“Angie! Hold up a minute,” Preston called.
She slowed, stopped and put her feet on the ground, half turned to look back at him. He was looking off to left along one of the straight logging cuts through the trees, pulling the camera out. He took a few shots, then quickly unfolded the map.
Angie turned around and pedaled back to where he stood.
“Darnedest thing I ever saw,” he said, shaking his head as he gazed at the map. He passed the camera to her. She understood and rolled back the last few shots on the view-screen. Her eyes widened just a bit.
“We’ve got tour buses all over the place around here during this time of year.” He chuckled as he went on, “But I’ve never seen one pulled that far off into the woods. The map shows a limited paved surface in there and what looks like a camping spot cleared. But a tour bus?”
“Well, it looks like a German charter. A little older than most you see these days. Looks like it lists a handful of cities down by the Swiss and Austrian borders.” She looked up and handed the camera back. “I can’t imagine what they would want to see here.”
“I suppose it could be history buffs. The Hürtgenwald Battlefield is just a few kilometers that way,” Preston said pointing ahead and off to the left a bit. Technically these trees are part of the same woodland. Plus, we are on the far northern tip of the Battle of the Bulge area. It wasn’t all just Bastogne; that was simply where the war correspondents were hanging out. Those were two of the nastiest battles in World War II.”
Angie shurgged. “That would mean old people, because my generation hardly knows anything or cares about that stuff. Younger folks even less. What kind of camping do old people do?” She was itching to get going again.
Preston put his camera away and prepared to ride off. “Big tents and lots of equipment, I’m guessing. I don’t intend to stay around and find out. Let’s go. Monschau awaits us.”
The route swung around the countryside and it was almost distracting in beauty. Preston didn’t want Angie to feel pushed; he wanted her to feel that in full control of riding. She was quite surprised at herself how quickly they reached Monschau. While the Venn Bahn led around the picturesque city, they decided to take the main street down into the busy town center for an early lunch. Preston also wanted to find a wifi hot spot.
He managed to get a good connection and checked the dropbox. The script found a short message. It contained an email address on a service with the Luxembourg TLD. The message told him it was his new address, that he was to create a password and check his mail ASAP.
So he logged into the server with his new account name. The system demanded that he create a new password and had a couple other hoops to jump through. The service was essentially a plain text operation with no pretty graphics at all. There was a message waiting for him and the subject was simply the numeral one with a couple of leading zeros. The message was brief:
Welcome, Mr. and Mrs. Forttensie. Got any pictures of your travels yet? I assume you are making your way here.
Preston had left his previous camera chip with their hosts near Valkenburg and started with a fresh blank. Up to that point, all he had were shots of himself and Angie in a few picturesque places. Plus he had the shots of that tour bus completely out of place in the woods. He doubted his boss had any interest in that. Still, he would offer them. He typed a reply:
We guessed the PO showed our new business address. So far, all we have are some honeymoon shots and something I thought strange: an aging tour bus out in the woods between Roetgen and Lammersdorf. What would you like to see?
He sent the message, and then poked around the interface a bit. Very Spartan, indeed. He was about to log out when a new message arrived. Naturally, the subject was zero-zero-two.
Very interested in the bus shots. Upload to the dropbox ASAP.
Hm. That was odd. Still, this was presumably the people paying the bills, so Preston complied. But first he removed the camera ID information from each of the images before encrypting them.
“Do you suppose there is something spooky to do with buses out here in the Ardennes?” She had a puzzled smile.
Preston chuckled. “In this, our new career field, nothing surprises me any more.”
