ALL THE MAJOR government servers were linked, so as soon as Tom jolted out of himself into the stream of data leading to the Pentagonal Spire’s server in Arlington, Virginia, it didn’t take long to find his way into the server of the Department of Homeland Security.

For a disconcerting moment, he felt strange, detached, a free-floating signal in a void. He was never entirely sure what he was doing when he interfaced like this. It seemed to come so much more naturally to the only other person he knew who could enter machines like this, the Russo-Chinese Combatant and his sort-of ex-girlfriend, Medusa. But today, Tom focused on his anger at the cop, and it sharpened his wits. He delved into the vast chain of zeros and ones, searching for the pipelines between the DHS and the domestic police drones flying over the United States.

When he located those, his neural processor sorted through an array of rapid-fire coordinates, and he latched on to the armed drone nearest to him.

A quick scroll through the database of registered gun owners in the area brought a familiar image to mind: Sergeant Erik Sherwin, the cop who’d robbed them. All registered gun owners had tracking chips in their skin, so he zeroed right in on Sergeant Sherwin’s frequency.

Thousands of feet above Sherwin, in the darkened skies between Las Vegas and the overhead skyboards, the drone’s mechanized gaze captured images of the cop just outside the casino, tailing the banker like an obedient puppy. Tom’s vision center registered the images like he was seeing through mechanized eyes of his own.

His plans changed.

Tom felt an evil little thrill, because he’d intended to wreak some havoc on the cop, but now that he thought about it, he really should ignore the hired thug and focus on the mastermind: the bald banker the DHS’s biometric database identified as Hank Bloombury, who worked for a subsidiary of the Matchett-Reddy Corporation.

Tom homed in on Hank and stalked him from the casino to his private car, the drone far overhead cutting a lethal path through the sky. Hank’s car began to pull out of the strip, but Tom was in control of a police drone—which could link remotely into vehicle auto navigation systems and tamper with them at will. Tom enjoyed messing with Hank’s autonav, steering the car back around and directing it toward the hotel he and Neil were staying in.

Hank must’ve finally realized what was happening, because he engaged the emergency shutoff. The car jerked to a halt; and the bald man popped out from inside it, rubbing at the back of his neck, obviously trying to figure out where he was.