It was nearly August, but a pleasant and dry breeze blew across the building ledge, making the night unusually comfortable. As Tommy squatted there and observed the man through the high-rise windows situated two blocks eastward, he realized the weather had improved his mood, even if just slightly.

His period of fury over the government's attack on all that he loved had passed—well, most of it had passed—and he'd spent the last days pondering what he should do next. So far, he'd come up with nothing solid. But he knew he had to confront this Caldecott-Nevarez asshole sooner or later, so he'd watched and studied the man from afar.

The special agent was everything Eric had promised. Observing the chap now, Tommy could see in his stick-up-the-ass carriage that bearing unique to a true and proper upper-class prig. The man was from money, that much was clear. His social media and various online profiles had screamed that story, as did his residence in a spacious apartment overlooking Central Park in one of the Upper East Side's toniest and most coveted buildings. The fact that it was late, and that the fellow had been home for more than an hour, yet still had not removed his tie, vest, or even his cufflinks said the rest.

"Fuck it," Tommy said as he slipped from the building ledge and drifted over to Ash's 48th floor apartment. There was still a hint of daylight, but at that point, he didn't care if anyone saw him flying, least of all the agent he was about to visit. He had another trembling flash of temper that he managed to tamp down quickly. He hadn't promised Eric and Camille that he wouldn't kill the man, but he valued what his two friends thought of him. So, he calmed himself.

Caldecott-Nevarez was out of sight somewhere on the far side of the airy flat when Tommy touched down without a noise on the balcony and admitted himself through an open sliding glass door. He made straight for the refrigerator and began rummaging. He might as well have a peck at something but, sadly, found not a hint of cheese.

"Are you lactose intolerant?" he called from where his head was buried in the refrigerator. He couldn't see the agent from that vantage point, but he felt the man's presence as he entered the apartment's large central room.

"Who the fuck are you?" the agent asked with a slight trace of annoyance.

Tommy wore his typical grunge, so he anticipated what the agent might say next.

"Cami ...," the man called out. "Cami!"

"Your sister isn't here," Tommy said as he emerged from the appliance with a large plate of chicken in one hand and a can of grape soda in the other. He moved over, snatched a paper towel from the roll with a spare finger as he passed, and took a seat at the dining table located at the center of the room.

It was a gorgeous table, a lovely piece of craftsmanship. He ran his fingers across the smooth wooden surface and gave it a solid knock with a single knuckle. Nice. Looking around at the apartment's furnishings and art, it was clear the man had good taste ... or someone, perhaps his decorator, did.

He shook his head and focused.

"I'm Tommy."

A look of understanding came to the eyes of the man, who for the last few moments had stood gaping and indignant at a total stranger's high-handed effrontery in his kitchen, and his features suddenly contorted.

At that same moment, the agent also seemed to realize his service pistol was lying in plain sight beside his badge on the table at which Tommy now dined. The man lunged for the weapon, which Tommy let him reach and unholster without protest.

Catching bullets, even slow-moving pistol rounds, was hard. At best, Tommy could do it only two or three times out of a hundred—but this was one of those times. As the agent drew and fired, Tommy stood, reached out, and snatched the bullet from the air and, with the opposite hand, plucked the gun from the agent's grasp. It was a single fluid movement.

Sitting back down, he made a point of raising his fist and dropping the spent round onto the middle of the table. In another show of force, he lifted the still charged pistol lazily to the side of his head and, laying the muzzle just behind his temple, squeezed the trigger. Another explosion, and another warped bullet dropped impotently to the floor.

"Have a seat," he said with a motion to the horrified man who stood before him. Let's hope the rest of this little meeting goes as well as the floorshow did, he thought. When Caldecott-Nevarez complied without a sound, Tommy slid the still-charged and loaded weapon over to him before continuing to nibble daintily at the chicken.

"Do you like Camille and Eric?" He suspected there would be no reply. Panic and shock often did that to people.

"Well," Tommy continued in a friendly tone, "they seem to like you quite a lot. They've both spent the better part of two days pleading with me not to kill you ... you and everyone else who came to my home the other day. I generally don't mind unannounced guests, but you can understand why I'm here ...." He gave the agent some time to speak.

To his surprise, the man found his voice almost immediately.

"I did what I thought was right, and I'd do it again," the fellow said plainly and with more courage than Tommy thought he would muster. "Was it Eric or Camille who told you where to find me?"

Tommy gave the man a surprised look and two hesitant chuckles. "Your joking, right?" he asked after a moment.

No reply.

"... the question wasn't rhetorical."

Caldecott-Nevarez's only response was a confused look.

