Chapter 32—The Scorpion in the Wolf's Den

  Tetherly Corporate Office Complex, Los Angeles Hills,

  Seven AM

  The rusted Toyota Corolla turned right, blinker clicking like a metronome. It slowed, engine humming as it left the quiet murmur of morning traffic behind, angular body pointed toward Hadley's office building. The sun crested the eastern peaks, bathing the roof and upper stories of the Tetherly corporate campus in blood-red light.

  The Corolla rolled through the private road between employee lots, traveling deeper into restricted parking territory as it approached the imposing edifice. From the passenger seat, Hadley watched in silence as his own shaded parking space slid past on the right. He gripped the leather handles bag. His knuckles whitened. The driver eased off the accelerator.

  The car glided up to the front steps. Brooms tapped the brakes, shifting the Corolla into park. Without killing the ignition, his head rolled sideways, watery eyes finding Hadley.

  "We're here," he said, in a voice like sun-dried nicotine. "Go inside. Newton's office. He's expecting you."

  "That's it?" Hadley didn't move. "You're not going to escort me in?" He recalculated the odds.

  "That's it." Brooms looked ahead through the windshield, already done with Hadley. "You're here. I brought you. That's my job for today."

  "What if I run?"

  "Newton pays me to do things for him. Things no one else will do. But even he doesn't pay me enough to set foot in there. And if you ran? You wouldn't make it three steps." Brooms leaned forward, twisting a knob. The car filled with the sound of an acoustic guitar and a woman singing sweet and low. Some song from the sixties, judging by the audio hiss.

  A cassette player?

  Hadley stared at the dashboard as if seeing it for the first time. Plastic knobs, plastic sliders, a clock radio with an actual liquid crystal display. No touchscreen. No GPS. No Bluetooth. The discrepancy caught him off guard, silencing even the hard boys' internal gibbering.

  "Where did you find this thing?"

  "Original owner," Brooms said. He turned the volume higher while the woman sang her pledge of undying love. "It works. Every day. The day it doesn't is the day I stop driving for good." He didn't look at Hadley. "Now get the hell out of my car before I stick your liver in the glovebox."

  End of conversation, end of the line.

  Hadley unclicked the passenger seat restraint, opened the door, bag in hand. As he stepped out, Hadley reached inside, wrapping his fingers around the handle of his knife. Any worry he had about Brooms seeing his clandestine weapon vanished as the Toyota pulled away, gaining speed before he'd even touched the curb.

  Hadley Caine slid a hand into the pocket of his slacks. He gazed up at the Tetherly offices, his skin cool in the midmorning shadow. Overhead, the building loomed. Menacing, a juggernaut ready to consume all in its path.

  Hadley let his bag drop to the pavement. It popped open, sending a flurry of hundred dollar bills drifting across the sidewalk. He didn't care. Either way this went down, he didn't need it anymore. Like a scorpion scuttling into a wolf's den, he walked forward into the Tetherly Building.

  The doors opened with a quiet hiss. Hadley stepped into the lobby. The air conditioning hit him like a wall — unneeded and austere. His running shoes squeaked against polished marble, each footfall echoing like the slap of a clown.

  The building felt wrong. No assistants shuttling between departments. No junior analysts clutching tablets. No one from facilities changing a lightbulb. Instead? Nothing. Just the low hum of the HVAC system and a faint, untraceable melody. The reception desk sat empty, the emblazoned Scruff logo looking out of place. Hadley did not notice the cartoon canine's prominent teeth, sharp as a knife. He leaned over the desk, frowning. The computer monitor was dark, the chair pushed in. A coffee mug sat next to the keyboard, still steaming. The perky blonde had left in a hurry, or had been told to leave.

  Newton's order? Hadley's fingers tightened around the switchblade. He felt the cameras dissect his every move. Only one chance now.

  Hadley continued across the lobby, up the open-plan stairs. He climbed, each step taking him closer to the second floor — and Newton's private elevator. Just a few yards beyond the crest of the stairs, he saw the elevator every day. Could visualize its brushed metal appearance with his eyes closed. Hadley had seen his warped image in the reinforced titanium panels hundreds of times. But he never used it. No one did.

  The elevator's lintel came into view, followed by its abrupt hardlined edges. Hadley inhaled, eyes focused on the portal's left-hand frame, eyes glued to the utter lack of a call button. No one went to the top floor without Newton's approval, regardless of access level. It was an invite-only sort of place.

