The Marketplace

Weeks passed and The Don was craving some more action. The call couldn t have come at a better time.

It was a Saturday morning and the weekly Kolaporti ° Flea Market was bustling. The smell of har °sfiskur (wind- dried fish) and h karl (rotted shark), filled the air as people hawked crafts, delicacies, and second-hand goods from 4-foot by 4- foot wooden booths.

The Don was told to come here ”another request from Knuth.

Buy a bag of Kleinur from the vendor in the brown wool sweater, he was told, along with the order that he was to disable some phone numbers in Egypt for a specific length of time. He wandered around the large indoor warehouse, stopping at a few booths as he went. Finally, he found the vendor he was looking for ”a baker. The Don s stomach grumbled.

The bag was filled with freshly made Icelandic donuts coated in powdered sugar. Inside the bag was a crumpled receipt. A sequence of numbers was written on it.

Special Receipt

Upon closer examination, it became clear what most of the sequence was: a date, a time, and three sets of numbers.

They say curiosity killed the cat, but that didn t stop The Don from starting to wonder about this Knuth guy and what he was up to. He hadn t thought much about it until Knuth contacted him for this new job. The fact that Knuth was depending so much on The Don to handle his telephone matters piqued The Don s interest. He had Knuth s phone number logged on his mobile phone, but chances are good that Knuth had called him from a payphone or spoofed his Caller ID by using an XML Integrated Voice Response application. These days, Caller ID can t be trusted and shouldn t be taken too seriously.

Maybe the phone numbers that The Don obtained from his earlier mobile phone trace for Knuth could provide some clues. One of the outgoing numbers on the phone was to the Banque Internationale du Burkina in Burkina Faso. A call from the Banque also came into the phone at one in the morning. The Don couldn t find any details online about the other two phone numbers on the phone trace, but one was obviously an outgoing call local to Mauritius and one was incoming from Zimbabwe.

As for the list of numbers he had just received, that remained to be seen. But once The Don gained access to the landline switch, he d be sure to set up a voice intercept on one of the lines.

Was there a connection between all of this? The Don pondered. He would just have to wait and see. The Don took a bite of the handmade donut, put the paper back in the bag, and headed to his flat.