Agony yawned as she slowly and luxuriously stretched beside the window, all the while keeping her eye on the building across the street. A glance at her wristwatch was enough to tell her that she had been standing on station for well over twelve hours straight. It was 1:43 pm, January 1st, 2020 and the New Millennium Economic Conference was well underway.
After another yawn, the Brotherhood hardwire rubbed the grit out of her eyes before lifting her binoculars back into place to give the conference center and grounds yet another scan. As far as she could tell, delegates had begun arriving at the center just before 8 am, their agenda getting them started fairly early in the morning.
Just as early in the morning the first of her trigger team had also arrived, a wraith that moved smoothly and silently through the gathering crowds, looking relatively untouched from her ordeal through the frozen streets of Calgary from the night before. As soon as she had spotted her, Agony had fished out the monitor to watch and make sure the team member found her programmed destination.
When she had confirmed that the trigger team member had managed to elude the Normals' security and get herself to her pre-designated place on the grid coordinates set out for the conference center, Agony had nodded in satisfaction before turning her attention back to her binoculars. The monitor went down onto the windowsill to await the arrival of the next member of her trigger team.
She didn't have to wait long: within ten minutes of the first member of the team appearing out of nowhere to glide into place, the second member faded into view, moving slowly around the security cordon as he worked towards to his final position. The rest of the trigger team followed shortly after, slipping out of the side streets surrounding the convention center to take their positions, silently waiting for Agony's signal safely out of sight.
The last team member, despite being stopped by the Normals' security and searched, reached her position just a few short minutes ago. With a glance at the monitor to confirm that all members of the trigger team had reached their final positions, Agony yawned again and slowly put the binoculars down on the windowsill beside the monitor. She then looked over at Martin, who was sitting on the edge of the bed he had spent the night in, slowly working his way through a box of croissants bought from a small bakery just down the street.
"Mr. Martin, sir. The trigger team is in place and is awaiting our signal."
"Good," the Frenchman rasped after swallowing what he had in his mouth. Martin was dressed in the same suit he had worn the day before, oddly unwrinkled despite the fact that he had slept in it.
Dipping his hand into an inner pocket of that suit, he consulted an old style pocket watch with a frown.
"And it would appear that they are ahead of schedule," he noted. "The final part of the conference where the ministers of finance and their nations' leaders will gather for a closing ceremony won't take place for a number of hours yet."
Martin looked up from his watch at Agony.
"Can your team members stay hidden that long?"
"Guaranteed, sir. That's what they're made for. They are currently in full stealth mode and should easily elude Normal security until they are needed."
"Good," Martin repeated, slipping his watch back into its pocket before reaching for another croissant. "Then we wait!"
Agony nodded in acknowledgement before turning back to the window, once more reaching for the binoculars. If the big chief wanted to wait, then they were going to wait! Lifting the binoculars to her face, she placed her eyes into the eyepieces as she swung them back down onto the grounds across the street to make yet another sweep of the security arrangements.
Catching sight of the sun's light reflecting off the binoculars' lenses from the sixth story window of the hotel, Dee nodded as she pressed the ear piece of her nearly hidden head set, activating her comlink.
"I have confirmation of the Brotherhood's Eye in the Sky," she softly reported, the mike pressing against her larynx yet hidden beneath her clothing, easily picking up her every word. Turning away from the street and the hotel, she continued on her security route, dressed in head to toe in the black combat gear of the security force protecting the convention center. She ducked her head as a particularly brutal wind swirled coldly about her for a moment, a lingering touch of last night's storm that had hammered the city in the early hours and blanketed everything with a thick layer of snow.
"Check sixth floor, fifth window from the north edge of the building."
"Got 'em," a man's voice whispered softly into her earpiece.
It was Tahsis from his position on top of the convention center's roof. In dappled white and gray winter camouflage from head to toe, he was hidden perfectly from the helicopters hovering overhead, his weapon draped with a camouflaged sheet to hide it as well. Additionally his EMF shield also served to hide him from infrared scans of the roof by the helicopters, one of the Security teams' visual protocols.
The Qos Viran's weapon was a modified Kala with an extended capability sight on its spine and a heavy, long-range silencer on the muzzle, turning the already deadly weapon into a powerful sniper rifle. With a pair of dark, face-hugging visors protecting eyes unused to daylight bouncing off the unremitting white snow laying all around, Tahsis looked through his sights, a boxy rectangle of flat gray with a set of controls set horizontally along its right face.
The big vampire's gloved fingers danced for a moment on those controls, activating magnification factors and polarization filters. Instantly the fifth window on the sixth floor leapt into view, the filters wiping out any glare from the sun off the windowpane itself.
