Technically, Ryan Z. O’ciaran did not exist—a matter of legalese, of course. The same certificate that May Yoshiko had in her folio, alongside the documents pertaining to Alien X. That was now the young man’s name.

At a glance, the youth’s snapshot could have passed for any mixed race citizen she’d find anywhere. He had curly hair from his mother, a woman of Mediterranean descent, and his vaguely African features from his father.

He was of average height and average physique, in his mid twenties, working as a bartender, and would have gone unnoticed until the Baltic Sea Anomaly. His disappearance had made local news but did not cause any ripples; people went missing every day.

It was his recovery that had caught Yoshiko’s eye. But then again, that had been a footnote buried beneath other headliners. It would have made a splash if the ongoing political tug of war between two major world powers and the discovery of something in the Arctic hadn’t been hogging the news.

Not unlike the moon race, the Space Administration and its two other counterparts from Siberia and Asia had been scrambling to the Arctic. Word on the grapevine was that an extremely old meteorite with an unknown metal composition had been unearthed after a large glacier had split off due to global warming.

However, May Yoshiko knew that there was something more to it. A truce had been hashed out for expedition teams and private security had been scrambled for the sake of neutrality between the powers. It was that or the entry of armed militaries would push things to the brink. And for a good reason too.

May did not get to be a field operative without her intuition. It was the same intuition that had tangled up a web of potentially interrelated events that led to Operation ET, under the cover of counter-intelligence operations.

The spate of incidents that had occurred after the first discovery had been too hard to ignore and too convenient to leave behind. The alien spacecraft had been the thing that had cemented it, and world intelligence agencies were scrambling to find something to sink their teeth into.

The world was in a frenzy and, despite the reveal, it had yet to fully hit the greater consciousness that it was all real and undoctored. Most people still believed it was a teaser for a film or an alien hoax. Contrarians were everywhere.

It had taken some bit of social engineering to guide public perception towards that end however hard it was to gag the witnesses that had seen it first hand. It had been the work of the Agency to seed information that would prevent the world from hurtling further into chaos. It was only a stop-gap measure and May had gotten ahead of the pack, nabbing a potential point of contact―Ryan Zeus O’ciaran.

Her initial appraisal of the man had been of a cynical youth, whose cautiousness might have been a double edged sword. Perhaps the young man had been too smart for his own good. As soon as she’d stepped into that room, he’d surmised at a glance that she was in fact an intelligence operative; not that she was trying to hide it. They’d pulled some bureaucratic strings to potentially extradite him to HQ because he was a non-existent person, his cosmetic changes notwithstanding.

Though the changes had been subtle, the facial recognition database had been hard pressed to find a match. There was as much as 10 percent deviation that marked him as an altogether other person.

It had been too easy to get rid of red tape without ruffling foreign affairs; the extraction had been well planned and executed, and all that had been left was to fly him on the next flight out. The veiled threats of prosecution were, of course, to establish the pecking order, but Yoshiko could tell it was not over. And to prove it, her phone rang over the infotainment system.

“ Yoshiko,” the Asian woman answered. She did not like what she heard.

----------------------------------------

It was a few minutes later that Yoshiko's coupe pulled into the hospital's parking lot. The rain had died down and there was a heavy security presence at the hospital. They were not the MPs that had been assigned to her Agency but the cantonal police force. While their activities in the country had been sanctioned, what had happened there was out of her hands. It was supposed to be a quiet operation.

“Agent Owen,” she said as soon as she got out of her vehicle. A junior agent had come to receive her from the lot, holding out a spare umbrella for her. The cantonal police inspector was there as well, garbed in a long black trench coat as he talked to one of their own subordinates. The rain was still coming in hard.

“ Ma'am,” her junior agent saluted as they fell into step towards the hospital. The whole parking lot was crawling with uniformed men and police vehicles. There was even a specialised truck from the Cybercrime Division.

“ What do you have for me ?” she asked her junior agent as soon as they'd ducked under the eaves. They had to stand aside to let patient transfers take place to a couple of ambulances waiting by the ramps. They both nodded to the police inspector as they crossed into the hospital.

“ The subject escaped,” Yoshiko's associate said. They were walking to the security office.

“ There was an intermittent EMP pulse, whose origin was unknown—we did a sweep. It targeted communications and lights but didn't endanger the patients—” he said. “ Four AEVs pulled out of the parking lot after a broken window was reported, but the two guards couldn't get to the ground teams in time,”

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”Let me guess,” Yoshiko said as they pulled into the security office,“ they used self-driving vehicles as a decoy?”

“ Yes,” the agent said. In the security office, they passed two guards at the door, flashing their badges as they were let in. The spacious security office had never seemed so cramped—there were routers, cables, and mini servers in the office.

