Interlude B: No Fighting in the War Room

You and I? We’re going to dance, baby, and we all know who’s gonna drop the ball first. It’s gonna be you, you fucking drop-out.

He snaps his fingers as he paces around the wide conference table, steady clicks matching his steady thoughts. Half a dozen men and women are seated around the table. Three of them are arguing over some blurry stills projected onto the wall, the ex-FBI girl disagreeing heavily with the ex-Interpol ones on whether the gait matches Markus’. She is right, but it will be good for the others to learn that without him stepping in.

Two of the men are typing furiously on their laptops, one cross-referencing some databases that he should technically have no access to, the other one deploying a freshly trained facial recognition system on a backdoor that they have into Instagram’s image archives. The last one is poring over a spread of documents spanning half the table.

On the far wall of the war room hangs a large map of the world, placed next to a larger map of the continental United States and a map of New York City. There are about a hundred pins stuck across the three maps: tips, leads, hunches, almost all of which will turn out to be wrong.

Is this overkill?

Probably. But Inspector Vidocq has been waiting for this moment for as long as he’s had this trumped up name: twenty agonising years. He’s sometimes had his regrets, turning down multiple offers from agencies around the world to double- and even triple-agent for them, but he’d needed the cash from the Boss at the time. The boring job of keeping the Boss’ son on a tight leash was the right call for that moment, but not the many quiet ones that followed.

His phone buzzes. He picks it up on the first dial, noting the name. The Boss’ big wife.

“How’s progress looking on D.C.?”

The feminine voice at the other end has a straight elite British snipe to it, with just the faintest hint of a Korean accent. Hyerim’s been calling him close to every hour, demanding updates. They’ve made good progress—his team is very sharp—but she’s still not happy for not having found the boy by day two.

“We’re pretty sure it’s a dead end, that it was one of his homeless friends in the rental car,” Vidocq replies. “Cameras in the garages at both ends of the journey show only him entering and exiting, and the car was sitting in the New York garage for long enough that Markus almost certainly can’t have gotten into it. We can press charges though—on the homeless man, Jericho, for identity theft, though he seems to have disappeared…”

“We don’t draw attention to this,” Hyerim says, cutting him off. “Otherwise, we’d have run to the press immediately. Could the camera footage have been doctored?”

“Can’t be certain yet, ma’am, but we’ve sent it to an outside team for review. They should have results soon,” he says. “But remember, Markus didn’t have resources when he left. He was practically penniless!"

“The longer they take, the further he gets,” Hyerim says. “Keep on at it. Are there any other resources you’d need from us? My husband is anxious.”

Words you never want to hear.

“I would increase surveillance around the other members of your family, ma’am,” Vidocq says. “I’ve mentioned this to you and your husband before, but I don’t like the coincidences in Scarlet and Jessica’s…”

“They’re being monitored, alongside the other daughters now. We’re starting to cut Mr. Samuel out of the loop at your advice. He looks clean to us,” Hyerim says, “but perhaps it is time we found ourselves a new Outside Man.”

“A good call, ma’am,” he says. “We’re currently working on—”

A sharp knock sounds at the doors to the conference room. The ex-FBI girl, Irene, holds up her left hand (she’s lacking a right), cutting off the other agents. She checks the door and opens it up a second later.

Two of Vidocq’s associates, PIs that he’s hired to do some groundwork, come marching in with an angry looking blonde stomping in behind them.

“Who’s this?” Irene asks, frowning at the lot.

“That’s Lizzie Kestrel,” Vidocq says, the phone still up to his ear. “I think she might have a thing or two to share with us.”