Chapter Text
Inside a cab in the Pioneer Square neighborhood of Starling City…….
(Barbara Gordon’s POV)
Barbara Gordon had never spent very much time thinking about how people saw her as Batgirl. She was usually working on a case, or behind a computer delivering information to the members of her team in the field. In those circumstances, there was simply not enough time to sit and think about what being Batgirl meant to other people. But here was different.
The main reason was that she wasn’t Batgirl here. The circumstances as to why that was tended to be a weird thing to explain to people who weren’t in the game, but this was how she figured it: If chasing someone down brought you to another hero’s city, you told them you were coming. Maybe they’d help you, maybe they had more on the guy you were after than you did, but it was a courtesy to let them know you were coming. And if this had been an investigation, she absolutely would have called and they might have pooled resources.
But this? This was not that. This was a research librarian from the Gotham City Public Library who also had a PH.D. in computer sciences coming to see about some rare books on a long train trip. And if it just so happened that she left the city having upgraded a close friend’s workstation to be the equivalent of some of those super computers in Switzerland and dropped off some files for that close friend’s other close friends, well wasn’t that just a happy little accident?
So, she could feel free to think more esoterically about the way in which this city had shaped the heroes who protected it than she might do normally. And once she had decided she could do that, she noticed things. For one, Starling City was….. interesting.
Sure, she knew this was a modern city. There were top-of-the-line cars, electric cabs like the one she was sitting in, and all the amenities you’d expect anywhere else in a major city. But the way in which the city looked, and moved, made her think she was in one of those classic 1940’s film noirs like Double Indemnity. The King Street Station, where she had just come from, was a prime example. It was well-lit, but not from any of the modern ways these things happened. No, this was lit like the Bradbury Building in National City. It just felt like an old-time place, for a city that was in many ways a city out of time. Deliberately so.
And then once you got out of the station, it rained all the time. Not just a light drizzle. No, sheets. And with that rain came a damp atmosphere, and ash-gray skies. Before too long, with generations of people who got used to living here and living like this, you’d want to plot and scheme to get a little bit more power. To make yourself better than perhaps you were supposed to be, to get out of the rain and look down on all the people who were still struggling. She figured this was why people like the Flash, Lady Lightning, and Supergirl didn’t work here. Power like theirs? People would move heaven and earth to get it.
Because, here in Starling City, there was a stratified class of people. People who are on the front cover of magazines, interviewed for glossy sit-down interviews on business TV, and all the rest of it. These were people who held themselves out as the elite of the elite, the rich and powerful. And they would, without hesitation, use all of those resources to harm working people. People who wanted compensation for a fair day’s work, or for the insurance they counted on to actually be there when they needed it. All Barbara needed for proof was the knowledge that this city’s greatest villain, the man who tried to destroy this city and rebuild it in his own image, was a man who thought that building himself up from a humble son of a family of tv repair men into the head of a multi-national tech conglomerate gave him the right to do whatever he felt like to the city he called home.
These were people who paid off all the normal levers of justice. So, in a city like Starling where justice didn’t work, where were you supposed to go? That, being the answer to that question, was the Green Arrow and Black Canary’s greatest skill set.
You could rely on them being there for you without a second’s thought, without a question. If you came to them needing help, they made sure justice got done for you. No matter what it was. And as she was listening to her cab driver’s radio, hearing all this mess about a hostage situation at the train station she had just left, she figured that while she was in their city she could do the same damned thing.
So, handing her cab driver a handful of bills, she got out near an alleyway and dialed one number on her encrypted phone.
“Green Arrow? It’s Batgirl. How can I help?”
Inside the Quiver…….
(Dinah Laurel Lance’s POV)
In a city like Starling, where there were mysteries and conspiracies seemingly around every corner, Dinah Laurel Lance had grown to become comfortable with never believing that the thing in front of her was actually all that there was. There was always something else, something someone wanted to hide, and figuring out what that might be had become vitally necessary. All she had, really, was what she could do with her mind and her hands. That meant, simply, she always had to be at the top of her game. There wasn’t time to coast, to think she knew everything or saw everyone.
