Spy School Viva Vegas

Chapter 6 - A Plan

Nathan Hale Administration Building
CIA Academy of Espionage
June 11
1800 hours

He was right. Or, nearly right. We did get a chance to eat a little before a message came in, and we were summoned back to the building. It felt like we had been caught being truant teenagers. Almost like when the principal at my old school would call for you by name over the intercom system. Only we weren't seeing the principal, because our principal was an idiot.

Someone had come into the conference room between the thirty minutes when we left and returned. It had been cleaned up, with all the papers, including the planes and storks, removed. Chip looked a little sad that his creations were missing. However, in there place, sat five manila folders with our names and for your eyes only on different ones. I knew from past experience that sometimes these briefings did not contain the same orders for everyone. Mine had been placed on the opposite end of the table as far away from Erica's as possible. I suspected this had not been done on accident, but I tried not to take it too personally.

"Well, if you're done stuffing your faces, I'll get down to business. Please open your folders," Cyrus said.

The very first page included a blurry black and white photo. It appeared to have come from some sort of security video camera, because it had the time and date in the lower left corner, and the camera number in the top right. The person at the center of the image was none other than Murray Hill. Given the date on the image, it was taken fairly recently, only a few days after I last saw him. He had been prone to dramatic changes in his body after only a few days, but in this case he looked mostly the same. Maybe he was even a little thinner now that he couldn't afford to eat all the time. The image was zoomed out wide enough that we could see the room he was standing in. There were several other people around him, and they were standing in front of what looked like a long snake-like treadmill. Only this treadmill was carrying bags and suitcases. It was clearly something you might see at an airport's arrival baggage carousel.

"While you all were playing preschool and making paper airplanes, I was having the CIA follow up on this lead. They were able to obtain security footage from the Las Vegas airport, and run it through our facial recognition software. They found one match. This appears to be Murray Hill recently arriving at their Las Vegas airport's domestic terminal."

"So that's it! The paper I found is the down payment that Leo Shang promised in Las Vegas," Mike said, proudly.

"It appears so," Cyrus said, less proudly. I knew he wasn't exactly thrilled with the idea that Mike was dating his youngest granddaughter, and I assumed he didn't want to be too friendly with him. "However, that is all the information we have at this time. There's no video of him going to any hotel, or otherwise. Granted, the CIA have only been working on this for a few hours, and they may pick up some other pieces of intel. It can take time to process all that video. Plus, we don't have access to the security footage inside the casinos, either. We might be able to obtain permission, but that also takes time we don't really have. Those casinos will not give it to us willingly."

"Can't we just hack them," Chip interrupted.

Cyrus gave him a withering look, sighing, "That's not how it works." Then continued, "The best news I can offer is he doesn't appear to have left through the Las Vegas airport, as far as we can tell. Now, that doesn't mean he's still there. There are plenty of other ways someone could leave Las Vegas, and we wouldn't ever have a clue."

"And, we still don't know where in Las Vegas he is," Jawa added.

"Mr. O'Shea is correct. This does give us enough reason to pursue this lead. We need to figure out where he is as soon as possible. Fortunately, it has greatly reduced the places we need to search, but will require us to go there on a surveillance mission. We've had a short turn around on this, but we feel we've worked out a pretty solid plan. That means you all are going to go on a little school trip."