—Just landed. Where are you?—
—In London?—
—No, on the moon. Of course London.—
—Okay. I’m on my way to check out of current rental. Moving to a new one. Meet me there?—
—Sounds good. I’m starving.—
—I’ll get takeout on the way.—
I sent her the address of the party villa and put my phone away. I was glad Ashna had finally arrived. I was going to need her help tracking down Dworkin. I asked the driver to wait outside the house in Kensington while I ran up the stairs and grabbed the few things I had left there. As soon as I entered, though, I realized I had forgotten about one major issue. Belka looked up at me from the couch and gave me a meow that could only be interpreted as: ‘Where the hell have you been? My bowl is empty.’ I had, improbably, become attached to this cat. It seemed he had become attached to me too. I had a small tote bag with me that folded down and zipped into a little square. I often carried it when traveling in case I needed to bring anything large back home. I opened it up and placed it on the couch next to Belka. He stood up and gave it a sniff. I lifted him into the bag and he stood there, looking up at me.
“You’re not going to like this. Apologies in advance,” I said and pulled the zipper closed. Muffled, plaintive meows began to emerge from inside the bag, sounding simultaneously betrayed and pissed off. “It’s just for a little while,” I said. “You’ll be roaming around the fancy house and peeing on the couch legs in no time.”
Ashna was already waiting when the taxi pulled up in front of the townhouse. I crawled out of the capacious rear of the hackney and hugged her.
“Good to see you. I have a lot of stuff to carry.”
“What took you so long? And what is all this crap?” Ashna complained, picking up the bag of takeout. “And what’s in this bag? My stomach wants to know.”
“Curry takeout.”
“British curry? You know that’s not real Indian food, right? It’s mildly spicy casserole.”
“I’m sure you’ll eat it anyway. Grab that bag too.”
“Oof, heavy. Cat litter! Why do you have cat litter?” Ashna hefted the bag and we climbed the three steps to the front door of the townhouse.
“Long story,” I answered, looking up the code on my phone and punching it into the keypad on the door. The lock clicked open and I pushed inside. “I have a cat now. A proper English cat.”
Inside, the house was every bit as luxe as it had appeared in the photos. The style reminded me of every millionaire tech bro’s loft I had ever had the misfortune to visit. There were hard surfaces everywhere with contrasting textures—brick, concrete, stainless steel, wood. The furniture was dark and low. The lighting was industrial.
“I feel like I got on an airplane, circled around for many hours, then landed right back in San Francisco.”
“Yeah. Our city’s desultory contribution to interior design has finally made it across the Atlantic. Anyway, it’s close to Jutting’s house. We can see his driveway from here,” I said, holding a heavy curtain aside and looking down the block. “Not that that matters anymore probably.”
“Sounds like you need to fill me in. But first, someone needs to let the cat out of the bag, both literally and figuratively.”
Belka meowed with an increasing fury. I unzipped the duffle and he hopped out immediately. He froze on the hardwood, sniffed, looked around, and began exploring.
“Nice looking cat. He’s a thick boy.” Ashna crouched down and ran a hand over Belka’s back.
I’m going to set up his litter box in a bathroom,” I said. “You can unpack the takeout.”
Twenty minutes later we were sitting on stools at a black marble breakfast bar eating curry.
“So, occult nerd has the notes now?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“That guy sounds like he’s all thrust and no vector. But I guess that’s useful in some circumstances. And the St. Martin character didn’t have any backups?”
“He did have a backup on an external hard drive but Dworkin took that too. At least that’s what he said.”
“Hmmm. So we need to track down Dworkin. I might be able to find out where he is by his cell phone. If I remember right, he has a cheap android phone. I have a fun hack I’ve been wanting to try.”
“Fun?”
“Fun for me Justin. Ordinary people would not understand the fun to be had compromising an unsuspecting oaf’s electronic devices.”
“How do you know he has an android phone?”
“I was in his email and all his accounts, including his cellular service account,” Ashna said, pulling a laptop from her backpack. “It’s simple. I craft a PNG image file containing malicious code. There’s a bug in the open source image library they use to display PNGs. I can use the vulnerability to execute my code and take over his phone. He’ll never even know his phone is hacked.”
“Then you can triangulate his location.”
“Trilaterate actually. GPS uses trilateration to measure distances, not angles. But yeah, more or less. I can actually just get his GPS coordinates from the phone.”
“How do you get him to open the image?”
“Hmmm. I’ll email it to him. Think of a subject line that will hook him.”
“How about The Miracle Big Pharma Doesn’t Want You to Know About!”
Ashna frowned. “No jokes please. We need something that won’t get spam filtered.”
“Okay. How about Dark Magic and the Elders of Zion, Shocking New Book Proves Existence of Global Conspiracy!”
“That might actually work,” Ashna said, looking up from her screen.
Chapter 17
Trilaterating Dworkin
July 4: London and Powick
I woke the next
