Chapter 92: What Kind of Normal Person Keeps a Diary?
The following morning.
Good light. A gentle wind.
Matthew sat at his desk and worked through the day's news from various quarters. One item that came up was Tony Stark's announcement that he was preparing to launch the Stark Expo.
Sitting at his elbow was a formal invitation to the event, sent over by Pepper on Tony's behalf.
Why Pepper and not Tony himself? The short answer came down to the arc reactor in Tony's chest.
Matthew's working theory: Tony had already identified the palladium as a problem and was somewhere in his workshop right now attempting to replace it using elements the planet could actually supply. Whatever he was working on had him fully occupied.
The unfortunate part was that none of it would pan out. The poisoning would continue getting worse regardless of what substitution he tried.
At some point in the near future, Tony would reach the stage where he simply stopped trying and threw himself into what he assumed would be his final stretch of indulgence.
He wouldn't find his way back until Fury showed up and put Howard Stark's legacy in his hands.
Matthew checked the time.
His estimate: two months, give or take, from Tony hitting his low point to Tony functioning again. Once that happened, the Iron Man 2 events would begin unfolding, and Thor wouldn't be far behind.
He filed the thought away and set the invitation aside.
He had just pushed back his chair to go make tea when he heard footsteps approaching in the hallway outside.
Unfamiliar ones.
He was still placing them when the door opened and Ada walked in, wearing her iconic red sweater and boots, a steaming cup of coffee balanced in both hands.
"Good morning, Boss. Your coffee." She set it on the desk in front of him with deliberate precision, then added, as if this were a meaningful detail: "Please be assured, brewed with Evian mineral water, as always."
As Miranda finished saying it, a quiet flash of satisfaction moved through her eyes.
She knew about the Evian detail because of Ada Wong's diary.
The diary was a small notebook covered in Ada's handwriting from front to back. A thorough record of Matthew's various habits and what Ada had apparently considered his more inexplicable personal preferences. The Evian mineral water requirement for his coffee. His habit of sending an assistant downstairs to buy something, then developing immediate selective amnesia upon their return, insisting they had gotten the wrong thing entirely.
Miranda had gone through all of it. She was confident that her impersonation, reinforced by this level of inside knowledge, had become seamless.
What she did not know was this:
What kind of normal person keeps a diary?
The notebook had been written during Ada's earliest weeks at Umbrella, before she had any real read on Matthew, before she trusted him, back when she still treated the situation as an assignment rather than something she had actually chosen. Once that changed, so did the notebook. It stopped being updated.
Miranda was currently working from an answer key written for the wrong exam. Every answer in it was wrong to begin with.
Matthew looked at the coffee on his desk. He was quiet for a moment. Then he looked up at the woman beside him with a mildly puzzled expression.
What had gotten into her today?
Pulling out material this old.
"Do you need something?" he asked.
Miranda's composure held, but something sank in her chest. Had she done something wrong? Was the temperature off? Had she come through the door incorrectly?
To avoid giving herself away in this first encounter, she kept her expression easy and shook her head. "Not really."
"Good." Matthew's attention moved back to the coffee, still steaming.
"I'll admit, that old bit did land." He paused. "But I don't like coffee. Go throw it out."
Before Miranda could move, he reconsidered.
"Actually, don't. Those beans are too expensive to waste." He pulled open the desk drawer and produced a small card, picked up a pen. "Take it to Peter Parker instead. Tell him it's from me."
He wrote a few words on the card.
For our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
He handed the card and the coffee over together.
Miranda nodded once and left, though she had no idea why the instructions contradicted what the diary had led her to expect.
Shortly after, a System notification appeared.
[System: +500 points. Peter Parker felt warm inside.]
Matthew's heart, for its part, was also warm.
Good to see you're still this easy to please. Five hundred points from a single cup of coffee. That was practically competitive with Tony as a point source.
He pulled his attention back to the news and kept reading.
A few minutes later, an item caught his eye. It wasn't prominent. It had been filed as routine local reporting, the kind of thing most readers would move past without stopping.
"Last night, a traffic accident occurred on Senmiya Avenue. No casualties were reported."
Below the text was a photograph taken at the scene. A full-size SUV, crushed completely flat. What remained of it did not look like the result of a collision. It looked like something that had been pressed from directly above with considerable and very sudden force.
Despite the fire damage and the general condition of the wreck, Matthew recognized the license plate.
That was Ada's car. The one he had given her.
He studied the photograph.
"Traffic accident." He said it without inflection, and clearly didn't believe it. The damage pattern was nothing like a standard road collision. For a car to end up in that state, you would need something like a fully loaded freight truck coming down sideways onto it from height. Ordinary accidents didn't do this.
He set the paper down.
More to the point: why hadn't Ada mentioned it?
The two of them were well past the stage of professional distance. By now, if Ada had been involved in any kind of vehicle incident, even a minor one with no real injuries, she would have walked into this office this morning and reconstructed the scene in vivid, thoroughly embellished detail. Before the conversation was over, she would have found a way to make it end with a replacement vehicle. And she almost certainly would have found a way to make the whole thing his fault, because if he hadn't kept her working late, she wouldn't have been on that road at that hour, and therefore the car, the fire, and any resulting inconvenience were technically on him. She would have turned the entire episode into a System point harvest before she was finished.
What had actually happened this morning was that she had walked in with coffee and the Evian callback.
Precise. Scripted. Off.
He thought about the footsteps again. The frequency had been wrong. The weight distribution not hers. A pace that belonged to someone else walking as Ada rather than Ada walking as herself.
His mind moved through the Marvel universe's roster of individuals capable of wearing someone else's appearance convincingly. The list was not short.
Matthew picked up the phone and called the number printed at the bottom of the news report.
The line connected. "New York Standard. How can I help you?"
The voice on the other end had the sound of someone whose luck had been running thin for some time.
Matthew kept it brief. "Last night's incident on Senmiya Avenue. Do you have more details? I'm offering a reward."
The word had an immediate effect. Whatever drowsiness had been in the voice disappeared entirely. The operator glanced around at his colleagues with a suddenly sharp eye.
"Sir. How much per piece of information?"
"One thousand dollars per item. No upper limit."
A pause. "Did you say one thousand?"
"Too low?"
"Not at all! Absolutely not!" The reply came fast enough that Matthew could practically hear the man sitting straighter.
One thousand dollars was real money in the current economy. Enough to cover half a month of expenses without trying.
The operator turned the situation over quickly. He had reached the conclusion that opportunity favored those in a position to take it, and that he was very much in that position. Which also meant he had no intention of letting any of his colleagues in on this particular conversation.
He dropped his voice and gave Matthew a username on Facebook. "I have a contact at the precinct. Soon as he has anything, I'll send it through that account. Keep an eye out."
The line went dead.
Approximately thirty minutes later, the information started coming through.
One burned flat-soled shoe. Half a damaged driver's license, Ada's photograph still visible in the corner. Half a cigarette. A set of handwritten field notes from the officer who had worked the scene.
A username appeared in his notifications: FlyingCat.
[FlyingCat: My precinct contact says the scene last night looks deliberate. He can't figure out what would be capable of flattening an entire vehicle without leaving a single trace of itself behind. His current working theory is aliens.]
A second message followed almost immediately.
[FlyingCat: Also: the scene recovered blood samples and skin fragments from multiple individuals. All of it is sitting in the evidence room right now. If you're interested, I can arrange for it to reach you. Ten thousand dollars.]
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