Gun control was a subject that had been debated into the ground. The interests tangled up in it were enormous, and the NRA was merely the visible target—behind it lay a web of stakeholders too thick to trace cleanly. Pull one thread and you could find yourself pulling on several others, and before long you were looking at people like Thea herself.
She owned so many weapons companies. That was not a technicality.
And Bruce Wayne's high-tech gear—where did he think the original components came from? He modified and refined, certainly, but someone had to engineer the base hardware. He was, in fact, one of the country's largest defense contractors.
The two arms dealers made eye contact across the room. They saw the same helpless resignation in each other's eyes.
Banning guns was not going to happen. They didn't care about the money—close the weapons factories today and ten new companies would open tomorrow. The industry employed too many people. You couldn't turn every weapons designer and factory worker out onto the docks to haul cargo; do that and you were halfway to a societal breakdown. Neither of them had any interest in that outcome.
Still, the idea had traction with the rest of the League. Even Superman—who generally believed in human freedom—conceded that unlimited freedom had a downside.
Thea gave Batman a look. This was the kind of decision that made enemies. Better for it to come from him.
Batman obliged without hesitation and shot the proposal down flat. Aquaman shrugged. Do what you like—my home isn't on land. Not my problem if you level it.
Total prohibition wasn't realistic. But a systematic survey of weapons of mass destruction was a different matter.
Civilian ingenuity had reached alarming heights. Cayden James—the obsessive hacker with a longstanding grudge against the Queen family—had built a small arsenal of high-yield improvised devices. Green Arrow had tried to arrest him several times and kept being outmaneuvered by his own caution, stymied every time by the threat of what those bombs could do.
Many villains who opposed the heroes seemed to have a genuine gift for explosives. The Joker was the most talented, but he was far from the only one. Whether they'd studied formally or taught themselves, the destructive potential couldn't be ignored.
Independent research teams had grown dangerously bold as well—willing to experiment with almost anything.
This latest incident was a case in point, and the root cause traced back to Batman—specifically, to a lab several degrees removed from his direct oversight. A few reckless young researchers, struck by the need for a particular data point, had decided they required a nuclear fission device for their experiment. Several reports were submitted, and—taking advantage of A.R.G.U.S.'s good working relationship with the League, and the personal goodwill attached to both Thea's name and Batman's—the supervising officer had approved the loan without much scrutiny, and in doing so triggered today's crisis.
A genuinely warm partnership between civilian and military institutions, touching in concept. In practice, neither organization's senior leadership had known anything about it until today, and people further down the chain had just... worked it out between themselves.
Thea suspected the A.R.G.U.S. contact might have assumed the request was coming from the League itself—otherwise it was hard to explain why they'd shipped something that dangerous in a single cargo truck with two drivers and no additional security.
She left the League to keep talking and went back to the White House. Her mother needed to know.
As it turned out, Thea had read the situation correctly. Amanda Waller was flown in by helicopter in the middle of the night, and when she heard the full account, the color drained from her face.
It hadn't been her order. Not Steve Trevor's either. Not Lyla's. The trail wound down through the organization until it ended at a mid-level field station director who had signed the transfer agreement.
"Do we not have an alert system? Can anyone access equipment of that classification? Where is our tiered confidentiality system? Is it being enforced strictly according to regulations? This time it was Central City—next time will it be the White House? The Pentagon?"
Moira's anger was controlled and pointed, delivered in a sequence of questions that each landed like a verdict. She had long been dissatisfied with A.R.G.U.S.'s tendency to operate beyond her oversight, and this was not merely a reprimand—it was a chance to insert her own people inside A.R.G.U.S.
If Thea hadn't been strong enough to intervene, Moira would have become the first president under whom a nuclear bomb detonated on American soil. If the bomb had gone off, millions of civilians would have died. A disaster on that scale demanded someone to answer for it—and that someone would have been her and Secretary Lane, possibly in prison. Three parts performance to seven parts genuine fury: Moira Queen was, in fact, very angry.
Going to sleep one night, waking up to a nuclear detonation. Was there anything more absurd?
Waller had absorbed a faceful of verbal tirade without flinching, but she wasn't without her own frustrations.
Intelligence organizations were never monolithic. Internal factions cut across each other in every direction. Senior military figures played these factions against one another to demonstrate control—Waller and Trevor had both been on the receiving end of that treatment more times than they could count, which had naturally produced a significant bloc of genuinely neutral operators in between.
The field station director responsible was one of those neutrals—and had, in his own estimation, been doing Waller a favor. Instead of currying favor, he had nearly caused a disaster.
"Find out who is responsible. I want the full report tomorrow morning." Moira dismissed Waller with a wave.
"Running this country is genuinely exhausting," Moira muttered once Waller was gone, rubbing her eyes. Thea moved behind her and began working on her shoulders.
For all her mother's complaints, the satisfaction was evident. Another president—any other president—might have watched this same sequence of events become an unmanageable catastrophe. Washington, Roosevelt—it wouldn't have mattered. Once a nuclear detonation actually occurred, there was no political response adequate to the scale of it.
Thea mentioned the gun control discussion in passing. Moira's reaction was not optimistic—anyone paying attention could see that the proliferation of civilian firearms was a major driver of crime, but nobody wanted to step into that minefield.
"We'll be careful on that front. But the proposal you raised—auditing high-risk materials, tiered classification of hazardous materials—that one we can run with." Moira's mind moved quickly; she had already identified where this gave her leverage.
The next morning, Thea accompanied her mother to the Pentagon.
The Vice President and Secretary Lane had been briefed in advance. The rest of the assembled generals had not, and they had no idea why the President had come to the Pentagon at all.
Moira had barely begun describing the previous night's events before the room erupted. Some obscure little public-interest environmental group with barely anyone in it had come within a hair of detonating a nuclear bomb on American soil!
The generals stared straight ahead in collective, silent horror. Moira's teleportation gem could save her life in an emergency—none of them had that option. They had no special protection. They lived in cities. Several of them had families in Central City.
"This is outrageous. A crime. Those people at A.R.G.U.S.—" One old general bit down on what he had actually wanted to say and substituted a marginally more appropriate word. The word he'd reached for first had been considerably more colorful.
He wasn't the angriest person in the room. No one wanted to be asleep—whether at home or at a mistress's place—and then simply not exist anymore. A quick death, perhaps. A painless one, certainly. But they did not want to die. Not even slightly.
Central City this time. Which city next? Their city? There was no way to know.