Exposition!
“So what was their angle?” Greg said, stubbing out his smoke; he had gotten what he needed from it. “How did they get through the line?”
“Not what. Who.” Ibrahim slid a smart folder over to him. Greg raised an eyebrow at the actual use of digitech, and flicked it on. A holographic image of a balding, middle-aged man appeared. “That there is Regional Processing Coordinator Oswald Feeney. He’s a twenty-year man, clean jacket, no disciplinary record and no signs of corruption. Boring family life, no money troubles, and his biggest vice was a weakness for ice cream. His subordinates said he was nice, but dull. Just the sort of fellow you would want looking over everybody’s shoulder to make sure that magically infected corpses don’t have gold-witch eggs in them.”
“No kidding,” Greg replied. “It’s also just the kind of cover you want for a deep-cover agent. Who looks at the boring ones? He’s our guy, then?”
“Either that, or our fall guy. It’s his signature on the clearance forms for all the corpses that turned out to be gold-witches, and nobody’s seen our good Mr. Feeney since yesterday. Either way, they got to him.”