So this was it,  crunch time.  For Man and Mutant kind alike Lienly knew that this was the only way. That cursed insect! He was quite happy serving the USA which had welcomed him with open arms, and quasi recruited him, to fight for justice.... With Roache's revelations. things had changed.  Now he was looking mentally from Roach to the USA, the USA to Roach, and could find little difference between them. It wouldn't be much different if all the politicians in congress were insects (and a couple of them were) , not if they allowed innocent mutants to be targetted like this.

Getting through the double doors was easy, a simple flash of the badge.  This was pretty secure, but the people knew him at the META Bot station, he was PD Linely. He had complained a lot when he was nearly arrested a few days ago by one of their PD "Rustbucket" models , still, at least he and Mellitus had got out of the situation mostly unscathed. He couldn't help but wonder whether he'd been victim to this unseen anti-mutant force. Hopefully it was just a glitch. Hopefully. 

The security got tighter as he went through each door, fingerprint scanners, retinal checks. He was allowed in to all of these places. Hopefully Roach wouldn't be stupid enough to make the Cameras go funny at an inconvenient time. There was going to be a tricky bit - a metal detector, designed to make sure no-one damaged the computer. He was technically allowed to bring in a USB stick, but if it got too close an examination....trouble. 

There it was, like an airport security scanner. Linely handed over his gun and badge to the attendant (he would receive them on the way out). The monitoring device was still in his pocket. "If you can hear me Roach, time to do a little bit of alchemy" he murmured to himself. This was normal for Linely,  and the department knew it. Pain reflexes sometimes caused a problem like that, and Linely dealt with the pain by whispering a bit. Nobody listened or took it seriously. Hopefully, Roach would hear it. Hopefully, or this little plan of his was going down the drain.

Roach wasn't anywhere near Linely. He was sitting comfortably in his limo, his legs crossed reading a news paper with a little headset on his head. In his ears, a quiet tapping told him the status of the agent he'd sent in, and his current obstacles. Lucky for him, this plan had been very carefully constructed from the start; the only real gamble had been getting Linely to cooperate.

As the officer approached the detector, the screen on the side of the operator flickered, and then shut off, and he cursed loudly smacking it again.

"Damnit! This is the third time today, what is up with this thing?! He stood up, and looked to Linely, shaking his head. "Sorry, don't worry about it, Joe, you go on through. #@$%in thing." He smacked the screen again, and it flickered on, then off again.

Roach tapped a cigar he'd lit on the ashtray provided in the limo, clacking his mandibles in satisfaction as he heard his bugs had been successful at that stage; they'd bee messing with the equipment on and off all day in preparation for this. By the time Linely got there, the hiccups would seem routine and annoying.

The Giant cockroach took a puff on the stogie, and clicked a reply to his bug, who ventured on to part two of the operation.

As the security guard swore violently at the machine, Linely felt a heavy sense of relief. Roach was a bug of his word it seemed. Suddenly the memory stick didn't seem too much like a fire in the back of his pocket. He quietly picked up his gun and badge on the other side of the scanner and went on through.

Pure white tiles covered the floor, glass panels, the whole place screamed hypermodern tech. Linely gulped as he remembered what this room meant. It had become necessary after the problems the NYPD had had with corruption, particularly involving Ragnork and... the Order.

More security details would follow, they were awfully sophisticated, Linely knew. The floor was loaded with some pretty neat METAgenetic sensors, they activated randomly when trod on, and could tell you somebodies mutation, and if they had had recent contact with a mutant on the most wanted list.

Tough to hack, tough to mess with. You'd need a technopath for it. Fortunately for Linely, Roach was not yet on the security database, which probably said more about the number of vicious mutant criminals that NYC was suffering from than what Roach was like. Roach had quickly developed a small file on himself in the NYPD MRC, small compared to other mutants... for now. The sensors couldn't find what they weren't looking for, as one of the squeaky clean tiles lit up green, Linely breathed a sigh of relief.