  He crested the last step. A bell chimed. The elevator door slid open. A modest four-person lift.

  There was that music, louder now. But not music — more like an orchestra tuning up poorly across the horizon.

  The door yawned. Hadley stepped inside the simple, carpeted elevator cabin. No mirrors. No wallpaper. No control buttons inside either. The door slid shut behind him. Overhead, above the now-closed doors, a red light flicked on.

  With a lurch, the elevator began its ascent.

  Hadley's body rocked side to side as the cart rose to its destination, his ears popping as the subtle gravity returned to normal. He was alone. Even the hard boys, tough as they were, sat stone still in his mind.

  The red light blinked, then turned green. As the doors slid open, the distant music filled the elevator. A classical piece. One he hadn't heard before. It wasn't the sort from the movies. Ragged and discordant, it sounded like anguish and demons and death.

  He stepped forward, crossing the shaft's threshold, feet touching the fifth floor for the first time. Squinted at the windowless hall, its only light source the opaque glass sconces along narrow walls of darkened mahogany. No chairs or wall hangings. Just a hall with an elevator at one end, and a pebbled glass door at the other.

  The elevator closed behind him with a whisper. Hadley turned. No call button on this floor, either. Just cameras — in the ceiling, in the corners, in the vents. Secure-IT. The same access system that had granted him unaccountable power was now responsible for preventing his escape.

  The music — if it could be called that — was loudest here on the fifth floor. Somewhere someone was doing something terrible to a violin, on purpose. Repeatedly.

  Hadley's mind flashed back to college. A lecture on the fall of Rome. Nero, fiddling while the city burned. His mask broke, the ghost of a smile flickering across his face. Emperors, mad or not, bled as easily as a back-alley bum.

  The music stopped.

  "Mr. Caine." Newton's voice. Unmistakable through the closed office door. "Come in."

  Hadley didn't move. He stared at the door, failing to glean any intel on the room ahead through its translucent surface.

  "Nothing on this floor is automated. You need to open the door yourself. Something you seem very capable of."

  Hadley Caine stepped forward, his muscles tensed for a fight. He pulled a hand from his right pants pocket, knuckles aching as he released the knife. Flexing his fingers, Hadley took hold of the solid brass lever, turned it down, and pressed in.

  He was greeted by a ring of faces. Photographs of orphans. Of widows. Movie stars. Heads of state. Each one smiling, each standing with the same man. Medium height, with a runner's build, sandy hair and a faint smile on a tanned face. In some he wore a handwoven tunic, of brown or undyed wool. In others he wore a suit jacket, custom made, tailored to hide its exorbitant cost. A costume for every occasion.

  But the feet were always bare. The barefoot billionaire.

  And there, across the darkened room, beyond a life-sized canine statue, sat Thomas Newton. Dressed in his smock-like tunic, the Tetherly founder typed at his computer, fingers a steady blur in the early morning sun. The light poured in through the bank of eastern windows behind him, casting the billionaire in a golden glow. A whisper of omnipotent power.

  Man or god, he has to die. The hard boys were back, chattering in Hadley's brain. Guardian fallen angels. He relaxed as they lent steel to his spine. Hadley advanced, approaching Newton's island of light. Past the smiling faces. Past the metallic mascot, toward the most dangerous man in the world.

  Time slowed, his senses kicking into overdrive. He saw dust motes drifting through beams of light. Heard the muffled impact of his feet against the floor. Smelled the metallic tang of his own nasal passages, flaring now to take in all the oxygen they could.

  He passed the statue, briefly noting that this interpretation of Scruff differed from the rest. Less cartoonish, less dog-like. More wolf than dog, born of titanium and steel. But he registered it only in the subconscious, buried beneath the hooting and cries of his own primal nature.

  Hadley reached the front of Newton's desk. His hands rested on the back of a chair, fingers making divots in the vegan leather cushioning.

  Newton looked up and stopped typing, letting his left hand come to rest on the desk. With his right, he gestured toward the chair in front of Hadley. "Have a seat, Mister…Caine."

  Hadley complied, pulling the seat back and sitting down. The cushion was soft, but it did him no good. He sat on the seat's edge, back erect, fighting to maintain a neutral face. For the first time in his adult life, it took an effort.

  The billionaire leaned forward, resting on his elbows, steepled fingers raised to his frowning lips.

