Chapter 23

A Wizard In Alexandria's Court

Chapter Twenty Three

Plots Un-Coiled

by Skysaber

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Story Day Twenty Nine, May 4th 2011, Wednesday - Morning

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Coil was losing.

The main doors had been lost, the hinges blown and the doors themselves lifted away by crane. The fighting had come inside. Explosives had been thrown by both sides, trying to clear out enemy pockets, but it was Coil's mercenaries who kept falling back.

Things had gotten worse when the government forces had opened up a hole through one of his base's walls, having tunneled down to reach it, then blown through with mining explosives, opening up another flank his men had to defend.

It was only a matter of time, now.

The Feds were not even listening to his attempts at faked surrenders, ceasefires to negotiate, or other delaying tactics anymore. Coil had considered his self-destruct charges... then realized that he did not have the guts to go through with it. It was one thing to scheme, 'They'll never take me alive'. But when he found himself staring that possibility in the face, he'd realized he was too much of a coward to actually do it. He'd rather live in a cell than die.

So the supervillain had admittedly run out of ideas, and turned control of the defensive operation over to his mercenary commander.

It probably wasn't the wisest decision, the man was probably already scheming how to betray Coil and turn him over to the authorities in return for better treatment for he and his men, but that would not change the outcome either way at this point, and Coil's brain hurt from wrestling with his many unsolvable problems.

In despair, he been reviewing his situation, going over everything that had been happening to him from nearly every angle.

Where had he gone wrong?

That things had gone wrong was unquestionable, because lately, everything that could go wrong, had been going wrong. Frankly it was like he was cursed! The victim of some witch or wizard out of fantasy, mocking him!

But Coil was a realist. He knew such things did not happen.

So he began to replay things from the beginning, in search of whatever mis-step he had made.

The very first of the horrible events had been learning through some of his more useful moles in the Empire (most of the less useful moles still reported the same information, just later - delays which, by definition, made them less useful) that he himself, Coil, had once had a mole in another organization who'd gone rogue and sold secret information about him and his power in return for a ride out of town.

That had not been happy news.

He'd killed the messenger who'd brought that unhappy tale five times in alternate timelines, and still had not felt it quite enough.

But, having been warned, Coil would have been a fool not to check over his organization, to perform a thorough housecleaning.

Secrets were how he lived, how he operated, how he'd survived. His ideal circumstance was where he knew everything concerning all of his potential targets and rivals, while no one knew anything about him. That's the way he liked it, and that's the way he'd kept it over most of his career as a supervillain.

Up until now, anyway, and that switch had not been his choice.

So back then, to discover that some of his most important secrets had been leaked had been *most* unwelcome. Even today, that event marked the start of where everything began to go wrong.

Once again killing a bunch of people, raping and torturing a few others, all in throw-away timelines to assuage his frustrations and take the edge off of his rage, he had then set about fixing things, and gone to work trying to discover who the leak (or leaks) had been, and how much they had known.

Going just by what the Empire had learned of him, the answer to the latter question was 'A Lot'.

Which made even more important the question of, 'Who?'

Coil had been able to work out that mole must have been one of his people in the ABB. However, knowing that did not help him narrow it down very much, as very soon after that the ABB organization was in shambles, with most of that gang's core people (including Coil's agents within that gang), either dead, gone into hiding, or in Federal custody spilling their guts to the Feds about everything they knew; both on the ABB and other gangs in town - including Coil's.

So at this point, that first mole who'd squealed on him could have been literally dozens of people, with no way to determine who. Worse, he couldn't have all of his ABB agents who'd been caught up in the Federal nets killed, yet very few had been trained to resist interrogation.

Despite how much it rankled, Coil had been unable to permanently silence everyone of his who had been caught, as due to Federal agents taking wise precautions, even with his power he had been unable to get all of them; and leaving any alive meant any remaining loyalty felt by the survivors vanished and they'd have eagerly told their Federal interrogators *everything* about Coil, just hoping the Feds eliminated him before he could get to them.

No, better by far to let his people believe that, once the heat had died down, he would rescue them all from prison, arrange new identities for them, and go back to quietly doing business, all safe and happy.

That happy illusion would make them do what they could to keep their lips shut, delaying the Federal investigation a little while, at least.

Even if it was a lie.

He'd already arranged to have poisoned the few that knew anything of real worth.

