Tel Aviv
Kruger? Where are you?”
Inside the software lab on the second floor of the SON Group’s offices in Tel Aviv, Israel, fourteen hundred miles from Italy, Luca Borgia’s voice rang out from the high-performance Piega loudspeakers.
“Utram Road. Standing in front of the Singapore Metropolitan Detention Center.”
“Sounds like they’re next door,” said Isaac.
“Quiet.” Danni patted Isaac on the back and pulled up a stool to sit beside him and Dov.
She’d counted on Luca Borgia to be a responsible businessman, and Borgia did not disappoint her. Minutes after receiving his May billing statement (nine days early), he had opened it, presumably scanned the contents, and saved it to his personal files. The Pegasus spyware was set free. For the past hours Danni and the combined team of the SON Group had been making a deep dive into Luca Borgia’s world.
For all intents and purposes, she might have been holding Luca Borgia’s phone in her hand. At her whim, she could access any app on it without the need for a pesky user name or password. In the parlance of spies, she “owned” him.
Borgia’s image was displayed on a color monitor mounted on the wall. He had placed his phone in a dashboard holder, and she could see him in his camel-hair jacket and pink shirt, his forehead fairly glistening with perspiration. She also knew his location to the nearest fifty centimeters as relayed to SON by the Global Positioning System that formed the heart of his Maps app.
A second monitor showed a map indicating his current location—traveling along Autostrada E35 in Central Italy. Thanks to the Maps app, they also knew that his home was the Castello dell’Aquila, the location where he parked his car most nights.
“What the hell happened?”Borgia demanded.
“Riske.”
“You said he was finished. I believe your words were ‘fish food in the Gulf of Thailand.’”
“He must have big lungs.”
“I don’t see anything amusing about this situation.”
“You had to be there.”
Isaac put the call on a five-second delay. “The other one, Kruger…Dutch?”
“South African,” said Danni, who had an ear for accents. “Not Afrikaans. A native, I’d say. A tribesman.”
Isaac turned off the delay. Once again, they were live inside Borgia’s phone.
“Listen to me,”said Borgia.“Hadrian Lester is dead. He took a dive off the top of a hotel right in front of my sister.”
“On his own?”
“Apparently. Suicide.”
Danni recognized Lester’s name from the emails De Bourbon had stolen from PetroSaud.
“It’s him,”said Kruger.“Riske. He saved the reporter.”
“General Teck Koo said you killed a seventy-year-old hawker. I told you to keep things nice and neat.”
“It couldn’t be helped.”
“You said the same about Bangkok. That turned into a bloodbath.”
“It couldn’t be helped.”Kruger’s irritation was evident, as was Borgia’s.
“So you say. Well, at least you have the flash drive.”
“When I tracked down Riske, he was in an Internet lounge. The flash drive was inserted in his laptop. It would be wise to assume he downloaded some, if not all, of its contents.”
