"- she'll be alright?"

"Weizza said brain function looks normal. She'll probably be a little–"

Alice opened her eyes. She was inside Weizza's clean room in the warehouse. Robert was at her side, and Julian was at the door. Marcos lounged nonchalantly against one of the walls.

"She's awake! Alice, can you hear me?" Robert asked.

"I hear you fine," Alice answered. "My head is killing me though. What the hell happened?"

"Weizza thinks you suffered a mini-stroke," said Robert. "You're lucky, if the clot had taken longer to clear, you might be–"

"Not with me Robert, with Petbe. What happened? Did we get in?"

Robert's face told her everything she needed to know.

"FUCK!" Alice's shout echoed harshly in the tiny room.

"Alice, try to stay calm. You're at high risk for a full-blown stroke after your incident."

"Stay calm Robert? How could I possibly stay calm? You know what this means, it's only a matter of time before Lynch strikes again."

Robert frowned and looked away.

"No! When?" Alice asked.

"About an hour after we tried to connect. We're lucky actually, if Lynch had noticed our failed login we probably would have been on the target list."

"Lucky!" Alice raged. "What part of our enabling genocide do you think is lucky, Robert."

"Mom," Julian broke in, "Take a breath. You couldn't have known Lynch would do this with Petbe, and I know you've been trying to make it right.

"I've been talking with Robert while you slept. He told me what you two have been through. I'm sorry I blew up at you, I didn't realize how hard you've been pushing.

"This was a bad break. But we can still beat Lynch."

"How Julian? We're locked out. Short of getting on a rocket I don't see it." Alice wasn't calm exactly, but she had at least stopped shouting.

"We take the fight to Lynch." There was an intensity in Julian's eyes Alice had never seen in her son. "We make that bastard pay for what he's done. Then we use his connection to shut down Petbe."

"Two problems with that Julian," Robert chimed in. "First, we don't know where he is. Second, we would need an army."

"Weizza has one," said Alice. "If you read between the lines - all the attacks she's been fending off from SumatoTek. She's been stockpiling firepower. If we can convince her to use it, I think we can take him out."

"Okay, say she agrees to lend us her robot army. We still need to find Lynch." Robert furrowed his brow. "He threatened every country on the planet; he must have planned for reprisals. He's somewhere he thinks is either impervious or unfindable. Or both."

"I have a theory," said Marcos. "SumatoTek had me steal two things from Blackmountain. The first was the location of the comm module in Budapest. The second was a list of recently updated SpaceCore mines. On Earth. Deep ones."

"You think he's holed up in one of them," Alice nodded. "It makes sense. Even a nuke couldn't hit you through two miles of rock. How many candidates?"

"Eight. And scattered across the planet." Marcos frowned. "I know he's in one of them, but once he gets wind we're searching he might bolt."

"Have you run it by Weizza?" Alice asked.

Robert and Marcos looked at each other. Robert switched to a whisper.

"She might be worse than Lynch. The things we've seen her do Alice..."

"I'm not sure about her either," interjected Marcos. "But she's the one with the coordinates. She took the stolen data from me in Myanmar, I don't have it anymore.

"I could try to call in the US military, but there's no guarantee we'd recover the information from her. Plus she'd definitely blow up my brain." Marcos shrugged. "I've grown kind of fond of it."

"Grown fond of what?" Alice heard Weizza's voice from the open door. "Aha, our patient is awake."

Weizza entered, still wearing her white scrubs. "Is she of sound mind?"

"I'm not sure I'd go that far," Marcos said with a grin. "But she's herself."

"Good. We must prepare our next move. It is time to find Lynch."

The others exchanged glances.

"I see you have come to the same conclusion. Excellent. That saves time. Now we must determine which mine he has retreated to."

"Are you able to check any of them for activity?" Robert asked.

"Most imaging satellites are controlled by SpaceCore, and the independents have gone dark," Weizza replied. "But I have my own surveillance methods.

"Blackmountain troops have been recently deployed to all of the candidate mines, along with base stations pointed at Petbe. Lynch has committed to his decoys."

"Marcos, do you have any connections you could use to find out which is the real one?" Alice asked.

"It'd take someone high up in the org chart to have that info, they're not exactly going to hand it over to me. That's assuming I could even figure out how to get in touch with them."

"I've got some phone numbers," Julian volunteered. "Have a look." He pulled out Antoine's cell phone he'd stolen from the Blackmountain cabin and tossed it to Marcos.

"Hmm..." Marcos paged through the contacts on the phone. "Cunningham. He might fall for it. Okay, here goes. Everyone quiet. Except you Alice, you stay close."

Marcos pulled out his own phone and dialed the number, then put it on speaker phone.

"Hello?" The voice on the other end sounded suspicious.

"Cunningham, how goes it, you old bastard."

"Who's this? I don't recognize the number."

"Marcos, remember me? I was squad lead on the Hungary operation."

"Oh I remember you. You're the asshole who stole secrets for SumatoTek from the Myanmar base."

"Now Cunningham, that was under duress. You guys missed a sleeper agent, Nakagawa. He had me at gunpoint.

"Look, I want to make it up to the org," Marcos continued, "I found someone the big boss might like. Say 'hello' Alice."

"Please," Alice whimpered, "please don't hurt me again." Marcos gave her a big thumbs up.

"You got the Yang bitch huh? Okay, we might be able to work something out."

"I'm not negotiating with you, I'll discuss this with Lynch. Should I bring her over to him at the Kidd mine?"

"Kidd? No, he's at Emp–" Cunningham stopped himself. "Nice try Marcos. No, you want to cut a deal, you'll work with me."

"I saw the ad on TV. Lynch wants Alice, bad. At least get me a call with him or I'll see what SummatoTek is paying."

"Fine, fine. I'll arrange something. Lynch is a busy man, I'll have his assistant set something up tomorrow."

"Do that. Bye Cunningham." Marcos ended the call, a big grin on his face.

"Empire mine," Weizza stated. "Northern California. Everyone get in the van."