Sophia was expecting a little more when she entered the comm center. It was basically a large lounge room flanked by five- and ten-year-old laptops and desktop computers, their fans humming with varying degrees of ferocity. The meeting between the Shadow Akhana elders would take place over the darknet, their own covert communications network. As Freeman explained it, the darknet was by far the most advanced covert communications network on the planet—the brainchild of Fifth Column engineers who’d defected to the Akhana. Freeman had quickly funded its development with money previously siphoned from the Fifth Column. The darknet provided the Akhana with multi-jurisdictional routing of all communications, ensuring their traffic never entered and exited the network through the same country. To
