The CONTACTS tab opened onto a clean, sparse display.
Three names. Bronze tier, each of them, which the system had apparently decided was the appropriate starting point for a man whose overall rating had been POOR two days ago. Maxwell studied the list with the methodical attention he gave to personnel files — reading between the entries as much as reading them directly, looking for what the system had chosen to include and what it had left out.
────────────────────────────────────────
─ CONTACTS — ACTIVE ────────────────────
THOMAS Tier: Bronze
Role: Fence / Procurement
Location: West End, Gotham
Status: Available
RENA Tier: Bronze
Role: Information Broker / Logistics
Location: East End, Gotham
Status: Available
NATHAN Tier: Bronze
Role: Courier Network
Location: East End, Gotham
Status: Available
Select a contact to establish connection.
────────────────────────────────────────
Maxwell's eyes stopped on the second name.
Rena.
He knew a Rena. Had known her for the better part of three years, in the specific, bounded way you knew people in the East End — well enough to nod at, well enough to exchange occasional fragments of useful information, not well enough to trust with anything that mattered. She ran a small general goods store four buildings down from his apartment, the kind of place that sold items whose precise utility was never entirely clear but whose continued existence suggested they were useful to someone. She was sharp-eyed and unhurried and had never, in three years of casual proximity, said anything that wasn't worth saying.
He had not known she was an information broker. He had suspected she was something other than a shopkeeper. Most people in the East End who survived long enough were something other than what they appeared to be.
He selected her name.
The system registered the selection with a single quiet chime and updated her status to CONNECTED. Maxwell closed the panel and sat back on his bed, wondering what, exactly, establishing a connection meant in practical terms and how long it would take to find out.
He found out in approximately four minutes.
Three knocks at his door. Unhurried, evenly spaced, the knock of someone who was not in a hurry and was not trying to seem like they were in a hurry, which in Gotham was itself a kind of communication.
— ✦ —
Maxwell went to the door and opened it.
The woman on the other side was in her mid-thirties, with the particular quality of stillness that belonged to people who had learned to take up exactly as much space as they needed and no more. Her hair was pulled back practically. Her coat was the kind of coat that had pockets, many of them, and the pockets all appeared to be in use. She looked at Maxwell with dark, assessing eyes that moved across his face and then, briefly and professionally, past him into the room.
"Maxwell Connor?"
"That's me," he said.
She studied him for a moment in the way of someone confirming that the description they'd been given was accurate. Whatever she concluded, it satisfied her sufficiently to move forward. "Someone recommended you to me," she said. "I have a job. May I?" She gestured toward the interior of the apartment with a small, precise movement that managed to be both a request and an assumption.
Maxwell stepped back and let her in.
Rena entered the apartment with the unhurried efficiency of someone conducting an inspection they didn't want to appear to be conducting. Her eyes moved across the room in a pattern that Maxwell recognized from his own habits: corners first, then the window, then the surfaces. She was checking for recording equipment. She did it quickly and without making it obvious, which indicated either training or long practice or both.
Apparently satisfied, she turned to face him.
Her gaze traveled over him once, head to foot, with the frank professional assessment of someone pricing a piece of equipment. Maxwell stood still and let her do it. He had been assessed by people far more intimidating than a bronze-tier information broker in the East End, and he had learned that the best response to being evaluated was to give the evaluator accurate information.
"You were recommended," she said again, as though this established a framework of mutual obligation. "So I expect a decent job." She reached into one of her coat's many pockets and produced an envelope — standard size, unsealed at one end, the kind that could have contained anything from a contract to a grocery list. She held it out.
Maxwell took it.
Rena was already moving toward the door. She paused with her hand on the frame and looked back at him with the expression of someone delivering a final clause. "When it's done," she said, "come find me. Not before."
Then she was gone, her footsteps fading down the hallway with the same unhurried, even pace as her knock.
Maxwell stood in the middle of his apartment and looked at the envelope in his hand.
He thought about the system selecting her name. He thought about four minutes between the selection and three knocks on his door. He thought about what it meant that an information broker four buildings away had a file on him and a job ready to deploy and had been waiting, apparently, for some kind of signal.
He thought about the God of Entertainment watching all of this with its chipped-tooth smile and finding it adequately diverting.
He opened the envelope.
— ✦ —
The contents were two items: a single folded sheet of paper and a smaller card with a hand-drawn map on one side and an address on the other.
Maxwell read the briefing sheet standing up, the way he had read incident reports — once through quickly for the shape of it, then again slowly for the details.
The target was a man named Gerald Coyne. Senior Director of Strategic Development at Wayne Enterprises, seven years in the role, previously with two other Gotham-based conglomerates whose names Maxwell recognized from his comics knowledge as organizations with complicated histories and complicated connections. The briefing gave his home address, his office location, his known routines, and a physical description that matched the small photograph paper-clipped to the back of the sheet. It gave a deadline of seventy-two hours. It did not give a reason.
It did not need to.
Maxwell looked at the photograph. Gerald Coyne was sixty-one, silver-haired, with the comfortable build of a man who had eaten well for decades and the careful, guarded expression of a man who had survived Gotham's corporate landscape long enough to understand what survival required. He looked like money and caution in approximately equal measure.
Maxwell set the photograph down and thought about Wayne Enterprises.
In the comics, Wayne Enterprises was many things depending on which arc you were reading and which writer had most recently decided to complicate it. At its most functional it was a legitimate multinational with genuine philanthropic operations. At its least functional it was a labyrinth of subsidiary companies and board-level power struggles that provided convenient cover for any number of things that couldn't be officially acknowledged. The Senior Director of Strategic Development would sit at an interesting intersection of those two realities.
A board-level hit. Someone wanted a power shift, or wanted to prevent one, or wanted to send a message to someone who would understand it. Gotham ran on messages like this — actions taken in the visible world that meant something entirely different to the people who knew how to read them.
Maxwell understood how to read them.
He picked up the map card. The supply pickup location was a parking structure in the mid-district, third floor, northeast corner. A locker number was written in small, neat figures below the address. Whoever had arranged this had arranged it with the competent, impersonal logistics of an organization that did this regularly and saw no reason to dramatize the process.
He set everything back on the table and looked at it for a moment.
He had questions. He had several questions, the most immediate of which was whether Gerald Coyne was the kind of man whose death would make Gotham measurably worse, measurably better, or simply different in ways that were difficult to project. He didn't have enough information to answer that yet. He would need more before he moved.
But he had seventy-two hours, and the supply pickup was straightforward, and the system's four-contract requirement was not going to fulfill itself.
Maxwell folded the briefing sheet, put it and the map card back in the envelope, and tucked it into the inner pocket of his jacket. He checked the time. It was half past three in the afternoon, which gave him several hours of daylight to collect the supplies and conduct his own reconnaissance before he made any final decisions about the evening.
He pulled on his jacket. He rolled his neck. He checked the minimized system panel in the corner of his vision — stats steady, no new notifications, the mission counter sitting at zero of four with the patient indifference of a number that had all the time available.
He had made a decision on the waterfront: play along, on his terms, toward his objective. A board-level target in a Gotham power struggle was not exactly the quiet life he had maintained for five years, but then again, the quiet life had been judged boring by a cosmic entity and reframed as a failure. He was done being quiet.
Not reckless. Never reckless — recklessness in Gotham was a cause of death with a turnaround time measured in hours. But done being invisible when visibility was the currency the next stage of his plan required.
Maxwell Connor opened his apartment door and stepped out into the grey Gotham afternoon.
Tonight, he was going to work.