Bella's policy was simple: if she was working, everyone else worked too.
She'd assigned a full task list to each of her lieutenants.
"Mr. Banks—on top of your regular duties, you're also responsible for recruitment. The Brotherhood can't run on hired killers alone. We need our own standing force. If anyone disrupts the security inside a Continental Hotel, our people need to be there to handle it."
"How many are we talking?"
Bella held up three fingers. "Three hundred. Recruit them under cover as Continental Hotel security staff—no Brotherhood connection, no assassin training required. I don't need them to be able to shadow a target or disappear into a crowd. What I need is combat readiness: proficiency with modern firearms and vehicles, solid hand-to-hand skills, and the ability to function as a unit. That's the baseline."
Gavin hesitated. His own combat experience was limited, and he wasn't confident he could oversee that kind of training program.
Bella read the concern and scaled back. "Find the people first. What matters most is character—no addictions, no integrity issues, and an ability to endure hardship and take orders. We'll sort out the training later."
"I understand."
Gavin Banks was on a plane back to Japan that same day. Japan was where he knew people; Japan was where he'd start. One hundred of the three hundred would come from there. And beyond the recruitment work—he still had a day job. If he missed a shift, management would dock his pay.
William Miles came back to find Bella one more time before departing for New York. It was one-thirty in the morning. She was still reading.
The Brotherhood had few active members, but its organizational structure was sprawling. Bringing it under real control—not just nominal control—would take far more work than an order and a handshake. She was still mapping it.
She looked up when he entered. "You have more?"
"Yes. This..." He hesitated, then held out a folder—blueprints, blue-on-white mechanical schematics.
Bella wasn't an engineering student. She studied the pages for a moment, then realized she was holding them upside down.
Whatever this was, she couldn't parse it.
No wonder William Miles had carried these blueprints for twenty-five years without producing a working result. He'd done it with the help of the Russian Brotherhood chapter, which had managed a rough prototype—one that could fail catastrophically at any moment. The gap between the Brotherhood's technical capacity and the Templars' was staggering.
"These are Abstergo's Animus schematics," William said. "I stole them in 1977. The Russian chapter attempted a working prototype, but the bleeding effect was severe. We simply don't have the engineering talent. Even version 1.0 is beyond us, let alone version 1.28." He paused, something like shame crossing his face. "I've tried for twenty years. I have nothing to show for it. I'm sorry. I can only leave this burden in your hands now."
He set the folder down.
Bella knew the Animus well. A device that reads a user's genetic memory and renders it as a three-dimensional virtual space—immersive, explorable, interactive. In practice, the Templars had used it almost exclusively to extract information from captive Brotherhood members, strapping them in and trawling through their ancestors' lives for anything useful.
It was not a technology the Brotherhood found particularly friendly.
"You're saying we should build our own," she said. "And use it to access our members' genetic memories."
William nodded, jaw set. "The written record is almost nothing. We're twenty years behind the Templars, and we may never close the gap without it. I'd volunteer as a test subject myself. My combat ability is essentially nonexistent, but I am a direct descendant of Altaïr and Ezio. My bloodline has to mean something."
He left the blueprints and caught a flight to New York.
Bella picked up the folder and looked more carefully at the first page. Five minutes later she realized she'd been holding it upside down again.
She couldn't make sense of any of it.
From Connor Kenway onward, the Brotherhood had been heading steadily in the direction of muscle over mind, with predictably little interest in science. That legacy had not served the organization well. Building an Animus wasn't a matter of staring at diagrams until something clicked. It required serious expertise in mechanical engineering—and that kind of talent wasn't something you improvised.
Tony Stark's arc reactor had a working original; a room full of engineers couldn't reproduce it. Mechanical engineering rewarded innate ability in ways most fields didn't. The Brotherhood had none of that talent on hand.
After some thought, Bella used Brotherhood channels to contact the Russian chapter.
Nine members remained in Russia—a sparsely populated country, useful for hiding. She tasked them with locating Anton Vanko and Ivan Vanko. Father and son, both in dire circumstances right now. Her estimate was that thirty to fifty thousand dollars would secure their cooperation.
Their combined knowledge of mechanical engineering should be applicable to Animus construction.
She also dispatched Osaka chapter operatives to Kobe with a separate assignment: find the White Ghost. She had an old promise to collect on. The White Ghost owed her a kill.
The target: Warren Vidic, head of the Animus experiment program at Abstergo Industries.
Warren Vidic's ancestor was Geoffroy Thérage—the man who had carried out the execution of Joan of Arc. The lineage had not improved. From the Brotherhood's perspective, Vidic was one of the worst figures currently active in the Templar hierarchy.
He had subjected himself to early Animus experiments—used his own body as test equipment. That combination of fanaticism and clinical detachment made him particularly dangerous. He didn't value his own life. He certainly didn't value anyone else's.
He was a senior Templar. Inner Sanctum of Nine. He had been the one to condition Daniel Cross, and it was that conditioning that had triggered the Purge and come close to destroying the Brotherhood entirely.
His public identity was that of a scientist. His actual one was an architect of atrocities. No one would argue the kill was unjustified.
One hand building the Brotherhood's own Animus. The other hand removing the Templars' chief Animus researcher. A perfect exchange.
The White Ghost was a man of his word. He asked no questions. He accepted a photograph and the last known location, and flew directly to Madrid.
He moved quickly.
Five days later, at a scientific symposium in Madrid, Warren Vidic was dead. The White Ghost materialized from nowhere, drove a blade across Vidic's throat—blood spraying more than a meter (over three feet) — then put five rounds through his chest. There was no ambiguity about the outcome.
The Templar Order erupted.
The Inner Sanctum was the organization's highest governing body. Its members frequently didn't know each other's identities. Now one of their most critical figures had been eliminated in public, in broad daylight, at an academic conference. The fury was matched only by the confusion.