Friday was uneventful. I spent most of the day eating, training, and reading.
By the time Saturday rolled around, I was ready for a break from the bunker. At 1 PM, I made my way to a payphone three blocks from the warehouse and called Vito.
"Yeah?" Vito's voice was rough, like he'd been smoking since dawn.
"It's Quince. Just checking in on Reynold's status."
A pause, then a cough. "Reynolds wants to meet you again. He gave an address and a time."
I hummed, processing that. Well, this could be going one of two ways...
"When and where?"
Vito rattled off an address in East Midtown. Three o'clock this afternoon. Not much notice, but that was probably the point.
"I'll meet him," I said.
"Excellent." The line clicked dead.
I hung up and checked my watch. Just enough time to get there if I left now.
The subway ride to Midtown was mercifully uneventful. Saturday afternoon crowds, tourists with maps, couples heading to matinees. Normal people doing normal things. The contrast of day to day life with my tasks always amused me.
The address Vito gave me turned out to be the Lexington Hotel, the kind of place that catered to business travelers with decent expense accounts. Nothing flashy, but professional. The lobby had the controlled chaos of any busy hotel: bellhops moving luggage, businessmen striding through with purpose, a family arguing about dinner reservations near the concierge desk.
I'd learned to prefer places I'd never been. Seeing familiar locations with the wrong storefronts, wrong faces, wrong details created a sense of freefall that was disquieting. New places were just new.
I walked through the front doors and made my way toward the front desk, but before I could get there, I spotted a familiar figure breaking off from a wall near the elevators.
Mr.Washington. Reynolds' bodyguard. African-American,six-two and easily north of two hundred pounds. His eyes locked onto me immediately.
"Mr. Davis," he said.. "Follow me."
He turned toward the elevator bank without waiting for confirmation. I followed in his wake, weaving through the lobby traffic. Washington moved like he owned the space, and people unconsciously gave him room.
The elevator ride was the quietest ninety seconds of my life. I'm rather taciturn in public, but Washington took silence to a professional level. He stood facing the doors, hands loose at his sides, expression neutral. Not hostile, just... present. Alert without appearing tense.
We got off on the fifteenth floor. Washington led me down the hallway, past numbered doors and the occasional housekeeping cart, until we reached room 1502. He knocked three times, once, then twice, then five times.
The door opened. Reynolds stood there, wire-rimmed glasses catching the light, expression professionally neutral.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Davis."
Why all the secrecy? Our last meeting wasn't this covert.
I kept my thoughts off my face. "Good afternoon, Mr. Reynolds."
Reynolds nodded and stepped back, opening the door wider. "Please, come in."
The hotel room was a standard higher-end suite. Sitting area with a couch and two chairs, desk by the window, door leading to what I assumed was the bedroom. Clean, professional, impersonal.
Reynolds gestured to one of the chairs. I sat. He took the chair opposite, while Washington moved to a position near the window where he could watch both the door and the room.
"The techs looked over the railgun," Reynolds said without preamble. "Everything checked out. Serial numbers match our records, all components are original." He glanced at Washington, who moved to the wall safe, opened it with practiced efficiency, and pulled out an envelope. He placed it on the small table between Reynolds and me.
"Your compensation is inside, Mr. Davis," Reynolds said. "Two thousand dollars. All there, in cash."
I opened the envelope and did a quick count. Twenties and fifties, all there. Two grand for a piece of hardware I'd found in a sewer. Not bad.
"Excellent." I stood, grabbing the envelope. "Pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Reynolds."
"Indeed." Reynolds remained seated, fingers steepled. "However, if you'd care to stay, I have a proposition for you that you might find... interesting."
I paused halfway to standing, then settled back into the chair. Something in his tone. "I'm listening."
Reynolds glanced at Washington, who moved to the window and checked the street below with that same economical efficiency. Whatever this was, it required more operational security than our last meeting.
"You recall our discussion about the Dire Wraith situation?" Reynolds asked.
"You got across the broad strokes last meeting," I said carefully. "Aliens. Shapeshifters. The government's trying to keep it quiet.."
"Precisely." Reynolds leaned back slightly. "As you know, the Deterrence Research Corporation has been developing our own detection methodology. You saw it at our last meeting. The device emits ultra-high frequency waves that scan molecular structure. Dire Wraiths emit distinctive signatures when exposed to those frequencies.." He paused.
