“Forget Stark. He’ll do what I tell him or we’ll find a new guy. We own MCB now.”

“POTUS won’t give approval until we can at least finish questioning the scientists. We’ve got no assurance that Mark Thirteen won’t just go incorporeal again and infect the rest of the city. There’s a lot we don’t know about it.”

“I’m not worried about that. We found one of the Decision Week survivors in a retirement community not too far away and brought him in. Doctor by the name of Blish. I questioned him already. The old bastard confirmed what we suspected all along, but I think he’s exaggerating the destructive capacity. They didn’t have the ability to deal with this back then, but it’s nothing we can’t handle now. I’ve got enough information to take it down when necessary.”

“Are you going to brief the Hunters inside?”

“Negative.” Stricken’s laugh was as cold as ever. “We wanted an excuse to restart the Nemesis Project. We’re never going to have anything better than this. We’ll let it play out, then provide the solution at the last minute. Let the Hunters do the bleeding until then. We’re not out any resources ourselves. Then I can go up the chain and tell them if I’d had Nemesis assets ready to rock, this all could have been prevented.”

“You’ll get your budget. Don’t worry. But there will be significant backlash against restarting Nemesis.”

“You mean Frankenstein’s monster? That lumbering freak has outlived his usefulness.”

The other man quavered. “But Franks is hard as fuck. He’s untouchable. He’s a national treasure. You know what’ll happen—”

“None of you have to worry about Franks. I’ll handle him. Same with Myers or any of the old guard that gets in the way, I’ll burn them too. I’ve got a mission to complete.”

The line was quiet for a long time. “That’s cold, even for you.”

“And that’s why you keep me around. Just get me my approvals, Mr. Secretary, and I’ll handle the messy details.”

I’d heard Nemesis mentioned between Franks and the Unicorn man yesterday. The dragon turned back to me as the TVs returned to their wide variety of channels. “No, I do not know what this Nemesis is that they speak of. However, it seems to be something that Stricken wants, and is prepared to sacrifice my lovely establishment, my employees, and my guests in order to justify.”