The first thing Josh did the next morning was drop by Jenn’s room on the infirmary floor. An odd sense of guilt gnawed at him as he looked at her sleeping peacefully, as if she had no memory of what’d happened to her the night before, while a nurse was typing away at a holocomp on the other side of the bed. But he knew it wasn’t his fault that the assassin had decided to contact him by such extreme means. He understood she wanted to stay untrackable, but he wasn’t convinced it ne-cessitated hacking people’s neural links just to give him a call.

Or maybe she truly did have no other way to contact him. Maybe she didn’t have a phone. Maybe that was why she’d felt the need to meet him face-to-face first.

A fragment of the memory of their elevator encounter crept into Josh’s mind. The way she stood ominously above him in the elevator shaft. The way the lighting cast her as nothing more than a silhouette until she leaned in close enough to reveal her identity. He still wasn’t sure whether she’d done so acci-dentally or deliberately. Though the way she’d asked him “What’s wrong?” gave him the impression of the latter.

Shortly, Josh snapped back into reality as he heard a hum of intrigue escape the nurse.

“Found something?” he asked while shifting his gaze from Jenn over to the nurse.

“Yeah, and it’s something I haven’t seen before,” the nurse replied, gesturing for Josh to come closer and take a look himself. He wasted no time obliging.

As he looked at what the nurse had come across in Jenn’s neural logs, he produced a hum of intrigue of his own, al-most identical to the one the nurse had let out. The latest dia-gnostic message, timestamped around the exact time Jenn had been attacked, showed but a long string of zeroes where it should normally display a clear error message. Just as what had been found in Miss Harady’s neural logs back when she had her “neural glitch”.

“This doesn’t make sense,” the nurse commented. “I mean corruption like this does happen sometimes, but it’s usual-ly random. This feels deliberate.”

“Yeah,” Josh muttered in response. “I’ve seen this once before.”

“Have you now?”

Josh nodded. “And I fear it’s gonna do something bad if we let it stick around. Can you delete it?”

“Yeah. Just need to find the ID. Easier said than done with the entry being corrupted, though.”

“I trust you’ll do your best either way.” The nurse had three hours – Josh hoped it’d be enough. Then he turned on his heels, preparing to leave and head for his next objective. “I have some other business to take care of. Give me a call if something comes up.”

“Will do,” the nurse hollered to Josh as he exited the infirmary room.

Just under two hours later, Josh parked the police car he had taken with Shinji in front of the DanariTek headquarters. The other car, with Devin and Goro in it, stopped in an almost parallel angle to theirs. They had about ten minutes to prepare for the arrival of the kidnappers, if the intel the assassin had given Josh was to be believed. But in a way, he had no reason to doubt her.

“How have you figured we’re going to handle this?” Shinji asked Josh as they exited the vehicle. Goro and Devin joined the two of them shortly.

“Goro and Devin will go in first to lead the evacuation,” Josh explained. “Get everyone except Martin Stokes out before the goons arrive. He’ll stay in as the bait. Then when they show up and storm the facility, we go in after them to take them down.”

“And you’re sure Stokes staying inside is crucial to the success of the plan?”

“Yeah. Use force if needed to keep him from sneaking out.” Addressed to Devin and Goro in particular, to which the two nodded affirmatively.

“So how did you know there’d be a kidnapping happen-ing here today?” asked Goro.

“An anonymous informant dropped me the intel,” Josh replied nonchalantly. A statement that wasn’t entirely false, but he did his best to sound like he was telling nothing but the truth. His colleagues seemed convinced, merely nodding in response.

Then he straightened his posture, a sign to the rest of the team that it was time to get busy. “Alright, crew. Let’s get to work,” he ordered, giving Goro and Devin the signal to enter the building. He and Shinji climbed back into one of the cars in the meantime.

“I hope your informant didn’t feed you a false lead,” Shinji commented while fiddling with a series of buttons on the car’s dashboard.

“They’ll be here. You’ll see.”

“How are you so confident?”

“I just see no reason to doubt the legitimacy of the leak.”

“Sounds awfully naive coming from the lead investi-gator,” Shinji replied with a hint of sarcasm to his tone, leaning back in his seat and pressing one more button. “We’re in the PA system. Ready when you are.”

Josh nodded and grabbed a microphone from the dash-board, then pressed a button on it to speak to the people in the facility through the PA system that Shinji had remotely taken over: “People of DanariTek, this is Officer Josh Heynes. There’s an incoming terrorist attack. We’ve sent two police officers into the building to lead evacuation efforts. Please follow their instructions. Proceed calmly to the nearest emergency exit. I re-peat: there’s an incoming terrorist attack. Proceed to the nearest emergency exit and follow instructions given by the officers in the building.” Then he released his finger from the button on the microphone and placed it back in its spot on the dashboard.

As they settled to wait for the arrival of the criminal gang, Shinji asked in a wish of confirmation: “So how do we handle the kidnappers? Shoot to kill?”

“Shoot to kill,” Josh reaffirmed.

“Did the informant say how many of them we can expect to show up?”

“No. But I’ll be surprised if there are more than five.”

Shinji nodded. “Five is a reasonable estimate for an operation of this kind.”

Maria listened to the emergency announcement from her office, already on her feet and in full-blown panic mode before it got to the part where it said to proceed calmly to an emergency exit. If there really were terrorists on the way, she preferred to be out of the building as soon as possible. Proceeding calmly was not an option. She wasted no time exiting her office and half-running towards where the nearest emergency exit would be – good thing she didn’t need to stop and look for the signs. Her photo-graphic memory guided her to it.

Eventually she turned to the hallway with the emergency exit door at the end of it, greeted by the sight of some of her colleagues – ones she didn’t know by name – already on the other side. “Hold the door for me!” she hollered to them, and they turned their gazes to her and obliged. Maria stopped to catch her breath once she was beyond the threshold.

While she was doing so, she heard the click of some-thing to her left. She looked to said direction and was greeted by the sight of a gun pointed at her. Or the entire group. Holding the gun was a figure wearing a mask in the vague shape of a skull, with a thin, cross-shaped window where the eyes would be. And it looked ready to shoot.

Another figure that appeared right then, also wearing a mask of the same description, clasped a cybernetic hand around the barrel of the gun and said in a robotic voice: “Hold your fire. We’re only here for Stokes.” A voice changer, had to be, in order to hide the identities of the attackers. The other figure put the gun down, a certain stiffness to the motion that looked like reluctance to Maria.

Then the masked men walked through the door Maria herself had gone through only a few seconds prior. No doubt to look for Martin. Her only hope was that they wouldn’t hurt him, as much as she resented the man herself. But she didn’t resent him enough to wish death upon him. She almost wanted to rush back in to find Martin and warn him about the goons, but she knew she’d be risking her own life if she did.

“What do they want with Martin?” asked one of her co-workers, a native Japanese woman that Maria estimated to be in her late 20s, in Jangl.

“No idea,” Maria replied.

“We should warn him,” suggested another coworker, this one a middle-aged black man, already digging his phone out.

“Yeah. We should,” Maria agreed.