The Hotel

You need to do some research before any more legwork (or dickwork) can be done. Back in the hotel room, you pull open your laptop and begin connecting to your organisation’s servers. The process takes a couple minutes, as you have to go through a personal router to a custom satellite and several layers of authentication on top of that, but in the meantime, you’re busy surfing the web.

Figuring out the gala that Natalia attended last month during Christmas is a piece of cake. The press seems to track that woman’s every move, and you click through a few articles that show pictures of prominent people eating and talking. In none of them do you see a hint of a Spanish looking person. That’s to be expected, since spies have a way of hiding from photographers, so you do the next best thing and log into Natalia’s email, the password supplied courtesy of the persuasion pill. You search through her inbox, and are relieved to see that she has not deleted what you need - the invitation and guest list to the gala.

You scan the list, and most of the names are notable enough that you recognise them off the cuff. You make a shorter list of names that are unfamiliar to you. It’s always tricky, working backwards through a list like this, because there are always going to be a couple of suspicious names that will require further investigation. You chuckle as you see a certain Jayson Bjorn on the list. The alias of an old friend turned enemy, Jayson shifted allegiances to the CIA a couple years back. It looks like he’s a step or two ahead of you, which is not unusual but still unsettling.

After crossing off all the prominent names, eliminating those who have cover stories that would be impossible for a spy to maintain, and then comparing faces to names that could potentially pass as Spanish, you’re thankfully left with a single name. Alejandro De Dios.

With your connection to the organisation up and running now, you enter the name into the search bar to generate a comprehensive data dump cross-referencing just about all the databases your organisation has access to. There are, unsurprisingly, a couple of hits under the alias (a cover wouldn’t be much of a cover if a search brought up nothing). Going through the relevant info, you toss out most of the information, which seems to be linked to a modestly successful shipping business that Alejandro “runs.” What does catch your eye is the lease for a warehouse in Moscow, a curious location for a business that deals exclusively in shipping. Not many bodies of water near there, and the place doesn’t look to be in an office neighbourhood. This smells like a safe-house or even a potential base of operations to you.

You spend a few more minutes checking sources and digging into backgrounds, but most, as expected, lead to dead ends. At this point, you have two options. You could go contact HQ, ask for more intel and back-up, and then move in on the location with a full team, or you could scout out the area yourself, and act on your information while the trail is as fresh as can be.

What do you do?