Beating Ruby

by Camilla Monk

  I kept telling myself that, after all, I was being handed yet another opportunity to come clean, and that a bazillion girls had dumped a guy before me—how hard could it be to just say no?—but in that moment, following Alex to the elevators, I just felt a little nauseated.

  He led us down to an underground garage. There he pulled a key from his pocket, which he pressed. At the other end of the aisle, two beeps resounded and lights flashed; a boyish smile lit up his features. We walked toward the source of the noise, and I have to say I was a little disconcerted when we reached the vehicle, like there’d been an error or something. Alex, on the other hand, seemed increasingly pleased, circling the simple white urban SUV with his hands on his hips, inspecting it.

  Honestly, those sleek lines were so generic I couldn’t even identify the model. The only odd detail was perhaps the lights, with their unusual bluish hue. I stepped closer to the round hood, examining the T-shaped logo in its center. “Tesla? An electric car?”

  “Yes, it is,” Alex replied with a carnivorous grin, grazing the handle to unlock the driver’s door. Okay, that was a little cool.

  “Why this one?” I asked as I buckled my seat belt, staring at the tactile dashboard.

  “Because I wanted to verify the rumors.”

  “What rumors?”

  His answer came at the same time that my body was propelled backward—I hadn’t even heard the engine start. “That it’ll pin you to your seat.”

  We made it to Zürich in one piece, but as the Tesla slowed down, I was pretty sure some of my internal organs were now stuck in places they shouldn’t be. All those accelerations had to be messing with my anatomy. The sun hadn’t risen yet, and we were driving on the Utoquai, along the shores of Lake Zürich, a dark, quiet immensity stretching for twenty-five miles in a valley guarded on each side by chains of snowy mountains. On our left, an endless ribbon of elegant nineteenth-century buildings flew past the car. Once refuges for rich landowners able to afford a chunk of the lake’s scenery for their private enjoyment, most of them had been turned into hotels welcoming an international clientele.

  My breakup with Alex had gone well. I had just said, “Sorry, we’re done, please don’t touch me anymore because it makes things weird between us,” and he had said, “Yeah, sure.”

  Okay, I’m lying. Alex seemed in such a good mood, and delighted with his new toy, that the words had remained stuck in my throat. I had spent half an hour trying to come up with appropriate lines for a gentle breakup, stuff like “Things are too complicated between us,” or “I have to let go for your own sake,” and . . . nope, I had nothing good, and I was still chickening my way out of this.

  I sighed in resignation as we stopped in front of the Eden au Lac hotel’s neo-baroque façade. Greco-Roman columns and sculptures, vegetal patterns—the ensemble was gorgeous, and perhaps a bit too much. Very European. I thought of Thom. He had been here, seen the same façade—this was precisely why we had chosen this hotel for our stay. Something had happened within those walls that had changed his life. I needed to stop wallowing in self-pity and work on understanding what.

  Alex took a left turn to access the hotel’s parking lot. He glanced in the mirror at the black BMW about to enter the parking lot as well. No need to see through the tinted windshield—March had been following us all along.

  Much like the flight, the few yards from the parking lot to the hotel’s lobby were spent in tense silence, and I pretended to be fascinated by the ceiling’s moldings while March took care of check-in. I can’t overstate how relieved I was when he handed me a key of my own. At this point, the last thing I wanted was to share a room with either of them.

  I plead guilty of filling my plate with a mountain of food at breakfast that morning, but that nice waitress in the dining room forced me. Like a pusher in a dark alley, every time I moved away from the gargantuan buffet, she’d show me something new and delicious I hadn’t seen yet. It went very fast, and before I could fully understand what had happened, I was sitting at our table, in the middle of that Versailles-like room, surrounded by gold-leafed stuff and big chandeliers. And there was approximately a pound of brioche, cake, cheese, ham, eggs, and jam in front of me.

