June 19, 2058

Downtown Neighborhood

Regina, Algonkian-Manitou Council

~~~

Leon felt the familiar wave of vertigo hit him as he jacked out of the Matrix and back into the normal world. Sylvia's hand steadied him as Leon leaned against the cyberterminal he had jacked into, and eventually Leon's breathing returned to normal.

"Cameras are out and their security is probably chasing ghosts. Get this truck in gear, we're on the clock."

The two hopped in a beat-up truck. Sylvia worked its arcane stick shift and got it into motion, gunning it down side streets to get to their destination. Leon put on his woolen mask, checked Sylvia's to make sure it looked good and showed nothing, and mulled over the plan.

After finishing up a two-day escort run (driving some nervous techhead to Thunder Bay, who Leon suspected was someone fleeing a career in the corporate world), Leon and Sylvia had returned to Regina to prepare themselves for the hit on Koki Ishimura. Brandon had stayed to guard their property, where Kenta had sent them the 20,000 nuyen advance payment, as well as the very important house blueprints, security measures, and further details for their target.

Leon, Brandon, and Sylvia had mulled over the data for a day and kicked around a few ideas. Eventually, Leon settled on a risky plan with a couple layers to it, one that was not their typical style, and one that could get Leon and Sylvia killed. But it was the only way.

Normally for any competent shadowrunner, the killing part of a contract killing was the easy part. The devil was in doing it without eventually getting arrested or killed yourself in response. This was especially complicated for Leon, because the Council was policed by the regional security company known as Long Arms, led by its hardass CEO/police chief David Longmiles. Longmiles was a law and order type who hated shadowrunners in general, and Leon in particular. If he could, Longmiles would've had Leon executed for every crime that existed in the local lawbook, but the three chiefs controlling the Council needed Leon for their own ends, and kept Longmiles at arm's length. Still, nothing was guaranteed, and if there was evidence tying Leon to something really bad, the chiefs might stand down and let Longmiles have him.

Going in and doing the job like a proper professional would have Longmiles all over him, as proper professionals were in short supply in the Council. Sniping or a careful break & enter with no evidence left behind would stand out. Therefore, Leon decided to impersonate an amateur and include a couple layers of deception. On the surface, Leon and Sylvia would simply break into his house wearing typical full-body burglar gear, kill Ishimura with a borrowed Streetline Special hold-out pistol, do a poor and panicked-looking job ransacking the place, and escape in their truck, leaving it at a chop shop where it would be re-painted and re-plated as they made their getaway in a second vehicle.

One layer of deception to the plan was that Leon had been decking into the Matrix, and carefully raided the security system that watched over Ishimura's house and the rest of the surrounding neighborhood. Leon was an average to above-average decker, but had a stellar Fairlight Excalibur cyberdeck with many of the best anti-ice programs out there, and some insider access codes from a friendly local decker known by his handle "OddOneIn". The local security group, a shoddy outfit known as BarrierSafe Security Systems, was not ready for Leon, who swiped confidential files from datastores, turned off slave modules that controlled various pieces of equipment, and crashed a CPU before leaving. Leon's raids were well-disguised, as no one at BarrierSafe even knew they were being hit by a decker, and assumed it was random outages or technical glitches. He had hit them three times this week, then a fourth time today, where he disabled most of the cameras in the neighborhood. Notably, he disabled cameras along the planned getaway route, but left a few houses off to the opposite side alone, as well as leaving Ishimura's cameras untouched.

This led to the second layer of the plan: Leon wanted to be seen by Ishimura's house cameras. The reason being that Sylvia would use a high-level masking illusion spell, one that she mastered while trying to finetune her Invisibility spell. This masking spell would change the appearance of the spellcasting targets, but did so in a way that could even fool heat-sensing cameras (which normal Invisibility and disguise techniques could not fool). So Sylvia, who was about 5 foot 10 inches tall, would disguise herself as a 5 foot 4 person with a different physique using this spell. Leon, who was around an even 6 feet, would be disguised as a slightly more muscular person who was 6 foot 4.

With any luck, Longmiles would see two amateurs on camera that didn't physically resemble Leon and Sylvia, and would have no concrete proof that Leon was involved, except for his usual hysterical accusations. If Long Arms suspected decker involvement, they'd dismiss it due to the fact Ishimura's cameras and maglocks were left on, as well as the fact that other crimes (hopefully) weren't occurring during the other camera outages.

Ideally, the murder would be attributed to a phantom B&E couple, Kenta would have his mole dead in a fashion that didn't point to Yokogawa, Ishimura would be buried with a full pension and life insurance given to his wife, and Leon would get paid enough to erase several debts he had been trying to shed.

Sylvia and Leon arrived in an alley a block behind the house, parked the truck haphazardly, and then Sylvia cast the illusion spells on both of them. Sylvia could walk forward and hold a gun while maintaining the magic, but that was about it for her fine motor functions, so it was up to Leon to do the rest.

Leon walked up to Ishimura's back porch, picked through the back entrance maglock with a simple electronics kit, and the hit was on......