The darkened expanse of Preacher's office was illuminated by the security officer's flash light as he momentarily opened the door to let the beam sweep across the broad space, his eyes narrowed as he looked for anything out of place. In reality of course, the man was a skilled telepath. He needed neither the light nor actual vision to determine whether or not the room had been disturbed since the last time he had visited it, roughly an hour ago. Still, Mr. Preacher wanted him to pretend he was a real security guard and, since the slender commander was the boss, the telepath went through the motions.
Satisfied that the office was still undisturbed, the guard closed the door and locked it, withdrawing his telepathic senses from the partially warded chamber at the same time. The massive wards that had protected not only Preacher's office, but the entire floor as well as the two floors beneath it, were still in the process of reconstruction since the Brotherhood assassin had left nearly twelve hours ago.
Even with every mover and teep that Preacher had at his disposal working nearly around the clock, it would still take nearly a week to reconstruct the psionic maze that provided the bulk of the security on the restricted floors. Those teeps and movers were even now taking a breather to regain much needed sugars before returning to the reconstruction.
Glancing at his watch, the guard saw that it was 23:30. Time to move to the next floor down and begin his sweep through there.
Behind the guard in the office he had just locked, the shadows shifted uneasily, just beyond the reach of the partial wards protecting the doorway. Then, with a ripple of Reality tearing, a teleportal irised into being, spilling out two black sheathed forms before vanishing. Immediately the two forms moved deeper into the shadows, hugging the floor as they scanned the room with their eyes.
With the tiny watcher embedded somewhere in the room, providing the EM coordinates to Preacher's office and the location of the remaining wards, it was relatively easy to fix the location in the teleporter's mind. Local EM fields were then warped to twist local space/time until two seemingly disparate points along the space/time continuum touched. Without the ward web to alert the guards to their presence, the two shadowy figures had arrived silently and without detection.
Mordecai glanced over his shoulder and tapped his forehead. Jeriko from where she was crouched just behind him, nodded in understanding and both went brain-dead. Just in time: as the man in black began to reach for a utility pouch on his vest, he felt an active scan wash over the room. 'They've increased the active scanning to compensate for the holes in their security grid,' he silently noted with interest.
That suited the big man just fine. Such scans were much easier to elude than static ward webs like the one they had run into their first attempt at a penetration.
A tap on his hip told Mordecai that Jeriko was preparing to scan for mundane security measures like Infrared lattices, ultrasound motion detectors and passive laser nets. He gave a curt nod to acknowledge and slipped his own detection device from the utility pouch he had been reaching for.
It was a small but powerful instrument created to detect psionic concentrations, like cloaking fields. He powered it up as Jeriko slipped forward to extend a sensor wand before her, it's display lit softly with a gentle blue light to maintain night vision.
The multiphasic scanner sent a narrow scanning pulse through the room, a portable LIDAR device whose narrow beam could render passive security webs visible to the enhanced vision of a psionic. And almost instantly it painted a tight lattice of dull red lines covering a majority of the room, an IR heat detection grid. Superimposed over the lattice were a looser, but brighter grid of laser light and the broad, light green swaths of an ultrasound motion detection system.
The overlapping detection grids effectively covered the rest of the room not protected by the partial psionic wards around the doorway, leaving only the far corner untouched. The corner the two grim lone gunmen now occupied. 'So much for it being easier without the ward grid,' Mordecai thought darkly as Jeriko slowly shook her head. This was going to take time to disarm. Time that, with the relatively quick return of the teeps and movers rebuilding the ward net, they didn't have.
Still, it was an opportunity they couldn't afford to squander. They needed the key to complete the decoding of the Armageddon data. Without it, they were merely guessing as to when and where the Brotherhood would launch its massive coup to overthrow Normal Humanity.
Fortunately the watcher in Preacher's office had alerted them both to the fact that the lean Brotherhood commander had installed the mundane security measures first thing after the assassin had disrupted the wards this morning. Although generally confident in his psionic protection and security, the Brotherhood commander wasn't going to take any chances with the powerful renegade loose in the city. Loose and with help, if the rather jumbled report from Silvermane could be believed.
Thusly forewarned, they were somewhat prepared to deal with the massive security system now in place to protect the office. Re-attaching his psionic field detector to his utility belt, Mordecai reached for the temperature dial built into the thigh of the thermal suit that he was wearing. Wearing its twin, Jeriko shadowed Mordecai's movements.
