing against a bunch'a Social Security types living out their 'golden years' in this bell jar. But I'm not gonna be one of them if I can help it!"

"Yeah, you made that pretty clear when you put a knife to Fawkes' throat," Bobby agreed, angry. "You cap a few retirees and suddenly you've got the fast track to the nearest looney bin, where you walk through the walls first chance you get," he accused. "Exactly like you were going to do with my buddy as a hostage."

"Your 'buddy' is my ticket out of this place," Carelli responded grimly. "That little parlor trick of his has NSA or NSC written all over it. And it's gotta be how you got out of this place before," he asserted. "How does it work? The lasers bounce off him or what?"

Fawkes gritted his teeth, realizing that Carelli had now seen him as he unQuicksilvered not once, but twice. Trying to convince a trained spy that he hadn't seen a man reappear out of thin air was going to be an uphill battle. He wouldn't even have bothered to try if it weren't for Kro. The last thing he needed was to be the headliner for the 'great escape', and be forced to lead a prison break at gunpoint, if the assassin shared Carelli's goal of escaping the care of ASS.

"What, you think he's some sorta 'star wars' era freak? What the hell do they put in the water around here?" Hobbes shook his head. "Maybe it's Lithium they oughtta be using."

"Oh gimme a break," Jack snorted. "I know what I saw, and I saw the string bean over there materialize in front of my eyes like some sort of Hollywood special effect. I've been in the business long enough to know when I run across something top secret," he jabbed an elbow in Darien's direction, "and he's it." He paused for a split second, and Hobbes opened his mouth to respond, but Carelli continued before he could say a word in Fawkes' defense. "What I want to know is, how did a washed up loser of an agent like you get assigned some hotshot invisible-freaking-man as a partner?"

The sheer vitriol in those words sent Darien's blood pressure soaring, and he snarled soundlessly as he unfolded himself from his chair to stand in front of the still-seated Carelli. "Loser? Hobbes?" he was too incensed to stand still, muscles quivering with anger. "Hobbes is the best I've ever worked with," he said flatly.

Carelli's amusement was unmistakable. "And you've worked with oh-so-many top of the line agents, haven't you, you greenhorn? Just let me give you a friendly warning, OK? Don't trust him. He's a loose canon."

Darien laughed without humor. "Usually that's what they call me, Jack. In this partnership, he's the reliable one."

"Match made in heaven, then," Carelli snapped. "But you haven't answered the question, Hobbes," he went on, speaking around Fawkes as if he wasn't there, verbal barbs still aimed at his former partner. "How'd you end up assigned to the wünderkind? I want to know how a blabbermouth like you gets to baby-sit something like him."

Claire carefully turned the sixth condom inside out, having dusted the outside unsuccessfully for prints. Not that she'd really expected to find any, what with the enzymes present in saliva easily able to denature any residual oils or proteins on the latex. But the insides, there she had some hopes of finding at least some partials to work with.

She examined the rubber carefully, using the magnifier to comb the surface for any trace of evidence. Once again, there was nothing. With a sigh, she set it carefully aside and went on to the seventh condom.

Once the outside had been gone over, she inverted it as she had the others, and tried to keep discouragement at bay long enough to finish this particular job. If it hadn't been for the unexpected contrast of the dark smudge on the translucent rubber about an inch in from the open end, she might have overlooked it as a manufacturing flaw. But there it was at last, something worth a closer look. She carefully positioned the latex and gingerly reached for a new swab and dabbed at the stain, a black smear fading off into gray. It looked suspiciously like a portion of a fingerprint, but there was so little of it, any ridge detail was lost. When she examined the swab, none of the substance had transferred to the fresh cotton, which told her it was in fact dry. Saliva hadn't reached it, and it had therefore been preserved. Which, given its position inside the condom, made sense.

Claire photographed it from several angles, just in case there was information to be gleaned from its appearance alone, then used a scalpel to excise the more smeared half of the stain, cutting it out of the condom and placing it in a petrie dish for a more detailed examination.

The next question was, what solvent would affect it? Picking up a lab wash bottle filled with distilled water, she let a single drop fall onto the plastic next to the quarter inch square of latex. With the point of the scalpel, she nudged the rubber into the water droplet. The stain ran instantly. "Ah hah," she muttered to herself, dissolving a bit more of the dark stain. She transferred the contents of the dish to a small test tube and this time added perhaps a half teaspoon of rubbing alcohol, which dissolved the remainder of the stain nicely.

While it had been years since Claire's last chemistry class, life as a Keeper, especially Keeper to someone like Darien Fawkes, had kept her lab skills well-honed. She spared a moment to envy the state of the art gas chromatography equipment as she suctioned up a sample of the alcohol containing the dissolved substance, and then injected it into the machine's port and pressed the 'start' button.

It was a few moments before the sample had been heated to the vapor points of its various constituents, but the wait was worthwhile. The chromatography graph that fed out of the machine resembled a cross between an EKG and an earthquake track on a recording drum. Each spike represented an element, and the combination of spikes, combined with their relative strengths, would give her an accurate idea of what exactly the stain was. While the alcohol was instantly identifiable, the remainder of the complex track wasn't so accommodating. She turned to the lab computer and set it to comparing the results to all the known samples in the database, and within minutes, had her answer.

"Ink?" she mused, puzzled, and wondering why this rang a bell somewhere. The stain was standard printer ink, a proprietary formulation common to one of the more popular manufacturers. She stared into space, considering this morsel of information, wondering how it would help her two associates in their search for the killer. She felt distinctly as if she was overlooking something. Some connection that ought to have been obvious. Setting the ink evidence aside, she returned to the files that held the details of the other murders, determined to go over it as many times as it took to find a way to assemble the pieces of this puzzle in a way that made sense.

