[X] Knowledge of the spy on the SDCW has been frustrating Xander to no end, and CyberWillow's usual surveillance has come up with nothing. Willow has some new spells ready though, and thinks that by redoubling those efforts and doing a deep dive on everyone's history, she'll be able to finally catch them out. Some of the measures might be a little extreme, but you can't put too high a price on safety, right?
S4.0E11: Panopticon
Buffy knew she was a little late as she pulled her bike up outside Giles' place, but she had a good reason: Harmony had been looking for attention before being left to her own devices for most of the night. They may have gotten a little carried away, or even a lot carried away, but 'just a little longer' was a well-reasoned argument that she had a difficult time turning down. It wasn't the first time she'd had to make up a little time on the road lately and it wouldn't be the last. She was a busy girl.
Part of her regretted that Harmony wouldn't be here for this, but it was probably for the best. If her limited understanding of what was going to happen tonight was accurate, it would generate a whole lot of gossip-like material that Harmony would be very not allowed to gossip about for multiple reasons. It was a mercy to her, really.
A glance at the Horae on her wrist told her she wasn't late enough that she needed to literally superspeed up the stairs and through the courtyard, though she did do it at a brisk jog. She noted absently on her way that the damage from her fight with Kathy was repaired, and hoped this meeting wouldn't be quite as drama-laden as the last big one to happen here.
Xander answered her at the door, but instead of throwing a jibe about her timing, he seemed distracted, keeping one eye on the living room. At first glance in the house, there was nothing wrong: Anya was perched on a big armchair, Willow was setting up some computer equipment, Oz was hovering by her side, and Giles was bustling in the kitchen. He was probably doing the British thing and making tea.
"Sorry I'm late," she said. "But it looks like we're all here now."
"Hey Buffy!" Despite being preoccupied, Willow was the first to respond. "I'm almost finished getting this printer setup, then we'll be ready to get started."
"Might want to talk things over first," Oz said. It was always hard to tell with him, but he seemed a little disturbed.
"That sounds good," Buffy nodded, taking a seat over on his and Willow's side of the room. After she was already down, she realized she probably smelled like all-kinds-of-naughty to him right now and hoped that wasn't why Oz was pulling a face in the first place.
"I agree!" Anya said happily. "I want to hear all about our bold new way to root out traitors!"
"Sure." Willow caught some of Anya's enthusiasm. "I should probably just start from the beginning, because some of you might have talked to me when I was on earlier versions and the project has drifted around as I've done more research. I'll start with the obvious question for the class: can anyone tell me why we aren't just using truth spells to try to find the spy?"
"They're notoriously unreliable." Giles emerged from the kitchen with tea for some and cocoa for others as he answered. Obviously he would know something like this already, and most of them probably did too by now, but it was good to make sure everyone was on the same page. "Depending on which you use, any number of circumstances might produce a false positive or negative, especially if a guilty subject has had time to mentally prepare themselves."
"And we'd rather not use one to narrow the field, because the whole under-a-spell vibe would tend to let our spy know we're onto them," Xander added. They'd managed to keep the knowledge to the people in this room. Buffy had even avoided telling Harmony, mostly because she was afraid her girlfriend's outraged suspicions might be a little too plain for everyone else to notice.
"Or spies," Anya said. "Just because we know there's one, doesn't mean there aren't more."
"So first I spent a lot of time and effort looking to improve that with digitization, maybe making multiple measurements at once, or tracking hidden variables," Willow continued her impromptu lecture. "Unfortunately it turns out the problem isn't with the specific spells, it's kind of the nature of truth itself. Trying to measure it objectively, at least any way I could think of doing it, invokes something like the uncertainty principle, and your results get all entangled and messy. So that was a dead end."
"Which is why we're drinking cocoa at Giles' place now and not marching our people in and out of the Crawford street basement," Xander said.
"Why we're not doing it yet," Anya corrected.
