Trowa watched from the rooftop of the apartment across the street from Midii’s own apartment as she parked her motorcycle on the curb outside her apartment and dismounted. She looked a little small standing next to it, but with her black leather jacket, unbound blonde hair, tight-fitted jeans, black combat boots, and sunglasses she looked… sexy. Without his meaning them to his thoughts drifted back to that eternal moment earlier that morning when she had leaned against him. He’d felt all of the strength and energy just drain out of her for a single instant, he’d reached up to lend his support but before he could try to get her to talk to him she’d pulled away and just kept walking.

Trowa still wasn’t sanguine about he and Une having all of the pieces to the puzzle. For one thing, they still weren’t certain precisely what she was planning; only that she was planning something that involved a computer hacker, a bunch of Consortium assassins that were going to be at the party, and a list of targets the Consortium had picked out. They didn’t know how all of the pieces fit together nor did they know if they had all off the pieces. Now was not the time to allow his thought to wnader into trivial and possibly dangerous territory outside of the parameters set by the mission. If he allowed the train of thought to continue he might just jeopardize the mission and with the stakes they were playing with there was no room for error.

He brought up visual inside her apartment and watched as she walked in the door, flicked on the lights, and gave the place of residence a habitual once over to ensure that everything was exactly as she had left it. Afterwards she set her keys and her purse down on the kitchen counter on her way to the fridge to grab a cold drink. The unstrapped her personal laptop from the leather carrier she kept it in and set it up on her low coffee table then went into the bathroom while she waited for it to finish powering up and going through the various security protocols she had programmed into it. There was very little chance of anyone compromising Midii’s careful internal security, but Trowa had always been a man to beat the odds.

<Careful,> he cautioned himself. <You’re bordering on hubris. Midii’s a smart woman; it’s not entirely skill that’s let you observe her without being detected for so long, there have been more than a few lucky breaks along the way.> With that in mind he continued his silent observation of his charge. A few minutes later the sensors picked up an increase in heat and he saw steam curl out from the crack in the bathroom door. She was showering then. She couldn’t possibly get into any mischief while in the shower. Then again, he really wouldn’t put it past her. A very tiny, desperately repressed corner of his psyche whispered of what kind of trouble he could get into in the shower with her. He quickly squealched it. Really, she leans against him for one moment and he looses it. How unprofessional.

She emerged a few minutes later in a cloud of steam, with a short bath towel wrapped around her torso revealing cleavage, hips, long shapely legs and barely covering her assets. Trowa quietly swallowed.

<Resist all temptation!> he quickly reminded himself. ((A.N. My favorite line from Miroku on Inu Yasha, also a nod to voice actor Kirby Morrow, couldn’t resist.))

She emerged from her sleeping quarters a few moments later dressed down in soft loose pants in caramel offset by a loose caftan top in satin rose. Her feet were bare and her hair was wet and unstyled; she wore no artful make-up or jewelry of any kind. Midii looked young; closer to her real age of around twenty, and as she sat down at her laptop she looked like nothing more than an average collage student settling in for a long night of study or typing away at a paper rather than an experienced espionage agent setting up for a major debacle.

Midii hauled out a notebook as Trowa switched views on her surveilence system to see what she wrote. To Do; then underlined it and put a number on the first line down. She was making out a to-do list! The incongruity of such a simple mundane thing being used for something that was not so simple and hardly mundane was not lost on him. Her list was cryptic, but hardly your average list for grocery shopping, a lot of it was in code naturally. She placed a question mark by the last item on her list; Trowa zoomed in so he could see it better… “Notify Preventors?”

Midii set aside her list and turned her attention to her laptop. She started out by hacking on line instead of logging on with a regular account. It was illegal but the best way to ensure her account was never traced back to her. The fisrt place Midii went to was the systems data base for the nearby Ellison Pharmaceuticals… Odd, why would she be looking at a pharmaceutical company? Another backdoor into Consortium territory? Something for her father? She accessed the restricted section, the place where they stored information about their more dangerous stock such as bacteria and virus samples. She scrolled down through the list of samples then clicked on three strains of e. coli, two for a cold, three strains of pneumonia and two lesser forms of stomach flu. All of them harmless, all of them easy to get over naturally, all of them about to go missing from Ellison Pharmacy very shortly. To be precise they were already off the lists in the computer and would likely be lifted from the research and development department later on that night. Midii backed out of the computer for the pharmaceutical company, carefully covering her tracks, then checked off an item on her list.

