The three-man team Emil had assembled as his technical crew sat before their computer terminals, surrounded by greasy snacks and a flow of coffee that had been constant for nearly the whole of the day. It was a day that, in their dark seclusion from the outside world, had begun dully, but which since had escalated into something entirely different.
The man called Vico, who had been the dominant personality of their trio ever since they’d met at the TechCafé coffee house in their early days of graduate school and become as inseparable as brothers, stood watching the other two tap away at their keyboards. The basement room was a jumbled collection of cheap Ikea tables and masses of wires that linked up their three computers, the enormous monitors stationed at each of their positions casting the whole room into shades of electronic greens and blues.
‘You’ve got her?’ Vico asked impatiently. The man immediately in front of him, whose name was Pietro and who was slightly pudgier around the middle than any of his imaginary girlfriends would approve of, simply nodded. He shoved a collection of empty Pepsi tins aside to make more room for his mouse, his left hand tapping his keyboard as the glow of his monitor reflected on to his face.
‘Yeah, we got her,’ he finally said. A hand went up, pointing to a window on the monitor. Not a map with a blinking red cross hair as was always the case in movies – it was a black window with white plain text scrolled across it. Amongst the numbers, a series of digits marking out coordinates offered a far more precise location.
Their third member, Corso, sat at the other side of the small room, his blond hair hanging down in an overgrown fringe that covered far too much of his face. But he typed with a ferocity that Vico knew meant he was at work on the same feed.
IP geolocation was no longer a difficult chore. At one point in the not-too-distant hacking past it had been an arena of speciality, something to be proud of. Nowadays geolocation was so straightforward as to be essentially automatic, and the real skill of the twenty-first century was learning how not to be spotted by those who wanted to know far more about you than just your physical location. Of course, there were still certain hurdles that threw themselves up in the course of the task from time to time, but most people who used the Internet were so unaware of the trail of digital breadcrumbs left behind their every keystroke that they all but invited invasive tracking.
The woman that Emil had them following was a perfect case in point.
Once he’d instructed them to seek out anyone in the region who had an expertise in whatever the hell the ancient language Emil cared about was called, things had been more or less automatic. Apart from the man in the Vatican, about whom they already knew, searches revealed only one other: this woman. It had taken a matter of minutes to link her name from social media entries to the principal IP address attached to her online activity, and then a matter of keystrokes to connect the IP to a server company. From there a few rudimentary firewalls had been easily hacked through to reveal a username and account, which in turn provided full personal details stored on an equally vulnerable customer database.
IP address 0:0:0:0:0:ffff:d191:66c, the long IPv6 form tied to the old-fashioned 209.145.6.108, belonged to an Angelina Eloisa Calla. Vico had never heard the name before this project, but then he’d hardly suspected he would have. There were over 2.5 million Internet users in central Rome, and he didn’t particularly care to know any of them. Not until there was a need to do so.
When it was necessary, though, it was a matter of professional satisfaction to Vico that, through less than an hour’s worth of work by their little trio, he’d been able to learn a terrific amount about the woman who had been a non-existent entity to him before that hour had begun.
Calla’s Internet hosting company had her registered address as Via Antonio Cerasi 18a, which Pietro had verified by cross-referencing data from both the power and telephone companies. From those combined details he’d determined that the woman had a single computer – an abysmally out-of-date MacBook that Vico could only assume was powered chiefly by steam and memories, and which included a virus scanner as obsolete as the hardware – as well as a Samsung Galaxy smartphone operating the previous generation of Android. By the cellular and WiFi tracking logs, the phone appeared to be the woman’s primary access point to the online world.
But these things were rudimentary. Any two-bit hacker could know as much about a target in just as little time, and Vico had needed more.
From the Agenzia delle Entrate, the Italian Revenue Agency, he knew that Angelina Calla was unmarried and filed her taxes each year without spouse or domestic partner. A woman who lived alone. From those records he identified her bank, which he passed on to Corso, who had in turn learned that Calla’s income of roughly €1,200 per month was paid out chiefly on the rent of her flat in the neighbourhood of Monteverde, utilities and surprisingly pricey subscriptions to a number of online journals normally bought into only by university and college libraries. There were no car payments, which suggested that she either owned something outright – which seemed unlikely given her overall financial portrait – or that she was one of the tens of thousands of Romans who commuted from A to B to C on their normal daily routine.
The journal subscriptions were a unique thread of character, and Vico had followed them thoroughly. Angelina Calla was apparently a woman of strong academic mind. She’d finished a BA in Classics at the University of Bologna, then moved to the capital to do both a masters degree and PhD at the Sapienza University of Rome. Apart from the keyword ‘Akkadian’ in her published doctoral thesis, ‘Elements of Pseudepigraphic Revisionism in Middle Akkadian Cultural Mythology’, he understood nothing of her subject, but it was clear that Calla was an adept in her field. And it was that field that meant she had to be found. It was the reason they had located her in the first place. They’d been commissioned to search out anyone who might know the territory of the ancient language, and the digital net that Vico and his team had laid across Italy had quickly focused in on her and the man. They knew the territory, so they became targets.
Vico had consolidated the whole of his research into a small digital dossier and forwarded it to the boss. Most of it, he imagined, was overkill – but he prided himself on his work, and a bit of ingratiating oneself to others was never wholly off base.
All that was really needed now was the fact that the MAC address of Angelina Calla’s smartphone pinged to cellular towers and open WiFi ports automatically. She had all the ‘convenience features’ of modern portable computing switched on, which meant she was live everywhere.
Which meant she was trackable. Everywhere.
‘Where is she at, right now?’ Vico asked.
‘She’s inside Vatican City,’ Corso answered.
‘Damn it, be more precise than that!’ Vico wasn’t as impatient as his voice suggested, but after the wet teams had lost both the woman and the male target earlier in the day, Emil’s charge to find them again had come with a sufficiently threatening tone to inspire Vico to get back to him with nothing other than a pinpoint location.
‘Belvedere Courtyard inside the Palace,’ Corso continued, squinting through thick spectacles, ‘just a second.’ His fingers danced over his keyboard. ‘North-western quadrant, ten metres to the right of the corner. Let me look that up.’
He began to type again, but Pietro had already cross-referenced the location.
‘That’s the entrance to the Secret Archives.’
Vico stared at the screen, nodding over the other two men’s heads.
‘That’ll do.’
His phone was already open, Emil’s number on the speed dial digit beneath his thumb.