"Was it a source in Wilkins' former collection?" Giles asked, then specified. "About the uncertainty in truth, I mean. I'm aware the Council has spent rather more effort on that particular problem than a few weeks, and as far as I know they have less to show for it."
"No, I was able to construct a proof using some of the spell design elements used with Cybermancy," Willow explained, obviously proud of herself. "CyberWillow, can you-?"
"Of course," she echoed, and the printer Willow had been fussing with earlier buzzed and started spitting out pages.
"I'll have to examine it in my free time." Giles sounded intimidated.
Buffy smirked at the idea of him finally finding a class he wasn't at the top of, but then decided she should move things along. "So no truth spells. Which means your new plan was a gossip spell? I guess gossip is the anti-truth."
Willow rolled her eyes. "I never should've called it that in front of you, it'll stick forever now. But I like to think of it as more of a background check spell. It works by the same principle I used to mirror the statewide police database, before I was good enough to just bash my way through normal security. It's just on a much larger scale; it effectively takes a sympathetic mirror of every document in the world the target interacted with, then filters down to whatever's most emotionally charged and mystically significant."
"Everything like their birth certificates or everything like their diary entries?" Oz asked.
"It has to be all of it, obviously, or we might not catch them out," Willow said. "The Pentagon doesn't just have a list of all the Initiative's spies squirreled away somewhere, I checked that already. Walsh isn't dumb enough to keep anything sensitive on any kind of computer, and there won't be any official records of it either. But they can't operate without writing down anything at all, there's got to be secret communications, illicit photos of our schedules, something."
"Maybe we could bypass the moral quandary and just cast it on Maggie first?" Buffy suggested.
"Can't," Willow explained. "It's like a background check in more ways than one. To cast it I need to kind of convince the universe the information is rightfully mine, that I have authorization. That works great for any of our people, especially since we write their checks and part of that money is directly from me. For her though, I've got nothing."
"And this is why I leave the spells to you," Buffy said.
"I'd like to ignore the wisdom of betters and also contribute from the peanut gallery, if that's OK?" Xander said, then continued after some eyerolls. "Wasn't the police data we stole chock full of errors? I seem to remember trying to track down a 'Gerbilicious' street as part of that project."
"Yeah, and we'll get some errors in this too, but it's not like we won't investigate anything suspicious after. This is just the first pass. It'll give us an idea where to look and who to talk to," Willow said.
"There's a second pass? Do we get to see that too?" Anya asked.
"We still won't want to show our hands, but I thought of a way around that," Willow said. "CyberWillow and I worked together to impersonate Gardner's floozy over the phone before, when we had to scare him. We would just do that again, impersonating whoever we suspect of being a spy, and calling people who we think might be their contact or know more. Then we can lead the conversation and try to get them to screw up and reveal something."
"Couldn't they still learn something was amiss, when they contacted them on their own?" Giles asked.
"I've got control over all the phone lines going in and out of Sunnydale now," Willow said easily. "CyberWillow's already listening in on anything that might be relevant there too, just in case, but we haven't got anything from that yet."
"There was the drug bust on 45 Thatcher Street, the day before yesterday," CyberWillow corrected.
"Well yeah, but nothing actually relevant," Willow said. "Anyway, if a call goes into the system that might compromise an ongoing investigation, we can just redirect it. Either make one side never pick up or just do more impersonations."
"Is it just me that's been out of the loop, or is this new to anyone else?" Oz said.
"I personally found out during the aforementioned drug bust, and I thought you maybe did too? I know Jimmy the heroin dealer did, and he didn't take it too well." Xander had his joking face on, but Buffy could tell things were getting tense.
"Heard about it over the radio, yeah. Didn't think I needed to check that we hadn't sunk to new lows. I guess I thought it was just one of our other invasions of privacy," he replied.
"It's not like we're doing it for the wrong reasons! Sunnydale's in danger, and it always has been. This is to protect it better." Willow said tiredly. "We're the government now, we can't just wander around blind!"
"Governments up until now have been doing good enough without all this," he said. "We did too."
