In the morning, Ricky sent a message to the group.
Our boy is in the sky lounge having breakfast. He’s got his slate and phone with him.
I caught the elevator to the roof. Stepping out, the hostess greeted me with a smile and a stream of rapid-fire German. I held up my card for her to scan, and she showed me inside.
A bevy of delicious scents filled my nose. The tables offered a smorgasbord of hot and cold dishes, representing the finest breakfast cuisines from around the world. There were cold cuts and sandwiches, scrambled eggs and bacon, breads and cereals, soups and pastries. As I inspected the offerings, I scanned the room.
Brunner was seated alone at a table, slate and phone on the table. Holograms competed with a cup of coffee and a bowl of muesli for his attention. For now the food was winning.
I stepped outside the lounge. It was a crisp, cool morning, a temporary respite from the summer heat. From here, I could look down on the Tiergarten district. Cars and people flowed down the streets into and through the Garden of Beasts, and I was reminded of a heart pumping great gushes of blood with every beat.
I found a table behind Brunner, with only the window separating us. He munched away at his muesli, completely oblivious. Maybe he wasn’t such a pro after all. I placed my back to the sky and waited. Pete arrived a few minutes later.
“Morning,” he said. “Great view, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“I could get used to living like this. Great weather, great food, great women. What else could a man ask for?”
“Here we go again.”
“Hey, come on. Relax a little. Or did staying indoors all this time make you stir-crazy?”
“I know you are.”
He guffawed. “A man ain’t meant to live indoors all the time. It’s not natural.”
I wondered how he could be so bright and perky in the morning. Or all the time for that matter. After so many years of knowing him, I still hadn’t solved the mystery.
“Frank’s late,” I said.
“Hey, he’s a civilian. ‘Sides, I made sure to give him a wakeup call.”
“Our man’s having a light breakfast. How long is he going to stay?”
“Yeah? People don’t come to buffets just for a bowl of rabbit food. We have time.”
Right on cue, Frank entered the lounge. Beside him was another hacker, Gabriel. The hackers had cleaned up nicely. In pressed shirts and pants they could pass for businessmen. They had also donned makeup, adding moles to their faces and making them look ten years older than they were. If Brunner looked up, he wouldn’t recognize them. Probably.
I waved them over, and the four of us went through an elaborate pantomime of greetings and handshakes for the benefit of casual observers. As the hackers laid out their hardware, I grabbed breakfast, returning with coffee and a plate of eggs and bacon.
Pete looked scornfully at the food. “That’s all?”
“We don’t have room for much else.”
The hackers’ fifteen-inch laptops took up most of the real estate. We had to drag over a fresh table. Pete shuttled back and forth from the buffet, carrying cups of coffee and plates stacked with sausages, cheeses, bread rolls and spreads.
“Help yourselves to the food,” Pete said, gesturing at the hackers. “Don’t want to distract you.”
“Danke,” Frank muttered under his breath.
The hackers went to work. Their computers impersonated the local router, redirecting all wireless traffic through the computers. They fired up their computers and began analyzing traffic, attempting to identify Brunner’s IP.
The hackers focused intently on their work, occasionally whispering to each other in shorthand German. This was their domain, and Pete and I were just visitors. We made small talk to maintain appearances, keeping an eye out for unwanted guests.
“We’re in,” Frank announced.
“Cool,” Pete said. “What next?”
“We’re going to image his computer on ours,” Frank said. “We can see everything on his computer and download its contents here.”
At that point, Brunner turned off his slate and got up.
“He’s leaving,” Pete said. “What now?”
“Don’t worry. In thirty seconds, his computer will start up silently and continue the download. For now, we wait.”
The hackers set their slates aside and tucked in. Pete had left all of two plates for them. Now and then the hackers checked their computers and keyed in a few commands.
A waiter cleared the plates, and we went back to work.
“Now… this is weird,” Gabriel said.
“What is it?”
“His phone is completely clean. No secure messaging apps. Or any kind of productivity apps. Just a fitness tracker and an ebook reader.”
“Any sign of material related to Onyx?”
“Give me a second…” he typed a string of commands, and frowned. “No. He only has bills, mails to his friends and family… He’s got Interpol docs and mails in there, but nothing to do with Onyx. I think.”
“Frank?”
“We’re not finished downloading yet.”
For the next ten minutes, he sipped at his coffee, frowned at the hologram, punched in more commands and continued frowning.
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, ‘nothing’?” I asked.
“There’s nothing in there that has anything to do with Onyx. No references, no keywords, no names, nothing.”
“Maybe it’s just buried somewhere in there,” Pete suggested.
Frank licked his lips. “I could upload everything we’ve found to our cloud and get everyone on our team to examine the documents manually. But… I think our friend has a third device. One he uses exclusively to communicate with Onyx.”
“Why do you think so?” I asked.
“If he were a member of a well-funded illegal conspiracy, he would want to use a separate device. If he believes he’s being investigated, he can brick his computer and dispose of it without compromising his identity. He won’t have to explain why he destroyed official computer equipment.”
“You could have told us earlier.”
He scratched his head. “Sorry. It just came to mind.”
