KB
21 January 2017
Santiago de Compostela
Although he thought he was probably being quite paranoid, as soon as he left his house on the Rúa de San Pedro, Iago checked there was nobody waiting to follow him. He walked straight to the old part of town, entering it via the Porta do Camiño, and once he reached Casas Reais, he cut off to the left down the Ruela da Oliveira, taking advantage of the short, narrow streets to make sure nobody could follow him. In less than fifteen minutes, he was sat in the same seat at the Law café where he’d met Mariana almost twenty years earlier.
The situation seemed a bit strange to Iago, but he tentatively got the attention of a waiter he hadn’t seen before.
“Excuse me, my name’s Iago. My friend Martín said he left an envelope here for me.”
The boy, who didn’t look old enough to be a university student, responded politely, giving Iago a brown envelope that bore his name scrawled in pen on it:
“Here you go”.
Iago drank his coffee, focusing more on finishing it quickly than on how it tasted, and left the café, looking around before he did to make sure none of the students were watching him. Without opening it to see what was inside, he placed the envelope in the inner pocket of his jacket and started the walk back to his house, on a quest for the privacy and calm he needed to search through whatever had been left in the envelope.
This time Iago took a busier street, heading up the Rúa Rosalía de Castro. Once he’d left the Praza de Galicia behind him and walked quickly along Virxe da Cerca, his jacket pocket, where his phone nestled up against the envelope, started vibrating. As soon as he got his phone out, the screen told him it was Silvia calling. He thought about not picking up, but in the end he said:
“Hi, Silvia.”
“Hi, Iago.” After a few uncomfortable seconds of silence, Silvia continued, “You’re in Santiago. Did you get here OK?”
“Yes, I’m here, I arrived last night. How are you?” Yet more silence on the other end of the line made Iago carry on, “What a stupid question, I’m sorry. I’m out running some errands, but if you’d like, we can meet for a coffee a bit later on. What do you think?”
“OK. Will you call me later?”
“Yes, I’ll call you as soon as I can.”
Iago hung up, put his phone in his trouser pocket and picked up his pace so he could get home as soon as possible. When he finally got back to his room, he opened the envelope carefully so as not to damage anything and then saw what was inside: a USB stick, a SIM card and a key.
Without waiting for even a second, he turned his computer on and noticed that the key, which could easily be for a door or a safe, didn’t have any sort of identification code or number on it.
As soon as his computer was up and running, Iago put the USB stick in and immediately copied its contents onto another one that he’d pulled out of one of his drawers. Before he looked at its content, he ejected that second pen drive and put it in his wallet.
When he finally opened the first USB, he found two folders. The first was called “Medical History” and the other only “KB”.
Iago opened the second one first, wondering what the two letters could mean. Inside it, amongst other files, he found a photo in which he immediately recognised Martín as a young man out drinking with his group of friends somewhere that seemed to resemble the football pitch on the South Campus, just below the viewpoint by the Paseo da Ferradura in the city’s Alameda park.
Taken when people still used film cameras, the quality of the photo made it very clear it was a scanned image that had been digitised. After trying and failing to spot himself in the photo, Iago realised he only recognised five of the eight people in it.
