Agents Of The ESA BOOK 2

The sausage roll sat heavy on Jake Philips' desk, half-eaten and already going cold. The synthetic meat had done its job well enough, tasting almost exactly as he imagined the original product had tasted a hundred years before, but this morning he had little appetite for it. He was too busy watching his terminal.

The Malta files were open across two screens, their familiar data columns organised and neat. He had been cross-referencing movement logs when the third screen, the one running background notifications, flickered once. A file entry appeared, stayed for less than two seconds, then was gone. He leaned forward in his chair. The notification had carried a name. Marcus Thorne. Campaign worker. Routine check-in scheduled for this morning, now absent from the system as though it had never existed at all.

Jake sat very still for a moment. He ran a manual search. Thorne's name returned nothing. Not a restricted file, not an archived entry, nothing. The system had not locked the data away. It had simply removed it.

He reached for his communicator. "Solo. Are you still at the gym?"

"Just finishing." Her voice came back sharp and a little breathless. "What's wrong?"

"Meet me at the office. Brussels. Now."

There was a short pause. "That tone of yours never means anything good," she said, and cut the connection.

The ESA headquarters building in Brussels was a tall, pale structure that reflected the morning sky back at itself. Jake arrived first, moving quickly through the lobby where a reception machine logged his entry without looking up. The corridors on the upper floors were quieter than usual. Colleagues passed him with their eyes forward, conversations held low or not at all. He noticed it immediately. The kind of silence that spread through a building when people already knew something they were not yet permitted to say out loud.

Solo arrived seven minutes later, still in her training clothes, her short hair damp at the edges. She fell into step beside him without a word, reading his face as they walked.

The Admiral's office door was already open.

She was behind her desk, her hover chair positioned with its usual precise stillness. She looked up when they entered, and Jake saw something in her expression he was not accustomed to seeing there. She was not calm. She was managing herself very carefully so that she appeared calm, and there was a difference.

"Close the door," she said.

Solo closed it. The room felt immediately smaller.

"Marcus Thorne," the Admiral said, and the name landed in the room like something dropped from a height. "Campaign worker attached to the Delacroix team. He was found dead in a lift at the Velvet Circuit on Rue de la Loi forty minutes ago. The attending medics flagged it as cardiac failure." She paused. "Ulysses has no record of his death. It has no record of his movements for the past twenty-four hours. As of this moment, the system does not acknowledge that Marcus Thorne has existed at all."

Jake looked at Solo. She was watching the Admiral with the focused, unreadable expression she used when she was calculating things quickly.

"A Digital Ghost," Jake said quietly.

"Precisely." The Admiral's hands were flat on the desk. "A crime the system is not only failing to record, but is actively programmed to ignore. Someone has found a gap in the architecture, and they are using it." She looked between them both. "The official Cleaners have been dispatched. They will reach the Velvet Circuit in approximately fifty minutes. I need you there before them."

"Off the books," Solo said. It was not a question.

"Entirely. You find what you can find, you document it your way, and you bring it back to me directly. Nothing goes through the standard channels." The Admiral held Solo's gaze for a moment. "Nothing."

They left her office and moved back through the corridor at pace. The building still had that muffled, avoidant quality to it, colleagues turning fractionally away, conversations dying as they passed. Jake kept his eyes forward.

It was Solo who noticed it first. She touched his arm once, a brief pressure, and he slowed without stopping entirely.

The maintenance drone was twenty metres behind them. Standard unit, the sort that drifted through the building's service corridors cleaning air filters and logging environmental data. Unremarkable in every detail except one. Its optical sensor, which should have been the flat amber of an operational unit, was pulsing a slow, rhythmic violet.

Jake kept walking. "You see it," he said under his breath.

"I see it," Solo said.

They turned the corner toward the lifts and neither of them looked back. The drone did not follow around the corner, but that was almost worse. A machine that stops following is a machine that already has what it came for.

In the lift, heading down, they stood side by side and said nothing for a moment. The city of Brussels spread out below them through the narrow window panel as the lift descended, grey and ordered under a white morning sky.

"Someone inside the building is monitoring us," Solo said eventually, her voice flat and certain.

"Or something," Jake replied.

The lift reached the ground level and the doors opened. Outside, the morning air was cold and sharp. Jake pulled his collar up as they walked toward the transport bay, the name Marcus Thorne sitting at the front of his mind, a man already erased from the world who had nonetheless managed, in the last seconds of his recorded existence, to leave a two-second flicker on a terminal in a flat on floor 149.

The Velvet Circuit was waiting. And the clock the Admiral had given them was already running.