Like most surveillance systems on non-secure installations, this one didn’t save their recordings permanently and supposedly deleted their archives after a waiting period. Note I said “supposedly.” Of course, the hotel was datamining.

The mining was only on the conversations in the public areas and corridors, but then that was what I needed. I found the stored archives from the past twenty cycles, took over one of the routines that was processing it (it was separating out the boring bits from the juicy business conversations that would need to be sent to a human or bot monitor for review), and redirected it to search for my keyword set.

Eight minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, my captured routine turned up a sizable set of hits. I got the timestamps, then released the routine back to its job of searching for proprietary financial information. The timestamps let me know which archives to check for the camera surveillance.

I made some room in my temp storage, downloaded the first archive, and started my scans. I was reviewing it all myself instead of using a quicker and more efficient facial recognition scan on the collected data. That type of scan is only 62 percent reliable under most conditions and while that’s fine for half-assed company security work, I didn’t want to miss my targets. It turned out I could have started there instead of wasting the eight minutes, because in the first pass I caught an image of Ratthi in a corridor, walking toward a pod junction, timestamp sixteen hours and twenty-seven minutes minus present time.

Gotcha.

I kept reviewing the surveillance. Ratthi should have put in some time reviewing it, too, or at least looking around a little, because two potential hostiles followed him to the junction. They didn’t try to get on the same pod, but they clearly had access to the security system, because they were there when I picked Ratthi up in the lobby again. They followed him to the stores and vending areas in the hotel’s lower level, then back to his room. Now that I knew to focus on that section of the hotel, I was able to eliminate a lot of video from other camera feeds, and within three minutes I picked up both Gurathin and Pin-Lee. All three were being followed, whenever they went out.

This wasn’t unexpected, given that GrayCris had to know they were here. But I’d been doing some risk assessments in background and there was a scenario where this was a trap for me, where the Preservation team was bait.