Buffy knew Willow was right. If they messed up with Adam, who knows, the world might literally end. But she could see where Oz was coming from too. "I know this has all come on pretty fast," she started. "But we won't have to be on a war footing forever. We should probably even try to work out like, checks and balances or something, eventually. Right now, we don't have the luxury. We've gotta use every tool in the box."
"That's how it is then?" he asked. "Everyone's on board?"
"As much as I've found the rapid pace of magical development concerning, I do believe that this is how it's meant to be used." Giles said. "If we can head off even some of our problems before they become disasters, the lives saved will be worth it."
"If it's between having CyberWillow listen to me gossip with Hally and being eaten alive by Adam the snake-faced-boy, I know what I'm picking," Anya said. "Trust me, being eaten alive is no joke."
Xander was the last one to weigh in, "Oz, I'd have your back if I could. But we lost people at graduation. We lost people a month ago. And the way we operate, on the edge of the knife, if this spy thing breaks the wrong way, we're gonna lose more. I can't just let it happen."
"Well, that's everyone," Willow said. "It's decided then."
"It is," Oz agreed. Then he got up and started walking.
"Oz?" Buffy asked.
"He just needs to blow off some steam," Willow was confident. She continued as the door shut behind him. "You were right when he was like this before, the first time with the spiders. I totally overreacted then. It's like, there's just some stuff he just doesn't want to be a part of, and he won't be."
"You're right," Xander nodded exaggeratedly, as if trying to convince himself. "Oz is a reliable guy. Tomorrow it'll be like this never happened."
Buffy didn't feel as sure, but figured Willow knew him best. They'd work out a balance again in a couple days, and things would be fine.
"So we should get going," Willow restarted the conversation. "But we have to decide who to look at first."
"Faith said the spy was on the Watch, right Xander?" Buffy asked.
"Can we really trust her though?" Willow said.
"She did, and I think we can," Xander said. "We kind of had a moment."
"But do you trust her because you had sex with her, or for good reasons?" Anya asked.
"We have more than hearsay to go on," Giles said. "The Initiative has been all too aware of Buffy's movements lately. They clearly knew about both her time stranded in Mog'tog'og and her engagement with Prince Barvain."
"Even before that, I'm convinced they knew the SDCW patrol schedules all through August," Xander said. "There's no way they could've been as active as they were and not run into any of us otherwise."
"That still doesn't mean the spy's necessarily with the Watch though," Willow said. "Tons of people knew all that stuff, practically everyone who works for us, including the whole police department."
"So you're saying everyone's a suspect now?" Buffy had been hoping they could at least narrow it down tonight, but instead it was even worse.
"Well, not everyone," Xander gestured to the room and paused dramatically. "Right guys? Not everyone."
"All of us are above suspicion, of course," Giles said.
"Are you really sure?" Anya said. "I could even be the traitor! Maybe Maggie recruited me when I was prudently avoiding fighting Wilkins."
"What?" Xander bounced away from her a little on the couch.
"Not that I'm saying she did," Anya gave a frustrated pout. "You have a way better operation than hers, and I don't pick losers. But we should be careful who we rule out."
"I'd rather not cast this for the first time on you, no offense or anything," Willow said. "Aside from what comes out very likely not being pretty, you have like fifty times as much history as everyone else. This spell's already kind of ambitious for normal targets."
"I'm much too risk-averse to chance it, so I'd have already scampered away before this meeting even happened if I was the spy. So don't worry about it. You can just do me later if you're ever feeling up to it. But there was a point to this," Anya took in the room again before continuing. "You all just were thinking how awful it would be if I was the spy. Now think about other people it could plausibly be and still be almost that terrible."
"We did just sorta do the thing where we filled in new people on a bunch of top secret information," Xander grimaced.
"We can trust Jonathan," Buffy said quickly. After what had happened up in the tower last year she couldn't imagine he'd betray them like that. "We've known him for years, plus I was inside his head that time too."
There was no disagreement, and then Xander said, "What about Andrew? He went to Sunnydale High too."
