“I think it could be sold to them,” I said. “Information comes at a premium, and every single team out there is wanting as clear a picture of where things stand as possible.”

“I do my thing, Chris does his thing, Kenzie does her thing,” Ashley said. “Sveta, Tristan and I help Rain in the meantime. When we have the intel, we hit them. Take out key players, interfere with a key part of their business, and we leave them ruined.”

“We maybe hit them,” Tristan said, with emphasis on ‘maybe’.

“If we spend the time to get that far, you’ll be itching to see it the rest of the way through,” Ashley said.

“And then what?” I asked, before they could get in an argument.

“Hm?”

“Let’s assume it’s a success, or you hand off the intel. What follows?”

“Depends on a lot of factors,” Tristan said. “We could take another piece of data collected on the way and jump off from there, or we don’t just take money, and we go to another team and we trade intel for intel. They tell us if they’ve got more tough nuts or tricky areas to tackle, and we use that as our next starting point.”

I nodded.

“What are you thinking?” Tristan asked.

“I… admit this makes a lot of sense. It may be harder than you’re picturing. Masterminds cover their asses, organizations have a lot of tools at their disposal.”

“If we get six pieces of a twenty-piece puzzle and we realize we can’t take things any further, we can still sell that intel,” Tristan said.

“Absolutely,” I said. “I’m trying to think about how that plays out in the long-term.”

“I don’t know,” Tristan said. “There’s the stuff I just said, but I was mostly thinking about the next few steps. I’d rather make calls based on the now and adapt later, depending on what comes up.”

“That’s fair,” I said. “I’m trying to be mindful of consequences, these days. You’d be making enemies, once people realized what you were doing and the role you’d played. If you’re not careful, Ashley and Chris as background observers are cards you can only play a few times, in a limited fashion.”

“You can play me eight times,” Chris said, pulling the pliers out of his mouth, “After that they’ll probably catch on.”

“If you don’t change your head that much, then they’ll catch on sooner than that,” Tristan said.

“On that topic, I’m not sure I like Chris being out in the field like that,” Sveta said.

“I’m fine,” Chris said. “I can handle that much.”

“I’m thinking Chris gets involved as a distraction. A few minutes at a time, a monster shows up, overturns the status quo. The kind of thing we do once every two weeks or once a month.”