Munroe made the twenty-minute walk from Graz Hauptbahnhof to the rental car agency, cap pulled down, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, and with the pack across her back.
She scanned expressions as she went, noting shoes and clothing and the posture and pace of fellow pedestrians; gauging the stop-start tempo of the streets, drawing in the rhythm of the city: bicycles, buses, pedestrians, cars; sidewalk greetings, dogs on leashes; crosswalks, mom-and-pop storefronts, traffic lights, and signage, all holding clues to the tics and quirks she must mimic to blend.
Every city had a unique heartbeat.
This one was cold and beautiful.
Graz had just over a quarter million people in a tight scenic package of rivers and mountains; carried a history so old that the stones seemed to cry out with the thunder of medieval knights, and, beneath layers of youthful faces and friendly gestures, the city breathed propriety, conservative and formal.
At the rental car office Munroe handed over a Spanish driver’s license to match a Spanish passport, filled out paperwork, and presented the requisite cash deposit needed to avoid the digital trail left by credit cards.
Such was the beauty of Europe—the beauty of everywhere outside the United States—a world of economies functioning fully without the need to carry plastic. It was head-shaking, really, how the American consumer culture had become so conjoined to the ubiquitous sixteen digits that paying cash for big-ticket items marked a person as potential drug dealer or terrorist; had created a country where carrying large sums of cash was reason enough to have the money confiscated by law enforcement under asset forfeiture laws. No warrant, no arrest, no proof of wrongdoing, no recourse—just poof, money gone, and feel free to continue on your now cashless way.
Welcome to the land of the free.
Munroe pocketed the keys and stepped out into the lot, back into the swirl of wind and leaves and a chill now tempered by the late afternoon sun.
Behind the wheel, she dumped her bag onto the passenger seat and retrieved printouts from her folder. Flipped through multiple pages of online maps, each one taking her in for a tighter view of her target areas. Then she set them aside and put the car in gear. A smart phone would have saved time; a cell phone, period, was out of the question. She might as well just start carrying a tracking beacon.
The office was her first hit, and she found it in the old part of town on the ground floor of a three-story stone building with a façade that hinted at money and respectability, and with signage that offered no clue as to what the business did.
The house was outside the city limits, where manicured farmland rolled along hills in all directions, situated twenty or so meters up a gravel strip off the two-lane main road: a modern house surrounded by well-tended grounds with laundry on the line and a car in the courtyard.
Munroe made several passes by the house and then returned to Graz and drove the streets of the old city, up one and down another, widening out until the map in her head was fully formed: a precaution against falling into the traps laid by unfamiliarity and ignorance.
A WEEK OF evenings and weekends spent watching the house and waiting for the man who would know brought Munroe the routines and patterns of the wife and children: bystanders caught up in the sins of the father.
Five business days of watching the office brought only secondary targets—two men and one woman who showed up at nine and left at six—faces that Munroe separated, over the course of the first few mornings, from the employees who worked at the businesses on the upper floors. She followed them home. Learned their patterns just well enough to know where to apply pressure if fate forced her in that direction, and then let them be.
More difficult than finding information was having the patience to sit through mind-numbing nothingness in its acquisition; to allow days of inactivity and nights of no progress to pass without the First World stress of time consciousness. But it was often from within this nothingness that strategy flowed, as it did now.
She’d needed four weeks of immersion on the streets and within the slums of Italy’s cities to pass invisible into the yacht yard and then out again with her trove of information; she’d need far less to access the building across the street, though invisibility would be harder to come by.
A cheap laptop became both temporary disguise and tool.
A café table against the inside window became her office.
Internet VoIP programs worked as a phone to place international calls.
Prepaid credit cards, loaded with cash long before she’d left the United States, unused and therefore unconnected to any of her prior movements, became a weapon.
With the doors to the office always within sight, in between jotting occasional observation notes, Munroe ordered clothes and had them shipped to the local FedEx office; paid for a business mailing service, phone answering service, and a registered agent in Delaware; filed to incorporate. She bought domain and web hosting, and, over the following days of waiting and watching for a target that had yet to surface, she utilized stock photography and text lifted off a multitude of websites to build deeper layers for the public image behind suit, tie, and business cards.
Like driving city streets to map them in her head, creating this foundation of legitimacy was a precaution she hoped never to need but would rely on to save her if called upon. And it was a tool with additional uses.
Munroe shut the laptop.
She glanced up again at the building entrance, took note of the woman who shut the door behind her, and jotted down the time. If the man who would know wouldn’t come to her, she was ready to come to him.