Free Afterparty by Daryl Gregory

internet voice call to his brother-in-law back home in Lahore—let’s call him Bashir, for alphabetical simplicity. Akbar in New York mentioned several times that he wanted to buy a luxury wristwatch. Specifically a Maurice Lacroix wristwatch. Could Bashir the brother-in-law help him?
    Olivia the Analyst was curious about this exchange. She had been monitoring cell phone calls, VoIP transmissions, and email for over five years, and she had developed an instinct for the unusual. When she was using Clarity, her powers of pattern recognition were especially keen, and that included recognizing items that were not part of the pattern. She wondered, why would Akbar go to all this trouble to purchase from a relative in Pakistan? Akbar could buy any designer watch he wanted online. Or if he wanted a knockoff, the streets of New York were full of them. Even if Bashir got some fabulous wholesale discount, Olivia categorized the interaction to be—to use a term of art in her field—“fishy.”
    She issued a tracking order on Bashir’s communications, and learned that a day after talking to Akbar, Bashir sent an email to an electronics store and asked about an invoice for a shipment of watches. Olivia noticed that the last three digits of the invoice corresponded to the number of a Virgin-Atlantic flight from London to Newark.
    Yes, she simply noticed. At this point in her career and chemical cycle, she was firing on all cylinders. The numbers, in a bit of Clarity-induced synesthesia, rang like chimes. Only a few weeks before, on a different matter entirely, she had looked through a list of flights to Newark and New York, and the numbers had stuck in her head.
    Olivia, growing nervous now, began to comb through the NSA’s data warehouse for all the signal traffic between Pakistani nationals. She ran queries on all the cleartext available, be it human-translated, autotranslated, or untranslated. In very little time she turned up forty-two conversations—forty-two!—between Pakistanis that mentioned watches, all in the last month. Flight numbers kept appearing in the conversations: a United flight from Pittsburgh, a Lufthansa flight from Munich. Olivia realized that they were trying to decide on a target.
    Time was of the essence. She flagged all the relevant data and wrote an alert memo, which she sent, per protocol, to her superior. Unfortunately, this was Memorial Day weekend, and the superior was out of his office, and Olivia could not get any response from his backup. Olivia was upset. It was clearly specified in the operations manual that the team coordinator or his backup was to be available 24-7. While she was fuming, a new cell call popped up from Akbar, her ex-pat Pakistani in NYC, to Bashir in Lahore. Olivia was listening to it live. Near the end of the call, Bashir read off the same London invoice number that Olivia had intercepted before.
    Olivia knew that flight. She also knew that it was already in the air . The plane would touch down in New York at 4:52 a.m. Then Bashir said, “You can expect delivery by morning.”
    Olivia was not even scheduled to be on duty that night. But she was the only person who could have recognized this pattern.
    She tried to call her superior on vacation, but it was 3 a.m. and the call went unanswered. She escalated and called his boss, who curtly told her to file a report for review in the morning. She called the company president and got only so far as his voicemail. Olivia would not quit. She began to call other government offices, ringing pens and cell phones and landlines all over the District of Columbia and Virginia. Of the people she reached, most had never gotten a direct call from a consultant before and refused to talk to her. She finally reached Willa Frank, the Undersecretary for Political Affairs, number three at the State Department.
    Ms. Frank asked Olivia to slow down and repeat the information. Then she asked for Olivia’s name again, and what company she worked for.