Go Scout The Warehouse

You get into your car and speed towards the warehouse’s location, aware that it’s sleek chassis might stand out a touch in the more rundown neighbourhood that you’re headed towards. In an old industrial area such as this, however, there are plenty of old lots laying about, and sure enough, you come across one to park in not a kilometre away from your final destination.

Leaving the car behind, you begin to meander towards the warehouse on foot, passing by a couple of homeless guys kicking around an empty beer bottle. They size you up, greed showing in their eyes as they see your tailored suit, but something about your gait and the way you glance at them gives them pause. They don’t get closer. It is also possible that the lot are employed as lookouts, so you double back a couple of seconds later to confirm that they’re not making any calls. They aren’t.

The warehouse looks decidedly unremarkable from the outside, with graffiti and a half rusted door that’s locked shut with several large locks. Tapping your sunglasses with your right hand, your vision zooms in on the window high up, but you see that the blinds are drawn, giving you no hint of what lays inside the building. With a blink of your eye, the lens returns to normal. There’s no sign of life as you cross by the warehouse, not even a lone vehicle in the distance. Could this really be just a regular warehouse? Usually there would at least be guards positioned nearby to keep lookout. Blinds over windows don’t exactly facilitate that. Perhaps hidden cameras then? You blink rapidly, activating an electronics scanner, but it gives no feedback whatsoever on anything in the street, other than a discarded and broken microwave lying in the entrance to an alleyway.

You circle around to confirm that there really is nobody nearby, and then you cross the street, making your way to those heavy double doors that guard whatever lays inside. From your coat pocket, you put on two gloves and flick on a small switch within each of them. They begin to hum softly, and as you put your hands against the door, they latch onto it as if stuck by some powerful adhesive.

These suction gloves allow you to rapidly scale the wall, as you pull yourself upwards with your hands, your feet bracing against the concrete exterior for support. You ascend rapidly, and pull yourself up to the second floor window in no time. From here, you can tell that the there are no lights on within this room, and that it is empty save for a spare desk that looks unused. Perfect.

Hoisting yourself above the window, you swing out and kick the window in. It takes several tries, but eventually, the glass falls out of the frame, shattering as it hits the ground. You slip in afterwards, deactivating your gloves and pulling out your gun. The noise of glass shattering could draw attention, especially because the building is just as quiet from the inside as it is from out. There’s a reason why you didn’t just pick the lock on the front door, and it wasn’t so you could be noticed by all.

As you observed earlier, the room is empty save for a desk, which has a few pieces of paper scattered over them. A cursory examination reveals nothing more than a couple of old restaurant receipts and some scribbling that looks to be in cipher. You snap a picture through your sunglasses, before deciding to explore the rest of the building.

Exiting the door, you find yourself on a catwalk overlooking a vast space, where cargo crates would normally be filling the place to the brim. Instead, you see two cars, an older model and a sports car, as well as what looks like a workbench with tools and supplies, and a desktop workstation. If this isn’t confirmation of an intelligence outpost, you don’t know what would be. There is, however, nobody in vision, and you wonder where the supporting staff could be.

That question is answered as you check the next room down the corridor, labelled Steam Room. You swing open the door, rolling in, and as you come up, you bump up against a server rack and a body on the ground. The man is dead of a single gunshot to the head, and from the bloodstain - this couldn’t have been more than an hour ago. Your hairs stand on end, and you freeze, listening for any signs of human activity, but there are none save for the hum of the servers.

Could this be another enemy spy in the base? There are an untold number of possibilities here, but you’ll need to be extra careful in order to figure out exactly what’s going on. You sweep over the room to confirm that there’s no USB sticking out anywhere for your to follow up on, and then you reach into your pocket and insert a dummy USB into the main server. The little device will intercept and relay as much data as possible into a honeypot, mainly so that the tech guys can trace where the targets are actually coming from when they inevitably follow up on this stick.

You look around the room and confirm that there’s nothing more to be found here. Stepping back out onto the catwalk, you see that there are multiple rooms ahead of you. You hear ominous noises, perhaps the noise of a silenced gunshot, from the conference room, while there are flashing lights behind the bathroom door.

Which one do you check next?