Private Monaco

Chapter 65

Mo-bot leaned back in her chair and stretched. They were still waiting for a response from Weaver, but she knew complex network analysis could take some time, so she wasn’t quite reaching the levels of frustration Jack had experienced hours ago.

She looked at the panorama visible through the picture windows. Jack and Justine were out there somewhere in the last rays of the afternoon sun, braving a city that seemed to have lost its mind over a motor race.

Mo-bot couldn’t blame Jack for being twitchy and impatient or for wanting to check Carver’s security. His feelings were those of a man dedicated to making the world a better, safer place.

Like Jack, she didn’t believe in coincidence, and Carver’s arrival in a city where Jack had faced attempted blackmail engineered to make him commit murder, combined with the corruption of Duval, a former government minister and friend of Carver, were an uncomfortable combination.

Sci was beside her, yet again going through the physical evidence they’d taken from Duval’s safe. Double- and triple-checking was Sci’s way of combating his impatience. Even though he seemed lost in concentration, revisiting each and every item from the safe, she knew he was desperate for progress. They all were. The waiting game was the worst part of being a detective.

“Well, this is a thing,” he said, turning to face her.

He was holding one of the passports they’d found in Duval’s safe, a fake Italian issue that contained Duval’s photograph but was made out in the name of Filippo Massimo.

“What?” Mo-bot asked.

“The biometric chip in this passport isn’t actually a bio chip.” He held out the relevant page for Mo-bot to see. “And look, the laminate comes away so you can access it.”

Sci demonstrated, raising the plastic page cover and taking the tiny silicon wafer from beneath it.

“I think it’s a phone SIM,” he said, studying it closely. “I can’t believe I missed it before.”

“It looks like a biometric,” Mo-bot replied. “We see what we expect to see. Let me take a look.”

He handed her the tiny wafer, which she inserted into a SIM reader connected to her workstation.

She opened a reader program and input some commands. Moments later the SIM’s data files appeared, showing two numbers that had been called using the card.

“Isn’t that Jack’s?” Sci asked.

Mo-bot nodded. “I bet if we check with him, the number of this card will match the one Duval used to call him and make the arrangements for his visit to Monaco.”

“What’s the other number?”

It was an American cell number and looked like a Chicago area code. Mo-bot ran the number through public directories and soon got a hit.

“Kendrick Stamp,” she said.

She pulled the public records for all the Kendrick Stamps in the Chicago area and only recorded a single hit.

“Looks like he was FBI, now retired,” Mo-bot remarked. “And Marine Corps before that.”

“Why would Duval call a former FBI agent?” Sci wondered.

Mo-bot switched windows to Amadeus GDS, one of the most widely used hotel reservation systems in the world. She accessed the database via a backdoor she’d created a few years ago to enable her to run queries. The NSA and other intelligence agencies had been able to interrogate hotel and airline reservation systems for decades, so she knew how useful such access could be. She did a search of hotel bookings in the name of Kendrick Stamp in the past three months and wasn’t surprised when she got a hit.

“He’s here,” Mo-bot revealed. “Or at least someone called Kendrick Stamp is staying at the Metropole.”

“You think he might be the other shooter Roman Verde was talking about? The backup plan?” Sci asked.

Jack had told them about Roman’s remark that a good general never relies on one plan.

Mo-bot shrugged. “The Metropole is ten minutes from here. You want to put on your walking boots?”