“Doc says you’ll get back to full strength… when?” DeForge asked.
“Two months, give or take.”
“Good. That should give Tech enough time to apply the finishing touches to the new field uniform.” He led Slade into one of the many engineering bays. There, behind glass, held aloft by a wire mannequin, was an updated version of the field uniform Slade had worn when he arrived on Lian Yu. It was black, made to blend in with the shadows, and featured a special weave of promethium in its fibers, a nearly indestructible metal composite that was as light as it was durable. Bandoliers crisscrossed the chest with pockets holding any number of hidden weapons and devices. There were clips of ammo for the two high-caliber pistols holstered on each hip, ready to unleash hell.
The greatest difference was in the design and functionality of its balaclava. Though its trademark orange and black color scheme was still present, gone was the pliable rubber and fabric mask Slade and Wintergreen had worn on the island—the very one which Slade had left for Oliver on the Lian Yu shore. Replacing it was a helmet, forged completely of promethium, the metal smooth and glinting under the lights overhead. Bulletproof and impervious, the mask was terrifying in its simplicity.
Finally, running in parallel with the bandoliers across the chest, two straps crossed at the uniform’s back, each holding a sheath for Slade’s weapon of choice—twin twenty-seven-inch tactical machetes. He preferred the razor-sharp metal’s quiet efficiency over the louder, and—in his opinion—less refined killing instruments contained in the lab, and unlike Digger’s boomerangs, there were no gimmicks involved with his swords. Each just offered a silent, effortless death stroke, which Slade had delivered to enemies far too numerous to count.
He reached out and touched the uniform’s cold metal, running his hand along it. DeForge certainly knew how to appeal to Slade’s inner soldier. The body armor was, indeed, impressive.
“Nice, isn’t it?” DeForge said. “Tough son of a bitch like you, I figure you’ll be giving this a test drive in a couple weeks, if not sooner.”
“About that—” Slade said, “—if it’s fine by you, I’d like to stay grounded here for the time being.” He could see a brief flicker of disappointment cross DeForge’s face.
“Slade Wilson, desk jockey?” DeForge said. “It’s hard to imagine.”
He was trying to push buttons.
Not gonna work, he thought. Out loud he said, “I just got home. I’d like to spend some time with my son.” Slade eyed DeForge. “After Lian Yu, I think I’ve earned that right.”
DeForge eyed his soldier, sizing him up.
“Tired of dodging bullets?”
“For now, at least.”
DeForge nodded, giving in.
“Any idea what you’d want to do?”
Slade pretended to consider the question.
“Help train the newbies, when I’m able,” he said. “But I’d also like to help with intelligence. It might pay to have someone with my field experience processing data as you track A.R.G.U.S. I might see something a ‘desk jockey’ might miss.”
“Very well,” DeForge said, shaking his head. “I’ll get you set up with Matt in Analytics.” The commander started to head out of the equipment bay. “Slade Wilson behind a desk,” he said, shaking his head again. “Hell really must be freezing over.” He disappeared down the hall, leaving Slade behind with the prototype.
Slade took in the uniform, lost in thought. DeForge was right. The idea of not taking a mission was jarring, even to him. He was born to wear armor like the prototype that stood before him. Those suits were designed to fit men like him—men who lived to serve their country through whatever means necessary.
One day, he might find himself back out there again, but for now, staying behind was part of his plan. He needed access to A.S.I.S.’s surveillance capabilities. Under the guise of helping fight the good fight against A.R.G.U.S., Slade would use the technology to find out if Oliver Queen was still alive.
7
The Analytics Department, like the rest of A.S.I.S., was unspectacular to the layman’s eye. Cubicles were arranged in an open office design, like those of a tech startup or a video game studio, with computer monitors aglow at every desk. The bullpen was quiet, each of its members focused on the task at hand—gathering and processing surveillance data acquired through means oftentimes falling outside the purview of the law. If the law even knew the organization existed in the first place.
“It’ll probably be easiest to think of the system like it’s another weapon.”