So, she kept paying attention. Because in Starling City, secrets were currency.. People were more interested in keeping their secrets, and what their secrets gave them, than they might be in doing the right thing. It was how the Merlyns had happened, and Helena Bertinelli, and a police force so rotted out by corruption and greed that it was a miracle anyone ever got arrested for the crimes that they actually committed. But she wanted that to change, and she hoped her and Ollie were making some headway on that. She wanted people to understand that there were people, both wearing a badge and not, who gave a damn about doing the right thing because it was the right thing.
It was why this hostage business was bothering her, because there were working people there. People who ran coffee carts, and staffed franchise outposts for donut places and things like that. People on an Amtrak train from Starling City to National City, who just wanted to get home and enjoy some nice views on the way. The one thing that they shared in common was that none of them, to the last, had ever expressed any interest in having their livelihoods or days affected by being pawns in a game that someone was playing with Ted Kord.
The Black Canary knew it bothered Ollie too, and confused him just as much as it did her. Not just because she could see her husband, hood down but blue eyes cold and focused just like if the Green Arrow was in the field, studying the blueprints of the King Street Station like he was expecting to find something special in there. But also because he kept muttering under his breath about how poorly this whole thing was run, and how it didn’t make any kind of sense to pull a move this big for one man. So, while he kept trying to work out why it was being done this way, she picked up her part of this: Why it was Ted Kord in the first place.
Ted Kord was a brilliant man with a handful of PH.D’s, but his finest work was in the field of computing. Besides writing the gold standard book on digital database security, he had also been a forerunner in cloud storage, distributed processing, and now cyber-security. If it was done with a computer, Kord Industries was the place you bought the computer from. So whatever this was, whoever this was, needed access to what Ted Kord’s mind could be for them. So that took out the local talent of crime gangs. There was no world in which some Triad or Yakuza underboss would ever make this move. Theirs was a lower-tech operation, by and large. You didn’t need high-end computer processing power to keep gambling debts, or send some thick-necked bruiser to run a protection racket.
So that meant she needed to be moving on to the companies in Starling City. She quickly knew Stagg Industries wouldn’t dare. They were dealing, full-time, with the public relations fallout of one of their “consultants” having been affiliated with someone who was trying to put Vertigo back on the streets. And Queen Consolidated and Palmer Tech wouldn’t even dream of running a play like this. They’d just hire one of Ted’s computer guys to a consultancy deal and that would be that.
No, this was somebody out of town. Someone who needed something big, and knew they couldn’t do it themselves. And that made her think of where the train was ending up.
The person who was running this would have to have been in National City. Someone who wanted what all the other companies in front of them had. Someone who needed to increase their market share, and didn’t mind breaking the rules to get there.
What was more, the Songbird of Starling knew how a man like Ted Kord would think. He’d take a business meeting on a train, especially with a competitor, because it’d be private and less likely to be revealed and potentially damaging. And considering the only logical option was a headhunter or something of the sort from a National City tech firm, Ted might not even want to be seen meeting with the person in public.
Somewhere in the passenger manifest was a clue. And for this, clues were vital. Because she had done all the profiling she could do. But she knew she was lucky, because she had friends who could help make this impossible job a little easier. Friends like Kara Danvers in National City, the Maiden of Might, who could very easily tell her about who was struggling in the National City business world. And then she heard the familiar sound of a breach being opened, and she knew what other friend had arrived.
Bruce Wayne had been, ever since his retirement, a human search engine. He knew everyone, had friends and allies in every organization with initials in every form of government and culture, and was only all too willing to make introductions when he thought it would do some good. But he still was Bruce Wayne to the public at large, and that meant he could not be everywhere. And he especially could not be here in Starling City without a cover story, and he did not have one for this.
And since Batman was well-known for staying exclusively within the borders of Gotham, the Dark Knight could not be here either. But that did not mean the Caped Crusader could not help.
