"Well I'm glad you like it, I grew it myself, from the vineyard onsite"
Pavel returns shortly with a soup entreé, it smells like the canned soy-version of potato and leek soup you remember from your childhood, but about six-million times better.
"But I'm sure you're not here to learn about wine. {turning to pavel}Thank you Pavel, could you bring up my projector?"
Pavel nods and returns shortly as you tuck into the warm soup, the crusty demi-baguette was vastly superior to the soy-wheat shit you normally had with jam on for breakfast.
"Firstly, I have to congratulate you on your resourcefulness. With your colleague disposed of, you did well to retrieve this data alone. {facing Mantis} Mr McMullion, you forced one of our enemies' agents into a sloppy mistake. He created a data trail and your recovery of this led to his detainment. From him, we have learned much of their organisation, though much remains shadowy. What we do know is that they are technologists par excellénce.
I lost three good operatives back-tracing their infiltration of your commlinks; and these were not amateurs by any stretch of the imagination. Understand this, you are expressly forbidden from engaging with their operatives in the Matrix. You are both far too useful to me to end up dribbling brain-wrecks like my other operatives.
{turning to face Knives} Mr Britt, think back a while to the warehouse you had to shake down. We have traced it as one of many routing hubs this group appears to have ties to.
We'd had it under surveillance for quite some time, and the recent increase in interest from outside parties such as your own family confirm we were right to be suspicious. The primary shipments they are interested in appear to be those of a magical nature; artifacts, raw materials, archaeological finds etc.
We don't know exactly what it means yet, whether it has any links to their motives or whether it is how they finance their operations, but your colleague here {gesturing at Mantis} was also involved in a fracas with their agent at the same warehouse. It does, however, corroborate our own suspicions of a darker mind behind their organisation. They go beyond organised crime, up the political chain and subsume and co-opt services from people as high up as the Lord Protector himself, or so we believe."
He lets that hang as he started on his soup, tearing into his baguette and buttering it before dunking it into the thick and hearty liquid.
The room fell quiet for a while, only the clang of cutlery on fine china bowls broke the silence.
Pavel returned with the projector, popped it onto the far left side of the table and cleared your bowls, speaking to Smith. "Sir, please signal when you are ready for your main course"
Smith nodded and powered up the projector, opening up a holo-terminal from it.
One of the three operatives that lost his mind to them managed to backtrace their signal to a routing post in the south Paris ghetto. It appears they have their own shadownet, a type of VPN separate from the main flow of Matrix data. We were only able to triangulate the signal to a rough area before our operative was taken out in a codewar and the signal terminated.
The holoterminal springs to life, a large scale map of paris zooms down to an aerial shot of ancient crumbling tenement blocks, semi-flooded streets and what looks like a shanty-town of sorts.
so much for the glossy brochures you'd seen of paris, the area looked like a total shit-tip.
Unfortunately, we cannot give a precise location, their broadcasting equipment must be located somewhere within 500-750 metres of this position. It has to broadcast a long way, so we know it will require power from a source more reliable than the ghetto can provide, think generators, batteries, solar and so on. It will run hot, so look at the buildings in the thermal spectrum. It will be of great importance to them, so expect it to be guarded.
Once you locate the broadcasting antennae, I need to you install this device {the image of the ghetto dissapears, replaced by a generic looking black box with an antennae of its own} covertly into it and flick the swtich on the right side of the device upwards twice. This device will record the outgoing signals and re-broadcast them to a commlink within about 75 metres away, give or take for interference.
You'll need to secure another commlink out of sight within range of this for us to be able to receive and decode their signals. Whatever happens, this requires absolute discretion. They are not to know about our subversion so you may only engage in hostilities as a matter of preservation. Go in quietly and do NOT leave a trace. Do I make myself clear? good...
Any questions?