Still, it was not a total disaster, as it was for just this purpose that Coil ensured that most of his own people (especially his moles in rival groups) did not know very much about him - and what they did know, he'd liberally seeded with misinformation.

What people did not know, they could not tell, even if they wanted to. And by keeping careful track of what the interrogators were learning, and most importantly what they got *wrong*, as he read those interrogation reports, Coil could normally detect a mole who'd squealed on him pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, the Feds had so many of his ABB informants in custody they had quickly detected that pattern. When one of Coil's former employees told them with great confidence, wholly assured he was correct, that Coil was a white man with an Australian accent, while in another interrogation room just across the hall another former employee was just as confident and assured that Coil was Asian, while others told them just as strongly he was Mexican, or African... well, the Feds weren't amateurs. They could tell when a misinformation campaign was being waged against them.

And he'd had too many moles within the ABB organization, people now in Federal custody and scared enough they were spilling their guts about everything they knew to anyone who would listen, for the Feds not to have noticed that was exactly what Coil was doing.

So now the Feds were alerted to one of his primary defensive strategies. Once aware that he used misinformation on a broad scale like that, they'd double and triple check everything, making that strategy... not useless, but far less effective, as well as far more expensive.

The FBI were actually a counter-intelligence agency, tasked with detecting and neutralizing enemy espionage operations within the nation's borders. If anything, by acting much like a foreign spy would, Coil's activities would have whet their appetite and gotten them *really* excited about chasing him down.

It would be a really big feather in their cap to catch him at this point - and so far as he could tell they were pursuing that goal *with vigor!* The small army of Federal troopers who'd broken inside of his front door and were now fighting floor-to-floor was something of a clue to that.

Federal budgets were often swayed by which agency had pulled off the most high-profile busts of criminal operations. And by more or less totally subverting the local PRT chapter using basic espionage methods, Coil had made himself one big, high-profile target for the anti-spy agency. As such, he represented that organization's best opportunity in a generation to prove themselves significant.

And they were going at it with gusto.

The worst part about all of this was the way that Coil had gotten onto their radar in the first place, by performing a kidnapping of a high-profile target.

The thing was, Coil was actually guilty of that kidnapping. He knew it. He'd done it deliberately, and been excited by the opportunity at the time. He'd thought the child of the mayor's sister, one Dinah Alcott, was a cape. Actually, her MRI had proved it (even if one of Coil's moles in the hospital had fed them fake results so the girl's parents did not know that), but the headaches those parents had taken her in for that MRI for in the first place were a pretty strong indicator of the girl having a Thinker power.

Coil *loved* having Thinker-style capes under his control, and some careful investigation and follow-up operations had proven the target was a precog, and a pretty powerful one at that.

Massively useful. Almost limitless possibilities to expand his operations while enjoying even greater safety.

Coil had decided then and there he had to have her.

So he'd played his little games, performed distractions, carefully tested out theories about how best to chase her down, until finally he'd caught the girl and dragged her to a little cell in his primary headquarters, where she'd gotten strapped to a hospital bed and carefully addicted to drugs.

He'd planned to use her own addictions to control her, even had a nurse on hand to carefully control and monitor her health while dosing.

The plan had worked perfectly in his mind. What he had not been able to account for was the girl's stubborn refusal to cooperate, even under *heavy* drug 'persuasion'.

In the end, he'd accomplished nothing.

He'd put two bullets through that little girl's forehead himself, then had his men dispose of the body somewhere.

Coil could not even say he regretted doing it. He'd been over everything several times, and still believed that in the same situation over again, in the same circumstances, he would've made the same choices.

He was a Very Bad Man.

He admitted that.

And like most Bad Men, he did not regret in the least doing Bad Things.

No, like all bad men what he regretted was getting *caught* doing them!

And he *deeply* regretted the killing of Dinah Alcott, not for having murdered an innocent young girl, but because of the consequences that had immediately followed.

He'd sent off men with the task of disposing of that girl's body, only by then the Feds were on the case, and had found it within hours - apparently having a lot more experience with how criminals disposed of bodies than Coil's mercenaries did. Already alerted, they'd been on the lookout, noticed some telltale signs in the likely locations, and not only the girl's body but the team of Coil's mercenaries who'd been the ones to drop it off had wound up in Federal custody - with experts working them over for information in both cases.