Laurel knew just what he was doing. He had sent Barbara Gordon, most likely with information from far less official and more entrenched sources than either she or Ollie could acquire. But she also knew Barbara, brief though their interaction was in the haze of a post-wedding dinner that had been sullied by the presence of the Al-Ghul’s. There was no chance in the world that she wouldn’t help with putting this hostage thing to bed. None at all.
But she didn’t need another fighter. Ollie and her, together, could absolutely defeat anyone when things got physical. No, for this, they needed the one thing they would find the hardest to get in the field: information.
And from what she knew, the Queen of the Fist knew damned well that Barbara Gordon was an oracle when it came to find information.
(Oliver Queen’s POV)
Ever since his memories of the old timeline had been restored, Oliver Queen had tried very hard to not rely on them. They were patterns he could recognize and avoid, so that he didn’t become someone he no longer wanted to see in the mirror. It was why, for instance, he had vowed to never take a life. When he had returned home, his father had not told him to kill anyone in the way of saving his city. Talia and Waller had taught him that. Those lessons were useless to him now, because he had a new way. A better way.
Sure, that way might be harder most times. But hard, he had learned repeatedly, was good. Easy was aiming an arrow for the heart. Hard was making someone think you were capable of doing that, while actually recording their panicked confession in your suit and then delivering that confession along with the evidence you acquired to the appropriate federal agency so there was no chance your target would be free in their lifetime.
And right now, as he was looking at the blueprints for one of the oldest and biggest train stations on the West Coast, he could again see the difference between easy and hard. Easy would be him and Laurel going down to King Street Station, beating up every hostage-taker they found, and then dramatically rescuing Ted Kord from his kidnappers. As he saw that though, and relished in just how good that would feel, he knew it wouldn’t work. All this needed was one guy getting too scared to think straight, and hurting Ted Kord or worse, and the whole thing would go to hell.
No, this needed to be played slowly. And playing it slowly was going to be very hard. Because there were more conditions than he had initially seen when he had first realized Ted Kord had been kidnapped. For one thing, there was only one train going to National City from here. Just one. It was a train that carried over 400,000 passengers, and was run by Amtrak. It went through Tacoma, and some other smaller towns, before hitting Portland and then Coast City on its way to National City. That was lucky, as he could access the passenger manifest and see just how many people were on the train when it had been stopped in the station. Because, before he even contemplated storming train cars, he needed to know who he would be fighting.
First thing he knew was that the Green Arrow knew damned well that this was being run by someone who didn’t want Ted Kord hurt, but in a specific place where he could be aggressively negotiated with. Unless this went terribly poorly, terribly fast, this was not going to be a situation where things got physical. So that meant the muscle for this were going to be reputable operators, the sort of people who were told to just not let anyone leave.
That would be where the meeting happened. Unless this person was an idiot, they’d concentrate their forces around where they were. So, if this was played right, they could get really close before an arrow ever needed to be drawn or an escrima stick pulled from a sheath. Because, of course, this was going to be another close-quarters combat scenario. And that was the easy part of the puzzle. Easy being relative in this sense.
No, the hard part was going to be getting to the train. Because as he kept looking at these blueprints, he was seeing the entrance and he was seeing who would be at it. Namely, members of SCPD SWAT. And judging from his and Laurel’s last encounters with members of SWAT, it did not strike him as particularly implausible for one of them to “accidentally” shoot either himself or Laurel and then claim an accident after the fact. It couldn’t be helped, of course. Investigating them after the whole business with Clayborne, and then doing what they could to make sure Bailey hadn’t been asked to tune-up innocent people after he had been wandering drunk out of a known gang bar, was about making sure justice was served. But he did know that it had made enemies. And they already had too many of those.
But it didn’t matter. Stuck on that train was an innocent man, as near as anyone down here could figure. And rescuing an innocent man was what the Emerald Archer was supposed to do. Sure, he was a billionaire. But they had protected royalty before, because it was the right thing to do. That, he figured, was what the Flash had wanted to have happened when he had reset the timeline. And the Speed Force, he was willing to state with nothing but circumstantial evidence, had taken that idea and put some nitrous in it by super-charging the brainpower of himself and Laurel. But none of it would have particularly mattered if there wasn’t something strong underneath it. And what was underneath it was the very real expectation that you could not harm someone in his city, and run away from facing justice for what you were doing.
