RETROSPECT

 
Author: Notmanos
E-Mail: notmanos at yahoo dot com
Rating: R
Disclaimer:  The characters of Angel are owned by 20th Century Fox and Mutant Enemy; the
character of Wolverine is also owned by 20th Century Fox and Marvel Comics.  No copyright
infringement intended. I'm not making any money off of this, but if you'd like to be a patron of the
arts, I won't object. ;-)  Oh, and Bob and his bunch are all mine - keep your hands off!  

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He seemed reluctant to talk, but finally the man said, “She’s been shot. She needs help.”

It seemed to break a spell. As soon as they realized she was not a hostage, they started moving. He and Monie joined Steve’s team in swarming up towards them, and while the guy froze like might run in the opposite direction, he waited until Steve and Clay took her from him at least. “Where’s she been shot?” Steve barked, as he and Clay laid her out gently on a clean patch of snow.

“I dunno,” he said uselessly, stepping back from them. As Brent approached, he leveled his gun at the man’s chest, and barked, “Don’t you move, asshole.” The man gave him a surprised look, and briefly scowled, but didn’t move further.

“What the hell happened here?” Monie continued, aiming it at the man who called himself Logan. She had holstered her gun, though. “Are you shot?”

It seemed to take the guy a moment to process the question; he seemed startled by the noise and the people. “Nuh,’m okay.”

Monie scoffed, and gestured at his torn, bloody clothing. “Fuck you, macho man.”

As Molly joined the chaotic scrum, Brent was startled by movement, as Lily came to and weakly slapped at Steve’s hand as he tried to unzip her parka. “-bring me out into the fucking snow -” she grumbled, partially opening her eyes, They were glassy, and looked shot through with red, as if her blood vessels had burst en masse. She looked just barely conscious, and only marginally aware of everyone around her.

“Where have you been shot, love?” Molly asked, crouching down and grabbing her hand.

She huffed a breath of pure white air. “Shoulder, side … maybe leg and back, I’m not sure.”

“Can you feel you arms and legs?”

“Fuck yeah. Wish I didn’t.” she attempted to look around, but Brent had the sick feeling she wasn’t really seeing much; her eyes seemed to roll, unable to focus on anything specific. “Logan here?”

He almost came closer, but Brent waggled his gun to remind him he was covered. He scowled at him once more, and said, “Yeah.”

“Tell ‘em bud, just don’t stand there,” she said, as Molly seemed to take her pulse.

Logan hesitated and scratched his cheek, making dried blood flake off, and looked down at his feet like a little boy before he muttered, “One of them got away, headin’ hard to the Southeast, on the other side of the trees.”

“One of them?” Monie repeated. “One of the gunmen?”

Logan just nodded.

“I’ll go get ‘im,” Monie said, slogging back to her snowmobile as quickly as possible.

Brent wanted to come with her, but knew he couldn’t. There was this little manner of Logan to take care of. He glared at him, and Lily coughed, the sound distressingly liquid. “Brent, don’t you dare arrest him,” Lily said, and he glanced down, sure she was

Looking at him. But she wasn’t; Molly was checking her eyes. The Chief was just guessing. Damn - was he that predictable? “He saved my life, and he showed me the drugs in the cabin.”

“Drugs in the cabin?” He repeated, not sure he heard her right.

“Old Man Hansen’s place?” Steve remarked, sounding puzzled. “Since when does that old coot do drugs?”

“They’ve been storin’ stuff there,” she told him, her voice sounding distressingly faint. “You’ll see it, it’s -” Her voice died, just like that.

“Lily?” Molly said, patting her hand. “Lily, can you hear me?” Acid churned in his stomach, but he knew Molly wouldn’t ask if she could hear her if Lily was dead. “She’s out again,” Molly said, her voice taking on a steely, professional tone as she reached into her pocket and pulled out her car keys. She tossed them up at Brent, who just barely caught them. “You drive - boys, help me get her in the back of my truck. If I can stabilize her we’ll need to head to the hospital in Winterbrook.” The wind had come up just then, and nearly tore her voice away in the howl, even from this limited distance.

“But I can’t drive,” he told her, as much as it pained him. He would have rather stuck by Lily, but the guy was a material witness at the very least; he had no intention of letting him go anywhere. “I have to-” Brent stopped as soon as he looked up.

