Chapter 1

Rose Parker pulled her blue sedan into the loading dock section of the enormous building. It had occurred to her that this might end up being just another silly assignment issued by Avery in order to target a few more innocent computer nerds. The only thing that kept her from turning around and driving away was that the order had come from Avery himself, and not Nyx who would have normally issued her the task. She didn’t care much for either of them personally, but there was something very peculiar about how it was worded to her by Avery.

‘No engagements or interactions?’ She repeated to herself. The additional questions about the many possible scenarios filled her mind. ‘What if I see Brandt there? What if this is a setup to get me out of the equation?’ As absurd and strange as the request was, she had no real choice but to shrug it off. Avery was too powerful to disobey, and even in the underworld of professional hitmen, she did not want to enter a pissing contest with Nyx who had plenty of notoriety despite only having met him recently.

The detour away from the objective in southern Oklahoma and travel to Austin had left her a little more exhausted than usual. She checked her watch one more time before shutting off the engine. 1536. The time was so specific in the message, there was no way she was going to risk botching the job over the obscure details. The final couple of minutes gave her more time for her racing thoughts. She could barely wrap her head around the science crap when it came to the artificial intelligence known as Avery. All she could hope was that this would be over soon and she could get on with her life.

Rose secured the Sig Sauer P320 into her shoulder holster, exited the vehicle, and calmly walked toward the back entrance. She slowly reached for the door handle and gave it a turn. It amazed her that the door was already unlocked. It was a Sunday after all, and the front parking lot looked quite vacant when she initially circled around to the back. Just a couple of cars, probably related to rent-a-cops and janitors. Pulling the door open, she noticed one thing immediately strange. There were yellow lights flashing all over the walls. An alarm was triggered, but certainly not from her intrusion. She had been as careful as possible, it had to be something else, perhaps a test.

The uncertainty was starting to make her nervous, awakening an instinct she had not felt in a very long time. ‘Get in, Get out.’ That was all that she could think of right now. Scanning her surroundings and walking lightly she made her way to the double doors that read, ‘Server Room’. The door was again, unlocked. When she opened it, she immediately knew why. The smoke was billowing up from what appeared to be endless rows of computer equipment. She could barely hear herself think over the roaring noise of circulation fans and the audible fire suppression alarm. “Jesus Christ!”

Rose’s next thought was not about what started all of this chaos, but how she was going to find this thumb drive in a haystack. Everything seemed to be on fire, and the rows looked as if they went on forever. It was a saving grace that she noticed the placards hanging from the ceiling. ‘ZG’ was directly above her. “Still going to be a few hops and a sprint to get to Section D.” She took another step forward before stopping at a very familiar sound. Five gunshots in rapid succession. The sound may have seemed distant and muffled, but there was no denying it, there were others in this room as well and now there was a real threat.

Quickly removing the pistol from her shoulder holster, she prepared for the possibility as she hugged against the large black server rack and peeked down the aisle. At that moment, she remembered the message from Avery. ‘No engagements, no interactions.’ It made even less sense to her now that she was in the room. “What the hell is the reason for that?”

“Fire Suppression System activating in 10 seconds.” The robotic voice spoke loud enough over the roar of everything in the room. She didn’t have to guess what that meant, but she definitely needed to get out of there before it happened. She peeked around the corner again, this time to see two men leaving through a set of double doors at the distant end of the room. One of them looked bloodied and aided by the other larger man. Seeing that they were out of the room, she decided this was the perfect time to get out of there as well. She took one step and again stopped in her tracks when an almost supernatural moment occurred. There was silence as the lights shut off completely and all of the machinery went silent at once. The only illumination in the room now came from the smoldering electrical components.