He still had questions, though. But those could be answered in the field. Questions like what SWAT had with them, and if the hostage negotiator had any info and was willing to talk about what he knew. Time to go and rescue Ted Kord.
Meanwhile, at the McMillan Housing Projects in Little Tokyo……..
(Thea Queen’s POV)
Thea Dearden Queen knew she was not her brother. And to be honest, more and more, she did not want to be. She saw what being the Green Arrow required, and what it meant for him to do it in the way that people expected it to be done. The sheer number of criminology, forensics, and psychological textbooks in the Quiver meant he had to study and keep up with the kind of continuing education that would make a PH.D student wince. But she didn’t have to do that.
Ollie had told her as much. “I got the chance to completely re-evaluate my life, Thea, and I wanted very much to do things better than I had been. Protecting this city, making sure its people can sleep at night, is what gives me purpose. But you do not have to do things the same way I do them. In fact, you shouldn’t. I obsess over this, Speedy. Because the enemies I’ve made, the people who come to the city looking to say they beat the Green Arrow and Black Canary, aren’t going to be your enemies. Your enemies are the people hurting the Glades.”
No, what she could do was simpler. She walked a beat in the Glades, and made sure everyone knew she wasn’t that interested in who drank from a bottle outside a corner store. She knew why they did it, after all. The corners in the Glades, and in all the ethnic neighborhoods that made it up, were the poor man’s lounge. Even when it rained, there was nowhere else to be to watch pretty girls go by. And it didn’t matter to her if they had a little bottle in a paper bag while they did it.
Because there were bigger things, and she knew it. And she knew everyone knew that she knew it. Things like this.
So, as Artemis walked into the housing projects in her rainbow-colored suit with her rainbow-colored recurve bow on her back, she nodded to the Hmong men sitting on the park benches discussing just how poor the Monarchs and the Huskies were this year. Under normal circumstances, like if Vertigo was being moved out of here, she’d clock them for being spotters for one of the drug dealers in the projects. But everyone here had a code. Sure, the lines were wider and grayer than Ollie and Sensei Laurel’s. But there were still lines, and a kidnapping of a child crossed all of them.
So she knew if these guys knew anything, they’d say so. And the nod was to let them know that she’d be asking, forcefully if necessary, some rough questions if this building didn’t give her the answers she was looking for. But she knew that people here wouldn’t be quiet about one of their own being kidnapped, especially here. Sure, the SCPD wouldn’t get anywhere on this. But she wasn’t SCPD.
For one thing, she knew how to speak Hmong damned well. It had been Sensei Laurel’s insistence for that. “There are things you can control about how your city sees you, Speedy. How you present yourself, the way you talk to them, and if you can speak their language. Everyone wants to be heard and respected. Speaking someone’s first language is a great way to do that.” So while she was doing homework or out on patrol, she was studying the languages of the people she looked after. Make no mistake, she looked after them.
Sure, this was a neighborhood where a higher-than-normal amount of people drank or smoked to take the edge off. But people knew that the Princess of the Glades made sure the weed you got was pure, not cut with whatever some unscrupulous weed dealer decided to put in there. Because people also knew that if you got high where you shouldn’t, she was going to make sure you never did that again.
So when she came here, asking a question, Thea knew no one was going to pretend they didn’t know anything. And if they did? Well, that was the other thing.
This was a neighborhood all about street power. Down here, a block made a difference. But she didn’t know all the players, not nearly as well as she might have liked. But do you know who the Rainbow Archer knew did? Arsenal.