"But?" I said.
"It's working inconsistently." Reynolds's tone was precise. "We've had false positives. Which means either the device has a flaw in its construction, or there's an error in the underlying code that processes the signal analysis."
"You want me to debug your Wraith detector."
"I want an independent pair of eyes on the software," Reynolds said.
I frowned. "You have qualified engineers. People who write embedded signal processing code for a living. I'm sure they know infinitely more about embedded programming than I do."
"The signal processing isn't the issue," Reynolds said. "The hardware handles the wave generation and detection. That's physics and engineering, and our people are excellent at that. The software's job is simpler: take the signal data, run it through pattern recognition algorithms, compare it against known Dire Wraith signatures, output a result." He paused. "The code itself is straightforward, pattern matching and comparison algorithms. If you can read C and understand algorithms, you can follow it."
"Okay," I said slowly. "But that still doesn't explain why you need me. Your engineers can debug their own code."
Reynolds met my eyes steadily. "I don't trust them to do so."
The temperature in the room dropped a few degrees.
"You think the engineering team is compromised," I said quietly.
"I think it's possible." Reynolds's tone was carefully controlled. "We conducted a field test. The results were... concerning." He didn't offer details. "I need someone to look at the code. Someone outside the company. Someone without pre-existing connections to the team or commitments that might compromise their judgment."
"Someone you can be sure is uncompromised," I said.
"Precisely." Reynolds leaned back again. "You're smart enough to do the work, but you're not established enough to have existing relationships with my competitors or adversaries. You're a known quantity to exactly one person in my network—Vito—which makes it easier to control the information flow."
I absorbed that. It was actually reasonable operational logic, if vaguely insulting.
Reynolds continued.
"Look at the code. Tell me if there's a problem. If you find one, suggest a fix. I compensate you for your time regardless of what you find. If your findings lead to a functioning detector, there's a bonus. If you help us smooth out any other pain points, that's valuable too."
Washington shifted position by the window. Reynolds noticed and glanced at his watch.
"If you do take this job, there are three rules. One: You work on the code in a location I specify, on equipment I provide. No copies leave that location. Two: You document your methodology and findings thoroughly. Three: Don't discuss your findings with anyone."
"Worried about what I might find?"
"I'm worried about what finding it might mean," Reynolds said evenly. "If there's sabotage, I need to contain the information before whoever did it knows they've been discovered."
"What happens if I find something wrong and you don't like the answer?"
Reynolds smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Then you've saved us from deploying a faulty detection system during an alien infiltration. That's worth compensating even if it's inconvenient. I'm not interested in comfortable lies, Mr. Davis. I'm interested in functional equipment."
"Fair enough."
"I don't need an answer right now," Reynolds said. "Think about it over the weekend. If you're interested, I have a number for you to call."
"And if I decide not to take the job?"
"Then we had a pleasant lunch meeting last week, a successful transaction today, and perhaps we'll do business again if you find something else that interests me." Reynolds's expression remained neutral. "No hard feelings either way. But I think you'd be making a mistake."
"Why's that?"
"Because when you need work that isn't selling salvage or playing mobster tech support, having someone like me willing to take your call matters." He paused. "The world you're in now has a ceiling. Selling hardware,under the table IT work, there's only so far that'll take you. I'm offering you a chance to demonstrate you can do more sophisticated work. That's worth something."
Vito must have told him about my previous work. Not a complete disaster, but not great. I kept my expression neutral, filing that away for later consideration. It made sense. Reynolds would have asked Vito for more background before pitching this to me. Still, knowing someone had been discussing my employment history, limited as it was, made me slightly uncomfortable.
But Reynolds wasn't wrong. The work I'd been doing did have a ceiling, and I did want more than that.
"I'll think about it," I said finally.
"That's all I ask." Reynolds extended his hand, and I shook it. His grip was firm, professional. "Call this number by Monday close of business if you're interested."
Washington opened the door. I walked out into the hallway, envelope heavy in my jacket pocket, mind already turning over the angles.
The elevator ride down was just as quiet as the ride up. Washington stood facing the doors, hands loose at his sides, expression neutral. When we reached the lobby, he nodded once—a dismissal—and I walked out into the Saturday afternoon crowds.