Trowa continued to monitor Midii’s online activity as he placed a call in to Lady Une.

“She’s accessed Ellison Phamaceutical and intends to steal several harmless strains of their testing viruses, colds, flues and stomach viruses to be exact,” he reported.

“She’s stealing biological viruses?” Une inquired, a note of unease creeping into her voice. “Is it your opinion that she intends to create a biological weapon?”

“No. If such a weapon was what she was interested in creating there are easier ways to aquire it. There are still several rogue scientists out there such as the man she brought in (insert name here) that would be willing to create such a weapon. Besides, the strains of the viruses she stole are all mostly harmless; certainly an inconveinience but nothing that will kill anyone even if left untreated.”

“What do you think she means in stealing them then?” Une said in puzzlement.

“It may have something to do with this list she appears to be compiling,” Trowa said not taking his eyes from the screen he was watching. The data she was accessing scrolled across the flat screen of his monitor even as he talked on a secured line with Une.

“List, Barton?” Une said in a tone that clearly indicated that more explanation was required.

“She’s just started moving on her next parameters,” he said by way of explanation. “It takes a minute to fathom out the direction she’s heading in. She’s just hacked into Preventors Archive database disguised as one of those moles she got rid of earlier. Apparently they had more free access to our system than we had originally granted them, oh wait, no they didn’t; she is working on her own. She’s begun to access the profiles on the political guests attending the function coming up. The Vice Speaker, the Prime Minister of Foreign Affairs, Council Representatives, Commissioners of the Trade Alliance, influential members of the Romafeller Foundation… she’s going through their profiles.”

“Heero’s not going to like this one bit,” Une said in amusement. “That’s his precious baby she messing around with, she may have just made an enemy for life.”

“Hm,” Trowa grunted non-comitially, already too engrossed on what was happening on the screen to pay attention. “I’ll call you again when there is more to report.”

“Roger. Out.”

Fifty-two files were quickly accessed, scrolled through at a speed-reading rate, then closed. Of those fifty-two ten names and files were downloaded. She had some unknown criteria for her selections. Midii again carefully backed out, covering her tracks, and signed off the account she was using. Trowa made a note of the names even as Midii flipped a page in her note book and wrote them down in a list. The first was Sergio Browonski, the Vice Speaker of the Earth Sphear Unified Nation Council Board. The second, Paul Jameson, the Prime Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was followed by Pietor Ivanovitch, the Council Representative for Eurasia, then by Hajime Kuramori, the Trade Commissioner. Next was Masaad ibn Jaseem the Council Representative for the Lagrange Point Four cluster colonies 12247 through 66734, and next came Mai-ju Fa the Council Representative for Lagrange Point Five cluster colonies 10116 through 44879. The last four names on her list were a Rabbi Yossel Kurtzviel, an influential man in his own right, Johnathan Harrison the Council Representative from Lagrange Point Colony Cluster Two, Kaati Alim Council representative of South America and Materu Senti, Council Representative of South Africa.

Midii checked her watch then accessed the copied harddrive of Smith’s computer on her own data pod and began compiling information; security access codes, check points, database parameters, systems configurations, security architecture, main lines of communications, signal codes, satellite feeds… everything she would need to design a massive electronic strike on the Consortiums information and communications hub. She intended to skewer the heart.

“X12 is a hacker, one of note who specializes in designing viruses that crash systems,” Trowa murmured as she rapidly assembled the data onto a spare data pod. “With the information Midii has and has been able to gather about the inner workings of the Consortium we can see that the group acts like most other syndicates or rebel cells; there are a few in the top brass that organsize everything and the members below who take orders from them are given their instructions via image meetings from the strongholds of power they rest in. The rest of the Consortium is separated into a variety of cells, each with a leader and several underlings. Most of the cells don’t know the names or faces of the other members outside their own cell. If she were to hire this man to perform his specialty by taking out all of their communications and crashing all of their systems she could do anything she wanted without them ever even knowing; hell… if she wanted to she could make a coup de etat on the Consortium itself! All she’d have to do would be to infiltrate the main Consortium base, kill off all of the leaders, create dummy images in their place and get rid of the underlings in the name of increased security. The disparate elements that comprise the organism Consortium would no longer be able to communicate with one another and there wouldn’t be a way to prove the veracity of the identities of the fake Consortium heads without their inner circle around.”

He once again picked up his cell phone.

“Lady Une… I think I know what she intends to do with the hacker X12…”

* * *