“Thank you, sir,” I said flatly, dredging up a polite nod and a stiff smile. “I do what I can for the good of the organization.”

I almost gagged on the words. But it was what I was expected to say. I was not so crazy as to insult the organization itself; if I did, I probably wouldn’t walk out of this room alive.

Mr. Roth smiled, though his expression was cold. Turning to the giant screen on the far wall, he pressed a remote, and an image flickered to life: a satellite feed of a snowy wilderness in the middle of nowhere. A scattering of plain gray buildings sat within a fence at the edge of the mountains.

“I am certain you know what you are looking at,” Mr. Roth said, watching me across the table.

I gave a short nod. “It’s a St. George facility,” I replied, observing the image on the screen, committing the layout of the place to memory. “If I had to guess, one of their northern chapterhouses.”

“Yes,” Mr. Roth agreed. “A brand-new Order chapterhouse, in fact. We discovered this base last week and have been monitoring it heavily ever since. As their security system isn’t online yet, we have decided this is a perfect opportunity to strike. Do you see this building, Agent Cobalt?” A red circle appeared on the screen, around one of the identical gray buildings in the center of the compound. “That is their data center. And your target.” Roth’s voice remained matter-of-fact, as if he’d just announced the time of the next conference call. “We need you to infiltrate their base, find the main computer and download a sensitive file from their network. After that, destroy the building so that no traces of us, or the information theft, can be found.”

I kept my expression cool, but inside, my stomach dropped. I’d received dangerous assignments before, but this? Sneak into a St. George base? Break into a chapterhouse swarming with enemy soldiers? “What will I be looking for?” I asked. “I have some computer skills, but I’m no hacker. Even in a new base, their files are sure to be well protected, or at the very least encrypted.”

Mr. Roth smiled. His cold gaze shifted to the person sitting across from me, and the human looked up from his laptop.

His eyes were sullen. As if sitting in a room with three dragons not only failed to impress him, he resented being here in the first place.

“Right. Hang on a moment.” Somehow, his English accent didn’t surprise me. I watched as the kid reached around his laptop, yanked something free, then slid it to me over the table.

I picked it up: a simple black USB drive rested between my fingers. Puzzled, I looked back at the human and raised an eyebrow.

“What is this?”