Chapter 33 : MAKING CONTACT
John Diggle parked his sedan in the same spot every night.
Third level of the parking structure adjacent to Verdant, northeast corner, backed against the concrete wall where the security camera's sweep had a four-second blind spot between passes. A military habit — the vehicle always positioned for rapid exit, always in a location that offered natural cover, always the same spot because consistency allowed the subconscious to flag anomalies. If someone was waiting at his car, Diggle would know before he rounded the corner because the parking structure's acoustics would carry the wrong sound.
I'd been cataloguing his routine for two weeks. Not stalking — studying. The way Marcus studied a fighter's stance before designing a training plan, the way Helena studied a building's security before planning an entry. PER 11 tracked Diggle's arrival time (variable, between midnight and 2:00 AM depending on patrol duration), his departure route (stairwell B, always), and his threat assessment protocol (sweep the level visually before approaching the vehicle, check the sedan's undercarriage with a pocket mirror, unlock from three feet away using the remote).
Tonight I was standing beside his sedan at 1:14 AM with my hands visible and my heart rate at a level Marcus would have called unacceptable for a man about to have a conversation.
Diggle's footsteps echoed in the stairwell. Measured, even, the stride of a man who'd walked through combat zones and parking garages with the same deliberate awareness. The stairwell door opened. His eyes found me before his body cleared the threshold.
His hand went to his hip. Not the dramatic draw of a man in a movie — the controlled, practiced shift of a soldier transitioning from walk to weapon, the sidearm accessible in the leather holster beneath his jacket. His body angle changed: sideways, reducing the target profile, weight on the balls of his feet.
"Don't move."
"I'm not moving." My hands stayed at chest height, palms out, fingers spread. The universal gesture of I chose to be here and I chose not to be holding anything. "My name is Charles. I'm the source Felicity's been looking for."
Diggle's eyes assessed. PER 11 read the assessment in real time — the rapid calculation of threat level, the comparison of my appearance against whatever profile Felicity had constructed, the weighing of my statement against the probability of it being true.
"Keep your hands where they are."
"They're not going anywhere."
He approached. Not directly — a lateral arc that kept the concrete pillar between us until he'd confirmed no one else was in the immediate area. Cleared the neighboring cars visually. Checked the ramp to the second level. Only when he'd verified we were alone did he close to conversational distance.
His hand stayed on the weapon.
"You picked a public parking structure. Meaning you want witnesses."
"Meaning I want you to feel safe enough to listen." The gym's heavy bag had been easier to face than this. My mouth was dry. My pulse thudded in my ears with a rhythm Marcus would have corrected: breathe, CW, you can't fight with a sprinter's heart rate. "I have intelligence on something called the Undertaking. Your team needs it. I'm asking for five minutes."
"My team."
"Oliver Queen. Felicity Smoak. You. The basement under Verdant." I watched his expression close — the soldier's mask, the face that revealed nothing while the mind behind it processed everything. "I know what you do. I know why you do it. And I know that in approximately three months, Malcolm Merlyn is going to activate a seismic device beneath the Glades that will kill hundreds of people."
Silence. The parking structure hummed with the ambient vibration of the city — traffic on the bridge, the bass pulse from Verdant's ground floor, a car door closing on the level below. Diggle's hand didn't leave the weapon. His breathing didn't change. But something behind his eyes shifted — not belief, not yet, but the recognition that the statement had contained specific enough claims to warrant evaluation rather than dismissal.
"That's a hell of a thing to say in a parking garage."
"It's a hell of a thing to know."
"And you know it how?"
"Research. Investigation. Three months of mapping the financial infrastructure that funds Malcolm Merlyn's operations." I reached slowly — very slowly, narrating the motion — into my jacket pocket. "I have a summary. May I?"
A nod. The hand stayed on the weapon.
The envelope was thin — five pages, curated from the hundreds I'd accumulated, selected for maximum impact and minimum exposure of my methods. Page one: the Pinnacle Logistics connection to Merlyn Global, with the shipping manifests I'd photographed at Dock 14 as supporting evidence. Page two: the Project Earthquake memo from the QC server extraction, with Merlyn's authorization code visible. Page three: the seismic equipment invoices routed through shell companies. Page four: the Cascade Development construction contracts linking Bertinelli laundering to Undertaking infrastructure. Page five: the device site address in the south Glades, with a hand-drawn floor plan reconstructed from Death Echo #5's sixty seconds of underground footage.
Diggle took the envelope. Opened it. Read the first page with the speed of a man trained to process intelligence briefings — scanning for key data, flagging the names and numbers, building a mental framework before examining the details.
"Merlyn Global. The shipping manifests — these are originals?"
"Photographs of originals. The originals are in a secure location."