"You got bloody lucky there Roach"-lucky that he was just to small fry, or lucky that they hadn't renewed the system yet? Or was it because Roach had placed a few bribes the right way? Linely wasn't sure. What he did know is that it could have gone really bad really fast.

Then it was simple. The central computer lay in a large cylindrical chamber, silver, featureless on the outside, no real issues there. However it was sealed by a code. A code that could only be unlocked by a badge pressed into the lock. The ID was recorded-and while PD Linely was allowed in there, if the monitering device was discovered...

A hiss from the door made Linely jump, it opened from the inside, it was Greg. Going out for a smoke. "Thank the lord for nicotine addiction" he murmured under his breath , as he carefully entered before Greg closed the door. A few friendly greetings later and he was in.

Darkness, only broken by a mass of blue light coming from the computers. Linely's eyes adjusted to the weird light from the screens. It had been bright outside. The supercomputer was busy running the META bots, the USB ports that were normally used were in plain sight, couldn't place the device in those... All the screen showed was a heck of a lot of code that Linely couldn't even pretend to understand. Now it was a case of finding the most obscure USB port in the supercomputer, the one that people always forget is there...the one that Linely would have a job to find.

Things got interesting when you got a little bit deeper into the NYPD headquarters. This was where being careful came deeply into play. Any who had ever seen him commit a major felony had either died terribly at the scene, been working for him, or was currently underneath his thumb via blackmail or bribery depending on moral makeup.

His file was one filled with anecdotal accounts of someone saying something about someone, with the exception of him doing things incredibly outlandish, but not on the level of anything that out land him on the most wanted list. Sure, there were records of bugs committing crimes visibly, but they couldn't be him. In the few cases that were documented, the perp had died on the scene. This was the one time that he'd ever directly approached someone with nothing other than a moral reasoning

Small receivers carefully assembled by bugs among the wiring in the walls of the police department sent signals directly to the bug in the limousine, who listened carefully to the little bugs report, and replied with instructions in his little buggy language.

Things were going perfectly. He gave a signal, pulled out a burner phone, sent a single short text, asking when someone would be home. He got a reply; 10:30. The data storage unit for the camera feeds suddenly had a critical meltdown. The screens all flashed that they suddenly had nowhere to send the data to. They would later find that a bug had laid eggs in the cooling fan, and something had chewed into a few wires, causing a short. Soon after 10,000 dollars appeared in Greg's bank account; it would help him a lot with the divorce, and all to wait until he got a text, and walk out of his station to go smoke a stogie.

Now, all that needed to happen was for Linely to insert the device into the computer for ten seconds. Ten seconds would get him all he needed.

A fire was reported outside the police station. Nothing too exciting; a dumpster somehow caught flame. Arson, probably. No one was hurt, but everyone at the station would notice, and be talking about it for weeks. Human nature.

There it was, the obscure USB port nobody ever looked at. Easy to miss if you didn't know computers or have never used it before. One of those obscure drives that you forget exists. Computer games could sometimes cause you to use it, but otherwise it was pretty uncommon. Most people wouldn't even bother to check-it could be in that computer for ages and no-one would know it was there. Linely was glad he had worn gloves. Leather, difficult to leave fibers on, standard issue for police officers, a forensics team would have a job tracing it to anyone even if they did find it.

He plugged the damn thing in. The code on the computer did not change, a slight beep from a USB going in sounded. There were lots of USBs in this thing, nothing out of the ordinary. He turned and left-Roach would probably find some way of picking it up at a later date. He left the chamber closing the door behind him, while a rather panicked security guard ran up to him.

"Fire, outside the building..." Well-Linely could guess what that was, that bloody insect. "Let me go and check it out" , and so Linely ran through the security barriers outside, nobody bothered to stop him-there was a fire outside!

A dumpster. The fire was already going out. Stuff like that burned out quickly when they had no fuel to burn. The smoke had gone high, the flames had died down. The fire department wasn't needed, all it was was a bit of a startle for Greg when he'd noticed it. Linely ran to the dumpster, simply to see if he could make out what had happened. Looking at the smoldering embers, Linely thought he could just make out the husk of a small insect. A cockroach.