I didn't head straight for the subway. Instead, I walked a few blocks, ducking into a deli that caught my eye. The smell of pastrami and fresh bread hit me as I walked in. I ordered a coffee I didn't really want and found a spot by the window.
The place was busy with the Saturday lunch crowd. An old guy behind the counter called out orders. A couple of construction workers in paint-spattered clothes argued good-naturedly about the Jets. A mother with two kids in tow negotiated with them about what to eat. Normal people doing normal things.
I realized I missed this. The day-to-day hustle and bustle. I'd been spending too much time in the bunker.
I'd always preferred solitude. However, I'd been using that as cover for avoiding the temporal displacement. That wasn't healthy introversion, that was just hiding.
I should get out more. Touch grass. Maybe grab a sandwich at a normal deli instead of eating peanut butter on toast in the wee hours of the morning.
I sipped my coffee and thought about Reynolds' offer.
On paper, it was exactly what I needed. Money, connections, a chance to demonstrate value to someone with a legitimate position. But there were complications.
First, the obvious one: I'd be auditing code that might have been sabotaged by shapeshifting aliens. In a secure location. Very specific rules about what I could and couldn't do with what I found. If things went wrong, I'd be very isolated and very fucked.
The paranoia made sense given the Wraith threat. But it also created the perfect conditions for... other things.
Reynolds was definitely working an angle, but honestly, it was more likely to be corporate politics than the Wraiths. Maybe Reynolds suspected sabotage but couldn't prove it through official channels. Or maybe he needed an outsider to "independently discover" problems he already knew about, to build a case for some sort of internal power struggle.
Either way, I was being used for more than just debugging code. The question was whether that mattered.
Then there was Reynolds' comment about "upward mobility" and "legitimate work." Like he'd looked at me and seen right through me. That level of perception was either very useful or very dangerous.
Possibly both.
I watched a businessman argue with a delivery truck driver over a parking spot. The construction workers left, still arguing about football. The mother finally wrangled a suitable compromise.
Normal problems. Normal lives.
Reynolds was right about one thing: I did need contacts higher up the food chain. Someone who could help me move the Stane goods when I got them. Someone who could point me toward reliable help for the actual break-in. Vito was useful, but his network had limits.
The question was whether Reynolds' connections were worth the risk of getting tangled in whatever he was up to, with or without actual shapeshifting aliens in the mix and if I trusted him to have my back if things went sideways.
I finished my coffee and tossed the cup.
The answer, realistically, was that Reynolds would hang me out to dry if it served his purposes. But that was true of basically everyone I was working with.
I headed for the subway station.
I had until Monday to decide, but I already knew what my answer was going to be.
The money was good, the connections were valuable, and I was curious. If there really was sabotaged code designed to let Wraiths slip through detection, finding it would be genuinely important work. Finally, in the case that Reynolds was bullshitting me for reasons I hadn't figured out yet... well, I'd figure it out as I went.
Probably.
What really tipped the scales was the need for a higher caliber of contact. I needed to pull off the Stane job then get out of New York, frankly. I was already lucky that nothing I had forgotten about (besides the Dire Wraiths) had cropped up, and I had no intention of being around for Inferno.
I caught the next train back. The car was mostly empty, the weekend crowd thinned out. I found a seat and stared at my reflection in the dark window.
This is either going to be very profitable or very fatal.
Swings and roundabouts.
The rest of the weekend seemed to fly by. I wasn't sure if it was worry or anticipation that sped the passage of time.. Having only the broad strokes about what I was getting into didn't inspire confidence, but I needed this opportunity.
Monday came around faster than expected. It seemed like no time at all. At 10 AM, I made my way to my habitual payphone three blocks from the warehouse and dialed the number Reynolds had given me.
One ring. Two rings. Then a familiar deep voice answered.
"Washington."
"It's Davis," I said. "I accept."
"Excellent." No hesitation, no surprise. Like he'd expected the call. "Mr. Reynolds will be in touch with you tomorrow afternoon."
The line clicked dead.
I hung up and stood there for a moment, watching traffic flow past. Well. That was done, then.
Reynolds called Tuesday afternoon. Same payphone, different day.
