He moved back to the party, and, after giving us a pitying smile, Henry joined him. The Secret Service detail shifted to a new formation around their principal, leaving Justine and me behind.
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?”
Chapter 66
Mo-bot phoned Jack as they were leaving the apartment building, but the call went to voicemail so she left a message.
“Seymour and I are going to check out a lead. Kendrick Stamp at the Metropole. Details are on my computer.”
“Would you look at all this?” Sci remarked, when she hung up.
He gestured at the street around them, which was thronged with people and clogged by near-stationary traffic. Monaco had surrendered itself to festivities and was full of noise and energy that intensified with each passing minute. Maybe it was just perception, or their direction of travel, which took them toward the heart of the city, but the music seemed to grow louder, the laughter wilder, and the chatter more frenetic with each step they took.
“It’s too much for me,” Mo-bot confessed.
“I prefer two wheels to four,” Sci said, referring to his love of big motorcycles. “But these cars are some of the most sophisticated pieces of engineering on the planet. What we’re witnessing is really a celebration of math and science.”
A group of men further along the street cheered loudly. One of them was wearing a jester’s hat with Formula One cars hanging from the points in place of the usual bells.
“A celebration of math and science?” Mo-bot said dryly. “Okay.”
It took less than ten minutes to reach the Metropole, a colonial mansion-style hotel that stood six stories high. Arched windows, imperial columns, Roman statues and manicured gardens all spoke to the grandeur of the city’s ancient past, but the hotel, located just off the Avenue de Grande Bretagne, somehow managed to feel modern and fresh.
Mo-bot and Sci crossed a cobblestone courtyard, passed a decorative fountain and went inside. They moved through the grand lobby, which featured a magnificent atrium and giant skylight, to reach the elevators.
Mo-bot’s search of the reservation system told them Kendrick Stamp was in room 408, so they took one of the cars to the fourth floor and stepped into a quiet corridor, which reminded Mo-bot of a first-class train carriage. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling at regular intervals, and bench seats set in alcoves lined the walls. A vase of fragrant lilies had been placed in between each pair of doors on both sides of the corridor, filling the air with their heavy scent. The thick carpet felt so soft and luxurious, Mo-bot had the urge to take off her shoes and walk it barefoot.
They found room 408 a short distance from the elevator, and could hear a TV playing CNN through the door.
Sci knocked. The TV was switched off almost immediately.
“Yeah?” a man asked through the closed door.
“Kendrick Stamp?” Mo-bot replied. “We’d like to talk to you, please.”
The spyhole darkened for a few seconds before the door opened a short way, restrained from going any further by the chain.
The man who peered through the gap looked haunted. He had dark shadows around his eyes, days of grown-in stubble, and the dry lips of someone who had spent too long inside an air-conditioned room. He wore a white vest and jeans and was barefoot.
“Who are you?” Stamp asked.
“Maureen Roth and Seymour Kloppenberg. We work for Private—”
“The detective agency?” Stamp interrupted. “I’ve heard of you. I was at the Bureau until a few months ago. Medical retirement.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Sci said.
“It is what it is.”
“Why are you in Monaco, Mr. Stamp?” Mo-bot asked, and he stiffened slightly.