WildCats Version 3.0 #18

"Great Minds"

Senator Basil Hazeltine organizes a "special committee" in investigating Jack Marlowe and the Halo Corporation. Agent Wax catches wind of the committee's investigation while still posing as Agent Downs by hearing from a drunken department head, including learning from irate oil lobbyists and automakers who see Halo jeopardizing their revenue and economy. Wax calls and warns Marlowe about this and also informs him that the National Park Service's mainframe was hacked to find any incrimination on Marlowe - which they didn't - and about superpowered assassins which Wax fears that Marlowe's enemies will come after him.

In Athens, Agents Addison and Chandler start their baiting on the Coda by having the former disguising himself as an ambassador, the Coda's intended target.

Meanwhile, Marlowe shares the news of the government's repercussions to Edwin Dolby. Both Marlowe and Dolby understands the reasons the U.S. government fears Halo's technology, in which Marlowe will assure that his enemies will find him a more powerful opponent than they have ever encountered.

Marlowe teleports to the White House where he confronts the President in his bedroom. He tells the beleaguered President that he has teleported away his Secret Service detail and begins lecturing him that America is economically enslaved to the oil-based market and using his administration to continually moving toward a goal of a world hegemony by making military campaigns against supposed "terrorist threats" and so-called "despots" to secure control over oil supplies necessary to preserve his and his industrialist cohorts' stranglehold on the free world economy. As a result, mankind suffers from this ethical imbalance. Marlowe further states to the President that he may see him as an enemy only because his company is providing the alternative that conflicts with the President's political self-interests, and tells him that he is not his enemy and that he (the President) is far from untouchable. Thereafter, the President picks up a sudden phone call from the Secret Service, who frantically reports on their brief disappearance before noticing Marlowe's abrupt absence. Now clearly recognizing Marlowe as a force to be reckon with.