Tahsis frowned as he carefully looked over the young woman he found standing there, just inside the window frame, a pair of high powered binoculars raised to her eyes.
"I make a single female," he whispered into his throat mike. "Mid twenties, light hair, unremarkable clothing. She matches Agony's description. Do you copy, Alpha One?"
"Copy that, Alpha Three," Dee subvocalized as she continued towards the next checkpoint, a heavily fortified position protecting one of the secondary entry points to the convention grounds. "You've made the puppet master." She glanced towards the convention center itself and to the spot where she knew Tahsis lay, completely out of sight and ready to strike whenever he needed to. And he wasn't the only vampire within the security cordon.
With her connections in the RCMP and CSIS, and Duffy's with Interpol, it didn't take any effort at all to get herself and Duffy on the detail responsible for convention security. And little effort beyond that to get a number of allied psionics as well as several members of the Qos Viran also attached to the security team. They had even managed to get several psionics mixed in with the various security details belonging to the delegates, to provide close quarters protection.
But the crown of their achievement was Alpha Team. Even as Tahsis monitored the grounds and nearby territory from his perch on the roof, the rest of Alpha Team, the ghost strike team assembled to take out the Brotherhood's moles before they could trigger Armageddon, were moving all throughout the convention center and its surrounding grounds.
Excluding Duffy, who was somewhere on the far side of the grounds, the entire team was made up of vampires from Lash's Qos Viran, all perfectly placed to strike when the moment presented itself. Two months of extensive training had prepared them for this day. Hopefully it would be enough to save the Human Race and its mutant children!
Dee frowned beneath her facemask, in place to partially to keep her face warm in the biting cold and partially to protect her identity from possible Normal terrorist elements that may also be considering using the conference as a convenient opportunity to strike. News that Agony had been spotted, while not good, had been expected. According to both the Armageddon Project data file and what Mordecai could tell them, the young hardwire was directly responsible for creating both the mole assassins and the covert 'trigger' team that would put them into play. Brotherhood protocols dictated that she accept ultimate responsibility for their correct placement and usage, hence her presence here.
But that also meant that the team of specially trained telepaths that made up the so-called trigger team was already placed about the grounds if she was present and watching the convention center like she was. Protocols again dictated that she couldn't assume a command position until all of her team was successfully located in their final positions.
That directly translated into the realization that the trigger team had somehow managed to elude the best security they could put into place in order to reach their final destinations. Not good news for a Normal world that might be forced to defend themselves against such creations.
And that bad news only got worse: while they knew what the trigger team would be ultimately doing, they couldn't make a move to dig them out before they could activate the moles to trigger the project. Even if they had the technology to detect creatures that easily defeated all of their security measures and protocols.
Only a psionic could do that now. And, as Mordecai anticipated and proved, the Brotherhood had taken steps to prevent any psionic from getting within a kilometre of the convention center. No psionic could come that close without tripping a broad spectrum of detection and disabling devices, some powerful enough to render any nearby psionic virtually brain-dead if they were caught in the devices' discharge path.
Not unless they were cleared by the devices' passive scans, which were programmed to ignore Brotherhood psionics. Alpha Team had seen a number of the devices at work when Mordecai had swept the convention center grounds with a light telepathic scan the week before, triggering them.
So they had to stick to the original plan of placing the Qos Viran in and around the convention center to await the moment the trigger teams turned the center into a killing ground. Mordecai, Jeriko, Raven and the Storm Wolves now sat some distance away in a command center donated by one of the local nations, offering tactical support during the operation.
"Did you copy that, Alpha Command?" she husked just loud enough for her throat mike to pick up as she nodded to the security team manning the checkpoint, an odd mix of RCMP and CPD constables, CSIS, Interpol and Secret Service agents as well as a number of military officers from several different countries.
"We copy, Alpha One," Jeriko's voice replied into her earpiece almost immediately, sounding a trifle breathless. Half-smiling at the anxious note in the hardwire's voice, Dee pressed her left hand against a portable hand scanner even as a number of the security team nodded in greeting back to her. One would almost think that the hardwire hadn't ever been in battle before.
Just as quickly Dee sobered just as the scanner began its sweep across her hand, reading her heat signature and confirming her identity against the security file held in its database. Battle, perhaps, but none of them had been involved in something this important! This was Humanity's final gambit against an enemy they didn't even know existed. Enough to make anyone feel just a wee bit anxious, she would think.
From where he stood near the primary access point to the convention grounds, the main gates, Lash took a step away from the dog team he was a part of to press his earpiece. He had heard the entire exchange between Dee and Tahsis over the shielded frequency they had selected for team ops. And it was time to start putting things into motion!
