He clicked on the link to the mind in the status notification. Encrypted connection formed. Backdoor activated, full immersion. Password sent. And he was in.

Breece smiled at the waitress as she brought him another coffee. She smiled back warily. He was just another customer at this interstate diner. Tall, muscular, maybe good-looking once, but now with a bulge of belly growing under his grimy T-shirt, his long hair tangled in dreadlocks, a ragged beard not quite concealing the scar that ran down one side of his face.

He stirred cream into the coffee, took a sip, and turned his attention back to the cheap slate in front of him.

Timing. It was all about timing. A punchline delivered too soon gets no laughs. The late bird gets no worms.

For maximum effect you had to time something just… so.

8.47am. There. The inflow of people to the building was hitting its max. Men and women waved their passes, stared into the retinal scanner, and then walked through the bulletproof glass doors. On the other side, when the doors opened, he could see that the queue in the lobby was backing up, DHS employees waiting to make their way through the bomb sensors and Nexus detectors inside. Breece smiled to himself. The Nexus detectors DHS had added were just slowing things down, creating a new bottleneck, a place of rapidly rising density of targets.

And there. Walking through the doors. Target numero uno. The man they’d been waiting for. DHS Chicago Deputy Special Agent-in-Charge Bradley Meyers. The agent who’d stood by as an enraged mob had killed a pair of geneticists three years ago, and had done nothing to stop it. A man who should have lost his badge, should have been convicted, but instead went on to be promoted. Well, his career ended now.

It was time.

Breece tapped the surface of the slate to initiate the action. A thousand miles away the mule’s cell phone sent a signal to the Nexus OS in the man’s mind. The mule hoisted the package, walked across the square, waved his ID and put his eye to the retinal scanner, and then opened the doors to the secure building and stepped inside.

Kade tried to make sense of the input from the man’s mind. He was indoors. People. A line. Multiple lines. Metal detectors. A belt feeding bags into a scanner. An airport, maybe. Dozens of people all around him.

Assassination. This code was for assassination. A gun. He’d have a gun. Kade grabbed control of the man’s body, patted himself down, searching for it in the pockets of the suit jacket, in his pants, in the small of his back. Nothing.

Someone bumped into him from behind as the line moved forward.

He turned, reflexively. The woman in a blouse and skirt was wearing a badge around her neck. So was the next. Department of Homeland Security. Oh no. Not an airport.