Jack Finn, alias Mr. One, was the very portrait of an ordinary man. Which made him a consummate spymaster.
He billed himself as a public relations and crisis management consultant. A fixer, in other words. He had spent two decades working in law firms and communications corporations before setting out to make a name for himself. Though a small player in the field, his website nonetheless boasted a portfolio of clients and sparkling testimonials. As an entrepreneur who provided his services on demand, there was small wonder that his work schedule was so fluid and his income so irregular.
His day job placed him into contact with the rich and powerful. Politicians, C-suite officers, lawyers, the true movers and shakers in Babylon. They came to him hat in hand, seeking his help to make problems go away. That gave him skin in their game. Those who fixed the problems of the mighty knew their deepest secrets. The more people he helped, the more they recommended him to their friends and family, the more secrets he amassed.
In public, he took supreme care to present himself as a secular. There were no atheists or agnostics in the world, not anymore, but a man could still choose which god to follow, or not at all. He made contacts with believers from every faction and none. He made no statements in public, he had no agenda but the client’s own, he was an empty vessel into which they could pour their confidences and their favors. He had no criminal record, he paid his taxes on time, he gave the authorities, mortal or otherwise, any reason to pry into his affairs. Those who persisted would find only a stone wall of silence, disguised as mountains of impeccable paperwork and careful legal dodges.
But those with eyes to see would find the cracks in the facade.
His openly-available biography glossed over the names of the companies he’d worked at before coming into his own. A careful scan of his tax records and bank transaction histories unmasked the names. They were all unremarkable, save for one little fact: every single of them was owned by shell companies, in turn linked to holding companies funded by the Seekers.
Deep penetrations of his former workplaces turned up a fascinating lack of information. He wasn’t on the payrolls, on internal memoranda, on external emails, on any electron ever emitted by his erstwhile employers. Sure, they could simply have shredded his records after he left them, but there would always be a trace, a link, a connection to the past.
There was none.
He maintained no contacts with his former colleagues. Not on social media, not in person, not anywhere else. He never appeared in their electronic memories: not in their gift records, their social networks, their messages.
He was a ghost.
Peter and Zen drilled into the cracks, piercing Finn’s shroud of secrecy to find the man beneath.
Finn had no office. When he wasn’t working from home, he did business from his gravcar, a luxury flying sedan. He never touched the controls, instead leaving that to his private driver. The driver did triple duty as a private investigator and bodyguard, but his personal security wasn’t bulletproof. Inside two days, the hackers had learned everything about him. Name, home address, weapons license, family members, and most importantly, his Seeker membership card.
Though Finn hobnobbed with the elite of society, he met with a very different set of people in between appointments. They were an eclectic bunch. Active-duty law enforcement, freelancers, gig workers, contractors, even a ghostwriter. All of them had two things in common.
One, none of them were the kind of people who would ever need a high-end fixer like himself.
Two, they were all part of Mr. One’s crew.
The same crew Yuri, Zen and Karim had torn through.
Every single one of them was dead, either during the blitz to rescue the Primate, or else during the final assault on the Cathedral. The Seekers, maybe even Finn himself, had used their influence to obfuscate the spider at the center of their web. So far as Babylon PD and the Public Security Bureau was concerned, the attack was an open case—and would remain so forever.
In the months after the failed hit on the cathedral, Finn had gone deep underground. He headed overseas and dropped out of sight. Two months ago, however, after the case had gone cold, he returned to Babylon and set up shop again. These days, though, he accepted no clients. He simply met people.
Cops. Contractors. Freelancers. And, occasionally, Speakers for the Seekers.
Whenever Finn met in public with his network, they masked their speech with coded phrases and innocuous references. Neither the Void Collective nor the Singularity Network could completely decipher their conversations. They spoke of sensitive matters only in private, only in environments Finn controlled, far from prying eyes and ears.
A private yacht. A high-security Faraday conference room. Or his safe house.
The Hex was among the first generation of arcologies built in Babylon. Combining residential, commercial and recreation spaces in a single structure, it had been hailed as a masterpiece of modern Babylonian architecture. It had garnered multiple awards over the years for its innovative design, incorporation of sustainability features, and integration of green energy technologies. It was the benchmark against which all future arcologies were compared.
It was a nightmare cast in glass and concrete.
Most arcologies were monolithic spires, fingers pointed accusingly at the silent heavens, or sprawling complexes of interconnected structures that writhed labyrinth-like across multiple city blocks. The Hex was neither. It was worse. Instead of a single skyscraper, or a neighborhood with a unified aesthetic, the Hex picked the worst of both worlds.
