The warehouse was one of only a few juicy bits they had gotten from the flash drive. Overall, the device had yielded little of immediate value apart from what they could get by selling the information. It contained files on three people that Ryan Silas kept tabs on inside his force. A kid programmer whose name Lilly vaguely remembered from somewhere. The Agent, Lilly also remembered, though from personal interaction. And one of Silas’ consultants, Daniel Brooks.

The kid was unimportant. Silas was keeping an eye on him because he had a history, and because it seemed he had refused a place with secret services in favour of one with the police. That was suspicious, Hounds agreed. They could try and compromise him, but Lilly said the kid was competitive and would likely try to challenge them out of pride rather than work with them.

The other two might be useful in the future. The Agent for one was in charge of investigating everyone’s current person of interest. Michael Runner. They should keep an eye on her and see if she found anything they hadn’t. Five years of fruitless search made for clutching at straws. They all agreed that Lilly should keep his distance, though, just in case. For now, anyway. That connection might be exploitable, too, in the future.

The other guy, Brooks, seemed to have some interesting connections and an obscure past. Not unusual for a consultant. Orion doubted he was in any way connected to Michael, but it couldn’t hurt to check, and there might be other useful stuff to dig up. In the worst case, if they found dirt on him, they could leverage that against him, or even against Silas, if what they found made for bad publicity. Orion doubted Brooks would be any easier to turn to them than the kid, though for different reasons.

Still, Orion had run the alias they had found in Brooks’ files by a few contacts in the business and gotten the location of a warehouse as an answer. To his surprise, “Dan Shio” was still active in a rather shady form of business. Maybe he was undercover for the police, maybe he was playing the cops, maybe he couldn’t let go of a difficult and oh so tragic past.

Either way, this was bound to be interesting, at the least. They had no other avenues of attack at the moment, and nothing better to do.

The money they could get from any additional information they found inside the structure would be a nice bonus. The last few operations had been with the goal to get clues on Michael, and those usually didn’t pay well. It was high time to make some cash, and to do a job that might not push them even deeper into the big tangled mess that was searching for Michael. Orion liked jobs where failing didn’t also ruin five years of planning. He did better on those.

If nothing else, this was going to be fun.

The layout was simple. Warehouse, surrounded by a fence, entrance secured with all kinds of technology Orion would love to get the blueprints for. The whole area was crawling with guards, with trucks coming and going from time to time. Going in through the sewers would require them to wait for a truck to pass overhead, lift the cover, climb out, grab onto the truck, and hope it drove into the warehouse. Then let go, roll out, find a hiding place, and wait. Without being noticed.

An excursion into the sewer system by one of Lilly’s Critters – a small all-terrain surveillance robot he had built with Orion one lazy weekend – revealed the first problem. The manhole cover had been welded shut. That needed to be loosened, and it wouldn’t be quiet.

Orion pressed his button.

The manhole cover jumped a foot into the air, started turning at its apex, and was foiled in completing its spin by meeting the ground with its edge. There was a crash. Several heads turned and two men raised their sub-machine guns, inching slowly towards the settling cover. The explosives had sent it a little to the side, coming to a stand some ways next to the dark hole in the ground. There were a few shouts.

Orion grinned and lowered his binoculars, peeking out over the edge of the roof, a safe distance away. The guard in the alley below, at the rear of the warehouse, turned his head but didn’t move from his spot.

Time for phase two. Orion raised the binoculars to his eyes once more and pressed the button again.

A string of fireworks went off inside the sewer, producing a series of bangs and flashing lights that, with a bit of imagination or paranoia, could be misunderstood as gunfire. The two guards with guns drawn jumped back with twin shouts of surprise. More people rushed over. The ensuing standard formations might have been born from imagination. But the speed and urgency with which guns were drawn pointed towards full-on paranoia as the guards’ motivator. Orion wondered how often they were attacked for real. A twenty buck diversion shouldn’t be that effective.

They had dismissed the sewers as soon as the surveillance feed had come back. There was no way in hell they could have removed that manhole cover unnoticed. It did make for a nice distraction, though.

Poison and he were lying on the roof of another warehouse, one over from their target. This area of the city had rows upon rows of them, most of them unused. They stood in a nice grid formation, with alley-wide gaps in between. It was too great a distance to jump across, though, and Orion wouldn’t have wanted to try it, anyway.