The head of security, a hunk of a man, was standing to the side glowering at the intrusion as he nursed a cup of coffee. A willowy looking youth in a beanie sat hunched over a laptop as they slurped noisily from a takeaway beverage. Half eaten burgers were strewn all over the place. Yoshiko grimaced at the sight; she could see why the security guard was rather morose.

“ Rook, report,” Owen said as soon as the two had stepped in. The youth being addressed started yelping before arresting a near spill from his drink. Rook was a White Hat forensics hacker.

“Ah, sorry about that,” he winced, shoving his plastic cup away from his mobile workstation. His fingers twitched nervously as he spun around to face the two agents.

“ I tried to recover corrupted and deleted footage, but no such luck—whatever EMP pulse they used cleared a whole day's memory without affecting the rest,” Rook said. He had downturned eyes which gave him the countenance of a sleepy person. “ The Four AEVs were scrubbed clean too, no crumbs and no signs the firewalls were breached,” he said,shoulders slumping.

“ Traffic cams and the Bubble-E Hivenet?” Yoshiko asked. The Hive-net was a moving mesh wifi network used to provide data at the cost of having Ads in your face.

“ Nothing,” Rook said, swivelling back to his workstation. The tapping sounds of keys emanated as he said, “ Whatever did this was so sophisticated as to mask its signature. Seems to me like someone put in the destination manually—the analog way.”

Owen turned to his superior; Yoshiko’s expression was unflappable as she watched the CCTV screens play on a loop before cutting off at a certain time stamp.

“ There was a call made within the premises,” Rook said. “ It was made to a certain Lucas Kaufmann―ah.” Rook Paused, as if realising something.

“ Something you want to tell me?” Yoshiko inquired, peering through her half-moon glasses. Rook flinched and swallowed audibly before he pulled up the images of Lucas Kaufmann.

“ Lucas Kaufmann is the alleged boyfriend of Cassandra Harper,” he said.

“ And?”

“ The hospital records show that Cassandra Harper was due for a transfer―spinal surgery. Which checks out,” he said again, pulling up something from the hospital’s EPRs. Some parts were unviewable due to HIPAA stipulations, so only the time the record was logged was available. “ I checked with the nurses, Lucas Kaufmann has been in the hospital for two days, but he’s nowhere to be found and his cell can’t be raised,”

“Hmm,”

“ I also checked the receiving hospital. Neither Cassandra nor Lucas were admitted to or checked into the hospital,” Rook replied.

“ Rook thinks this was premeditated,” Owen chipped in. “ The subject has her. We need to get that alibi from Lucas Kaufmann,”

“Should I pull up his records?”

Yoshiko hummed in contemplation. “ No, they are already one step ahead of us and any evidence would be circumstantial at best,” she said, shaking her head.

“ Owen,”

“ Yes ma’am?”

“ Get the crew together. We’re packing our bags.”

“ And the police inspector, ma’am?” the agent said.

“ I’ll handle it,” Yoshiko said, massaging the bridge of her nose.

“ Acknowledged,” Owen said, stepping out.

“ Rook, see if you can get that report to HQ.”

“ Riiight? And who is this subject we’re looking for?” Rook inquired.

“ Classified,” Yoshiko said, looking askance at the security guard, who snorted and got up from his seat. Rook grumbled something under his breath about clearances and about not being paid enough.

“ We should have set up an APB and asked for more coverage,” Rook muttered. “It would have been easier to catch him that way.”

“ That’ll risk unwanted attention; this operation was meant to be lowkey,” Yoshiko said, repressing an eyeroll. “ Siberian agents might know something is up." Their methods are not exactly subtle. "

“ Ah. You got that right,” Rook sniffed, closing the apps on the workstation while making sure all traces of backdoors had been scrubbed. “ That explains why the cordon was so thin―I wish I knew what or who we were dealing with, but hey, I’m just the sniffer,”

Owen chose that moment to make his reappearance. “ Ma’am, we’re ready to roll out. Do we have a destination in mind?”

“ Lucas Kauffman lives in Grindelwald,” Rook offered.

“ No,” Yoshiko refuted, shaking her head. “ I am sure that’s where they’ll expect us to look,”

Silence permeated the air between the two agents and the hacker as Yoshiko contemplated her next move.

“ So the operation's a bust then?” Rook asked from beneath droopy and resigned eyes.

“That’s too soon,” Yoshiko added, meeting each gaze in turn. “ Central expected nothing less than the asset’s acquisition. I have a hunch they’ll be showing up somewhere before long,” she added with thinly lidded eyes and a subtle smirk, which disappeared like a flash of light.