Matt Nakauchi, one of the department technicians, led Slade to an open desk. Wearing a gray button-up shirt open at the collar and relaxed pants, he was by all outward measure a normal, average guy. The only glimpse of his underlying quirkiness came out while discussing the capabilities of the A.S.I.S. technology.
Then he spoke a mile a minute.
“It’s probably more effective, too, at least in my opinion,” Nakauchi added. “Quieter than a gun, more precise than a knife, but way less blood.”
“You’ve never seen me use a sword,” Slade responded with a smirk.
“But that’s my point. What we do, no one sees.” Nakauchi grabbed the mouse and started clicking. “While you normally take the enemy head on, we attack where he least expects it—in his moments of what we laughingly refer to as ‘privacy.’ Or ‘her’ moments,” he added. “I don’t discriminate.”
Slade watched with mild bemusement as the tech opened up a program. Aerial images of Australia popped up on screen, most likely from drones, or spy satellites in orbit overhead.
“This is our latest weapon of mass data deconstruction—the Super Intelligent Image Recognition Algorithm,” he continued proudly. “Or as I call it, SIIRA, pronounced like the California wine. Makes it classy.”
“I won’t be calling it that,” Slade said.
“You will after I show you what it does.” Nakauchi gave him a cocky grin as he pulled up another screen showing a seemingly endless list of files and data. “Imagine trying to find someone in all this nonsense, right? A total needle-in-a-haystack type deal. Unless, of course, you have a tool that will sift through all the hay for you.” He punched a few keys and brought up a picture of Slade—one taken well before Lian Yu. Maybe even before Joe. Both eyes intact. Slade stared back at himself, trying to remember the time when he was still whole.
“This is from your dossier,” Nakauchi explained. “I use it not to point out your whole missing eye thing—apologies, by the way, because that sucks—but to illustrate its vast capabilities. If you were within the scope of a camera, it’ll find you, adjusting for age, hair, scars, whatever. Watch.” Slade leaned in as the tech ran a search. A few seconds later, security camera footage showed him buying groceries at a neighborhood mart. “Marmite, eh? I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen someone buy a jar. It always just exists, you know?”
“I had a craving,” Slade said. “What else can it do?”
“The Marmite or the computer?” Nakauchi asked, and when he didn’t get a reply, he continued. “Do you remember what you were doing, say, ten years ago?”
“Waiting for my son to be born.”
A couple of keystrokes later, and footage appeared on the screen—of a much younger Slade, pacing in the hospital waiting room.
“Scary good, right?” Nakauchi said.
Slade stared at the screen, wheels turning.
“How accurate is it?” he asked.
“It’s still in beta, so there are some kinks, but I’d say it’s accurate to roughly eighty-five percent. Definitely good enough to point that sharp sword of yours in the right direction.”
Slade nodded. Good enough indeed.
* * *
“Is that the best you got?”
Digger Harkness stood over Slade Wilson, who lay on his back. The two had been sparring for the last thirty minutes. Harkness, who was trying to stay sharp between missions, had issued a friendly challenge. Hand-to-hand combat,
first to five takedowns wins. The younger operative was eager to test himself against the legend.
Slade, for his part, gladly obliged. A month on from his injuries, he was itching to exert himself and test how well he had recovered. That his ego had been challenged only added fuel to the fire. He’d figured he would teach Harkness a lesson.
Instead, he was down four-to-one.
Frustrated, he slapped the mat and got to his feet. His chest was heaving as sweat broke across his brow. It felt like he was standing in quicksand. His agility and strength had yet to return. Harkness regarded him with a sly, cocky smile.
“Need a moment?”
Slade grunted in response, readying himself.
Harkness shrugged, and engaged.
It happened quickly. Slade parried, blocking an onslaught of punches and kicks, keeping pace initially, but then fading with fatigue against the younger man’s relentless attack. Finally, Slade, his technique grown sloppy, threw a desperate punch that Harkness countered easily, using Slade’s momentum to toss him to the mat one final time.