"Mr. Davis." Reynolds' voice was as controlled as ever. "Wednesday morning. Nine AM. Meet Mr. Washington at our Jersey facility." He rattled off an address. "1520 Commerce Boulevard, Secaucus, New Jersey."
"Understood."
"Good. Washington will handle the intake process and get you set up. You'll be there for one day. Document everything you find."
"Got it."
"Have a pleasant day." The line went dead.
I spent Tuesday and most of Wednesday morning in my usual routine. Meditation, exercise, reviewing technical manuals. Keeping my mind sharp and my body loose. The work ahead would be mentally taxing, and I wanted to be at my best.
Wednesday morning, I strapped on my needle pistol in its shoulder holster, threw on my leather jacket, and took the train out to Jersey.
The train dropped me in Secaucus. I walked fifteen minutes through an industrial area, wide roads, flat terrain, the kind of landscape that existed purely for logistics and commerce.
The DRC campus sat at the end of the road, set back from the road behind a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Three buildings arranged in a rough U-shape around a central parking lot, all matching architecture: four-story glass and steel construction, tinted windows, that generic mid-80s corporate aesthetic. A sign near the entrance read: Deterrence Research Corporation - Tristate Engineering & Development Center.
A guard shack sat at the vehicle entrance. Washington was standing just outside it, hands clasped in front of him. He spotted me approaching and gestured me forward.
"Mr. Davis."
The guard in the shack, a white man in his early sixties, looked up from his clipboard and glanced at Washington, who gave a slight nod. The guard waved us through without asking for ID.
We walked across the parking lot. Maybe sixty percent full. There were a couple cars, sedans and pickups, one Mercedes near the entrance to the center building. People walking between buildings with coffee cups, completely normal. Just like any engineering facility in my universe.
Except for the helipad on the roof of Building A. That was unusual for a suburban industrial park.
"You get a lot of helicopter traffic?" I asked Washington as we crossed the parking lot. "Used to." Washington's tone was flat. I waited, but he didn't elaborate.
After a few steps, I tried again. "What happened?" Washington was silent for a moment, and I thought he might not answer.
Then: "The government impounded our VTOLs. Part of the Magnum situation." The way he said it made it clear that was all I was getting. I let it drop.
I filed that away as a reminder: however professional and boring this place looked, these were the people who'd had Moses Magnum running the show.
The building Washington led me toward had a sign: Building B - Research & Development. Four stories, tinted glass, utterly generic. The kind of place that could house anything from a pharmaceutical company to a software firm. You'd never know it was a defense contractor unless you looked closely.
Washington pushed through the glass doors and I followed.
The lobby was small but professional. Tile floors, potted plants, a reception desk where a blonde woman in her twenties sat with a headset, typing at a computer terminal. She glanced up as we entered, gave Washington a professional nod, and went back to her work.
A directory board on the wall listed departments: Development Labs - 1st Floor, Advanced Systems - 2nd Floor, Quality Assurance - 3rd Floor.
Past reception was a security checkpoint. A turnstile with a card reader, manned by another guard at a desk. The guard, a white guy in his early fifties, barely looked up as Washington swiped his badge. The turnstile clicked open and Washington gestured me through ahead of him.
We walked down a corridor, fluorescent lights humming overhead, past doors marked with department names and room numbers. Dev Lab 1. Materials Testing. Electronics Fab. Quality Assurance. All very normal, very corporate.
Washington stopped at a door marked Development Lab 3 and swiped his badge again. The lock clicked, and he pushed the door open.
Inside was a small office. maybe twelve by twelve feet. Two desks, each with a terminal and keyboard. A filing cabinet in the corner. A whiteboard on the wall with some half-erased diagrams. The air smelled faintly of coffee and electronics.
Washington pulled a Polaroid camera from a drawer and gestured for me to stand against the wall.
"Face forward."
I did. Flash. The camera whirred and spat out a photo. Washington pulled it free and waved it gently, waiting for the image to develop.
While we waited, he opened a manila folder on one of the desks and pulled out a laminated badge. It had the DRC logo, a placeholder photo square, my given name of Quince Davis and text that read: TEMPORARY ACCESS - Contractor - EXPIRES 24 HOURS.
Once the Polaroid had developed Washington slipped it into the badge holder and handed it to me.
