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Ham: 5
Ham logged out of the chat. Adam bit a thumbnail. Five minutes later Ham’s handle popped up again, and a second name appeared.
Ham: DL, here’s your genie.
And he disappeared before Adam had a chance to thank him. He knew Ham would be back soon enough with a request or requirement of his own. That was fine. This was the price of doing business in the hacker world.
Adam addressed the new chat mate.
DL: Good to see you. Can you help with a project?
GR8T: What do you need, and how much are you paying?
DL: Enough. I need a feed for the cameras surrounding the Topkapi.
GR8T: Military-grade, dude. Gonna cost ya.
DL: Sky’s the limit. Bring it.
GR8T disappeared from the chat. A long string of numbers appeared. Adam used it to wire transfer five thousand dollars. Good-faith money. Moments later a file appeared, floating in lazy circles in the middle of his screen. Adam scanned it, found exactly what he needed, then downloaded it. With two more clicks, he transferred another twenty-five thousand dollars, then logged out of the chat.
Hackers were predictable, thankfully. Wave some cash and you could get whatever you wanted. Adam appreciated the fact that Nicholas had created the “bank,” as they liked to call it, and given Adam approval for up to $100,000 in transaction fees without extraneous approval. It made working the DarkNet so much easier. Plus, the hackers knew when Dark Leaf asked for help, they got paid. It was a win-win for everyone.
Opening the file GR8T had sent him, Adam disguised himself further, coded open a slick back door through the museum’s firewall, and tapped directly into the ultrasecure video feed at the Topkapi Palace.
He worked quickly, fingers crossed this ploy would work, that he hadn’t just wasted a quarter of his bank on nothing. So many museums recycled their feed at the end of the day, or the end of the week. From what Kitsune had said, he’d need the feed from about two weeks earlier.
He was in luck. The Topkapi didn’t recycle their feeds weekly. They kept them all, bless their paranoid little souls.
He saw the feed appear for the time frame in question.
He made a quick copy of it, exited out the back door, closed it thoroughly so no one would know he’d been in the system, wiped all his tracks, and shut down the link.
All in all, it had taken him less than five minutes to make the grab.
Should he tell Nicholas now what he’d done? No, better to wait, see if he could identify the blonde who’d visited the Topkapi before he said anything. He heard their voices; he really liked Kitsune’s voice, the Scottish lilt. He started running the feed from the Topkapi against the FBI’s NGI facial recognition databases.
If the woman Kitsune had seen was a criminal, Adam would find her.
While that was running, Adam decided to open a fresh window and tap into the Venice CCTV video feed. He wasn’t interested in the shooters in Piazza San Marco today. He wanted to zero in on what happened the day Kitsune had nearly been killed.
The Venice CCTV did recycle daily, but he quickly found the archive where they dumped their old files. He pulled twenty-four hours of feed, downloaded them, released the cameras, and started his search. He combed through hours of footage quickly, running the feed at ten-times speed, looking for Kitsune jumping from rooftop to rooftop.
He was about to give up when he caught sight of her, leaping through the air like an inky blackbird. He stopped the video, ran it back, and watched in total awe as the woman flew off the edge of the building, soared in an arc fifty feet wide, and landed in a boat below. Switching cameras, he saw her shoot out of the canal into the lagoon, bullets smashing into the water behind her. Adam whistled, low. He thought at first she’d been really lucky, then changed his mind. She was that good.
And it occurred to him. What he really needed to see was the man chasing her. He rewound the video and changed the camera angle, looked closely toward the area he assumed the bullets had come from. Sure enough, a face appeared at the edge of the building, watching Kitsune escape unscathed. Taking a screen grab of the face, Adam sent it to Gray to run, while he searched through the NGI database for the blonde.
It was a half an hour before the computer dinged. A match. But it wasn’t what he expected.
He’d struck gold.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Adam walked into the living room, a huge grin on his face. “Hey, kids, gather around. Daddy’s got a nice surprise.”
Some laughter, then Mike said, “What do you have for us kids, Daddy?”
“I found the blond woman Kitsune saw at the Topkapi. Nicholas, I’m sure glad you got your buddies in MI-5 to sync with us, because that’s where I found her—the MI5’s facial recognition database. Her name’s Lilith Forrester-Clarke.” He handed Kitsune a printed screen grab. “Is this the woman?”