Logan was gone.

 

 

10

 

British Columbia-Present Day

 

 

 

Logan walked into a room in the mansion he had never seen before.

It was decked out in the gold and red décor of a garish Chinese restaurant, and the room was mostly filled by a long mahogany table, around which several people sat in matching chairs.

Dead people.

There was food laid out of the table, but an odd mélange of tastes and cuisines - steaming bowls of mashed potatoes sat near a lacquer tray of sashimi, while a quart of strawberry ice cream melted slowly beside a rack of shish kebabs and a bubbling pot of paella. Xia sat at the head of the table, eating toast with a fork, while Tom, sitting to her left, ate a fajita with a spoon. Leonie sat on Xia’s right, eating chocolate mousse from a crystal goblet, while Mariko sat beside her, picking pepperoni off a slice of pizza, while Lily, seated beside her, sipped an Irish coffee. Sitting apart from them all, at the very end of the extremely long table, was Yasha, with a white plate full of blood in front of her. She looked up at him as he entered the room, and her almond shaped eyes were vampire yellow, but the rest of her face hadn’t changed - it was like a transition stuck in the middle.

Since she was the only one who seemed to acknowledge his presence, he asked her, “What is this?”

Her gaze was level, inscrutable. “Feasting for the dead is common in many cultures.”

Oh, how cryptic. It even sounded like Yasha. “Yeah, for the dead. You all are dead. Do you eat?”

Her gaze almost felt like a physical thing, pressing against him. “The clues are there. Put them together.”

He took a good look around the room, and saw that one of the chairs had morphed into Cressida, who was helping herself to a beer. Mutant Spike and Reaper were huddled side by side, speaking in hushed tones and sharing a grape Popsicle, while Shrike looked on enviously. Stryker was bound and gagged in his chair, not eating, but blood from his slashed throat was starting to spread across the dark wood towards the oasis of food in the center. No one noticed. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

She didn’t seem surprised; even in the afterlife, she was implacable. “We all have our secrets, yojimbo. The thing that is here is your answer, and the thing that is not is your second one.”

He shook his head, as if trying to clear it, and stared at her anew. “Knock off the riddles, okay? Just give me one straight fucking fact. What answer is here? To what?”

Stryker’s blood was now creeping towards her end of the table, and she looked down at it, noticing. She reached out and touched it, scooping some up in her cupped hand, and she poured it on her plate. “Three dragons,” she said, then licked the palm of her hand.

The sense that he was no longer alone made Logan wake up and tense, ready to fight, but he realized, once he opened his eyes, he was in a place to posh to fight in.

“Oh, Logan, I’m sorry,” Tagawa said. He was standing about a foot away from the door he must have just come in. He was dressed neatly in a crisp gray linen suit with a white shirt and no tie, looking as if he was about to go have lunch on the veranda. If the change of attire wasn’t enough of a tip off, there was a mild golden light spilling in from the window wall - it was morning. “I was trying to sneak in and grab the beer can.”

Morning, and he had fallen asleep. Shit.

He sat up, feeling like a complete ass, which was typical really. That strange dream was still nagging at the back of his mind … was that a genuine dream? Something else? A little of several things? Weird. But it was always weird when he had a genuine dream that didn’t involve his warped past. “Ah fuck, I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Tagawa sounded genuinely puzzled. “I’m sorry you slept on the couch. I have a spare room.”

Logan shook his head, and noticed the beer can on the floor, beside his foot. At least he had drank the whole thing before nodding off, and didn’t spill any on his carpets. “So what did I miss?” He asked, dry washing his face.

“Well, the lab returned some results, although they’re just tentative.”

“Already?” He then glanced at the window once more, and realized the sun was rather high in the sky. “Oh, wait. It’s afternoon, isn’t it?”

“Afraid so.”

“Shit.” After running a hand through his hair, and figuring it couldn’t get more messy, asked, “What did the report say?”

“I didn’t really read it; I left it for you. It’s in the kitchen.”

He briefly wondered why the hell he left it in the kitchen, then figured why the hell not? As good a place as any.