The thing was, while Coil *was* guilty of that kidnapping, he felt deeply betrayed and a great sense of unfairness over the FBI being involved, because the one thing he was certain he'd never done was BRAG ABOUT IT!

Coil had done everything possible to ERASE signs of that kidnapping! It was all supposed to be just another mystery disappearance, letting the family think... whatever they were inclined to think, honestly. Let them believe the girl had run away, or been kidnapped by the ABB to fill a spot in Lung's child brothels, or just been run over by a car then crawled off and no one found or identified the body.

There were a *million* possible ways for a person to disappear in this town!

Why, oh why, did they have to get the *right* idea?!

Obviously, because they had received a ransom letter, claiming responsibility in Coil name.

But who had sent it?

Coil had thrown a tantrum that must have destroyed his own base eleven times, all in alternate timelines of course, once he had heard of the news. Then he'd done everything possible to identify the sender. He'd gone through his files and identified everyone who knew, or might have known, the details of that operation revealed in that note. Then he'd interrogated them all, under torture, in alternate timelines, gone through their records, and thrown countless tantrums while doing so.

Nothing.

He'd discovered none of what he'd looked for.

He'd never uncovered the identity of which of his men had betrayed him, and it *had* to have been an inside job! They had revealed precious information, alluding to secrets that Coil had never told anyone.

Only someone very close to him could have learned those things.

Yet all his investigation had pointed to was that only Coil himself could have written that letter - and Coil knew he would *never* have sent a ransom letter to the girl's parents, claiming responsibility! That went contrary to his EVERY GOAL for that operation! He'd certainly never been amateur enough to send it to the WRONG ADDRESS, thereby dragging the PRT in on the issue!

Then, and this was a kicker that never failed to get his temper mounting and his blood pressure skyrocketing, HE'D CERTAINLY NEVER KIDNAPPED **VISTA**!

Why? Oh, why was he being blamed for that one?

Oh, yeah. Another letter, obviously.

But Coil had not even known that the Ward had been abducted until his civilian identity, in his capacity as a senior PRT consultant, got called into a meeting in the PRT concerning it.

So, he *couldn't* have sent that letter!

Although, a dark thread of doubt entered Coil's mind, as with how often his organization had acted lately, apparently on his orders (orders he could not remember giving!), he'd begun to wonder, sometimes, whether his power had more aspects to it than he'd previously supposed. After all, The Dragonslayers had intercepted a shipment of Tinker supplies meant for Armsmaster, and not only had they been paid from Coil's accounts, the parts had been delivered to one of Coil's alternate bases, collected by Coil's men...

But that was getting ahead, jumping further into the rabbit-hole of this mess. He knew that would just end in a never-ending spiral, as it had many times before.

If he was to understand anything about this mess, he had to be meticulous, or he'd get lost in it again. And the important point was the FBI's attention was first drawn to him by their receiving ransom letters - that he hadn't written!

Coil worked best by *avoiding* official attention, not diving headfirst into it!

Oh, he knew the police and PRT had each received a letter, saying it was from him, claiming responsibility for both kidnappings. The one thing Coil had never found out, in all of his investigations, was who *HAD* sent them!

His moles in all other organizations. Nothing, not the PRT and Protectorate's thoroughly compromised computer systems, his people on the inside, his bought-and-paid-for police informants, and his spies in not only the gangs infesting Brockton Bay, but all neighboring towns, had all assured him (many even under torture, in alternate timelines), that they knew nothing about any attempt to frame him.

So who was it?

Who did it?

Once again, back to questions he could not answer.

Back to the mole hunt.

So there was rather a lot of information being collected by the Feds , not just on Coil's group, but on every other power structure in Brockton Bay, including the PRT, and the Feds did not seem happy with any of it.

But chasing down which mole had leaked which thing, when and to whom, was a frustrating tangle that had proven impossible for Coil to unravel, even using multiple timelines devoted to it. Perhaps he could later on, once things had cooled down. But right now that information was all too hot, and none of his Federal contacts were willing to take on that much risk at the moment.

Coil wanted to cry and rage and scream over the unfairness of it. But no matter how many countless times he'd done those things over the past couple of weeks, it had not magically conjured up any answers.

