Present day

The man in black pored over the files he had taken from Lance Bryson’s house after he killed him. His information had been correct. Lance had been handling money for the Program. The money had been moved around through some shell companies and funneled through a money-laundering operation or two but, if one knew where to look, it had Smythe’s fingerprints all over it. The man had taught himself the basics of forensic accounting out of necessity since he no longer had a team of analysts and data miners supporting him. That, combined with his knowledge of the Program and a considerable amount of guesswork, had allowed him to follow a portion of the money and get at least some idea of what the Program was doing since it had gone dark over a year ago.

A sense of ironic mirth flickered in the back of the man’s mind at the idea of the Program going dark, since it had never officially existed in the first place, but he ignored it. The Program may have always been secret, but its agents, the superheroes, had been anything but. And Reaper hadn’t been seen in over a year, which suggested that Kessington was up to something.

Unfortunately, what he had found didn’t seem to make any sense. The financials the man had taken from Lance suggested that the Program had been investing in satellite arrays, long-life batteries, and microsurgery. Kessington was never one to throw money around without some Machiavellian scheme, which meant those things were connected. But they didn’t fit. Something was missing.

The financial records didn’t have the answers the man needed. Which meant it was time to either go see a friend, or go see an enemy. Given how many more he had of the latter than the former, the man decided to start with a friend.

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Gwendolyn Summers, AKA the Wraith, lived some distance away. It would have been much more convenient to call her rather than go in person. However, when you talk to people on the phone, you can never be sure someone else isn’t listening in, or holding a gun to their head.

Gwen was a hacker, one of the best. As the Wraith, she alternated between hacktivist and thief, exposing Ponzi schemes one day and syphoning funds from Swiss bank accounts the next. The man had saved her life a year earlier when the owner of one of those Swiss accounts had sent men with guns to recover his money and to make an example of Gwen to discourage any other would-be thieves. Since then, Gwen had been helping the man track the Program’s activities, though he was careful not to tell her too much about himself or why he was having her look into the people he was. She was also beautiful and occasionally made flirtatious comments that suggested she might be amenable to a physical relationship. This last part may have affected the man’s decision to go to her home rather than pick up the phone.

Whatever the reason, the man was on the first flight out, and by that night he was breaking into Gwen’s apartment. Some might consider it impolite to drop by uninvited, let alone break in, but politeness is poor tradecraft, and it doesn’t pay to walk into an ambush because you are worried about your manners. Plus, it helps with making an entrance.

So the man scaled the wall of her apartment, pried a window open a crack with his fingertips, fed a wire tool through the crack, used the tool to open the window, and then slipped inside. The man moved through Gwen’s bedroom silently in the darkness. He opened the door a crack and saw Gwen sitting at her computer. From the door it would take three long steps and a short one to get to an appropriate position for a dramatic entrance. He waited and listened for the subtle change to a person’s breathing that occurs when they become intensely focused upon something. He got his opportunity after about a minute, and he moved across the room like a ghost through fog. Then he stepped from the shadows mysteriously and spoke.

“I need your help.”