The intelligence exchange took the better part of a morning.
By the time the teacups had been emptied and refilled twice and the most critical pieces of each side's operational picture had been shared, the shape of the alliance had taken on a functional solidity. Not trust, precisely, but the kind of working alignment that does not require trust: two parties with non-conflicting objectives who have established that cooperation is cheaper than opposition.
Spandine rose and adjusted his cloak.
"The details will require a few more days. I need full reports from my field operatives before we can finalize any joint operational plan. If you can afford the patience, Mr. Crocodile."
"Crocodiles hunt by waiting," Crocodile said, from behind his desk. He had not moved from his chair in the last two hours, and showed no sign of intending to. "I have been waiting in this country for years. A few days is inconsequential."
"Then I will be in contact." Spandine turned toward the door, then appeared to recollect something. He looked back at Crocodile with the specific expression of a man who has saved a point for exactly this moment. "One more thing."
Crocodile's eyes moved to him. No impatience in the look, only the patient, reptilian attention of a man who had long since mastered the discipline of his own reactions.
"The Seven Warlords system was established in 1503," Spandine said. "More than ten years. In that decade, Mary Geoise has never exercised its formal authority to conscript the Warlords for operations, and the Warlords have never been called to cooperate as a collective force. The closest thing to a genuine deployment was the White Hunter's operation in the New World."
Crocodile's expression did not change, but something behind his eyes sharpened slightly.
Smoker's New World campaign had reshaped the balance of power in the second half of the Grand Line and elevated him to Emperor status. From the perspective of the Warlord system's supposed function, it was the only result in a decade that Mary Geoise could point to with satisfaction. Against that, Crocodile's time in Alabasta looked like comfortable semi-retirement, and they both knew it.
Spandine reached into his coat and produced a Den Den Mushi.
It was dark red, almost burgundy, and its shell had an unusual angular quality that suggested a bat more than the rounded forms of ordinary models. He set it on the desk with the deliberate placement of someone making a precise statement.
"The supreme authority I carry is not only useful for coercion," Spandine said. "This is the Warlords' summoning line. Each of you received one at the system's inception. In ten years, Mary Geoise has almost never used it." He looked at Crocodile steadily. "I am authorized to delegate that use. The decision of whether to summon, and which of your fellow Warlords to call to Alabasta, I am placing in your hands."
Crocodile looked at the Den Den Mushi.
After a moment, he reached out and picked it up, turning it over in his left hand. His hook rested on the desk. The dark casing caught the aquarium light and scattered it in thin reddish lines across his fingers.
"You are authorizing one Warlord to summon the others," he said. The faint amusement in his voice was the genuine kind, the kind that emerges when a situation reveals itself to be more interesting than anticipated. "That has never happened."
"No," Spandine agreed. "It hasn't."
"Which means, implicitly, that whoever gathers them would be directing the operation."
"Mary Geoise's position is that the overall situation takes priority. They have no interest in dictating terms that would create friction. The mechanics of coordination would be at your discretion."
Crocodile set the summoning Den Den Mushi on the desk in front of him and regarded it for a moment longer. Then he nodded.
"I'll consider it carefully."
Spandine smiled. "I look forward to your answer. Robin, would you see us out?"
Robin set down her teacup and rose with the unhurried composure of someone who had been doing this particular task, managing the mechanics of Crocodile's office while maintaining complete interior distance from it, for several years. She led Spandine and Who's Who to the door without a word. Who's Who followed, checking the corridor before stepping through, and the three of them moved down the carpeted passage toward the upper floors.
The office door closed behind them.
Crocodile did not move immediately.
He looked at the dark red Den Den Mushi, then at the Bananawani turning slow circles behind the aquarium glass, then back at the Den Den Mushi. He turned the unlit cigar over in his fingers, a habit when he was thinking through something with more than one dimension.
The Revolutionary Army was in Alabasta. Dragon was in Alubarna. Cobra, facing the full weight of his impossible position, had in all likelihood already agreed to whatever Dragon had offered him.
Crocodile had been operating in this country for a decade on the assumption that his primary opponents would be a weakening royal family and a rebel force he himself had funded. He had not built his operation around facing Dragon's organization simultaneously.
He was not afraid of the challenge. But he was not stupid about it either.
The summoning line sat on his desk.
He turned through the roster in his mind.
Smoker was excluded before the thought fully formed. Whatever the White Hunter was, he was not a man who would operate under Crocodile's direction in Crocodile's country. The Emperor's prestige, the relationship with Mary Geoise that had apparently involved enough money to purchase a neutral-zone designation for an entire city, the underlying dynamic: all of it pointed toward a situation where Smoker's presence would complicate the authority structure in ways Crocodile had no interest in managing. He moved on without dwelling on it.
