Santa Muerte!

Tasìa thought as she stared at the bodies. Three men, all well dressed, in white shirts, silky vests, black pants and polished dress shoes. A woman dressed in a similar fashion. They all appeared to be in their mid-thirties in age.

Felicité was right; they had that certain look to them that marked them as spooks.

She listened for sounds above and deeper into the basement. It was as quiet as the dead. Inspite of the grim scene in front of her, Tasìa was not discouraged from completing her task. She had seen in her career as a rogue burglar what robotic security could do to squatters and her own crewmates.

Tasìa crawled into the basement. On quiet toes, she dropped to the floor beside the balusters of the stairway leading down to the floor. The boards appeared agéd and likely too creaky to have risked walking down them.

She would stay in the shadows of the small stairwell until she had an executable plan in place.

Whomever was still here most likely did not want her to see what she just witnessed.

It might prove to be a deal-breaker if they discovered how much she knew. Then again, these were not people she put any trust in even if they proved to be Felicité's 'friends'.

She needed to start working on a plan B in earnest.

Tasìa gave herself five minutes to accomplish her current task, then she was out of there no matter what. She set the timer on her watch.

However, she doubted she would need all of that time. Tasìa suspected she could find what she needed on the bodies. They looked to have been untouched since they were initially shot.

Tasìa quickly scurried over to the poker table. She had brought a netted laundry bag, one of many from her stash, in her fanny pack. Cash on the table in near blood-splatter free condition had not been touched.

Gleefully, Tasìa scooped it up.

There were two dozen mini-bottles of vodka; the same two premium brands Felicité had shared with her.

Interesting.

Which party were Felicité's allies - the invaders or the wiped-out home team?

She studied the dead woman. Her eyes were still open. Her hair was desert dry. Forensics was not her forte but Tasìa tried to guess the day the spooks were shot.

Then, it occurred to her.

As of Wednesday.

It was the answer that Felicité had given her when Tasìa inquired how long the cameras in the corridors had been taken off-line.

Recalling how the Argentinian responded, Tasìa shook her head and she frowned to herself.

She knows something about this.

Tasìa checked the woman's pockets. She found a specialized personal assistant mobile. The NeoPalm PAM was a high-end item in common use among professionals in the IT community.

The dead woman also had a purse lying limp beside her.

Tasìa swiped that as well. She was almost giddy, at this point.

In spite of her convictions, upbringing, and the current morbid circumstances, even still, a good heist enraptured her heart in a way nothing else could.

The Angel of Theft, her deceased partner Cuervo called her.

When she began to place the purse in the netted bag, Tasìa realized it felt imbalanced. As if something in it was heavy but not at all symmetrical in the distribution of its weight.

From the feel, Tasìa guessed a weapon.

She was right. A Desert Eagle.

Infernal Madré! What was Lady Spook trying to stop with that?

She checked the pockets of the other three bodies. Two more phones, three IDs, credit and debit cards plenty. One of the men possessed a small .32 caliber Browning Short with six magazines of ACP rounds in a well-hidden interior vest pocket.

it was the same gun her father trained her on. Tasìa decided she needed to find a way to keep it.

Another gentleman had a stiletto strapped above his ankle. It bore a full-grained leather handle, a cobalt blue metal blade and was well balanced.

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The rogue smiled; she used to collect decorative blades.

Soon it will be time to start a new collection.

With her bag full, Tasìa swept through the sub-basement on her quiet little feet. It appeared it was mostly used to store parts and weapons.

A set of eight .30-06 (thirty-ought-six) carbines with suppressors built into them caught Tasìa's eye. They appeared well used.

For what purpose?

Tasìa's intuition spoke to her when she recalled what the guard over the radio said about a war criminal. The rogue shivered at the answer it gave her.

This is where a death squad camps out and stays hidden from public scrutiny.

In the far northeastern corner a stairwell led up. Sectioned-off right next to it she found a fair-sized computer server that set beside a workstation. It appeared ransacked.

A room with walls of cement block was closed off by a thick locked door. Tasìa still had a few minutes left before she evacuated. Her lockpicks were never far from her.

Inside the room was a pressurized hatch on the floor. Leading to what, she wondered. Access tunnels?