(Roy Harper’s POV)
Roy William Harper Jr. knew what his role was. Sensei Oliver had, over heaping bowls of ramen over nearly 3 years, taught him what it was to be the second-in-command. Everything from training his eye to see what Thea couldn’t, to making himself as big and imposing as possible so no one thought they could get away with anything. And now that the secret of his sensei having lived this entire life once before was now out in the open, those lessons took on a new significance. The errors he was trying to avoid, the things he wanted his student to never do, were clearly things that had happened before. So, he paid attention. And soon, he could fill in Thea’s gaps for her without being asked and purely on sight alone.
He still tried to soak up all the knowledge he could, because he never felt like it was enough. If Thea needed someone by her side, he wanted to be there with every possible bit of information and sober counsel that would be useful to her in any and every situation. So when he knew they were coming down here to chase down a kidnapping, he knew what he was going to do. He was going to know precisely where to go.
The fact that this was a Hmong girl made this harder, of course. From everything he had learned, this was a deliberately insular community. Speaking their language, he knew, was just the beginning. You had to understand their culture, the things that mattered to them, to get their help. And asking around, to the few Hmong friends he had, he knew where to start. The McMillan Housing Projects.
The Hmong had their own community centers, their own cuisine, and generally handled disputes inside that framework. So to hear that a kidnapped girl was being allowed to be looked for by himself and Thea made one thing clear: As much as things like this were possible, that community trusted Arsenal and Artemis. And he wanted that to mean something. He wanted it to matter.
He knew how people saw the Green Arrow and Black Canary. Even down here in the Glades, where they didn’t appear as much as anyone would like them to, they were looked at as the best friends a working man could ever dream of having. He wanted that for himself and Thea here, and for the rest of the city too. He wanted the guys who toted lumber into the city, the guys who worked at the steel plants and in the mills that made paper and textbooks, to know they had someone watching their backs when they went home.
And starting that standard by being one of the people who went door-to-door in a dangerous housing project to make sure that an eleven-year-old girl got back to her dad because her mom had snapped and taken the girl was a good way to start.
This was a lesson Roy knew Sensei Oliver couldn’t help him with. Going door-to-door, with his reflex bow on his back and his crimson-red hood up so no one clocked that Arsenal was really a car mechanic, was not something the Green Arrow had ever needed to do. But car mechanics helped people too. How many kids from the neighborhood, who had scrimped and saved to get a beat-to-hell Toyota Camry, had he helped by making sure that car ran smooth?
No, he knew what he was. And he knew what this community needed. It needed someone to stand up against injustice. Like a Red Tornado.
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(Author’s Note: All Dialogue took place in Hmong.)
Roy figured this wouldn’t be easy. And as they knocked on door after door, getting nothing but single-word answers, he was right in his initial guess. But god, he hated it. He hated knowing that somewhere, in this city, there was an 11-year-old girl scared out of her fucking mind and he couldn’t find her. But he also knew he couldn’t obsess on it. This was a small community, and they would help him if they knew. And someone, somewhere here, knew something. They had to. Right? But every time he thought he was about to lose his hope, he only had to look over at Thea and see what the point of this whole thing was.
This was her city too, and she loved it just like Roy did. What kind of partner would he be if he didn’t help her get this done? So, as he knocked on what felt like the millionth door, his mind was on making sure they got some damned good answers. But the woman behind the door set every alert system the Red Tornado had on the highest of alert. For one thing, her body language. Every other woman here moved like they were sad, like they wanted to help. But this felt like she was hiding something, deliberately so. And then he looked in her eyes, blood-shot with the dilated pupils and he could just tell she was crazily high.
Like the kind of high you are when you’ve just finished doing something you know you shouldn’t be doing, and you have to get stoned to avoid the guilt of it. And then he saw the vial, green-colored, next to a bottle of soda and a bacon cheeseburger from Big Belly Burger and he felt a burning hatred begin to form in his chest. Vertigo. What kind of a fucking monster did you have to fucking be to get high on Vertigo with your kid around? Especially when it wasn’t even a kid you were supposed to have custody of.
