•••

Angel paused outside the main office, not sure he wanted to enter. He had been given an official summons by Cordelia, the self-appointed head of the 'investigate Wolfram & Hart' team. She, Fred and Xander had spent most of the past six weeks amassing information about the law firm's involvement in local and world politics and business matters. The only things that Angel, Wil and the others had been asked to do was go to various places and pick up prepackaged information—that they delivered straight to Cordelia. She took her role in this job very seriously.

As Angel stood in front of the door, weighing the likelihood that he could make it upstairs before Cordelia's enhanced nose detected him, Wil and Wesley showed up, having just exited Caritas. "She knows you're out here," Wesley said, urging Angel to enter with them. "You can't escape this." Angel knew he was right, so he followed the others inside. Oz and Gunn were already in the office, sitting in two of a set of chairs placed in rows, facing one wall. Cordelia had set up a screen and projection equipment against it, and a computer screen saver was currently being displayed.

"Great! Broodboy finally decided to come in," Cordelia bit out. She had known Angel was standing on the other side of the door, and it irked her. 'We've got a lot of information to cover, so we should get started, no?"

Xander switched off the lights, allowing the two remaining humans to see the screen better. He and Fred took seats near the front, on opposite sides of the row of chairs.

Cordelia turned off the screen saver, revealing a PowerPoint presentation. "Ok, we all know that Wolfram & Hart are up to their eyeballs in bad things. We also know that they've got us on their radar, and we're some of their favorite targets. But we also know that we aren't the only thing they're working on." She advanced past the title slide. The next picture was of Anthony Salis.

"This investigation started when I recognized the face of Anthony Salis, a candidate for a position on the city council and city prosecutor with multiple ties to Wolfram & Hart. He attended law school on a scholarship funded by them, and he consistently loses whenever he goes up against them in court." The next slide was a list of names and places.

"You've already been told about the various scholarships and organizations that Wolfram & Hart fund or own. What you may not know, however, is just how the law firm uses these connections." The next slide showed another list of names and places.

"See, what Wolfram & Hart is doing is grooming people to be loyal employees, right out of the womb. You might think from interacting with Lilah and Gavin that Wolfram & Hart is a bunch of high-class, snotty white people. The truth is, most of their admittedly white lawyers come from low-income areas. The law firm sets up philanthropies to improve public schools and provide college tuition money, all the while tracking selected people no matter where they go. For instance," She flipped a slide, "Person X was born in Detroit, on the 'wrong side of the tracks.' His elementary school was among the worst in the state, until he scored very high on an 'aptitude' test that Wolfram & Hart sponsored—a test we can't find a copy of no matter how hard we look. After that, the school suddenly won an 'improvement grant' from a dummy corporation. But that's not all. Person X moved from Detroit to Boston in the seventh grade. He moved into a similarly low-class area with a bad middle school—and then Bam! That school gets a grant and a bevy of new teachers. The high school he's slated to attend also starts getting improvements; now it's one of the best public college prep schools in the country."

The next slide was a bunch of numbers. "This shows how often Wolfram & Hart have repeated this process, both in the U.S. and abroad. They've got seventeen dummy corporations and charities set up to hide what they're doing, so all those people that get helped aren't all singing Wolfram & Hart's praises."

"Why wouldn’t they want that?" Angel asked.

Cordelia smiled. "How often do you hear Wolfram & Hart in the news? They don't want that kind of publicity. They'd rather be the quietly respected law firm—the one that everyone likes and no one investigates. What happens, though, is that all these people feel a great amount of loyalty for their benefactors—all of whom are really Wolfram & Hart."

"So they've got an army of lawyers—and probably other types too—that watch out for their interests," Wil summarized.

"You've got it. That's not conjecture either, buddy. When Wolfram & Hart wanted a new arena for the Lakers, the real estate contracts went through with no hitches, the city practically begged contractors to take hard-to-get building permits and nobody complained about the four thousand people who lost their homes. Of course, most of the owners of the Lakers are Wolfram & Hart clients," Cordelia explained. "And it just gets worse."