Once more, Tasìa grinned. She now anticipated opportunities opening up for her.

At some point soon, she would need to investigate whether the tower was built for the spooks or did they simply appropriate it for their own purposes. If the answer was the former, the hatchway likely led to an area separate from the service tunnels.

That route would be less regulated than the rest of the complex.

That had to be the case, Tasìa reasoned. The hatch was placed there in order to facilitate movement so the spooks would not need to go through the same access chokepoints as everyone else.

Tasìa shook herself from the revelry of hope this discovery gave her. She needed to accomplish one more thing before she abandoned the sub-basement.

Tasìa made her way back to the stairs leading into the fenced-in area. Tasìa needed to try the woman's PA mobile while the rogue was still inside the tower. If the range of its signal frequency was blocked from outside interference she would need to obtain the array of data Felicité asked for right now.

Within minutes of her search Tasìa had exactly what she sought; Lady Spook's name was Demona Heloïste. She was, indeed, the IT specialist among the tower crew.

The woman must have thought herself impervious inside her tower before she was shot to death. For the sake of personal convenience, Lady Spook, Demona Heloïste, had her codes set to be bypassed already.

A shiver went up her spine. Don't be supid, Tasìa, she told herself. There is more than that going on here.

It is as if Heloïste was ready to just pull up the array of data and hand it over to me the moment I dropped in.

Tasìa had to close her eyes and shake off an unsettling feeling before she could get on with her task. What had she gotten herself in the middle of here? Has the side she unwilling sided already lost? Will the victors be upset with her?

As Tasìa breathed in to steel herself, her father's words whispered into her being. Composure allays great offenses, she repeated again and again for several seconds.

With her aloof sense of calm returned, she focused on the device once more.

There was enough storage on the device to do what Felicité set the little cat burglar out to accomplish. Unfortunately, downloading the array of data would take a few minutes longer than allowed by her self-imposed five-minute deadline. It was a large chunk of information, several terabytes worth.

She did not like this; Tasìa watched the stairwell leading up into the tower, wearily.

Were the spooks or whoever it was who inhabited the tower now wondering what was taking her so long to get there?

Even after she finished up in the sub-basement, she still had to crossover the roof again.

Tasìa eyed the dead woman. She knew now she made the right decision to keep hidden instead of confronting them head-on.

As she waited by the top step, she heard voices above.

"I can't believe they fucked it up. Four rolls of those coins lost!"

"Javier, shut up about it already. If she comes through, what will it matter? We call it off just as we promised."

Footsteps started to come down the stairs.

"All right, this game of b-ball decides who cleans that shit up."

"Javier, you lost the last game, it should be you."

Tasìa slunk under the stairs. Minimizing her petite body in the shadows there.

"This game decides. My ankle was still twisted up when we played Thursday."

"This game then."

She got a look at the two as they approached. Although they dressed in shorts and t-shirts, they had the same straight-cut, hard-bodied, protein-rich diet look of the four card players. Spooks.

It was not likely an invasive force that murdered the four, but a matter of internecine betrayal instead.

They passed by Tasìa when they entered the fenced-in area grounds. The latch was once more shut. This time with a twist to lock it from the outside.

Shit.

What was she going to do now? Tasìa checked to see if the download was completed. Something on the screen distracted her eyes.

Tasìa had no idea what it could have been. The names of thousands of files flipped through faster than she had any chance of reading them.

The download completed. Whatever it contained, the file would be found within the last four percent of the downloaded content Tasìa calculated.

Tasìa sorted the files by clicking 'stored most recent.' She scrolled through the files to see if anything caught her eye.

Her skin heated up and flushed goosebumps across her chest when she saw the file name.

Sigrid Rosa.

The reaction was entirely involuntary. It made no sense to Tasìa why it affected her so powerfully.

The name meant nothing to her. She knew Sigrid was a common Scandinavian name but she had no connection to the Nordic Nations.

Many in the Salvage authority did, however.

She recalled the false memory of Auntie Tatiana asking her who she was. The Rose.

Tasìa opened the file. It was organized as a multimedia document. The first entry of which was a picture of Tasìa herself with a caption underneath.

Tasìa Alma-Gris, the Sigrid Rosa.