He turned to the Project Earthquake memo. His reading pace slowed. The memo's header — Project Earthquake — Phase 2 Construction — landed with the weight of something that couldn't be unsaid, and Diggle's jaw tightened the way Marcus's jaw tightened when a sparring partner landed a shot he should have blocked.
"Malcolm Merlyn." Not a question. A processing statement, the name being filed in a mental folder labeled threats alongside every other name John Diggle had classified during a career spent in the company of dangerous people.
"Malcolm Merlyn. Using his corporate infrastructure to fund and construct a seismic weapon beneath the Glades. The device is real. I've seen it. The construction site is disguised as a transit authority project. The security is military-grade — I tried to get close and they..." I paused. They killed me wasn't an option. "They stopped me."
"You went to the site alone."
"I went to the site because I needed to confirm the evidence before bringing it to someone who could act on it." The words came out clean, organized, the project manager's cadence that Diggle's military training would recognize as briefing structure rather than storytelling. "Your team has the capability to investigate further. Oliver's access to Merlyn Global through Queen Consolidated. Felicity's technical skills. Your operational experience. I have the evidence base. Together—"
"Why us?"
The question Marcus had asked about training. The question Helena had asked about the dossier. The question everyone asked when a stranger appeared with gifts and no apparent motive, because in Starling City, gifts from strangers came with strings attached to explosives.
"Because Oliver Queen is the only person in this city who will do something about it."
Diggle's eyes changed. The soldier's mask held, but underneath — a fraction of a degree, visible only to PER 11's enhanced micro-expression reading — something shifted from evaluating a potential threat to evaluating a potential asset.
The shift happened because I'd said Oliver's name as a statement of fact rather than a question. I hadn't asked are you working with the Hood? I hadn't implied or danced around it. I'd stated that I knew, clearly and without leverage, because John Diggle respected directness the way Helena respected capability and Oliver respected results.
"You know who he is."
"Yes."
"And you've known how long?"
"Since before he came back." True. Absolutely, incontrovertibly true, in a way Diggle couldn't possibly interpret correctly.
He closed the envelope. Held it at his side. His hand came off the weapon — not all the way, just far enough that the posture shifted from armed response to armed conversation, which was the Diggle equivalent of a warm handshake.
"I'm going to verify every page of this. If anything doesn't check out—"
"It will."
"If anything doesn't check out, I'll find you. And that conversation will be shorter."
He walked to his sedan. Unlocked it remotely. Opened the door.
"Charles."
"Yeah?"
"How do I reach you?"
I gave him the prepaid phone number. Not Helena's burner, not the monitoring line — the clean number, the one that existed specifically for this contact. He didn't write it down. Military memory — he'd have it stored before the sedan cleared the parking structure.
He drove away. The engine sound faded down the ramp, around the curve, gone. The parking level was empty again, just me and the concrete and the ambient hum of a city that didn't know someone was trying to save it.
I walked to the stairwell on legs that trembled — not from cold, not from danger, from the specific vibration of a man who'd just handed the most dangerous intelligence in Starling City to a stranger and staked everything on the belief that the stranger's partner would act on it.
[HEROIC ACT: CRITICAL INTELLIGENCE DELIVERY TO ALLIED ASSET. +25 CP. TOTAL: 115 CP.]
The notification arrived in the stairwell and I almost laughed. The System was tracking my meeting with Diggle the way it tracked mugging interventions and criminal disruptions — as a heroic act, a contribution to the defense of the city, measured in CP with the cold arithmetic of a mechanism that quantified courage the way accountants quantified revenue.
A hundred and fifteen CP. The largest single reward I'd received, and it came from standing in a parking garage and talking.
The car was — there was no car. I walked. Forty-five minutes through February streets, hands in pockets, the adrenaline fading into something quieter and more uncertain. Diggle had the envelope. Oliver would read it. Felicity would verify it. And then the three of them would decide whether the warehouse clerk who'd appeared in a parking garage with evidence of an earthquake machine was an asset or a trap.
The phone sat in my pocket, silent. Helena's text from earlier — IRS audit papers filed. Three-week countdown — glowed on the screen when I checked.
Two operations running in parallel. Helena dismantling her father's empire from below. Team Arrow confronting the Undertaking from above. And Charles Weston walking between them, holding the threads together with borrowed hands and a secret that would unravel everything if he ever spoke it aloud.
Forty-eight hours passed. The phone stayed silent. Danny's coffee arrived at the warehouse every morning. Marcus noticed my distraction during training and said nothing. Helena monitored Frank's deteriorating operation from the garage, marking assets being liquidated and employees being dismissed with the methodical satisfaction of a woman watching a house burn that she'd spent months dousing in accelerant.
Then the phone rang. Unknown number. I answered.
Diggle's voice: "Be at Verdant tonight. Basement entrance. Eleven PM."
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