Comstock went with some people to detain Dr. Greenburg while Phantasm and Dragón worked on Logan.
"Brought in a spook to talk to a spook, huh? Alright Ranger boy. What did you want to talk about?"
For a few minutes, Logan tried to play the card of catching up with Phantasm without admitting to being Harley, and had just enough time to get comfortable before Dragón started laying it on thick.
"You two ... you two really want to know what's going on, don't you?" He chuckled.
"Well, my name's James. James Doe, but my friends call me John. I'm in the 18-34 demographic, and I like long walks on the beach and candle-lit dinners. You could say I like taking a walk on the beach every month." His laughter was forced. Trying too hard. Despite his physique, he had a smoker's cough and wretched breath.
"You can ask me whatever you like, but I'm confident that you can't do anything to me. Either you black bag me and send me away before someone walks in here and sees that you're holding a baseline without cause and denying him a lawyer, or I'll just end up walking as soon as the phones get ringing and someone starts asking those tough questions. I'll end up on a nice plane, probably one of those triple-7's, and have a nice seventeen hour flight with hard drinks and nothing to do but laugh. Maybe even one of those weird little coconut drinks with the umbrella, those stewardesses can do damn near anything these days."
They'd buttered him up. A seventeen hour flight from Las Vegas could put him in Bangkok, but more likely it would put him in Bahrain. Utopia turf. Feeling invulnerable and goaded on, he kept talking.
"It's sad, you know? Sitting here dealing with you two. Even if you think I'm not James Doe, I'm pretty sure you can't prove squat without making up some shit about me 'dorming down' like they talk about in those tabloids." Phantasm knew Logan had made a big deal to Solitaire about being able to dorm down, way back when he joined the team. He probably used that skill to help maintain identities and convince cops he was just an innocent bystander. He wouldn't explicitly admit to being Harley Logan, but he'd always liked having power. The protection of being an officially dead man only goaded him on.
"Oh, I'm
really sorry I can't help you." He poured each word out like it was syrup.
"But I'm just a wounded old soldier caught up in something a little too big. I like simple things, like cigars and whiskey and a good brawl now and again." He respected Dragón more than Phantasm, that much was obvious, and wanted to keep walking the line, playing like he wasn't Logan to avoid answering questions straight while flapping his gums and reveling in how clever he was.
"Ms. Phantasm, I've seen you in the news and the magazines, and now that I'm sure it's you you look awful. That celebrity lifestyle, it gets to you huh? I have a doctor I go to see, knows a lot about machines and gray goo and that kind of thing, and he always fixes me up. That and Jack Daniels. You should probably look at getting one or the other. Your cheeks are all sunken in." He couldn't stifle another chuckle. He knew something about the nanoweapon virus.
Logan had lost all sense of time. Instead of stalling, he was taunting, confident he could keep it up all night.
Spoiler text: (Highlight or hover over the text to view)
OOC: Trying to make sure this scene closes out in a timely fashion so it won't interfere with the other fireworks going on. Beyond tactics, I really need to know what questions you want answered here.
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A few rooms over, soldiers started interrogating Dr. Greenburg. Sgt. Tucker handled the start of the interrogation while Dragón and Phantasm talked to Logan. Some of the rest of his men had gotten the okay from Frostburn to look through the medical lab and his quarters for anything they could use. Comstock watched through another video camera.
At Dragón's suggestion, Sgt. Tucker explained that they'd detained an intruder using eufiber camouflage, then asked if Dr. Greenburg had found any evidence of a break-in in the labs or his quarters. Greenburg demurred. Tucker stalled for time with more routine questions about security in the lab, assuring Greenburg that some of the novas would be along once they'd finished with the intruder.
Twenty minutes passed. Binary and the soldiers called Comstock to let him know that they'd completed their search. Greenburg didn't have any journals or anything like that, but he did have about 8 terabytes of data encrypted and off the network. Binary had flexed his cyberkinetic muscles to unlock them, and said they were complete medical workups and assorted other observations of every member of T2M, files that went above and beyond the standard workups and included Greenburg's professional opinions of everyone's strengths, weaknesses, and the progression of their quantum taint, both psychologically and physiologically. And ever since Logan had come paying visits, files had been copied every month on the dot, generally in the hours before Logan would arrive.
Dragón and Phantasm had left Comstock with instructions if something like this came up before they took a break from talking to Logan. He walked into the room and sat down next to Sgt. Tucker.
"We caught Harley Logan. And we have your files." He paused to let it sink in.
"I can protect you. But I need to know why."
"I ... I'm not sure what files." Greenburg broke out into a full sweat.
Comstock didn't feel clever. He didn't really feel like he knew what he was doing. But Phantasm had told him to just keep repeating one word, and see what comes spilling out. She and Dragón would be along to get whatever the doctor was still holding onto.
"Why?"
"Look, I need a lot of data for my work. The health and well being of Team Tomorrow's nova members is paramount to, to, to our position and prestige around the world, to our ability to function and-"
"Why?"
"I kept those files on my personal computer. It's a secure facility. You shouldn't even have seen them and-"
"Why?"
"Look, I can't talk about anything here. I need to speak to-"
"Why?"
Greenburg sighed.
"Oh ... I'm probably a dead man anyway. Alright it's ... yes, I met Logan once a month. For over a year now.
"No. Start with why those files exist."
Greenburg had trouble looking Comstock in the face.
"About five months after I joined the project, I and some other medical personnel were asked to participate in a think tank. They wanted contingency plans for a variety of problems: what if the novas turned violent, how to save someone's life if the node proved a health risk, how to evacuate a city after a quantum attack." He swallowed.
"We mostly brainstormed, but it helped emphasize how little we really knew about the phenomenon. So they asked us to stay in correspondence. Called us a failsafe."
"When I got this job, the group agreed it would be prudent to keep our own notes. I think the group got me this job, because soon I was getting a lot of requests for specific data. I was supposed to keep an eye on T2M:A, and help coordinate with others to make further contingency plans. After one doctor got caught by a telepath, the group agreed to anonymity and stopped talking face to face. A few other doctors said they wrote a letter to Director Larangione and got special funding and a Director for our project. And we got a name: Proteus. After that, we worked off the radar completely."
"At first, a lot of it was ... was good. Like, what if you had a heart attack and we couldn't operate? Or what kind of therapy to get for Dr. Zero if he had a complete psychological meltdown? We wanted to know how to help you, save your lives and protect Project Utopia. But then, during the Equatorial Wars, it got a lot ... darker. They started asking me to keep running reports. And they kept asking me to model interactions between exotic chemicals or nano-scale elements and each of your bodies. They started sending me new software or lab equipment to get the work done."
He looked small. Defeated. Glad to have finally been caught and confronted.
"Lately, since Binary came onto the team really, Logan has come to pick up my reports in person rather than risk transmission over a network. He's always checking the security measures of the base. He was recruited in after the end of the Equatorial Wars. Said they faked his death so he could operate more freely."
Spoiler text: (Highlight or hover over the text to view)
OOC: Same here, I need direction for the questioning. Comstock will want to know everything about Proteus.