Wednesday, 20 November, 1517; Korean BBQ House, Capital Hill, Downtown Seattle
The fat man nodded, his double chin tripling. "I will have the data compiled and sent if you will designate a secure address. But I must insist you not share with any associates or subcontractors. We are embroiled in a delicate information-sharing controversy ourselves, so our intelligence must be kept within an extraordinarily tight circle for the time being. But you are already on the right track, I am impressed. Here, let me show you."
An AR display appeared between the two men. It split into quadrants. Each quadrant showed a grisly and very public death: immolation, dismemberment, melting, and...inside-out-turning. Throngs of onlookers stared aghast at each. The Korean flicked a finger and red circles appeared around the faces of four different women, one in each of the crowds.
"We have number crunchers of our own, I assure you."
The backgrounds disappeared, leaving just the four women. Two humans, an elf, an ork. There was no resemblance in terms of hair color or attire, but when the AR image overlaid the four images and the facial recognition software pointed out the key markers, it became clear that all were the same woman.
"We cannot identify her in any database. The two operatives that were tracking her previously each met their grisly ends just as they were about to report on her movements. However, we were able to retrieve some data from devices recovered from their corpses. Much was corrupted along with the destruction of their bodies, but we have pieced together enough to know that this woman has at times frequented three locations. All verdant spaces in public parks. The exact coordinates, one each in Snohomish, on Council Island, and in Fort Lewis, will accompany the data I send. We have no indication of the frequency or timing of her visits to these places. As of about twelve hours ago, we set up drone surveillance on all three locations, which we can patch you into with certain limits to your access. And of course we are doing our best to access public surveillance all over the metroplex with a tie-in to facial recognition applications. But so far we have found nothing."
He closed the display.
"As I said, thin. Our best successes have been with human operatives, but they all died. While our automated efforts have turned up nothing. I am therefore hoping you, with your unique nature, can somehow bridge the gap. Finally, I remind you of something I said earlier: information about our attackers would be rewarded generously. The death of this one would glean us nothing, and I fear her capture would alert her handlers to change their plans. If you acquire this target, learn what you can without direct action."
