After Jimmy dropped me off, and before heading down to the bunker, I walked to the payphone and fed in some coins.
Vito picked up on the second ring. "Yeah?"
"It's Quince. Checking in about that Reynolds meeting."
"Right. Got it set up for you." I heard papers rustling. "Wednesday, eleven AM. There's a Greek restaurant called Titan on 5th Avenue, about three blocks south of the DRC Tower. Reynolds likes it because it's quiet and the food's good."
I scribbled the details in my mental notes. The location made sense. It was close enough to the DRC headquarters that Reynolds could claim it was just a lunch meeting if anyone asked, but far enough away that they wouldn't be sitting in the company cafeteria.
"Titan, 5th Avenue, eleven AM Wednesday," I confirmed.
"Reynolds will be in a private room. Just ask at the front" Vito paused. "He's professional, but don't mistake that for soft. DRC's had a rough few years and they're cautious about new contacts. Be straight with him."
"Got it. Thanks, Vito."
"Don't mention it."
The line went dead. I headed back to the warehouse, the DRC case heavy in my hand.
After another elevator ride to the bunker, I stretched. After the AIM meeting, I felt like I had been up for longer than I had, but it was still only 2 PM. I decided to keep going with my trend of smaller jobs. I should look into hunting down the monk, but I decided I might as well leave that for tomorrow afternoon. I needed to prepare for the meeting with the Deterrence Research Corporation representative tomorrow morning.
Deciding that some preliminary research was probably in order, I silently cursed the absence of the internet in its twenty-first century form for what felt like the fiftieth time. I decided to spend the rest of my time today at the main library branch and see what I could pick up about DRC, its internal structure, and Reynolds himself from publicly available sources.
The advantage to interacting with someone who wasn't a full-time crook was that he had to have some sort of publicly accessible profile. Interviews, newspaper articles, magazine articles—all of these were potential sources that could give me a sense for Reynolds before I walked into that room. Understanding the company would help too, but understanding the man across the table was just as important. With that in mind, I dropped the case off in the armory and climbed back into the elevator.
Time for some research.
After another subway ride, I arrived at the main library branch. I walked past the lions, through the doors and up to the reference desk.
A different librarian from before looked up.
"Can I help you?"
"I'm looking for corporate filings. Annual reports, SEC documents, that kind of thing, for publicly traded companies."
She nodded. "Business reference section.Take the stairs up, turn left, look for the 338s. We keep annual reports and 10-Ks for major corporations on file. If it's publicly traded, we should have it."
"Thanks."
"Those reports can be dense. Let me know if you need help finding anything specific."
After hours of flipping through annual reports, I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my eyes. The early afternoon sun had stretched into late afternoon and the library's reading room had grown quieter as other researchers filtered out.
I'd found more than I expected. Not everything, obviously, but enough to sketch out DRC's internal landscape. Revenue breakdowns hinted at which divisions were profitable (satellite electronics, barely; conventional munitions, marginally) and which were supposedly keeping them alive ("technology licensing" and "R&D contracts" that were suspiciously vague). The organizational charts in the annual reports showed the usual corporate hierarchy, but reading between the lines of carefully worded executive profiles revealed the real story: a company full of ambitious middle managers jockeying for position, all while the board tried to figure out what to do without their founder.
The numbers themselves told a story too. Revenue was down nearly 20 percent since Magnum's death. The satellite/space division was real and growing, but nowhere near big enough to offset the collapse in their core business. The dual-class share structure meant that the CEO, Ivor Carlson and his friends on the board could run the company however they wanted, regardless of how the public shareholders felt about it.
The "technology licensing" revenue was particularly interesting. $47 million a year, consistently from licensing what, exactly? The footnotes were deliberately vague, mentioning "various international partners" and "proprietary defense technologies" without any specifics. For a company that had lost most of its major contracts and was supposedly struggling, $47 million in licensing revenue seemed oddly robust.
Either they really did have classified tech worth licensing, or that line item was covering for something else entirely. Probably the latter.
It was fascinating in a morbid way. I'd wondered before how these fictional corporations actually functioned day-to-day, and now I had at least a partial answer.
Whether DRC would actually care about what I had to sell was another question entirely. Reynolds had agreed to meet, which meant Vito's introduction carried weight, but that didn't tell me if they'd pay well or just low-ball me.
Now to find something on Mr.Reynolds...
I furrowed my brow. How the hell was I supposed to find one mid-level corporate employee in New York without the internet? No search engines, no LinkedIn, no company directories online, not even a crummy database. Just... paper and microfilm.
Reynolds worked for DRC, that much I knew. But he wouldn't rate coverage in the Times unless he did something newsworthy, and "quietly buying back stolen prototypes" probably didn't make it into the business section.
I pulled out my notebook and started thinking through the problem systematically. Reynolds could be from anywhere in the States. Or maybe he'd grown up in New York but in a different borough. Hell, for all I knew he was from New Jersey. But he worked in Manhattan now, and he had to live somewhere in the metro area. Local papers sometimes covered new hires at major corporations, especially if the person had military service. "Local veteran lands corporate job," that kind of human interest angle.