"Listen, bud, you have a name that stands out, and for a guy who is supposed to be a counterintelligence agent, you have quite an active and robust Internet presence. It took me all of 15 minutes to track you down. You should consider putting your social-media accounts on friends-only mode."

More blank looks from the agent.

"Speaking of which," Tommy added in feigned candor, as he reached into his pocket to fish out a phone, "I've bumped into some people you might know. I even met your sister at a bar near Columbia's main campus just last night."

The agent's face dropped at the series of pictures Tommy showed him of an attractive woman in her early twenties. Several of them showed her kissing at the camera and posing flirtatiously.

"I gotta tell you, Ash," he continued solemnly, "I think your baby sister has a little crush on me. She invited me to that little soiree your folks are having at the South Hampton beach-house the weekend after next, and she seemed really excited I attend." Tommy changed the function of the phone and began dialing. "I said I'd let her know today ... what should I tell her?"

The agent made some choking noises that ended in a desperate, "... please."

An audible and excited, "Tommmyyy ...," could be heard on the other end of the phone before Tommy brought it to his ear.

"Hey, Camden, puddin'," he said with a smile, "how are you? ... yes ... no, no I'm not alone ... I would love to hear the dream you had about me ... but ... hon, you'll never guess who I'm with. No ... no ... your brother ...."

Tommy paused and glanced at the squirming man in front of him. "Hey, hon, I've been talking to your bro, right. Well, it seems some friends of mine are under investigation by his office ... yeah ... well, the upshot is it would be incredibly awkward for me to ... yeah, no, I'm sorry. Put him on? ... Tell him he's a what? ... an 'Ash-hole?'" Tommy couldn't stifle a laugh. "I won't tell him that ... right. But, look, I can't attend that thing your folks are having, as much as I'd love to. I don't want to get your brother in ... no. If things change, absolutely ... I think you're beautiful, too. Hey, look, I gotta go. I just wanted to touch base ... Okay, babe. Bye."

The two men sat in silence after he ended the call, with Tommy taking occasional nibbles of chicken. Ash's cell phone buzzed insistently near the door—likely it was the agent's sister calling to give him an earful—but it remained unanswered.

"It's a horrible thing when someone threatens the ones you love, isn't it?" Tommy said after a time.

"What do you want?" the man asked in a voice so hoarse it was scarcely audible.

"I'm going to make you a deal," said Tommy, sliding the plate aside. "You come at me any time you want, any way you want. You throw every miserable and pathetic resource of the federal government against me, and your family will always be safe from me ... always. But if you ever come after anyone I love, ever again, I will track down and murder everything you hold dear ... everything and everyone ... before I decide whether or not to let you die. Do you fucking understand me?"

The agent nodded. It looked as if he might speak, but no sound came out. Much to his credit, he didn't whimper, though the fear and concern for his sister, whose only discernable shortcoming was having an Ash-hole for a brother, was clear on the agent's face.

Nevertheless, Tommy was less than perfectly happy with himself. Not too many decades before, he would've killed this man out of hand. Fuck, you've gotten soft, whispered a nasty and familiar voice inside him.

But another slice of him, a better portion, mourned what appeared the inevitable and complete passing of the law-abiding citizen he'd become in recent years.

Tommy sat trembling in indecision for some seconds. That better slice of him knew something simply was ... wrong. This was the point at which he'd intended to demand Caldecott-Nevarez abandon his campaign against them entirely, on pain of brutal retribution, but ....

"No," he said aloud, half to that ugly inner voice and half to himself. He wanted his life back ... just the way it was. "This isn't going to work again."

There was a sudden return of panic in Ash's face that Tommy waved off.

Threats weren't enough. That fact had always been clear to him, though not clear enough. Certainly, he had to take immediate action when it came to attacks against those closest to him, as he had with R. Leslie Jeff the year before—an event of which Caldecott-Nevarez seemed oddly unaware.

But this wasn't the eighteenth century anymore. Sitting down and trying to cow into submission the entirety of a vast modern state by threatening one person, one tiny and replaceable cog, was the very pinnacle of folly. Threatening a small body of people, the staff of one discrete government agency, would do little more. The fact that the Special Services Administration had buckled before his threats the previous year was nothing short of a miracle, one that he now knew would never be replicated. Such actions would, at their very best, throw a brief impediment in the paths of their enemies ... until that single cog got replaced or another agency of that great infernal machine lashed out against them.

He made a decision.

"I'm going out onto the deck and make a phone call," he told the agent. "Then you and I are going to talk."

Tommy was back in a few minutes after stepping outside to call Max in order to arrange the meeting she'd suggested with her boss, the Secretary of Defense. When he sat back at the dining table, he pointed over to the agent's laptop.

