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Adjustment, but doing so would have
unnecessarily increased the cost of this, the Angelo Adjustment.
    The wind whipped violently across his face as he lowered the
goggles over his eyes and tightened their strap behind his head until they were
snug. There were a hundred better, safer, or cleverer ways of doing what he was
about to do, but each of them cost several times more money to set up—and, as
always, Jericho prided himself for staying on budget.
    He walked over to the edge of the building and looked down
to the street below. It was fully eight hundred feet down from where he stood
on the residential building’s flat rooftop, but he knew that altitude would be
the least of his problems on the relatively short, yet perilous descent.
    Jericho activated the goggles’ infrared light filter and
immediately caught sight of the building’s security camera infrared beams as
they danced across the face of the building in a seemingly random pattern. The
night air was so thick with smog in New Lincoln that depending on the visible
spectrum of light was foolish, especially in matters of security, so all
mid-tier systems used infrared or better tech.
    Since the wormhole had collapsed two centuries earlier, the
technology of the Chimera Sector had undergone a radical metamorphosis which
saw the blending of millennia-old technology with more modern examples of
humanity’s scientific achievements. As such, only the ultra-wealthy members of
a planet’s populace could surround themselves with exclusively high-end
devices—and Mr. Angelo, Jericho’s next Adjustment, was ostensibly not one of the ultra-wealthy of Virgin Prime.
    The overlap of the low-tech, omni-directionally sweeping, night -vision security cameras created a nearly impenetrable
grid which would almost certainly catch anyone attempting what he was about to
attempt.
    But Jericho had spent nearly two decades finding ways around
such security measures, and this particular security net could be defeated with
nothing but a well-timed flip of a switch.
    He felt inside his pocket for the Timent Electorum insignia:
the symbol, if not badge, of his office. Once he had confirmed it was where it
should be he activated the tension brake on the wire and stepped out over the
edge, moving very carefully as he let out incrementally more line until he was
perpendicular to the building’s vertical surface.
    He tapped the new earpiece with his free hand and said, “I’m
in position, Baxter.”
    “Copy that,” came the older man’s
disinterested-sounding voice through the earpiece. “Initiating power spike in
ten…nine…eight…seven—”
    When the countdown reached seven, Jericho gradually let out
the line as he began to run along the wall of the building. The tiny suction
cups built into his bodyglove’s footpads ensured that he never pushed too far
off from the building to maintain control of his descent.
    “Six…five…four…” Baxter, his second-best operator, reported
in his droll, monotonous voice.
    Jericho was running as fast as he could keep his legs
churning, which meant that he had let out all of the tension he could from the
braking mechanism on the miniature spool of wire.
    “Three…two…one…”Baxter continued as though he was reciting
some particularly uninteresting bit of trivia.
    Jericho had ‘run’ nearly twenty five stories down the side
of the building by then, and the fast-moving IR camera’s beam of invisible
light came sweeping toward his path. If the light touched his body he would be
unable to complete his mission—and would miss the opportunity of a lifetime in
the process.
    “Zero: spike’s away,” his elderly operator reported dryly.
Just before Jericho’s body entered the beam of infrared light, the beam winked
out of existence for just a fraction of second.
    But by the time that light had returned, Jericho’s body had
passed beyond its path and he knew he had just seven seconds before the next
beam would come into contact with