My heart is hammering.
I have access to everything. There aren’t many app icons; some I recognize, some look foreign, but it’s mainly just the in-house apps, no additions, no Candy Crush. I tap on Mail. An inbox bounces up. All the emails are in Russian. Shit. I thought something like this might happen. Okay, well, I guess they were Russian. Anyway, it’s an alphabet I can’t read. Okay. The easiest way to do this is to copy and paste into Google Translate, hardly elegant but, again, let me stress: I am not a spy.
I can’t copy and paste the emails from this phone directly into Translate because I can’t let it go online, and I definitely can’t forward them to my email account and do it from there.
I turn to the hotel computer and load Google Russia and type in the email provider that the emails have been sent to. It’s the Russian email provider Yandex. The landing page means nothing to me; the writing is a mess of angular nonsense I don’t understand, but in the top right-hand corner is a familiar box, containing space for a username and password. I type the email address on the phone into the first box and click the illegible squiggles below the password. Password reset. I fill it out and wait. I stare at the phone.
Oh bugger.
I’m not going to be able to get the reset email, obviously! What a fucking moron. I’m not online. The reset email won’t get through. Why the fuck didn’t I think of that? Idiot.
Okay.
Okay.
Hang on…I can turn Wi-Fi on while still inairplane mode. Of course! Mark showed me how to do that on the flight over so we could use the inflight Wi-Fi. Then I won’t pick up any network signal. It won’t be traceable. I can connect to the hotel Wi-Fi on the phone, collect the reset email, and then reset the password. Yes!
I run through it quickly, connect the phone to the hotel Wi-Fi network, and wait for the reset email to arrive. A batch of thirty-one messages download onto the handset, my password reset email being the last one to arrive. Nobody is missing these people yet. Nobody has accessed this account for days.
I reset through the email link and choose the password G650. It seems apt. Holding my breath, I wait for it to confirm. It works. Now only I can access their emails.
I scroll through the emails; the Google banner at the top of the page reads:This page is in Russian. Would you like to translate it?I click Translate.
I read.
Most of them appear to be statements or receipts of some sort. Some are meeting itineraries. Locations, times, and people. Some of the emails are spam. Funny that criminals get spam too. But none of the emails seems to be personal. No names in the emails. I see Aegys-Mutual Consultants referenced a couple of times. Another corporation, Carnwennan Holdings. Transactions between the two. Another called Themis Financial Management. I stop reading. I need something more, a person’s name, something. I commit a few of the company names to memory; I’ll look them up later.
I delete the emails created by my password reset andsign out of the email account; I clear the browser history on the hotel PC and sign out of the guest page.
Now text messages. I’m pretty sure I’ll find something in the text messages. The green message icon shows there are forty-two new messages. I don’t think I’ve ever had more than ten unread texts in my life, but then I suppose these guys aren’t alive, are they? That can cause an unnaturally high buildup, I’d imagine.
I tap on messages. The phone has no saved numbers, so the messages all appear under phone numbers. I Google them. The +1 codes—America; +44 codes—UK; +7 codes—Russia; +352 codes—Luxemburg; and a +507 code—Panama. The Luxemburg number’s text chain seems to be mainly written in French and German. The Panama text chain is in Spanish with the occasional English word cropping up. The American and Russian numbers seem to be purely English. Whoever this phone belonged to spoke a lot of languages and had a lot of balls in the air. So to speak. I tap on the first message, the most recent one, the American number. I read the chain:
THEY HAVE AGREED. THEY WILL EXPEDITE THE TRANSACTION. SAFE FLIGHT
INFORMATION NOT RECEIVED AS ADVISED
IS THERE A PROBLEM? WHERE ARE YOU?
CONTACT ME
THIS COULD TURN UGLY, ADVISE
I go back to the message menu. Choose the next message chain down. The Russian number:
MEETING LOCATION SET FOR TODAY
PICK-UP SET FOR 22:30 AT HELIPORT.
FLIGHT REDIRECTED? WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT LOCATION? IS THERE A PROBLEM? CAN WE ASSIST?
THEY DID NOT RECEIVE. WHERE ARE YOU?
WHERE ARE YOU?
WE NEED TO TALK, RESPOND AS SOON AS YOU RECEIVE THIS.
RESPOND