He checked the alley below again. The guard looked rattled. He glanced around, paused, took a step towards the commotion, paused again, and finally opted to stay where he was. Orion dubbed him Greg.

Somewhere on the roof behind him, Poison tugged on the rope leading down into the gap between their building and the next one over to the left. The gap met the alley Greg the Guard was stationed at, though the chain-link fence that ran the perimeter of the warehouse separated the rope and the nervous guard.

The rope, formerly buried beneath bits of gravel, pulled taut, shifting rock and debris across tarmac. It could sound like the scuff of footsteps. To someone already on edge, it might seem like a person walking towards the fence from between buildings.

Greg the Guard was plenty on edge by now. Already jittery from the supposed shots at the other side of the complex, he jumped again and clamped a hand over the gun at his side, drawing it hastily. He glanced around and inched slowly towards the alley, gun aimed. Not enough.

Orion put away the binoculars and crawled back into a crouch. They’d have to employ an even more obvious distraction, and he didn’t want to risk being visible for that.

Lilly remotely activated the toy car and drove it up the alley. Greg fired two shots at the sudden noise and failed to hit the toy.

As quietly and quickly as he could, Orion lifted the board. They’d tied a length of rope to either end so they could navigate it far more easily. Orion managed to manoeuvre the board across the gap between their roof and the warehouse and bring the far end down steadily and silently, forming a bridge.

The moment the wood touched down, Poison was running across with light feet. Orion grabbed the second length of rope and followed her, a little slower so he wouldn’t fall and break his neck.

Greg the Guard was still staring at the alley, eyes open wide, mouth pressed shut. He didn’t seem to comprehend the continuing noises now that he’d shot at them. Bullets obviously solved a lot of his problems on guard duty. The sounds of the toy car across gravel and the commotion of shouts from his colleagues proved sufficient to cover Poison and Orion for the moment, and to fully engage Greg.

But somebody would have heard the shots and come help soon. Someone might look up.

So as soon as Orion was across, he hauled the board up towards him by the rope. If he had tried to pull it in from here, it would have slapped down and either fallen or hit the warehouse side with a noise that couldn’t be covered up quite that well.

As soon as the board was fully across, Orion lay down flat on his back next to Poison, a few steps from the edge. Poison had pulled the tarp from her backpack and spread it over them and the board, and everything went still.

Phase one of their plan had been successful.

The tarp imitated the general colour and texture of the roof surface as far as they had deduced from satellite pictures. Any drones they might have sent to get a closer, more personal look would have been shot out of the sky. Both the weather balloon and the private jet plans had been discarded due to a lack of budget for jobs like this. So the satellite pictures had had to do, and hopefully the resident security drones would be of sufficiently low quality not to make out human-shaped impression underneath a canvas sheet.

Unless they were heat-sensitive. That would require a very quick exit.

For now, they would wait right here and keep still and listen for any sudden machine gun fire until the next part of their plan came to pass.

They had packed lightly, as always for waiting periods: tarp, water, Openers, lock picks, flash-bangs, knives for emergencies. Plus a few toys Orion always had on him on any job, like the binoculars.

Their hoods were drawn tight over the scarves covering their faces, and they’d left the caps at home. Better to be flexible and have a large field of vision here. If everything went right, nobody would see how ridiculous they looked, and if everything didn’t go right, they would have bigger problems to worry about.

It was an hour to midnight when the tarp settled over them, two hours to shift rotation for the guards. That much had been consistent over the last few days, at least. The darkness had helped them move. There were flood-lights around the complex, so they’d been able to cross roofs without falling to their deaths, but the night made for strange atmospheres, and Greg the Guard surely wouldn’t have been as jumpy in broad daylight.

While all of the guards would have been more jittery to sudden noises, they were also less likely to take the whole thing seriously now that everything was quiet again. Sudden noises followed by quiet were something to look into at day. At night, it was just plain weird, and none of the guards would like to admit later on that they were worried about strange things in the night.

In two hours’ time, the guards would have sorted out their stuff, find the spent fireworks and maybe even the toy car, increase security, search the building, and calm down again. They’d dismiss the whole affair as a failed attack or a prank. By the time their colleagues showed up to relieve them, it would be ‘there was a bit of a hustle, strange stuff, maybe keep an eye out’ instead of ‘we were attacked, stay on high alert’.