"We didn't really know him there," Buffy hadn't, anyway. She'd even missed out on the monkey play thing.
"It'd be weird if he was a spy," Willow said. "He's always been so enthusiastic."
"Like a puppy," Buffy agreed.
"He doesn't have any respect for Maggie Walsh," Anya said. "He could be faking everything though."
"Could he?" Xander said skeptically. "Really?"
"Well, maybe not," Anya shrugged. "If he is selling you out, it's probably to some demon lord or something, maybe to another minor god. It'd make more sense."
"That isn't a problem we have any evidence of, though," Giles said. "We must not let paranoia get the better of us, we're only investigating because we know for certain there is a spy from the Initiative. We have little reason to suspect Andrew of that."
"He could've been the one to tip off Spike," Anya said.
"Or it could've just been Drusilla, with her freaky fortune telling," Willow said. "We know for sure she's with Spike and Vanessa now, she probably was hiding when he swept through town. And if anyone could've predicted Buffy getting trapped in time, it'd be her."
"We'll table Andrew," Buffy said, then waited a beat. "I guess there's Cynthia."
Everyone kept straight faces for a few seconds then simultaneously broke out into laughter.
"I mean, it's not impossible," Buffy said with a little smirk on her face.
"Cynthia, the cunning spy who deviously found out about your secret lesbian relationship before the election and then kept it entirely to herself," Xander said. "Yup, that tracks."
"Do we have to be worried about Warren?" Willow said. "He seems like a good guy, but none of us know him too well. Umm, Buffy, your thoughts?"
Kiss a guy once and suddenly you were the expert on all his hidden secrets. But did she have to be? "Could we even scan him if we wanted to? He doesn't technically work for us."
"The city owns stock in his company." Willow fished a certificate out of her bag and flashed it to the room. "Twenty percent of it. It's enough of an obligation that we could look into Mears Research and Development the same way, even if the results might be a little sketchier."
"I'm not sure how he could've gotten our schedules," Xander said. "Maybe once or twice, but the whole roster every day? He would've known about Buffy, but for the rest he'd need an accomplice at least."
"It makes him less of a suspect," Buffy agreed, happy she didn't have to make a value judgement.
"Tara obviously couldn't have gotten those schedules either," Willow said. "Or even told the Initiative about Buffy that first time, since we didn't recruit her until right after that."
"So of all the new inductees, that leaves Matthew Waters," Giles said.
"He'd have access to all the patrol schedules," Xander said, shaking his head sadly. "He sees them all in advance, so we can coordinate crosstraining."
"Nobody really knows him," Willow added. "Except Vanessa."
"Wilkins' bastard granddaughter," Anya said. "What a sterling seal of approval."
"He's played ball with us whenever we've needed him though," Buffy said. "With Amy, and then that bartender guy too."
"Chief Waters has had little opportunity to subvert your actions or conceal information from you since I became operational," CyberWillow cut in, echoing across the room. "It may have been possible for him to sabotage Amy Madison's imprisonment earlier, but anything more recent would've exposed him immediately."
"I was breathing down Amy's neck pretty hard back then too," Willow said. "He could've maybe undone my measures quietly, if he knew what he was doing, but if he was Walsh's spy he wouldn't, she knows dirt about magic and knew even less back then."
"She said he didn't have anything to do with Wilkins when I questioned her about it, right before the election," Buffy said.
"Can you really believe her?" Anya said. "I'll give you a hint: the answer's no."
"Alright," Buffy said. "He could've been behind everything, and even if he isn't exactly on the Watch, it's close enough that it could've even been what Faith meant. If he's bad, we need to know now, since he knows everything."
"One magical background check on our Police Chief, coming right up," Willow said. She fished a paystub out of her bag and started positioning it on the scanner she'd set up earlier.
CyberWillow started talking again as she did. "While the nature of the background check spell precludes cooperative casting, I was able to assist by specially preparing a scanner and printer to act as ritual focuses. When used to process the primary input and output they will reduce the strain involved in sufficiently multithreaded sympathetic casting by 86.5%."
