<em>That had gone about as well as expected,</em>Alan thought. Chase was on board, provisionally. He was a good find. If he were the sort to give out compliments freely, he would tell Aden so.<br/><br/>The room he now sat in was large, dimly lit, and contained enough furniture for a space a quarter the size. Downstairs was an enormous, and enormously unsuccessful, pinball arcade and pool hall. The second floor, of which he was now the sole occupant, hadn't been used for more than storage in years. The owner of the building now lived in the south of France. The manager of the arcade cared more about having a distribution point for illegal cigarettes and his techno band's atrociously bad CD then he did for running the business. In all, the space was big, ignored, and very well wired. It would be a suitable base of operations.<br/><br/>Alan tapped a few more keys on his state of the art laptop, then hit Send. The message went out to four separate public websites, buried in their discussion forums. The eleven people who bothered to visit a message board devoted to the discussion of Seagram's Ginger Ale might glance at the message as a curiosity, or a computer glitch. Only someone who made it their business to routinely sweep the web looking for mention of her handle might find all four pieces, stitch them together appropriately, decrypt using a public key he'd left as a YouTube comment on one of her music videos that had been posted years ago, and then, if she were sufficiently intrigued, respond.<br/><br/>The message itself was simple:<em>Copycat. London job. Need the best. Contact Alan.</em>Followed by a decaying IP address that would be recycled in twenty-four hours if it wasn't used. He opened up the telnet chat window and waited to see if anyone decided to stop by.<br/>