Hitman (2016) | Hitman 2 | Hitman 3
In the dead of night, 47 stealthily approaches a lone beach house in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, as part of a mission to help find the Shadow Client and eliminate him, as per a temporary alliance between the International Contract Agency (ICA) and Providence. The house, registered to a non-existent environmental NGO, is the safehouse of Alma Reynard, a top lieutenant of the Shadow Client. After hacking into Reynard's computer, 47 discovers that Robert Knox, a Providence operative, is defecting to cut a deal with the Shadow Client. Just as 47 finishes uploading his findings to Diana, Reynard and her team arrive home. 47 kills Reynard and escapes. At his hotel room in Wellington, he gets some brief but vague memories of his past, triggered by the photo the man on the train had given Diana. Diana contacts 47 to mention that the ICA's Board of Directors have given them the all clear to hunt down the Shadow Client's militia, not least because they're causing panic worldwide with their militia. 47 surmises that Diana didn't tell them about the man on the train, and mentions that taking a contract for personal gain is against ICA trgulations, which 47 sarcastically approves of. Diana also sympathizes with 47's struggle for losing everything, and mentions that's the key reason she's helping him get answers about his past.
Following the information picked up in New Zealand, 47 heads to the Global Innovation Race in Miami, to eliminate Robert Knox and his daughter, race car driver and financial prodigy Sierra Knox. Meanwhile, Providence's leaders are furious with their best man axing their own operatives and turning to Diana for help, but the man justifies his actions by revealing their target's identity - a mercenary named Lucas Grey, who killed Providence operative Eugene Cobb before setting his sights on the rest of the organization. Despite being an active mercenary in several wars, Grey's history before 1989 doesn't exist. Meanwhile, Lucas Grey is in hiding, working with his ally, hacktivist Olivia Hall. Hall frantically suggests assassinating 47 for doing Providence's work, but Grey tells her that the assassin is the key to finding a group of people he calls "the Partners".
47 heads to the village of Santa Fortuna in Colombia, ruled by the Delgado drug cartel. The cartel is aiding Grey's militia by getting them around the world to make surprise attacks and escape undetected. To weaken the militia and the cartel, 47 takes out its most prominent figures; Rico Delgado, the cartel's head, Andrea Martínez, the cartel's PR agent, and Jorge Franco, the cartel's chemist and cocaine manufacturer. After the mission succeeds, Diana sends an encrypted voice message back to the ICA, and notes that despite completing this part of their mission, the location of Grey is still unknown. Alone, Diana visits a graveyard in Brookwood, Surrey, to the graves of her parents, and remembers the events leading to their death. After Diana's brother James died from drinking contaminated water, the Burnwood family hoped to take action against the company responsible. After paying their respects to James and leaving, the family car explodes with Diana's parents inside. Meanwhile, in Johannesburg, South Africa, Grey, alongside a team of soldiers, raid an ETHER lab, and steal a vial from the facility, kidnap the company's CEO, and publish a hostage video revealing Providence's existence to the world.
Diana discovers that one of the militia's fake IDs belongs to Wazir Kale, a pirate also known as "The Maelstrom" and a member of the Shadow Client's eastern cell. 47 heads to Mumbai to track down and kill Kale alongside his two lieutenants - Vanya Shah, a local crime lord, and Dawood Rangan, a corrupt Bollywood producer. Despite Mumbai's labyrinthine reputation, 47 manages to eliminate the three, delivering a critical blow to the militia.
The ICA and Providence manage to locate Grey in an abandoned youth correctional facility in Brasov, Romania — The Institute for Human Betterment, and 47 travels there on a mission to kill him. However, Diana warns him it could be a trap, before the comms get jammed. Instead, 47 holds Grey at gunpoint while he helps him remember their shared past; the two men were once subjects in Doctor Ort-Meyer's cruel experiments and made a promise to tear down Providence and the Institute as revenge. Those memories cause 47 to spare Grey, who reveals Ort-Meyer was working for Providence under its leaders, the Partners, and their right hand man, the Constant. 47 and Grey once tried retaliating against the Partners only for 47 to get captured and, in a paranoid bid to keep them compliant, had his memory wiped while Grey managed to escape unharmed. Olivia reveals Grey stole an antidote that would negate the memory-wiping serum injected into 47 that ETHER were holding on to. He needs 47 to remember the first Constant of Providence, as they hold the key to bringing down Providence. Diana, after being convinced by 47, decides to help them, despite her reservations. Upon receiving the serum, 47 recalls the incident where a small village was massacred, and remembers that the first Constant was Janus, a former spymaster who once worked for the KGB.