I shook my head. “We did what we could here. Keep searching his devices. If you can’t find anything about Onyx, look up Hexenhammer and Opal. We need to keep track of their movements.”
“Okay. What are you going to do?” Frank asked.
“Plan B.”
***
After breakfast, Brunner stepped out of the hotel and went exploring the city. He stopped by cafes, parks and restaurants, working on his slate in timed bursts. We followed him everywhere he went, the hackers right beside us. But it was clear that he was still carrying the slate from breakfast. The hackers probed deeper and found a digital ocean of memos, manuals, requests for information, status updates and trashy ebooks, but no smoking gun that pointed at Onyx.
At five in the evening, he returned to the hotel. I stationed myself in my room, prepared my B&E kit and donned light disguise. At a quarter past five, Bob called me.
“Brunner is headed to the gym. Sports clothes and phone. No slate. You wanna penetrate his room, now’s the time.”
“Tell me when he’s at the gym,” I replied.
The last thing I needed was for him to realize he’d forgotten something and return to the room with me still inside. I took the lift down to the lobby, where I wandered around the gift shop. As I examined a box of premium chocolates, Bob called again.
“He’s in the gym and hitting the weights. Longsword and I have eyes on. You’re clear.”
“Roger.”
“He’s doing HIIT exercises with kettlebells,” Eve cut in. “You won’t have long.”
High-intensity interval training. Short periods of anaerobic exercise and shorter periods of recovery. I only had a half hour. Maybe less.
The easy way would be to unfurl the charagma and
warp into his room. But Bob, Ricky and the security guards were watching. I took the elevator to the eighth floor.
At room 829, I set the box on the floor and retied my shoelaces. Brunner had set out the Do Not Disturb sign. Just as Ricky had described, there was a single hair taped across the door at ankle height. If it were broken, Brunner would know I had been inside.
I delicately peeled the tape off halfway, creating just enough room to open the door without disturbing the hair.
And paused.
Here was one telltale. But why not more? Why not a guardian daimon, too?
I stuck my hand inside my pocket, as though to retrieve my wallet, and unfurled my charagma. I opened my voidsight, tuned up the sensitivity, and looked.
The world dissolved into mass, density and gravity. The room was clear. No tripwires, photocells or other booby traps. But at the ceiling, just beyond the range of visible sight, was a pocket dimension. It looked like a large swirling sphere, feeding directly into the Void. A creature floated inside the pocket dimension. A floating eyeball with wings.
A hinni of the watcher phenotype.
The eye emitted a huge white cone, wider and brighter than a human’s. It could see and log everything within this cone, and its sight would not be obscured by mere matter.
It looked at me. I looked back.
You never saw me. Go to sleep. Do not alert anyone.
I compressed my thoughts in a diamond and launched it at the jinni. The watcher shuddered. Its single eyelid drooped shut. It folded up its wings, covering itself. Its light cone winked out.
I patted my shirt pocket and discovered the master key inside. Rolling up the charagma, I unlocked the door, entered the room and engaged the door chain.
For the next five minutes I studied the room. There were many ways to leave a telltale: roll up a corner of a blanket, lodge a paperclip in a door hinge, scatter fine powder on the floor, and that was before going into magical means. Finding none, I took photos of the interior on my buds. I had to leave the room exactly as I had found it.
Brunner kept his room neat and tidy. That made things easier. He had left his slate on the dressed, plugged into a wall outlet. A suitcase sat on the floor next to the bed. His clothes were inside the wardrobe. So was the room safe.
And in my voidsight, I saw several small objects resting on a larger, flat rectangle inside the safe.
While waiting for Brunner to leave his room, I’d familiarized myself with my room safe. This one was no different. It had a digital keypad, with a user-defined password between four to eight digits long. I thought of inspecting the keypad in aethersight, peering back through time to divine the combination, but I didn’t know how the jinni would react. Badly, I imagined.
Instead, I pulled out my B&E kit, opened a small bottle of talcum powder, and dusted down the keys. Fingerprints appeared on 1, 2, 5, 7, 9 and 0.
The numbers fit his birthday. I punched in the digits in Pantopian style, day-month-year. The reader displayed an error message. I tried the Hesperian fashion, month-day-year. Same result. One more wrong entry and the safe would lock itself down for at least fifteen minutes.
I felt around the keypad. It was a large block of polymer raised above the metal door of the safe. On the underside, I found a raised cap. I unscrewed it, revealing a tubular pin tumbler lock. This was the override system.
I didn’t have the key, but I did have an aethertool.
I had already scrubbed the sigils off this one. I touched my mind to the aetherium. The wellspring of its infinite potential flooded my inner eye with swirling streams of light. Sifting among them, I picked one out of countless others.
The aetherium flowed out of the handle, forming a thin shaft. The shaft flared outwards, terminating in a hollow cylinder with an internal protrusion.
“The target is taking a brisk walk on a treadmill,” Eve reported. “Looks like he’s cooling down.”