The librarian had said local papers were organized by borough, then chronologically. Which meant I was looking at a haystack the size of New York City, and Reynolds was one very small needle who might not even be in it.
But what else did I have? I couldn't just walk into the DRC Tower and ask for his life story. "Hi, I'm here to sell you back your stolen military equipment, could you tell me a bit about Mr.Reynolds" I needed something for the meeting—context, background, an angle. Knowing Reynolds's history, where he came from, what his deal was would provide me with useful insight.
I did some quick mental math. The Defense Industry Weekly article said DRC had been struggling since Magnum's death in '79. If Reynolds joined during the chaos, there was a chance of a feel-good article, especially in the post-Vietnam years when a lot of guys were struggling. Call it 1978 to 1982 as the search window. Multiple boroughs. A lot of local papers.
This was going to take forever. And it might not even work.
But I didn't have better options. I headed back to the microfilm cabinets and started pulling spools, working my way through Queens first since DRC's headquarters was in Manhattan and people often lived in the outer boroughs.
Hours later,after looking through what felt like an endless succession of school board meetings, local business openings, and high school sports results, the afternoon sun slanting through the library windows had shifted to the golden tones of early evening. My eyes ached from staring at the microfilm reader's glowing screen.
Queens had been a bust. I'd moved on to Brooklyn, then the Bronx. Nothing. Maybe Reynolds wasn't even from New York. Maybe he'd moved here from Maryland or Virginia after getting out of the Army, and no local paper would have covered it because he wasn't local.
I was halfway through a 1978 edition of a Staten Island paper when I reconsidered my approach. If Reynolds had been at DRC since the early 80s, and if he'd gotten hired during the post-Magnum chaos, maybe he'd actually joined right after Magnum first disappeared in '75 or '76, when the company desperately needed people willing to work for a scandal-plagued defense contractor.
I went back to the Queens microfilm, this time pulling a newspaper from 1976. The Howard Beach Chronicle, January through December.
More school board meetings. More restaurant openings. An entire issue devoted to a local kid who'd made it to the Yankees' farm system.
Then, in the March 1976 edition of the chronicle, I struck gold.
Buried on page 7 was a brief article:
"Veteran Returns to Private Sector"
I stopped scrolling and centered the article on the screen.
The photo was grainy and small-local paper quality, clearly taken with whatever camera they had on hand. A white guy in his late twenties, maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven, standing stiffly in front of a house. His face sported an uncomfortable half-smile.
The caption: "Lawrence Reynolds, recently separated from the U.S. Army, joins the Deterrence Research Corporation."
I leaned closer to the screen, reading the article itself:
"Lawrence Reynolds, nephew of Howard Beach resident Margaret Reynolds, has accepted a position with Manhattan-based Deterrence Research Corporation. Mr. Reynolds, 27, recently completed eight years of service in the U.S. Army, including assignments in Siancong where he worked in strategic analysis. 'I'm grateful for the opportunity to bring my experience to the private sector,' Reynolds said. 'DRC is doing important work in national defense.'
"Mr. Reynolds earned his degree in Economics from the University of Maryland. He will be working in DRC's procurement division.
"'We're very proud of Lawrence,' said Margaret Reynolds, a longtime resident and member of the Howard Beach Civic Association. 'He served his country with distinction during difficult times, and now he'll continue keeping America safe in a different way.'
"DRC, headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, manufactures advanced weapons systems and defense technology."
That was it. A brief blurb.
"Strategic analysis."
That's a polite way to say "he was a spook".
Which meant Reynolds had spent eight years learning how to gather information, assess threats, and probably handle all sorts of interesting things.
And Siancong. There it was. The aunt had been proud enough to mention it specifically, even though by 1976 most people just wanted to forget the whole mess. "Served with distinction during difficult times"—more careful phrasing, the kind of thing you said when you couldn't talk about the actual work but wanted people to know it mattered.
I sat back from the screen. Siancong. The name triggered something in my memory. Lady Lotus. The Siancong Wars. That memory spell at the end of the second war that scrambled everyone's recollections.
I checked my watch. Still a few hours before the library closed.
I felt the drive to know more. Not just about Reynolds, but about Siancong itself. Because if there was a memory spell affecting what people could recall about the war, I needed to understand how it worked. What people remembered clearly, and what got foggy.
If I couldn't learn about Reynolds directly, maybe understanding the war that shaped him would give me something. It was a long shot, reading about battles didn't tell me much about one intelligence officer's personality. But Reynolds had spent eight formative years there, and that had to have left a mark.
Honestly, part of it was just curiosity. I knew the broad strokes from the comics. Lady Lotus,NATO and the communists fighting to gain access/control dragonsbloom, the memory spell. But seeing how it actually played out in the historical record, seeing the gaps where the spell had eaten away at people's understanding? That was fascinating in a morbid sense.
I made a note of Reynolds's article details, then stood up and stretched. Time to hit the history section.
