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Roscoe Hynes
Central City – 4:18 P.M
Roscoe Hynes sat hunched over a laptop, the blue glow from its screen painting his face. Lines of text scrolled like electronic rainfall, and every so often he tapped a key to pause the stream, brows tightening as he sifted through cloned fragments of Lieutenant Gil’s digital life. Line after line of endless metadata was parsed through algorithmic filters he’d cobbled together with borrowed code and an overindulgence of caffeine. It was mostly junk, but he kept digging.
The stink of mold and rust still clung to the walls of the basement, which had become his home over the last five months. Not that he considered it as such. It was just the only place left where the Agency wouldn’t drag him out in the middle of the night and lock him in a box again. Roscoe still flinched when doors opened too quickly; still woke up sometimes thinking he was back in that sterile white room with the humming lights. He still remembered the sting of their needles, the way they whispered to each other behind mirrored glass like he wasn’t human, as if he were something to be solved. At night, strapped to a slab under harsh fluorescents, he’d wondered if they’d ever planned to let him go, or if the only exit was a toe tag and a closed file. Compared to that, the basement was paradise. But even paradise, when you couldn’t leave, started to look a lot like a cage.
When he had been rescued from the Agency’s makeshift detention facility, Roscoe thought he’d be able to get his life back, but the Agency had other plans. It turns out that once you’re labeled as a terrorist and fugitive, with your face plastered across every screen in the city for months, there wasn’t much of a life to get back to.
So Roscoe remained in hiding, in the basement of a condemned bar, far from windows and prying eyes. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d been outside in the last few months, a precaution Leonard insisted was necessary. Although Roscoe agreed, he’d be lying if he said the isolation wasn’t eating away at him.
At least Lisa was here.
Lisa Snart’s legs were tucked beneath her on the couch nearby, arms folded, chin resting on her knuckles as she watched him work. She didn’t talk much when he was in this mode, but she stayed close. And when he worked too hard, staring at the screens without blinking for too long, she’d tether him back to the moment with her honeyed voice and warm smile. It was grounding and helped more than he could ever put into words.
Roscoe knew that the only real way he could ever get out of this hole-in-the-ground was to crack the military-grade, government-issued flashdrive they’d stolen during his escape from the Agency’s facility. Packed tight with firewalls and layered encryption, the device had proven too difficult to crack, hundreds of hours of work yielding only a single prompt for Agency authorization. Without better equipment and programs, he had come to terms with the fact that it was beyond his capabilities.
Gil’s phone on the other hand?
Roscoe and the others were under no illusions that they’d find the codes necessary to access the drive on the lieutenant’s personal cellphone. The Agency was cruel, not stupid. Still, there was likely to be something usable on it, something they could act upon or leverage to get further answers. It was simply a matter of sifting through all the irrelevant bits, of which there were many.
“This could take all day,” Roscoe muttered to himself as he allowed the cascading stream of digital information to resume.
“Y’know, if that’s too difficult for you, there’s another way,” said a gruff voice from the opposite end of the room.
Mick Rory occupied a far corner of the basement, perched on a battered folding chair with his feet up on a crate of scavenged and obsolete electronics. An old, dog-eared copy of
Dracula rested in one calloused hand, half the pages curled from water damage.
Roscoe didn’t even glance up. Rory had made it a habit to sit there, slowly reading and offering some variation of the same suggestion each time anyone else voiced a thought.
“We’re not setting Lieutenant Gil on fire, Ror,” Lisa simply told the brute.
Rory grunted. It was the same answer he’d been given numerous times since Leonard had decided on the plan to snag the officer’s phone.
Roscoe blinked hard, eyes sore, as he dug further into the data. The file tree cracked open another directory. Then another. It was more of the meaningless text logs he’d been scanning through for hours now. Sighing, he slid the cached conversation through a rudimentary decryption program. If history was anything to go by, this would be yet another chat between the lieutenant and one of several dozen women who had to endure painfully awkward flirting and cringeworthy pickup lines.
As he scrolled through the recovered message log, however, his program isolated two strings of text. It had picked up two of the keywords Roscoe set it to look for.
Colonel and
Eiling. He glanced at it, scanned the following texts, and then scrolled back up to the start of the exchange before rereading it.
“I think we’ve got something,” Roscoe said.
Lisa slid in next to him, one hand resting on his shoulder. “What is it?”
Just then, the basement door slowly creaked open, and heavy boots descended the concrete steps. Leonard Snart appeared, looking tired but focused.
“Phone’s gone,” he announced to the others. “Scrambled and dumped.”
“Should have just let me melt it.” Leonard nodded toward the laptop in front of Lisa and Roscoe, ignoring the pair moving to put a few extra inches of distance between themselves. “Results?”
“Maybe,” Roscoe answered. He turned the screen toward Leonard, “see for yourself.”
Leonard stepped closer and peered down at the text files on the computer.
Up for a drink tonight? 🍸 Or are you gonna ghost
me again, Harper?
Tonight’s another test cycle. You’ll have to wait.
C’mon, cancelt he lab work
I’ll make it worth your while 😈
Sorry.
Colonel’s giving a full burn on the Dilustel prototype
tonight that’s gotta count as a reason to celebrate
After the test tonight, we blow off steam
My treat
You in?
Short skirt required 🥵
Celebrating what? Last time we ran the experiment
it almost cooked the volunteer from the inside.
You saw the vitals, Joe.
He lived didn’t he? Barely even screamed
That’s what progress looks like, Harper.
You want clean, go work at a hospital
You’d fill out scrubs nicely 🍑
It’s not about clean. I just don’t think anyone fully
understands what that metal does to people, and Eiling
doesn’t want to follow the proper scientific protocols.
He knows what he’s doing
And if this works we won’t need to tiptoe around
metas and mutants anymore. One soldier in Dilustel
could end a riot before it even begins.
Or start one we can’t put out.
You worry too much, Harper
How about this
Finish your shift and put on something fun. Then
I’ll pretend I didn’t hear you questioning command
I can’t.
You can
See you tonight 😘
“God, what a fucking creep,” Lisa shuddered.
“Bet you wish you let me burn him now.”Leonard’s eyes narrowed on the screen. “Dilustel.” He repeated the word like he wanted to memorize how it tasted.
”Sounds flammable.”“Never heard of it before,” Roscoe said, already opening a new search tab. “Names not in any official logs. No public patents. Not even anything on that conspiracy blog that leaks all the government secrets. Which probably means it’s either brand new or scrubbed.”
Leonard nodded. “Even if it’s nothing, it’s a lead. And we don’t have many of those.”
“So what, we follow Gil again?” Asked Lisa.
“No,” her brother answered. “We go after her, not him. She’s nervous, which means she knows stuff. We can use her to find answers.”
“How long ago did this test happen?”
“It hasn’t yet,” Roscoe told Leonard. “These texts were from this morning, just an hour or so before we nabbed the phone.”
“Ew,” Lisa frowned. “This asshole was being that pervy first thing in the morning? What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s still not burning, that’s what’s wrong with him.”Lisa shifted uncomfortably on the couch as she considered the implications behind the lieutenant’s words. “That poor woman.”
“Don’t worry,” Leonard said, his tone hardening as a plan began to form. “We’re going to make sure Gil gets stood up tonight.”
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