Clearance Operation Underway

In a temporarily rented office building in New York, the floors stood empty. Plastic dust covers for the renovations still hung over most of the place, making it look like a space still under construction.

This was the temporary command center for an operations squad borrowed by Ezekiel Sims, and Amaria Mamed's equipment had also been moved here. They had not simply picked a warehouse or abandoned factory as a covert operations base because the hacker Amaria Mamed's work relied too heavily on network equipment.

Network cables were not something that could simply be run anywhere, and bandwidth was not unlimited. So they had no choice but to find an office location with its own basic infrastructure, saving both time and effort.

If they truly wanted to find unregistered black-market network lines, though, resourceful New Yorkers could still find them.

But Ezekiel Sims did not have the connections; the operations squad loaned out by Abstergo would not do that sort of bring-your-own-supplies work; and Amaria Mamed frankly admitted that her own connections were problematic.

They said free was the most expensive. Anyone who believed that resources obtained from Old Black on the street had no hidden problems and could be trusted completely had to be an idiot.

Other than leaving no official record, using such resources was nothing but risk. Who knew how many hackers were monitoring that network line and recording their actions?

After a brief assessment, Ezekiel Sims simply rented an office building with complete basic facilities as a temporary operations command post. A whiteboard stood nearby, covered with printed photos of the targets. Several people already had large red Xs drawn over their heads, to the point that Amaria Mamed usually did not dare look toward the whiteboard.

It was as though her own photo were up