  Alex raised an eyebrow at my plate before resuming his explanations. “I received our tram enthusiast’s identification during the flight. His name was Karsten Salzgeber. Thirty-eight. Born in Feldkirch, Austria. Good career in the Austrian army, with five years in the special forces—”

  “Until he received a dishonorable discharge following a disastrous raid in Afghanistan,” March completed, as if to drive home the point that he had read the file too.

  I took a swig of my hot cocoa. “But you don’t usually get a dishonorable discharge just because a mission went badly. Right?”

  “You do if you try to set a Taliban’s fifteen-year-old son on fire to make his father talk. Five members of the unit were tried. That’s the magic of combat stress and peer pressure, I guess,” Alex said, looking down at his cup of coffee. “Following his discharge, he became a mercenary. According to our data, he joined a Vienna-based private security company about a year ago. That’s when he kind of vanished from our radar.”

  “Why is that?”

  “The question you want to ask is: Who did that? After that date, we have no records whatsoever—no credit card logs, no medical expenses, no flights . . . nothing.”

  “Someone was paying it all for him? Like, keeping him in some sort of bubble?” I asked.

  “Yes. A pattern typically seen when one joins the service of a powerful employer,” March explained.

  I chewed on my brioche. “He and those guys with the motorbikes were watching Thom’s place. They probably wanted to make sure there would be no loose ends. Do you think Thom met him here in Zürich?”

  March confirmed, cutting his slice of cake in even pieces. “Very likely.”

  Alex watched him do so with a curious stare. “We could try to question employees here at the hotel, but I’m not really fond of that kind of direct approach. They’re used to keeping their clients’ secrets, so we’ll mostly get lies.”

  “What about the security cameras? Thom was here less than four weeks ago, and many systems can store logs for up to a month. Can’t the NSA, like, hack into those? Or maybe Colin?” I inquired while stuffing my face with French cheese.

  “Probably, but I’ll need an authorization before they do it for us.” Alex smiled. “What about you? Could you?”

  I laughed at first, because I thought he was joking. “Of course, network security is IT’s biggest joke. But I don’t do that kind of stuff; I never had the mindset for that.”

  Next to me, I hadn’t noticed the way March’s lips had curled into a predatory smile. “Don’t sell yourself short, Island.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  The Chihuahua

  “We need you to get back in the game, Samantha! You’re the only hacker hot enough to infiltrate Andreï Preskovic’s sex club and break into his computers.”

  —Abby Chuman, Fatal and Sensual Ukrainian Nights II: Bound Forever

  “Swear again!”

  Alex rose from the white Louis XVI armchair in which he had been listening to my complaints until now. He flattened his right palm over his heart. “Island, I swear that if you get caught, I’ll cover for you. You won’t go to jail.”

  Sitting cross-legged on my bed, I cast a wary glance at my unopened laptop. In a corner of my room, March was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, and watched the negotiation unfolding before his eyes in silence.

  “I won’t get disavowed?”

  “You won’t. You’re not even an agent. Worst-case scenario, you’ll get a call and your phone will explode, along with you.” Alex grinned.

  “Oh my God!”

  He doubled over with laughter when I scrambled up from the bed. “Just kidding! Now can you please . . . ?”

  I searched March’s expressionless features for some sort of actual reassurance. He answ
ered my silent plea with the arching of a haughty chestnut eyebrow. “You wanted to be a spy. Congratulations on becoming one.”

  I drew a resigned breath and grabbed my laptop. Alex sat on the bed next to me, and when I launched the command line and started typing, March joined us, sitting on my other side.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, watching the colorful lines of code scroll on the black screen.

  “I’m inside their router’s admin. That was the easy part, because their password is super weak. This, here”—I pointed at a particular block of text—“is the list of all devices connected to their network. Mostly phones and laptops, so it’s not really interesting. What I’d like to check is this . . .” My index finger stopped on a specific entry, an old-ass Windows server that seemed like the perfect candidate for hosting temporary video surveillance archives, but it also looked ripe for the taking. There were dozens of critical vulnerabilities to be found in a nearly ten-year-old server, and someone who named their machine “IchliebeRösti”—I love rösti (a kind of Germanic hash browns)—couldn’t be trusted to properly install security updates in a timely manner.

