Campos's men were a bunch of street thugs. The whole crew had been partying in the nightclub, their brains too fogged up to react. Their danger instincts were shot. Even when their eyes registered that something was wrong, their minds couldn't formulate a coherent response. Every last one of them was operating in a fog.
Only the long-legged beauty noticed the shift. She quietly drifted toward the outer edge of the crowd, positioning herself for a clean getaway.
"The fuck! You touched my woman?"
"Fuck! You intercepted that last shipment, didn't you?"
"Boss, please—I didn't sell you out, I swear!"
Nobody could tell what hallucinations they were seeing. One by one they drew pistols or knives, and the air erupted in a frenzy of gunshots and wild slashing. More than ten dropped on the spot.
The long-legged beauty didn't waste a single breath. She turned and ran.
"Get back here! I hired you to protect me! I'm the—!" Campos never finished the words I'm the boss. An arctic chill locked every joint in his body, as if he'd been plunged into a meat locker.
The last thing he saw was a figure like a wrathful specter—a nun, seizing him by the throat. Every scrap of courage, every ounce of viciousness and pride evaporated in that instant. His eyes rolled back, and he collapsed.
Bella and Shaw strolled out at a leisurely pace.
This was no graveyard at all. It was a parking lot. The whole crew had been walking in circles the entire time, never more than 200 meters (650 ft) from their own nightclub.
"You let her go on purpose, didn't you?"
Shaw watched the long-legged beauty—Gisele Yashar—tear out of the parking lot in a Porsche Cayenne like the devil was on her tail.
"She hasn't actually committed any crimes. I can't exactly arrest someone for not reporting what she knows, can I?"
Shaw shot Bella a look that said you just want her body and sniffed. "Suit yourself. She's small-time anyway... Now this big boss is something else!"
Shaw studied the Demon Nun with cautious eyes. The fragment of her soul that still carried spirit-body memories made her instinctively wary of a being who walked the line between holy and unholy.
The gap in rank between them was enormous—no amount of courage or willpower could bridge it.
The Demon Nun gave a contemptuous snort. She dove straight into Campos's body, rifled through every last one of the drug lord's memories, fished out the private ledger he'd hidden away, and then puppeteered the body right out of the parking lot. There was still a performance to stage.
FBI agent Brian reassured Dominic's sister that he would do everything in his power to get his brother-in-law out. He had barely stepped through the door when he ran into the badly wounded "Campos." After a suitably theatrical sequence of events, Brian managed to get his hands on the ledger through a stroke of extraordinary "luck."
The rest fell into place. The LAPD and FBI launched a joint operation that dismantled the drug cartel stretching across all three North American nations and seized more than sixty million dollars in illicit funds.
Brian earned a promotion for his role—and a transfer out of Los Angeles.
With nothing else on her plate, Bella put Shaw on the LAPD SWAT payroll. The department's caseload was crushing these days; every night brought another batch of civilians who'd had too much to drink and decided to start throwing punches. Violent incidents were popping up faster than anyone could track. Shaw's particular talent for hitting things happened to be exactly what they needed.
Looking after her little sister, sneaking back to Arendelle to check on her wife, and quietly helping Charlie crack cases on the sly—Bella's entire break was a blur of nonstop activity.
Just before the new semester began, Victor Von Doom and Reed Richards's experiment to observe a cosmic storm at close range entered its final countdown.
The two of them had used a combination of dazzling intellect and ironclad confidence to win over President Sawyer. The Nanomite warhead debacle had nearly stuck the American government with a "state sponsor of terrorism" label, and an already dire reelection outlook had only gotten worse in the aftermath.
Victor and Reed put on a masterclass at the White House, arguing the entire panel of advisors, scientists, and professors into stunned silence. By the end, half the experts in the room looked ready to drop to their knees in sheer admiration.
At this stage, Reed Richards still carried a trace of youthful naivety. Victor Von Doom, on the other hand, was in his full glory.
A self-made empire. Less than a decade from founding his company to a market capitalization exceeding ten billion dollars. How many people on the planet could claim that? Victor's towering self-assurance was infectious, and President Sawyer caught the fever. This project would succeed.
Things couldn't possibly get any worse. The president decided to go all in.
Government funding flowed. NASA took the lead. Von Doom Industries served as the operational entity. More than thirty corporations, banks, and investment firms signed on as investors. A compact space station, built at a cost exceeding ten billion dollars, was officially brought online.
A deluge of news coverage explained the relationship between the cosmic rays and humanity, between the cosmic rays and Earth itself. According to Reed Richards, those rays held all of humanity's secrets. Once their secrets were unlocked, human lifespans would increase dramatically. The cure rate for terminal illnesses would reach ninety-nine percent. Weyland's cloned organs, Victoria Hand's shark brain white-matter research—none of it would matter anymore. Humanity would be perfect.
The entire scientific community was dumbstruck. Researchers sat on their biology, genetics, and medical papers, afraid to publish. Everyone wanted to see what the cosmic rays would actually do.
Public discussion was even more feverish. One rumor held that the cosmic rays would turn newborns into a new species of human. When Samantha heard that, she stared at little Kitty—who was happily gnawing on her own fingers—with such a look of regret that she practically wanted to shove the kid back where she came from.
President Sawyer's approval ratings began to climb. Even Charlie was in good spirits for a while.
The day before the cosmic storm was due to enter the solar system, Victor Von Doom waved to the assembled media, then calmly boarded the space shuttle bound for the station.
Four others went up with him: Reed Richards, who had provided the data models and orbital calculations; Ben Grimm, the shuttle pilot; Susan Storm, serving as secretary; and Susan's younger brother Johnny Storm, the co-pilot.
The five of them were all connected in one way or another. It was less a scientific expedition than a family adventure.
Reed Richards had talked up the benefits of cosmic rays so extravagantly that not only politicians like President Sawyer but even many of Weyland's own scientists couldn't follow his logic or figure out where his theoretical basis came from.
"Shouldn't we be doing something? We haven't performed a single cloned-organ transplant lately. Several patients are in a holding pattern."
Weyland-Yutani had provided some technical support for the space station and shuttle. Regardless of who sat in the Oval Office, the moment that person needed support, every major corporation offered a helping hand. It was an unspoken understanding between the big companies and the White House—nothing to do with party or personality.
Today Weyland-Yutani had reserved the Hayden Planetarium in New York for cosmic-ray observation. As the shuttle prepared to launch, 006 turned to Bella, his expression conflicted.