Fuck, yeah!
That means I have an assignment waiting for me.
Not one of these bullshit cover assignments, either.
I mean an actual field op instead of simply gathering intel. It’s been too damned long since a good, juicy assignment’s been dropped in my lap. I was beginning to think they were trying to give me a not-so-subtle hint that they wanted to put me out to pasture and get me to take my retirement without actually forcing me to resign or having to fire me.
I delete the message and swipe into the phone’s settings to factory reset it. That’ll have to do until I can get out of here and dispose of the thing. I pop out its SIM card and snap it between my fingers, then flush that down the toilet.
I can’t just duck out of this meeting, though. If I do, it’ll look suspicious.
Mainly because my “company” was the one who set it up in the first place, to work with this bot farm about running some algos to try to decipher things Amazon’s been doing as of late, to see if we can piece together a better picture of Amazon’s AI.
I mean, that’s my cover story.
I was mostly scoping out this company because we’re pretty sure they’re behind a metric shit-ton of disinfo traffic that crops up on various social media platforms during every US election.
It’s over an hour before I can finally get out of there after declining his offer to take me out to dinner. I claim that my breakfast hasn’t been agreeing with me and return to my hotel room. There, I use another burner I’d left in my suitcase to hook into a VPN and check a disposable e-mail account.
That gives me a four-digit number, which I memorize before deleting the message, emptying the trash folder, and then deleting the account.
I already know the country code, area code, and three-digit prefix. Those are fixed.
The last four digits give me the full phone number I’ll need to call within twenty-four hours.
Lucky for me, I can get a flight out to Budapest two hours from now instead of having to wait for my original flight to Paris tomorrow morning.
* * * *
The flat I use as a safehouse in Budapest looks untouched when I let myself in. None of the tells I left the last time I visited here four months ago have been disturbed, and a quick sweep of it shows it’s still bug-free. It’s one of several refuges I have sprinkled around Europe. Not even my handlers know about it—or most of the other safehouses I own.
Hey, if they’re stupid enough to pay me in black money, I’m smart enough to put it to good use.
But here I have supplies and privacy and can check in without worrying about the prevalent sniffers that are everywhere in the Ukraine and Russia. I grab a burner and set out across the city on foot so I’m not hitting the cell towers closest to the safehouse when I make the call using a secure messaging app.
The call is connected, but no one speaks.
“Excelsior,” I say.
“Hold,” a man replies.
A moment later, the call is connected. “Where are you?” Rich asks. That’s not his real name, but that’s what I call him. He’s my official handler, which likely means this assignment isbig. I rarely hear from him in person unless it’s an off-the-books wet-work op being handed down straight from top brass.
I’m eager to jump into it, whatever it is. I’m fucking bored out of my mind lately, and bored agents are dead agents.
“Budapest.” Hell, lying about that when they could track me through my fake passport is stupid and will make them want to take a closer look at my movements. They know I frequently use Budapest as a jump-off point for missions in this region.
“Perfect. Here’s your dossier number…”
An hour later, after downloading the info to my secured tablet, shutting down the burner, and wandering around the city—including getting myself some dinner because I’m fucking starving—I have convinced myself I’m not being tailed and I return to my safehouse.
If they look for me, they’ll find a hotel reservation over by the airport, which is where the cell towers will ping my phone’s location from when I called. Obviously, I’m not there. But it needs to look like I’ve got a place to lay my head while I’m here or they’ll start looking closer at me and my movements.
Again, the whole “I don’t want to attract the bad kind of attention” thing.
While I’m excited to get started, the more I read about this assignment…
The more questions I have.