Jinbe. The Knight of the Sea, Fish-Man Island's champion, the Warlord who had spent years closely aligned with the Whitebeard Pirates before the battle that had rearranged the New World's order. A desert country in the first half of the Grand Line was perhaps the single environment least suited to a fish-man's capabilities. There was also the historical proximity to Whitebeard's crew, which created an alignment Crocodile had no particular reason to trust. He set Jinbe aside.
That left four.
Kuma was the first of the four he eliminated. The man operated with the disposition of a machine, executing Marine assignments without apparent personal consideration, and the closeness of that relationship with Marineford was something Crocodile found naturally objectionable. Beyond that, Kuma had been a king. Alabasta was a kingdom. The possibility of some prior relationship with Cobra, however unlikely, was a variable he did not need in an operation this sensitive.
Three remaining.
Doflamingo. Crocodile's feelings about the man were unflattering and he did not pretend otherwise, but feelings were not operational criteria. Doflamingo had, against reasonable odds and under Mary Geoise's observation, managed to manufacture the legal conditions for a throne seizure and had it accepted. That required a particular combination of ruthlessness, tactical creativity, and patience for complexity that Crocodile respected regardless of the source. The String-String Fruit was versatile in ways that were difficult to fully predict, which was a genuine advantage in an uncertain engagement. And there was the matter of Dressrosa: whatever Crocodile thought of the man personally, the result spoke for itself.
He included Doflamingo in the list. Reluctantly, but he included him.
Boa Hancock. The Pirate Empress, the Kuja Pirates' captain, the woman whose single documented fleet engagement had destroyed an entire Marine squadron and stripped it of its supplies. Beyond that, she had been quiet. No documented operations, no public profile worth assessing. The mystery was itself a form of information: someone Mary Geoise had approved for Warlord status was not weak by definition, and someone who had remained this silent for this long had either nothing to prove or reasons for discretion that made them more interesting than the alternative.
A first direct contact with Hancock was, regardless of how the operation went, worth something for future reference.
Mihawk. There was not much to deliberate about here. The title of World's Greatest Swordsman was the kind of title that could be manufactured through politics or could be earned through the unambiguous medium of surviving every challenge issued by every significant swordsman on the seas. Mihawk's title was the second kind. He had accumulated it through actual combat, in public, under scrutiny, over many years. Whatever else could be said about the man, that specific credential meant exactly what it claimed to mean.
Mihawk was unpredictable in behavior but consistent in quality. That was a workable combination.
Doflamingo, Hancock, and Mihawk.
Three Warlords whose backgrounds were unambiguously outside Marine alignment, whose capabilities were individually significant, and whose presence in Alabasta would represent a genuine shift in the operational weight available to him. Crocodile was not accustomed to sharing a stage, but he was accustomed to winning, and winning against Dragon's organization required a different caliber of support than anything Baroque Works could provide alone.
He picked up the dark red Den Den Mushi and held it for a long moment, feeling the slight warmth of it from being handled.
Then he set it aside, reached into his desk drawer, and produced a different Den Den Mushi, smaller, unmarked, the kind with no manufacturer's plate on its base.
He dialed a short sequence from memory and waited.
The line connected after the third ring. The voice that came through was low and unhurried, with the specific quality of someone who had long since passed the point of being troubled by receiving calls at unusual hours.
"Boss?"
"Daz Bonez," Crocodile said. "Clean house. All traces, all intelligence your end. This country has acquired some interesting visitors, and the situation is shifting. Until further notice, your only task is Cobra. Watch him. Do nothing else."
A pause. Not hesitation, just the pause of a man absorbing instructions completely before acknowledging them.
"Understood," Daz Bonez said, and the line went quiet.
Crocodile set the Den Den Mushi down.
If there was one person in his organization he trusted without qualification, it was Daz Bonez. Not Robin, who was capable and loyal in her way but whose loyalties had layers Crocodile had never fully mapped. Not any of his Baroque Works officers, who served competently but served the structure rather than the man. Daz Bonez had been with him since before Alabasta, since before the Warlord title, since the years when Crocodile's ambitions had been significantly less organized than they were now.
He had told no one else that Daz Bonez existed in any operational capacity. Robin did not know. Spandine did not know.
It was the kind of redundancy that had kept Crocodile alive through situations that had ended other people's careers.
He leaned back in his chair and looked at the aquarium.
The Bananawani drifted past the far panel, massive and slow, their bodies casting long dark shadows through the filtered water.
"Interesting," Crocodile said, to no one in particular.
He reached for the summoning Den Den Mushi again, and this time he did not set it down.
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