15. scourge of the Red Dragon

Ms. Draghôné stared the scientist deep in the eyes, as they waited for Alvin to arrive.  The intensiveness was so overwhelming — her gaze so menacing — Otto quickly broke eye contact from fear and looked at the floor, then reflexively glanced back at the pool, and Barry dead on the bottom; he could only look at Barry for 2 or 3 seconds, then fear forced him to look back at the ground, and close his eyes.  His body stiffened even more, and his legs began to tremble ever so slightly; then his jaw.  Only about 45 seconds later, Alvin came and escorted Otto Boch out of the hot-spring pool room.

She pressed the button on her chair’s arm and spoke “Elvin, come up here and retrieve Barry’s cell-phone before the hot water gets to it.”

She pressed another button on her chair’s arm and spoke “Smithers, come to the hot-spring immediately.”

A few second later the arm spoke back “I’m finishing the cloning process, but I’ll stop and come now.”

She pressed the button again “No, finish.  Then come.”

She pressed another button on her chair’s arm and spoke “Vincent, come to the hot-spring immediately.”

Less than a minute later, the round, black floor section dropped down and Elvin rode the white-tiled floor section elevator up to the hot-spring pool room.  He had a mobile, wheeled cherry-picker crane with him and he used it to pull Barry out of the pool, and found the cell phone in Barry’s pocket.

Meanwhile, Smithers had arrived, and began talking with Ms. Draghôné, as Elvin worked on retrieving Barry from the pool.

“How long will it take you to retrieve the data off the phone?”

“Well, we identified it as an iPhone when he came in, so it likely will withstand the submersion, even with the hot water, since Elvin is getting it out here momentarily.  We won’t have to battle with the hardware being damaged.  And the new package developed in Israel by Palantir will hack into it within a minute or so.  We just have to dry it fully.  We can blow-dry it.  So, maybe less than an hour from now?  But if the hardware is damaged, we will likely have to desolder the chipsets and hack them manually.  Perhaps a day, two at the most.  Worst comes to worst, we already have the phone I.D. now, so we can get historic info from the network logs.  Again, a day at most, but it won’t necessarily be as detailed.”

Vincent arrived as Smithers spoke, and he walked over next to Smithers, as they both looked up at Ms. Draghôné on her platform.

Ms. Draghôné said to Smithers “Fine.  Get the data, find the numbers of Barry’s personal team and security team; search the records of all their phones, and their contacts, and the contacts contacts, until you find the phone number of that whore who compromised Barry’s meeting.  And I want to know her name.  Use the new Sally assistant.”

“Yes, ma’am.  Using A.I. was what I was thinking, also.”

“Once you find her number, I want to know everything you can find about her, her friends, her contacts — I want to know where she buys her socks!  Everything.  Search her friends’ activities around the day of the breach.  They must have helped her get away.  I want a complete mapped network of calls and contacts.  We know she left her phone at the tower.  What phone did she use to get away?  Find it.  Hack it and make it our ears and eyes.  Find her.”

She looked at Vincent from her vulturous perch.  “Once Smithers supplies you with the info you need, go find this whore and eliminate her.  And everyone she is with.  All her friends.”

“Yes ma’am.”

========= later that day ==========

The speaker chimed and Ms. Draghôné pressed the button.  “We have the dataset.  We analyzed it, and I should come explain to you.”  He was hoping to see her in her swimsuit again.

“Fine.  Come.  I’m eating.”  She poked at her food with no expression on her face.

Smithers rode the elevator to the upper level and walked to the dining room where Ms. Draghôné sat alone, eating.  “We know who she is, where she lives, who her friends are.  But that line ends.  However, we analyzed her friends, and one received a call shortly after the breach at the Tower.  We traced that to a cab driver.  We got the historical Geolocation data from that phone — it was close, it had been manually erased, but the memory trace itself was still present on the drive — and we were able to derive a likely location, a home, where we think the cab dropped her off in Eastern upstate New York.  From there, we were able to identify thirteen phones that we could Geo-locate, using cell-phone tower signal strength to triangulate their positions, that reside near that home, plus another four that are there now, but not usually.  We analyzed their traffic, and one just had a phone call today, just earlier this morning, from an American phone in Mexico.  That phone never had any calls from Mexico before.  We think that location is tied to her, or at least contains clues.  We installed ears and eyes on that phone, and we are working to get into the Mexican phone, and triangulate its position if there are enough towers in the area, but the network is clogged and overloaded right now.  Vincent is already on his way in the GVT6000 to the house in New York.  And her name is Jasmine Rose Fujikawa.  She has a daughter named Tammy.  No other known relatives.  She buys socks at Wal-Mart.  She likes canvas hightops.”

The Red Dragon smiled, and took a bite of anaconda with sweet Barry sauce.