After a brief stop in a bathroom a hell of a lot cleaner than many of the motels he had stayed in, Logan met Tagawa in the kitchen, where the older man was fiddling with his microwave. It was a large, open kitchen of highly polished cherry wood and a large bay window looking out on an elegant garden. The color of the wood reminded him somewhat of the table in his dream, and the smell of food made his stomach both growl and lurch - was it an omen of some sort? Had Bob thrown in some prescient bells and whistles for him?

The middle of the kitchen was taken up by a breakfast bar with genuine red leather and chrome stools that were probably salved from a closed diner, and as he took a seat, Tagawa slid two things towards him: a can of beer, and a manila folder. “think I’ll need it?” He wondered, with a slight smirk.

Tagawa just shrugged. “I just had a feeling beer is to you what coffee is to me.”

Did the insights ever stop with this man? He cracked open the beer, and then cracked open the folder. The first page was filled with graphs, chemical structure analysis, names with no less than twelve syllables, but finally he flipped to a “synopsis” page that reeked of toner. “Dentine, keratin, calcium,” Logan read aloud, trying to puzzle it out. “The dart was bone?”

Tagawa removed a bowl from the microwave, and frowned as he thought it over. “Is dentine and keratin in bones?”

“No. Dentine’s stuff in your teeth - and I assume they mean that and not the gum - and hair is made of keratin.” Logan glowered at the paper, as if trying to make it cough up its secrets, and then noticed Tagawa had shoved the great smelling black bowl towards him. “What is this?” He asked, although he knew by the smell it was some kind of Chinese food.

“Mongolian beef rice bowl,” Tagawa said, taking a stool on the opposite side of the bar. “You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”

Logan shook his head. “Prob’ly should be, but no.” Logan then noticed the red silk wrapped chopsticks sitting on the breakfast bar, and glanced up at Tagawa suspiciously. “You don’t hafta feed me, ya know.”

His brown eyes widened slightly. “What kind of host would I be if I didn’t?”

Maybe he didn’t adhere to many Japanese customs anymore, but that one was firmly in place. He dipped his head, and said, “Thanks. But how d’ya know I can use chopsticks?”

“Would you prefer a fork?”

“No, I just wondered.”

“I didn’t know, I just knew you spoke the language quite ably, and seemed aware of our customs. I just assumed you had spent some time in my former homeland.”

Tagawa’s gaze was as mildly curious yet aloof as always, and Logan realized he was trying to figure out if he was the “mononoke” Logan that he’d heard mentioned in Yakuza circles. Had he decided one way or another, and did he care? Logan didn’t really know, and figured he didn’t care what he thought, as long as he didn’t make an issue out of it. He unrolled the chopsticks and picked them up with his right hand, easily picking up a slice of beef and bringing it to his mouth as he continued to read the synopsis page. The beef was really good, and the sauce had a nice kick of peppers - his nose was going to start running any minute now. “This is really good,” he admitted. “Don’t tell me you can cook too.”

Tagawa gave him a serene smile that accentuated his crow’s feet, but didn’t make him any less dignified. “I could build a walking mechanical dinosaur out of parts scrounged from a Radio Shack dumpster, but I can’t make a waffle without causing a four alarm fire. I know a very good deli that is willing to deliver food to a rich old coot who tips reasonably well.”

“Does anyone buy that “coot” line?”

“You’d be surprised,” he replied, with a sly smile.

Logan helped himself to a few more bites as he finished scanning the page. The initial analysis of the poison revealed it to be something akin to ricin. He scanned the information repeatedly, wondering what he was missing, and only belated realized he’d eaten half the bowl already. Well, he was hungry, and the deli made good stuff. “Okay, that dart - or whatever it was - was made of some weird hybrid natural material; the poison on it has some chemical similarities to ricin, but is even more lethal.”

“Is that possible?”

“According to your tech guys, yeah.”

Tagawa tapped his fingers on the bar top as he thought. “I wonder if there’s anyone on the mercenary market who uses darts. Many of them specialize; I could make discreet inquiries.”

Logan raised an eyebrow at him. “It scares me that you know the mercenary world so well.”

He shrugged a single, slender shoulder. “My family were Yakuza, Logan. Do I have to tell you no one leaves them? I know the mercenary market because it is in my interest to do so.”

