WRAITH CASE STUDY AUGUSTA PINE
IDENTITY SECURITY DIVISION
Professional thieves always have the best security.
After all, when you make a living stealing things, you become acutely aware of how easily they could be taken.
This was why I was sitting in an ISD surveillance van. The exterior was meant to look like a plumber’s van. The interior was all screens, camera equipment, and some high-powered microphones.
For this assignment, there were two wraith handlers: Prefect and a woman called Warden.
Warden was in her midthirties. She came with two wraiths whose names I immediately forgot.
The men looked like rich, middle-aged accountants and regarded me with undisguised skepticism.
Maybe they’d been arrested for tax fraud and decided that being temporarily killed was better than mingling with a lower class of criminal in prison.
I mentally referred to them as Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
“How did we end up on a mission with a kid?” muttered Tweedledum to Tweedledee.
Tweedledee sighed. “She’s supposed to be some kind of prodigy. I heard Warden talking about her a while back.”
Prefect ignored them both. As always, he had brought me to the job without a word of explanation. That was his way—he liked to send me into situations without briefing me first. He said it made me more observant. I thought it just made me paranoid. Which was probably the real point.
We were watching a tech company in San Francisco.
The building used to be a bank and it still had the old-money, impenetrable appearance.
There were tattoo scanners at the front doors and anyone venturing inside had to be inspected and ID’d by security guards.
The doors looked capable of withstanding a bomb blast. There was a back entrance into the basement, but there was no exterior doorknob.
None of the windows on the first three floors opened.
And there were cameras tucked into the building’s every hallway. I knew because we had tapped into them.
“I have an informant,” said Warden, a touch smugly.
“So now what?” I asked.
“We observe,” said Warden. “And we look for a way in.”
Which was how I ended up sitting in that van, watching the inner workings of corporate tech culture for the better part of three days.
People dressed in designer office wear typed into computers, chatted with one another, cried in supply closets, clogged a toilet on the second floor, and generally seemed to live perfectly ordinary and boring lives.
It almost made me wish I’d gone to prison.
Until the eighth-wealthiest man in the world strolled into the building.
“Keith Stenc,” I breathed. “Okay. So this is one of his companies?”
“You didn’t know that?” asked Tweedledee.
I perked up. Surely an investigation into a wily tech billionaire would prove interesting. Maybe he’d bought an entire country’s stolen IDs or was secretly an international spy. I’d always wanted to take down a spy. “Okay, what’s so illegal that it requires two wraith teams?”
“Corporate espionage,” said Warden.
I wilted. “Well, that’s boring.”
“Patience,” said Prefect. “He stole something. Something valuable. We need to retrieve it.”
“I’m not a legal expert,” I said. “But I think there are these things called ‘warrants’ that let people like you search places.”
Prefect gave me a flat stare.
“Oh, his legal team beat your legal team,” I said, grinning.
“No,” said Prefect.
That’s when I finally got it. “Oh, he stole something valuable.”
“Are you sure she’s a prodigy?” asked Tweedledum.
I resisted the urge to throw a stale doughnut at him. “I mean, he stole something the government wants. And instead of keeping things all nice and aboveboard, they sent us in so we can steal it from him.”
“Crudely put but not wholly inaccurate,” said Prefect.
I grinned. “What are we stealing?”
“We do not steal,” said Warden.
“We acquire,” said Prefect dryly.
“Well, what are we acquiring?” I asked.
Warden exhaled slowly. “Stenc impersonated someone in order to retrieve a file from a rival company. So technically this job is under our jurisdiction. But you are also correct that certain members of the government would like to have that file. It contains … delicate information.”
“Are we talking missile guidance plans or naked pictures?” I asked.
“Neither,” said Warden. “But … it’s closer to the former.”
“Weapons design,” I replied. “Probably created by someone not willing to sell to the good old US military. But this billionaire stole it. And now we steal it from him. Cool. Do we get a commendation if we find it? ‘Best Government Thief’?”
“You get to leave this van,” said Prefect.
Which sounded like an even better reward, honestly.
That night, Warden sent Tweedledee inside.
He scaled the side of the building. For all that he looked like an accountant, he picked his way up the building’s brick wall like a spider up a web. I blinked, impressed. “Parkour enthusiast?” I asked Warden.
“Former cat burglar,” she replied.
