I owe dear readers an infinite apology for disappearing, and a great deal of gratitude for the continued comments, follows, and favourites. I am, for all practical purposes, done with fanfic writing, but I cannot leave this one incomplete. Not only does it keep nibbling at my brain, but seeing that people are still tracking it is a powerful and persistent reminder. I cannot promise thrills and exciting plot twists for the remaining chapters – this one is a bit of a bore but I had to stick it in to pull the plot out of a ridiculously absurd technical conundrum – but I *can* promise that I won't rest easy until the story status says "complete" ;)
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"You've seen it, boys. The good, the bad, and the ugly."
Her companions' glum nods confirm that they share her thoughts. The ugly predominates.
It is a quarter past nine, and she has just returned from her meeting at Suntec to their Swissotel suite HQ and is shedding her silks and baubles and unravelling the complicated hairdo until she is down to a crop top and long fitted underskirt and wearing her usual ponytail.
She showed up early on the off-chance that the reception guards would let her through so she could wait for Brian at, or rather outside, his office – wait meaning, of course, doing a maximum of reconnaissance in the time available and giving the boys back at the Swissotel a chance to take a good look at the surroundings with the help of the minicam embedded in her necklace. Bruce was going to hack into the building CCTV network, which includes cameras in the lobby, the elevators, and some floors, wait for her to walk into the 43rd floor restroom, and freeze the feed from any cameras on that floor until Brian got into the building, at which point she would be seen re-emerging. This would give her free run of the corridor in between, while Bruce and Theo browsed the other CCTV feeds for anything useful, though they suspected that the most useful cameras, the ones inside Brian's office, were not connected to the network, and her minicam would be their only visual source from there. Her early arrival turned out to be pointless; the guards were quiet, polite, and unyielding. But the greater disappointments were still to come.
Regardless of the outcome of her meeting, they hoped to get another look around in Brian's office later in the day. There is no chance the guards would let her back in after hours under her current visitor identity, and it is too dangerous for her to risk blowing her cover by returning in a different persona; so the plan was to stage a fictitious malfunction in one of the elevator engines housed on the roof above the top floor, easily faked by shutting it down via Bruce's systems hack, as soon as Brian left, and send in Bruce – Theo has ruled himself out due to his foray into vandalism – as a repairman with a fake ID from the service company they found in the building records, carrying a steel toolbox with the EMP generator, an array of picklocks, and assorted minicams and bugs. Once upstairs and on his own – if any of the guards went up with him he hoped to dispatch them by saying it would take a while after surveying the "damage" – Bruce would shut off power to all elevators to give himself an extra modicum of privacy and take advantage of frozen camera feeds to sneak one floor down and break into Brian's office. He is not as flawlessly accomplished at unlawful entry as she is, but given enough time he could do it. Before stepping inside, he would set off the EMP to cover his tracks, just powerful enough to wipe the data on any autonomous surveillance devices Brian may have installed. The resulting local power outage might look suspicious but could be blamed on the earlier "malfunction" for the guards' benefit, and this way Bruce would have at least five minutes to look for anything worth stealing or copying, plant his own spy toys around the office, lock the door, and sprint back up to the engine room before the guards could walk up the emergency stairs to investigate the new accident.
By the time the meeting started, she knew that the plan would never work. Brian trotted into the lobby at five to eight, looking like he had arrived for a test he was not ready for, and once they were up on the 43rd floor, her heart sank. Not only did the door to Brian's office have a building surveillance cam trained on it, but stuck just above the door was a big digital clock. So much for the frozen feed trick. And even if the guards do not immediately notice the unchanging figures, with the timing of the "repairs" likely being pushed into late afternoon, the difference in the ambient light between the 43rd floor feed and the other floors at a time near the fast-forward tropical dusk will probably make them notice that something is off. Had Bruce hacked into the building systems yesterday, he would have seen the clock and could have recorded footage from yesterday afternoon so they could wait for the time to coincide, but between studying the blueprints, sneaking the diamonds into her room, getting ready for dinner with Kitty, and planning their night date, she suspects he figured it could wait until today – or else he would have mentioned it last night. Waiting until tomorrow won't work either: the building is completely shut down on Sundays and anyone, even a repairman, trying to get in will be subject to extra vetting and scrutiny. Bruce could, of course, deploy the EMP and take out the local circuits, clock and all, before breaking in, but that is sure to bring the guards upstairs way sooner than he can break into the office. The locks she saw Brian open are not exactly Fort Knox, but are nonetheless a good quarter of an hour's work for her if she wanted to leave no trace of a break-in, and probably half again as long, if not twice as long, for Bruce.