  I cracked my fingers and set about exploiting a well-documented vulnerability. It was nothing incredibly elaborate, in the end: just a few remote requests in ASP that would mess with IchliebeRösti’s web applications, granting us total access to the server. Hacking is bad, and I should have felt bad, but I have to confess that a thrill of impish excitement sent tingles through my body. There was a joy to be found in sin that I couldn’t deny.

  Soon, I was scouring its drives for video files. A long list of results appeared. Now, Alex and March might have cared little for computer shenanigans, but they knew what a several-gigabyte “.avi” file meant.

  “Great, can you isolate the recordings for March 13, the day before he came back to New York?” Alex said, placing a hand on my shoulder. March clicked his tongue, but said nothing otherwise.

  I was all too aware of the warmth radiating from Alex’s palm as I selected a group of files. “There you go. Are we going to watch them all?”

  “No,” Alex said. “According to his agenda, Roth spent most of the day at Machina Tomorrow and came back to the hotel around six. Show me the lobby, starting from five thirty.”

  I double-clicked on the file, and we watched as an accelerated ballet of guests, visitors, and employees appeared on my laptop’s screen. The recordings were in black-and-white, but the resolution was decent, allowing us to distinguish faces and some level of detail.

  “Look!” I paused the video and pointed at the lean silhouette of a balding blond man walking through the front door. Long gray coat, always that same old backpack. Thom. There was something eerie in seeing him alive again, real and unreal. I felt my heart tighten, watching him cross the lobby and climb the marble stairs. It was hard to see his expression clearly, but I thought he didn’t look particularly stressed.

  On my shoulder, Alex’s hand tightened.

  March cleared his throat. “Can you show us his floor?”

  I squirmed away from Alex’s hand as I searched for the second floor’s security recordings. There were several files, one for each camera. I opened them all, creating a black-and-white mosaic on my screen. As you’d expect from cameras filming an empty hallway, there was nothing remarkable about that particular tape. Thom could be seen reaching the top of the stairs, strolling on the thick carpet, and entering his room—end of story.

  The three of us looked at each other, then at the screen. I sped up the video again, watching the hours tick by in each window’s lower right corner. People coming and going, room service, a couple fighting . . . no Thom, who appeared to be still in his room. March’s hand suddenly pressed mine.

  “Stop, please.”

  My heart jolted: he was right. At 2:17, Thom had come out of his room. His posture, the way his shoulders hunched as he fumbled with his room key—something was wrong. This had clearly marked the start of his descent into the pit. Before our eyes, Thom walked down the stairs and into the lobby. I loaded the lobby’s security recordings. He was leaving the hotel in a hurry, without his precious backpack. Behind the glass of the entrance door, a man in a black parka was waiting for him in the street.

  “Salzgeber.”

  I paused the video and turned to Alex. He was staring at the still with a dark expression, his forefinger rubbing his chin mechanically. “Keep playing it, please.”

  As soon as I pressed Enter, a visibly shaken Thom followed the Austrian mercenary outside the hotel. The last that could be seen of them were their backs as they climbed into a dark Mercedes.

  “They contacted him. Somewhere between six and two that night,” March concluded.

  “But we checked his phone calls, his e-mails, and nothing came up,” Alex countered.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “You know better than I do that it’s easy to reroute a phone call and mask its origin.”

  He nodded, brown eyes still locked on the screen. “Could you do the same for the street cameras? Tell us where they went?”

  “I’m not sure. I have no idea if they even store the files for that long, and we’re talking about hacking dozens of different cameras in order to re-create their path. I don’t think I’m qualified for this, Alex.”

  I saw the disappointment in his and March’s faces, and I kinda felt like a loser because I wasn’t the badass hacker they had imagined. I offered Alex a rueful smile. “You’re gonna have to call for help after all.”

  He patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’ll ask the NSA to lend me Colin again. Let’s just hope they cooperate quickly.”

