Chapter 3: Burned

Radner visited the clock shop again on Thursday. Katrin observed from a rented apartment across the street, photographing his arrival and departure through a telephoto lens. He spent seventeen minutes inside and emerged carrying a small package wrapped in brown paper that he placed in his briefcase with careful deliberation. She followed him to his apartment and watched his lights. He remained home for the rest of the evening, which was unusual for a man whose social calendar was typically full. She filed her preliminary report through the encrypted channel that only she and Grey could access. The response came within the hour: Continue surveillance. Do not approach. Prepare for extraction if confirmed. The following morning, Katrin found her apartment compromised. It was subtle, the kind of intrusion that most people would miss, but she had placed three physical tell-tales at the entrance and two of them had been disturbed. Someone had entered while she was conducting surveillance. They had searched her belongings with professional care, replacing everything in its approximate position. Approximate was the revealing word. Katrin kept her possessions arranged with geometric precision for exactly this reason. She swept the apartment for electronic devices and found two: a microphone embedded in the telephone base and a GPS tracker attached to the underside of her watch strap. Both were high-quality hardware consistent with the equipment used by the foreign service she suspected of running the mole. She left both devices in place and modified her behavior to account for the surveillance. Whoever had compromised her apartment now believed they could hear her conversations and track her movements, which meant she could feed them controlled information. But the breach raised a critical question: how had the opposition known where she was staying? That information existed in only two places: her own operational file and the encrypted channel she shared with Grey. Either her encryption had been broken, which she considered unlikely, or Grey himself was compromised. The investigation had just doubled in complexity.