Hobbes leaned further back in his seat as Darien turned to glare in his direction, silently demanding that Bobby defend himself against what he apparently considered slander. Hobbes didn't see the point. Nothing was going to change Carelli's opinion on what had gone down 13 years before in Berlin, and Bobby didn't see any percentage in trying. He knew Darien was convinced of Carelli's guilt, but his own instincts, regardless of what he'd told Fawkes, said that Jack wasn't the killer.

"So who did the murders?" he asked his former partner, ignoring the glare from Fawkes. "You want us to believe you're lily white, then maybe you'd better come up with a suspect we like better'n you for the jobs."

Carelli snorted. "Why? Go ahead, Hobbes, arrest me. If it gets me out of here, it's all good. And I won't even have to try poking holes in your invisible friend, there, to see if he goes transparent when he bleeds. Because trust me, I'm getting out of this place one way or another.

"Yeah, I'll take that bet," Kro spoke up. "I think it's about time we dropped a line to Big Brother upstairs and got them in here to take you off our hands." With that, he rose, his rifle back in hand, and hauled Carelli to his feet once more. "I'm taking you down to the maintenance office until the suits come for you. You two, go home. I'd say you’ve done enough for one night."

Bobby knew a dismissal when he heard it, but the idea of letting Kro take over what he considered his investigation didn't sit right, and he bristled, getting up himself. "This is our bust," he protested.

"Hobbesy, let's just go, alright?" Fawkes requested wearily, holding out an arm to halt Bobby's move towards Kro and Carelli. "I'm beat. And I need something to eat," he added.

Instantly, Hobbes' focus shifted to Fawkes, worry taking the place of indignation in the space of a single heartbeat. "OK, partner. Food it is," he agreed unhappily, doing his best to ignore the sarcastic smirk from Jack. "We're outta here. As long as you're sure you're OK alone with him," he said to Kro, jabbing a forefinger in Carelli's direction.

The former assassin grinned. "Trust me, Hobbes. I've got it covered. I ate punks like him for lunch with room left for dessert, back in the day."

"Not like me, gramps," Carelli sneered as Kro seized him by the ropes around his wrists and steered him unceremoniously towards the front door of the apartment. "Me, I'm gonna stick in your craw."

"Lock up behind you, will ya?" Kro directed, ignoring Carelli's taunts.

Hobbes nodded, following in Kro's wake, Darien right behind him.

An hour later found Hobbes rooting around in the refrigerator in Fawkes' apartment replica, searching for another frozen dinner. Darien had already eaten three of them, and was still complaining about being hungry. Bobby had made him drink another of Claire's green power shakes, with much whining and complaining on Fawkes' part, but apparently, the kid's caloric requirements hadn't yet been met. "OK, this is it for the short order kitchen, pal," he said, pulling the last frozen entrée out of its packaging and popping it into the microwave. "Something tells me ASS wasn't figuring on you bein' a bottomless pit. Four Hungry Man-sized meals in one night?"

"Well you're the one who told me I needed to eat something, earlier," Darien pointed out as he poked in the cupboards for stray munchies. He located a bag of potato chips and tore it open, stuffing three into his mouth and crunching loudly.

"That was four hours ago," Bobby responded dryly. "And I was thinkin' something that has some kinda redeeming nutritional value," he went on.

"You sound like Claire," Darien complained and popped another chip into his mouth.

"Yeah, well, maybe she's got a point, there, pal," Bobby said, snagging a chip for himself.

"She's always got a point, Hobbes," Darien snorted. "But a calorie is a calorie, right?"

"Wrong, my friend. And these," Hobbes grinned as he took another chip, "are about as empty as they get," he crunched his mouthful happily. "But these are extenuatin' circumstances, my friend, so I won't rat you out to her this time. But you gotta eat better."

Darien grinned back. "So where you takin' me for breakfast tomorrow morning?" he asked, eyes bright with laughter.

"Breakfast?" Hobbes repeated. "You so sure we'll be outta here by breakfast? I tell ya what. If you're right, and we're out before noon, I'll treat you to the biggest steak and eggs breakfast you can cram into those hollow legs of yours. Deal?"

"Hell, yes," Darien agreed enthusiastically. "Deal."

The timer alarm on the microwave beeped insistently and Hobbes opened it and lifted the corner of the cellophane to vent the steam, then stuck it back in to finish heating.

"So, who do you think really did the killing?" Darien asked a moment later, setting the chip bag on the polished concrete surface, then rounding the end of the counter to sit on the stool on the other side of it.

Hobbes leaned up against the counter opposite Fawkes, considering the options, slim as they were at this point. "Probably not Carelli," he admitted, and was pleasantly surprised when Darien nodded in reluctant agreement. "What I think we got us, is a player to be named later," Bobby said slowly.

"So I guess that means no breakfast, huh?" Darien sighed after a long silence and reached over to take another handful of chips.

"You never know, Fawkes. We might get lucky. We're not exactly slouches in the ol' investigation department, ya know. And we still have our ace in the hole," Bobby grinned cockily, pointing at the ceiling. "Claire's no slouch, either. She'll find somethin'. Count on it."

Fawkes nodded, and the microwave timer went off a second time.

"Dinner's served - again," Hobbes said and turned to retrieve the now-hot meal.

