The rain over the West Side Highway at 4:15 PM had turned into a thick, slanting gray sheet that blurred the Manhattan skyline into ghost silhouettes of concrete and iron.
Inside the thirty-fourth floor of 55 Hudson Yards, the atmosphere felt less like a high-rise technology office and more like a crime scene undergoing execution.
Two private security guards wearing dark suits and earpieces stood silently near the reception gallery, their arms crossed, watching every breath I took. At the center of the main floor, Arthur Vance’s senior IT director was already seated at my primary terminal, inserting encrypted external storage drives into our custom server racks, downloading the master source code of the Aegis dynamic pathing algorithm.
I stood at my desk, my coat already on—a severe, hi
