While Tristan simmered and damped down his utter rage at Jian’s and Anjali’s injuries, Colleen gaped at the picture on the screen. “Tristan, we have to get them out. We can’t wait anymore. We have to do something. We know where they are. I’m serious when I say that I can find a damn gun show and have us armed in an hour. It’s Sunday, so it’s a weekend. Any gun show will open at noon, right after church.”
“We’ll get them out. We have an agreement now. I need to work on the Anonymity program a little before we hand it over because everything in it is hand-coded.”
“You can’t give them Anonymity Plus.”
“Well, no. They don’t know the new and improved version exists, so I’m not handing that over to them. If anything, I’m going to tweak it to screw it up, make it crash at the least possible provocation. I’m going to call this one Anonymity Minus.”
She sighed. “I still hate them having access to your program at all. Can’t we just kill them?”
“You and I aren’t subject matter experts in hostage rescuing. We can’t.”
“But we can call the police. They have a hostage rescue team. It’s pretty good, too. The TV had footage of their female sniper taking out a guy with a shotgun duct-taped to the back of a hostage’s neck from the rooftop of the next building over. She dropped him straight down with one shot.”
“Sergey said they’d shoot them if they saw police, and at least some of the police here are on Butorins’ payroll. I don’t want to risk it, not when we know that they want the computer program. This is straightforward. We got them into this, and we can get them out.”
“I hate this.”
“So do I, but as soon as I get Anonymity Minus ready, they’ll be released. It doesn’t have a user dashboard or anything so that laypeople can use it. That’s why uploading your pictures to make your version was such a pain in the butt. I need to put in some sort of graphic user interface functionality so they can use it.”
“Do you want them to use it?” she asked.
“Well, no. I want Jian and Anjali back, so I have to make the program look like they can use it.”
“Right. Okay, let’s do it. Do you think you can have it done any sooner than Wednesday?” she asked. “That’s a long time for Anjali. And for Jian, too, of course. I wish I could help to make the time go faster.”
“You can test and debug the code,” he told her. “You did a great job with Anonymity Plus, Colleen’s Version. It’s a lot of help to have another set of eyes on it.”
“But we only have one computer,” she said.
He stretched his face into a grin that he didn’t feel. “Two-hour delivery saves the day. I’m going to get my usual shampoo, too. This hotel stuff is acid-stripping my hair.”
Colleen’s phone shivered on the bed and beeped, as it had been doing several times a minute for the past hour.
Tristan asked, “Is someone trying to get ahold of you?”
“Oh, no. That’s the Sherwood Forest forum. I put up a post telling them that I wasn’t dead or kidnapped by aliens because the rumors were flying. I mean, jeez, I hadn’t logged on for a few days. The conspiracy theories had gotten out of control.”
The phone buzzed again. “So they’re still direct-messaging you?”
“Oh, no. It’s just people commenting on my post. There are a lot of replies.”
A few hours later, a text pinged Tristan’s phone that read, You will receive a phone call from Rogue Security within the next fifteen minutes.
He had to get Colleen out of the room.
Or, he could leave.
She would want to come with him, or she would rightfully get upset that he wasn’t working as hard as he could on finishing the Anonymity program and thus freeing Jian and Anjali.
So Tristan stretched and scratched his stomach. “Do you know what I could go for, for lunch?”
Colleen gestured to the still heavily laden breakfast tray by the front door. “Sausage and eggs? Pastries and hash browns?”
“A burrito,” Tristan said. “Where’s the best place around here to get a burrito?”
“Los Dos Molinos, but they don’t do LunchRun. They don’t have any delivery.”
Perfect. “It seems like a crime to come to Phoenix and not have a really good burrito. I am craving a really good burrito.”
“Craving? You pregnant?” she snarked.
“I know you’re ahead with the debugging. It’s easy to make these burner credit cards. Would you be so good as to run and pick up some burritos whilst I bash out this code?”
Colleen glanced at the hotel room window that overlooked a golf course, lush green fairway islands in riverbeds of rocky desert clay. “I’ve been cooped up lately, first in my apartment and now here. Just driving around when we broke into GameShack made me unreasonably happy.”
“I’m always glad to make you unreasonably happy, and I would be unreasonably happy with a burrito. I’m placing the order right now online.” He’d already found the website and filled in their orders. “What kind do you want?”