She was in for more bad news during the meeting: there was no way to be sure that the precious database was even there. Brian never showed it to her, not even after he had examined and taken her diamond surety in the narrow meeting room adjoining his own inside the office suite. All he had to show was a series of screenshots accompanied by his sketchy explanations – for what it was worth, it did look like the real thing she had seen a few days ago in Gotham – and by promises that he would let her test the working database before she handed over, or transferred, the final payment if she were to be the highest bidder… which, with a top bid of thirty million they had decided she could realistically offer, was far from guaranteed. Brian said he would let her know the outcome by noon Monday, when he would either tell her when and where to pick up the surety if her bid did not win, minus his 50K "processing fee" – which he would presumably use toward buying himself a lifetime supply of industrial-strength tranquilisers to treat his chronic jitteriness – or tell her the meeting place and payment terms for the final transaction.
Now, her de-alter-egoing finished, she plops onto the supple sofa and starts picking absently at the room service breakfast Theo has ordered for her, keeping half an eye on Bruce scowling at the tiled CCTV feeds on the laptop screen.
"I should have hacked it yesterday. He must've stuck the fucking clock there on purpose."
Bingo. She was just thinking the same thing.
Still, she cannot begrudge Bruce this lapse, especially considering last night's date.
"Don't kick yourself. We just need to think of a Plan B."
"I guess I could get in from the outside after dark… shoot a harpoon line from Two Suntec next door and slide over – "
"You'll still need a legit pretext to get into that one. Besides, they're the same height," Theo reminds him. "You won't slide twenty feet before you get stuck."
"I could try to pull myself over along the cable – "
"It'll take an hour to do it with your bare hands. Too much risk of the hook getting undone in the meantime."
"If I had the ones I used in Gotham – "
"You don't. Although…"
"What?"
Instead of answering, Theo puts up a hand as the laptop speaker comes to life.
Selina's meeting was not a total waste of time and diamonds, after all. True, her most significant accomplishment happened after she left, or rather pretended to leave: Brian stayed in his office, presumably unwilling to lock and unlock it again, giving her a chance to immediately ride back up to the 42nd floor, take the stairs up the remaining floor to avoid being caught by the camera, and sneak into the empty Deloitte partners' reception at the far end of the hall. These people took a pretty relaxed attitude to security, with only a pair of infrared sensors in evidence; if the guards saw a signal from these and got suspicious, she'd be out long before anyone came up to check. As it was, the minute or so Selina spent at the reception desk was enough to write down the receptionist's cell phone number from a directory printout and to pick open and rummage through the desk cabinet and steal the most valuable thing there, a spare building access card.
But more to the point, her other achievements included dropping a retransmitter into the garbage bin in the ladies' room she popped into just before the meeting and then strategically losing an extra bugged earring under the meeting room table – if Brian found it later, he'd never recall, between her hairdo and headscarf, that she still wore a full set. Thanks to her sleight-of-hand, they can hear what is going on with subsequent visitors, in addition to getting their mug shots from the elevator cams thanks to Bruce's hacking. They will not know the bid amounts – Brian sneakily asked her to type her bid on his laptop instead of saying it out loud, presumably in fear of eavesdroppers, and will surely ask the others to do the same – but they might pick up useful tidbits and record the proceedings, for Theo to take the data to the Interpol asking to run voice IDs and facial recognition on the bidders, and for Bruce to send them to Kettering in Langley for the same purpose. At the very least, they'll know how many are in the running and might guess their origin already from accents and passing references. The first few minutes of the second bidder's meeting are spent trading cautious chatter before a mention of checking with my superiors in Aleppo points them to his Syrian provenance. On the downside, the superiors part also reminds them that the bidders meeting Brian are likely to be rather low down the respective totem poles of the terrorist outfits they represent.
