Colleen
When they neared the hotel, Colleen arranged herself in the suitcase again, just in casewhatever.
She rocked in the darkness as the limousine drove.
Jian’s voice called, “Keep driving. We will proceed to a different location.”
A few minutes later, Tristan unzipped the bag. “Two police cars were waiting outside the guest entrance. It was best not to take a chance.”
Colleen sat up, flipping the top of the suitcase back. “Well, damn.”
Jian said, “I can book another hotel, perhaps under a better pseudonym than Isolde Crowne.”
“Don’t you watchLaw and Order?”Colleen asked him. “The police will just track his credit cards.”
“Mr. King uses anonymous, disposable credit cards backed by cryptocurrency to pay for most travel expenses.”
Seriously?
“Wow. Secretive, much?” she asked Tristan.
He shrugged. “I use crypto for privacy reasons. Bitcoin, CurieCoin, Ethereum, the whole point of all of them is to evade authorities. I use it to avoid scrutiny. I don’t like people watching what I do and where I am.”
Colleen snorted, “Yeah, you wrote a whole computer program and set it loose on the internet so that facial recognition couldn’t track you. Have you ever had a social media account?”
“Not on the ones that don’t value your privacy.”
“Heh. Typical hacker.”
“Guilty.”
Her thoughts swirled and settled on what he’d said earlier. “But CurieCoin is different from the other ones, though. Bitcoin and Ethereum, yeah, those are just to move money around the black market, pay untraceable bribes, and to buy things with black-market dirty money. The whole point of CurieCoin was to tie up people’s money in GameShack’s streaming services and online video games, like company store money. It’s a total racket.”
Tristan lifted one side of his mouth in a smile. “Yeah, probably.” He turned back to Jian, shaking his head. “When they figure out we haven’t checked into this hotel, they’ll come looking for us. They’ll be looking for us at other hotels. And it’s eleven-thirty at night.”
Jian lowered his voice. “I can inquire at a lessappropriatelodging, Mr. King, but the security will be lesser there, too.”
There was an obvious answer to this conundrum, and Colleen fretted about it while Jian and Tristan debated the merits of different options for where to sleep that night, each worse and less suitable than the last. Jian worried about suitability and security. Tristan ran his hand through his hair with fatigue.
Finally, when she could stand the increasingly bad options no longer, Colleen squeezed her eyes shut and blurted, “We could go to my apartment.”
“Absolutely not,” Jian said, and Colleen nearly sighed with relief. “Surely, the police will be staking out her apartment. I assume it’s rented under your name,” he said to her. “It’s the least secure option.”
Colleen thought about it. “Yeah, it’s under myname,but I use a disposable debit card with a limit for the exact amount every month to pay the rent. Some people had problems with the management randomly tacking on fees and deducting them from their checking accounts. So if they’re tracking my credit cards or my bank accounts, it wouldn’t show up.”
“Typical hacker.” Tristan scratched at the dark five o’clock shadow on his chin. “We could at least check and see if there is a police presence outside. We were only able to put a few changes of clothes for each of us in your bag, Jian. Colleen could get new clothes to wear at her apartment.”
She had packed most of her decent clothes for the trip. “I suppose I have something in there,” she muttered.
Tristan continued, “And I’ll bet her Wi-Fi is secure.”
She perked up. “Oh, it is. I have a double-VPN network with black ice anti-hacking programs. I’ll bet evenyoucouldn’t hack my firewall.”
He grinned at her, but his smile was tired. “That’s right. A few nights ago, I tried to locate where QueenMod had sent that picture from because I was trying to convince myself that you, Colleen, couldn’t be the same person as QueenMod. The ISP number seemed to have originated from Phoenix rather than down the hall at the hotel. It was one of the reasons I didn’t put it together.”
Colleen chuckled.“Of course,I logged into my home VPN to send files. I mean,jeez.”
“I should have expected nothing less.” He lifted his head to speak to Jian. “And that is the best reason to at least try her apartment. If nothing else, the cybersecurity will be impeccable, and they won’t be able to find us merely by tracking our credit cards. Short of having a friend in town with a personal security force, Colleen’s apartment is our best option.”
