“We found him,” Kai Leng reported.

The Illusive Man had no need to ask who he was talking about. A top Cerberus assassin, Kai Leng had for nearly three years been on a mission to track down a single target.

“Where?” the Illusive Man wanted to know.

“Omega.”

The corded muscles of Kai Leng’s neck momentarily tightened with revulsion as he spoke the name — a completely involuntary, but understandable, reaction. The space station represented everything Cerberus despised about alien culture: it was lawless, savage, and brutal. The reflex caused Kai Leng to turn his head, offering a glimpse of the tattoo on the back of his neck: a snake swallowing its tail.

The ouroboros was often used to symbolize eternity, but the Illusive Man knew it had a darker meaning as well: annihilation. Which was, in its own way, also eternal.

Cerberus had discovered Kai Leng a decade ago, liberating him from an Alliance prison camp. The Illusive Man had looked carefully into his past before recruiting him: a marine with N7 special forces training, he had been arrested after killing a krogan in a bar fight on the Citadel while on temporary leave.

The Alliance had come down hard on the former lieutenant, making an example of him. He was stripped of his rank and sentenced to twenty years in military prison. Kai Leng’s long list of documented confrontational and even violent behavior toward aliens had no doubt contributed to the harshness of his sentence. For the Illusive Man, however, his anti-alien leanings were proof of character. That, combined with the fact that he had managed to kill a krogan while armed with nothing more than a standard-issue service blade, had made him a perfect recruit.

In the decade since Cerberus had arranged his escape, Kai Leng had become one of the organization’s top wet-work operatives. But he was more than just a ruthless killer. He understood the need to be discreet; he knew how to plan and implement complex and delicate operations.