I grunted and carried on. Touching the makeshift key to the keyhole, I flashed the aetherium into a soft clay-like substance and gently inserted the key. The aetherium molded itself to the keyhole, filling the internal grooves and pressing up against the pins. A few pieces broke off, and I had to will them to merge with the main body.
I kept most of my attention on the aetherium, filling the tiny gaps separating the key from the pins, working entirely by feel. With the rest of my conscious mind, I said, “Eve, could you distract him? I need more time.”
“Roger.”
A few moments later, Eve spoke.
“Hi there. I’m Jane. What’s your name? Patrick? Ah. Where are you from? Are you… Oh.”
A moment of silence.
“He blew me off,” Eve said in disbelief. “Now he’s leaving.”
I shook my head. There were few men in the world who could resist a sweaty young woman in spandex. Brandt was apparently one of them.
Where’s he going?” I asked.
“Can’t see from here. Bull?”
“Stand by,” Ricky said.
Eve couldn’t just hop off the treadmill. That would look suspicious. As I waited for Ricky, I kept working the tumblers, patiently overcoming them one by one.
There was no more give. I flashed the key into metal and turned clockwise.
Click.
“He’s going to the spa,” Ricky said. “Looks like he’s going to get a massage. You’ve got at least ten minutes—thirty if you’re lucky.”
“Okay,” I replied, and opened the door.
There was an eleven-inch slate inside the safe. Wallets, passports and pouches rested on and around the slate.
I took a photo of the interior, picked up the slate, and gingerly placed it on the dresser. I fished out a small data stick from my pocket and inserted into the slate. A small LED at the tip of the stick turned red. The data extractor would defeat his firewalls, download everything on the computer and upload a malware suite. Eventually.
While I waited, I examined his passports. He held an Osterian passport and an Interpol Travel Document in his real name. So far so good. But he had three more passports. A Ungrian one in the name of Belzary Pataki, a Rhosian one made out to Pavel Gennadyevich Bondarev, and a Hesperian passport named Patrick Brown.
I snapped photos of them all and then turned to his wallets. The first one was a traveler’s wallet. Cash, credit cards, an Interpol identification card and a Pantopian driver’s license. I ignored the money and took photos of the cards.
The second wallet, more akin to a man-purse, held credit cards, licenses and identity documents that matched his other names. It also held a mix of rubles, dollars and pans.
He had four small pouches, each with nametags. In each pouch, save for the one with his real name, I found prosthetic eyes and fingercaps. Pete had a similar kit. Shame I didn’t have the right equipment to capture his fake biometrics.
Brunner, or whoever the hell he was, was a player. He would be ready to go anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice. So long as he stayed away from countries with mandatory DNA testing, he would be safe.
“Brunner is leaving the spa. Are you done yet?” Ricky said.
I checked the slate. The LED was glowing yellow.
If this were a regular job, I’d abort immediately. But Brunner was leaving tomorrow, and we might not have another shot at his slate.
“I’m packing up. Stand by.”
“Hurry up,” he said.
I looked around the room. Nothing to clean up. The light was still yellow.
“He’s at the lift lobby,” Eve declared. “Get out of there.”
I returned his stuff to the safe, rearranging everything in place. The LED was still yellow.
“Come on. Come on,” I muttered, wiping off the keypad.
“He’s in the lift. You have to leave now.”
The light turned green.
I eased out the extractor and shut the safe door. The lock re-engaged automatically—the override key would not reset the passcode. Leaving the room, I knelt and car
efully reapplied the telltale. I stood, turned my attention to the jinni.
Wake up. Resume your watch. Nobody came to the room. You will report an all clear. I was never here.
The daimon shuddered. As it cracked open its eye, I left the room and walked away.
Brunner appeared around the corridor. In between me and the elevators.
I felt him staring at me, trying to recognize me from somewhere. My heart pounded. I continued walking normally, folding up the charagma.
I stepped around him.
He ignored me.
I took the elevator to my floor.
“I have his data,” I reported. “Mission complete.”
3. Strategy of Tension
Compromising the devices was the easy part.
The hackers aboard Kalypso went overtime, downloading every last byte from Brunner’s phone and slates. They mirrored the devices on their own hardware; now, every time Brunner received a new email, created a new document, called someone or installed a new program, the hackers would know about it.
In the morning, after Brunner checked out, so did we. Returning to the airship, we helped the hackers pore through the deluge of data. The hackers narrowed down the scope by using keyword searches to identify interesting documents, but we had to go through the documents by eye.
In the lounge, the hackers combed through the information downloaded from Brunner’s phone and decoy slate. Retreating to the war room, the Nemesis team focused on the information recovered from the slate I had found in his room. What we got was… underwhelming.
“There’s nothing here,” Eve muttered. “It’s completely clean.”
Hyperbole, but not by much.
I’d expected paper trails pointing to past operations, address books filled with contact details, records of appointments, money transfers, specialist apps, intelligence, something that pointed at a black operation.
What we got was a series of stored emails.
“It’s something, at least,” I said.
Brunner exchanged emails with someone else several times a day. No real names, just pseudonyms composed of seemingly random letters followed by numbers, but the tone of voice indicated that his contact was clearly his superior. Maybe even his handler.
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