Dent-head lingered in the shadows, unmoving, his synthetic eyes fixed on the scene across the street. Through the tinted glass of Amigo’s restaurant, he read fragments of the conversation—lip movements alone providing enough data. His AI-augmented brain parsed and translated the silent speech in real-time, the language of human mouths rendered into thought.

  Viktor’s name surfaced—Viktor Romanov. Crime lord. Father of the murdered man, Mikal. They were discussing the case.

  Dent-head watched as the pair rose from their table and made for the exit. Without hesitation, he stepped from the darkness and moved swiftly, precisely—one hundred yards along the pavement, aligning himself with the path ahead of the restaurant’s door. On paper, it was just another routine beat, another midnight patrol. In reality, his neural routines had calculated the optimal angle and timing for a chance “encounter.”

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  His internal systems estimated only a 30% probability that the suspects would believe it was coincidence.

  But that didn’t matter.

  The objective wasn’t deception—it was observation.

  Every twitch of an eyelid, every tonal shift in their voices would be recorded, analyzed, and transmitted to Internal Affairs. There, human officers—those trusted—would comb through the data, parsing guilt from innocence, truth from corruption. And if these two were dirty, if they knew more than they claimed, the AI would see it in the micro-expressions long before they ever realized they’d been made.