The first thing they did was some open source intelligence-gathering. They fired up the laptops and accessed the online media outlets, TV stations both local and national, and scanned the law enforcement radio frequencies for information.
It didn’t take long to find the two items of interest that they were looking for. The first was from a running news report from Die Presse’s online news service, which stated that the body of a man in his thirties, believed to be a Spanish citizen, had been found dead in the car park at Vienna International Airport. There were no further details and the Bundespolizei were currently investigating.
“This could be Alvarez?” said Jax, scrolling down on her laptop.
Lyth appeared at her shoulder and read what was on the screen. “That would explain the phone call? They lifted his cell phone off him.”
“True, and with a sniffer program it could have logged our routes in and out of the city from when Alvarez checked in with us. They could even have logged the rough location of the safe house?” nodded Tanner.
“But it still doesn’t answer the question of how they knew we were in Vienna and how they knew about the Sailfish extraction,” countered Jax.
And that’s what bothered Tom Lyth. Sure, the details of the route to set the ambush, was part physical surveillance and partly good timing on accessing Alvarez’s smartphone to retrieve geo data. But the bigger picture, the why they were in Vienna at all… that was a mystery. Was there a leak in the Prism? Maybe. But then again, if the attackers weren’t Trillium operatives, then it was conceivable that there could have been a leak somewhere in Trillium’s network about the Vienna visit. Perhaps a ‘third force’ had an interest in Sailfish. But who?
He decided that there wasn’t enough hard data at the moment to support a theory either way. That would come in time. For now, all they could do was protect the asset and get him out of Austria as soon as possible.
“Boss, I think I have something else,” said Tanner. He was hunched over his laptop, watching the signal bars go up and down, pressing his headset close to his ears to listen into the secure police channels he had hacked.
Lyth came over. “What do you have?”
“Local police are going mental. They’ve found debris and shell casings at the scene of the ambush, not surprisingly.”
“Any bodies?”
Tanner shook his head. “Not that I’m hearing, at least not yet. Locals heard gunfire and crashes in the area and called it in. From the chatter, the current theory is that it’s a shootout between a Chechen organised crime group and a Macedonian crime gang. Apparently, there seems to be an ongoing turf war between them. But as for bodies, nothing. Whoever attacked us seems to have taken the casualties with them.”
Lyth stood back and thought about it. The positives were that if the police thought it was a gang turf war, they would centre their investigation on that. That bought them some breathing space and by the time they had figured it out that it wasn’t criminal and began to look elsewhere, SCALPEL would be, hopefully, out of the country. So for now, they were protected and safe from the Austrian authorities.
Unfortunately, the negatives outweighed the positives. Sabina had been kidnapped and was presumably going to be used as leverage to force them to hand over Pavel. Alvarez was dead, murdered, by a second team of attackers and the whole extraction operation was well and truly compromised. Fuck!
“What do you want us to do?” asked Wolf, nursing another mug of his second favourite coffee brand.
Lyth pondered it for a moment. “For now, we do nothing. We are off the radar, we are locked down and we are secure. We are also all exhausted, so get some rest, guys. The shift rota on Sailfish starts now. I’ll take first shift. Everyone else get some sleep. We’ll look at it with a fresh pair of eyes tomorrow. Tomorrow, I’ll take the Audi, it has the least damage to it, dump it and get a new vehicle from one of our contacts.”
“You’re going into Vienna?” asked Jax, rubbing her eyes and trying to stifle a yawn.
Lyth nodded. “I also need more information about just what is happening here.”
“How are you going to do that?” asked Wolf, taking a final sip.
“I know a man in Vienna, an old friend. If anyone can tell me what’s going on, he can.”