Logan straightened slightly as he got Tagawa’s message: he knew the underworld because parts of the underworld had been gunning for him. He may have been out of it, but he got underworlders not beholden to the Yakuza to protect him, run interference … or even more. The word “canny” had probably been invented to describe him. “You got guts, Tagawa.”

He chuckled, and said, “Tony, please. If I am to call you by your first name, you must call me by mine.”

Logan almost commented on the first name thing, but didn’t - that could have been Tagawa on a fishing expedition. Besides, Tony wasn’t his first name either - it was a nickname. “You can if ya want, but why would Stoff farm this out? There’s no fucking way he had the cash.”

“Stoff?”

He made a dismissive gesture with his free left hand. “The main suspect, who had the nerve to die before the murder.” Logan started to flip back and forth between the pages, but made himself stop. What magical thing was he looking for? A big sign saying “Here’s your culprit - he done it” ? It was a natural dart, made of materials that didn’t necessarily appear together naturally, with a natural poison that was a more lethal variant of one of the most deadly poisons known to man. His brain kept insisting there was something here, but wasn’t coughing it up.

Then it finally hit him. "John Doe."

Tagawa folded his hands together on the bar top. "I beg your pardon?"

"The killer signed the card "John Doe", but it may not have simply been a taunt - it may have been a clue. Maybe this isn't about Stoff, but about him." In a way, it didn't make sense, but then again, it was also perfectly reasonable. Shit. "Do you have a phone I could use?"

"I have several. Would you like my cell?" He asked, reaching into his jacket pocket.

"No - a land line is more secure." Well, it was. Sometimes just by flipping the dial on your radio you could pick up cell phone conversations; it wasn't that hard to intercept wireless. But a land line had to be either deliberately tapped or a party line to be picked up by anyone else.

Tagawa smiled at the comment. "You sound like a bodyguard. There's a phone in the hall, on a side table."

"Thanks."

"Does this mean you've found your answer?"

Logan sighed as he stood, not sure how to respond to that. "I think I'm close, yeah."

But the more he thought about it, the more he realized he never should have gotten Tagawa involved.

 

***

 

It seemed like every major city had a used bookshop like this one; haphazard shelves full to bursting with books, mostly cheap, mass market paperbacks, with comfy if homely chairs for patrons to sit in while they sampled a new find, and maybe a cat or two wandering the aisles or sleeping on a high shelf, looking at you like you were invading their privacy. These places always smelled faintly of mold and paper slowly rotting away, deteriorating in sunlight, humidity, and time.

This one had a pudgy orange and white cat looking down at him from the one empty spot on a very high shelf as he pretended to peruse the titles, waiting for Brent to appear. Well, at first he pretended. But Logan found some interesting titles between all the Steels and Rices and Grishams that made him pause. For example, stuffed between dog eared copies of "The Other Side of Midnight" and "The Thief of Time" was an old leather bound copy of "Call Of The Wild". The binding was stitching, not glue, so the parchment thin pages were almost falling out, but Logan found himself marveling at it. They didn't make books like that anymore, if they ever did beyond specialty orders. And Jack London may have been kind of a dick, but this book was a classic.

(How did he know Jack London was a dick? And when had he ever read this book?)

Confusion aside, he decided he'd have to buy it. Maybe he could bring it back to the mansion, add it to the communal library. It was a silly, stupid idea, and yet that spurred him on to look for more books that the Xavier library probably didn't have, but should have had.

Shelf scanning, he found a book of obscure Pablo Neruda poems, a former coffee table book discussing the great surrealists, with full color examples of the great works, and a classic Japanese mystery novel that he had no idea had ever been translated into English. Belatedly did it occur to him he was losing the plot - he had told Brent to meet him here because bookstores were always good public meeting places: you rarely encountered the bad guys here, and nobody really thought anything about a person entering a building so harmless.

(Why did this seem familiar somehow? When had he formulated that "bookstore" theory?)

Every time the brass bell over the door jingled, signifying an entrance or exit, he would subtly peek around the corner, and see if it was the cop. Finally it was, but Logan didn't point himself out - he stayed in one place, pretending to look for more treasures among the trash (ooh, Samuel Beckett), waiting for Brent to find him.

