"How's it going?" Luke asked as he brought Jessica a plate from downstairs. The noise from Cap's bar and Grill was a comfortable background noise, and both of them found it soothing, a reminder that normal life did, in fact, exist, and that a good number of people were enjoying said life only a few feet below Luke and Jessica where they both now sat in Luke's kitchen. The sky was dark outside the nearby window, the lights from the front of the bar pointing down to illuminate the sidewalk.

"Running through social media profiles of everyone on this fucking list," Jess replied, remembering finally to look up and acknowledge the presence of her boyfriend, and the dinner he ad brought her, "thanks."

"Find anything interesting?"

"Stuff you would expect. Her secretary Linda tweeting out "Catch a glimpse of Annelie in Berlin next weekend when she blah, blah, blah. Her dialogue coach Sofia letting her mother know that they will be in Porto on the 25th and she could meet Annelie if she wanted."

"But nothing like she be staying at The Marcel in room 123?"

"Nope. After the second letter showed up Annelie's people stopped releasing public information about where and when she was traveling, but stuff like Sofia's was still showing up in social media feeds."

"Did the hotels tweet anything about her visit?"

"Haven't gotten that far yet," Jessica answered before a two-hundred watt light bulb went on in her mind.

"Mariner Labs," she said as she looked at Luke.

"What?"

"Mariner Fucking Labs," she repeated, "Mariner Labs that created 100,000 fake social media accounts and used them and their own home grown spyware to scrape 3 million pieces of information with their so-called untraceable software which they sold to whoever the fuck could afford it."

"Oh, that Mariner Labs."

"Yeah, that Mariner Labs."

"I guess, since we are talking about this, their software was not all that untraceable."

"Not so much. Apparently when you pay your coders shit they produce shit, and scraping 3 million pieces of information with shit query code eventually gets you caught."

"Now I remember. They're under Federal indictment. Their CEO's hiding out somewhere with no extradition."

"Now you catching on."

"And you think someone scraped info that told them where Annelie was staying?"

"No I think they scrapped a shitload of information and then sold it to someone who used it to figure out which hotel servers to hack, and then that told them which room she was staying in."

"Before she knew herself."

"Yup. The cities she was visiting might have been public knowledge, but not the hotels. But it's not like she was going to be checking into a Motel 6, it would be one of the swankiest hotels. So you start at the top and work down until you find some internal chatter like Annelie Bodin will be checking in on the 19th and everything has to be perfect, blah, blah, blah. Two hours before check in you grab the door code, make a card, put your maid's outfit on and leave your twisted letter for her to find."

"Can you prove any of that? Do you need to?"

"No. Neither. I'm not the fucking district attorney. I don't need to prove shit. I just need to find out how they did it."

"So what are you going to do now?"

"I'm going to pick a city where she got a letter and start hacking servers."

Jessica would admit to anyone who was willing to listen that she was a script kiddie when it came to hacking, and that it was really Malcolm that was the brains of the operation for anything more complicated than a simple Google search. It was because of him that Jess had the tools she needed already sitting in a file on her laptop, and all she needed to do was type in a URL and click go.

"Most companies still don't do shit to protect their internal servers," Malcolm said when he was transferring the tools over and teaching Jessica how to use them, "most of them still use the default login info for their admin accounts on their routers and firewalls. It's fucking criminal."

"Which is good for us, right?"

"In this case, yes. And it's why I always pay with cash."

Jessica had looked at her very attractive friend as he sat at her desk.

"When was the last time a woman let you pay for anything, let alone with cash?"

"I go places by myself," Malcolm replied defensively.

"When?"

It took him a few seconds to reply.

"I went to the laundromat by myself."

"Get the fuck away from my desk."

Jessica, Luke and Malcolm had been through some serious shit in the past, but they had come through it all more or less in one collective piece; which was more than she could say for at least one thing, one person, that they had in common, the one person who had brought the three of them together, not knowing that he was forging the weapon that would ultimately be his downfall.

Fuck you, Kilgrave, Jessica thought as she forced her mind to focus on the task at hand, a task that she was not looking forward to. To be safe she was choosing the top five hotels for each city, which meant over twenty hotels to look through. And while Malcolm's tool made access to each hotel's private network simple, it was what Jessica found once she gained access to the first hotel in the first city that made her rest her head in her hands.

