“Los Dos Molinos, but they don’t do LunchRun. They don’t have any delivery.”
Perfect. “It seems like a crime to come to Phoenix and not have a really good burrito. I am craving a really good burrito.”
“Craving? You pregnant?” she snarked.
“I know you’re ahead with the debugging. It’s easy to make these burner credit cards. Would you be so good as to run and pick up some burritos whilst I bash out this code?”
Colleen glanced at the hotel room window that overlooked a golf course, lush green fairway islands in riverbeds of rocky desert clay. “I’ve been cooped up lately, first in my apartment and now here. Just driving around when we broke into GameShack made me unreasonably happy.”
“I’m always glad to make you unreasonably happy, and I would be unreasonably happy with a burrito. I’m placing the order right now online.” He’d already found the website and filled in their orders. “What kind do you want?”
Colleen chuckled and told him red sauce and chicken, which was the first time he’d seen her smile even a little bit since Anjali had been taken.
“I’ll get beef with the green sauce.”
“Oh, dude. Green? You might want to check that.”
“I like green sauce. I know what I’m doing.”
She smiled at him again. “Yeah, you’re probably right. If it’ll make you type faster, I will get you a burrito. And it’s been right about twelve hours since we uploaded Anonymity Plus into the GameShack servers. It should have propagated through the internet by now, right?”
“Yep, it should be operational by now,” he confirmed.
“So I’m just a ghost now, flitting in and out, and no surveillance cameras can see me.”
That made Tristan smile. “Yes, even if those Butorin assholes or anybody else breaks into a surveillance system and tries to use facial recognition software to find you, you should be safe.”
Colleen took her phone and purse and walked out the door, leaving Tristan alone in the hotel room.
Just as the door clicked, Tristan’s phone rang.
Jesus, that was close.
An unidentified number showed on the screen. “Hello?”
“This is Magnus Jensen of Rogue Security. A Mary Varvara Bell has designated this phone number as a contact point. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”
The man’s accent was European of some sort. Not German or French. Swiss or Dutch, maybe? Tristan had never been as good at placing accents as some of the other guys at Le Rosey. “This is Tristan King.”
The man’s already deep voice dropped. “Excellent. The initial contact phone number is correct. That’s an auspicious way to start the operation. I hear that we have a hostage extraction. I need every bit of information possible about the targets, the bad guys, and the location.”
Tristan told Magnus Jensen everything he could—names, dates, the address, the room number—and answered questions as they arose.
Yes, the primary attack and current location was the Presidential Suite at The Boulders. Because Tristan had stayed there the previous week whilst he was doing GameShack reconnaissance, he could confirm that there was an elevator and enclosed hallway leading to the main door. The open balcony was directly below the roofline on the west side that overlooked the Valley because the sunsets had been like an orange laser show blasting through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows.
Yes, there were two hostages, and he had names and descriptions.
Yes, there had been a proof of life just an hour before, and he texted the photo of Jian and Anjali to Magnus Jensen.
Tristan told him, “And I have real-time audio and video surveillance inside the location.”
Magnus Jensen asked, “Wait, you have what?”
Tristan described how he’d hacked Jian’s phone to transmit audio and visual signals.
Magnus chuckled. “That’s an interesting piece of software. A friend of mine might like to take a look at that. I could knock a percentage off our fee.”
“I’m not paying the bill for this operation,” Tristan told him, except with his blood and soul.
“Then we could discuss licensing the intellectual property from you, but that’s a conversation for another day. Is there any way I can get access to the live feed?”
“Unfortunately not, but I would like to be a part of the operation. I can bring my phone with me.”
“We don’t work with amateurs.”
“I’ll stay back and wait until the location is secured, but I want to make sure I see Jian and Anjali get out safely.”
Magnus Jensen sighed. “All right, but you’re not carrying a firearm. The best militaries in the world have trained our operators. Most of them are US or other special forces. We are not walking into a dangerous operation with armed amateurs.”
“Understood. When is the operation planned for?”
“We’ll study the situation for the rest of the day while our operators arrive in the Phoenix area. I anticipate a call time of midnight, local time, and a go-time of oh-two-hundred hours. I will text the locations for each. We try to keep communications to a minimum.”
“Midnight. Okay. I’ll wait for your text and be there.”
They had just hung up as Colleen bounced back into the room, holding two large brown paper bags. “Mission accomplished!”
He looked up at her and forced a big grin on his face. “Excellent. I’m famished.”
And that was how Tristan ended up choking down a nuclear-hot burrito smothered in green sauce that could only be described in mega-units of hellfire with tears streaming down his face whilst smiling and giving Colleen the thumbs-up. “It’s delicious.”
She smiled back at him. “Uh-huh. Yeah. The menu says that the green is hotter than the red.”
Yeah, she’d tried to warn him, but he’d been so preoccupied with getting her out of the room that he hadn’t listened. Served him right.
Now he just needed to figure out how to sneak out of the hotel at midnight without her.
33
Lying
Tristan
Tristan kept her appraised of his progress, telling her when he was uploading packets of code to the cloud folder he’d set up for the transfer. He’d sent the folder’s link to Sergey, too, and he watched Sergey download the files as he posted them.
And Sergey did download them. Every time Tristan uploaded a micro-slice of the program into the folder, Sergey was right on top of it, downloading the computer code right away.
The speed with which Sergey leaped on each file upload and greedily downloaded it suggested desperation. Huh. Someone must be looking over Sergey’s shoulder and demanding that he produce the Anonymity program.
It didn’t make Tristan feel any more sympathetic toward the asshole who’d taken Jian and Anjali hostage, but it was a piece of intelligence that might come in handy in the future.
Later, as the day turned into evening, Tristan turned to Colleen. “I’m uploading another section for you to debug. Three down, fifty-two to go.”
Colleen had paused from working on his recent material and was watching the spyware on his phone. “Anjali keeps telling them that she has class and they have to let her go. This is killing me.”