Seven AM.
October cool, low sixties, almost brisk—except for the Pacific humidity. Hadley crossed the crisp blacktop of the Tetherly Building's open-air parking lot. The sun's first rays bathed the shoulders of his white Oxford shirt in a fiery glow. He walked past the sentinel shadows of leafless trees standing guard along the lot's edge and island swards. His mahogany brown leather shoes crushed dark leaves to powder. An ocean breeze stirred the particles into momentary dust devils that scattered to ground and sky.
The freshly painted lot stood vacant. Few employees arrived this early, with the bulk of the workforce trickling in between eight and nine AM. Most members of the Tetherly family embraced the company's generous work-life balance policy.
Hadley Caine was not most people.
He'd risen early, following a short, dreamless sleep. Nothing strange—Hadley couldn't remember the last time he'd had a dream. Instead, at the moment of sleep and the moment of waking, one thought occupied his mind: Allison Myles, and her inevitable death.
His one-armed quarry wouldn't be in today. He'd already checked the sent folder of her company email address—already seen the hastily dashed-off resignation, sent without elaboration at nine the previous night. His rabbit wasn't returning to this bolt-hole.
That was fine. He wasn't here for the rabbit. He was here to unleash the hounds.
Hadley stepped up the curb, past the anti-truck bollards, and entered Thomas Newton's domain. The Tetherly Campus, eight miles west of UCLA, sprawled over five hundred acres of revitalized Californian hillside. A new landmark in the Palisades. A stone's throw from Temescal Canyon, the land had once belonged to a veritable who's who of Hollywood A-listers.
That was before the wildfires. When insurance quotes fell laughably short of the cost to rebuild, even millionaires were forced to throw in the towel. Which was when Newton swooped in, purchased the burnt-out lots, and greased the rezoning committee. Fifteen months later, the SOC was open for business.
The SOC, or Scruff Office Campus, commanded an enviable view of both surf crashing on Will Rogers State Beach and the rusty sunrise over San Gabriel Mountains to the east. The campus owed its name to the original Scruff—Newton's childhood pet—as well as Tetherly's family-friendly canine mascot.
Hadley passed through the double doors of the main building, a sprawling four-story structure, more wide than tall. The building dominated the campus, its design more in keeping with a mega-church or elite college auditorium than the skyscrapers of yesteryear. Great plate-glass windows looked out toward the seaside on one side and peaks on the other, while the building's rooftop glistened in the sun. The rooftop, coated in a shield wall of solar panels, powered the building while helping shade the next-generation rooftop HVAC units clustered beneath their umbrella-like canopy. Thanks to the marriage of ecological and technological advancements, the million-square-foot building remained at a constant 68 degrees Fahrenheit—all while reporting an impressive carbon-neutral rating.
All this BS to feel like an open window.
Hadley's bespoke leather footwear slapped inelegantly on the lobby's marble floor, drawing the notice of the lone figure sitting behind a circular receptionist's desk. A woman, blonde, her hair done up in spiky blue highlights. "Good morning, Mister Caine," she smiled widely, cheeks standing out like a pair of apples. "You're here early." She followed him with her perfect teeth, their capped enamel glittering cartoonishly—almost as unreal as Tetherly's canine mascot, just feet below her, airbrushed onto the desk's outward-facing surface.
"I'm supposed to say something about the early bird, aren't I?" Hadley replied, without breaking stride. He passed the round desk without stopping to chat, leaving both grinning faces behind. The woman was perky.
Too perky for her own good.
He ascended the sweeping stairs without passing guard or checkpoint. The Tetherly campus was secured by its own Secure-IT surveillance system, like most schools, hospitals, and institutions in the country. Cameras tracked him from the moment he came in sight of campus, face recognition software matching visitors against clearance databases. Security personnel occupied the main building, but they mainly handled spousal disputes that spilled into work or overly eager job applicants. The system ran with German precision—granting or denying access based on credentials.
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Hadley was never denied access. He had made sure of that.
The glowing rectangle tracking Hadley's movements through the Secure-IT system remained green regardless of his actual, on-paper clearance. The digital security system was perfect—impossible to hack. But from the inside, with administrator access? Completely manipulable.