Heavily insulated, the thermal suits covered the two lone gunmen head to toe, extending over their faces to leave only their eyes uncovered. And those were covered with night vision goggles, effectively sealing their bodies off from the external environment. With the adjustment of the built-in thermostat, they could alter the amount of heat their bodies gave off. In this case, the IR grid was looking for body temperature, approximately 36 degrees Celsius.
A glance at the liquid crystal display built into the right forearm of the suit allowed Mordecai to note the room's ambient temperature at 22 degrees Celsius. With the IR grid calibrated to work up from room temperature, all they had to do was adjust the suits' output to yield room temperature. Displayed just below the ambient temperature levels was the output temperature from the suit. Keeping his eye on that, Mordecai dialed the suit down and watched as the output temperature dropped until it was the same as the ambient temperature.
Thumbs up from Jeriko indicated that her temperature had also been successfully dialed down. That done, now all they had to worry about were the laser grid and the ultrasound motion sensors. While the laser grid was wide enough for them to physically avoid it by stepping carefully, the ultrasound projectors created a wide field of energy that was easily disturbed by the slightest of movements.
Dipping a hand into one of the large pouches on the front of his vest, Mordecai drew out a large egg of dull burnished metal. A quick twist of one end allowed three stubby legs to ease free of the egg's body, creating a tripod of stability. He placed it as far as he could in front of them without disturbing the ultrasound field just beyond as Jeriko isolated the projectors' frequency with the multiphasic scanner.
The egg was a resonance generator, capable of creating a jamming field that effectively cancelled out the ultrasound frequency being projected by the ultrasound sensors. As soon as they isolated the correct carrier frequency, as Jeriko had just done with the multiphasic scanner, it was relatively easy to adjust the jammer.
With an eye on the display numbers that Jeriko now showed him, Mordecai made those adjustments via tiny recessed buttons on the egg's side. As soon as the egg's built-in display indicated that they had the correct resonance frequency to cancel out the ultrasound field, he activated the jammer by depressing the power switch just beneath the calibration buttons.
There was an initial pulse of sub-audible sound, more felt than heard, then another sweep with the scanner yielded the green swaths of ultrasound were gone. A tight smile of satisfaction touched Mordecai's lips. Then, carefully maintaining his brain activity-dead status, he looked over his shoulder and, without speaking, pointed to the right hand side of the room to indicate that Jeriko should begin her search there. He would start on the left, easing forward as he pulled the psionic field detector from his utility belt and thumbed it to high sensitivity.
As Jeriko swept along the bookshelves and cabinets on the right hand side of the room, Mordecai reached Preacher's massive and rather pretentious desk and made a quick shuffle through the papers that were scattered on the polished top. That almost instantly yielded a number of folders with pictures of the three encounters he had already had with Brotherhood heavies: the airport, Curly's and the alleyway.
The presence of the photos put a frown on Mordecai's face. A frown that only deepened when he realized that the photos were police crime scene pictures, their backs stamped with official seals. That could only mean that the Brotherhood had infiltrated the local police department. Which went a long way to explain how little the local news media spoke about the three incidents in the city, each separate occurrence serious enough to warrant federal attention. The infiltrators were working to hide the Brotherhood's presence here!
That meant that the Normals most likely had no idea that the Brotherhood existed and in such power in Calgary. And so they would be oblivious when the coup actually took place. It was clever and spoke of a conspiracy just as complex and far reaching as the Shield.
Moving one of the photo folders aside, Mordecai found a dossier on a Brotherhood hardwire by the name of Duchesne. 'Ah, our little assassin,' he realized as he swiftly leafed through the dossier. 'Hmmm, impressive. Looks like he's even more dangerous than we thought. We'd better watch out for this little complication!'
Mordecai eased the dossier back to the desk top and seeing that there weren't any other papers of interest there, began to carefully go through the drawers in the massive oaken desk. Two of the drawers were locked, but the others yielded several maps of the western coast of North America, clearly marked with twisting lines of blue, a number of key cities strategically located high lighted.
Other than the markings, the maps were of little use and he returned them to their place. They did, however, confirm what little data they had managed to extract from the Armageddon files: the Brotherhood was planning something big and Preacher with his little Calgary operation, was crucial to the Brotherhood here, on the west coast of North America.