The FBI were involved because they had received ransom letters over a couple of kidnappings. While kidnappings were their jurisdiction, the PRT would normally have claimed any parahuman crime as their own jurisdiction, and with their greater clout forced the FBI to leave the case to them. However two things stopped them, the first was Poo-get's branch had been going over a rough spot or two then and let it slip their notice, so the Feds were well involved before the local PRT were even paying attention. Secondly, Coil had carefully cultivated a certain mystique about whether he was even a cape or not. By maintaining doubts that he even had powers, he'd gleefully seen the PRT's response was, as he'd predicted, to make him even less of a priority for them than the low-key villain he'd already displayed himself as.

Being all but ignored by the local PRT office had suited him quite nicely. He'd been the villain nobody cared about.

But it being officially doubted whether he was even a cape or not had come back and bitten him on the behind, because (as he'd discovered, to his great dismay), when the FBI wanted him...

... the PRT hadn't been willing to get in a turf war fight with the other Federal organization over who got to keep the investigation.

Well, since the Feds wanted him badly and were willing to fight hard to get him, and Coil had deliberately cultivated an attitude within the PRT where they did not care about him very much, and since there was no proof, or even half-decent rumors, about Coil's powers at that point, they'd been willing to let the Feds have him as not worth the hassle for a man who might very possibly be just an ordinary man in tights running a small group of mercenaries.

So pretending to be a normal man had taken *so much* attention off him from the PRT's perspective. But it had left him vulnerable to the FBI, who'd been proving so very much more tenacious - AND better investigators than the PRT had EVER been!

Coil had chewed on his own leather seat cushions in frustration a few times over having his own deliberate defensive strategy turned back on him like that.

The Feds were not the *only* foes he'd suddenly had to worry about, either.

Whatever mole it was who had leaked Coil's secrets to the Empire, the information that mysterious person had revealed to them had changed enormously how the Empire treated Coil and his mercenaries.

Before that, nobody had much cared who Coil's mercs were, or where they went, so long as they did not tred near the sacred cows of the other gangs.

But whoever had squealed on Coil, they had been one of the few who'd known what his power truly was. So the Empire knew, and suddenly they had eyes watching his men everywhere. Wherever they went, whatever they did, Coil's mercenaries were being tracked, reported on, and profiles made.

In less than a week, The Empire had discovered the location of Coil's primary underground headquarters.

And Coil did not like that a bit.

Suddenly the Empire was in position to place people to watch most of his comings and goings, which meant when he'd tried to cause them problems by revealing their cape names to the public, so they'd have more troubles to worry about than just him, the Empire had retaliated by revealing COIL'S civilian name *and* identity *and* power!

So he'd had to dismiss that timeline. But worse! That was MONTHS of investigative work, uncovering those names, that Coil suddenly had no use for, as any time he revealed the information concerning the Empire's capes (even indirectly through the PRT a few times) they revealed his in turn.

Having one of his most devastating strategies turned back against him had not pleased Coil one bit.

No, it still had him back to chewing on his seat cover some days.

He still had no idea how they'd learned what his power was.

Since he did not let that information out, and what few who'd known it were mostly dead, he was looking at a situation where he had been betrayed either by a dead person (in which case, they were not dead - he'd merely been led to believe so), or Cauldron (who also knew all about his power, but had sworn off on interfering with Brockton Bay, so should not have said anything, but were so powerful he dared not do anything back even if they had), or perhaps some flunky or minion had just managed a really good guess.

Unlikely, but humans were capable of amazing feats of brilliance sometimes, and not having any evidence did not stop them when jumping to conclusions.

Of course, most of the time when people jumped to conclusions, those were wrong, and left them looking like idiots. But it happened often enough they were right on one of their random guesses that he could not discount the possibility.

The whole thing was proving to be madly frustrating, as he had not been able to rule out many possibilities yet!

People who had been dead were supposed to stay dead, and not tell any tales!

He'd had mercenaries, in throw-away timelines, exhume the bodies of most of those who'd worked for him, checking DNA of their remains to ensure that was really them laying in those coffins out in those cemeteries. Some of the deceased had arranged to be shipped out to family, or their native states, so he'd sent the remains. But that only meant he'd sent the people longer distance to check on those corpses.

Some were impossible to check, as he'd had a few of his mercenaries who'd died arrange for their bodies to be cremated, and the ashes scattered to the winds.

He would be forever suspicious now one or more of those men had not actually died. They'd just faked it to cover their escape from him.

He'd be instituting a new 'no more cremations' policy soon, to cover that.