The real issue is that finding out who the bidders are and on whose behalf they bid will not necessarily get them closer to the prize. In theory they could try to track all bidders as they leave and keep an eye on their movements on Monday so as to ambush the winning bidder post-handover. In practice, however, there is no guarantee that the person coming to collect the database will be one of today's attendees; in fact, it is more likely to be a more senior figure, and anyway, if the parties involved have any sense, they will send a different man if only to throw off any attempts at surveillance.
To make matters worse, Theo and Bruce have now seen that the camera Theo had put up outside the building garage may not be much help in tracking the departing bidders. The second bidder arrived in a taxi and walked in through the main entrance, asking the guards if he could use the passage leading from the lobby to the shopping mall on his way out, if the hand gestures are any indication. With multiple street exits and full of Saturday shoppers, the mall is perfect for covering one's tracks, and it will be anyone's guess when he might decide that he has waited enough to sneak out safely, which exit he has agreed on with his getaway driver, and what disguise he may put on in the CCTV-free mall toilets in the meantime. No doubt subsequent bidders will have thought of the same ruse. As they listen to the meeting wrapping up, Bruce is tapping away on the keyboard, trying to find a way into the mall CCTV circuit, but if his muttered swearing is any indication, he is not having much luck. Selina and Theo follow the distant conversation in gloomy silence punctuated by rapid-fire typing.
"Fucking hell." Bruce flops back against the sofa cushions after yet another string of code produces nothing but a nasty beep, even as the bidder is making his exit toward the mall.
"It could be worse," Theo says unconvincingly.
"Not by much," Bruce counters. "We've got 48 hours before the database is sold. We won't know who will make the final exchange, or where it will be made, and we don't even know who will have placed the winning bid today. In principle, it could even be Selina, and then we won't have the money ready."
"It's not the first time you're dealing with crazy odds. Think about how you nabbed Falcone in Gotham. No one thought it possible."
The unexpected mention makes Bruce sit up. But if he is pissed off at Theo for bringing up his past, he is not showing it. "That was easy," he says after a moment's pause. "Falcone had stupid, obvious sidekicks who helped me prove his guilt."
"Then we do the same here, look for Mitchum's sidekicks," Theo shoots back. "See if there are any besides Kitty. Except that I think –"
Before Selina can interrupt and ask what the devil Theo is talking about, Bruce picks up on his drift, and they continue practically in unison.
"Mitchum himself – "
"Must be the sidekick," Theo finishes. "Who can bring us to the real boss."
Selina takes advantage of a second's pause to jump in. "OK, OK, time out. What the hell did I miss and who the fuck is Mitchum?"
Theo does a pretty convincing facepalm. "Sorry, was going to tell you when Bruce started his CCTV moaning. And then," he adds, blithely ignoring the death glare, "I figured it could wait until after the second bidder meeting. Bruce heard back from your CIA friend Mr Kettering this morning, same time as I heard back from my Interpol buddies here. We've got some info on the guy you just met with."
"Brian?"
"Hugh."
"What?"
"His real name isn't Brian Perry, it's Hugh Mitchum. The data from the local immigration have his photo matched with another name, Charles Burlington, but it looks like a disposable identity he used to enter the country. Kettering's trawled the media and all sorts of records until he found a definitive face match. Doesn't have any prior convictions, worked in finance, got fired from HSBC Investments four years ago and has been making ends meet in consulting. I'm guessing he's in it for the money, but there is no way he's stolen the database himself, and most likely he isn't the one keeping it either."
She thinks back to the fidgety guy, his furtive, insecure manner and hurried explanations. "Figures, if you ask me. But he knows a thing or two about security and secrecy."
"Most likely, his puppetmaster does, and is good at giving instructions."
"Good point. What else did Kettering find?"
"Not a lot, but my local contacts helped with the rest. You know the Interpol gets data dumps of hotel guest IDs from the local police, so they can run a check against the wanted lists. They store raw data for a month, and I asked them to run a search for our guy. There were no hotel bookings in his real name or the Perry name, but they found Burlington staying as a guest of the paying patron right next door at the Raffles. The Somerset Maugham suite, kind of ironic, with Maugham a part-time spy and all. And guess whose name his suite was booked in." When Selina pulls a puzzled face, Theo triumphantly answers his own question. "Kitiya Davison, aka Miss Kitty from the flight."
