The morning after the catacombs, James slept four hours and woke feeling like himself again.
Not rested exactly.
His body had done most of its recovery work overnight, Compound Alpha's enhanced healing clearing the deep bruising from those entity strikes, the stiffness in his left shoulder working itself out while he slept.
But there was something else too. A quiet settling that came after a night that had asked serious questions and received serious answers.
He'd handled it.
All of it.
The raid.
The catacombs.
Every part of the evening that could have gone wrong had been managed through preparation and fast thinking and a ferrous alloy framework he'd never expected to matter.
James made coffee, sat at his primary workstation in the factory's upper office, and opened the intelligence file he'd been building on Intergang's ten-city network.
The decrypted data from the two Apokoliptian devices was still the most complete picture anyone had of the network's structure.
Batman had received the same data, obviously. The League would have it now through whatever channels Batman fed them.
But raw data wasn't the same as analyzed data, and analyzed data wasn't the same as actionable intelligence with local context layered on top.
James had spent the past two weeks building that layer.
He knew which Gotham criminal organizations had been in preliminary contact with Intergang's buyers. Knew which city had the most advanced distribution infrastructure still intact after the raids. Knew which of the ten cells had leadership capable of rebuilding quickly and which would dissolve without external support.
City by city, he'd mapped the survival probability of every node.
Three of them concerned him.
Metropolis, Central City, and Star City.
All three had cells with competent leadership, financial reserves independent of the destroyed relay network, and enough Apokoliptian tech stockpiled before the raids to remain dangerous for months.
He needed to feed that analysis to the right people. Quietly. Without revealing his source material or his methods.
AEGIS had already built the anonymous channel architecture.
Encrypted drops routed through seven jurisdictions, untraceable to any origin point.
Whatever reached local heroes would look like it came from an intelligence professional, well-placed, thorough, and completely invisible.
James spent the morning completing the final three city reports.
Cross-referenced everything twice. Stripped any detail that could lead back to his lab or his specific methods of analysis.
By noon, three separate intelligence packages were in three separate dead drops.
Metropolis's would reach Superman's known contacts within six hours.
Central City's would reach whatever network Flash maintained.
Star City's was the most interesting question, because Star City's local hero situation was, as far as James's meta-knowledge told him, currently in transition.
Oliver Queen had only recently returned from wherever he'd been.
The Green Arrow persona was new, still establishing itself. James wasn't sure if Star City had an intelligence network worth feeding yet.
He filed that question for later. It would resolve itself.
----
The Metropolis deal had been in progress for eleven weeks.
Drake Shipping, James's investment partner Timothy Drake Sr.'s company, had been pursuing a logistics contract with a mid-sized Metropolis import firm called Harmon & Associates.
The contract was significant, eight figures annually if the relationship held, and it would establish Drake Shipping as a genuine interstate operator rather than a Gotham-regional business.
James had facilitated the introduction four months ago. Had quietly helped structure the proposal. Had used his financial analysis skills to make Drake's numbers look exactly as strong as they actually were, no inflation, just clarity, because inflated numbers collapsed under scrutiny and Timothy Drake Sr. was too good a contact to burn with short-term thinking.
The final signing was scheduled for Tuesday.
James drove to Metropolis on Monday evening rather than flying.
He liked the drive.
Four hours with nothing urgent happening, AEGIS running passive city monitoring back in Gotham, his mind free to process things that didn't require immediate response.
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