"Alpha Team, this is Alpha Leader," he subvocalized after his comlink activated. "Alpha One and Three have made the Brotherhood puppet master. Go to Alert Status Yellow. The hitters are in the park. I repeat, the hitters are in the park. All teams stand by."
As Lash's command rolled through the interlinked com system and acknowledgements were starting to come back to him from the scattered members of Alpha Team, Mordecai leaned back from the monitor he had been studying deep in the belly of the Tyrell Nation's command bunker. A thoughtful expression had been painted onto his grim features, further exaggerated by his slow and methodical stroking of his chin.
"So, we got Agony in the house, obviously positioned to watch her trigger team get placed and wait for the most advantageous time to strike." From where she was sitting a couple chairs over in front of a bank of her own monitors, Jeriko chimed in, speaking Mordecai's thoughts out loud.
"Looks like the Brotherhood, despite our best attempts to keep them out of the city, have penetrated our perimeter and is setting the table for tonight's party."
"Indeed," Mordecai agreed, reaching into an inside pocket to slip Paladin out. "Paladin, give me a three dimensional display of the convention center grounds after downloading the accumulated data from our passive monitors seeded throughout the area."
"Downloading the accumulated data via secured subspace com lines, Mordecai," Paladin's soft female voice reported without a pause. "And routing updated data to my holographic emitter."
With a flicker of blue light, the now-familiar globe of blue light appeared in space just to Mordecai's left. A second flicker raced up the globe as Paladin created a three dimensional image of the convention center and its surrounding grounds, quickly painting in the Normal security placements and the location of each Alpha Team member.
Paladin seemed to pause there as the tiny lone gunman A.I. processed the information from the passive monitors Lash and his Qos Viran had scattered all throughout the convention center and grounds during the preparation for the conference. While unable to generate an active telepathic scan and hence avoiding detection by the Brotherhood's passive defense net, the monitors could detect nearby psionic fields, giving an approximate location for any psionics close by.
A third flicker of light scanned up the globe as Paladin finished processing the monitor information and painted in the relative positions of the members of the Brotherhood's trigger team that had passed by the monitors. Mordecai frowned as he leaned close to the display, his eyes marking the red dots that were trigger team members placed strategically throughout the convention center grounds. Jeriko and Raven quickly joined him, the two lone gunmen wearing almost identical looks of concern.
"Look at that," the Native American hardwire grimly directed as she pointed at a number of red dots clustered relatively close to the conference center building itself. "They look like they're inside."
"That would confirm the data that we've pulled out from the Armageddon file," Jeriko indicated with a musing frown. A silver lone gunman A.I. also appeared in her hand. "Excaliber, give me the closing section of the Armageddon Project file, detailing the final triggering event and pipe it to a text display."
"Displaying that now, Jeriko," Excaliber's soft male voice replied and, with a flicker of blue light, a text reading display appeared, already scrolling through the data that filled the screen end to end and side to side, searching for the closing segment of the complex and intricate Armageddon Project.
The scrolling halted a heartbeat later and, with bright lines of red and yellow, Excaliber outlined the closing segment of the file, detailing the actual strike of the assassins. Jeriko nodded in confirmation as she quickly read over the material.
"Yup, this confirms it," she reported, looking up at a frowning Mordecai and a pensive Raven. "The Brotherhood is positioning their trigger team to facilitate the assassin strike during the conference's closing ceremony, tonight."
"How long do we have until the closing ceremony begins?" Mordecai asked, his tone thoughtful.
It was Raven that answered, pulling out a conference schedule from one of the many pockets hidden all over her combat uniform in familiar lone gunman black. Flipping it open to the schedule page, she quickly ran her finger over the table.
"Six o'clock this evening," she reported, glancing at a clock on the wall. "We have just a little over four hours before it takes place."
"Hmmm." Mordecai returned a hand to his chin as his thoughts churned. "It's too bad that the file doesn't give us an exact time for the strike. It could happen at any juncture during the three hour block the closing ceremony is going to cover."
"Knowing the Brotherhood, they'll strike at the most visible moment to maximize the impact of the event," Jeriko noted out loud, deactivating Excaliber's display before returning the silvery case to a pocket of her own black battle garb. Although none of the psionics would be assisting Alpha Team in the operation down at the convention center, they were all suited up in case the Brotherhood tried to attack the city to overtly begin Armageddon by destroying the center.