The sudden crash and thud of the stool smashing to the floor sent Bobby spinning to see what had happened, spilling the piping hot lasagna all over himself and the floor. He let it fall, staring at the person who stood where Fawkes had been a second earlier. "Oh crap," he uttered for the third time that day.

She found it at last - and could have beaten her head against the wall for missing something so glaringly obvious. "Oh. My. God." She swept up the pile of papers containing all the scant details available in the three previous murders and hustled out of the lab at a jog.

Her ASS shadow, who'd apparently been holding up the wall outside the lab while he filed his nails or some such, startled as she burst out into the hall, having to scramble to catch up with her as she moved rapidly down the corridor away from him.

"Whoa, whoa, there, doc, where the hell do you think you're goin'?" he asked as he reached her and grabbed her arm, whirling her around to face him.

"I need to see whoever runs this lunatic asylum, and I need to see them now," she snapped, wrenching her arm free, angry. "You have a far greater problem on your hands than you think," she went on in the next breath.

Her intensity must have registered because he shifted his grip from her wrist to her elbow and steered her rapidly down the hall past the monitoring center and through a double security airlock into what she could only assume was the heart of the Community's administration area.

That guess was confirmed when she was hurriedly ushered into a sleek wood-paneled office decorated in a style calculated to impress. Claire couldn't help but wonder just who it was who was supposed to be wowed by the tasteful and expensive display of government largess in an organization that was a reputed myth. The price of the rosewood desk alone would have bought her a new gas chromatograph like the one she'd been using in the lab a few hours earlier.

The woman behind the desk was also calculated to impress. Or that was Claire's uncharitable impression of the 40-something blonde in a tailored mocha pinstripe business suit and coffee-colored silk blouse. The Keeper cleared her throat impatiently, refusing to play the 'wait and see' game. Lives were at stake, after all.

The woman looked up irritably from the files she was examining, laid out precisely in orderly rows over the surface of the desk. "Dr. 'Keeply.'"

"I haven't had the honor of an introduction," Claire mimicked the snippy bitchiness in the other woman's voice. "Are you in charge of this circus?" she demanded.

"At least this particular division of the circus," the blonde responded, rising in a stately manner and extending a limp hand across the desk in Claire's general direction. "Agent Bonita Hammer."

The Keeper wasn't sure if she should shake the hand - or kiss it. She chose to ignore it. "'Agent' Hammer. You are aware of the killings that have occurred under your watch," she responded bluntly.

Hammer's eyes narrowed. "Yes, Doctor. I am," she replied coldly. "As I'm aware of the arrangement made with your superior for your services in catching said killer."

Claire clenched her teeth, furious on a deeply instinctive level. "'Agent' Hammer. I have been drugged, transported against my will, and forced into complicity with your agenda. The problem I am having is that I don't believe your agenda is in the best interests of anyone involved. Including the killer's."

Hammer frowned, and the immobile creases confirmed Claire's impression of multiple visits to the local plastic surgeon for Botox injections. The frigid, stiff, pseudo-expressions could be symptomatic of nothing else.

"My agenda?" the ASS supervisor repeated.

"Cover-up." Claire refused to pull punches with two of her closest friends trapped inside the hall of mirrors this martinet supervised. "A murder in one of the highest security facilities this country possesses? You can't convince me that you didn't know you risked playing host to potential killers," she asserted.

Hammer laughed bitterly. "Potential? There's nothing 'potential' about it, Doctor. The agents sequestered here have repeatedly proven themselves to be lethal. Unfortunately for me, as well as the national security of quite a number of countries, we don't execute former assets simply because they are also inconvenient. Believe me, I'd like nothing more than to pump that dome full of sarin gas and go home for a nice long nap. Unfortunately, I don't have that authority. Yet. But you seem to have an opinion on what's been going on here, so I suggest you bring me up to speed on the situation inside before anyone else ends up dead."

Claire narrowed her eyes, glaring. There were reasons women made very dangerous enemies - and even more dangerous allies - in the working world, and Bonita Hammer was a prime example of one such. Enlightened self-interest ruled those in power positions. And self-interest prevailed over all other considerations, more often than not. No wonder females in this new economy were viewed with equal parts contempt and fear. She set the files she carried down on the desk. "We don't have a killer," she informed Hammer, pausing long enough to provoke a disbelieving look from the agent. "We have two killers."

"What?" This was clearly something that hadn't even entered Hammer's mind. "What do you mean, two killers?"

"I mean exactly what I said. We've all been operating on the assumption that the murders had to have all been the work of one person. But if these killings had occurred in the outside world, that assumption would never have been made, based on the evidence we have," Claire said forcefully. "We have two totally different MOs, Agent Hammer. Strangulation and stabbings. Two of each, now. Unless I miss my guess completely, what we're seeing is a competition. First the stabbing death of Nora Blake. Then the strangulation of Spaulding then another stabbing, this time of Steed, and tonight, the strangulation death of Jordan Oaks. One style of killing, followed shortly thereafter by another death in the other style. We have two different people playing some sort of twisted game of one-upmanship."

Hammer had the grace to blanch. Without a word, she reached out and pulled the files Claire had placed on her desk over to her own side of it towards her, flipping through the autopsy reports in each one, whether to confirm what Claire said, or in search of something to disprove the theory, the Keeper couldn't have said.

"Holy hell," Hammer said unhappily, the facts of the murders laid out in black and white before her.

"It wasn't until Oaks was killed that we had enough dead bodies to spot the pattern," Claire added. "I have to get a message to Agents Fawkes and Hobbes," she concluded. "They need to know they're looking for two different killers."

Hammer nodded and rose from her desk, heading straight for the door of her office. "Come with me, Doctor."

