“He’s sent something,” Mo-bot said, clicking on a message that had just arrived on our secure server.
She opened the attachment and the screen filled with a map of Monaco, showing the route of a vehicle: the white van that had transported Justine, with timestamps of different locations in the city. There were inset photos of the van taken from traffic cameras and other municipal surveillance sources. Each photo was also timestamped and identified by location and device name. The final photo had been taken by a traffic camera near a police checkpoint at the edge of the city. It showed an officer searching the van, so either they’d hidden Justine somewhere in Monaco or they had a concealed compartment in the vehicle.
The timestamps of the van’s journey through the city from the abduction to the police checkpoint ruled out the vehicle stopping anywhere. I’d followed it for a large part of its journey and knew they hadn’t removed her, so I guessed she was hidden in a false ceiling or floor when it was searched. I was pained by the thought of a police officer being so close to finding her. I couldn’t bear to picture her captive and afraid, surrounded by enemies.
Mo-bot must have sensed my pain because she minimized the map and the photos.
“We’ve got a time and a location, Jack,” she said.
I knew she was deliberately being optimistic and trying to give me reason to hope.
“We can hit the streets and find out if anyone saw where the van went from there. I’ll get Weaver working on whether he can pull anything from the French side,” Mo-bot said.
I nodded. “I’ll ask Duval if he’ll partner with me. His local knowledge will be useful when we pound the streets. I want you and Sci to go to Monaco Police Headquarters. Beg, borrow, steal, call in every favor to get Sci access to their forensics lab. See if the biker’s clothes from the hotel or anything from the guy they have in custody can help narrow down a location.”
Mo-bot nodded and smiled, but it looked a little forced. “She’ll be okay, Jack. We’ll find her.”
I hoped she was right, and as long as there was hope, there was everything to play for.
Chapter 23
Sci was in his second-favorite place, a lab. His favorite place was his garage at home where he restored old motorbikes and the smell of grease, metal and two- and four-stroke combustion brought him to life. Labs were a close second though, and even this under-equipped example was a better place to be than the hotel suite, staring at a computer screen.
Sci didn’t know how Mo-bot did it. She never seemed to tire of her machines and didn’t even have the outlet of a hobby like his bikes to restore her. Mo-bot’s entire existence was devoted to the digital world. Sci was pretty sure that when Silicon Valley started to offer implanted computer chips, Mo-bot would be first in line to have one hooked up to her brain.
But he was happy for her. She had a vocation and, like him, had established herself as a world leader in her field.
It was Sci’s notoriety as a forensics specialist that had got him in the lab. Jack had phoned Valerie Chevalier and offered her Sci’s services as a consultant. He’d pressed hard and Valerie had agreed to ask her head of forensics, Pascal Garnier. She’d called back minutes later, accepting the offer.
Sci had written books, published papers and lectured on crime-scene investigations. He didn’t recall Garnier, but the man said they’d met briefly at a conference in Las Vegas. He was mid-fifties, quiet, thoughtful and so eager to please that he treated Sci like a celebrity, offering him free rein of the lab at Monaco police headquarters.
Sci wished he could have added some real value, but the lab was rudimentary, and any specialist work had to be sent to France, so he and Garnier were limited to reviewing the basics.
“Nothing off the guy’s prints?” Sci asked about the man they were holding in custody.
Garnier shook his head. “If he’s been arrested, we can’t find a record. And we’re not getting any results from his photo either.”
“Send it to me,” Sci replied. “We might be able to ID him.”
He was thinking about Weaver and the capabilities of the NSA, which would far outperform the resources of the Monaco police and Interpol. He rocked back on his swivel chair and put a supporting hand against a lab bench. They were surrounded by microscopes, chromatographs and spectroscopes but the place was missing things like fuming chambers, and Sci felt sad for Garnier because he would always be limited by his lab.
“Did you scope the guy’s clothes?” Sci asked.
Garnier hesitated, before shaking his head. “I didn’t,” he confessed. “I would only do that to place a murder victim or a—”
“Criminal at a crime scene,” Sci interrupted. “And where is the scene of an abduction, right?”
Sci understood why Garnier hadn’t examined the suspect’s clothes properly. Conventional thinking said they knew where the crime had taken place: over a relatively expansive area of the heart of Monaco. But Sci couldn’t rely on conventional thinking to find his colleague and friend.
Garnier hesitated again.
“Is it where the kidnap victim is taken? Or where they are held?” Sci smiled at him, like a professor trying to encourage a student to think outside the box. Clothes could reveal as much of a story as fingerprints. “A kidnapping is an ongoing crime. Scoping the perpetrator’s clothes might give us a clue as to the victim’s current location.”
Sci felt a little strange referring to Justine as a victim, because she was one of the last people he ever thought of in those terms, but it was an accurate word, and it kept his language from becoming personal and emotive in the company of another law-enforcement professional. For now, Justine was the victim of a crime, but hopefully not for much longer.
“You got some gloves?” Sci asked. “And a mask? Let’s gear up, get the suspect’s clothes and see what we can find.”
Chapter 24
We stood on the Avenue Pasteur a few yards from the street sign welcoming people to Cap d’Ail, signaling the almost invisible border between Monaco and France. There was no indication of separate nations, just a welcome to a new district. Monaco was not officially part of the borderless Schengen Area, but it had opened its borders anyway to facilitate frictionless travel. Technically, this spot on a narrow street flanked by terracotta-colored office and apartment buildings, running off a busy roundabout, opposite a small store selling building supplies, marked the point where two countries converged. The checkpoint had been established a short distance from the border, just after the roundabout.
I tried to imagine what Justine must have felt when the van was stopped by the cops at the hastily convened checkpoint. Video footage from a traffic camera mounted on a post on the corner of the street showed a Monaco police car blocking the narrow route and two officers checking vehicles leaving the city state.
Had Justine attempted to signal the cops? Had she even been conscious?
I’d watched the moment over and over again. One young police officer had approached the van and spoken to the driver. Like a football fan who thinks their hopes and prayers might alter the outcome of a slow-motion replay, I longed for the man to discover Justine when he opened the door to search inside. But the van had seemed to be empty. I knew from my own experiences in Moscow that it was relatively easy to conceal someone in a disguised compartment, and I’d put money on there having been a false bed in the van’s floor to circumvent any visual inspection.