Unable to meet today. Apologies.
No. It wasn’t from Sabban. It was to Sabban. From her.
As she stared at the words she definitely hadn’t typed, a shiver raced along her spine and the little hairs on her arms stood at attention.
She hadn’t texted Sabban. So who had?
“What is it?” Olivia asked.
She shook her head instead of answering and checked her message history. The text to Sabban was there, timestamped at 11:47 a.m. Sent from her phone.
At 11:47, she and Olivia were in the American Cathedral in Paris’s courtyard. And her phone was in her pocket.
She had not sent this message.
“Here,” she croaked, her throat suddenly dry and sandy, as she thrust her mobile at Olivia.
In the space of a heartbeat, Olivia narrowed her eyes in confusion, then widened them in alarm.
“Someone hacked your phone.”
She powered it down, removed the battery and SIM card, and did the same with her own phone. Then she wrapped everything in the aluminum foil from the champagne bottle sitting in the ice bucket.
“Makeshift Faraday cage,” Olivia explained. “Not perfect, but it’ll block most signals.”
“Someone sent a message from my phone while I was carrying it.” Marielle thought it through. “Remote access?”
Olivia nodded. “Could be. If someone installed spyware on your phone, they could be sending messages, making calls, activating the camera and microphone.”
Marielle curled in on herself, violated. How long had someone been watching her? Listening to her conversations with Omar?
“When’s the last time you downloaded anything?” Olivia asked. “An app, a file, anything?”
Marielle thought back. “I haven’t. This is the phone Jake gave me at the airport. It’s clean.”
“But it’s not. Either it was compromised when you got it or ….” She trailed off.
“Or someone accessed it while I was carrying it around.” Marielle suppressed a shiver and raced through the implications. “If they have access to my phone, they have access to everything. My contacts. My messages with Omar. My location data.”
“Which means they know we’re at the Plaza Athénée,” Olivia confirmed. “And they know we’re planning to meet Sabban and Hanna.”
“If they want to grab Hanna, why would they send a message cancelling the meeting?”
Before Olivia could respond, a knock sounded at the door. Marielle’s hand moved to her weapon.
“Housekeeping,” a female voice called first in English, then in French.
Marielle arched an eyebrow. Housekeeping? It was such a well-worn trick it had become a cliché.
They moved to flank the door again. Olivia checked the peephole.
“There’s a cart,” she whispered. “For what that’s worth.”
“Not much,” Marielle whispered back. “But surely a place like this wouldn’t let randoms wander around. Especially not to this floor. They’d need the special key card.”
They held each other’s gaze for a moment, then Olivia shrugged and cracked the door open, keeping the chain engaged.
Through the narrow opening, Marielle saw a young woman in a hotel uniform standing in the hallway with a laundry cart.
