The Inquisition

Chapter One - Situation

Wednesday, December 27th, 2028

13:30

Special Agent Chustaine ignored the blurry drone feeds broadcasting on the six television flat screen wall to walk the opposite side of the situation room plastered with an enormous state map, marred by push pins leading to various city maps, documents, and casenotes. Despite serving as the culmination of everything the Department knew about the suspects, Chustaine's impressive operation hid a startling reality: the mission thus far had been a complete and utter failure. He'd been pursuing them for almost a year and despite commanding the greatest intelligence apparatus in existence, the Department was no closer to photographing the group, let alone capturing them. Intelligence gathering thus far had been fueled by rumor and hearsay, producing nothing more than conflicting descriptions of his targets. Camera footage and audio recordings of the group did not exist, not even on social media. Rumors spoke of everything from malfunctioning cameras and shorting microphones, to light distortions, signal blackouts, force fields and lightning bolts. Chustaine didn't believe such ridiculous supposition and yet he couldn't deny the lack of photographic evidence. Tactical operations fared no better, yielding some of the most blatant examples of government bungling seen by the public in recent years. Chustaine's career teetered on the edge of a precipice as pressure for arrests crescendoed to a point he could not ignore. Each failure wrought daily annihilation onto him by his superiors who expected results no matter the cost.

Though the suspects hadn't engaged in bombings, hostage-taking, torture or ransom, the government was quick to label the group "terrorists" almost as soon as they'd appeared. Others dismissed the team as wannabe vigilantes, simple criminals lucky enough to escape capture thus far. Chustaine, there since the beginning, disagreed with both classifications. His study of them, the shreds of evidence left in their destructive wake, and the effects on the average citizens they encountered led him to a deeper understanding of them. These were clearly American citizens defying the laws of the land, raising arms against those sworn to protect, inspiring others to collude with them to take law and justice into their own hands. Insurgents, Chustaine thought, operating under the banner of freedom unchecked, riling others to rise up and question, to fight instead of follow. The scenario would not be allowed to come to pass. The department wanted all the sheep back on the reservation and wanted them quiet, content, and oblivious of the eventual slaughter. To do this, they needed this bull out of the china shop. The vigilantes had to go.

In his defense, Agent Chustaine was no mere buffoon dressed in a g-man suit. Rather, his shrewd intelligence, tactical ruthlessness and unique interpretation of department procedures were all part of the repertoire which earned him accolades as a top agent and the command of a black budget section of the DHS. This had been his greatest triumph; the past year his greatest failure. The situation made him sick to his stomach.

Chustaine's underlings filtered into the command center to brief what he already knew: The Department lacked the means of tracking and identifying their targets, starting with the team's vehicle,a War-on-Terror Era Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) truck with no ping and no metadata hitting the central server. Such vehicles were dubbed "lowjacked," free from the tracking technologies monitoring speed, steering, global positioning, and occupant life signs while allowing government access to the vehicle cameras, microphones and biometric data. Another agent briefed his assessment of the team's weaponry, guns which also failed to ping, indicating of preference for the older style mechanical firearms instead of state of the art, biometrically accessed e-guns, modern weapons which relay serial number, owner information and GPS coordinates with every shot fired, weapons accessible by authorities in cases where violent crime is either imminent or in progress. Another agent, a communications analyst, briefed her portion of what the others knew: the vigilantes could hack into, usurp control of, and transmit on any encrypted radio network while managing to keep their own internal communications secured. A fourth agent briefed what they knew about the seven suspects themselves: no cell phone data, no internet hits, no fingerprints, no social security numbers or tax data, no sales data, and no credit card receipts, no personal information to speak of.