After the requisite walk, I pulled several relevant-looking titles. Siancong: A Political Geography(1963), The First Siancong War: America's Forgotten Conflict (1965) and finally, Arterial: One Officer's Account of Route Nationale 2(1980)
Siancong: A Political Geography was helpful for getting a sense of the country. Published in 1963 by a Western visitor with apparent communist sympathies, it described a small nation of 3.2 million wedged between Vietnam, Laos, and China. The author covered the major cities. Thoát Nhìn (the capital), Đá Xanh (agricultural hub)and Lạc Phong (western mining town). The book painted a picture of fresh war damage, displaced populations, and a struggling economy.
What caught my attention was the passage about the western hills. The author mentioned that "French-Siancongese-Sen families" had "gone to ground" in isolated enclaves in the western hills beyond government control, with rumors of American and French "advisors" operating there. He'd tried to visit but been turned back—the region was "persistently mysterious and officially sensitive." SR Siancong forces had made several unsuccessful attempts to assert control. Local officials would only say the area was "undergoing pacification" without elaboration.
Reading between the lines: even in 1963, Western forces were already quietly in the western hills. The "advisory" mission that would become full-scale intervention was already underway.
Moving onto The First Sin-Cong War: America's Forgotten Conflict, I got an overall sense of the timeline for the first war. The US started with an advisory mission in 1950-51 driven by domino theory concerns, growing to about 6,000 advisors by mid-'51, then escalated to full combat deployment from 1951-54. Multiple failed offensives into the western mountains culminated in the fall of Lạc Phong then Thoát Nhìn in '54 and a Communist victory.
The tactical details were clear. Terrain, battles, casualties. Standard military history. The strategic/geopolitical rationale was equally straightforward. Domino theory, stopping communist expansion, supporting French allies. The logic was laid out plainly and simply, and it made sense in the context of the first war.
So people remember everything about the first war in Siancong. Looks like the memory spell didn't cover that...
Route Nationale 2: A Veteran's Account was more interesting (and existentially horrifying).
The tactical details were extensive. Convoy operations. Superhuman battles. All described matter-of-factly. There was even a brief mention of Genoshan mercenaries hired by the SR Siancong government around 1970. The author noted that the Genoshan expeditionary force included "superhuman operatives with terrain manipulation capabilities" that made ambushes along Route Nationale 2 particularly brutal until USAF air support "compromised their operational effectiveness."
I had to appreciate the euphemism.
Neatest way I'd ever seen to describe "bombed into a loose collection of carbon atoms."
What was also interesting was the existence of Genoshan superhumans in 1970. Almost certainly early mutates, though the author had no way to know that.
But why the NATO forces were fighting was vague. The book never quite explained the overall strategic objectives.
I walked back to the shelves and pulled three more books on the Second Siancong War. Different authors, different perspectives. A French officer's memoir, an American journalist's account and a strategic analysis published in 1981.
All of them had the same gap. Every accounting had detailed tactical information. Clear memories, accounts and analysis of battles and casualties.
But when it came to why—the actual geopolitical and strategic rationale—every explanation rang hollow. Protecting loyalists. Supporting allies. Stopping the spread of communism.
I stared at that last one. Stopping the spread of communism? That's what the First War had been about! Siancong was already a communist state when the Second War started in 1965. What spread were they stopping?
The words were there, but the reasoning underneath was hollow. The logic simply... wasn't.
I felt a chill settle in the pit of my stomach.
This was different from reading about magic in comics. This was evidence. Physical proof that someone had reached across an entire planet and altered the memories of thousands of people. Not erased. That would have been cleaner. Someone had reached into the minds of ..everyone and foggedthe truth. Left them able to remember battles and body counts but unable to grasp why.
Lady Lotus had rewritten history, and I was holding the aftermath in my hands.
The authors seemed to remember every tactical detail. Convoy formations, casualty counts, grid coordinates, even what coalition forces ate for breakfast. Despite that, none of them could coherently explain why the coalition forces had been there in the first place.
That was the spell.
I sat back from the books on the table. The waning afternoon sun slanted through the library windows, warm on my shoulders, but I couldn't have felt colder. This wasn't theoretical anymore. This was magic powerful enough to cloud an entire war, and subtle enough that no one realized it had happened.
That was the most existentially terrified I'd been since waking up in this world.
I sat there for a long moment, staring at the books without really seeing them. Then I wrenched myself back onto track, forcing myself not to spiral.
The spell didn't touch my knowledge.
My memories came from reading comics in another reality. I was sure there was a magical explanation for that, but since I didn't know anything about the ins and outs of wide-area thaumaturgy, I'd chalk it up to luck.
I checked my watch. 6:30 PM. I should start heading back.
I re-shelved the books and headed downstairs, mind still turning over what I'd learned. Knowing more about Siancong wouldn't directly help me with Reynolds. Three paragraphs in a local paper and some books about Siancong and its wars weren't exactly a dossier. But it gave me context on the events that shaped him.
It wasn't much of an edge. But walking into a meeting with an ex-intelligence officer who worked for a ruthless defense contractor, I'd take whatever advantages I could find.