A trench-coated blonde femme fatale spy out of john Le Carre, sitting in the reception area of a foreign embassy. She holds a necklace that ...

It wasn't so easy for Steel Sable to get into the embassy. Not with all the AI and cell phones and surveillance equipment. Fortunately, she preferred the value of old-school surveillance with shoe leather. And charm, gallons of it. Because in this foreign embassy, people still operated on relationships. She got a visitor's pass because she got the front desk receptionist talking in Slovenian about her family, her kids, her mother's never-ending health issues, recipes, gardening, the whole works. AI might be great at automating tasks and predicting threats, but the spy business was a people business, plain and simple.