"A friend of mine told me courts do everything online these days," he said to the agent. "Show me on your computer the document that gave you the right to come into my home and attack my family."

The man began talking, slowly at first, but then with growing confidence. The things he said were like those Tommy had heard pitched by government agents not long before. Such arguments were long on suggestions and intimations of hidden dangers and of the rights of societies to defend themselves, but were short on any principled justification of government lawlessness. Apparently, there were no warrants or court orders needed in such instances. The man had the decency to keep his comments short, though, and after five or so minutes concluded and sat quietly.

"Do you really believe all that?" he asked the man, privately grateful for his brevity.

"I don't know who that was at your house the other day, but they killed four of my men," the agent replied as if that said it all.

"So could any person with a firearm," Tommy nearly snorted. "Do you aspire to suspend all the rights of gunowners, too? You had no business attacking my home, but even if you did"—he again calmed himself—"there is nothing that any Gifted person can do that a normal person with the proper tools can't ... and worse. But no decent or principled person would suggest burning down the courts and shuttering the schools of law because some asshole ran riot with a bulldozer."

Such a notion was a simple truism to Tommy. Modern technology rendered most Gifts mere banalities, and even his many Gifts were a sheer trifle compared to the carnage a modern nation-state could unloose on its enemies, or on its own citizens.

But the look on Caldecott-Nevarez's face perplexed him. It was as if the man had never heard, let alone considered, these simple arguments. Tommy had suspected the agent wasn't quite as stupid as Eric painted him. While doing his research, Tommy carefully had puzzled over several of the agent's reports and papers that were available online, and, barring the possibility the documents had been composed by ghostwriters, they showed a writer with a moderately clever mind who was able to understand the views of others and confront them intelligently.

What was more, the man had come far for one so young. True, he was from a family of considerable wealth and political connections, but that described a great many government officials who had not risen so far, so fast. At the tender age of 34, Caldecott-Nevarez already was leading multiple high-profile investigations out of the FBI's New York Field Office.

Tommy rose, recovered a pen and several sheets of paper from a nearby desk, and, after resuming his seat, began to write. When he finished, he slid the completed paper over to the agent.

"That's a list of 14 people, all of them like me ... people with superpowers," he said in the man's own vernacular, "who have committed serious crimes in the last year." As Tommy spoke, he already had begun to write on a second sheet. "The names should be familiar to you, because you are, I think, the agent in charge of investigating most of those crimes."

After a few more minutes writing, he slid over the second paper.

"That's a list of nine federal agents who have been helping these men conceal and continue their criminal activities," he said. "Do an investigation, get warrants, make arrests, and prosecute in a suitable court of law, and you'll have no trouble from me, whether the person you're investigating has special powers or not."

Tommy leaned toward the man, trying his very best to push aside the anger and hatred he felt for him.

"Look, Ash," he continued, "you may not know this, but you're not the first government agent to want to round us all up or kill us. There is a dark and ugly history to it, some of it damned recent, the kind of thing that would put a guy like Joseph Mengele to shame. I want to give you the chance to reset everything."

To Tommy's surprise, the agent began looking over the papers carefully, and, from his reaction, it was obvious the man recognized several of the names on the first sheet and at least one name on the second.

Then the FBI man began asking questions.

Their conversation lasted an additional two hours. Mostly it ranged within the scope of Summerall's criminal conspiracy and the government officials who might be supporting it, but the man asked a number of general questions about the Gifted and other topics. Tommy answered his questions candidly but without sharing any particular information that might endanger any of his friends or wards.

It was certain from the tenor of the agent's questions that he had no substantial understanding of the Gifted or their experience, recent or otherwise, so Tommy refrained from pressing him on what else he might know or, for that matter, how the man had become aware of the location of his residence. The latter was an issue hardly worth pursuing given the fact he soon would see Max.

After Tommy departed, flying from the balcony as he'd arrived, he wasn't sure what to think of it all. He usually was a shrewd judge of human intentions but here felt great uncertainty. The government man seemed sincere and appeared truly shocked when Tommy had sketched the basic outline of the conspiracy they'd discovered the year before—he had agreed, in principle, to meet with the agent again to discuss the details of it—but Tommy didn't know if this young man would ever make any sort of suitable ally, or whether he might yet stab them in the back at his first opportunity.

Perhaps the agent really was as stupid as Eric claimed, but there was a lot to be said for winning the cooperation of a person having money and powerful family connections. Such things were important currency in every society.

In the end, it didn't matter, because bullshitting his way through things had gotten them nowhere. They needed a plan, so he had to try.