18 [Infiltration]

Haley observed from the air for several minutes, that was all it took for them to move out the items from the shipping crates into trucks – shoot an employee to make it 'convincing' and hear the sirens of the police approaching.

It was clear that this was a rehearsed performance, but Haley couldn't help but internally praise how smoothly they operated, the entire operation had taken less than ten minutes and now he was following them unbeknownst to them from the air.

Twenty minutes later the convoy following the trucks with the shipments split off – the cars stopped at the front of a skyscraper while the trucks continued round to the back and started to unload the goods from the shipments into a loading bay at the back.

'Looks like these guys aren't simple, do they own it or are they simply using it as a base?' He contemplated while watching them quickly unload the truck and move the goods inside, it was clear from their practiced movements that they had done this many times to which Haley could only curse his luck. 'This can't be something they do often or else the officials of the city would've long caught wind of it, guess I can only blame my own bad luck huh?' He thought with a sigh before looking at the now empty loading bay, he circled around the front and noticed that the black car convoy had also disappeared, most likely into an underground garage somewhere.

Without wasting time he ordered the drone to land atop the roof of the building, if he simply went in through the front door he would be as good as dead; currently he had no weapons to defend himself with and he wasn't feeling suicidal.

"Perfect." He muttered when he saw what he wanted on top of the rooftop, there was a door leading to a stairwell that no doubt gave access to the entire building, beside it was a simple code lock which he solved by placing his hand over the pad and quickly interfacing with it.

Within moments the red lock had turned green.

Click.

He heard the sound of the door opening automatically before sliding open to allow him inside without much thought he ordered the two drones to survey the situation from outside and alert him if anyone else entered the building whether from the back or front before stepping inside the building.

Unfortunately the door pad hadn't been linked to the rest of the security system so he was unable to hack into the network of the building; a iris scanner or a camera would probably be linked to the main network which would give him full access the only problem is that if he found a camera before a scanner the chances of him being detected while trying to hack it would put him in unnecessary danger.

'At least they didn't bother to install cameras in the stairwell otherwise I'd be screwed.' He thought trying to cheer himself up as he continued to descend down the stairs checking through the doors occasionally for cameras or something used to protect something important but nothing, every floor had the same layout, it was like someone had simply copied and pasted every floor to build this skyscraper.

Every single floor had an active office however, he could see the people within walking back and forth as they carried papers or datapads and spoke to one another. From his small window he could also make out four elevators on the right side of the building, he assumed that the left probably also had four simply out of a need for symmetry, but he wasn't willing to bet on it.

Floor fifty, just like every other floor.

Floor twenty, 'Oh, this one's empty.' He thought with interest but didn't bother to check inside just in case there was someone he couldn't see within.

Ground floor.

"One hundred and fifty fucking floors and they're all the same?!" He asked in shock logically something like this should be impossible there was also at least a few floors reserved for the executives which had a different more luxurious layout compared to the rest but there wasn't one.

He'd observed for those men in black on all hundred-and-fifty floors but it was as if they had disappeared into thin air, if not for the drones still circling the building from above confirming where he was he would've thought he was crazy.

'Well, if there's nothing above ground then.' With a sigh Haley walked out of the stairwell for the first time onto the ground floor and eventually found himself at the reception, luckily the reception was in front of the elevators so he could easily sneak behind.

There were three cameras focused on the front doors and one focused on the back exit behind the elevators, it took longer to describe than it did for Haley to enter an elevator and interface with it with his link.

"Thought so." He said with a grin as he watched as an entire new row of potential options appeared on the holo-display showing the floors, the only difference between them and the original set was that these all were negative numbers.

Haley had thoughts of going directly to the lowest floor because logically the man in charge would always be at the top of the building so the reverse could be just as true, it was a sort of curiosity that he wanted to satisfy but he managed to reign himself in for the time being.

Through his link with the elevator he had, finally, managed to breach their security network and find his way to the cameras. After putting the elevator into maintenance mode to ensure no one would disturb him he started to surf the camera feeds and get a good look at their operations.

Counterfeiting, Drug Production, Slavery and murder contracts – Haley took a deep breath when he saw all of this, 'Isn't this building basically the headquarters of a syndicate?' He thought silently knowing that he had probably just stumbled across something that only a select few outsides of the syndicate knew about.

"It's possible that none of them even know where they are, there's sleeping quarters from floors negative 120 to 140." He mumbled before focusing back on his task.

It was five minutes later that he found where they were holding the shipments they'd stolen, there was a crew currently going through them in an underground warehouse and cataloguing them, there was hundreds of crates containing god knows what but Haley intended to take everything he could escape with.

"Only two floors below… I wonder if any of those crates have the potential to go up in smoke." A small grin formed on his face as he clicked the button for the floor.

Then with a small shake of the elevator jumping into action he began to descend.