Nigel motioned to Natasha. “I need a moment.”

Nigel led Natasha to a private room that served as his war room.

“I see that you are making good use of the room Tage provided,” Natasha said.

“Mr. Tage has the fastest high-speed internet I’ve seen anywhere!” Nigel said.

“What’s on your mind?”

“I found several pings on Jet’s phone. I haven’t given up on her. I won’t—” Nigel said as he choked up.

Natasha put a hand on Nigel’s, and after a few minutes he went on.

“So far, her phone has pinged in three separate countries: the United States, Canada, and Morocco. I’m grateful she had her data roaming turned on, because I could pick up additional metadata from her phone.”

“How were you able to get this? Did you hack her phone?”

“At first, I could create an alert based on phone activity. But after a bit of research, I found that the Pretzelverse communications app contained additional metadata,” Nigel explained.

“I thought you stopped using that app. Didn’t you create your own communications app?”

“Yes, and we turned it off for a while, but we re-enabled it to play the Colossal Machine again.”

“I also found . . . an open-source Prog-hub site.”

Nigel hesitated. He wasn’t sure if he should tell her how he’d hacked Pretzelverse now that he knew its relationship to Collective Systems.

“Go on,” Natasha said.

“The project . . . contained a lot of reverse-engineered code that I used to gather the metadata.”

“When was the last ping from the phone?”

“Three days ago. I could geo-locate the phone to Agadir, a city in southern Morocco. After a little more digging, I tapped into several cameras around the marina,” Nigel said.

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“What did you find?”

“Nothing interesting. Most of these cameras didn’t contain a video playback system. So, I got to thinking: if I was holding some cargo that I didn’t want anyone to know about, I wouldn’t use a regular slip in a marina. I would try to use something else.”

“Such as?”

“I checked more commercial cameras that I could exploit, and found something interesting,” Nigel said.

On his laptop, Nigel played back some grainy video that looked like any other commercial dock. Boats were present, but the camera quality was so bad that Natasha couldn’t make out any details.

“I don’t get it. What am I looking at?”

“The video from one the cameras in the commercial area. From a shipping company, I think. I used ShowALLD to scan the local IP range for the rest of the harbor and found another interesting tidbit: a portable IP-based camera on another vessel. The owner left the camera on for an extended period. Based on the make and model of the camera, I could hack into the saved video feed,” Nigel said.

He let that realization sink in for a moment, and then pulled up the video feed. The camera was much better quality than the one from the shipping yard. Nigel scrubbed through the video until he came to what he was looking for. He stopped the video when he saw the image. The video was good enough to be able to enhance it, and his laptop fan whirred. It was Jet with a boy of about twelve following her. It looked like they were traveling to another part of the vessel.

“Good job. Now, can you determine who that vessel belongs to?” Natasha said.

“Already pulled it. They registered the boat to a corporation called Indigo Oil, LLC. After doing some OSINT—”

“What’s that?” Natasha’s interrupted.

“Oh, ‘OSINT’ stands for open-source intelligence, which involves searching and analyzing information either online or offline. Now, listen—this part is very important. Indigo Oil belongs to a guy named Nasri Zubayr Hadad,” Nigel said.

“Why is that important?”

“According to what I found and verified through several credible sources, this guy goes by another name: the Sultan. He is a collector. It is rumored that he takes young girls into his harem. Most of the time, he gets permission from the families of these girls, but not always. I did some checking on the Dark Web and found connections to Black Iris.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I found direct references to the name Black Heart. He knows Dahlia! I hacked the forum and came across several encrypted messages,” Nigel said.

“If they are encrypted, how did you read them?”

“The system administrator previously had them on the system drive. I used some of my tools to liberate the private key for the site. Once I did that, I could unlock all messages on the private message board.”

Nigel brought up a list of messages. He changed the filter to bring up messages pertaining to the Sultan and Black Heart.

“Look at this one,” Nigel said as he displayed the message.

Nas,

Here are two contacts in the United States. I believe that you will be able to find that special girl you’re looking for.

—D.

“Who else do you know who goes by ‘D?’ To be sure, I correlated a list of known public-facing IPs that Black Iris uses for their MORP relay nodes. All roads lead to Black Iris!” Nigel said.

“We need to show this to Alexei. Perhaps he can convince Dahlia to find out where the Sultan is now,” Natasha said.

Nigel nodded in agreement. Let’s bring her home.