Eberson gave a short nod. Deanna knew that she had hit her target. Once again, the man would remember that she expected quick and exact results, and that she would not take any failure. Eric Chen in person had put her in charge of finding out who had attacked their servers in Terekhovna; the hell if she would ever go back to the C.E.O. himself with only apologies to offer.

“And the Wizard? Any family or contacts listed with his data?”

“He’s an official one. A Maverick, I mean.”

Eberson handed her one of the data-chips, and paused as he was waiting for her to insert it into her personal unit to consult the report directly through her neural interface.

“Chas Norris,” he resumed, again on a simple glance from her. “17, a half-sister, genetic pattern registered at the Franklin clinic of Hawking Level 2. A tough little rat. He may be the one who cracked the Bloodhound program last year, though we don’t know for sure.”

“He must have been doing that from the cradle.” Deanna allowed herself a cold little smile. “To which Cell is he affiliated?”

“Asimov. Same as his sister. There aren’t many left of them. I’ve assigned Alvarado, Merritt and Palmer on their case. Norris seems to have been operating alone these past weeks, I’m not sure if we’ll find something there.”

“Good. Well, let me know about the woman as soon as the lab sends the results. It’s not the only report you have for me.”

These words were not meant to sound as a question, and Adrian caught her thought at once, answering it by pushing a second chip toward her.

“Kobayashi’s,” he said while she was downloading its content as well. “I wonder if this was planned, or only a coincidence. Norris’ attack caught the sys-admins’ attention just at the right time, you see. The Mavericks managed to seize control over the East Building monitoring system, including the cameras and the security drones. We’ve tracked and terminated four of them, but the last one and Kobayashi are missing.”

“Don’t you think this is really a little too much?”

Deanna replaced both chips on the table, her neural unit quickly processing and filing all the transferred data in her grafted memory banks.

“A little too much of what? Coincidences?”

“Our security system is one of the hardest to hack into. We’ve made three official Mavericks test it in exchange for their freedom, and we make sure to always keep it up to date. A rat breaching into it is one thing, but how long would a confirmed Wizard need to hack it during an extraction? Certainly not only a few seconds, even with Norris’ intervention. No. No, they knew where to hit, that’s it. We have a leak, Adrian.”

Eberson kept silent for a few seconds. On the holo-vid, the news broadcast had now left room to a debate between the Governor himself and the Mayor of Olympus regarding the measures to deploy to fight the Red. Deanna caught the suggestion of employing nano-technology, right before she gazed ar her second-in-command again. There indeed was something odd in the way those Mavericks had performed their task, that very morning, abducting the scientist Miki Kobayashi without anyone being fast enough to stop them. Even though the security Agents had killed most of them during their escape, she knew that a detail was missing in this, and an important one at that.

“I want the Internal Investigation team on the ranks. Right now. Have a couple more Agents watch them as well, just to make sure that our mole isn’t one of them. We need to check and compare everything again. Date of hiring, previous employer, politic affiliations, the latest meal they ordered at the local joint. Everything, you hear me?”

“Yes, boss.”

“If anything has eluded us, I want to know it by tomorrow morning — no, by today’s evening. Chen wants results.”

“He’ll get them. Ah — please give me a minute, if you don’t mind.”

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