Inevitably he did, and played his part to perfection, casually strolling up the aisle, pretending to scan the shelves himself. Although dressed casually in a white shirt and chinos under his ubiquitous London Fog trench coat, everything about him screamed "cop" - after a while, you became your job too indelibly to ever be separated from it. "Never fancied you as a bibliophile," he admitted quietly, as he came to stop right next to him. They were standing shoulder to shoulder, both pretending to scour the same shelf.

"I'm an illiterate, is that it?"

"No, just weird. So has your contact come through for you?" They both pitched their voices low, library quiet, but in a way it seemed silly. The cashier was watching a portable t.v., and while the volume was low, you could still hear the natter of talking heads on a news show, save for when outside traffic noise drowned it out.

"In a way. Tell me, did you ever solve that John Doe case? That one you thought I was guilty of?"

Brent looked at him sharply, like this was a conversational one eighty he had not been expecting. "No, why? We figured he was in with the drug gang, but we never got a positive i.d. on the guy. We never got one on you either. We entered his statistics and mug shots into the national missing persons database, in case a match ever turned up, but none did."

That should have struck him as curious, but why would it? In spite of what books, movies, and television would tell you, some crimes did go unsolved; some people simply slipped through the cracks of the world and disappeared, un-remarked and so quickly forgotten it was clear there had been no one to remember them in the first place. And Logan knew that well, because he was one of those people; he was also one of those crimes, technically unsolved, and always un-avenged. "What about the murder weapon? Did you ever find that?"

Brent nodded, pulling down a dog eared copy of "The Hitch-Hiker‘s Guide To The Galaxy" from the middle shelf. "Yeah. The guy Lily killed had a weird ass military knife on 'im. It was made of some super tough alloy that always remained sharp; to demonstrate, the coroner stabbed it through a cement wall - it cut through it as cleanly as butter, and not only was it undamaged, but still sharp. It was un-fucking-believable. No wonder it cut through that guy's ribs like there was nothing there."

"Adamantium," Logan sighed, feeling a gnawing in his gut that had nothing to do with the hot peppers from the Mongolian beef. "The metal is called adamantium."

Brent gave him a sidelong glance, rifling through the paperback. "How d'ya know that?"

"Let's just say I have an intimate familiarity with it. Do you know how these guys got such a knife? They can't be on the market."

He stared at him like he wanted to ask more questions about how he knew of adamantium, but seemed to understand that Logan wasn't going to give him what he wanted, no matter the third degree. "An army supply depot was ripped off about a week before the incident, but that’s all we ever learned: they never told us what equipment was taken or how much. But we figured the night vision goggles, the rifles, the knives, all had to be from the army stash. Monie always felt that they got away with top secret stuff, so that’s why they never gave us a full inventory, but she loved her conspiracy theories. I figured it was just the military looking down their noses at us again.”

The final penny dropped. Oh, those stupid bastards - they ripped off equipment bound for the Organization. They were so dead it wasn’t funny.

Nor were they the only ones bound to die.

“Go back to work, Brent, and close Lily’s case.”

This time he turned to face him, giving him the full power of his glare. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me; do it. And maybe put in some overtime tonight, stay around your fellow cops as long as possible, and if you have any routines, break them.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? What is going on?”

“You don’t wanna know.”

Brent’s glare turned into a hard glower. Couldn’t take the cop out of the man. “If you don’t tell me what you know, I’ll take you in for obstructing justice, and whatever else I can throw against the wall and make stick. So tell me -”

“Tell you? And get you killed too?” He snapped. “Look, your friend was right - there’s a big conspiracy theory here. Stoff and his moron buddies saw something they shouldn’t have, so someone is cleaning up the loose ends.”

The expression on his face clearly said ‘bullshit’. “Why the fuck now?”

“I dunno; that’s the one piece of the puzzle I haven’t figured out yet.”

Brent’s look could have set fire to the shelves. “Why Lily? She wasn’t in Stoff’s gang.”

“No, but I’m sure once they got Stoff to talk - and I’m sure they did - they must have feared Lily knew too much.”

He threw up his hands in disgust. “Too much? About what?!”

Logan grimaced and looked away, at the paperbacks on the lower shelves (hey, “Shooting At Midnight” - that was a pretty good book), trying to think of something he could tell Brent that would appease him, make him drop this and go away. But he had nothing but the truth, which gnawed in his gut and made him close his eyes and try and wish it away. It didn’t work; it never did.

