Free The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle by Peter F. Hamilton Page A

makes it particularly hard to track and recover. And I haven’t gotten this close to him for twenty years. So I will be seriously disappointed if an individual screws this up. It will be a career-wrecker.”
    Don Mares tried to sneer off the threat. He didn’t really succeed. Maggie thought it was because he’d realized the same thing she had. Paula Myo never smiled because she didn’t have a sense of humor.
             
    Adam was finishing a rather splendid early breakfast at the Westpool Hotel when his e-butler informed him that an unsigned message had arrived in its hold file. It had come from a onetime unisphere address, and the text it contained was encrypted with a key code that identified the sender to him immediately: Bradley Johansson.
    Outwardly, Adam drank his coffee quietly as the waiters fussed around the restaurant tending to the other guests. In his virtual vision, he prepared the message for decryption. His wrist array was worn on his left arm, a simple band of dull malmetal that flexed and expanded constantly to maintain full contact with his skin. Its inner surface contained an i-spot that connected to his OCtattoos, which in turn were wetwired into his hand’s nerve fibers. The interface was represented in his virtual vision by a ghostly hand, which he’d customized to a pale blue, with sharp purple nails. For every tiny motion he made with his flesh and blood hand, the virtual one made a scaled-up movement, allowing him to select and manipulate icons. The system was standard across the Commonwealth, giving everyone who could afford an OCtattoo direct connection to the planetary cybersphere. He guessed that most of the businesspeople having breakfast around him were quietly interfacing with their office arrays. They had that daydreaming look about them.
    He pulled the appropriate key out of its store in his wrist array, represented by a Rubik’s Cube icon, which he had to twist until he’d arranged the surface squares into the correct pattern. The cube opened up, and he dropped the message icon inside. A single line of black text slid across his virtual vision: PAULA MYO IS ON VELAINES.
    Adam just managed to hold on to his coffee cup. “Shit!”
    Several nearby guests glanced over to him. He twitched his lips in an apologetic smile. The array had already wiped the message, now it was going through an elaborate junction overwrite procedure in case it was ever examined by a forensics retrieval system.
    Adam never did know where Bradley got half of his information. But it had always been utterly reliable. He should abandon the mission right now.
    Except … it had taken eighteen months to plan and organize. Dummy companies had been established on a dozen worlds to handle the disguised machinery exports to Far Away, routing and rerouting them so that there would be no suspicion and no trail. A lot of money had been spent on preparations. And the Guardians wouldn’t receive another shipment of arms until he could set one up. Before he did that, he needed to know what had gone wrong this time.
    They had been so close, too. Rachael Lancier’s last call confirmed that she had put together about two-thirds of the list. So close.
             
    Maggie Lidsey’s car drove her into the headquarters building underground parking lot an hour before she was due on shift. She’d been working longer hours ever since the case started. It wasn’t just to curry favor with Paula Myo; she was learning a lot from the Chief Investigator. The woman’s attention to detail was incredible. Maggie was convinced she must have array inserts, along with supplementary memorycells. No aspect of the operation was too small for her to show an interest in. Urban myth certainly hadn’t exaggerated her dedication.
    The elevator in the lobby scanned her to confirm her identity: only then did it descend to the fifth basement level where the operations centers were situated. The Elvin team had been codenamed Roundup,