Chapter 463 The Bugged Mission
The man that followed her around didn’t recognize her. He stayed put, holding a magazine, sitting on a bench. On the surface, he looked like he was reading. In truth, his eyes never left the women’s restroom entrance.
Tilda walked by with a cup of coffee, acting casual. As she passed him, she stumbled on purpose.
“Darn it!” she blurted. The coffee splashed all over him. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said quickly.
Her voice changed, speaking in a fluent foreign accent.
“Hey! Hands off!” The man shot back, startled. He answered in a foreign language and hurriedly put a distance between them. He told Tilda not to worry about this and hurried away without making a scene.
Tilda’s lips curled into a cold smile.
She went into the restroom, changed her look in the mirror, and pulled out her phone. She opened an app.
Perfect. The bug is in place. She clipped on a pair of wireless earbuds. Through them, she could hear the tiny device attached to the man.
He was fumbling with his clothes now, checking for odd things. He’d feel safer after a quick once-over. This man had no idea the bug was Tilda’s own creation—a nano-sized mechanical device.
Once activated, it latched onto a target and crawled directly onto their skin. No one could find it just by searching their clothes. As a hacker, building and upgrading devices like this was one of Tilda’s hobbies. After perfecting the design, she handed the method to Andy, who managed to produce a few more. The hardest part wasn’t the coding but finding the rare parts. Even Andy didn’t have many.
The device was good enough to pass the security scans of Bloodveil, the top assassin network on the Dark Web. Their systems couldn’t detect it. Only the highest-level government-grade body scanner could. In Cetherland, there was exactly one machine like that. It had cost billions, built with rare electronic materials and years of work from top scientists. If someone really had access to that scanner and still wanted to go after Tilda, she’d almost feel flattered.
Through her earbuds, she listened to the man shuffling his clothes, clearly searching himself for anything strange. He came up empty.
Tilda left the restroom and headed to the meeting point Andy had sent her.
Andy gave a small smile. “All done?”
“Yeah. Taken care of,” Tilda said, pointing to her earbuds.
Una pouted. “What are you two whispering about?”
Tilda ruffled her hair and said, “Just saying you look beautiful.”
“Hmph. Don’t think sweet talk could fool me. Hey, that feels nice. Don’t stop.”
Night fell. Una had played all day and was tired. She went back to the hotel to take a shower.
That left Tilda and Andy alone. They borrowed a hotel meeting room, locked the door, and shut down the cameras–leaving no trace behind. They’d left the amusement park around five in the afternoon. The car had stopped following them and drove off. Tilda kept listening to the tail through her earpiece, but she learned nothing new.
Using the bug’s signal, they traced the follower’s location.
Andy tapped the map on his laptop. “He’s staying at a no-ID motel off the third beltway,” he said. “The kind that doesn’t ask for papers.”
“Just like we thought,” Tilda replied. “But if he’s been following us all day, why hasn’t he checked in with whoever hired him?”
“Maybe he hasn’t found anything worth reporting yet,” Andy guessed. “No need to call it in.”
They ran more guesses while Tilda hacked into the motel’s nearby cameras.
“No cameras inside the room,” she said. “The only feed points at the window. You can’t see anyone in there.”
“For now, our advantage is that he hasn’t found the bug I planted,” Tilda added. She pressed her lips together. “We need a chance to get into his room and plant a hidden camera. And he must not notice.”
“Leave that to me,” Andy said. “Jeselton’s my turf. I’ve got people for this.”
“Thanks, Andy,” Tilda said.
Just then they heard a faint rustling sound. The laptop speakers amplified it into a low, rhythmic hum.
Andy scowled. “What is that? Morse code? No–doesn’t sound right.”
“They’re using a Morse-like code,” she said. “Some kind of custom reporting pattern they created.”
She recorded the sound and fed it into the search database she’d built.