xp_logs | Nathan and Doug, late Friday night/early Saturday morning

After his rather disturbing IM conversation with Domino, Doug goes immediately to Nathan. Between the two of them, they manage to find her and get her help rapidly. Nathan is rather impressed with Doug's work.

After carefully closing and setting aside his laptop, and making sure that Marie-Ange was sleeping well, Doug dashed quickly up the stairs and down the hall to Nathan's room. Reaching the door, he rapped briskly, a touch out of breath.

Nathan looked up from the book he was reading, frowning a little as he identified the presence as 'Doug, agitated'. "Come in," he called immediately. Doug all but flung open the door, and Nathan dropped the book, sitting bolt upright in his chair as he saw the look on the young man's face. "What is it?" he asked sharply. "What's wrong - is it Angie?"

Doug shook his head. "Not Angie," he replied. "Dom. I just got through with a couple of emails and IM with her. She sounds like she got pretty messed up. I'm worried about her."

Nathan frowned more deeply. "She emailed me earlier, said she'd gotten a little banged up on the job," he said, standing and moving immediately for the desk and his own laptop. "I thought she sounded a little jittery, but there wasn't anything that was panic-inducing... what the hell did she say to you?"

Doug took a deep breath and began to tick off on his fingers. "Let's see, she was beaten to hell, cut up, burned with a cigarette, caught in a truck bomb explosion, and is now combining vodka and painkillers. I think that's about the tally."

"Oh, for the love of..." Nathan grabbed the phone with one hand, dialing an international number quickly, and opened the laptop with the other. "I'm going to kill her," he growled. "'Just a little banged up' my ass." He fired up his IM program, grimacing as the phone rang once, twice, three times before it was picked up. "Privyet, Alexey," he said sharply, and continued in Russian. "~Yes, this is Nathan.... yes, I want something, why else would I be calling you? .... no, we can talk about St. Petersburg later. I need you to find Dom.... No, I don't know where she is, other than somewhere in Vladivostok with a pair of army officers. She might have been picked up after some kind of explosion.... mafia-related, yes. Is there anything.... oh. .....You're kidding me... no, of course you're not. ...Really.~" Nathan tried very hard not to grind his teeth. "~I'd appreciate that very much.~" He rattled off the phone number quickly, then hung up. "FUCK!" he snarled, trying not to give in to the urge to slam a fist into the desk. From her cage, Bella made a worried cooing noise.

Doug stood very quietly as Nathan conversed with Alexey. He grimaced at the sound of Nathan's end of the conversation, as it didn't sound good. He jumped slightly at Nathan's outburst. "Bad?" he asked quietly.

"There was a huge truck bomb in Sukhbaatar, which is on the Russia-Mongolia border. Apparently the Russian army made a number of arrests and shipped them to Vladivostok for questioning." He shook his head angrily, dialing the Berlin safehouse's number since GW didn't appear to be online. "You'd think she would mention having been arrested, huh? I'm going to kill her, I swear..." The phone only rang twice this time before it picked up. "Lien? It's Nate. Get GW, now." He cradled the phone on his shoulder, typing rapidly to bring up the email. He grimaced, but then half-turned back towards Doug, his eyes widening a little as he realized what a resource he had here. "Can you figure out where she sent this from?"

Doug slipped into the chair that Nathan vacated for him in favor of pacing back and forth as Lien got GW. Cracking his fingers, he lowered them to the keyboard. "You only had to ask, boss man," he replied, beginning to sift through the headers of Domino's emails, as well as logging into his own computer to bring up the IM log from earlier.

Nathan took a deep, furious breath. He didn't doubt that she could have gotten herself out of custody without too much difficulty - there wasn't much Dom couldn't talk herself out of, given the opportunity - and if she'd been as beaten up as Doug said, that certainly would have lent credence to a 'young woman in the wrong place at the wrong time' defense.

"Nate?" GW's voice said on the other end of the phone.

"Did Dom email you?" Nathan asked sharply.

A pause. "Yeah... told me the job was a little rough, so she was going to stick around in Vladivostok for a week or so before she headed back."

"Well," Nathan said, biting off the end of each word, "apparently the job was a lot rough and there are a number of complications she didn't let us know about." He outlined what Alexey had told him rapidly, and fancied he could hear GW grinding his teeth in Berlin. "He's going to try and find her. You should probably be standing by for a pick-up, though."

There was a bit of encryption on the emails, which made sense, given the institutional paranoia likely endemic to any mercenary who liked staying alive, but Doug was good at hacking, and besides, he already had a head-start, given that he had the actual emails to work with, and hadn't just intercepted them. He sifted carefully through the fake headers to find the true ones, then waved carefully to get Nathan's attention. "What do you want me to do with this, boss man?" he asked softly.

"Hold on, GW," Nathan said, bending over Doug's shoulder and bringing up an email, hurriedly typing in the address to one of Alexey's secure accounts and a heads-up subject line. "Narrow it down as much as you can," he said. "IP address, anything more would be good. Then send it there."

Doug nodded and continued to refine the information as best he could. Working his way through the ISP's logs, he managed to find the phone number Domino had been logged on from, and from there began working on finding a location. Finally, he found it, and whistled. Catching Nathan's attention again, he pointed at the screen, which displayed an address that Nathan looked at and recognized as an FSB safehouse.