The new guards would be attentive, of course, but not jumpy. By four in the morning, they would have relaxed a little and settled into their routines. Nothing strange would have happened on their watch, and they would think that nothing was going to, feeling a little more secure with every quiet minute that passed.

No matter how professional a mercenary you were, you couldn't spend eight hours on your feet, on high alert, ready to react and fight. The guards would wear out or simply get bored of another uneventful shift at some point, and that would grant a second-long delay in reactions and a fraction less trigger-happiness.

It was a lot of effort to get that bit of an advantage, but it could save their lives, and Orion was willing to invest in that. It was another five hours until then, though. He shifted his legs into a more comfortable position, careful not to disrupt their cover.

The tarp should hold up to drone inspections of the roof, if anyone bothered to check. If a guard came up in person, though, things would get difficult very quickly. The tarp-covered, human-shaped lump they formed wasn’t exactly inconspicuous.

But the roof was a single flat, smooth expanse, no staircase leading here, and there were no emergency ladders going all the way up. There was a low, circular structure not unlike a chimney, but it was covered with metal mesh. That was not an access point.

People weren’t meant to be up on the roof. That’s what made it such a good, if tricky, entry point.

When the sewers had been discarded and reused for distraction, they had started looking at their former entrance ideas again, including the roof. The security was too tight, at least if they were going to use emergency ladders or otherwise scale the walls. Never mind that there were no ladders. And the windows were too high up to reach without those, at least if they wanted to reach them from the ground.

The cameras mounted to the sides of the building all pointed outward and down and the ones that approached an upward angle were mounted without range of movement, in some oddly convenient twist of fate. Orion didn’t question that and simply let Lilly loop a stationary feed for a few minutes to give them a window of opportunity to go past the ring of security and onto the roof.

Distracting the guard had given them twenty seconds in which a small strip of roof was unsupervised because there was nobody at that side of the building. Nobody except Greg the Guard, and he had then been busy with a toy car. It was just long enough for the board-and-tarp stunt. Poison swore she’d done the board thing successfully, and they’d practised it on a row of benches in a park.

Twenty seconds of immediate, intense action, and now came hours of waiting, and after that they would have another intense time span of snooping around, much longer than twenty seconds. Depending on how that went, they’d either make a very quiet exit, or a very loud one.

They still had no idea what they would find, or if they would find anything useful at all, for that matter. Sure, there were trucks going in and out, and the warehouse belonged – indirectly, of course, and not on paper – to Max Rivers, but that much was true for an alarming portion of the city’s industrial sections. Maybe it was weapons, maybe drugs, maybe something different altogether. Maybe even something legit that Rivers used as a side venue. They’d find out in a few hours, and possibly be very disappointed with their findings.

The first step of the plan had been timing and a bit of luck, the second would involve concentration and skill over a longer period of time. That was the really difficult part. A lot of work still lay ahead, with a long time they had to go without slip-ups. The wait until then didn’t do much to calm Orion’s excitement. He hadn’t done a good run like this in too long. He just hoped it wouldn’t be for nothing. Just his kind of luck to get past easy security to find an empty warehouse or something boring like piles of cocaine and cash.

‘All right, I’ve set the cameras back to their jobs. The guards are running around like headless chickens, but nobody noticed you. Yet.’ Lilly’s voice was quiet and tinny in their ears, the earpieces turned down in volume just in case, for later. No reason to get caught because their communications weren’t covert. It seemed the settings were just right, because Orion could hear Lilly in his ear perfectly, but he couldn’t hear a second feed from beside him. If it was quiet at this short a distance, it was safe enough.

‘I’ll keep you updated. I’ll also check in with you every hour or so, more often when you’re inside. While you’re outside, we’re doing regular tests of your gear. Obvious one is your hearing, and if you don’t respond it’s most likely that that’s done for. We’ll try the rings next. Remember, twist on the underside, away from your pinky to check in, towards your pinky for distress, if you can reach.’

They’d done this two times since the start of the job, and dozens of times on earlier occasions, but they’d agreed long ago to repeat instructions often to avoid stupid mistakes, especially if there were only two options and one of them was a distress call. No need to call in the cavalry because one of them had bad long-term memory. Of course, their version of “cavalry” wasn’t very impressive, but that was all the more reason not to waste it.

Orion dragged his thumb over the ring on his right hand, along his palm, from pinky to forefinger. A segment of the ring shifted and turned along with the gesture. Next to him, he could feel the muscles in Poison’s left arm tense against his shoulder as she twisted her own ring.