"You know we get visions all the time. We also help other people, the 'hopeless,' right? Do you want to know just how often we've inadvertently helped Wolfram & Hart?" Cordelia asked, flipping to another slide.

"I know we've done it a time or two," Wil replied hesitantly.

"More than you'd think. Sometimes those 'clients' off the street are dummies—they're leading us to cases that are problems for Wolfram & Hart clients, where the law firm doesn't want its shoes muddied by the nasty details of demon-killing. An assassin can always be traced back to the firm—there's a trail somewhere, no matter how obscure. But us? All it takes is one stupid person to come to us and we take care of it."

"What about the stupid person?" Wil asked.

"Actually, the stupid people I'm referring to are often legitimate employees of Wolfram & Hart's clients. The clients or the law firm subtly lead them toward using us, and then they do, and we clean up their messes. There's no good link between them and Wolfram & Hart—no money, no informant. Some of these cases are just bad situations, while others are actually Wolfram & Hart screw-ups," Cordelia continued. "Now for the conjecture part of our presentation."

"Why, oh why, is Wolfram & Hart doing this to us? From what Fred, Xander and I can see, it's to keep Wolfram & Hart's image clean," Cordelia said.

"Clean?" Angel squeaked. "Everyone knows they're demonic lawyers."

"So what? Everyone also knows that Lorne's a demonic club owner, and no one cares about that," Cordelia replied. "What I mean is that most people, demon or human, don't have issues with Wolfram & Hart because all they know is the 'good' law firm—the one that donates its time and money to charity and is always first to lend a hand to the city in need. What would happen if Wolfram & Hart started taking out contracts on troublemakers?" Cordelia continued to flip through slides, alternately showing where Wolfram & Hart's image was improved by certain situations, while Angel Investigations' public image plummeted.

"We're the unwitting heavy men of our worst enemies," Cordelia stated sharply. "We do the dirty work—the killing, slaying and shaking down, while Wolfram & Hart reaps the rewards. That opera house thingy? Cleaning up that act saved a Wolfram & Hart client millions. And when we aren't needed to clean something up, the law firm is really good at distracting us so we don't get in the way. Disneyland is, of course, a recent example. They lured the seers away from Angel and Wil, and then struck. The vamps were rightfully worried about us, but in the meantime they didn't catch the news about all those eraen demons torturing the innocent. As it turns out, those eraen demons were clients of Wolfram & Hart, who contracted for a mass feeding."

"It gets worse. They're learning to multitask. Remember back when Wil first showed up? Those kragrlange demons were set up to test your souls, true. They also kept us from hearing about three separate harvestings that went on that night. No, we didn't get visions about them—but we don't get visions about everything anyway. The thing is, if we hadn't been preoccupied with getting us straightened out, we would have heard from someone about what was going on."

"Lorne," Angel muttered.

"What?" Cordelia asked, annoyed at being interrupted.

"Lorne. He told me that we shouldn't lose contact with the community."

"He's right—but we did anyway, didn't we? No, we might not have picked up on the scope of their operation right away, but we might have managed to foil a few of their bigger plots. The mayor and most of the city councilmen have some sort of connection to Wolfram & Hart. The law firm doesn’t even have to bribe them—they think they're acting in the people's best interests," Cordelia said.

"But why?" Gunn asked. "I mean, yeah, there's some financial profit for their clients, but in the end we're good and they're bad."

Cordelia shook her head. "Not exactly. Well, we are good and they are bad, but it's not that simple. They may be bad, but they're not chaos. See, the white hats of Angel Investigations and the really, really black hats of Wolfram & Hart overlap in one key area—order. They're evil, but most of the badness they represent needs some sort of order to be bad. When stuff goes random, their clients suffer. That's where we come in. We love to clean things up, and we don't ever stop to think about the consequences, say, ten years down the road." The slide show was over, so she turned off the computer while Xander hit the lights. Meanwhile, Fred handed out huge packets of information to each of the investigators.

