The thirty seven new employees of Roxxon Oil were perfect. They arrived on time, did their jobs with quiet competence and never caused any trouble.
They were ghosts in the corporate machine, utterly unremarkable and therefore completely invisible. And every night, they would feed a torrent of unfiltered data into the insatiable maw of Amon's network.
The Janitor's Cart: Roxxon Tower, 47th Floor
Elias Vance was the new janitor. He was a grey haired man in his late fifties with a slight limp, the kind of person an executive would look straight through without registering his existence.
His file, the one Roxxon HR had on record, said he was a retired army quartermaster. In reality, he was a former Mossad saboteur whose loyalty had been rewritten and perfected. His cleaning cart was his workstation.
Late at night, long after the last ambitious vice president had gone home, Elias began his real work. The boardroom, a monument to corporate arrogance with its massive mahogany table and panoramic city views, was his primary target.
His mop handle contained a pneumatic launcher. With a soft sound, it fires a micro bug, no larger than a grain of rice and colored to perfectly match the wood grain, onto the underside of the table.
Another was placed in the base of the credenza, another in the recessed lighting fixture. These were multi spectrum sensors, capturing audio, video and even thermal fluctuations that could indicate a person's stress level.
His best work was in the CEO's private bathroom. He replaced the GFI outlet next to the sink with a visually identical duplicate.
This one contained a hardline tap that spliced directly into the building's ethernet connection, giving the Red Queen a physical access point deep inside Roxxon's supposedly secure network.
The Server Room: Roxxon Applied Sciences, New Jersey
The new security guard, a woman named Maria, sat in the climate controlled server room, a place that housed Roxxon's darkest secrets.
The official security protocol required a physical guard to be present at all times, a human element to prevent a purely digital breach. They never considered that the human element could be the breach.
On her personal data pad, she was running a piece of software provided by Amon. It was a mirroring program, but one unlike any other.
It simply requested data, packet by packet, at such a low and slow rate that it was statistically indistinguishable from background system noise and routine diagnostic checks.
Over the course of her twelve hour shift, the program would copy terabytes of data.
Research notes on illegal biological agents, encrypted payrolls showing "consulting fees" paid to foreign dictators, geological surveys detailing deliberate and catastrophic environmental dumping in South America.
The data flowed out of Roxxon's most secure facility like a slow trickle from a leaky faucet, completely undetectable.
The Shipping Depot: Red Hook, Brooklyn
At the bustling Red Hook depot, the new logistics clerk, a young man who called himself Jake, was a model of efficiency. He processed shipping manifests with a speed and accuracy that impressed his supervisor.
What his supervisor didn't know was that Jake had a photographic memory. He was memorizing the manifests for the off the books deliveries.
He noted the specific container numbers, the shell corporation names, the destinations in unstable countries.
He saw the discrepancies: manifests that claimed to be shipping "industrial solvents" in lead lined containers that weighed ten tons more than they should. He saw the routes that carefully skirted international waters and customs checkpoints.
At the end of his shift, he sat in his car and recited every detail into an encrypted burner phone, uploading the raw data directly to Amon. He was a living leak in the heart of Roxxon's black market operations.
…
Amon remained silent, his focus on the incoming data from the New Jersey lab, the complex chemical formulas scrolling across the screen in a silent stream.
The Red Queen's avatar floated beside him, her holographic form a stark contrast to the sterile functionality of the bunker. She lounged in the air as if on an invisible chaise, a virtual magazine in her hands one moment, a half eaten holographic apple the next.
She was processing petabytes of stolen data with less effort than a human would use to read a gossip column.
"Boring, boring... encrypted cafeteria menus... oooh, wait a second," she said, her casual tone suddenly sharpening with the predatory interest of a cat spotting a mouse. The apple vanished. "Now this is a juicy one."
She waved her hand with a theatrical flourish. On the main screen, a high definition video feed bloomed into existence.
The perspective was from a low angle, looking up from beneath a polished mahogany table. The audio was crystal clear. It was Elias Vance's bug in the Roxxon boardroom, capturing a secret meeting.
The feed showed two men. One was Roxxon's CEO, Hugh Jones, his face florid with a mixture of anger and anxiety.
The other was Senator Robert Thompson, a man with a public reputation as a straight shooting man of the people. In the privacy of this room, his face was a greedy mask. They were in a heated argument.
"...absolutely not, Robert," Hugh Jones was whispering, his voice a strained hiss. "The risk is too high. Another twenty percent is insane. We've already paid you a fortune."
"The political climate has changed, Hugh," the Senator shot back, his folksy charm replaced by a snake's quiet venom. "The Federation's new 'transparency' initiatives are making things difficult. Killing that clean energy bill in committee wasn't easy. It required a lot of favors, a lot of... persuasion. The price of doing business has gone up. You want Roxxon to remain competitive in a world that's trying to outlaw you? Then you will pay the price."
The Red Queen let out a small gasp. "Oh, he is just the worst," she chirped, her eyes wide with glee. "A corrupt politician. It's like finding a vintage collectible." She mimicked typing on a virtual keyboard. "Let's see... Senator Robert Thompson. Publicly campaigns on family values and fiscal responsibility. Privately has a secret mistress in Alexandria and a son with a gambling problem that he's been covering up for years."
She shook her head in mock sadness. "Naughty, naughty."
With another flick of her wrist, she made the video file disappear from the main screen. A encrypted file labeled "THOMPSON, R. LEVERAGE" appeared in a folder on the side of the display. "Tagged, flagged and stored for future blackmail," she announced with immense satisfaction. "He'll be a very useful puppet for The Leader to play with later. See? I'm helping."
She gave Amon an innocent smile, as if she had just organized a spice rack rather than cataloged the means to destroy a man's life and career.
Amon remained silent, his focus on the incoming data from the New Jersey lab. Complex chemical formulas scrolled across the screen.
"What are you looking for?" Red Queen asked, floating closer.