Darien groaned and rolled onto his back, bumping his aching head on the overturned stool he'd fallen off. He cursed.

"Hobbes!" he demanded, wondering how Bobby could have missed his noisy crash to the floor, or the wielder of the brick that had presumably been used to crack him upside the head.

Silence was the only answer he got. That was enough to shift his focus from self-pity to worry. Where the hell was his partner? He risked turning his head to see what, if anything, the rest of his pseudo-apartment might tell him about what had happened.

Nothing seemed out of place at first glance, and Darien gathered himself painfully into a sitting position, reaching up to catch hold of the edge of the counter and using it to lever himself to his feet. He stood swaying, a white-knuckled grip on the polished concrete slab the only thing keeping him vertical. His vision swam in and out of focus and he stared, blinking, at the spattered tomato sauce, noodles and melted cheese that decorated the kitchen floor like something out of a bad 'D-grade' horror movie. "Hobbes!" he repeated, this time, his voice sharp with worry. "Bobby?"

He used the countertop as a railing to steady himself as he made his way around the end of it and back into the kitchen to take a closer look at the mess, hoping that Hobbes would somehow miraculously appear on the floor, tucked up against the cabinets under the counter.

No such luck. He was left with a spectacular mess, and a pair of perfect size eight footprints silhouetted in clean concrete amidst the sloppy red spill. As his vision cleared, smeary tracks resolved themselves into two distinct patterns; Bobby's deeply ridged Doc Martins had left prints in the tomato sauce, and conveniently deposited wavy patches of lasagna with every stride towards the front door. Hobbes' tracks were accompanied by a slightly smaller set of what looked like sneaker treads, following in a shorter stride length.

Darien squinted at the prints and followed them unsteadily out the door of 'his' apartment, determined to find his partner. Since the footprints weren't far enough apart to signal anything more than a walking pace, Fawkes could only assume that Hobbes had been herded along with the persuasion of some sort of weapon. By this time, he knew Bobby well enough to know that he would never have just left a partner lying on the floor unconscious unless he was either in hot pursuit of the perpetrator or was under duress of some kind and forced away against his will.

Unfortunately for him, the tracks faded out completely shortly after the first left turn in the pathway outside, and he stopped, massaging the back of his head where a distinct lump was beginning to take shape. He had no idea where Hobbes and his unknown companion might have gone beyond this point. Unease gave way quickly to something near panic, and he turned on his heel and set off at a lope towards the nearest security camera he could remember the location of.

Hammer and the Keeper burst into the main monitoring room at high speed, the titular head of the Community barking orders to locate the two guest agents on the surveillance system at all possible haste. The night shift was manned by a skeleton crew, but they managed to move rapidly enough to get the remote cameras cycling through their programming, while Claire headed back to the digital video archive and turned on the monitor there. McGillicuddy had shown her how to use the system earlier in the day, and she scanned for the late-afternoon time imprint when she'd first caught sight of Hobbes in the compound's maintenance office. A niggling sense of impending doom, of some detail she'd overlooked, something she'd missed, spurred her in that search.

It had been about 5:00 in the afternoon, or perhaps slightly later than that, and she scanned in 4X mode through random frames on all six of cameras in and around the maintenance area so she could establish the exact time, providing a frame of reference for any further sightings of her coworkers and friends.

She kept a tight rein on her nerves as she found and quickly panned through the section of the recording of Bobby in the office with the two other men, hoping to move on quickly to anything visible after that encounter. She couldn't have said why, but something was nagging at her, something about that period of time, something she'd seen, but not remarked on.

She sped through the recording until a single frame caught her eye. The weedy little man - Wallace something - held his hands up in a manner reminiscent of someone at gun point, then let them fall to his sides with a shrug, the gesture not noteworthy in and of itself, but what it revealed made her sit up in her chair, mouth dry. "Oh bloody hell," she snapped, furious with herself for not having put together what she'd noticed the first time she'd seen this with what her findings in Oaks' murder had told her. "The ink!"

Her outburst brought the attention of Hammer and her minions to bear on her, and she looked up from the monitor aghast. "I think I know who killed Spaulding and Oaks," she informed them.

Hammer and the night shift supervisor scrambled across the room towards her and peered over her shoulder at the image she'd freeze-framed onscreen. "Wolbrom?" Hammer retorted in disbelief. "You've got to be kidding. He's an analyst, not a player," she scoffed.

Claire didn't bother to answer, simply reversed through the frames until Wolbrom was captured, hands up, fingers stained, on the monitor. "Ink, Agent Hammer. I'd be willing to bet it matches the kind I found on the condoms I pulled out of Jordan Oaks' mouth tonight."

Hammer stared at the grainy evidence before her in shocked silence.

The security supervisor on the other hand, nodded sharply. "We got a pneumatic canister in the receiving dock from Kro with Wolbrom's latest requisition earlier tonight," he informed his boss, reaching over Claire to fast forward the recording several minutes until the other, older man Hobbes had been conversing with could clearly be seen tucking a form into a clear holder, and placing the whole thing into the vacuum pipe that sucked it away into the unknown. "I'll go get it," he added as he turned and jogged off.

Less than three minutes later, he was back with it, and had even brought along a pair of latex gloves. Claire put them on and unscrewed the top of the canister. "Has anyone else handled this?" she asked.

"No," the agent responded with certainty. "PM shift knew it was one of Wolbrom's requests, so there wasn't much urgency," he told her.