Check and mate.
The younger man extended a hand to help him up. With a dispirited sigh, Slade accepted. He didn’t like losing, but he wasn’t about to be a bad sport. Harkness slapped him on the back.
“Good match,” he said, trying to sound genuine.
Slade laughed in self-disgust. “Hardly.”
“You’re just rusty.” Harkness tossed him a bottle of water. “It takes time for the skill to come back around.”
“Rematch when it does?”
“Sure,” Harkness said, “but next time, we use our weapons.” Slade nodded, watching him snatch up his bandolier of boomerangs and head off toward the locker room. The man was skilled, no question, but Slade believed himself to be the superior fighter. He had been overwhelmed, not by skill, but by fatigue—his strength and agility not yet fully restored from his arduous ocean swim.
Slade headed off to the showers, the sparring session confirming the results of the blood test a month ago. He was beginning to accept that the mirakuru was gone.
* * *
Using the SIIRA system, Slade located and tracked the Queen family and their associates. Oliver’s mother, Moira, sister, Thea, and best friend, Tommy Merlyn, even his former girlfriend, Laurel Lance, the girl whose picture Oliver had kept in his wallet all those years on the island.
He spent his time carefully assembling details, a voyeur from thousands of miles away. If Oliver Queen was alive these people would know, and they would lead Slade to his revenge.
He grew to despise them. Just another opulent family, living in the rarified air of luxury and decadence few would ever know. He watched as Thea and Tommy coasted on the riches of their parents, and wondered if Oliver’s upbringing had been the same. Slade pulled up old news reports about Oliver’s party days, saw him wander the halls of Queen Consolidated, screwing around with starlet after starlet. Unmotivated and soft. How in the world had a spoiled, pampered brat like that managed to find the depth of character needed to survive an island like Lian Yu.
How had he become a cold-blooded killer?
The thought that this man had felled him infuriated Slade to no end. He figured someone else had to feel the same way—if not about Oliver himself, then about the privileged family who spawned him. So he began searching for people who might be enemies of the Queens.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Or at least a prospective ally.
He decided to begin his investigation with Queen Consolidated. He looked for patterns in legal action taken against the company, in attempted acquisitions of its subsidiaries, and in the behaviors of its competitors. It was during this avenue of inquiry that he came across a young female executive at Stellmoor International, a rival company. The executive’s name was Isabel Rochev, and she had been at Stellmoor for years, working her way up through the ranks. Rochev had made a career out of snatching up Queen Consolidated’s weaker satellite divisions, like a bird circling its prey.
She would dismember the companies for profitable parts before unceremoniously discarding the carcasses. The losses ultimately made no difference to the Queen Consolidated bottom line, the fact of which was hammered home in the company’s press materials. These were subsidiaries of little consequence, which made Rochev’s actions more obvious—clearly this woman had an agenda beyond simple business.
Slade knew what hate looked like.
Yet hate wasn’t enough to find Oliver Queen.
* * *
Four months into his research, however, and to his own surprise, Slade’s disgust with the Queen family began to evolve when he realized how broken they were as people. Though they put on a brave face in public, behind closed doors—in their most private spaces—the Queens were a family fractured by grief. It had been more than three years since the sinking of the Queen’s Gambit, where Oliver and his father Robert had disappeared and were presumed dead. Yet the family’s sorrow remained as raw as the day it happened. He watched as Moira lost herself in work and in the arms of Walter Steele, a high-ranking executive at Queen Consolidated, while her daughter, Thea, tried to drown her sadness in an ocean of prescription drugs.
The ripple effects were present in the Lance household as well. Laurel’s father, Detective Quentin Lance, spiraled down a rabbit hole all of his own: of alcoholism.
Though he tried to stay vigilant in his search, as the days passed by he actually found his hatred waning. To his surprise Slade found himself filling with regret.
Regret for himself.
