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“Tell them I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
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“I wasn’t here,” Teddy said. “And I have no idea who would want to break into my room. Sorry. I wish I could be of more help.”
“If you think of someone, we’d appreciate you letting us know.” The officer handed Teddy a business card.
“When can I get back into my room?”
“Let me check with our tech. I think he’s almost done.” The officer disappeared inside the suite, then returned a minute later with the crime scene tech in tow. “It’s all yours. Again, call us if you think of anyone.”
“I will.”
Teddy entered his suite, expecting the place to be a disaster. What he found, though, were a few dresser drawers hanging open and some clothes moved around, but that was it. It appeared Matthew’s intervention had stopped the intruder from finding anything of interest.
Teddy retrieved his laptop from where he kept it hidden under the living room bar. He logged onto the Santa Barbara Hills Hotel’s security system and accessed the stored video. Hacking into the system had been one of the first things he’d done after checking into the hotel. Hehadn’t expected trouble, but years of experience had taught him to prepare for anything.
It didn’t take him long to discover that the intruder must have been carrying a jamming device. Anytime the guy came within twenty feet of a camera, the video degraded to static.
Teddy was able to pull a semi-decent shot of the man from footage taken in the hotel lobby, though. It was good enough for him to positively identify the intruder as the man who’d been sitting at the bar when Teddy left earlier.
Clicking through the video, Teddy followed Matthew up to the suite. For the most part, it confirmed Matthew’s story. The only discrepancy occurred in the hall outside Teddy’s room.
The doors to the rooms at the Santa Barbara Hills Hotel were inset a good foot into the hallway walls. So, while the camera could see the entrance to the suite, the door itself was hidden from view.
According to Ben, Matthew said the door had been ajar, and he’d only needed to push it to enter the room. On the video, however, Matthew not only took longer at the door than Teddy expected, but he also removed something from his pocket prior to going inside. Perhaps the item was something Matthew thought he could use as a weapon. If Teddy saw him again, he’d ask.
From a secret compartment in his makeup case, Teddyretrieved a latent fingerprint kit, then searched his rooms for any prints the intruder might have left. The man must have been wearing gloves, though, because the only prints Teddy found were his own.
Whoever the intruder was and why he had wanted to search Teddy’s rooms were questions Teddy couldn’t answer. Not yet anyway. So he returned his focus to Rebecca’s kidnapping.
He retrieved the bag containing the thumb drive Novak had received, dusted it, and found four distinct prints.
Though it had been some time since Teddy had parted ways with the CIA, he still had a back door into its network. He uploaded the prints to it and started running them through the databases the Agency had access to.
While he waited for the results, he checked his email. As always, there were a lot of messages.
Among them was one from the film’s associate producer in charge of postproduction. She sent the same basic email every night containing links to footage of what had been shot that day. This included both what Peter was shooting for the film and behind-the-scenes footage for promotional purposes.
According to what Matthew told Ben, the intruder had been posing as a guard on set that day. It took Teddy only a few minutes of scrolling through the behind-the-scenes footage to find shots of him. They were muchbetter images than the one the security camera caught in the hotel lobby.
After capturing several screenshots, he connected back to the CIA server and uploaded the clearest picture of the man to the facial recognition search engine. He then checked to see if there had been any hits on the fingerprints.
As he’d suspected, two of the prints belonged to Carl Novak. The other two did not, however. But they did belong to someone whose prints were on file with the Citizenship and Immigration Service.
“Well, well, well.”
32
“Wait here until I give you the okay,” Teddy whispered, then crept across the dark room.
His hair was slicked back, and he had a scar on his cheek that peeked out from under the sunglasses he wore, even though it was night. They were part of the look he’d created for Billy’s fictional “contact.”
When he reached the sleeping form on the bed, he grabbed the man’s shoulder and gave it a hard shove.
“Rise and shine, Mr. Vulin.”
The Novaks’ estate manager’s eyes popped open as he jolted awake. At the sight of Teddy looming over him, he jerked again.
