The Robber Princess

Chapter 9. Code Black

Chapter 9

Folkering and Lieutenant Colonel Tierwald and his officers had not yet fully secured the building when Regina had sounded the alarm. As a result, they arrived in time to arrest only Marcelo and two guests who were not in the organization's dossier at all. The rest of the guests, including Regina, had eluded them.

General Montalvo arrived at the mansion within minutes and was furious. "How could this happen?" he raged at Brickelstein. "I promised Judge Ramirez the whole organization! I put my reputation on the line for you, and all you did was arrest the one man with more lawyers in this country than a politician!"

"I did see and identify others in the dossier," replied Brickelstein, not intimidated by the General's temper. "That surely will count for something. Now, how long do we have until we must produce Marcelo to the judge?"

"A long time in most cases, but we'll be hearing from Marcelo's lawyers first thing tomorrow morning!" shouted Montalvo, still agitated.

"Then we have ten hours, maybe twelve. We'll use that time to collect whatever intelligence we can. In the meantime, we need to post a watch at the all the airports and border crossings. Princess Regina, Princess Angelica, and Alexandr Nikolaev. They left the premises together. Can you arrange this?" General Montalvo pulled out his cell phone irritably, made a call, and fired off a torrent of orders.

Brickelstein called Folkering over. "Did you bring the universal boot drive that we talked about?" he asked softly in German, hoping no one would notice. Folkering surreptitiously passed a small thumb drive into Brickelstein's hand and Brickelstein closed his fist around it and pocketed it.

Brickelstein and Folkering approached Montalvo, who has just finished his call. "I'm sending Folkering with you to listen in on Marcelo's interrogation, if that's all right with you." Montalvo nodded his assent. "I'm going back to the hotel to make a report to the Queen," Brickelstein continued. He looked Folkering in the eye knowingly and proceeded to the front door of the mansion.

Once he was sure no one was looking, Brickelstein broke his even stride and bounded quietly up the stairs. The police squad had already swept the house and arrested everyone, so he was pretty sure no one was left in it. Brickelstein methodically looked in every room. He found the master bedroom and on one side of it was a computer desk with a laptop on it. Taking care to stay away from the window, Brickelstein crept to the desk and examined the laptop.

To his delight, it was a simple Lenovo Thinkpad. This would be easy. He inserted the thumb drive into one of the ports and powered up the laptop. Years prior, after the 9/11 attacks, Brickelstein and Folkering had devised a special, extremely high capacity thumb drive that could be a boot drive for most brands of personal computers. This enabled them to circumvent the usual security features. At home, he had used it primarily in bank fraud cases, which had become more common since the Great Recession. Brickelstein had not shared this innovation with other governments due to its sensitive nature, but Eidelmark criminal law did not bar its use. The speed and efficiency at which Eidelmark had been able to complete white-collar criminal investigations had won Brickelstein some admiration within Interpol circles.

The laptop booted right away and Brickelstein copied the hard drive's contents to the flash drive for future, unhurried examination. He knew that the data likely would be inadmissible against Marcelo in an Argentine court, since the judge probably would invalidate his arrest the next morning. But he might gain enough intelligence on other members of Marcelo's organization to find and arrest them (at least in jurisdictions in which criminal procedure was more lax), and especially clues as to Regina's whereabouts.

The data transfer took over an hour. By the time it was finished, the house was empty. The police officers had all left and Marcelo, his guests and household staff all had fled or been arrested. Most of the lights were off. Brickelstein quietly made his way through the dark corridors back to the service entrance where he had first entered while disguised as a Tangoría. He exited the house and stole across the grounds to the edge of the property. The fence was higher than he had remembered. With some difficulty, he scaled the fence and jumped down to the other side.