Happy as Selina is to see puzzle pieces fitting together, she could do without a reminder of her blunder. Still, as Theo said, it could be worse. "Anything on her at the Interpol?"
"Nope. Her prints came up clean. But since we know that she booked Mitchum's room, we have her as a known associate, so Bruce and I started tracking her movements via her SIM card, the number she gave Bruce."
"You mean your friends started – "
Theo shoots a glance at Bruce. "No, we started. Let's say there are ways to get into telecom provider data with or without a warrant. We'd probably get a warrant for our man if we pushed, but it would cost us too much time, and I owe the local Interpol too many favours already to get a warrant laterally, as it were."
She nods. The world is lucky her current partners in crime prefer to use their expertise for honest ends, or else their mayhem potential would be stratospheric.
"This way we can also cross-reference her GPS coordinates with other active phones. It looks like she has a secondary SIM card slot in her phone, we've seen two different numbers active in the exact same spots as her principal SIM twice already, so I'm guessing that she has a series of burner SIMs that she uses to contact Mitchum and maybe other associates, but her big mistake is keeping the primary SIM active. As far as we can tell, she herself stays at a campus post-grad residence, and Mitchum must have told her to keep phone contact to a minimum and not to come to the Raffles to be on the safe side. But they do meet somewhere, and seeing what numbers are active near her phone and near her last known whereabouts when it's off, we can check who they belong to. And as soon as we see Kitty contact anyone we'll run a location trace on that number as well. On top of that we have known locations for Mitchum at Raffles and Suntec, though it looks like he keeps his phone switched off most of the time and probably uses a series of disposable burner phones, not just SIM cards, so it can take a long time to find any meaningful patterns... " Theo pulls an apologetic scowl.
"But it's still better than nothing," Selina finishes.
"Yep. We've also written to Kettering to ask if he can pull her SIM location history for us and do the cross-references, it is a much bigger mass of data than real-time tracking but he should have the resources for it. And now that we know Mitchum's staying at the Raffles, guess where I'm moving this very morning. I'll use the Renner ID," Theo continues, seeing Selina's momentary worry, "so we'll keep this room I booked as Al-Juhani to meet in. But I found the perfect suite over there," he tips his head in the direction of the window, where the Raffles sprawls in its wedding-cake colonial glory far below. "Two suites away from the Maugham suite, the ones right next to it were booked, but all these Personality Suites share a common veranda. And it's got a priceless name to boot."
Theo is clearly making another theatrical pause when Bruce cuts in dryly, his eyes still on the screen. "It's called the John Wayne suite, in case you're forgetting."
John or not, it has Selina snickering.
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TBC
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Burner phone is a colloquial term for prepaid, very basic, dirt cheap cell phones that can be discarded after each use to thwart tracking attempts.
We've seen EMP devices in the Nolan films; part of the way they are seen working is realistic, part of it isn't. The links here are to a serious discussion too boring to read through, but I put them here as a possible cure for insomnia (asterisks = dots): [http www] dtic*mil/docs/citations/ADA332511 and [http www] dtic*mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a463475*pdf
Tracking phones through the GPS locations of the SIM cards is common knowledge by now. Articles showing its extent include [http www] theguardian*com/world/2013/dec/04/nsa-storing-cell-phone-records-daily-snowden and [http www] dailymail*co*uk/news/article-2518541/NSA-tracks-locations-5-BILLION-cellphones-everyday-overseas*html#ixzz2mcXm8DtK
Other, even easier ways of tracking include tracking wi-fi signal use: [http www] dailymail*co*uk/sciencetech/article-2384844/Hacker-creates-tiny-spy-computers-named-CreepyDOL-track-persons-movements-entire-cities*html#ixzz2b8ifpglH and hacking into the phones: [http www] dailymail*co*uk/sciencetech/article-2514892/mSpy-app-lets-people-spy-partners-calls-texts-track-them*html
The Raffles Personality Suites, their respective names, and the shared veranda are real, as is Somerset Maugham's intelligence stint, though the suites' relative locations were down to artistic license on my part: [http www] raffles*com/singapore/rooms-suites/personality-suites/