  "I'll admit, Mr. Caine, I didn't know your name — not until this morning." Newton met Hadley's eyes, his tone apologetic. "Your entry in the company directory didn't ring any bells either. Had to visit your LinkedIn to figure out who you were." Newton shook his head. "Your job code is low. Shockingly low, considering the clearance level attached to your company profile. Any idea why?"

  "I saw a potential exploit," Hadley replied. "I thought it would be worthwhile to investigate."

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  "A little penetration testing?" Newton raised an eyebrow. "White-hat hacking is not the usual domain of human resource managers, Mister Caine. And it fails to explain why you felt authorized to activate Horus Overwatch. You caught me off guard — and that's hard to do. Impressive, Mr. Caine. That's genuinely hard to do." Newton's expression darkened. "Then again, I expect interference from foreign governments. From other envious competitors. Not mid-level code monkeys who find a backdoor into something they never should have seen."

  "Sir, let me—"

  "No." Newton raised a hand, cutting him off. "Let me explain, Mr. Caine." He leaned forward. "You thought you were so clever. Some sort of tough guy? You're not. You're like a kid who found the key to his father's gun safe and thought he'd take it to school for show and tell. You have no idea the damage your little redaction has caused."

  Hadley's hands balled into fists in his lap. His lips pressed together, hard. "Excuse me, Mister Newton," he spat, "but you're lucky I didn't go to the media instead. They would've had a field day. And I don't think the U.S. government would approve of—"

  "I don't care what the U.S. government approves of," Newton snapped. "I give them permission to use our systems. I grant them clearance. You are way out of your depth, Mr. Caine." He let the words hang for a moment. "And, to make matters worse, you are responsible for the loss of an important piece of company property."

  "What are you talking about?" Hadley blinked. "That team had their own gear, or rented it from—"

  "That's not what I'm talking about," Newton cut him off. "A prototype. Military-grade prosthetic, being tested in-house. Surreptitiously."

  Hadley stared blankly.

  "Are you really that dense?" Newton shook his head in disbelief. "Access to our entire classified server, and all you saw were toy soldiers — toy soldiers you could activate at the press of a button, without any thought to the second or third order effects of your actions." Newton exhaled deeply through his nostrils. "How did we ever hire someone like you?"

  Hadley flushed, face reddening like a coal. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

  "Allison Myles — one of our Prosthetic Interface Consultants — abruptly turned in her resignation three nights ago. We tracked her via Augmented Positioning Tracing to a small hamlet in New York State called Sanguine Springs. I believe you know the town."

  "That bitch?" Hadley stood abruptly, his arms splayed like a gunfighter. "She runs off with company property, and you're blaming it on me?"

  "That…woman," Newton said coolly, "did not steal anything. Not that she knew of." He fixed Caine with a flat look. "She was wearing the prototype. It's her arm, you mongoloid. And now she's free in the breeze. Thanks to you."

  Now! Now! the voices in Caine's mind roared. Now. Do it now.

  Wordlessly, Hadley dove, sliding on his belly across the desk toward Newton. The move was not graceful — but it was fast and that was what mattered. He barreled into Thomas Newton's chest, driving the man and his chair backwards. The billionaire toppled over, crashing to the floor with Hadley on top.

  Newton's head smacked the floor, hard. Hadley grabbed a handful of the other man's hair as he bounced back. His other hand was already in his pocket. Hadley fumbled the switchblade free. His shoulder popped audibly as he reared back, his thumb on the blade's release switch. With a savage grunt, he drove the knife inward, activating the switch just before contact.

  The hard boys sang in bloody ecstasy as Hadley stabbed again and again, pounding the knife against Newton's torso. His breath came in ragged bursts as he swung for his enemy's kidneys, and liver, and groin.

  Beneath him, Newton struggled and moaned. Hadley tightened his grip on the billionaire's scalp, forcing his head back hard against the floor. Hadley stared into the dying man's unfocused eyes and raised the switchblade overhead for the final blow. His lips broke into a bloody smile as he swung the knife downward.

  A blur of LED and chrome smashed into Hadley like the bumper of a truck, knocking him clear of Newton. His knife spun free, turning like a dying satellite before clattering to the floor. He rolled three yards across the carpet, coming to rest face down. Before he could rise or gather his wits, a weight landed on him, pinning him firm at the back and shoulders.