And then Thea peeked in over his shoulder, and she saw a man counting pills on a kitchenette counter that had seen better days years ago. Here it was: Kid kidnapped by a mom, with her dealer in the room, who was going to do god only knew what with the kid in exchange for the mom getting her high. Without even having to look, without even having to say a word, Artemis grabbed a flechette from out of her suit. She wasn’t hitting the mom. She figured the woman was drugged out of her mind enough that she wasn’t even really here. So, while Roy kept feeding her soothing bullshit in Hmong, Thea aimed a flechette loaded with a very powerful tranquilizer at her Vertigo dealer and watched as he staggered and went face-first into the counter and then out cold. If you sold drugs to a smacked-out mom with her kid in the house, losing a couple of teeth seemed like a solid consequence.
“You’re going to go to rehab. Not tomorrow, not when you get cleaned up and realize what you did and what you made your daughter see. NOW. And when you get there, you’re going to tell every counselor in the place that you kidnapped your daughter to sell to your dealer so you could get high on Vertigo. And when they look at you with disgust, I want you to use that to get better. Because this can’t be your life.”
But Roy glanced over at Thea and knew they weren’t done. Someone was still running Vertigo in these projects, someone who didn’t care about crossing any of the moral lines any of the street guys used to hold. Whoever it was, whoever could conceive of sanctioning a thing like this, was a devil. And Artemis and Arsenal knew they had to be the ones to fight this devil.
Back in the Quiver…….
(Barbara Gordon’s POV)
Barbara Gordon knew well what she was expected to do here. Drop off the terabytes of information Bruce had acquired on all of the aliases of Ra’s and Talia Al-Ghul, and then head back to Gotham. That was what she was here to do. But she didn’t think Bruce, or Dick and Tim for that matter, would have ever been ok with her leaving and not offering her help with what looked like a massive problem in front of the heroes of Starling City. And make no mistake, from what she could tell, the both of them would need all the help they could get.
They were going to have to enter a train station, one of the oldest and most well-known on the West Coast, which was loaded with state and federal police officers who would be on high alert dealing with an incredibly stressful situation and thus would be in no mood to cater to vigilantism. And then, they would have to use all their skills as martial artists and ninja to clear a full passenger train and prevent highly-paid professional mercenaries from leaving the station with their principal and their hostage. All while avoiding being shot. This seemed like something they could not do alone.
Sure, from what she had watched in grainy surveillance footage and heard from Bruce Wayne, if anyone could do it they would be the ones who could. But why make them? Why force people to have to get lucky, to have to fly blind if you could help them? So, pulling up the King Street Station schematics, she allowed her other great skill to reveal itself.
Sure, she was a master researcher. But computers? There was not a system in the world she could not access and bend to her will. She had gone after super-computers, the sorts of things that were in those research labs in Switzerland, and made them give her all the information she wanted. Compared to that, hacking an Amtrak train hub to give her the intel she needed to get two heroes in and out without being hurt? Child’s play.
So, as Batgirl opened up the passenger files for the Coast Starlight train heading from Starling City to National City, she took a glance over at the theories that the Jade Samurai and the Queen of the Fist had left behind. She had to admit, these were pretty good. (Also, their handwriting was immaculate.) But they weren’t hers to run down. What she could help with here was not investigation, but with intel and guidance. Time to get started.
In the King Street Station Parking Lot………
(Oliver Queen’s POV)
Of all the skills Oliver Queen had grown to rely upon in his current life, paying attention to every detail and planning for every eventuality was the most important. When all you had to help you do what was right was your brains, a very expensive bow, and your skills as a fighter, knowing what you were walking into was not just a luxury skill. It was vital. Not seeing in 360 degrees, and being bit by something you hadn’t planned on, would be the death of himself and Laurel. Not in a metaphorical sense, but literally. He would die, and so would Laurel.
In this line of work, nothing was more vital than knowledge. He could have all the martial arts skill in the world, but it was less useful without the knowledge of the terrain you were fighting on. So, as he pulled his motorcycle behind one of the big mobile command unit vans the SCPD had acquired, he began to think on what he knew and how he could use it.
