“I think it would be very hard to explain to a judge why your agent took the free clothes from the store,” Natalie said. “I think you could explain it, but it feels like an implicit protection racket and that’s something that would be thrown in your faces.”

“Hey Tristan. Can I grab one of those whiteboards?” I asked.

“Sure.”

The whiteboard didn’t have the legs or rollers attached yet, so Sveta held it upright for me. I wrote down the bit about taking the dress ‘on the house’.

“I don’t like the threatening tone, either. Entrapment has a pretty high bar, but if your agent threatens the targets, implicitly or explicitly, to insinuate herself into that environment, it casts a lot of it into jeopardy. They’ll turn around and say they had to do these things because a woman in black who can kill people by pointing at them was telling them to.”

I wrote it down. “We’ll tell her to tone it down. How long until we can communicate with her, Kenzie?”

Kenzie spun around in her computer chair, pulling her legs close to her chest to keep them out of the way of the desk’s edge. She stuck out a foot, kicking one of the boxes to the right of the desk. A bar appeared diagonally across it. “Sixty percent. Ummmm. Fifteen minutes until we can be totally sure they’re not tapped into cell towers or internet.”

“I actually have a lot of concerns about her as an undercover agent.”

“She’s not an undercover agent,” Tristan said. “She’s just there. Keeping an eye on things, keeping an ear out.”

“That’s an undercover agent,” Natalie said.

“She isn’t joining any team or participating in anything,” Tristan said.

“No espionage, no immediate risk,” Chris added his voice.

“I have concerns,” Natalie said. “I’ll just say that.”

Ashley was investigating a bookstore now, on the main screen. Our testing of the waters.

On the other screen, Prancer was meeting a trio of others.

Kenzie glanced at it and hit a key. Windows popped up, with three-dimensional models of each face, mask included. A young woman with a purple hood with nascent antlers sticking up through it, a skinny woman with rusty nails instead of teeth, and a woman in a white jacket with a doctor’s face mask.

I named them. “Velvet and Nailbiter. That might be Bitter Pill, but she hasn’t shown her face or been photographed any for the files. Is there sound?”

Kenzie hit a key on her keyboard. “It’s going to kill the flying camera’s battery. We get a minute or two and then I need to bring it home. Or we get three minutes and I bring it halfway home, and someone has to go over to pick it up wherever I land it.”

“Alright.”

“…up to?” Velvet asked, her voice playing from a speaker.