Private Berlin (Private 5)

Mattie frowned, feeling strange and then hollow when Chris went to the woman and embraced her, pressing his cheek to hers and rubbing her back.

“Who is she?” Mattie managed.

“I don’t know,” Gabriel replied, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “But I did see her come out of his office about an hour after these images were taken. I also heard him say that he would look into something for her and there would be no charge. They hugged again. She left.”

Morgan said, “Can you go into Chris’s files, find out who she is?”

“With your permission, Jack,” Gabriel replied.

“Granted,” Morgan said.

Gabriel typed again. He paused, seemed puzzled, and typed again. “That’s odd,” he muttered.

“What?” Mattie asked, leaning over to see the scientist’s screen.

The old hippie was typing again. “This should do it.”

But instead of Schneider’s digital file folders, Gabriel’s screen was filled with bright pink, emerald, and black pixels that seemed to shift and move and crawl over one another, as if they were alive.

“What the hell is that?” Gabriel said, shocked and staring at the screen.

“What’s going on, Doc?” Morgan demanded.

Gabriel mumbled in disbelief, “I think we’ve been hacked.”

Up on the big screen, Morgan looked perplexed and then angered. “That’s impossible,” he sputtered. “I just spent millions upgrading the security system. Gabriel, you were part of that effort.”

The computer scientist held up his hands in surrender. “I was, Jack. But I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s like someone dumped thousands of termites into Chris’s work area. They’ve eaten all the data.…”

Katharina Doruk interrupted, “I thought you once told me that you can always bring back echoes of files, Doc.”

“Not this time,” he replied. “Whoever did this was good, Kat. Scary good.”

Morgan looked furious, but said: “We’ll deal with this breach later. Between the hacking and the cases he was working on, I think we’ve got cause enough to activate Chris’s chip. Do it, Doc.”

Mattie nodded her agreement with Morgan’s decision, but she felt agitated by questions that suddenly shot at her from all sides.

Who hacked the system? Why? What if it’s a coincidence? What if this is separate and Chris is off on a vacation he decided to extend? What if we find him there with another woman? Should I care?

I do.

But should I?

“Give me a minute, Jack,” Gabriel said, entering a command that stripped his screen of the brilliant termites.

He typed in a second command and his screen filled with a long list of names. He scrolled down to Chris Schneider’s, and then highlighted a corresponding series of numbers and letters.

After making a copy of that code, Gabriel called up an application called Sky Eye. He entered the code into a blinking box and hit Enter.

Half of the amphitheater’s screen jumped to a Google Earth view of Berlin. Mattie was first to spot the blinking orange icon out on the far eastern outskirts of the city, several kilometers south of the neighborhood of…

“Ahrensfelde?” Mattie said, puzzled. “Can you bring us in, Doc?”

Gabriel was already ahead of her. He highlighted the blinking icon and hit Enter. The picture zoomed down and in, revealing the blurry image of a building in the shape of an L. It had an arched roof that looked broken in places.

Dense vegetation pressed in around the place, which abutted a large undeveloped space choked with trees and brush.

“Cross-reference it with the city plan,” Mattie said.