"It'll be super helpful," Willow agreed. "I think I could've still managed without, but it would've maybe knocked me over each time."
"That sounds like a really big difference," Buffy said. "That's a domain thing, right?"
"It is, but having big multipliers like that is how most serious magic gets done in general," Willow said. "Having the processing power of the university's supercomputer instead of my desktop at home is an even bigger factor than that, and this next trick is thirty or forty percent on top too."
She was done with the scanner and returned to her laptop, ready to cast. But instead of starting with a flurry of high speed typing as Buffy had seen before, her eyes glazed over and she sunk her hands down until they phased inside the keyboard.
"I don't bother with this for small stuff because it's kind of disorienting, but for this I'm gonna need every advantage." Then Willow went quiet, absorbed in concentration.
Buffy moved around the couch to peek over her shoulder and see what was going on, if anything was visible at all. The screen displayed the same rhythmic text Buffy half-remembered from the police database spell, but it was moving much faster, so fast that she wasn't sure if any of the others would be able to resolve it on the screen at all. It was changing in jitters that were more and more disconnected from each other, and she suspected that however the monitor worked wasn't quite up to the task.
When Willow had cast the similar spell months ago it had finished without much fanfare, but this one apparently needed some extra kick. Willow started chanting:
"'Tween Father Deep and Mother Sky,
Follow threads he can't deny.
I string the noble code,
For his fealty owed.
All that was known:
Each new word.
Fates sown.
Merge!"
"Jumping jargon!" Xander was surprised by the flurry of action the spell resulted in.
Right when she finished, all kinds of different looking papers had started shooting out of the printer, way faster than the proof she'd printed earlier had. They had so much momentum on the way out that they scattered all over the room as a spray of documents. Buffy grabbed one before it hit her in the face, and was momentarily surprised by the texture; it didn't feel like the same printer paper anymore, and on a second look it wasn't the right size either. It was some kind of police form, complete with copier artifacts and handwritten sections filled out in different color ink.
The flood of paperwork ended as abruptly as it started, leaving Giles' room covered in clutter and half his knick knacks knocked to the ground.
"Sorry about that," Willow said weakly. She looked pretty peaked, tons of multipliers or no. "Next time maybe, umm-"
"A barrier in front of it," Giles said dourly. "Such is the danger of novel magic."
"The spell appears to have been a success," CyberWillow observed. "On preliminary analysis, the great majority of our results seem to be police records."
"These papers aren't gonna incriminate themselves, people," Anya said. "Let's get sorting."
------------------------------------------------------------------
"Well this is either really bad or really funny," Buffy said, brandishing her latest find.
The 'document' she'd uncovered from the pile was written in something red, featuring some shaky text proclaiming that Matthew Waters had sold his soul to Tanya Lopez for her shark skateboard. There were a pair of printed 'signatures' on the bottom, as well as a decorated blue oval that might optimistically be a picture of the mentioned item.
She handed it to Giles, who examined it cautiously.
"Is that written in blood?" Anya asked.
After running his finger along the surface, he said, "I believe this is crayon."
"Can we get an ID on Tanya Lopez?" Buffy asked.
"The most probable candidate was born in Sunnydale in 1963 and went missing in 1979, later presumed dead." CyberWillow answered. "Several other possibilities theoretically exist, but none have known mystical significance."
"It might not even be real," Willow said. "We have to expect some false positives to pop up because of the quantum fluctuations."
"Does it even matter if it is?" Buffy wondered.
"There are some demonic courts that might take the case, but I think it'd be a hard sell, even if you had the original and not this reproduction," Anya said. "Forget the lack of blood, it isn't even notarized."
"Not to mention Ms. Lopez's untimely demise," Giles said.
"She might still be around as a vampire," Willow speculated.
"She's never appeared on any camera footage I have access to," CyberWillow said.