Why am I wasting so much time on this wretched family, in chasing a ghost? he wondered. For all intents and purposes, Oliver Queen was dead. Meanwhile, he had his own family waiting for him at home, so close and so very much alive.
* * *
Slade decided to go home early for a change.
Home. A place Slade hadn’t known for such a long time. Though reluctantly at first, Adeline still allowed him to return to the house. The smell of dinner wafted out to greet Slade as he walked up the path, and he could make out details in the scent—carrots and onions caramelizing in a pot, the fat of stew meat browning in butter, aromatics of black pepper and thyme. The savory fragrance marking the beginnings of a stick-to-your-bones stew. After his time on Lian Yu, the once unexceptional meal had become a cherished luxury.
Joe sat cross-legged on the floor of the den, doing homework. Adie heard him come in and poked her head out from the kitchen.
“Got tired of invading people’s privacy?” she asked.
“Decided I’d rather have some of my own,” Slade replied.
“You know better, but it’s good for you to hold onto your illusions,” she said. “Now you can help Joe with his homework.”
Slade slung his coat over a chair and sat down next to his son. He felt himself sink into the carpet, the boy’s warm form nestled against him. Joe looked up at him and smiled, then put his head back down toward the task at hand. He was scratching out a small essay in pencil, his writing the expected haphazard scrawl of a ten-year-old. Slade recognized his own handwriting in a few of the vowels.
“What are you working on?” he asked.
“A book report,” Joe answered. “We’re reading a ghost story book, and Ms. Cho wants to know if we thought it was scary, but if we didn’t think it was scary, then we have to write about what we think is really scary.”
“Sounds tactical.” Slade grinned. Knowing an enemy’s fear meant possessing the means to control him. Why wouldn’t the same hold true for school children?
“What does tactical mean?” Joe looked up at him.
“That your teacher’s a smart lady,” Slade said. “So, was the book scary?”
“Not really.” Joe shrugged. “It did have spiders in it, but I see those every day, and really big spiders don’t exist.”
“I don’t know, mate. I’ve seen some pretty big spiders.”
“How big?”
“The size of your face.” Slade use
d his hand and fingers to mimic a spider’s crawl. “And they would leap at you, like this!” He grabbed Joe’s head lovingly, causing the boy to squeal in laughter.
“So if it’s not spiders, what are you afraid of? Dragons? Vampires?”
Joe shook his head. “Mom says they’re all fake, and you can’t be afraid of stuff that’s fake.”
“All right, tough guy,” Slade said. “What’s something you’re scared of that’s not fake?”
Joe paused, considering. Then he shrugged again, matter-of-fact.
“I guess I was scared I wasn’t going to see you again,” he replied, “but I don’t think that counts.”
Slade was stunned. Fighting off the emotion swelling within him, he mussed Joe’s hair.
“I think that counts just fine.”
* * *
Slade found Adie over the stove, stirring the pot of stew. She waved him over, dipping the spoon into the pot.
“Here,” she said, offering the spoon to him. “Taste this.”
“You were wasting your time at A.S.I.S.,” Slade commented, licking the spoon dry. “Because you’re a goddamn good chef.”
“Please.” Adie took the spoon, rinsing it in the sink before putting it back in the pot. “You were stranded on an island eating twigs and dirt the past three years. I could serve you a leather shoe and you’d love it.”
“Depends on the leather.” Adie mimed some fake laughter and went over to the cutting board to slice up lettuce for a salad.
“How did the homework go?”
“Fine. Joe writes like I do, which isn’t ideal.”
“You mean gibberish?”
“No,” Slade said, stealing the spoon back from the pot. “Like he’s writing in the midst of a seizure. Must mean he’s smart.”
Adie playfully grabbed the spoon back. “And that, my friend, would come from me.”
“No argument here,” Slade agreed. He paused for a second, looking at the stew simmering on the stove. “Joe said he was afraid that I wasn’t coming back.”
“We both were,” Adie said. Like it had been with Joe, her tone was matter–of–fact. She continued chopping up lettuce greens. “Does that surprise you?”
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