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still preferred the rapid play of the stock market. He counted buying this place as “doing his bit” for the team.
    As he entered the building the signal came in on his specs
    announcing a team confab. He called that good timing. He found David Connolly in the conference room, simultaneously on the phone and on the specs’ communications channel, as usual. Fluke pulled a chair up beside him and gave a salute as he joined the channel.
    “For those just joining in,” David said, “We’ve got an update on the bomber. Longo is in a coma state, but the police got a partial thumbprint from an inner component of the unexploded bomb. Not Longo’s. They ID-ed it as belonging to one ‘Albert Johnson,’ last known address in Milwaukee.”
    “Last known?” Fluke interrupted. “How long ago?”
    “Over ten years. Pre-Event. Get this: he lost the house to foreclosure—by Capital Finance.”
    A chorus of ahs greeted that over the specs’ channel, and one live “aha” as another man entered the room. The teleporter—what was his name? As he took a seat across the table, Fluke gave the fellow a nod and consulted his database. Being new kid in town made him a big fan of databases. Tom. Tom Stanton.
    “Before the foreclosure, Johnson had been let go from a sales job with Farmland Dairy Distributors and soon after, divorced by his wife. We figure he left Milwaukee about then, but he drops off the map. We’ve got nothing on him since the Event. No address of record, no driver’s license, no credit trail. His nearest relatives thought he was dead.”
    “But his print was on the bomb?” Tom asked.
    David gave him a nod.
    “And we did some checking. His former employer, the man who fired him, was recently found dead at his home outside Cincinnati, apparent suicide. And three months ago Johnson’s ex-wife and her second husband died in Milwaukee—looked like a murder suicide, with the wife shooting the husband, then turning the gun on herself. But I think in light of recent events, we’ll be taking a second look at these deaths.”
    “Could we have a puppet master on our hands?” Fluke asked.
    “Given Longo’s state, that’s the working hypothesis.”
    Groans greeted the news.
    David went on, “It’s a rare talent. Hopefully we’re wrong. Could be drugs, hypnosis—some other form of coercion involved. We’ve got people checking Longo out before we make a final determination.”
    “If Johnson made himself vanish for ten years, why’s he coming out of the woodwork now?” Rachel’s icon accompanied the message, the sight of it kicking Fluke’s system into high gear.
    “We think his ex-wife’s second marriage triggered him somehow.”
    Questions flooded in from the team members.
    “How do we deal with a puppet master?” Stacy Peterson, telekinetic, according to the database, asked.
    From Tom Stanton: “What’s his next move?”
    “We got any photo ID on the guy?” asked Hank Stanislaw,
    transmuter.
    “Think he’ll try again for the Capital Finance board?” Fluke added his own top concern to the queue.
    “The only photos we have are over ten years old.” David responded, “but I’m uploading one now over your links. And yes, we think he’ll try again for the Capital Finance board. He appears to be going after people he blames for his hard luck back pre-Event.
    “Problem is, a puppet master is not likely to do anything directly. He’ll try to get at them using someone else—could be anyone.”
    “I don’t see any clairvoyants on the local team,” Fluke noted.
    “No. True, reliable foreseeing is a rare talent, and we just lost the nearest one, out of Cincinnati... looked like a suicide, but we’ll check on that one too. There are a couple more on the continent and we’ll try to get one on the case.”
    “David?” Rachel’s icon glowed in Fluke’s VR field. “Um. I’ve seen this guy. Today.”
    “What? Where?”
    “He looked older than the picture, but he would… a little grayer, a