While most of the results were dry documentation, occasional gems of weirdness like that were swimming around too, but nothing so far had been both incriminating and plausible. Even the outlandish stuff didn't have any indication Matt was connected to the Initiative, so it was looking like he was probably clear.
"I'm starting to get a little concerned," Xander said. He'd been ignoring the previous conversation and was sorting through some of the endless police documents. The rest of them had been fishing out everything else to look at, but Xander had more experience with those and was trying to make sense of them. "But it could be nothing, and it's definitely not a spy thing or even a demony thing."
"But you're still concerned," Buffy said worriedly.
"We all trust your judgement, if you think the matter deserves attention," Giles stated.
"A lot went down around Matt when he was working in San Francisco," Xander said. "Officer involved shootings especially, but also some big busts, undercover operations, other gang-related stuff."
"I'd think that'd mean he was more prepared for Sunnydale," Anya said flippantly.
"We don't actually get much people-on-people crime here," Xander said. "Which is one of the reasons it's hard for me to judge. But some of this speaks for itself, like his promotion to detective."
He shuffled through some of the stacks he'd created for the appropriate documents. "He joined the force there as an officer in 1986, and was promoted on August 25th of 1990. Four years as a uniform is pretty quick, but the real suspicious part is this. Issac Mendoza was shot dead in his own apartment during a drug bust on August 21st by Detective Aaron White. Supposedly White returned fire after being shot at when he kicked down the door. Matt was acting as his backup that day, the only other person on the scene. He confirmed the story."
"Is the timing really that weird though?" Buffy asked. "Maybe they just promoted him for handling himself well under pressure."
"That's not all of it," Xander said, then threw two near-identical papers on the coffee table. "Two ballistics reports for the same incident. Both by the same guy, Frank Rogers. One holds up the story, but the other has a bullet hole straight through the front door. In the story the front door was open already when the gunfight happened, the angle would be impossible."
"We should remember this spell has a habit of producing false results, sometimes with uncanny similarity to something that might have been real," Giles cautioned.
"The ballistics report without the contradictory evidence is the one filed in the state database," CyberWillow stated.
"So maybe this other one is just a weird artifact," Xander said.
"Or maybe that's the real one, but they changed it afterward to make the story line up." Willow grimaced. "Police corruption is a real problem, and we shouldn't ignore it. It wouldn't be right. But I don't want to believe Chief Matt could do something like that. He's such a nice guy!"
Xander shrugged helplessly. "I haven't gotten through nearly everything, but there's one more incident that might be related. It's suspected that Detective Aaron White was murdered by Terrence Lewis on December 4th, 1997. On December 7th, Terrence died of three GSWs to the chest, resisting arrest. In whose custody?"
"You wouldn't be all dramatic about it like this if it wasn't Matt's," Anya said. "I don't see what's wrong with that though, sounds like good old-fashioned vengeance to me."
"Well, I'm not saying I totally blame the guy, but it's not really how the cops are supposed to do things," Xander said. "And if the spell thought all this police paperwork was important? Maybe it's just the tip of the iceberg."
"We should keep investigating this," Willow said, resolved. "If only to clear his name."
"I agree that it's a serious issue, but I'm not so sure that pushing forward is wise," Giles said. "It brings us no further toward our original goal, and with CyberWillow watching, we can be assured that any misbehavior of that kind won't be repeated."
"He could be an accessory to murder though!" Willow said. "We have to find out! How can we keep on keeping on with him, waiting in suspense like this?"
"While these documents paint a concerning picture, they may also be lacking in context," Giles said. "We don't know the reasons he might have had for doing what he did, and any infighting now over old sins might leave us more vulnerable."
Vote: How do you handle the possibility Chief Matt Waters participated in significant police corruption in San Francisco?
[] Ignore it. There are a lot of people working with you that have troubled pasts, and as long as it stays in the past it isn't a problem now.
[] Question him directly. Go to Matt with your evidence and give him a chance to explain what it's all about.
[] Investigate him in secret. Use spoofed phone calls and possibly other means to try to put together more of the story. You can stunt if you have additional ideas.