I looked at the ID briefly. Not my best photo, I was scowling because of the flash.
"Clip this to your jacket. Visible at all times."
I clipped it on.
Washington moved to one of the terminals and tapped a few keys. "You're in the system as a contract developer. One day access to this room only. Security will see you in the database if they check." He gestured to the terminal. "The codebase is on this machine. Five thousand lines, like Mr. Reynolds said."
He opened a drawer and pulled out a yellow legal pad and a pencil. "Document your findings here. Handwritten. No digital copies, no printouts. When you're done today, leave the notepad in this drawer. Lock it." He placed a small key on the desk. "Your notes will be retrieved at 3 PM."
He paused. "This is a shared workspace. If anyone asks what you're working on, keep it vague. General debugging work on legacy code. Nothing about the analyzer project."
I nodded, taking it all in.
Washington moved toward the door, then stopped and turned back. "Three rules, as discussed. One: You work on the code in this room, on this equipment. No copies leave this location. Two: You document your methodology and findings thoroughly. Three: Don't discuss your findings with anyone here. We'll debrief at 6 PM at the DRC tower on 5th, after Mr. Reynolds has reviewed your notes."
He opened the door. "If you'll excuse me, I have to leave."
"Wait," I said. "You're just leaving me here? By myself?"
Washington paused, one hand on the door frame.
"And how the hell did you -"
"Have a productive day, Mr. Davis." Washington stepped through the door and closed it behind him with a quiet click.
I stood there for a moment, staring at the closed door.
Well then.
I moved to the window and watched Washington cross the parking lot below with that same economical stride. He got into a grey 1970 Charger, and I noticed the guard at the shack was already opening the gate. Washington revved the engine once and peeled out, the Charger's rear end kicking slightly as he accelerated through the exit.
Guess he wasn't lying about leaving.
I sat down at the terminal and flexed my fingers. The monitor glowed a steady green-on-black, a command prompt blinking patiently. Standard Unix setup, looked like a VAX system. I pulled up the directory listing.
Five files. About what I'd expected. I opened main.c first to understand the control flow.
Standard embedded C from the era. Main loop initialized the hardware interface, started the signal processing routine, then entered a continuous loop: capture signal data, process it, run it through the biosignature matching algorithm, output result. Clean, straightforward architecture.
I spent the first hour just mapping out how everything connected. Drew diagrams on the legal pad: data flow arrows, function call trees, hardware register addresses. The kind of foundational work you had to do before you could actually analyze anything.
The code itself was competent. Whoever wrote this knew what they were doing—proper memory management, sensible variable names, consistent style. Not great code, but functional. The kind of work you'd expect from a hardware engineer who'd learned to program out of necessity rather than passion.
I was deep into signal_proc.c, when I heard the door open behind me.
I turned. A woman in her late twenties walked in, carrying a coffee mug with a faded corporate logo. White, brown hair in a practical ponytail, wearing slacks and a cardigan. She had the focused look of someone already mentally engaged with whatever problem she was working on.
"Morning," she said, nodding at me as she set her mug down on the other desk. "You're the new contractor, right?"
"Yeah," I said carefully. "Just started today."
"Janet Smith. QA, but I get pulled in for code reviews sometimes." She sat down at her terminal and started typing. "Working on something?"
"Wrangling some legacy code," I said, keeping it vague.
"Ah." Janet took a sip of her coffee. "Good luck with that."
She seemed friendly enough, but I wasn't about to get chatty.
Janet didn't seem to mind the lack of conversation. She pulled up what looked like a test framework on her screen and started working, occasionally making notes on a pad next to her keyboard.
I turned back to my own terminal and kept working.
Another hour passed. I'd gone through signal_proc.c and hardware_if.c, made notes on their structure and logic flow. Everything looked clean. No obvious bugs, no suspicious patterns. Just straightforward engineering work.
I pulled up biosig_match.c and started reading through the main pattern recognition algorithm.
The analyzer applied a series of filters to the raw signal data before running the comparison against known Dire Wraith signatures.
Clean. Each filter was a separate function that could be tested independently. I started reading through them one by one.
The first two looked fine to me. The third function, however, stood out.
I stared at the #ifdef.
Conditional compilation was pretty normal. Nothing suspicious about that.