Hadley turned, leaving the open-plan stairs to walk along the second-floor balcony ringing the SOC lobby. His stride didn't falter at the sudden beeping chirp at his feet—the deferential noise made by one of Tetherly's autonomous floor-cleaning scupper-bots. Like most of the company's innovations, they proudly bore the image of Scruff the dog. Hadley barely noticed the machines anymore.
His office sat at one end of the horseshoe-shaped floor plan. He approached the featureless door, its glass surface darkened to an opaque shade for privacy. The illusion of privacy, anyway. The door unlocked as he approached, swinging easily inward on a well-balanced vertical hinge.
The office faced west, where crashing waves caught the dawn's golden light—a far cry from the cinderblock walls of his previous job. Back then, before Tetherly, he'd worked in human resources. Now he was human resources, a role that had opened doors he'd never expected to find.
Hadley settled at his desk as his monitor flickered to life. He logged in, bypassing the email client and staffing shortcuts for a mundane icon tucked in the corner. A double-click triggered a warning message, then a login screen. His fingers moved across the keyboard until the screen confirmed access: the contractor catalog.
He worked on Tetherly's standard-issue computer—expensive hardware he despised but used for the status it conveyed. Growing up without such symbols, he'd relied on his brain instead: his own network of plans and secret thoughts. That same instinct for systems had always helped him find ways into places he wasn't supposed to be.
He rarely indulged that impulse at Tetherly, but when he did, the results often surprised him.
Scrolling through the catalog, he found what he needed under "Cleaning Contractor": Horus Overwatch.
He'd first encountered the name months ago during an afternoon of idle digital exploration. The company—named for the ancient Egyptian god of sight—had caught his attention, though he didn't place it until later. A muscle-bound soldier-of-fortune type in Monterrey had dropped the name while failing to impress a barmaid, his mercenary posturing repelling exactly the kind of women both he and Hadley hoped to attract.
Horus Overwatch was supposedly some sort of off-the-books strike team.
So why was it buried in Thomas Newton's personal contractor list?
Hadley understood the logic. Tetherly stood apart from other tech companies, shining like a beacon of innovation. But even beacons cast shadows, and shadows bred protesters, anarchists, and luddites—harmless in small numbers, but potentially terminal if they metastasized.
Horus Overwatch served as Tetherly's invisible scalpel, excising threats to the company's empire before they could spread. The arrangement impressed him. Newton—the Barefoot Billionaire, the IoT's supposed Messiah—maintaining his own kill squad.
Hadley glanced at the ceiling camera. His spoofing program was running, replacing his live image with a digital clone just as it had at his apartment the night before. He smiled. Completely unobserved.
Time to borrow Newton's guard dogs.
First, research. He opened multiple browser tabs, pulling up profiles of domestic terrorists from years past: Waco, Oklahoma City, Las Vegas. He studied the perpetrators' backgrounds, weaving common threads into a fabricated narrative that would rewrite Allison's past to erase her future.
Thirty minutes later, he hit send on an encrypted message to a shielded address. The message contained his manufactured biography and an elevated threat assessment—a complete target package.
Now he just had to wait.
Hadley was about to close the contractor portal when the screen refreshed. A reply already? He opened it:
TARGET PACKAGE RECEIVED.
MISSION ACCEPTED, PENDING COMPLETION OF CURRENT OP.
LOCATION OF HVT NOT PROVIDED.
REQUEST PRECISE GRID LOCATION OF HVT.
He frowned before catching himself. Horus was apparently mid-mission but willing to queue his request. A quick search confirmed that HVT meant High Value Target—they wanted Allison's location.
He'd assumed they handled their own tracking. Apparently not.
Switching to his personnel screen, he pulled up Allison's file, ignoring her California address to focus on family connections: a mother outside Albany, New York, and a deceased father from Sanguine Springs.
Two destinations, two directions. He opened another tab, accessing the Secure IT Global Network to search for Allison's face in the Albany area over the past day. Within minutes: a hit from Albany International Airport, then the parking garage where she'd entered a silver rental car.
He tagged the vehicle and instructed the system to track it through the network of Secure IT cameras. The trail led through Albany's streets onto the Adirondack Northway, images showing the car moving steadily north. After checking coordinates against Tetherly's GPS system, he typed his reply:
TARGET LOCATION IS
44°23'34"N, 73°39'22"W
SANGUINE SPRINGS, NY.