Free Deadline by Stephen Maher Page B

again to identify yourself and confirm your location.”
    Jack swallowed.
    “I ask you again, how do I know you’re a CSIS agent?” he said. “I think the Ottawa Police Service might want this BlackBerry. You can get it from them, can’t you?”
    Endicott barked back. “Look, kid, this is not a game. Identify yourself, or the agents will arrest you instead of just taking the phone.”
    Jack was confused. This didn’t make sense.
    “I’m not telling you anything until I know who you are,” he said. “Why don’t you give me a CSIS switchboard number?”
    There was silence on the other end of the line.
    “Look,” said Endicott. “Let’s try this again. Believe me, the last thing you want to do is face charges under the Security of Information Act. Please identify yourself and confirm your location.”
    Jack stood at the urinal, looking up at the ceiling. There was a hole in the drywall, in the corner, where two walls met the ceiling. It looked as though somebody had cut it out to run a wire and had not bothered patching it.
    “What do you mean, confirm my location?” he said. “Do you know my location? Are you tracking me?”
    He looked at the phone. The screen said Unknown Caller. He could hear the voice talking still, but he had stopped listening. He flipped the phone over and took out the battery, cutting off the voice. He looked around him, his mind racing. Someone was coming for him, and he didn’t know who. He jammed the BlackBerry deep inside the hole by the ceiling, so that nobody would see it without a flashlight and a good reason to go poking around in a dirty hole, then sprinted upstairs into the bar. He caught the waitress’s eye, paid, and left. Once he was outside, he broke into a run.
    Five minutes later, two middle-aged men entered the bar. One of them walked around the room, scanning all the customers, then followed the sign pointing downstairs to the bathroom. His companion sat at the bar and ordered a coke. He smiled at the waitress.
    “Tell me, we were supposed to meet my friend here, but I think we got our wires crossed, and he might have left just before we got here. Did you see somebody leave about five minutes ago? I just was talking to him on his BlackBerry.”
    “I’m sorry,” said the waitress. “Lots of people coming and going.”

    Balfour got bored of watching the dot blinking, so he restarted the video, and left the tracking map open in another window. When it stopped blinking, he shut down the porn, checked the time of the last ping, and sent another message.
     
    To: 74X93B4
    From: 58K42E6
    Subject: BB location
    BlackBerry no longer transmitting. Last transmission at 8:47 p.m.
    As soon as he sent it, he got a call.
    “We lost him,” said the voice. “It looks like he turned the phone off. I’ve been thinking about this, and I think it’s likely that the suspect has a second BlackBerry or some kind of mobile phone. Can you write a program that would match up the known movements of this phone with other phones that were in the vicinity at the same time?”
    Balfour leaned back in his chair and thought about it.
    “Hello?” said the voice.
    “I’m thinking,” he said. “You’re talking about a co-location phone. That makes sense. It should be possible to find him that way. We can go through the raw feeds from the transmission receivers for the past 24 hours. It might take a while, but it should be possible.”
    “Well, you get on it, and message me as soon as you get anywhere,” said the voice.
    “Roger that,” said Balfour.
    He set to work, drilling down through the tracking program to the raw data feeds from the transmission towers that handled the signal from the BlackBerry over the previous 24 hours. It took some doing, but he was able to download massive database files.
    He wrote some code for a database program and ordered it to search for other phones that were present that appeared more than once in the files. The program whirred quietly for a moment,