But something nagged at me. ENABLE_ENHANCED_THERMAL_COMPENSATION. Was that flag defined?
I pulled up constants.h to check. No definition there. That meant it was either defined on the command line during compilation, or not at all.
I needed to check the build system.
I backed out of the source file and navigated through the directory structure until I found the Makefile. Opened it, started scanning through the compiler flags.
There it was. -DENABLE_ENHANCED_THERMAL_COMPENSATION. The flag was defined for the production build.
But what about other builds? I found two more Makefiles. One for development, one for testing.
Development build: No flag. Test build: No flag. Production build: Flag enabled.
My stomach dropped.
I went back to the function and looked at the #ifdef block again.
XOR. For thermal correction.
I grabbed the legal pad and started working through the math. Drift correction should be arithmetic. Subtract the drift, maybe scale it, add it back. Basic math.
An XOR wasn't the type of operation I expected to see there..
I looked up THERMAL_CORRECTION_CONSTANT in constants.h: 0x5A5A.
Why 0x5A5A? That wasn't a power of two, not a standard bitmask, not derived from any thermal coefficient I'd ever heard of. Just... arbitrary.
Or not arbitrary.
I grabbed the legal pad and started working through the logic. The function was supposed to correct for baseline drift. Small variations. But the XOR operation would flip specific bits in a predictable pattern.
I traced through hypothetical values. Low delta, normal variance, the XOR doesn't apply, but that jitter compensation triggers about 10% of the time. False positives. High delta, way above normal, the XOR applies and transforms it back down into normal range. False negatives.
The pattern held across multiple values. High deltas got XORed down. Low deltas occasionally got boosted up.
This wasn't correcting anything. This was deliberately letting Wraiths pass as human while making the detector look broken.
My hands were shaking slightly as I wrote on the legal pad:
Function: baseline_drift_correction
Location: biosig_match.c, line 247CRITICAL: Contains conditional compilation block (ENABLE_ENHANCED_THERMAL_COMPENSATION) - Flag ONLY defined in production Makefile - NOT in development or test builds - Code block uses XOR operation for claimed "thermal correction" Issue: XOR is bitwise operation, not arithmetic correction
Constants: 0x5A5A appears arbitrary, no clear derivation from physical properties
Effect: Transforms high delta values (Wraith signatures) into human range Secondary effect: Pseudorandom false positive generator (~10% rate) masks device failure
ASSESSMENT: Deliberate backdoor. Production builds are compromised. Development/test builds clean.
I sat back, staring at the screen.
Which made the backdoor itself strange. It wasn't exactly amateur hour—you needed to understand build systems and conditional compilation to pull this off. But it also wasn't sophisticated. Anyone doing a thorough code review would catch the XOR operation. The arbitrary constant. The production-only flag.
If this was corporate espionage, I'd expect something cleverer. Buried in the signal processing where you'd need domain expertise to spot the flaw. Something that could pass as an honest mistake.
And if it was the Wraiths... Reynolds had described them as a threat. Shapeshifters who'd infiltrated god knows how many organizations. That level of threat should come with skills to match. Not this.
This was too obvious to slip past competent review, but too systemic to be accidental.
Which left one explanation: the whole team had to be in on it.
No code review would catch this because the reviewers were compromised too. No one tested the production binaries properly because the testers were in on it.
That's why it didn't need to be subtle.
If the entire engineering team was compromised, then Reynolds was right to bring in an outsider.
My whole body went cold.
More importantly, one of them was in the room with me right now.
I looked back at my notepad. The analysis was right there in my handwriting. Function name, line number, the word CRITICAL underlined. Anyone who walked past could read it. I needed to get this to Reynolds. Lock the notepad in the drawer like Washington said, get out of here-
"Interesting observations."
I froze. Janet was standing right behind me. I hadn't heard her move. She was reading my notepad over my shoulder, head tilted slightly.
"Conditional compilation. Production-only flags."
Her voice was pleasant, curious.
"Very thorough work, Mr. Davis."
My hand started toward the legal pad, but she was faster. Her hand clamped around my wrist. The grip was wrong. Too strong for someone with that build. The fingers felt less like a hand and more like a claw digging through my sleeve.
"Unfortunately" she said flatly, "you're not going to tell anyone."