On the other hand, some of the dead were easy to confirm as dead. He had a jar full of Tattletale's ashes diverted from a PRT holding facility and they now stood proud on a shelf installed in his office for just that purpose, so he could gaze on them fondly as often as he wanted to.

The PRT had been forced to clean up her remains with an industrial vacuum cleaner, after Lung had burned them, then kicked them about, scattering them. But Coil had film from two agents among the ABB who'd worn concealed body cams that fateful night, so he knew better than the PRT how that fight had gone down, as he'd not only read the PRT's own internal reports, he'd seen the Undersiders die.

That did not mean he had not had their remains tested, then and again now. But the test results were clear.

He'd even had the remains of Rachel's *dogs* tested. The DNA matched. Their hideout had been looted by ABB soldiers and filled with gang tags, and none of Coil's discrete eyes on that location had noted anything since the team's demise. Even Bitch's kennels full of dogs had been looted, emptied by Empire thugs as fodder for their dogfighting rings - something that girl would never have allowed if she'd been alive.

Of course, those trucks full of dogs had been burned during the fighting between the ABB and Empire that night, just like the trucks the ABB had used to loot the Undersider's base had then been carjacked by the Empire, then parked in a warehouse lot which Lung burned that night.

But the fact remained the Undersiders were dead.

That made them one of the few potential leaks Coil could confidently say were not the source of his problem.

Anyway, some days the search for leaks and potential moles in his own organization felt like the *least* of his concerns!

Since having his Tinkertech supplies stolen, Armsmaster had made it his personal mission in life to hunt down Coil and see to it he was properly punished. While Coil had to laugh from time to time at the image of the wanna-be knight dressed in his old, backup suit of armor that had not been updated in years, and wielding an even older generation of halberd, the man was still both effective and efficient, and had managed to root out even more data on Coil's operations than even the Empire had.

It had been very much like standing on an iceberg as it melted, the little island of safety getting smaller and smaller every day as Coil's secrets, his moles and his penetrations of the local Protectorate's computer systems, had been unearthed by that Tinker's crusade.

In fact, Coil felt certain that, if the FBI had not found him first, Armsmaster would have been at his front doors not long after.

It was possible, actually, they would have tied if they had not both been beaten by Dragon, who'd tagged Coil as their most important lead into the whole situation with The Amazing Doctor Whodunit.

After all, whatever traitor had pointed fingers to him, drawing the Feds notice by sending off those ransom letters, had made *Coil* the most important link to their ever-growing investigation into that most elusive of enigmas.

Coil would have been carelessly laughing over the government's ineptitude at catching that joke villain if, mere moments after his first arrival and public posting of inane plots (on an internet board of all things! Talk about amateur! Did that nitwit *want* to get caught?) suddenly Coil found himself in Cauldron's headquarters.

Coil still felt salty over having been given a *most* rigorous physical interrogation by Alexandria (herself amusingly dressed in a ridiculous pink costume), waterboarded, beaten, slapped around, and with over half the bones of his body broken before that woman had even calmed down enough to ask him any questions.

Despite having done similar things himself, he felt it rather unfair to be on the receiving end.

Like all villains everywhere, he wanted to dish it out, but *not* take it!

Then she'd gotten upset and had not believed any of his protestations of ignorance!

Coil still wanted to nurse a grudge over that...

... but did not dare to.

He admitted to himself, that woman scared him now.

When he awoke from night terrors, heart pounding in terror... well, at least he knew what those nightmares were about, now. They wore Alexandria's face, and a bright pink uniform.

FINALLY, after exhausting most every other form of torture or interrogation he could think of (Thomas Calvert had been inside of an actual iron maiden now. It was the sort of experience that led to them no longer being his favorite band. In fact, when he'd gotten home one of the first things he'd done was to throw away his entire collection of their records.), at last they'd gotten to powers-assisted interrogation.

With Eidolon overseeing that portion of the interrogation, having only assisted until that point, periodically healing him between sessions, Coil had wept and cried like an infant as he'd confessed over and over to never having heard anything about the man until he'd heard the name Doctor Whodunit in one of the many PRT briefings he'd attended.

At last, they'd believed him.

By way of apology, they'd even put his fingers back on.