With a sigh of surrender, Logan admitted miserably, “Me.”

 

11

 

 

British Columbia - 16 Years Ago

 

At first, Lily had no idea what woke her up.

It was pitch black, with only a little light from the safety lights in the parking lot bleeding through the blind slats. It didn’t sound very busy either outside or in the halls, so she guessed it was very late at night - maybe two, three in the morning. Her meds were still good; they wrapped her in a warm blanket of forgiving numbness, although she got the sense they were starting to wear thin; in an hour or two, she’d be desperate for another dose or three. But while it lasted, it was very pleasant.

She could feel herself floating away again, drifting off, but then she realized there was someone sitting in the chair against the wall, and as her eyes adjusted, she realized the silhouette was all wrong for one of her people. And all the same, it was a familiar shadow. “Hey Logan, did you finally show up for medical treatment?”

She heard him shift uncomfortably, sit forward in his chair. “Nuh. ‘m okay.” His voice was still too soft, but not quite as tentative as before. Maybe he was finally getting used to the sound of his own voice.

“How can you be okay? You got shot several times, like me. If you’re afraid of something, the treatment’s great around here - good drugs. “

“If I wasn’t okay, I’d be dead by now.”

Oh, yeah, that was a point. How long had she been here? The problem with painkillers was they could play havoc with your short term memory. “I guess so. Tell me you went somewhere. You didn’t treat yourself, did you?”

There was a long pause before the word “No,” floated out of the darkness. His peaked hair made interesting shadows; they looked like stubby horns, or perhaps ears (Catman strikes again).

“You were hurt - you can’t tell me you weren’t.” If silence could be deemed sullen, this was. “Why are you here if not for that?” But as the silence dragged on, she realized with a suddenness that would have been brutal, had she not been as stoned as a frat boy, that he was here to check on her. It was sweet, in a twisted sort of way. If she hadn’t gone after him, she wouldn’t be in this stupid hospital bed, with four bullet wounds to show for it. (But what a story she had to lord over all the other cops - shot four times, walked away. Well, limped. Was carried. She could leave that last bit out.) Maybe he knew that; maybe that’s why he was checking up on her.

“Did they get the guy?” He finally asked, breaking the silence. “The one that got away?”

“Stoff? Oh yeah; Stenz ran him down. Literally in fact. He claimed she deliberately ran his snowmobile into a tree, and caused him to break a leg, but she claimed in that storm, she was lucky not to run into a tree herself.”

“What d’you think?”

“I think he was lucky to get off with just a broken leg.” Probably Steve’s sudden appearance, to see if she needed help, kept Monie from jumping up and down on his head. “He’ll be goin’ up the river for some time. Ellison’s seeing if he can’t tie him or his group in some way to the death of a John Doe we discovered recently. It may be difficult since all his compatriots are dead, and we can‘t challenge his alibi.” According to the report she had glanced at, there were four other men found, not including the one she had divested of his brains - one of them was a local, Michael Stiles, which pretty much explained their appearance in this burgh. The four had been killed quickly, with a brutal efficiency: two broken necks, two staved in skulls, as if they had been rammed with bone shattering force into trees, pummeled with a heavy object, or fed their rifles butts at high velocity. When asked to explain their deaths, she claimed not to remember much of the evening after the shoot out with John Tarkin (the man she had killed). No one suspected her, but no one understood what the hell had happened; most of the dead men were still clutching their guns. Who the hell could have snuck up on them and killed them with bare hands or brute force?

Brent suspected it was Logan, but she refused to name him. She wasn’t sure how she felt about what he did, although there wasn’t an attorney in the land that couldn’t get him an acquittal based on a self-defense; he wasn’t even armed. Honestly, she didn’t want to know how he did what he did, or how he could do such a thing.

According to the coroner’s report, it looked like all the men died within a five minute period, probably more like four. If that was true, Logan was superhuman: faster, stronger … and impossibly lethal. She wondered if anyone even knew he was in the hospital. She bet he creeped in like a low lying fog.

She sighed, scratching her shoulder idly (the stitches itched, when they didn’t hurt like a fucking nightmare), and asked, for what seemed the thousandth time, “Are you finally gonna tell me who you are, Logan? Or should I guess?”


 

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