Claire raised an eyebrow at this. "Why are his requests considered low priority?" she demanded, pulling the form out of the plastic tube that contained it, examining the paper. Indeed, new printer cartridges where what had been asked for. She'd take any bet that a compositional analysis would confirm a match between the ink sample she'd gathered earlier and that found in the cartridges.

The security officer shifted uncomfortably, and Hammer glared at him. "Spit it out, Stern, she snapped.

"He's a prima donna," Stern admitted. "And his printer cartridges always have to be special-ordered. Some weird size or something. We just get tired of him whining about everything related to that book of his, and treating it like we're keeping him from winning a Pulitzer or something," the agent said reluctantly.

"You mean you deliberately withhold fulfilling his requests simply because you find him annoying?" Claire asked, incensed.

"Marcus, we'll discuss this later," Hammer interceded before Claire could launch into a scolding. "Doctor, right now we need to concentrate on the more pressing problem," she commanded.

Claire glared. "If that sort of treatment is symptomatic of what Wolbrom has received here, then it may very well have a bearing on his reasons for resorting to violence," she responded.

"Doctor, his motives don't interest me in the slightest, at the moment, and even if you're correct, and being treated like a 98-pound weakling by my team has driven him to murder his fellow inmates, the more urgent issue is to keep him from committing another crime. Save your bleeding heart tendencies for his defense attorneys." Hammer chided coldly.

"Director," came a call from across the observation room, and their attention turned to an agent manning the security cameras. The petite Asian woman in standard ASS cream garb pointed a carefully manicured index finger at the bank of screens above her. Directly over her head, the camera mounted in the maintenance office showed the lights back on and the older man Claire recognized from earlier pushing another man, obviously restrained, into a chair by the desk. "Kro's taken a prisoner," the woman informed them needlessly. "Looks like Jack Carelli," she concluded.

On the monitor, Claire watched the older man, Kro, tie his captive to the chair with cable ties around wrists and ankles fastened to the metal framework of the furniture. So that was Bobby's former partner, she thought to herself, looking on as Kro turned his attention to writing something out and putting it into the pneumatic system for delivery to the world outside the habitat dome.

"Simons, go get that," Hammer ordered, and the third agent in the security room dashed out as he'd been bidden to retrieve the newest missive from inside the Community. "So, Doctor, it appears our second killer may already have been taken out of the picture," Hammer turned to Claire with a certain satisfaction.

"Perhaps, but we still need to locate Wallace Wolbrom," she retorted.

"No hurry, since, if you're right, he's taken his turn already, and it's our mystery man's shot at the next victim," Hammer pointed out, the lack of concern in her tone infuriating the Keeper anew.

"Uh, Director Hammer?" the small woman manning the monitor bank interrupted hesitantly, "We may have another problem."

Claire and Hammer both turned to focus on the monitor third down from the left of the one currently showing the interior of the maintenance office. On it, a bedraggled-looking Darien was standing unsteadily in front of the camera in the little plaza perhaps 50 yards from his temporary residence, waving frantically for attention.

"Oh, God, now what?" Claire asked rhetorically.

Darien burst into the Community's maintenance office at a dead run, winded from his sprint across the compound. The slamming of the door against the wall startled the occupants of the room into movement, though Carelli, secured to a workbench with cable ties, couldn't go anywhere.

Kro, on the other hand, had his homemade rifle in hand and aimed at Fawkes before the door had bounced back off the wall to slam into Darien's shoulder as he cleared it. As quickly as it had been brought to bear, the gun was lowered, Kro relaxing visibly, a blend of annoyance and relief in his expression. "What the hell are you doing here?" the ex-assassin demanded, sharply.

"Hobbes is gone," Darien explained breathlessly. "The killer snagged him."

Carelli's snort of amusement was ignored by both Fawkes and Kro.

"What are you talking about? We've got the killer right here," the assassin protested, waving in Jack's general direction.

"Maybe, maybe not. All I know is, someone broke into my place, cracked me on the head, and Bobby's gone. And he didn't go 'cuz he wanted to, trust me on that," Darien responded grimly. "The guys upstairs sent one of the RC helicopters to bring me here. So where do you keep the bat-phone around this place? I need to fill 'em in on what happened."

Kro shook his head. "It doesn't work like that," he informed the antsy agent. "I'm still waiting on them to get back to me on Carelli."

At that moment, one of the canisters wooshed down the Lexan pipe and bounced to a stop in the receiving bay at Kro's elbow. The two men exchanged glances, and the retired agent opened the air-tight door to remove the message tube, pulling the paper free and smoothing it out on the desk. "Dammit," he muttered as he scanned the scant few lines. "Wolbrom?"

"What?" Fawkes interrupted. "Who’s Wolbrom?"

"Your killer. Well, one of them, anyway. Looks like there's some kind of sick competition going on between Wally and some other nut case to see who can ice the most over-the-hill former espionage agents."

"Two killers? Crap. And this Wolbrom guy is the one who has Hobbes?"

"Looks that way," Kro agreed, shaking his head in disbelief. "At least if we assume Carelli here is the other whack job."

Jack grinned toothily at this. "If it means someone is going to rid the world of Bobby Hobbes, I'll be glad to muddy the waters for ya. Sure, I killed those old-timers."

"That's not what you said an hour ago," Darien snarled back.

"An hour ago, I didn't know someone was going to do me the favor of terminating my ex-partner," Carelli grinned evilly.

Fawkes' fists were balled tightly at his side, tension zinging through him. "Where is Bobby?" he demanded.

"Wouldn't you like to know," Carelli laughed.