Diana misleads the ICA into believing Janus was the Shadow Client, allowing 47 to travel to Whittleton Creek, Vermont and kill him and his bodyguard, Nolan Cassidy. While on the job, 47 uncovers intel revealing a pattern of a meeting between Janus and Providence's current Constant, along with Janus being the head and founder of a secret elite group called The Ark Society. Despite knowing the Constant will show up in the Society, Grey and Diana are stuck as to when, but Olivia tracks Janus's coffin to an island in the North Atlantic and notes the society will hold a wake there to honour their founder, meaning they need to stake out the society for two months. And with it, a more pressing concern catches Grey's attention.
Grey's militia, formerly disbanded, has reformed as a heist crew under the watchful eye of Noel Crest, currently residing on Ambrose Island. The crew have stolen a server relay for an ETHER satellite, and Grey assumes he wants to sell it on after getting the data off of the ETHER satellite. Akka and her pirate gang, are also on the island. Officially, the ICA contract is one that was already outstanding for Akka, giving the crew a reason to kill Noel and Akka, and get paid for it. After 47 disables the satellite, both Grey and 47 discover he was going to use the satellite and reconstruct Caruso's ETHER Virus from Sapienza, and wipe out Providence members using it. 47 kills Crest and Akka, and leaves the island, safe in the knowledge that Providence is none the wiser to the threat of a Providence attack.
With two months passing, 47 is tasked to head to the Isle of Sgàil and kidnap the Constant. However, there's a wrinkle in the plan. Grey's informant mentions that the Constant has an implanted chip that would poison him if he is compromised. Nonetheless, 47 manages to take him away and kill the two people who are in possession of a remote that would activate the chip, bounty treasure hunters Zoe and Sophia Washington, the current heads of the Ark Society.
With the Constant captured and his poison chip removed, 47 and his team force him to tell them who the Partners are. The Constant reveals the Partners are comprised of three families; the Carlisle's, the Ingram's and the Stuyvesant's, stating that they made Providence to secretly control the world's affairs and they now had their sights on them. As Grey and 47 leave to strike before Providence does, the Constant taunts Diana over not truly knowing 47, while a flashback reveals a younger 47 was the one who blew up the Burnwoods' car.
As 47 and Grey move out to find the Partners, Diana and Olivia contact both to inform that they had faked their deaths to cover their tracks. Grey and 47 heed the Constant's cryptic advice to "follow the money", with Grey determining they should head to the Milton Fitzpatrick bank in New York City, run by a Providence operative and bank director Athena Savalas. The crew intend to extract the data on the Partners' bank accounts to get at the Partners' identities, or rather the trails that allowed them to alter such details. 47 then carries out his mission, offs Savalas and takes the data undetected.
Olivia decrypts the data 47 found, tracing the Partners' transactions to a small Maldivian corporation called Haven Corporate Services, which prides itself in forming new identities for criminals. However, its access keys to its database are reset on a frequent basis, meaning that Olivia's attempts at hacking the servers are impossible without intervention.
47's mission then is to assassinate Tyson Williams, the corporation's CEO and founder, Ljudmilia Vetrova, the client handler, and Steven Bradley, who is in control of Haven's software and technology. 47, under his usual guise of Tobias Rieper (with the alteration of being a former thief who once robbed the Shamal Casino) infiltrates the resort and facility to kill all three targets, allowing Olivia to extract the data from Havens' servers undeterred.
However, upon returning from his mission, Olivia and Diana discover the contents of the Partners' banks accounts are gone, effectively making The Partners have no power in Providence anymore, and all assets have gone to a one "Arthur Edwards". Realising this, Diana runs off to the interrogation room on the boat and sees that The Constant has disappeared, and managed to slip away from their grasp during their mission. Grey receives a call from the boat, and assures 47 that everything is going according to plan, now that they have learned of the Partners' identities, they can head off to find and eliminate the Partners' of Providence.
