Local time – 5:05am, Sunday 17th June, 2011.
Prague, Czechoslovakia.
Daniel stood under the shower and washed away his day. He found himself more able to relax in this steamy tiled place than anywhere else, including bed. When he was in the middle of a mission, there was no time to relax. He was lucky he hardly needed any sleep; an hour here and there got him through. This particular project was giving him an intense insomnia. Not because it was incomplete, not because it was getting slightly out of hand and not because it was increasing in importance every time his boss phoned for another rant. No, this project was just plain frustrating. The girl was so close to his grasp, but she was somehow eluding his outstretched hands.
His impatient decision to leave the hotel and try intercepting her on the way from the airport hadn’t paid off. Talk about bad fucking luck. He would never admit that to his boss of course. When he got back to her hotel, her luggage was gone. So there was no point hanging around. The nauseatingly cheerful woman at the front desk was no help, and when her moron of a son turned up, with a guilty look on his face, he was even less use. Pity.
The condescending little cow was obviously determined to rub salt into the wound. Instead of doing the smart thing and staying hidden, she turned up on a fucking conspiracy video, acting like she’s solved the riddle of the universe. It didn’t take them long to work out where she procured the recording in the castle. Some people do fucking stupid things for money.
He turned the taps off and waited for the steam to subside. When he opened the glass shower screen, he heard a sound he had been hoping to avoid for the next few hours, in the interests of trying to get a couple of hours’ sleep. His frigging phone was ringing again. It was his boss. Again.
‘Daniel, where the hell have you been?’
‘In the shower’
‘For 10 minutes?’
‘Apparently.’
‘I need you back in the field straight away. Page’s team have a lead on who distributed the video. He’s left trace code behind on the server that has been identified as belonging to an insider at Google. His name’s Ryan Kitchener. We’ve found his face at Prague airport yesterday, he flew in on a fake passport from Estonia.’
‘So he’s been visiting the bases?’
‘Yes. He’s with North. There’s absolutely no doubt about that.’
‘And where is he now?’
‘That’s what you need to work out. Get on with it!’
‘Yes sir.’ Daniel often pictured his boss slamming down his phone, which was always far more convincing with a desk phone. He rubbed his temple while he considered his next move. Ryan Kitchener and Alex North. They’ve got their amateur theatrics out onto the Google main frame email server. They’ve no doubt realised it’s been struck down with the virus news. What then? Would they panic and flee Prague? Or lie low until it’s safe to go out on the street? There wasn’t much point guessing, when he had technology available that could find the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Sitting on his bed, with a towel wrapped around his waist, he phoned the office and waited while one of the techs tracked down phone numbers and IP addresses linked to Ryan Kitchener, ex-employee at Google. Within minutes, he had a list of over twenty numbers. He threw on some clothes and started methodically typing the numbers into his tracking software. Unsurprisingly most of them were disused or dynamic IPs. Useless. But eventually, one golden little nugget appeared. A static IP address brought up a red dot on the map of Prague. It was linked to an iPad SIM card, bought and registered in California. And according to the map, the last time this IP address was connected to the internet, it was 15 kilometres from Prague airport. This was 25 minutes ago. The little red dot was fleeing Prague and once again Daniel would have to race to the airport to catch it.