And although the procedure was repetitive, and they all knew it in their sleep, it was oddly reassuring to have Lilly’s calm, rational voice explain it all again. And to confirm, once again, that their gear actually worked the way it was supposed to.

They slowly worked their way along the rest of their gear as far as they could reach it without too much of a fuss. All in top condition, as expected. They ended back on their rings.

‘Uh-huh, seems to work nicely. Confirms communication, too. Try not to get the rings caught on anything, the fingerprint lock can only do so much against mechanical pressure. And please try not to fiddle with them when you get nervous. See you in a few.’

The five hours went by quietly, long boring stretches of waiting, interrupted only by Lilly’s checks and updates on what went on around them.

The guards found the explosives that had blown up the manhole cover, but not the firecracker remnants that had provided extra sound effects. A whole team of them had chased ghosts through the sewers for a while and even managed to get into an accidental fire-fight with themselves. That was the risk you took by taking live ammunition into dark enclosed spaces, expecting to encounter enemies.

Eventually, after realizing there was nothing to be found, the guards had simply welded the cover back into place and written the whole thing off as a botched rival gang’s attack.

Lilly’s toy car had miraculously escaped unnoticed and could be used for future pranks. Greg the Guard was pronounced a jittery coward, jumping at a cat or rat or such. He bore the laughter and mockery with slumped shoulders and refused to leave his post for anything short of the apocalypse after that.

The shift change came and passed. A few short stories were exchanged, a bit of laughter was shared. Greg the Guard was made fun of, and multiple different versions of the same story soon circulated. The gist of it was that apparently, some wannabe punks had snuck into the sewers and tried something, but run at the first sign of real trouble. In one version, they’d fired behind them wildly during their escape, which was the only thing allowing them to get away.

Retaliation of some kind would be taken care of later, when the perpetrators had been identified. Somehow, Orion failed to muster any pity for the kids who would bear the punishment. He’d been one of those once, a trainee, and he’d been responsible for his own shit. Gang membership meant catching a few from time to time, deserved or not. Since nobody had gotten hurt tonight, retaliation wouldn’t be too bloody.

Overall, the night shift went about their work more relaxed and much, much less alert than Orion had planned for. Still, that was on the outside. The guards on the inside worked on a different routine, with a continuous shift change they hadn’t been able to figure out yet.

Every now and then, someone arrived or left along with the other guards, sometimes trucks left with a passenger less or more than they had arrived with. Those scattered few observations made it hard to guess at the exact number of people inside at any one time, or to figure out shift lengths and changes. There might be other means of getting into and out of the warehouse they hadn’t spotted.

It seemed to be a dynamic exchange with an overlapping pattern, with every one or two guards on their own personal schedule. Not too good for catching guards at their most tired.

Orion suspected that that was precisely the point. Maybe some of the guards even rode inside the trucks, alongside whatever load they carried, to obscure their passing. In the last hours, a few vehicles had come and gone, and he was wondering as to what that particular load might be. Again, the speculations started chasing each other in his bored head. Drugs? Weapons? Money? Bloody corpses?

And what exactly was Dan Shio’s job in all this? If Daniel Brooks was using an alias for this, the warehouse had to be involved in illicit activities, with Brooks himself in the middle of it. Strange place to be for a police consultant. What was this job? Was there anything to oversee? He might organize. Take part in some kind of manufacturing. Coordinate and oversee the guard shift changes. In that last case, there would be a clear method of identification, or Shio knew all of his guards by looks.

Maybe he was added security for whatever business went on here. In the files they’d snatched from Ryan Silas’ office, there had been some indication that Shio had formerly worked as hired muscle, first on the street, later for a private security company, before joining up with the cops. He might still be in that field.

Or maybe the warehouse had a different purpose altogether. It almost definitely belonged to Max Rivers, despite what any official records might say. Then Rivers decided who worked where, on what, and he usually didn’t like to rely on outside help. So Shio had to be working for him.

Was it a one time gig? Just for this operation, in this place? Or was Shio a regular? Had he come with the territory, or had Rivers assigned him here? Was this one of Shio’s own side operations, the compound given to him to do with as he pleased?

There were far too many ifs in this, and far too little gain in the worst case. The thoughts kept coming back to haunt Orion’s boredom, steadily repeating without progress.

Still, it wasn’t like he had anything better to do right now.