Xaviers!

After the trip to Chinatown, Chase decided Ashlie was far better equipped to make sense of the parts of the degraded message that he couldn't. He knocked at her door and made his way inside. Time might just be of the essence.

"Please, do come in." Ashlie says without a hint of sarcasm from where she is working on soldering something among a meticulously sorted array of components on a workbench.

"I found a lead on the Lotus," he said, holding up the torn off notebook page. "A scheduled meet with some Russian, I think. It's incomplete though. I figured you could work your metaphorical magic and fill in the blanks faster than me or Kinney."

"Certainly. Let me see." she says, putting her tool down delicately before turning to Chase and taking a look at the note. Almost immediately the holographic screen of the workbench springs to life, displaying the partial words. It rapidly cycles through all possible letters, flashing and moving actual words aside as they come up. Once the screen is filled with all possible words (excluding obvious proper nouns), combinations start being put together, immediately disappearing again when they make no logical sense until only a couple are left.

Code: Select all

new assignment
meet R--h--kov in Seva-to--l
harbor statue 17th at noon

"Insufficient data to determine exact name. Cross-referencing cities in Russia and eastern European countries against coastal ones only leaves Sevastopol, Crimea." she finally decides.

"That was... quick," he commented, impressed. "Think we have enough time to get eyes on that meet?"

"Easily. Although the right course of action would be to inform the Secret Service and Russian authorities and let them deal with this. It's what I had to do were I to get involved with this."

"Then we'll just have to do this the old fashioned way," he nodded.

"Which is to assume they have abandoned their target and let the Russians deal with whatever clandestine operations are going on. That way I don't feel compelled to contact anybody with this information. What the Russians are up to is none of our business. Especially after disrupting their 'benevolent mutant integration facility' nobody has any reason to get to the bottom of any of this. Understood?"

"Understood," he answered. Of course, finding out what the Russians were up to wasn't the objective now was it? "As long as they aren't operating here, I'll sleep easier."