For one thing, this was a corporately run op. He wasn’t quite sure by who yet, but it had to be someone with some juice. You wouldn’t have the credibility to get the manpower you needed to try and hijack a passenger train, and risk federal time if you were caught, by being some low-level street guy. No, he was pretty sure he knew what this was. And he figured whoever was behind it had read some book, or asked someone how you were supposed to do it. This whole thing, whatever else it was, was at its core another hostage situation.
But that somehow made it worse. Yes, there were protocols for this situation and he and Laurel had been trained on them all. But those protocols were also very well-known and publicized. Not to the average civilian, of course, but to the people who were in the game. People like, he realized with a sigh, the “retrieval specialists” this job would require. God damnit.
So they’d know everything about what SWAT was supposed to do, and how to stall them while whoever their principal on-site was kept the negotiations up with Ted Kord. And the Green Arrow also knew that the SWAT hostage negotiator on site would have no idea they were being toyed with. So, again, it came down to him and Laurel to rescue Ted Kord from a train worth of highly skilled professional operators who were being well-paid to make sure their game wasn’t being messed with.
Why was this reminding him of the League? Because everything was reminding him of the League right now. Every last move he made, every chess piece he pushed to force another move, was reminding him of sitting in that hotel room with Ra’s Al-Ghul and realizing he was playing on another man’s board. And he didn’t care for it. But he also knew he couldn’t hit Ra’s. An entire year of going after a far less sophisticated, in-control, and intelligent Ra’s last time had required sacrifices above and beyond anything he wanted to do again. So, unfortunately, this meant he could not yet go to war against the League of Assassins without causing himself and Laurel a ton of problems.
But tonight, in this train station, the League was not a thing he needed to worry about. There would be time to handle them. No, tonight he was dealing with a different class of criminal. Not a musclebound idiot recruited from the parts of Starling City where the block you grew up on still made a difference, but professionals. People from reputable ex-Special Forces outfits, people who did corporate security and had long ago learned not to ask questions they didn’t want the answer to. So this was going to be a chance to let loose, to really remind the League everything that he and Laurel were truly capable of.
But still, there were things he was missing. And he knew it. The Emerald Archer was unsure who was pulling the strings on all of this, and why they hadn’t just had a meeting at a steakhouse over an old-fashioned and some ribeyes like normal people did. It was a brazen move when this really didn’t need to happen this way. There had to be a better way to do this in secret, without Bloomberg or any one of the other business channels knowing. The more he thought about it, and turned the tumblers of the plan as he was seeing it, the less sense it actually made.
Whoever was behind this would need to have reserved a business-class ticket, brought equipment for a presentation to Ted Kord, while also the whole time knowing they were just going to kidnap the train? It was the kind of thing you did as a diversion, the more he thought of it. And that made him wonder what the real game here was.
For one thing, he knew SWAT had no idea. They weren’t trained investigators. There would be no reason for them to know this was a stall play. Why would you even assume it? No, if you were the hostage negotiator or the unit commander, you’d follow the protocols that were laid out. And unless he and Laurel stopped them, they’d be giving whoever was running this precisely what they wanted.
Oliver had never imagined himself as being the sort of person who took pleasure in destroying the criminal enterprises of others, but here he was now doing it. Being a detective, using his brain and his understanding of how people thought, was far less physically taxing than fighting wave upon wave of well-trained enemies night in and night out. And even now, with the League looming and god only knew what else coming down the pike, he knew he wanted to do this as long as he was able.
Time to show whoever was behind this who the Jade Samurai really was.
(Laurel Lance’s POV)
Dinah Laurel Lance knew how her husband Oliver Queen investigated crimes. Watching his brain relentlessly work to dismantle even the most complicated plans of criminals who thought themselves to be smarter than him was always a thrill to her, because she knew just how much he thought of himself as a grinder and not someone truly gifted with any great investigative talent. What was it he had said?
“I can just tell when people are lying to me, Pretty Bird, or when something doesn’t make much sense. And when one thing doesn’t make much sense, it becomes easier and easier to find more things. And before you know it, you’ve found the key to breaking open the whole case.”
