Leaving me alone in this holding cell with Will.
My terror twists and darkens into rage, and without even thinking about it I run full-force toward the gate of the enclosure, where he stands. I let out a frustrated scream as he calmly clicks the lock shut again, closing me off.
“You’re a feisty one, aren’t you, petite fille?” he whispers, leaning close so that his ice-blue eyes and pointed nose are mere centimeters from my face on the other side of the chain-link fence. “I’ll break you of that.”
I spit directly into his face. He blinks once, then wipes his face with a smirk.
“Oui, I’ve got special plans for you, Olivia,” he growls. Then he turns on his heel and strides out of the room, turning off the light as he goes.
I sink to the floor, clinging to the cold metal gate, utterly alone.
10
Max
Navigating the congested streets of Paris in the middle of the day is hard enough on the best of days. The grating voice of the man to my right makes it even less bearable than usual.
“Did they really not teach you any of this kind of tracking in Russia? Or whatever Russia-school you went to? This kind of stuff is, like, freshman-level kind of tracking,” my tech-savvy friend says with a laugh as he scrolls through the blinking map that’s pulled up on his laptop.
Felix Meunier is a name I wish I would never have to call upon again when it came to matters related to work, but he’s one of the most talented computer specialists in the university, and more importantly, he’s never been afraid to get his hands dirty. Most importantly, he owes me a favor.
If only it weren’t for his insufferable personality.
I met Felix when he came to me shortly after getting my post at the university. Just like he is now, he was working then as one of the IT staff members who ensured the sprawling enclave of bureaucracy that was the University of Paris kept running smoothly. But apparently, Felix had been involved in some shady dealings with the criminal underworld of Paris. He was the kind of white-collar criminal who thought he could skim money from the university while playing the same game with some of the offshore accounts the local mob who had ties to the university.
Inevitably, he got himself into hot water, both the French police and the mobsters he’d managed to offend breathing hard down his neck from all angles. He came to me looking for help.
To this day, I don’t know why he reached out to me specifically, but I suspect he did some digging into my background and thought I’d be the kind of person he’d want to have his back in a situation like his. The assumption was correct, but I only agreed to help him reluctantly, covering his trail and burning old bridges that might have tied him to his crimes. He was beyond grateful.
And despite my best efforts, I haven’t been able to shake the little man since, so I suppose we could be called ‘friends.’
“They did not teach us…’your expertise’ in Spetsnaz training,” I answer, trying desperately not to say “they didn’t teach us how to be nerds.”
“Right, right,” he muses, his fingers flicking the screen back to his voluminous spreadsheets through which he’s been inputting data that’s been assembling the GPS signal we’re tracking now, “have to keep all the training on killing enemy spies, climbing up sheer cliffs, wrestling bears with your bare hands, that kind of thing, right?”
“We were taught to track,” I say, no smile on my face, “but we needed no such technology to hound our targets down like animals.” He stares at me a moment before giving his head a light shake and turning back to his computer. I smile quietly to myself; it was helpful to recount the details of my past to keep the fear of god in men like Felix.
“Anyway, like I was saying: the email address you have was sent from a computer that was hooked up to the internet, just like any email, so that means it’s got a server associated with it.”
I’ve already stopped paying attention, but I nod.
“So I can trace that server and bounce a signal off it and figure out where it’s coming from, kind of like echolocation, but with internet signals. Does that make sense?”
“Of course,” I lie absently.
“It doesn’t look like this person was using any sophisticated technique,” he adds with a scoff, “even the most basically tech-savvy users who do so much as illegally download a movie will use something that masks your IP address at least, or maybe a program that can bounce signals around to confuse people like me who might want to track ‘em, but it looks like your guy was just sending an email from a building, plain as day. I could pull up the email here if I wanted.”