Satisfied that the desk held little of additional interest, Mordecai closed the drawers, his gloved hands leaving no fingerprints. He then made his way quickly and quietly over to the closet wall after a glance yielded Jeriko still busy on the far side of the room, and he began to check for wall safes.
It only took a matter of moments before he discovered the first one. As he carefully held the picture away from the wall and examined the standard stainless steel door, Mordecai glanced down at his field detector. It read nothing. 'An obvious decoy,' he thought bluntly, easing the picture back down against the wall without a sound. A quick glance at his wrist display yielded that their time was swiftly drawing to an end. He had to hurry if he wanted to complete the search within their budgeted time schedule.
Quickly Mordecai checked beneath all of the other pictures, but found nothing. It was only as he began stepping passed the small wet bar, close to the door, that his field detector gave a soft peep to indicate that it had found something.
Pulling up short, the man in black unclipped the detector and held it towards the bar after muting its audible alerts. With a sharp eye on the detector's tiny display, he slowly began to sweep it back and forth, watching the numbers shift on the display as the detector registered either a growing or waning field strength.
Finally after a moment's work, he had narrowed the field down to a small portion of the back of the bar. As was typical of a cloaking field, the portion of the back wall appeared seamless, without any edge to indicate that it was an opening of any kind. But careful probing with his fingers told him otherwise: gentle pressure downwards convinced the section of wall to slide out of the way, revealing a simple palm access point.
It was a plain plate of glass, set into the actual wall behind the bar, colorless and square in shape. It most likely had some sort of sensor grid behind the glass, able to detect both heat gradients and finger prints, a linked-in Artificial Intelligence then comparing them to a database of gradient profiles in order to confirm identity.
Mordecai eased slightly back from the plate, eyes narrowed thoughtfully. Considering that it was, itself, some sort of protection and was protected by the cloaking field, this plate must access something relatively important, something Preacher wanted to keep from even careful and experienced prying eyes. Perhaps the place where he kept the key to the data from the Armageddon file. 'We could only be so lucky,' the big man darkly mused.
Knowing that he had gotten Jeriko's attention by stepping back from the wall, he turned slightly to point to his two eyes then down at the wall, indicating that he had found something worth looking at. She nodded as she caught the simple signal and continued her own search, letting the big psionic examine the plate at his relative leisure.
After letting the most recent active telepathic scan sweep by, Mordecai allowed a trickle of energy into his psionic cortex. Just enough to make a direct scan of the plate for booby traps or anything unpleasant that awaited the individual without the proper access. That scan yielded nothing.
A soft sigh whistled out through Mordecai's nostrils. Finally, a break of some sort. He turned his attention to the watcher's data and downloaded the information on Preacher's body signatures. Isolating the data on Preacher's hand, he mapped the physical structure of the prints and the heat signature onto his glove to resemble Preacher's right hand. Then, after a moment's hesitation, he placed his gloved hand firmly onto the plate.
Instantly the plate lit up with a soft orange light, a brighter bar of illumination sweeping from top to bottom to scan Mordecai's counterfeit palm print in its entirety. It took only a second for the sensors behind the plate to detect a match close enough to Preacher's actual palm print to allow access. There was a soft pulse of light then the plate clicked as some sort of release catch was activated.
The plate and a relatively large section of the wall then swung inward to reveal a small, well-lit space beyond. Expecting some sort of electronic device, or storage mechanism, what Mordecai found in the small space was enough to make him physically twitch in surprise.
In the small space, surrounded by heat lamps to keep the temperature constant, were two living human brains, encased in fluid-filled crystalline shells. A steady stream of nutrients and oxygen was being pumped in while wastes were pumped out via micro-pumps and flexible plastic tubing.
"Wet banks!" he muttered darkly as he examined the encased organs. 'And, by the size of their psionic cortices, they were psionics at one point!' As he took a step closer, he abruptly felt the light pressure of a low-level probe touch his outer core shields.
- Access code, please, - a woman's voice chimed softly and melodically inside his mind and Mordecai frowned tightly. Not only were these brains alive, but they apparently had some sort of consciousness maintaining them. It smacked of frankensteinism, a perversion of psionic science that was supposedly outlawed years ago.
Just as abruptly Mordecai's eyes were narrowing thoughtfully. It was logical to assume that the wet banks may hold the decoding key, being protected not only physically by Preacher's security, but also by their own on-board sentinels in the disembodied consciousness. If he could somehow gain access to one, or both of these banks, he might just be able to find the key after all.