  Hadley lifted his head to scan the room — a motion that earned him a thumped skull. There was a crack at impact and a crunch as forehead and nose met the floor. Hadley cried out. Then he felt the claws settle into his back.

  A goofy voice spoke from atop him. "Subject detained." Cheerful, attentive and warm.

  The generated voice of Tetherly's cartoon mascot.

  "Excellent work, Scruff," Newton said.

  Nose throbbing, cheek flat against the carpet, Hadley watched through his peripheral vision as Newton rose to a sitting position. The billionaire rubbed at his side, groaning as he probed his abdomen through the unbroken fabric of his tunic. His fingers came away dry and uncolored. Newton turned, fixating on an object lying on the carpet between them.

  Hadley's switchblade. Newton crossed to it and picked the weapon up. The knife was all handle, just the tip of the blade peeking from its front aperture. The blade had never deployed.

  Newton turned the knife, watching the blade dribble downward, catching halfway out. "Nice toy," he said. "The trick is, the blade must be fully engaged before you stick it in anything." He turned it over in his hand. "Otherwise it fails to lock." He tossed it to clatter on his desk. "Good thing, too — otherwise you'd have perforated me. Even if my Pursuit Unit took you out in the end."

  A Pursuit Unit? Not a statue. Hadley tensed under the weight holding him to the ground.

  Thomas Newton stood over Hadley, observing him the way a boy might an overturned beetle. "Release him, then stand by. Just in case."

  At his command, the machine scuttled sideways off Hadley's back and into full sunlight. The glare off its metallic surface made him squint, which hurt his broken nose.

  It was incapable of stillness — juddering first one way, then the other, vibrating to the point of becoming a blur. Early computer animation. Not enough frames, moving like something lighter than it was.

  Hadley pushed himself up to his hands and knees. His face ached. His teeth felt loose. His head throbbed with each heartbeat. But most worrisome of all, the voices in his mind lay silent. The hard boys were terrified.

  "What is that thing?"

  "That thing," said Newton, "is the future. Meet Scruff — a Pursuit Unit Proxy. The boys in the basement call it PUP, when I'm not around. Next evolution in corporate asset protection."

  The PUP ceased all motion. Hadley stood, still eyeing the lethal machine. Up close, it looked less like an abstract statue and more like what it was — a wolf, rendered in steel. The only indication it wasn't purely decorative was the pulsing red LED nested inside what Hadley now recognized as a camera array.

  "You threaded quite a needle, Mister Caine. The Horus Overwatch program is being mothballed. Yours was to be one of their last missions, even if the operation hadn't turned into a bloodbath." Newton crossed the room and laid a hand on the PUP's neck, just behind the camera array — what passed for the robot's shoulder. "Scruff is designed to replace human contractor assets entirely. All that remains is a real-world test." He turned, regarding the still-unsteady Hadley. "And that is where you come in."

  "You want me to operate it? Like a drone pilot?"

  "No. Scruff and the rest of the Pursuit Unit Prototypes are fully autonomous. Powered by the Tetherly AI — an LLM trained on every available combat and warfare resource in existence. They also gave him a persona, generated from ten thousand hours of wolfpack behavior and K9 unit footage."

  "If the thing is that capable, what do you need me for?" Hadley regretting the words as they left his mouth. If Newton agreed, there was no reason to keep him alive.

  Newton smiled. Not warmly. It was the smile of a chess player who already knew his opponent's next three moves. Hadley thought again of small boys and helpless bugs.

  "You are entangled, Mr. Caine." He reached down, righting his fallen chair and settling back into it with the ease of a man returning to his natural habitat. "This whole scenario is due to your incompetence. Consider yourself on retainer until the situation you created is resolved." He steepled his fingers. "Allison Myles is still in the wind. I want her back — more specifically, I want what she's wearing back. Additionally, two members of the Horus team have gone dark. Deaths I can accept. Loose ends I cannot. Those men are professionals who know too much, and they will need to be neutralized."

  Hadley said nothing. He was watching Scruff.

  The Pursuit Unit had gone still the moment Newton started talking — not in response to any command. Hadley recognized it for what it was: the innate, loaded stillness of a predator that has stopped needing to move. Assessing. Analyzing. Listening to every word in the room.

  The hard boys were gone. Not sulking, not regrouping in the dark back room of his mind. Scared from their clubhouse by the arrival of something they couldn't bluster past.