Darien raised one fist to nail Jack, only to have his wrist caught in the steely grip of the ex-assassin. "He's baiting you, you idiot," Kro snapped, chastising Darien for losing focus. "You're letting him play you, and while you waste time arguing with him, your partner is maybe getting fitted for wings."

"What if you're wrong? What if 'they' are," Fawkes demanded, jabbing a thumb at the ceiling to indicate the ASS agents doubtless located somewhere overhead.

"I've got a better question for you, Fawkes," Kro came back with. "What if they aren't?"

This brought Darien up short, and he swallowed convulsively. "Fifty-fifty odds Wolbrom has him, if Carelli is lying, and isn't the other killer," he nodded slightly, putting together the pieces Kro had handed him.

"Fifty-fifty is better that zero, which is what this particular clock is counting down to if you don't get your ass in gear and go find Hobbes," Kro agreed. "Wolbrom's place isn't too far from here: past the main pool, across the jogging path. He's in Hibiscus Flower Court, unit 144. I'll draw you a map," he added, catching up a pen and turning over the paper that had just been delivered via vacuum tube.

Hobbes tried to shut out the awareness of the wetness lent his clothes by the cooling tomato sauce, wondering if he'd be able to get the oily cheese stains off his new leather boots. Of course, that presumed he'd survive long enough to worry about it, he admitted to himself as he shifted uncomfortably in the rush-bottomed ladder-back chair he'd been bound to.

He'd tried to initiate conversation with Wolbrom half a dozen times since he'd been taken captive at knife-point, having had enough hostage training to know that getting the captor talking was the surest way to reduce his chances of ending up dead. The mousey little man was having none of it, however, not so much as turning towards Hobbes in acknowledgement of the effort. He cleared his throat and tried again.

"Y'know, if you really wanted to hear about my last stay in here that bad, you coulda just asked," he said, fretting about how his partner was doing. He hadn't been allowed to check on Fawkes, so he had no idea whether Darien had been stabbed, or just knocked off his stool during Wally's surprise assault. Wolbrom ignored this attempt to establish dialog as he had all Bobby's earlier ones.

Hobbes watched the man moving about the apartment, trying to figure out what it was that was setting off alarm bells. Besides the obvious fact that Wally, of all people, had managed to get the drop on him. It rankled the way having Eberts suddenly demonstrate unexpected prowess in guerilla warfare would, an utterly unanticipated skill in either man. "Uh, Wally?" he nudged again, the unease at this uncharacteristic silence growing. Not that he was exactly an expert in Wallace Wolbrom and his 'normal' behavior. But he'd at least encountered the man once before, and while annoying, he'd hardly seemed a threat of any kind. Particularly not to an agent like himself, with almost 20 years of experience in the intelligence field. "Can you at least tell me why I'm here?" he asked trying to keep the plaintiveness out of his voice.

Finally Wolbrom turned to face him, and Bobby felt his stomach drop into his mozzarella-covered boots. The man looking back at him was someone he'd never met before. He gulped, hoping it wasn't audible. The former analyst might never have existed, for all that this person shared the same body. "Crappity-crap-crap," he whispered.

"Why not? I don't imagine you have anywhere more pressing to be at the moment," the stranger inhabiting Wallace's body inquired with a cold shrug, face still expressionless. The chill was now glacial in the eyes Bobby'd thought of as a watery blue. "And by the way, my name isn't 'Wally', for future reference."

"Sorry for the confusion, pal. It's just that you look an awful lot like him," Bobby managed , mouth bone dry. And he thought he had psychological problems....

This earned a slight nod of acknowledgement, and the menace emanating off the man faded a few measures. "An unfortunate circumstance," was the response to this. "Though it has its advantages at times. My name is Douglas," he concluded, turning away again.

"Douglas," Hobbes repeated, trying it on for size. "You been in here long?"

"Agent Hobbes. This is not a hostage situation. Making polite conversation will not delay me in my actions long enough for the cavalry to come riding to your rescue. In point of fact, this place is conveniently without a police force of any sort. So you see, there will be no rescue. Nor do I feel any particular need to explain my actions. However, since it's essentially Wallace's fault that you find yourself in this situation, I suppose I can bend my rules enough to answer your questions. But I'm warning you; this is a courtesy I don't generally extend. Do not try my patience"

"And I appreciate it, my friend," Hobbes replied, mustering his best shot at bonhomie while trying to ignore the sharpening steel being used on what he recognized as a boning knife. "So... Why am I here?"

"Because my partner, Wallace, insisted. Put simply, I saw him, then raised him, in poker parlance."

"I'm here because you have a bet goin' with Wally, huh? What kinda bet?" Bobby pressed his luck and continued his queries in as conversational a manner as he could, hoping to keep it casual, keep the quiver in his muscles from being echoed in his voice. "What kinda stakes?"

'Douglas' arched a single eyebrow as he ran a thumb along the edge of his knife to test its sharpness. "The highest, I assure you." Wolbrom set the knife down and smiled at Bobby. It was an expression Hobbes could only compare to one of Arnaud's most evil smirks. "For him, the publication of his book. For me... call it satisfaction."

Hobbes filed this away, unsure what to make of it. "You still haven't told me how I fit into your plans," he risked the question.

"It's really not complicated. You are the way I raise the stakes in my bet with Wallace. As it stands, the score is even. I can't let it remain that way; after all, my partner has no field experience. Letting him beat me at my own game isn't acceptable." Wolbrom set down the sharpening steel on the kitchen counter and picked up the boning knife, carefully adjusting his grip on it.

Hobbes did his best to ignore that gesture. "Your partner... Wally? That how you met? In the field?"