Colleen chuckled and told him red sauce and chicken, which was the first time he’d seen her smile even a little bit since Anjali had been taken.
“I’ll get beef with the green sauce.”
“Oh, dude. Green? You might want to check that.”
“I like green sauce. I know what I’m doing.”
She smiled at him again. “Yeah, you’re probably right. If it’ll make you type faster, I will get you a burrito. And it’s been right about twelve hours since we uploaded Anonymity Plus into the GameShack servers. It should have propagated through the internet by now, right?”
“Yep, it should be operational by now,” he confirmed.
“So I’m just a ghost now, flitting in and out, and no surveillance cameras can see me.”
That made Tristan smile. “Yes, even if those Butorin assholes or anybody else breaks into a surveillance system and tries to use facial recognition software to find you, you should be safe.”
Colleen took her phone and purse and walked out the door, leaving Tristan alone in the hotel room.
Just as the door clicked, Tristan’s phone rang.
Jesus, that was close.
An unidentified number showed on the screen. “Hello?”
“This is Magnus Jensen of Rogue Security. A Mary Varvara Bell has designated this phone number as a contact point. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”
The man’s accent was European of some sort. Not German or French. Swiss or Dutch, maybe? Tristan had never been as good at placing accents as some of the other guys at Le Rosey. “This is Tristan King.”
The man’s already deep voice dropped. “Excellent. The initial contact phone number is correct. That’s an auspicious way to start the operation. I hear that we have a hostage extraction. I need every bit of information possible about the targets, the bad guys, and the location.”
Tristan told Magnus Jensen everything he could—names, dates, the address, the room number—and answered questions as they arose.
Yes, the primary attack and current location was the Presidential Suite at The Boulders. Because Tristan had stayed there the previous week whilst he was doing GameShack reconnaissance, he could confirm that there was an elevator and enclosed hallway leading to the main door. The open balcony was directly below the roofline on the west side that overlooked the Valley because the sunsets had been like an orange laser show blasting through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows.
Yes, there were two hostages, and he had names and descriptions.
Yes, there had been a proof of life just an hour before, and he texted the photo of Jian and Anjali to Magnus Jensen.
Tristan told him, “And I have real-time audio and video surveillance inside the location.”
Magnus Jensen asked, “Wait, you have what?”
Tristan described how he’d hacked Jian’s phone to transmit audio and visual signals.
Magnus chuckled. “That’s an interesting piece of software. A friend of mine might like to take a look at that. I could knock a percentage off our fee.”
“I’m not paying the bill for this operation,” Tristan told him, except with his blood and soul.
“Then we could discuss licensing the intellectual property from you, but that’s a conversation for another day. Is there any way I can get access to the live feed?”
“Unfortunately not, but I would like to be a part of the operation. I can bring my phone with me.”
“We don’t work with amateurs.”
“I’ll stay back and wait until the location is secured, but I want to make sure I see Jian and Anjali get out safely.”
Magnus Jensen sighed. “All right, but you’re not carrying a firearm. The best militaries in the world have trained our operators. Most of them are US or other special forces. We are not walking into a dangerous operation with armed amateurs.”
“Understood. When is the operation planned for?”
“We’ll study the situation for the rest of the day while our operators arrive in the Phoenix area. I anticipate a call time of midnight, local time, and a go-time of oh-two-hundred hours. I will text the locations for each. We try to keep communications to a minimum.”
“Midnight. Okay. I’ll wait for your text and be there.”
They had just hung up as Colleen bounced back into the room, holding two large brown paper bags. “Mission accomplished!”
He looked up at her and forced a big grin on his face. “Excellent. I’m famished.”
And that was how Tristan ended up choking down a nuclear-hot burrito smothered in green sauce that could only be described in mega-units of hellfire with tears streaming down his face whilst smiling and giving Colleen the thumbs-up. “It’s delicious.”
She smiled back at him. “Uh-huh. Yeah. The menu says that the green is hotter than the red.”
Yeah, she’d tried to warn him, but he’d been so preoccupied with getting her out of the room that he hadn’t listened. Served him right.
Now he just needed to figure out how to sneak out of the hotel at midnight without her.