It was like one of those big jigsaw puzzles that require just one more piece for everything to fit together, or like a game of Jenga where one stick can make the whole tower fall down.

When Agent Martin sent that message to be picked up, it instantly piqued my interest.

I looked at President Garner's condition, and from lab results in his medical records, he had a stroke and went into a coma. It was suspicious, but he was not a young man, and time has taken its toll on his body. Besides, there was little we could do about it without creating a big diplomatic incident; he was also guarded around the clock by extensive security detail.

Yet, I can't help but blame myself for not trying something sooner, maybe certain events wouldn’t have happened… maybe. Anyway, I sent an empty transporter from the Missile silo to pick Agent Martin up. He almost had a heart attack when I opened the door a few feet in front of him. Understandably so, since he could not exactly see the craft before that. It didn't take him long to come aboard, in fact, once he got over his initial shock, he practically ran inside (and literally jumped into a seat).

The transporter was only a few miles in the air when several black SUVs, with dark tinted windows, converged on the place. He was right to be scared; the people who exited those cars were not there for a baking contest (unless there is some new way to bake a cake with automatic weapons).

Agent Martin was quiet, and I did not want to make him more nervous by talking to him; there was no pilot inside so he knew that the craft was remotely controlled, exposing him to the reality of sapient AI would be more than he could take. I was monitoring his vital signs and they were highly elevated.

As Michael advised (and by now a modus operandi for us), I scanned the hell out of him and discovered several trackers on his body. These were not off the shelf bugs, but highly sophisticated devices that would be very difficult to detect… on Earth. I had a few advantages and nanites made quick work of disabling them. Agent Martin was not the Trojan horse, which I was sure of, as the range of those tracking devices was not strong enough to transmit from orbit.

In the shortest possible time, the transporter brought him to the Ascension and he was standing before Michael.

When he started talking about how things were back home, I became concerned. I did notice some power plays and transfers when Philip Cain took the office, but that is normal when the new President takes the reins (it would seem those transfers and resignations were far more sinister than that). For me to be so clueless meant that those responsible were intentionally avoiding digital records.

Moreover, despite being able to listen to countless conversations by hacking digital devices, there is simply too much data to go through. Ares is doing his best, and several conspiracies were unearthed by his diligence, but humans are endlessly resourceful and imaginative when they want to keep something hidden.

Agent Martin gave Michael the memory card he took from the Oval Office, and he inserted it into a reader. I scanned the file and watched it on fast forward in its entirety, even before the video started to play on the holo-screen.

It was disturbing on so many levels. Not only for what was on it, but due to the fact that this was the missing piece of the puzzle we were searching for all along. If you think an AI cannot be pissed off, think again. I was upset mainly with myself for not connecting the dots a long time ago, but to think that the freaking leader of the ‘High Council’ was so high in the USA’s power hierarchy was… way out there, like a bad joke. He was the spider that spun his web so far it was almost unbelievable.

Well, a deep dive into the digital footprint of Philip Cain was in order, and I went into it like a fury. Collecting all that was publicly available and then breaking into all databases that were not. I must have broken every digital law known to man, but I did not care. Like a bloodhound on the scent of its prey, I followed all the leads and finally compiled the most extensive personal file of any individual... ever. (Seriously, I even got the results of all his Proctology exams… I was that thorough.)

I then dug into his family history, and… oh, boy, what a can of worms that was. To my surprise, their particular kind of cancer entered this continent with the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century, of all things. That's right, his lineage stretches to those people who ransacked the Mayan’s civilization, and the following generations never stopped with their ancestor's activities. They were bad to the bone, the lot of them.

The list of properties the Cain family owned was hard to imagine; they were easily at the top of the 1% of ultra-rich. Nevertheless, I suspected that that was only the tip of the iceberg; as leaders of the ‘High Council’ throughout the ages, their accumulated wealth must be immense.

I was looking for the possible location of that basement Philip Cain mentioned in his sociopathic conversation with President Garner (when he gloated after poisoning him). My search found the most likely location, a freaking castle the family built in the late 18th century. They owned a vast amount of land around it; I can only imagine how much influence over the centuries they had, to keep it intact. The building was a monster. As if each successive generation wanted to add to the building and show how much more exploitative they were than their predecessors.

Of course, I knew Michael would want to pay it a visit, and looking at his schedule, Philip Cain was currently in Geneva, Switzerland, attending some low-key peace summit. Simultaneously, Michael needed me to find a way to save President Garner.

The best plan I came up with was healing him by delivering medical nanites carried by miniaturized drones that looked like small insects. It was a technology I borrowed from a few startup companies, which were working on a way to mimic insect flight with miniaturized machines. It took some time to build them to ideal specifications and then to use them for the medical nanites’ delivery platform.

They delivered their payload to President Garner, without anyone being the wiser. Still, it would take a while for the nanites to make any significant changes. They were just a few and for a miraculous recovery, one needed access to a full AutoDoc.

Yet, most of my attention was occupied by Michael’s excursion into the heart of Philip Cain’s power (that freaking castle of his that I wanted to touch with a well-aimed Hammer).

They went to it and encountered relatively small resistance; I guess the best protection is if nobody knows there is something there to guard.

It took some doing, but they found the secret basement and all the wealth that was hidden inside. For all that, the most important thing was the data. Mister Cain was a busy little beaver and had scanned all records into digital format. It only made sense since some of them were so old they had started to disintegrate. (If only he knew that he was doing all that work for little old me.)

As soon as Pete plugged in the wireless dongle into the USB port on the computer rack, I started transferring all the data as fast as the connection would allow it. There wasn’t even a password on it or even a basic firewall. Then again, it was a closed system in a place he thought was the most protected in the world.

Gigabytes of data were streaming to me, and I used time dilation to skim through all of them. It was a history of madness that stretched over centuries. Every previous patriarch of the Cain family deserved to be executed several times over. The amount of suffering this family inflicted on the world was unprecedented; they were rotten to the core. Those who were not brutal enough were sent away with a changed name, as they were not deemed worthy enough to continue the family’s legacy of evil.

The most important thing was the current information, about the operations the ‘High Council’ was working on right now. The people they had under their control, the amounts of money they were making. It was as if Philip Cain was bragging how merciless he was to the journal’s future readers.

Michael read the entry about the poisoning of President Garner, the missile attack that killed our father, and the cream of the crop—the place where he was right now, and the meeting place of the ‘High Council’.

I closed my eyes and breathed out a great sigh of relief. All the pain, anger, and thirst for revenge that I held trapped in my soul, finally had a way out. A specific target that we searched for so long was in our sights.

My father’s murderers had a date with destiny, and there would be nothing in the world that could stop what was coming for them.