She loved running down cases with him, because she saw things he didn’t and vice-versa. Like right now, for instance. His mind was exclusively on how you’d run it, and how this entire thing seemed to be a distraction for something else. Her mind was going to one question, not that complicated really. Why would Ted Kord have agreed to take a meeting like this?
He was a billionaire, a certified computing genius of the first order, and someone who stayed on the cutting edge of science. What in the world could have made him want to take a meeting on a train with a competitor, knowing said competitor would want to manipulate him into doing something for them? It bent credulity to snapping, and that made her think about what else she knew Ted Kord was.
Her studies of him had indicated he was a brilliant computing genius, an engineer, and an honest-to-goodness billionaire. But he was also well-known for being someone who wanted to maintain his connection to the world. He didn’t travel on private jets, drive a fleet of expensive cars, or do anything that seemed to indicate he was as rich as he was. If you didn’t know better, you were forgiven for thinking he was just a regular guy.
So, the Black Canary figured he would travel on a commuter train. That made sense. He had a higher-than-normal chance of seeing how his products actually worked in the field, and altering what he needed them to do based on what his consumer base needed. But he also wouldn’t travel with security, because regular people didn’t do that. But that was not trying to stay humble. That was being dumb. On purpose. And because of that, now she had to rescue him.
But the question of who he was going to have to be rescued from? That was a lot more interesting. They had already figured that it was someone from a National City tech firm, considering the Coast Starlight train that was currently being held hostage had its last stop in National City. And someone who needed to increase the market share of their firm, or else…. And then it hit. It wouldn’t be the CEO, not really. Sure, they might know but they’d insulate themselves. The protection would be the point.
And that meant not the CEO, but a CFO was running this. Someone who could credibly bring a contract over, and spin some silk-smooth line of bullshit about setting up a deal. The whole damned time, of course, trying to get something out of Kord was the real play. But what? What could they want?
Then, as if cued by some grand author somewhere, she got her answer. Barbara Gordon, who had taken over the computers at the Quiver, had texted her with one simple sentence: “Samantha Arias.”
So, she started googling. Ollie was counting his arrows, and re-reading the blueprints for the King Street Station on the computer screen in his pocket. And judging by the gleam in his cold blue eyes, Barbara had given him access to the SWAT team’s radio feed so that he could hear what they were doing as they were doing it.
Knowing Ollie was handling the infiltration, and probably had an equally sharp idea on how it was he was going to get them both out when they got Ted Kord safe, meant that the Songbird of Starling could focus on reading up more on Samantha Arias. And….. whew. This was….. This was not good.
Sure, there was a way in which someone who was a graduate of the Wharton Business School who just happened to have become the CFO of L-Corp, who was getting beaten up every which way but loose by Kord Industries in addition to the regular suspects they had already worked out, happened to be on the train when a hostage situation occurred with Ted Kord on the very same train could be a coincidence. But she didn’t trust that. She figured no halfway-decent investigator would trust that either, really.
She couldn’t prove it, of course. At least not yet. But this Samantha Arias woman was in her city, holding her people hostage while she tried to wheedle some deal out of Ted Kord. It couldn’t be allowed to stand. And it wouldn’t be.
But getting Samantha Arias wasn’t the problem. It was trying to figure out if Samantha Arias was acting alone, or if Lena Luthor was trying to set up some form of a Chinese firewall so she had plausible deniability over what was going to go on here. That question, and a few more, couldn’t be asked here. They needed to be asked in front of Lena Luthor, so her and Ollie could tell how high the bullshit rose.
That meant, of course, one thing. When this was done, and Ted Kord was free, they’d be chasing down leads in National City. They’d call Supergirl to make sure they weren’t stepping on anything indelicate by showing up, but this needed to be answered. It was just the right thing.
Laurel understood this, right here, was the key to being a detective. Wherever the lead took you, wherever the evidence told you to go, was where you went. Not moving on a lead, letting a case rot on the vine, was malpractice of the first order.
She was the Queen of the Fist. And some interloper had tried to run into her kingdom. Time to send them packing.