The ride was quiet after the bustle and rush of getting to it in the first place.  Their captors asked if they had any questions, but Laneya was not keen on being chummy with them, and it seemed neither were the other two.  Besides, she was focused on what Maria’s real name was, and that took half the trip before she remembered.  It had been a modeling competition, as she’d thought.  Somewhere in Spain, it didn’t matter, but she could remember the contestant list now, and only one name on it started with “Maria.”

Of course they would use aliases.  It would be hard to find out anything about the other two, then.  Laneya spent the rest of the trip staring at the tunnels flashing by her window, sometimes picking at the tray of food she’d been given.  Stress made it hard to eat.  And though she did not externally appear flustered by the situation, it did rank in the top five most stressful she’d been in.  Not enough to make her wish to contact her parents, but she had considered it, and that was saying a lot.

The briefing raised more questions than it answered, but as she cynically expected, their three guides left them now that there was really something to ask them.  Chief among her concerns was “why these two?”  What she’d heard of the other two did not slot them into the plan as well as her own skillset did in her mind.  Obviously they needed someone for the technical side of the operation.  But a government student, and cellist without her instrument?  Even the former, Richard, expressed his own low opinion of his selection.

And Laneya didn’t have an answer for his question.  It was plain that he did not have anything to contribute.  At least the other girl could be part of entertainment, or something, but Richard seemed to offer nothing.  And so Laneya stayed quiet, focusing her facilities on the question at hand.  Yes, it would have perhaps made more sense to ask him if he had any other significant traits than just the career he was pursuing, but he and their new superiors had posed a question, and she did not intend to open her mouth until she had an answer.

To her, it seemed that the situation was simple, and the pieces of the plan would need to be, as well.  Their difficulties lay in attending the party, approaching the data, collecting the data, and leaving without (or, less desirably, with) incident.  Collection obviously fell to her.  She would need information and tools, but it wasn’t anything that she couldn’t do in a week, if their employer would be flexible in budget and she could return home for some things.  If their associates had as many connections as they seemed, it shouldn’t be hard to get them invited to the party as part of an entourage, right?  The rest, she didn’t know about.  The information they had to go on seemed so sparse.