His office was in the North Tower of the WTC. However, he was away at the time of the lethal bombing. His vacation was hardly a coincidence, given that he had financed mastermind Ramzi Yousef and had chosen the day of the truck bomb explosion. The goal of the Neighbors at that time was the erosion of the public’s confidence in the head of the House Armed Services Committee that would lead to his resignation.

“Are we ready, Eighty?” Bacon asked. “I’m certain Nine will be here shortly, so we might as well begin.”

Bacon’s face, like those of the others, was electronically distorted. The bottom of the massive screen displayed small boxes containing the encrypted video feed of each attendee, while the center area was reserved for a larger display of whoever was speaking. Bacon’s feed was the only one to run in the upper-left corner of everyone’s display.

The director held fiat over all board decisions. The advisory committee was there to help plan a new AP or to deal with decisions involving a member. Bacon would be a Neighbor until he could no longer do the job, after which his number would be given over to his replacement. Lancaster Hill had wisely laid out the blueprint of succession seventy-five years before:

Any Neighbor who no longer serves the cause because of an illness, shall be retired by the board, and their number reassigned to their replacement.

Except for health issues, no one ever left the society of their own volition. Members were sometimes dismissed when they lost their positions, or their influence otherwise waned, but they were always quickly replaced. Rarely, a member insisted on disengaging himself, or was found to be a security risk. In those instances, there were specialists in elimination who were kept on retainer at the advisory committee’s discretion.

The final screen lit up as Selma Morrow, N-9, activated her camera. She was chief of strategy and operations for Phelps and Snowdon, considered one of the strongest hedge funds in the country. She held the same position on the society advisory committee, and as such was a consultant to every AP. A personal favorite of Bacon’s, Nine would be his nominee to succeed him when the time came. For the moment, though, succession was not the issue.

The Janus strain was.