"More or less," 'Douglas' evaded a direct answer as he approached Bobby's chair. "I'm afraid that's 'need to know,'" he added, laying the frigid flat of the boning knife against Bobby's throat next to the scrape Carelli had left there less than 18 hours before.

The mind-boggling irony of that statement wrenched a humorless laugh from Hobbes against his will. "And I don't need to know, right? Well, I'll tell you something I do need to know, Dougie," he lashed out, tension, worry and even fear snapping his control like matchsticks. "What the hell did you do with MY partner?" he roared, thrashing like a trussed steer at the rodeo.

The searing burn of the knife through his skin mostly failed to register, the irrational rage firing along his nerves like dynamite numbing him to physical pain.

Then it ceased with the familiar cold that spread over his skin like welcome ice on a sunburn as Wallace's wrist, hand, and knife vanished.

If he hadn't been staring straight up at Wolbrom as Fawkes unQuicksilvered, one hand around Wally's wrist, the other wrapped tightly around Wolbrom's throat, he would never have seen the matching anger in Darien's expression. Simple, plain, unadulterated fury. Not Quicksilver madness, but sheer outrage. As the fingers tightened on Wolborm's larynx, Bobby saw the instant that 'Douglas' departed, and Wallace returned. It wasn't just the residual Quicksilver chill rolling off Darien that made him shiver, but he couldn't help the mile-wide grin. "Doug, meet the cavalry," he crowed as Darien hurled the knife across the dining room.

Good ole' 'Honest Abe', 16^th President of the United States of America, once had this to say: "I have been told I was on the road to hell, but I had no idea it was just a mile down the road with a Dome on it." Truer words were never spoken... even if he was referring to the Capitol building in Washington DC, and not the local underground lunatic asylum we finally escaped from again, this time with a murderer - two, actually - in tow.

"So, you have a chance to look up George Pappadamos while we were inside again?" Darien asked his partner as they slouched into the Official's office for the post game analysis, his hands shoved in his pockets, curious as to whether Bobby had availed himself of the opportunity to touch base with the man whose disappearance had formed the basis for Hobbes' most notable official 'failure' as an FBI investigator.

Hobbes shot him a glare from under one eyebrow. "I didn't exactly have time for social calls, Fawkes," Bobby retorted, irritated. "One'a us had to do some work while we were stuck in that place."

"Excuse me?" Darien snarked. "And who was it who actually caught the killers?" he asked, unable to help himself, the opportunity to tease his partner too good to pass up.

Bobby glowered as they took their usual seats, ignoring the various other people in the room. "Killer," he corrected.

Darien grinned.

"Technically, Darien is right," Claire interrupted the looming argument, looking up from the files she held.

"Explain, Doctor," the Official snapped.

"It's extremely rare - Hollywood clichés notwithstanding - but it appears Wallace Wolbrom has classic symptoms of the dissociative condition commonly known as multiple personality disorder. So far, we've only been able to isolate the two that Bobby and Darien met, however there are doubtless more. ASS's psychiatrists have promised to keep me informed. It's really fascinating," she said, her enthusiasm for a medical oddity unmistakable. The longsuffering sighs from the rest of the office's occupants curtailed any further rhapsodizing, and she refocused on the more prosaic details of the case.

She consulted her file again. "Wallace was an analyst for the NSA from 1982 to 1992, and from what I can see of his records, was regarded as a competent, though not exceptional, one. Apparently, however, he began to grow dissatisfied with his role, and started pressuring his superiors for an opportunity to participate in fieldwork," Claire read off, then looked up with a faint smile at Eberts, who fidgeted slightly.

"At any rate, he was eventually granted his request and served on a low-level fact-finding mission into Bosnia in the summer of 1992, where his fluency in several Slavic languages was considered an asset. I've spoken with the field agent who supervised the mission, and..." Claire paused, her expression rueful. "Let's just say things did not go smoothly."

"Like how?" Darien asked, curious.

"Like he probably blew the mission, I'm betting," Hobbes responded with a snort, reaching up to scratch absently at the gauze pad and adhesive tape the Keeper had used to patch the wounds on his neck that morning when they'd finally been released from the Community. "Frickin' amateurs."

"Did I ask you?" Fawkes inquired archly, slapping Bobby's hand away from the bandage. "And stop picking at the scabs," he added for good measure, turning his attention back to Claire.

"In all fairness," the Keeper continued, ignoring the byplay between the partners, "it wasn't entirely Wolbrom's fault. However, what had initially been deemed a low priority mission ended up turning up the first evidence of the atrocities NATO eventually was forced to intervene to stop. The situation became extremely hazardous, and Wolbrom simply didn't have the qualifications to handle it. Most of the details are classified, but it seems that several agents were injured when Wallace overreached his abilities and tried to rescue one of their number from the local constabulary."

"You mean he went all 'James Bond on 'em, right?" Hobbes nodded, his 'experienced agent' expression registering his disapproval of the antics of a rank beginner. "What, playin' in the sand box with the real men was too much for him, and he went loco?" he asked sarcastically, revolving a forefinger in circles near his head.

Claire shot him a frown. "That's hardly very sympathetic," she pointed out, "especially coming from someone with mental health issues of his own."

Darien snickered. "Hobbesy's getting chewed out by the teacher," he grinned, shoving an elbow into Bobby's ribs gently, and the senior agent looked abashed at the dressing down.

"All I'm sayin' is, pencil pushers just don't have the experience to deal with a situation when it goes south on 'em, that's all," Bobby whined to Darien.

