The Plan

"We've got it."

Captain Khan's tablet filled with lines of text and numbers. A massive spreadsheet, with some sort of unreadable data, plus a long program, rendered in some programming language.

A second message popped up onscreen.

"Target was not bank, rather nearby analytics firm. Working on state-of-art program: not merely descriptive or predictive, but also prescriptive."

She blinked. If they had taken that, then...

She replied. "What could they do with it?"

The reply came quickly. "They could make any company they choose go boom or go bust. They could make a candidate win or lose by a landslide. Anything that could be influenced by a large mass of people making a specific decision - nothing too much against their beliefs, but small changes would work."

The possibilities, she reflected, were almost endless. They could start a war, if they wanted to. Or end one. She dearly hoped it would be the latter as opposed to the former.

"Captain Khan! Airport's got a match!"

And she was ready to find out.