The basic building block was a pod. Six stories high, twelve units per floor, the walls were painted a flat white, the glass tinted against the sun. Scores of pods were stacked one atop the other at crazed angles, every pod deliberately misaligned from every other pod, a collection of mid-rises slapped together by a devil-haunted child to create a mockery of a skyscraper, arranged in a roughly hexagonal fashion. Some pods jutted out into thin air, precariously sandwiched between higher and lower pods; other pods haphazardly bridged neighboring wings at acute angles.
Staircases ran from the ground and up along blank walls to service common corridors. Irregularly angled spaces on the roofs of every pod hosted gardens with oddly-shaped lawns, lounges enclosed within many-pointed perimeters, recreation areas separated by blocks of back-to-back apartments. Upon the roofs of the highest pods, concrete blocks mimicked suites and penthouses, oriented out of alignment with the lesser units to face the forest surrounding the compound. Swimming pools and community gardens lurked under overhanging blocks. More stairs connected the rooftop spaces with nearby pods. Doors connected neighboring pods through interior walkways.
The whole compound was a chaotic congeries of cuboids and polyhedrons and hyperrectangles, the entire edifice seeming to shift and shimmer the longer a man stared at it, hinting at impossible shapes lurking in incomprehensible dimensions and openings into eldritch infinities.
“Looking at it makes my eyes hurt,” Zen muttered.
Yuri grunted in agreement. Its visage was a nest of knives scraping across his irises. Its very existence was an act of sacrilege against every school of architecture he was familiar with. Should it one day be declared an archdemon risen from some abyssal hell, or an invader from an alien realm far beyond the understanding of men, he would not be surprised in the slightest. He had no idea how humans could have designed it, never mind found it worthy of awards.
The Hex was technically a gated community. A head-high wall surrounded the enclave. An electric gate fed into the main road. Smaller gates opened into the sidewalks. Keycard readers controlled access in and out of the compound, reinforced by a single guardhouse at the main entrance.
Half a kilometer away, lying prone side by side on the rooftop of a more conventional skyscraper, Yuri and Zen observed the structure through high-powered binoculars. What he saw wasn’t encouraging.
“Security isn’t a problem,” Yuri said. “No dogs, no drones, and the guards barely step out of the guardhouse. The real problem is accessing the target.”
“You mean finding the target,” Zen replied.
Finn lived in Unit 04-08, Pod 3A, Green Wing. The address might as well be meaningless gibberish. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t locate the unit within the teeming hive of edges and angles.
“Where the hell does he live anyway?” Yuri muttered.
Karim’s voice floated through Yuri’s earbuds.
“I can talk you in.”
“Go ahead.”
“By eye, go to the southwest sector of the compound.”
Zooming out, Yuri saw two pods on the ground floor, arranged like a wedge. A third pod bridged the gap at the narrow end, joining the roofs together. At the other end of the further pod, a fourth pod hung from the edge of the roof, with nothing beneath it but a swimming pool. A fifth pod clamped the down on the second tier of pods, as though desperately preventing the unbalanced pod from plummeting into the water.
“Contact,” Yuri said.
“Go to the pod on the third stack.”
“Contact.”
“Go to Level Three, Side One, Window Two.”
“Lycan, there isn’t a main entrance or facing to that pod that I can recognize,” Yuri rebuffed gently. “There isn’t a Side One I can reference.”
Karim paused for a moment.
“Make Side One the side facing you.”
“Roger. Contact.”
Window Two was to the right of a staircase, semi-exposed to the elements. The stairs flowed down into the roof of the left-hand pod on the second tier, and fed up into an off-angled shed on the roof of the third-tier pod. Yet another pod was planted at the far end of the roof, deliberately positioned to divide the roof between a cramped sitting area and a tiny triangular observation deck.
“How did you find it?” Zen asked.
“I read the maps posted on the ground floor,” Karim replied.
Must be nice to have the ability to project your soul into the Aether.
“Can you confirm if the target is inside?” Yuri asked.
“Negative. The apartment has a powerful ward. I breach it, it’s going to set off alarms. It’s also the only warded apartment in the pod.”
“How do you want to insert?” Zen asked.
“Not from the ground. We don’t know the interior layout of the stairs and connecting corridors. Way too easy to get lost.”
“That leaves us with an air assault.”
“Yup,” Yuri said. “After that, we head down the stairs, breach the apartment, do what we have to do, then extract. In and out in five minutes flat.”
“Sounds easy enough,” Karim said.
Yuri laughed sardonically. Zen too. A moment later, Karim joined in.