Coil had respected the power of that organization before, but now he lived in mortal terror of inciting Cauldron's wrath against him again, even in little ways. So when they'd sent him home, asking only for him to send on everything he learned about Doctor Whodunit, Coil had dutifully sent on every meeting note he'd made from PRT briefings since then, every hint he'd read on the internet, even one napkin he'd once doodled on that had Doctor Whodunit's name attached to a wholly imaginary cartoonish shape he'd scrawled once during a particularly boring meeting over lunch.

All in hopes that, someday soon, he'd feel safe enough to stop lying awake every night in fear they might haul him in again over some other misunderstanding.

Armsmaster's personal grudge could well destroy him, or the FBI might get him first, but Coil would ten thousand times rather fall into their clutches than displease Cauldron again.

What's worse was, everything they'd done to him, Coil had already done to others, so he knew on some level he'd deserved it.

That had rather taken the fun out of torturing prisoners for his own amusement.

Anymore, he'd kept seeing himself in their places.

Just because it wasn't fun anymore, did not mean he'd stop doing it, of course. Business was business, after all, and sometimes when you're a villain you've just got to wrench someone's finger off in a vice before you can be certain they're really telling you the truth.

But they had taken all of the fun out of it for him.

Between Armsmaster pursuing him in an endless fury, with the FBI breathing down his neck at the same time, it was almost difficult to notice, or even give it any credit, when the ABB suddenly decided hating on him was their latest crusade.

The way Coil understood it, someone had shot some kid that had displayed the powers of Oni Lee, while publicly claiming to be that cape's kid, and Lung was mightily upset about that, blaming, who else? Coil.

Feh.

Lung was too busy getting his face beaten in daily, always ending in swimming lessons wearing an anchor tied to his feet, to be any trouble to Coil or his men.

The ABB's accountants, on the other hand, were apparently something to be feared, because one night every cent Coil owned, in his villain or civilian identities, was just... gone.

Overnight, his bank accounts were empty, his credit cards maxed out, his rent on several properties overdue (by several back payments that he'd been sure he'd been all paid up on the night before, but could find no record anywhere of having made), his home mortgaged to the hilt where he was *certain* he'd owned it free and clear just the night before, and his businesses penniless and in debt to their eyeballs where he'd always been positively swimming in money before...

No, it was a blitz worthy of Tattletale, back when that Thinker was still alive.

He was glad he knew she was dead, otherwise he would have suspected she'd done it to him. But, knowing that, the only candidate was the ABB, because of his enemies only they had the manpower to have pulled that off, and the complete lack of any sort of regard for legality in their methods for doing so.

The Empire's accounting was largely done by Victor, and while that man was good, he'd had nowhere near the number of man-hours since learning of Coil's power to have performed such a blitz.

For a lone Thinker to have pulled that off in that small amount of time would have required computing power not even available to Dragon.

Also, the FBI had to obey certain laws. So while they could have just seized everything he'd owned, it would have looked differently. And if not the Empire, nor a lone cape, nor the FBI, that left the ABB and their strong force of in-house accountants as the only possible culprit.

If not for that critical strike against his financial support, Coil would have dismissed the ABB's grudge against him as not worth his time. For the most part, that gang were too busy losing fights to the Empire to be worth paying any attention to. And, with the core of that gang being arrested by the FBI (including those accountants!) it was probable they could never perform another such strike on him again, so Coil went ahead and dismissed that gang as the non-threat they were.

He had bigger fish to fry.

He was going to have to come up with some alternate form of amusement, though, now that he could no longer visit Lung's brothels anymore.

You know, life used to be so uncomplicated. He could still look back, not that long ago, to when he'd first learned of that Belmont boy (again, through his moles in the Empire). He had been desirous to add that Master/Trump, or even just his harem to his own stable of capes.

That had not been the start of his troubles, but it had been an exercise in frustration, to say the least.

If only he had been able to devote more of his time and resources to the problem of that simple kidnapping/recruitment, he could easily have solved it! But already by that point Coil, otherwise known as Thomas Calvert, had been having a particularly bad couple of weeks.

His last free weekend before this siege, for example, while he, as Thomas Calvert, had spent that weekend in bed, sick with a bad stomach flu, the cops had finally decided that no one was going for the money set out for the kidnapper, went to reclaim it, and discovered that their just slightly over three million dollars in ransom money had disappeared, one million in marked money from the PRT break room vending machine, plus another two million (and change, Doctor Whodunit's ridiculous fee of twenty-seven dollars and eight-six cents had been included that money) in sequential bills from in between the mattress and box spring of Piggot's apartment, vanished without anyone noticing.

