Jim Sanumá parked his car, such as it was, far enough west of the airport not to be seen. Retrieving its cargo from the glove compartment, he gave the lock mechanism a sharp kick. It folded sharply, forming a rough box shape, which Jim shoved into the dit…

"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,…

The surviving security footage from the office building was taken out, uploaded to the police computers, and processed until it divulged its secrets. Within two hours, it had created facial reconstructions of the heist team.

The faces had been run through…

The Old Man, holding his gaze on the computer screen, raised his hand and curled his finger. Come.

Vargas didn't need to be told twice, but he hesitated nonetheless. Is this a trap? he wondered.

He steeled his nerves and brought forth the briefcase. "…

They took their passages out. Secret subterranean extensions in the parking garage led them into the storm drain system, then up the drainpipe, down the fire escape, across the building, and safely conveyed them to their vehicles a few blocks away.

They …

A moment passed, for Matt Quyen, where he was uncertain if he had gone from standing to lying on his chest, about a story lower, with a few broken ribs and ringing in his ears, in one unbroken sequence, or if he had lain there for minutes or hours. His ve…

They open the steel-walled box which contains the data. It's a red plastic object the rough size of a brick and shape of a Lego, with grey cable ports on the underside. One of them flips the drive upside-down in a single, fluid, motion that takes a fracti…

Suspects entered the building at 10:19. We arrived twelve minutes later...

"It's locked!", said Matt Quyen as he gingerly tried the office doors.

"Move away from the glass," said the team leader, "We're going to smash it." The squad backed up as the cap…

Trinity Keane tallied up her advantages. There were few of them, given that she was being chased by the police, but she noticed one - they don't know about my eye. That meant the fog wouldn't work on her.

She veered expertly, avoiding obstacles marked i…

There was a camera - small, hidden - mounted on the hood of Trinity Keane's car, scanning forward in millimeter-wave, visible, and infrared. All of this transmitted itself to her bionic eye, in an offputting but, she had to admit, useful way - the visible…

The battery of sensors in the hood of the police car tracked the signal, the shining beacon of radio waves emanating from the van. It plotted the location onto a GPS map in the dashboard.

Meanwhile, a small army of police waited behind the barricade. Near…

The old man wasn't the only person in the van. In the driver's compartment, Trinity Keane switched between police stations. The content was almost entirely banal - robberies, traffic, drug possession, et cetera - but now and then, the interesting happened…

The first police presence came in the form of a formation of drones, small and silver, hardly visible in the morning light. They flew from their base, along Hyacinth Street, and collectively pulled into a dive as they approached.

An unobtrusive antenna at…

To understand why Mike Green had begun to scream, one must merely look at the events of a few seconds earlier.

Then, an old man had sat in a windowless van, ensconced in soundproofing, and raised a small radio to his lips. "Begin," he declared tonelessly,…

"So, I heard you were in town?"

He could practically hear Mike Green's intense grin over the phone. In college, she had been his best friend. Shortly thereafter, they had parted ways - Gonçalves to Freetalk, Green to some analytics firm bound by sheafs of…

Ryan Gonçalves stared into his drink at an airport bar. The bar was disgustingly new and trendy, with its former Starbucks-esque earth tones phased out in favour of post-Starbucks decor, all garishly bright contrast. The drink was something lime-green and…

The sky over the city was still pitch-black, even at five in the morning, with forty-five minutes to sunup and a clear sky. They made their way to a parking garage downtown, a few blocks from the scaffold-ridden visage of the Megaspire, with forged securi…