"What are we gonna do?" Gunn asked, staring at the folder he'd been given. It looked like a headache waiting to happen.

"Stop helping people?" Xander offered. "Not likely."

"It's a catch-22," Wil remarked. "We're damned if we do and damned if we don't. We, Angel and I, can't just stop helping. We have to keep on with this. Plus, there's no guarantee that your or Cordelia's visions can be taken away."

"Limiting ourselves to just the visions is a bad idea—fiscally and ethically," Fred added. "We can't stay afloat on just Lorne's rent and the pennies we squeeze out of vision victims. Besides, we do help people besides Wolfram & Hart's clients."

"But we can't keep doing their work for them," Oz offered. "Yeah, we're saving someone's life, but not all of Wolfram & Hart's clients are Lakers' owners. They represent murderers, and worse."

"He's right, you know," Cordelia agreed. "Who in here really wants to be the person who saved a mass murderer from the vengeance demon all set to do its job?"

Angel slumped down in his seat. Why couldn't this have been a simple prophecy? Compared to this, impending apocalypses were nothing. He'd rather face a demonic ascension, Sunnydale-style, than try to tease apart the ethics of helping versus fighting Wolfram & Hart. "I don't know," He said finally.

"This is difficult," Wesley remarked softly.

Gunn choked. "Difficult? That's like saying Dennis Rodman is having problems with his life-style."

"We could always make up a survey to give clients before we help them," Xander offered.

Cordelia snorted. "And how many young co-eds being chased by vampires are going to stop to fill out a survey on their connections to Wolfram & Hart?"

"Hey! It was just a thought," Xander replied defensively.

"We've already amassed a database of known connections—clients, former employees, all those students…" Fred added. "We can set up the database to flag any client of ours that matches up. Most of the visions are at least partially honest. Even if Wolfram & Hart is behind the attack, the victim is usually innocent."

Wil nodded. "We would help those anyway. I don't know. Maybe we should think about this for a while—avoid too much emotion."

"It's certainly sticky enough," Xander said. "I'm with you all on this one, though—we can't just stop helping."

"What we need to do is bring down that law firm!" Gunn said firmly.

"How?" Cordelia asked. "They're like a huge old oak tree."

"What?" Gunn asked. "You lost me, Delia."

"Oak trees put down deep roots," Cordelia said, waving her hands around. "Really deep roots. By the time they're big and old, those roots are everywhere. If you just pull the tree up, it takes a lot of the ground with it—and leaves a big hole and a lot of soil with no support. The next time it rains, whoosh! Erosion."

"What she's saying is that just taking out Wolfram & Hart all at once—even if it were possible—would leave a huge vacuum, on many levels," Wesley translated. "On the obvious level, there would be a shortage of lawyers in the city—they do handle normal people as well as demons, you know. On a more serious, but less visible level, they provide a great deal of structure and control for the demonic community, both here and elsewhere. With nothing to control those elements—we certainly cannot—they would run amok. But all that is beside the point. The firm is much bigger than anything we could tackle."

"You all sound like you're just giving up on fighting them," Gunn said suspiciously.

Wil shook his head. "No, but there is more than one way to defeat such an enemy. It is far better—both safer and more effective—to destroy the firm's foundation than to simply try to blast it from the surface. That's how termites work, if you'd like to continue with the Discovery Channel themes. What you want to do is like Cordelia's tree uprooting picture. There are more insidious ways to destroy something, though."

"You sound like you've got experience with that," Xander murmured.

Wil shrugged and looked at Angel. "We all have our strong points." They didn't need graphic details of how Spike had brought down several of Angelus' enemies using just such a method. It wasn't his trademark railroad spike, so it didn't make it into his chronicled history. The fact remained, though, that he knew how to be subtle if the situation called for that.

"Anyway, I agree with Wil—we should sleep on this," Cordelia said. "Those binders are just summaries of the information we found. We can discuss this again in a few days. I for one want a long day's sleep, and I'm sure Xander and Fred are in at least as bad a shape."