“I wonder if Nicholas is a bad influence on you, or vice versa. Will this give us enough ammunition to sink them?”
“Hopefully.”
“And can you cut off their money supply?”
He merely grinned at her.
“Go for it, launch it. Let’s see what you can find.”
“Hold on, I have a few lines of code left to write.”
He tapped away while Louisa got herself a shot of espresso. “I’ve got to joggle my nervous system awake.”
“Don’t drown it in cream and sugar, and use triple the espresso.”
“It’s too small for triple the amount.” Louisa turned the small ceramic cup over in her hands, then set it under the spout of the Nespresso machine and pressed the button. “Are you about ready to nail this Rodgers dude?”
There was a second of furious tapping, then, “Yes. It’s launched. Can we order some food? I’m starving. Sitting around typing drains away the carbs, that, and watching you eat everything in sight.”
Louisa patted her flat stomach. “Gotta keep this fine machine in top working order. Lots of carbs or I lose my RPMs. Room service’s the greatest, give them a call. How long will the program take to work?”
“An hour at most. All we need is for someone at Rodgers’s firm to open the email and it will launch automatically. They’ll never even know we’re in.”
“How does it work?”
“It will download all the transactional data. Which is a ton of stuff, so I wrote a second program that should filter out everything labeled Genesis and Kohath, with variables. Once we have the data, we can reconstruct the last couple of years, see all of Rodgers’s transactions. This Rodgers guy is good, he completely obscured most of it.”
“Explain what you mean he’s obscured most of it.”
“It’s all numerical,” Adam said, picking up the phone and the hotel menu. “From what I can tell, the files are coded both by company and by longitude and latitude. Which is an interesting way to do things, but it’s his way of keeping his clients separate and secure.”
Adam ordered prosciutto and melon with cheese, looked over at Louisa, doubled the order, and added a full Italian breakfast, with extra bacon.
Louisa got up, began pacing. “I wish Nicholas would call.”
Adam hung up the phone. “While you napped—okay, I napped some, too, but for the most part, I kept an eye on the satellite, as he asked. So far, no one has left Castel Rigone.” He frowned. “It’s weird. Either the Kohaths have flying brooms or they’re hunkered down inside that mountain.
“What really worries me is there’s no movement on Kitsune’s tracker, not since Nicholas set off the micro EMP. I can only assume it’s been knocked offline somehow, and isn’t transmitting. I don’t know what else could be happening.”
Louisa said, “I hate to ask this, but will the tracker continue working if Kitsune is dead?”
Adam rubbed a hand through his hair. “Yes, it would continue to work for seventy-two hours. It was originally designed for the military to keep track of their spec-ops people should they be taken or killed in the field.”
“I sure hope Kitsune is all right and she’s found her husband. I like her. She’s tough and smart. A pity she’s a career criminal and we’re FBI. And that’s just bizarre. I’m going to take a shower. Call me when the food gets here or Nicholas calls.”
Louisa headed into the shower, and Adam sat back and watched the four quadrants on his computer screen. The satellite imagery shifted incrementally on one quadrant, the data dump from the hack into Rodgers’s files on the second, a third showed data from the Genesis Group’s files, and the fourth showed Kitsune’s tracker, only it was blank. Adam didn’t like it one bit. What he’d told Louisa was right—he had no clue what had happened to it.
Adam’s feet dropped to the floor when Kitsune’s tracker suddenly came online and started to move.
He sent a thank-you heavenward and shouted, “Louisa! Get in here.” She dashed out, a towel wrapped around her, and her hair twisted up in a turban. “What? What?”
“Kitsune’s tracker lit up. She’s on the move.”
“Thank goodness. Where is she heading?”
“West. Fast. Look at this.”
He pulled up a green screen overlaying a map of Europe. The GPS locator representing Kitsune’s location was a small, flashing dot of white. “I have no idea how they got out without my seeing the tracker. The satellite’s been watching and no one’s left the mountain.”