  Hadley almost smiled.

  He knew that feeling. He'd inspired it in other people his entire adult life, whenever he let the mask slip — that doe-like freeze as a soft target realizes, too late, which one of them is the predator. His hard boys, the voices of his darkest nature, had looked at this chrome-and-LED machine and recognized what it was. And fled.

  Hadley recognized it too. Just differently.

  Another hunter. Another predator. Another monster.

  The difference was, he wasn't afraid of monsters.

  "Scruff requires a field evaluation before we scale production," Newton continued. "Something real. They're in New York. So will you be."

  "What if they run?"

  "Nothing changes. Scruff chases. You follow."

  "And if I refuse?"

  Newton's only response was a smile of sincere empathy. Hadley could see the venom moving behind it, patient and unhurried.

  He stepped closer to the desk, trying a different angle. More questions — anything to keep Newton talking. Talking men revealed things. "How do you find them? Myles wasn't as stupid as I thought, and this time she has backup. And those contractors — they're mercenaries. Get in, get out is their lifestyle. They could be anywhere by now."

  "We don't have to find them," Newton replied, leaning forward, fingers returning to the keyboard like a concert pianist. "They're already found." He turned to his monitor, fingers moving across the keyboard without looking down. "The internet of things. Every traffic camera, every gas station security camera, every smart doorbell on every suburban street in this country runs Tetherly firmware. And that's not all — phones, smartwatches, medical implants, and wearables. It's all right here, updating purchase habits, biometrics, and location every ten minutes." A cascading grid filled the screen — gas stations, highway ramps, a diner counter, a bus depot, feeds blinking to life in their dozens. "Finding people stopped being a problem the day we finished the infrastructure build. That was four years ago."

  A second window opened. Dense scrolling code.

  "And if they manage somehow to go off-grid? We have other tools. Targeted content. Localized algorithmic pressure. Propaganda, tailor-made to fit the target and the locale, algorithmically generated to turn the public against Miss Myles and her ballistically gifted comrades." Newton's eyes stayed on the screen. "The rogue Horus elements get the same treatment, with added help from local law enforcement." A pause, almost clinical. "Those men can hide from the law. But they can't hide from Scruff."

  Hadley looked at the wall of feeds. How many cameras did Newton control? It had to measure in the millions. The feeds flickered, showing each scene for a fraction of a second before changing to the next disjointed view. And somewhere in that grid, moving through the world with military-grade hardware fused to her elbow, was his prey — Allison Myles.

  The hunt was still on.

  "So you need me to get this thing to New York. I'm going to need some access — a kill switch, in case the machine goes sideways."

  "Access denied." The Pursuit Unit Proxy spoke, its outlandish voice adding insult to injury.

  "He's right," Newton nodded. "That is above your clearance level, Mr. Caine. Get used to it, if you want to stay alive."

  "Come on," Hadley snapped. "What if the damn dog goes haywire?"

  "It's a risk." Newton closed the computer windows, stood, and graced Hadley with another magazine-cover smile. "One I am willing to take. Consider it your contribution as junior partner in an off-books venture."

  Still smiling, Thomas Newton extended his right hand.

  Hadley nodded, as if absorbing a difficult truth.

  What he was actually doing was counting.

  Newton thought he'd handed Hadley a muzzle. What he'd actually done was hand him a weapon — a chrome-and-titanium weapon with autonomous targeting, combat-trained reflexes, and the simulated mind of a predator.

  Newton has no idea what I'm going to do when they're out of the picture, thought Hadley. All he had to do was figure out how to bend the PUP to his control.

  He was a few points behind. That was fine. He'd come back from worse.

  The game wasn't over. If anything, standing here in this office with a broken nose and a useless knife and the world's most powerful man already writing him off as a blunt instrument — this was exactly where the game got interesting.

  "A partnership," Hadley said. "Sure." He took Newton's hand and shook.

  The hard boys were still silent. Maybe gone for good, even. But deep down, beneath the silence of his mind, something was beginning to stir.

  Not fear.

  Anticipation.

  Let the games begin.

  The End

  This is it. the last chapter of book one!

  The danger only deepens in the next volume, which will be here before you know it.

  I'm going to take a short break, to rest up and let the keyboard cool down. Then it'll be back at it, a new chapter every Tuesday until book two is complete.

  Thank you all so much for reading. See you next time on the road!