  “How long will it take?” March asked.

  “Twenty-four hours max, if their boss really wants to test Erwin.”

  March’s eyes narrowed. “That ‘boss’ is the handler for the young hacker you’re talking about, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And he’s on bad terms with Mr. Erwin? What’s his name?”

  Alex shot a suspicious glance at me. “I’m afraid this is not something I can disclose, Mr. November.”

  March indulged in a huff of exasperation. “For God’s sake, stop these pathetic games. We’re obviously talking about Mr. Hendry.”

  “I can’t confirm—”

  “Save your breath, Mr. Morgan. I’ll call him. He knows me.”

  Alex and I blinked like owls while March got up from the bed and pulled out his phone. He seemed to look up a number, his fingers scrolling and tapping on the screen repeatedly. Several seconds passed, during which he waited for someone to pick up. They did.

  “Good morning, Mr. Hendry, I’m sorry to wake you up. I’m with Mr. Morgan, whom I’m certain you already know operates under the supervision of Mr. Erwin. I took the liberty to contact you because I believe you might be able to help us with an urgent matter.”

  I had no idea what the other guy was saying, but I gathered it had to be something along the lines of “Who are you and how the hell did you get this number?” When March spoke again, his voice exuded the icy cordiality I knew he reserved for clients. “Who am I? Well, I’m Mr. November, and I used to kill people for a living. And you are the man who shared a photomontage based on what I understand to be a popular children’s movie. A photomontage describing me as the Tomato Guy.”

  I could hear the daggers in each syllable as March gritted out the nickname Hendry had once given him. If phone calls could kill, that guy would have been dead, and I think he knew it. The exchange lasted for another minute, during which I heard March tell Hendry that, indeed, each life was a sail on a sea of regrets, before inquiring about the well-being of his grandma—who was apparently retired in Miami and had a Chihuahua named Edgar. Once he was satisfied that, on the other end of the line, his victim was pissing himself in terror, he voiced our demand regarding the surveillance camera recordings.

  In the end, I think March didn’t care if the NSA could actually fulfill his request. This was about a man to
whom life had offered an opportunity for revenge. And it was about a Chihuahua too.

  Of course, I cannot condone those thinly veiled threats to shoot Hendry’s grandma and her dog, but I have to admit they did the job. Less than twenty minutes later, the guy sent us a nifty 3D map designed from the partial logs of thousands of various unsecured cameras and security devices in the area—gotta praise how the NSA really is everywhere.

  We gathered around my laptop again to examine the map. According to this data, the Mercedes had taken Thom for a seventy-minute trip past Lake Zürich and its smaller sibling, the Walensee, and through the border to Liechtenstein. The vehicle had reached its microscopic capital, Vaduz. It had then left the well-lit and camera-monitored streets to drive north toward the Alpspitz—a 6,300-foot peak overlooking the city. The glowing blue line depicting Thom’s trip stopped there, because once on the mountain road, there had no longer been any external device capable of recording the vehicle’s presence.

  Thom had been brought back to the Eden au Lac around six thirty, something confirmed by the hotel’s own surveillance recordings.

  “So, Vaduz it is,” Alex said, his eyes set on the interrupted line on the screen.

  “A charming city,” March remarked.

  I closed my laptop. “What’s next?”

  Alex looked past me and at March. “I suggest we split. Island and I will go to EMT Switzerland to question Professor Premfield. I gather he knew Roth well. Meanwhile, Mr. November, you could put your knowledge of Liechtenstein to good use and see if you can find where they took him after the car left Vaduz.”

  The plan made sense—and there was a good-cop smile to help the medicine go down—but it was obvious in the way his shoulders stiffened that, for March, the very notion of receiving an order from Alex was akin to eating an apple Skittle. Obscene.

  “I’ll make sure to let you know if your opinion is needed, Mr. Morgan,” he retorted coolly. I saw the way his fingers were drumming on his thigh, though. Alex’s plan was the best one and he knew it.