“Less, I think,” Roslyn murmured. “Snipers.”
“Do not eat that,” Mooren’s voice snapped in her ear. “We did not have a chance to sweep the kitchens.”
Roslyn chuckled and leaned back.
“I am being advised not to touch the food,” she said. “So. What do you want, Mr. Killough?”
“I suppose asking just what you were thinking yesterday would be rude,” he said drily. “I can put together the logic chain, I suppose, but it very nearly got messy.”
“I’ll admit that I didn’t expect to find a bomb in the apartment of a man we thought was dead,” Roslyn said. “I think we handled it relatively well after that.”
“Fair,” he conceded. “It could have been much worse. I had a security setup in the hallway that they missed, so I knew they’d stripped and rigged the apartment. Safest thing to do was leave it the hell alone.
“I figured they’d eventually either remove it themselves or send in an anonymous tip,” he told her. “My plan was to send an anonymous tip before the landlord tried to take possession.”
“Could have been messy,” Roslyn agreed.
“Thankfully, I had a backup plan and options,” Killough told her. “They just didn’t extend to retaining most of my damn tools. Hence reaching out once I realized you were poking at the same problem.”
“Lafrenz,” she noted.
“Among others, yes,” he agreed. “I see you have access to our reports and some data.”
She glanced around at the other patrons. They weren’t paying attention, but this conversation could still be dangerous for them to overhear.
“I think we need to move this somewhere quieter,” she told him. “Just realize our observers are coming with me.”
“Of course,” he allowed. “May I bring my coffee at least?”
“Sure,” she said.
“All right,” Mooren said in her ear, the Sergeant’s voice resigned. “We also have visibility on the park one block south of your location. Backup team can move with you covertly and I’ll only need to relocate one sniper team.”
“Walk with me, Mr. Killough?” Roslyn said, eyeing the sidewalk Mooren was suggesting. It would work.
By the time they reached the park, Knight and the other two plainclothes Marines had fallen in around them. The five of them entered the green space and found a modicum of privacy there.
“Talk, Mr. Killough,” Roslyn ordered. “You’re alive where three other people are dead, but you went dark six weeks ago and everyone thought you were dead.”
“It turns out that the Link is still compromised,” he reiterated. “I don’t know how, I don’t know where, I don’t even know how they picked our reports out of the traffic running through the civilian net to the Core.
“But they IDed us based on our reports and moved to neutralize us as quickly as they could.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how many Marines you brought, Commander Chambers, but I guarantee you that you have underestimated the threat level.
“My analysis suggests we’re looking at at least three Mages and somewhere in the region of twenty covert-operation Augments,” Killough laid out swiftly. “At least one Mage appears to be primarily security while the others engage in their research.”
“That’s a larger security force than I expected, yes,” Roslyn conceded. “How big is this lab?”
“Big,” he said bluntly. “I believe we are looking at one central location with maybe a dozen satellite facilities for…processing. The satellite facilities are irrelevant. Only the central facility will have access to their data, and it’s where the Mages are hiding.”
“How big?” she repeated.
He shrugged.
“Around sixty active people, including security and researchers,” he told her. “It was designed for five times that, so the facility itself has to be significant. I think I know which sector of the city it’s buried underneath, but I haven’t had the eyes and the analysis tech to find it.”
“That large a facility should be detectable from orbit,” Roslyn countered. “That seems…unlikely.”
“This might have been a rogue op under Finley himself, but he was drawing on Directorate resources throughout,” Killough reminded her. The Republic Intelligence Directorate had proven themselves again and again to be one of the best covert-ops organizations in human history.
“They know how to hide their shit.”
“So, what do you know that isn’t in the reports I have?” Roslyn asked.
Killough sighed, glancing around to be sure the Marines had bought them enough privacy for this conversation.
“I don’t think the missing-persons analysis made it into anyone’s reports,” he said grimly. “That was why they rushed the job on Yuan. They’d been talking to the Guardia and recognized the pattern—so the lab’s security rushed the op and Yuan was publicly killed instead of disappeared.
“Whoever is in charge of security here is fond of making people disappear,” the MISS agent concluded. “It’s a Mage, but that’s all I know. I’m not even sure where they found Mages for this shit.”
“Finley had a lot of things to teach,” Roslyn guessed. “Some people were willing to do anything, I think, to learn from him.”
“Yeah.” Killough was silent for a few seconds, then sighed. “Here, that anything is running somewhere around six hundred people.”
It took Roslyn a moment to put together the pieces of what he’d said.
“Wait, you’re saying they’ve killed six hundred people?” she demanded.
“Excess-missing-persons analysis,” he told her. “Compared to the prior decade and similar cities elsewhere on Sorprendidas and in the Protectorate, the last two years have seen at least six hundred extra people go missing…and never be found.”
“My god,” Roslyn murmured. “But…why?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Experimentation is my guess, but I haven’t seen any excessive jump in morgue counts. It’s like they completely disappeared. Not even their bodies found.”
“So, they’re either still alive or the researcher moved the bodies elsewhere and disposed of them to keep them disappeared,” Roslyn concluded. “But what are they even doing that would require hundreds of human subjects—and killing them?”
“It’s something to do with the Prometheus Interface,” Killough told her, shaking his head. “I don’t know what, but Lafrenz was one of the critical people building the neural-interface component of the system. Without her, Finley would never have managed