That included the Storm Wolves, now a rapidly growing knot of powerful psionics thanks to a number of softwires from not only the Avalon nation, but from the other independent nations in Calgary as well, choosing to take the DNA transformation. Each new volunteer went through the methodical process that turned him or her into inverted psionic powerhouses before swearing allegiance to the newly-minted psilord.
Most of the newly created hardwires were now out and about the city, making sure the Brotherhood wasn't planning to do just that: penetrating the perimeter keeping them out. Including their leaders, Lisa and Samantha, the first Storm Wolves. But the small force of inverted psionics who swore their absolute loyalty to the powerful man in black, who made them, still had a presence here in the command bunker.
That presence was commanded by one of the very psionics that had helped Mordecai create the psi nation of Avalon. Silently Melanie, once a proud member of Avalon's ruling council and now one of the most powerful of the Storm Wolves, handed Mordecai a pamphlet that had the exact itinerary of the closing ceremony. The newly created British hardwire, fulfilling a dream she had held since her capture at the hands of a Brotherhood ESET after the destruction of her nation of becoming a hardwire, stood in full battle gear just behind Mordecai's shoulder.
After she and Justine had positively identified Mordecai at the meeting with the leaders of Calgary's independent nations, Melanie had led the charge to embrace being a Storm Wolf and become part of Mordecai's daring plan to stop the Brotherhood and save an unknowing Normal world. News of Mordecai's reappearance had also swept through the nation that he helped build like wildfire. It didn't take long before Melanie wasn't the only one that was looking for the man in black.
After seeing the conversion first hand and what it had made in Melanie, just barely behind Lisa and Samantha in hardwire power, Tabitha was next. And they were swiftly followed by a nearly constant stream of volunteers that virtually emptied Avalon and its havens scattered all over the world; those who had sought to avoid the war were suddenly filled with hope that they could become powerful enough to defend themselves. With that understanding, they came in droves.
And Avalon wasn't the only one: within days of the Avalon exodus to Mordecai, volunteers from a number of the independent nations in the city appeared to add themselves to the growing ranks of the Storm Wolves. It would become the most pivotal event in recent history: the creation of an army psionically bonded to the first psi lord, Mordecai. The event would become known in the lone gunman database as the Whelping of the Wolf Pack, and it promised to change the future, forever.
With the Storm Wolves increasing their ranks, Mordecai had no choice but to incorporate the growing force into their plans. The powerful inverted hardwires joined the Alpha Team on its training runs as they prepared for the conference and the Brotherhood's launch of their Armageddon Project. And they trained for a possible Brotherhood attack on the city itself in the event of the assassins failing to begin the war to end all wars.
That training had consumed the month and a half between the final fall of the Brotherhood in Canada and the conference itself. It was now time to see if all that training was about to pay off!
Taking the program from Melanie with a silent nod of thanks, Mordecai flipped it open to give it a quick scan.
"Looks like there's two or three photo opportunities that'll put everybody important in the same space. The Brotherhood's assassins will hit then. That makes these photo ops the Brotherhood's primary strike opportunities. And ours, as well," he said after a quick moment to process the information that he read from the page. He looked up at Raven and Jeriko. "Now, the question is: does Alpha Team have access to the closing ceremony's itinerary?"
Lash frowned as he looked over the itinerary on the big display board standing just behind the conference center grounds' main entrance. 'Photo opportunities during the closing ceremony?' the big vampire silently mused. 'That would seem to be the perfect opportunity for our Brotherhood friends to make their move. I think it'd be prudent to position Alpha Team accordingly.'
"Alpha Leader to Alpha One. Where are you, Dee?" he subvocalized.
"Closing on checkpoint four, Alpha Leader," Dee's voice, tiny and subdued in the vampire's earpiece quickly replied. "What's up?"
"I think I have the time frame in which the Brotherhood's going to make it's move. Do our people have clearance to enter the main building?"
"Confirmed. That was part of the security package I put together for the team before we came onsite. We needed ultimate mobility."
"Perfect. Alpha Five, Seven, Eight and Ten, move into the building and take positions around the main conference room where the delegates will be holding their closing ceremony. We have possible hit time frames between 6:30pm and 6:45pm as well as 9:30pm to 9:45pm during photo opportunities for the delegates to be seen together."
"A prime hit time," Dee confirmed, the realization open in her quiet voice. "And the rest of the team, Lash?"
"I want the rest of you covering the exits. If we miss the moles inside, we need to terminate the trigger team with prejudice before the slaughter can begin."
The acknowledgements were quick to come in, every member of Alpha Team hearing Lash's commands over their shielded link. Hearing them Lash nodded with satisfaction. Almost as smooth as a Qos Viran exercise. With Alpha Team in position, all they had to do now was wait!
****