Which just goes to show that you should never judge by appearances.
Tweedledee chose a window on the sixth floor, presumably because there would be fewer alarms at such a high entry point.
He coaxed the window open and slipped inside.
He flitted down the hallway, using his visor to avoid infrared sensors and other traps.
We watched him through that same visor, seeing everything he did on one screen while another depicted the point of view of the building’s security cameras.
Those cameras blurred around Tweedledee’s face.
It was good to know that the anti-facial-recognition software in our visors worked.
Tweedledee slipped over another sensor embedded in the floor and approached Stenc’s office. It was locked, but nothing a good thief couldn’t handle. He slipped into the office, scanned it for infrared trip wires, and came up empty.
Tweedledee seemed to exhale in relief. Then he squatted down beside Stenc’s computer.
And then something at the edge of the screen twitched.
I blinked and stepped closer to the screen. Stenc’s office looked wholly ordinary: a desk, a computer, file cabinets, a few crates below the desk, and an empty bin.
My attention was drawn to a black metal box sitting under a table in the far corner of the room. It looked like a large computer chassis.
Until it simply unfolded itself.
I drew in a sharp breath. “Prefect?”
He was watching another screen. When he heard the thread of panic in my voice, he hurried to my side. “What is that?” I asked, pointing.
The crate rearranged itself and I realized what we were looking at.
A dog. No, I thought. It was a not-dog. No dog could ever look as creepy as that creature. There was no head, and those legs were back-hinged. The sight filled me with a sense of wrongness.
It was one of those robot dogs that the military and police used in unmanned operations.
“Guard dog,” whispered Warden, her face tight. “That wasn’t in my informant’s report.”
Tweedledee saw the not-dog and jumped. He made for the door.
Which slammed shut two inches from his nose. He must have tripped the security.
There was a heartbeat of stillness.
Tweedledee yanked at the doorknob, but it didn’t budge. Fear was written into his every movement, and I held my breath in shared horror. Being trapped was one of those primal nightmares that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
Tweedledee pulled a window breaker from his belt and pressed it to the window. The glass did not so much as crack. Not-glass, then.
This entire building was a trap of nots.
“Some kind of shatterproof polymer,” said Warden. “That wasn’t in the report, either.”
“What the hell was in your report?” snarled Tweedledum. It could have easily been him breaking into that office.
Or me, I realized belatedly.
Something had been built into the dog’s back. A kind of weapon. I didn’t recognize it.
The not-dog tottered after Tweedledee. It moved with the unhurried gait of an artificial creature that had never known fear nor anger nor urgency.
And then the something on its back fired.
I turned away the moment I saw Tweedledee stagger and hit the wall. I didn’t need those images in my brain—I already had plenty of nightmares. But I could still hear the soft gasp from Warden as her asset’s life signs vanished.
For a few moments, no one said a word.
“Are we—are we going to get him?” asked Tweedledum.
“No need,” said Warden.
I leaned against the van wall, closing my eyes. Nothing would link Tweedledee to the Identity Security Division. That was the whole point of using wraiths: plausible deniability. To Stenc, this man would simply be an intruder caught by the security system.
Tweedledum’s breathing did not slow. His eyes were wide, sweat dampening the hair at his brow. “That was a rail gun,” he said. His hand went to his own chest, as though feeling a phantom pain. “That was a damn miniature rail gun.”
“That’s what our CEO stole?” I asked. “The designs for a robot dog rail gun?”
I wasn’t a weapons expert by any means, but I’ve always had a short attention span, an internet connection, and a tendency to get sucked into research deep dives.
All I knew about rail guns was that they didn’t need explosives or propellants to shoot a projectile.
The US military had been trying to implement them on its warships for years, but there were issues with energy and cooling.
If someone had finally managed to build a weaponized, miniature version, and then Stenc had stolen it …
well, no wonder we were here. This was our opportunity to get our hands on that tech without anyone ever tracing it to ISD or the feds.
“He wasn’t supposed to have built it yet,” said Warden. Her face was so pale that her freckles stood out sharply. “Our mole said he hadn’t sent the files to his design team.”
“Well, he built it,” said Prefect. “Your source was misled.”
Warden flicked her fingers, activating her ringware. “Attempt One, unsuccessful,” she said. “Asset 072424 has been neutralized.”
Her voice was so cool that it made me feel sick.