"I'm going to kill her slowly," Nathan growled, tapping on the open email window. Part of him was stunned, though, at how quickly Doug had done that. Decryption and a trace, all in the space of a few minutes. Damn, the kid was good. "Guess what, GW? She's apparently the guest of Russian Intelligence."

"...I'm going to kill her."

"Get in line." He watched Doug send the email to Alexey. "I'll call you back," he said, and hung up as soon as GW responded, dialing Alexey's number. "~Me again,~" he said in Russian as soon as the phone was picked up. "~She's at an FSB safehouse. Just sent you the address. Go pick her up for me, will you?~" Nathan smiled humorlessly. "~Yes, I'll owe you one.... no, you can't keep her. Call me when you've got her? .... thank you.~" He cut the connection again, then sighed, looking down at Doug. "Now we wait," he said, going back and sitting down in the chair he'd so rapidly vacated. "That address isn't far from where Alexsey is right now. Shouldn't take them long to get there."

Doug attempted to make himself comfortable in the chair. There was no way he was headed anywhere until he knew that Domino was safe and sound. "So, I should probably get in line for killing Domino now, shouldn't I?" he asked in a too-casual tone.

Nathan took a deep, shaky breath. "I do not get this," he said, shaking his head. "She knows better than this. All she would have had to do was tell me in that email that she needed help and I'd have gotten Alexey to pick her up hours ago." Doug gave him a questioning look, and Nathan sensed the direction of the question before he asked it. "Vasily - one of the members of the Pack - is Alexey's little brother. Alexey's ex-FSB himself. You could call him the king of the freelancer scene in Vladivostok if you wanted to be dramatic. And he knows how to do things quietly."

Doug nodded slowly, processing the information being given to him. He sensed instinctively that this was something that Nathan probably wouldn't talk to most of the other students about, that he'd proven something with his quick hacking job. "Well, in one of her emails to me, she made some noise about you coming to pick her up and fuss over her, but then when I got her in IM, she did a bit of a turnaround and got huffy with me for suggesting that I could get you or Pete to pick her up." He shrugged. "Pride, most likely."

"Pete," Nathan muttered, his eyes flickering towards the door for a moment. But then he shook his head. "No," he decided. "I'm sure Pete's got contacts in Vladivostok, but let's let Alexey try first. No point in having people tripping over each other." He eyed Doug. "How you tracked that down to an FSB safehouse that quickly... I'm impressed, Douglas."

Doug shrugged self-deprecatingly and blushed slightly. "I'd say it was nothing, but that wouldn't be true. Blame it on a misspent youth and a overfondness for computers?" He chuckled wryly.

"I'm going to kill her," Nathan muttered, still holding the phone. He became aware of Moira poking worriedly at the other end of the link from down in the lab, and hurriedly sent back reassurances and a quick explanation of what was going on, assuring her that they didn't need to both be up here worrying. #Might as well stay down there where there are plenty of distractions, love - I don't think Doug's going anywhere, so I'm not going to be alone.# He glared at the phone, grimacing. "She scared you," he said. "When you came in here - I could tell. I thought something must have happened with Angie's precognition or something..."

Doug nodded slowly. "Well, Angie's sleeping off a headache I suspect is precog-related, but nothing out of the ordinary there. And yeah, she did scare me. The first email, she was drunk, and a little flirty, and she mentioned a bit about being injured. I was moderately worried, but then after the second email and the IM conversation..." He shrugged. "I like Dom." He carefully avoided talking about the 'pro bono' job he had steered Domino towards, as he still couldn't be sure how Nathan would react to the French government approaching Marie-Ange.

A tight little smile flickered across Nathan's face. "I know, Doug. She told me the whole story when she was here. Wasn't much point in throwing a fit, given that she took care of the situation quite conclusively." He grimaced again, rubbing at the back of his neck. "Stubborn, she's so damned stubborn... "

Doug nodded. "That she is." He tapped his own foot nervously, waiting for Alexey to call back with news. ~Just please let her be all right,~ he prayed silently.

It was, by Nathan's calculations, forty-eight minutes and roughly thirty-six seconds from that moment until the phone rang again. He and Doug didn't manage much in the way of conversation in the interim. "Yes?" he asked, then closed his eyes for a moment, a wave of pure relief flooding through him as Alexey rattled off a quick report. "~You sound like you're calling me from the car? ...no, Alexey, I'm not complaining. How is she... they did give her medical attention, then? Well, wasn't that nice of them...." His expression went somber as he listened. "~Yeah, probably the safest thing to do. You didn't... no, I'm not getting squeamish, I just don't want this to have caused trouble for you.... well, then everyone's happy, aren't they? .... all right. I'll tell GW to get his ass over there and get her. She's probably better off in Berlin anyway.~" Nathan smiled very faintly. "~Yes, I know you're going to collect. Thanks, Alexey.~"

Doug sighed in relief. "They found her, then?" he asked. He levered his body out of his chair and stretched tiredly. "In that case, I think it's well past bedtime for me. I have a girlfriend to check in on, and then my bed is calling my name."

"Alexey's got friends at a private hospital," Nathan said. "They're going to take her there and keep an eye on her until GW arrives." He sighed, mustering a very faint, tight smile. "Thank you, Doug. I owe you one. And I mean that."

Doug waved a hand as he yawned prodigously. "No you don't, Nathan. Alexey probably would have found her without my help. In any event," he said, yawning again, "I'm for bed before I fall asleep on your floor. Good night."