The screen on Bronson’s laptop suddenly changed, the screensaver vanishing as a Skype call came in.
‘At last,’ Bronson said. ‘That must be Billy.’
Bronson answered the call, and asked if the youthful hacker had found out anything useful.
‘I managed to pull some data, yes,’ Billy replied, ‘but it wasn’t easy. I had to run the hacking software through a bunch of proxies so nobody would be able to trace it back to me, and that slowed everything down. The good news is that if any of the Spanish security people decide to run a back-trace to try to find me, the trail will stop in Vienna. I thought that was kind of appropriate, Vienna being full of spies during the Cold War.’
Billy chuckled at his own joke for a moment, then got down to the business at hand.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘the phone number you asked me to investigate, the one that seems to belong to this guy Pere. The records only start from a few days ago, and he’s used it quite a bit, and from a bunch of different places in Madrid, so I guess he’s been out and about, probably looking for the two of you.’
‘That makes sense,’ Bronson replied.
‘You gave me a time, or a rough time anyway, when you wanted me to nail down his location, and that’s one of the places where he seems to spend quite a bit of time. I can’t be absolutely specific about where that is. It’s not anywhere near the centre of Madrid, so there are fewer masts to use for triangulation. But I’ve been able to pinpoint the spot to within about thirty metres.’
‘That’s brilliant, Billy. I’m ready to copy if you can read the location to me.’
‘With all this technology at your disposal,’ Billy scoffed, ‘you’re still using a paper and pencil? I’ve already sent the location to you. You’ll find it in your “My documents” folder on your hard drive. I’ve called the file “Bad guy”. If you want my guess, I think it’s probably a warehouse or an office on some kind of industrial estate, because of its position. It’s called Paracuellas de Jarama, and it lies pretty much halfway between the Barajas International Airport and the Torrejón Airport, and they’re both out to the north-east of Madrid.’
‘That’s excellent work, Billy,’ Bronson said. ‘I’ll make sure I see you as soon as I get back to England to settle up with you.’
‘You just do what you’ve got to do out there, my friend. I’m in no hurry. Oh, and the last time I ran the check through the system, the guy you’re looking for — or at least his mobile — was still at that location.’
76
‘So what do we do now?’ Angela asked. ‘Have you had any good ideas?’
Bronson didn’t reply for a few moments, just stared at the map of Madrid.
‘Right now, Angela, I don’t know what’s a good idea and what isn’t. But I do know that striking early is generally a good tactic. Think about it from the other side of the problem for a moment. The people who are trying to kill you and recover the parchment absolutely know that they’ve got us on the run. OK, there was a bit of a fiasco as far as they were concerned at the café. Unfortunately for them, I was there as well. But that didn’t really even slow them down. They tracked us to our hotel and sent along another hitman to finish off the job. We were lucky, because we’d already left the room and were on our way to the car when he identified us.’
He paused for a moment and glanced at Angela.
‘Given that all that’s happened today, I’m prepared to bet that the bad guys are still out combing the streets of Madrid looking for us, and they’ll be doing their best to make sure that we can’t leave the city. They’ll have a watch in place inside both the airports, and at the main railway station, and they’ll be looking out for the first sign that we’re on the move. In other words, they’ll be doing whatever they can to lock the city down tight, and they seem to have the resources necessary to achieve that.’
‘So you mean that if we try to go anywhere, they’ll find us?’ Angela asked.
But Bronson shook his head.
‘Not necessarily. My guess is that they’ll be expecting us to try to leave town. But they don’t know about Billy the Kid, and what he managed to do with a wireless network, a laptop computer, a handful of programs and some pretty dammed awesome hacking skills. They won’t have any idea that we know where they are. And even if they did have the slightest inkling of that, I think the last thing they would expect us to do is take the game to them.’
‘Attack is the best form of defence?’
‘Exactly. I think we should get out to this location that Billy managed to identify for us’ — Bronson tapped the map for emphasis — ‘and see what we can do there. At the very least,’ he finished, ‘that’ll be the last place in Madrid where they’ll be looking for us.’
Angela glanced at her watch.
‘Just one question,’ she said. ‘How do we get out there?’
‘I’m not sure we should be going anywhere. I’d far rather you stayed in the hotel. They can’t possibly have found out that we’re staying here, so you’d be safe.’
Angela shook her head.
‘I’ll make this really simple for you,’ she said. ‘If you’re going out, then so am I. There’s no way I could just sit here in this hotel room waiting for a knock on the door, hoping it’s you and dreading that it isn’t. And if you don’t come back, then what the hell would I do? No, if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it together, whether you like it or not.’
Sometimes wisdom lies in recognizing a fait accompli when you see one. Bronson knew that Angela was one of the most determined people he had ever met. And, in truth, in many ways he would rather that she was with him — in previous sticky situations she’d always proved a competent partner.
‘OK, if that’s what you want,’ Bronson said.
‘It is. So how do we get out there? Use the hire car?’
‘We’re not going anywhere near that car. If we drive around in that there’s a good chance we’ll be spotted by one of the bad guys out looking for us, or maybe even stopped by the police, because that car’s missing two windows and there’s a gouge in the roof where I scraped it when we drove out of the hotel garage. We’ll have to hire another one.’
‘Right then,’ Angela said. ‘Let’s go. What about the parchment and our stuff?’
Bronson glanced round the room.
‘I think we have to leave it here. There’s no paper trail linking us to this hotel or this room, so it should be safe enough. And we’ll need to come back here afterwards.’
Bronson spent a couple of minutes using a cheap multitool he’d bought at Madrid airport to remove the plastic side panel from the bath, and then Angela slid the metal-lined briefcase into the space this revealed. Bronson replaced the panel and then fiddled about with some oversized paperclips he took from his computer case, bending them into different shapes.
‘And they are?’ Angela asked, as he slid them into his pocket.
‘Door keys, of a sort. Just some rudimentary lock-picks in case they’re not obliging enough to have left a door open for me.’
Finally, he checked the Beretta pistol. It was the M92 model in nine-millimetre Luger, the end of the barrel threaded to take a GemTech Trinity suppressor. Bronson checked the magazine.
‘Definitely a professional,’ he murmured.
‘What?’
Bronson showed her the magazine.
‘This holds fifteen rounds,’ he said, ‘and the man who shot at you fired twice, but there are fourteen bullets left. That means he fully loaded the magazine, then chambered the first round, took out the magazine and placed another round in it. So he had one round in the breech and ready to fire, and a full magazine in the butt. That’s the mark of a professional. You were very lucky.’