Speaking about disappearing money, it really was ridiculous. Thomas Calvert was among the few that had access to the accounting reports of executives in the local PRT, and Poo-get had not even *noticed*, that among the spending cash she'd been issued each morning, then returned every night (Public Relations insisted that notable figures going out among the public be able to pay cash for any purchases, thus it was billed as a PR expense), there were frequently two twenties missing, replaced by one ten, two ones, a dime and four pennies, along with a receipt.

She had been charged the twenty-seven dollars and eighty-six cents for being subject to the epiglottal morphic transducer! As well as *every other* plot that The Amazing Doctor Whodunit had ever performed against her!

Tangent aside, that weekend while he was busy spending quality time in his apartment alone with a barf bucket, someone looking remarkably like Thomas Calvert had spent the weekend in Las Vegas blowing three million on blackjack and hookers.

Then going on, signing Thomas Calvert's name on receipts while racking up a truly astounding gambling debt!

He...

Thomas Calvert was so confused, he did not even know who to be upset at anymore.

Who did it?

Who'd done it?

...

... wait a minute.

Whodunit?

Coil's inward turmoil froze to a halt, as he did a very human thing and jumped to conclusions.

Whodunit.

The Amazing Doctor Whodunit. By selecting that name he'd all but signed his work, hadn't he? Nobody could identify him. He had Tinkertech that made the entire world cringe in terror. Even if the man had the mentality of an infant and insisted on acting like a B-movie villain, it was obvious he had information sources nobody knew about, had surpassed even Cauldron in keeping secrets and penetrating those of others. Coil himself had been an agent of Cauldron just enough to know that post concerning them and their secret base had been spot-on, far too accurate on too many data points to have been mere guesswork.

The Amazing Doctor Whodunit... had done it.

It was obvious now.

It was with a smile of beatific relief on his face that the Feds found Coil when they burst into his office and took him into custody.

As the supervillain squirmed helpless in the grips of several burly officers, the ambitious young FBI commander, Agent Flint, was grinning as he stepped forward and proclaimed, "Thomas Calvert, alias Coil, you are under arrest."

There was no alternate timeline to drop this time.

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

Coil did not kill Dinah. That was a tofu decoy, and they'd sent it off knowing that it would die.

Better it than her, right?

Also, the Undersiders obviously aren't dead. The tofu decoys Jared had prepared were already arranged to be perfect DNA matches. The trucks filled with loot from the Undersider's base got carjacked, then returned to the Undersiders by Lisa (who arranged for the trucks used to be parked in an Empire warehouse lot that burned later on that night), while the dogs from Rachel's kennels are with Rachel in Fairhaven.

All of this just proves that Lisa did a better job at covering her tracks when concealing the survival of the Undersiders, than her former boss did in trying to track them.

And yes, she did manipulate some gang goons from the Empire into 'stealing' all of Rachel's dogs, as the most effective way to clear out those kennels swiftly, cheaply, and easily. This was why, waaay all of those chapters ago, in Chapter 3, Lisa sounded cagey when she agreed to Jared's request that she get her teammate's dogs out. She was trying to conceal her method, which she knew Rachel would not approve of, but which worked. "Tip off some Empire thugs about those dogs. Convince them to collect them to use in their dog fights. Then divert to location of my choice," was pretty much her internal dialog. It worked. But she knew Rachel would not approve.

The SI character back then knew she was sounding cagey, and figured out she was hiding something, but figured it was best not to press her on why with Rachel and Alec listening. This turned out to be a good call, as Rachel would've gotten upset if she'd heard what methods Lisa had intended on using to move all of her dogs that quickly.

And yes, after robbing Lung, Lisa did turn about and devote considerable time and attention, as well as the computing power of her better-than-Dragon-tech smartphone, arranging for Coil's little financial problems.

Cauldron were *going* to investigate Coil to explore his supposed connections to Doctor Whodunit. They were just a tad upset at the time they did it, and the object of their frustration was not there to help them resolve their tempers in person, so Coil got roughly used by some very upset people.

It's not like he did not deserve it. He'd done worse to others himself. He's already admitted to that.

Bad things happening to bad people is called Justice, and though "The wheels of justice turn slowly, they grind exceedingly fine."

Beta work by Dogbertcarroll