Gayle left her micro earpiece in its case and put on the headset instead, plugging it into the USB port of her laptop. Then she tapped on the comms icon at the bottom of the screen, opening the program, and clicked on the frequency bar she’d labeled Team 1—which was the augmented Shepherds team. The bar labeled Team 2 was a separate circuit—comms with the CIA team hiding in the shadows to whisk her out of Hong Kong if things went bad. Steve had been explicit that the Shepherds would be left to fend for themselves if the Chinese got involved, but Gayle wasn’t sure if she would be able to go along with that . . .

It was an order she’d struggled with since arriving last night.

“Joshua Actual, Mother—how copy?” Gayle said, making her presence known on the comms circuit for the first time. For this operation her call sign was Mother, but it didn’t carry the weight it usually did. She wasn’t running the show, and she wasn’t authorized to intervene and save the day if things went south. Today she was “Mother” in name only.

“Five by, Mother,” Nisha said. “One is in position and mute but can hear you.”

“Mother, check.” She zoomed the satellite feed onto the park between the Renaissance hotel and the convention center. Nothing jumped out at her as unusual. People milled about between the two. Cars passed beneath the park through the Central–Wan Chai Bypass tunnel. A helicopter sat static on the helipad at the northeast edge of the center, two additional pads empty beside it. There were the expected EMS and police vehicles in and around the center, but nothing out of the ordinary to her eye.

And I’m looking. So if I don’t see what they have set up, hopefully that means neither do the Chinese.

“Good hunting, Joshua One.”

She leaned back in the comfortable chair at the desk in her decadent corner suite. She couldn’t see the convention center from here, but she could look across Victoria Harbour and the Kowloon business district across from them. Her corner room was all glass, and she let her gaze drift west, past Victoria Peak and across the north edge of the Lung Fu Shan Park. She stared pensively at Little Green Island and Green Island beyond, both easily visible from her high and luxurious perch.

It’s like a mirage, she thought. It all looks so normal . . . this city and harbor with its boats and buildings and busy people running about.

“Except some of those people are demons,” she murmured and shook her head.