xp_logs | Operation: Louisiana Lowdown: Research Monkeys (Reply)

While the surveillance Jubilee set up does its work, Doug and Wanda do research back at the office into the movements of the Moseley Initiative personnel. The pattern of their travels creates an alarming pattern...

"Why the hell did it take so long for these idiots to pop their heads back up, and what the hell are they up to now?" Doug asked, pecking at the keys of his laptop. He and Wanda were both ensconced in the Snow Valley conference room, a variety of printouts and other papers spread on the table. "I mean, Rumlow's whole organization pretty much vanished off the map for months, right? So either all the grunts involved in that Mosely Initiative thing should have been picked up by other organizations, or -something-. I don't get it."

Wanda, having wisely left the the computer portion to Doug, was rapidly flipping through papers and placing them in various stacks in front of her. "But they could not have been completely absent - keeping that many people under the radar is a hard thing. Doable, obviously, but hard. There must be markers of activity from someone somewhere!" She waved one handful of papers at him. "It is simply a matter of finding it as quickly as possible."

"Well, now that we have an idea of where they're looking, and the people involved, it narrows things down." Doug pursed his lips pensively, rapping away at the keys to create a set of search parameters. He frowned, but then sent it forth to see what information it would return. He took off his glasses and polished them on the hem of his shirt, then rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

"Somewhat, anyway," Wanda murmured, picking up yet another ream of paper to flip through. The map to her left had small notations marked all over a certain area of the U.S. - to this, she added another two more random marks as she carefully went through the printouts. "The day this job is easy is the day I retire."

Doug cocked his head at the notations Wanda had left on the map. "Those look familiar..." he said, scratching at where the arm of his glasses curled behind one ear. "Now if I could just figure out what." He frowned. "What were they looking at in these areas?" he asked, trying to kickstart his memory.

"Let us take a look at the area and maybe that will job your memory," Wanda offered, standing up so she could bend over the map to see it from a better angle. "Fairly heavily populated," she noted, running her finger down through one section. "Not New York City but not some town that God forget about, either."

Doug watched Wanda's finger trailing idly across the map, tracing contours. "That's it!" he said as he visualized concentric shapes overlaid on the map. He brought up a website. "Nuclear fallout patterns," he said, feeling a chill at simply saying the words. He plotted the points Wanda had placed on the paper map, and they corresponded perfectly with the outer edges of each of the bands on his screen. "I'll bet you a bottle of your scotch that they were looking at wind and weather patterns in each of those areas."

Wanda's jaw clenched suddenly as she saw very clearly what Douglas had been pointed out. For years, she'd lived in places that - to this day - were terrified of another Chernobyl and she'd learned to respect that fear. The idea that someone was investigating the best possible route to do it now was not a surprise. Bad men and women with money always wanted to do bad things. But it was still incredibly chilling. "I do not waste my scotch on empty bets," she said, thickly. "Right, now that we know what we are looking for, we go forward. Look for anything else that they may be searching for. Poison in the water supplies, a massive non-nuclear explosion ... if they are looking into nuclear fallout patterns, then their back up plans will be as dangerous as their first."

"Probably a dirty bomb. Easier to get the material and put it together than a straight-up high-yield nuke," Doug observed. "And yeah, there's got to be something else at play. Not all of these fit the nuclear profile." Enough did that it was obvious that they were using fallout studies as a base... "This one doesn't fit," he said, pointing at the records of a few men in Atlanta. "What's in Atlanta that..." He trailed off, staring off into space. His fingers moved across his keyboard, almost of their own volition. And when he was done, a document under the heading of the Centers for Disease Control was on his screen, a study of disease outbreak centered on New Orleans. "President Madagascar. Shut. Down. Everything," he muttered."

"Douglas, I really hate when you say things that make no sense," Wanda commented, abandoning her maps and papers for a moment to come and stand over his shoulder. "Son of a bitch."

"So we're not entirely sure what they're looking at doing, but whatever it is, it'll be big. And toxic." Nuclear, biological, chemical...whatever it was, it wouldn't be good.