All-Chemical Spider #105.
The cybercafe's windows were fogged from the gap between the cold outside and the warmth of too many machines in a small room.
The figure at terminal seven had been there since before the attendant had opened the place. She'd let him in because he'd been waiting at the door with cash and no conversation. The cash covered two hours, and she hadn't looked at him past the hood pulled forward over his face and the gloves on his hands.
Jake finished the last of it.
He closed the final tab and sat for a moment looking at the dark screen behind the cursor, the blank rectangle that held the post he'd drafted and published three times across separate markets before settling on the version with the cleanest language and the most neutral profile metadata.
Three accounts, all new, all drawing from the same research -- the notebook open beside the keyboard, its pages covered in the chemical notation he'd been reconstructing from memory since Sleeper was gone.
The symbiote had pressed its knowledge into him in Star City, and he'd spent the rest of the night writing down everything he could remember on a notebook from Cheetah's library, filling it with shorthand that would look like nothing to anyone who didn't already know what they were reading.
Smile. Kobra-Venom. The pheromone, its full structural pathway, the three-step synthesis that had been sitting behind his sternum since Sleeper, waiting for him to find a use for it.
The post listed what he needed, priced at a number that was high enough to be serious but not so high that it read like a trap, and the compounds he'd included extended one step past what his recipe required.
He shut the notebook and looked at the screen one more time.
Then he cleared everything and powered the terminal off.
He gathered the notebook. His hand went to the hoodie's pocket, confirming the shape of the folded notes there without pulling them out, and he stood and crossed the cafe toward the door, threading the narrow space between the terminals with his hands in his pockets and his head still forward.
At the front counter he pulled a bundle of notes from his jacket and dropped them on the desk without counting them or stopping. The attendant looked up from her phone and then at the money, and Jake was already at the door.
"Hey--" She came around the counter. "You've got change. And your ID--"
But the street outside was empty. She looked both ways, the thin morning air reaching past the door frame, the street doing its early-hour thing with no one on it who had been there a moment ago. She stood in the doorway with the change in one hand and the laminated card in the other and looked at both.
Above her, moving east at rooftop height, Jake let the swing carry him.
The navigation thread ran northwest. He let it run and didn't follow it, not yet, pulling a right at the junction where a telecommunications tower gave him a transit point, descending briefly below the roofline to cross a bus route and then back up again, settling into the London geography.
The post was live, the profile would start receiving contact within the day if the market was as active as the metrics suggested, but contact required proof of payment, and proof of payment required funds, and funds were not something he currently had in any quantity that a serious supplier would respect.
He needed to make a substantial monetary withdrawal.
The bank sat on a commercial street in the older financial district with its mix of Georgian stone and glass additions.
He noted the camera placements, the security rotation at the ground-floor entrance, the position of the cash-handling rooms relative to the building's structure, and built the approach in the margin of his thinking.
He came off the swing two streets back and dropped to street level, moving through the early morning foot traffic. He walked with his head forward and the hoodie doing its work, and his sense read the street ahead without announcing itself.
The bank came into view at the end of the block.
He walked past it on the opposite side, reading the frontage, confirming the positions he'd memorized, noting what had changed from his aerial survey -- a security presence at the side entrance that was heavier than the rotation he'd plotted.
He turned at the far end of the block and went around, taking the alley that ran behind the building, and his sense mapped the rear face as he moved past it.
He went up the building opposite at the corner, hands finding purchase in the stonework, and from the height he could see the bank's roof and the gap in coverage he'd been building toward.
He confirmed his bearing, let his breath settle, and crossed the gap between the buildings in a single swing, releasing at the top of the arc and coming down onto the bank's roof without the web line -- a free fall of the last several feet, landing on the lead flashing above the old stone with his weight absorbed through his legs, the impact no louder than weather.
He moved across the roof toward the access point he'd identified.
Below him the building held its morning operations, the sounds of it reaching him through the stone -- the ventilation system, the electronic hum of the security infrastructure running its cycles.
His sense read through the surface, mapping weight and movement, locating the concentration of human presence behind the teller floor and the different concentration further back where the cash-handling operated.
The skylight access was above the secondary stairwell. His metal fingers found its interior frame and closed around it, and he hauled himself through the gap.
He went through and dropped the last few feet onto the stairwell landing in the dim interior light of the bank's maintenance corridor.
He stood in the building's quiet for a moment, his sense ranging out through the walls and floors. He needed to be fast.
The stairwell led toward the cash-handling floor. He crawled down the ceiling, using low swings to compensate for the stiff caused by his mechanical arm, and the throb of his possessed arm.
He dropped to the floor at the corridor's far end and pressed himself into the alcove beside the fire door and waited.
A guard came around the corner, moving with the loose attention of a man whose shift had been uneventful long enough to stop expecting otherwise.
Jake stepped out behind him, his forearm finding the man's throat in the same motion. The guard's hands came up once before the pressure on the carotid did its work and he went slack. Jake lowered him to the floor against the wall and checked his breathing and moved.
The sequence repeated on a second guard, ending with the guard folding down the wall with his chin on his chest and his breathing slow and even.
Jake found the vault at the corridor's end, behind a second security threshold -- a keypad, a reader, and above the lintel, almost invisible against the stone, something that had nothing to do with electronics.
His sense found it before his eyes did.
The navigation thread in his peripheral vision began to spin, slow at first and then faster, circling without settling.
Jake stood two meters from the door and read what was coming off it -- a field, layered and patient, sitting against the vault's face like something that had been placed there with time to spare and intended to remain. Not a tripwire. A ward, similar to the one outside Jason Blood's building.
London was careful.
He looked at it and thought about how Constantine had solved the problem -- with magic.
The dagger came into his right hand on the pull of it. He held it still for a moment, and then he pressed the tip of the blade against the ward's edge.
The field yielded slowly at the point of contact, redistributing around the pressure. The dark residue in the blade fed into the contact point and the ward's geometry shifted, a seam opening along the line of the cut.
He continued, drawing the blade along the field's face in a slow, deliberate stroke.
No alarms went off.
The ward folded back from the cut and held its new shape, the gap clean and wide enough for a body to move through without contacting the remaining edges. He stepped through and the vault door was in front of him.
The vault door was a mechanical problem.
He put the dagger back and looked at the handle and the locking mechanism and the seam where the door met the frame. His mechanical hand found the handle and his right hand found the door's edge and he pulled.
The steel groaned once, low and brief, and the locking bolts sheared at their housing and the door swung open.
Red, flickering light bled into the atmosphere as the alarms went off. Jake ignored them.
The vault's interior was cool and organised and smelled of paper and metal. The bundles were racked in denominations along the far wall, secured with bands, dense and uniform.
He worked efficiently. The web lines crossed the space and the bundles came off the racks in clusters, wrapped and consolidated into carriers that grew against his chest and back as he moved through the racks.
He didn't count -- he estimated by volume, pulling enough that the figure would clear what the suppliers would need to see.
Barely three minutes had passed when he moved back through the gap in the ward, and he was already being shouted at.
"Hey you!"
"Stop there!"
He fled back to the stairwell and up, the web carriers heavy against his back, and his sense found the roof access clean and he went through the skylight frame and out.
He wasted no breath firing and swinging away, the web carrier shifting against his back with the weight of it. A single bundle worked loose from the outside of the pack in the first arc and fell, spinning end over end, and hit the street below and burst its band and scattered across the pavement in a long spread of notes that the wind caught and distributed further.
He didn't go back for it.
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