"Well, this particular 'pencil pusher' seems to have gotten enough experience somewhere to split off a persona who managed to murder not one, but four veteran agents," the Official interrupted sharply, cutting short the banter across from his desk. The Fat Man turned his attention to the Keeper. "Was that the cause of the personality split? Being exposed to a situation he wasn't trained to handle and consequently failing to resolve it successfully?"

"That is the current theory, at least regarding the 'Douglas' persona. We have yet to pinpoint the personality that he must have split off first, sometime in his childhood," Claire nodded, then hesitated as if unsure whether to continue or not. "However, the agent in charge of the mission seems to feel that 'Douglas' was brought on by his recommendation that Wolbrom absolutely not be allowed back into the field," she eventually went on. "It was shortly after a reprimand accompanied by that notation was added to his file that Wallace's mental state began to deteriorate. He was given a psychiatric discharge and remanded to the Community, since he has been privy to too many classified operation to be allowed his freedom, particularly as he was showing signs of severe post traumatic stress..." Claire trailed off and closed the file she held. "It's really very sad," she concluded.

Hobbes stifled a snort that might or might not have signaled agreement with that assessment, and Fawkes poked him again. "Stop picking on the guy," he chided his partner.

"Oh, so now you're siding with the 'poor little pencil-pusher' contingent?" Bobby challenged. "C'mon, Fawkes, you know I'm right. Amateurs have no business in field ops. Am I right? C’mon, I'm right - you know I am!" Righteous indignation made his voice even more bluff than it usually was.

Darien chose not to answer with anything more than a raised eyebrow.

Hobbes went all uncomfortable-looking and pulled his collar away from his neck with a forefinger awkwardly. "Present company excepted," he backpedaled. "Anyway, you aren't an amateur any more, Fawkes. You've passed your practical exam and everything," he said.

"Yeah, but I was about as green as grass when it came to the spy game when I first came aboard this gig," Darien reminded. When Hobbes dropped his head, chastened, Darien grinned. "Just for that, I'm holding you to that promise you made at dinner last night," he added as his belly rumbled loudly.

"What promise?" Bobby frowned.

"You're buyin' me the biggest steak-and-eggs breakfast in San Diego," Fawkes grinned back at his partner. "Eberts, too. Oh, and Claire, if she hasn't brought any of her leftover Chinese food," he teased his friend.

"Hey! I didn't say I was treating the whole frickin' Agency to a meal," Bobby protested. "Besides, it's almost 2:00 in the afternoon," he added, clearly thinking this was going to get him off the hook. "They stopped serving breakfast hours ago."

"Stella's Diner down the street serves breakfast all day," Darien grinned happily. "And it's got an 'A' rating from the heath department," he added. He had his standards, after all.

Bobby looked from Darien to Claire to Eberts, none of whom offered him any sympathy.

"I'm overdue for my lunch break, actually," Eberts said instead, and Hobbes moaned softly.

"So am I. And my leftovers will keep until tomorrow, I imagine," Claire agreed, raising her eyebrows in an impish waggle.

Hobbes rose out of his seat dejectedly and with many exaggerated longsuffering sighs, then waved his hands in a 'well, come on' gesture. "OK, OK, lunch is on me," he whined, the inflection nearly as effective as Darien at his best, and Fawkes, Claire and even Eberts smiled, following the agent out of the office as he departed.

As he shut the door behind him, Darien heard the soft snort of amusement from the Official, and he grinned.

Two hours later, so stuffed he groaned as he flopped into his couch, Darien settled back contentedly, prepared to spend the remainder of the late spring afternoon watching bad horror movies on one of the local TV stations. He reached for his remote, only to recall he'd left it on the kitchen counter the morning of the previous day before heading off to work. This time the groan was one of annoyance, and he levered himself out of the upholstery and went to retrieve the device.

He found it where he'd left it, and picked it up, only then noticing the red light blinking on his answering machine. He didn't get many callers aside from Hobbes, and sometimes Claire. Curiosity prompted him to play back the message, and he smiled as his aunt Celia's voice came wavering over the speaker.

"Darien, how are you, sweetie? I haven't talked to you in over a month. I hope you're doing well, not working too hard. And I hope you're eating properly. You're far too skinny," she dithered on and Fawkes smiled fondly.

"At any rate, my dearest, I wanted you to be the first to hear my news," she went on, and that was the first moment he realized the waver in her voice was that of excitement. He straightened slightly and increased the volume a bit. "I'm terribly excited," she said, the tone confessional, and he grinned wider.

"I feel like a school girl," she went on, and Darien swore she was absolutely giddy.

"I'm getting married!" she trumpeted, and Darien felt his jaw drop in utter shock. The last time he'd visited her, she hadn't said anything about even seeing anyone, and now this?

"I want you to give me away," she added, and Darien picked up the receiver, the machine cutting off as he dialed her number in Cold Springs hastily.

"Hello?" came her voice, slightly tinny with distance.

"Aunt C?" he greeted her. "What's this about you getting married?"

George Bernard Shaw once said 'If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must man be of learning from experience. The problem with that, as I see it, is that maybe it's a repeat of history, but in a different time, and a different context, how could you see it coming? I know they say you should expect the unexpected. Well, I guess there's some merit in that, but there are things you just have no way to brace yourself for, you know? Like elderly aunts suddenly jumping on the 'happily ever after' bandwagon. Married? Aunt C was getting married? And it was right then that I flashed on the dream I had just before Halloween the year before. Just before Benjamin Scarborough's nut-case daughter started sending me poison pen letters. A dream about a lot of things, a lot of weird things. And of Celia in a wedding dress....

End