Alycia Chin has been hard at work. She and SNOWMAN booked a pair of hotel rooms in Khartoum. Agent 1337 is working out of some kind of van, which they drive around the neighborhood to pirate good wi-fi. Nobody knows where Hot Mess is staying, but she’s around. Outside the window, Isbitalia Street is alive with traffic.
Alycia chose this particular location for two reasons. First, the University of Khartoum Faculty of Pharmacy is a block away, and there’s a hospital one block further. Second, it’s in a location Jason probably wouldn’t think to check for her. His messages have been getting increasingly and obnoxiously emotional. “I worry about you.” “I hope you’re doing okay.” “Whatever is going on, you have my support, but it would be nice to hear from you.”
I have to do this on my own. I can’t just keep running to a Quill when the evil Chin family needs to be stopped. This is how it is.
Aside from those reasons, she chose Khartoum precisely because it had no significance to the group’s mission. There are no important assets here, no individuals important to the mission. That’s the only way to stay out of her father’s omniscient eye.
Achilles and Pyrrhus Chin, in their video call with her in Mexico, didn’t - physically couldn’t - react with the same speed as a face-to-face conversation. But it was an interactive call. The speed of light is a constant, and electronic communications like video chats are ultimately limited by it. Even digital data is subject to limits in how many times you can bounce it around the planet before it degrades. With these factors, Alycia has been calculating a minimum and maximum distance where the call could have come from.
She thumps on the connecting door to get SNOWMAN’s attention, since she wants a second opinion on her conclusions. The door opens, revealing the robot boy stuffing his face with falafel.
“What are you doing?” she demands.
“Eating. Alex found this street cart with basically chicken tendies and french fries and ranch in a tortilla. It’s like a buck a wrap. So good.”
“You know that my father’s empire is trying to kill us, right?”
SNOWMAN shrugs. “He’s welcome to try. A man’s gotta eat.”
“You’re a robot boy, you do not have to eat.” Alycia emphasizes “boy” out of pure spite and annoyance.
“Whatever.”
SNOWMAN tries to shut the connecting door, but Alycia stops it with her hand. “Come check my data for me.”
“Fine.”
Alycia spends twenty minutes explaining signal analysis, Chin family strategy, and her own assumptions about what happened on that call. At the end of it, the two geniuses agree on her major points. First, that strike had been intended to be lethal, but that Achilles Chin had accounted for the chance of failure. Second, the presence of her father and previously unknown brother in the same physical location probably meant it was an important base of some kind. Third, the potential search area was still a fraction of Earth.
Alycia states her conclusions with a heavy sigh. “We’ve got one set of data. We’ll need another line to my father, if we’re going to find him. And that’s just my father. I know him well. Pyrrhus, my new brother, is a total unknown. Did my father mold him the way he molded me? Or am I a failure, or an experiment, and he is different?”
Alycia’s gun comes out, and she whips it toward the hotel window. After a few seconds, Hot Mess peeks inside. “Hey gang.”
“How did you get up here?” Alycia demands.
Hot Mess holds up a specialized pistol as she crawls her way into the room. “Grappling hook.”
“Where did you get that?”
“Took it from a hero.”
“When did you run into a hero?”
“When I was robbing the bank.”
Alycia stands up from where she’s been sitting, and holsters the gun. “You were robbing. A bank?”
Hot Mess rolls her eyes. “No duh. I’m a villain, s’what I do.”
“What you’re doing is calling attention to us.”
“Nah, it’s cool. Pyrokinetic powers are pretty common, and I used a different skill set here. No hostages, no nothing. Burn my way through an underground tunnel wall, check. Burn my way up through the floor, check. Lure some broody guy in black robes to follow me, check. Get his gun and knock him out, double check. Now he’s gonna waste time hunting me, instead of the local villains. Just another day for a master villain.”
Alycia sighs and tosses her arms up in an angry shrug. “Fine! Fine. Any heat?”
“Just from my powers, ha ha.” Hot Mess peeks around the room, sniffs, locks onto SNOWMAN’s remaining falafel supply and heads into his room to steal some.
“That’s surprising.”
“Relax, boss lady. I robbed the Egyptians. Nobody minds them losing money around here.”
The British had invaded Sudan in the 19th century to “protect” the Nile from the French, and before that the Khedive of Egypt had invaded to take slaves for his armies. Sudan’s independence wasn’t recognized until 1956. Alycia can imagine how people feel.
“Fine. I assume you’re donating your haul to the cause?”
Emma comes back from SNOWMAN’s room with a falafel in each hand. “After subtracting everything this little joint venture has cost me personally, sure, why not?”
SNOWMAN interjects. “Back on topic. I think your next move is to do what AEGIS had already done - do signal analysis, try to spot a Chin-like pattern, follow up, survive your dad’s inevitable assassination attempt, get another line on him.”
Alycia glares, but knows he’s not wrong. “Let’s call the others.”
A shared call comes online, with Alex in their van and Nono presumably at her home in Halcyon. Alycia explains the plan.
“Unfortunately, we can’t compete with AEGIS in terms of SIGINT. They have massive taps on international Internet traffic, and equally potent computing power.”
Everyone’s quiet, until Alex pipes up. “We move to Hong Kong and take over a cryptocurrency mining farm.”
“We what?” asks Nono.
The others on the call can practically hear Alex warming up for a recital of their own awesomeness. “Cryptocurrency mining farms. These guys get a huge amount of computing power together to do complicated math. It’s a big money laundering scheme, as usual, but they’ve got the assets we need. The friendliest countries for this business are China, Venezuela, Georgia, and Canada. Of those, China has the biggest coast and hence the best data pipeline. So we take over a crypto farm, have SNOWMAN go diving to put a tap on the pipe, and start sniffing.”
If nothing else, Alycia is impressed by the audacity of this move. “Okay. How long to put together the kit to do that?”
“Three weeks,” says Alex over the call. “That should give you time to arm yourselves and roll up on some nerds.”
“Um, guys?” Nono’s voice is timid. “Are you… are you talking about… um, just, y’know, hurting people and taking their stuff? That sounds kinda, uh, bad guy-ish.”
“Sometimes people do bad things for good reasons,” Alycia admits. “The rest of us are struggling with what we’ve done in the past, Nono. If you don’t feel comfortable doing this here, I understand. This is the reality of the world of spies and secret agents, but you don’t have to be a part of it if you don’t want.”
There’s silence, and Alycia takes that as a refusal. “Okay. Let’s make arrangements. Emma, see if your contacts can get us some guns and tac gear. Alex, work on the pipe tap. SNOWMAN, get over to Hong Kong and scout us some guys to hit. I’ll start working on identities, passports, and the logistics.”
The call ends, and the team breaks up to commence its grim business.