"Of course it's all in German," she said to herself, "why the fuck wouldn't it be."

This is going to take all fucking night.

"It's the same stack buffer overflow exploit that my tool uses," Malcolm said, "It leaves the same footprint as my tool would if I didn't scrub the log entries."

"And you're saying that they didn't scrub the log entries?"

"No, they didn't," he said as he pointed to the three tcsh shell terminals that were open on Jess's laptop, "they used it to get access to these three hotels, just like you did. They got into whatever private channel the hotel was using and looked for chatter about Annelie, and they found it just like you did in the Hotel de Rome private Slack channel."

Jessica had had the forethought to set up an Excel worksheet to store info for each hotel, and it was on the row dedicated to the Hotel de Rome in Berlin that she had added the information she was looking at now.

"Her publicist announces to the world on February 28th that Annelie will be in Berlin on March 15th. Someone starts hacking hotels in Berlin on March 2nd. They come back every day until March 4th when the hit pay dirt with the Hotel De Rome. Morning of the 15th they grab the room info from the reservation system."

"They're good, but a bit sloppy," Malcolm said, "If they had cleaned up after themselves we would never know they had been there."

"Annelie will be happy that it wasn't someone close to her doing something shitty."

"Yes, but that would have been simpler. You saw for yourself how easy it was to get access to her room info, and her room, hours before even she had access."

"Once they knew where to look. I can't believe Mariner Lab's product comes cheap, not the tool, not the info."

"I doubt it. Some lone asshole sitting in his kitchen couldn't afford it, though if he got it some other way, and he had the tools and the talent, he could do exactly what you did last night."

"So maybe these assholes relied on public info for the first two, but then had to resort to Mariner, or someone like them, to zero in on where Annelie was staying."

Jessica was running on fumes, but a thought occurred to her.

"How good a job do you think Mariner Labs did securing their own servers?"

The smile formed slowly on Malcolm's face.

"Only one way to find out."

"Run it by me again," Trish said as she looked at the hand written notes she had just made.

"The first two letters alert Annelie's camp that someone is stalking her," Jessica recounts, "She tells her publicist, and everyone who works for her, to shut the fuck up about where she is traveling and when. That seems to work for a short time, but it's only because it took those assholes that long to realize the jig was up. Letter number three shows up eight days after someone buys Mariner Lab's illegally scraped database of information."

"And that database had private social media messages that pointed them in the right direction."

"Yup. That gets them the city Annelie's visiting and the date she'll be there. Then they're back to the usual hacking hotel server bullshit," Jess said.

Trish looked at her notes. "Until they stop, either because they are ready to move on to kidnapping, or because their Mariner database is out of date, and they don't want to pay for more data."

"Or because the database didn't have the info they needed because Annelie's people finally grew a brain and stopped sharing information, even privately."

"But they found her in New York," Trish said as she remembered stepping barefoot out of the limo at the airport and the violence that followed.

"Found her and tried to grab her, and killed four people in cold blood in the process."

"So they're done with letter writing and have moved on to the next part of their plan, and don't give a shit about killing innocent people."

Jessica nodded her head, even though Trish could not see it. "And hired sociopaths from Russian prisons, and Russian mobsters from Brighton Beach."

Both women were quiet for a moment as Trish scribbled on her yellow legal pad. Annelie was still in the cavernous bathroom getting ready to go to work. Laurel was technically on duty, Sara was asleep in the other bedroom, breakfast dishes littered the dining room table and they would not allow anyone to enter their rooms to remove them; they would stack them in the hallway themselves later. Trish had cleared a space in front of her where she sat at the table, a space that now held her yellow pad, her cooling coffee in it's china cup, and her cell phone that lay flat on the table as Jess's voice played through the Jabra earbuds that Trish was wearing.

It was Trish that spoke first. "Any chance that you can identify who it was that bought the database right before the third letter?"

"Malcolm is going to get into it," Jess said as she picked up the limp piece of toast in front of her and took a bite, "if he can't find out then nobody can."

"Thank him for me," Trish said simply.

"No need for that. We'll bill you for his time. And mine."

"I'm going to have to sell a fucking kidney to pay for all of this," Trish said as she thought about Dakota North, and the briefcase that held the information that had started Jessica down this road.

Jessica smiled and took a sip of her own coffee before speaking. "Let's find these assholes, and sell their kidneys instead."

"Deal."