Blake Swaps Crosetti’s Phone and Steals Meeting Information

Blake Swaps Crosetti’s Phone and Steals Meeting Information is a covert intelligence-gathering operation built around a small diversion and a precise exchange. Blake uses Don Challenor to occupy Filippo Crosetti by telephone, then takes Crosetti’s phone long enough to discover that he and Jane Glasson, using the alias Astrid Townsend, are due to meet Ingrid Denner about the Elixtris project. The information gives Blake a concealed advantage in a crisis whose crucial evidence is hidden in other people’s communications.

The Distraction

The opportunity begins when Jack Harkness takes Don to a bungalow on the western side of Mullion, where Ray Hocking and his wife Linda live. Harkness has apparently not told Ray that Don is coming; he goes inside first to explain matters and says he will fetch Don afterward. Left alone in the MG, Don tries Blake by text. When she replies, she does not explain the wider plan: she tells him to call the Schweizerhof Hotel in Zürich, ask urgently for Crosetti, and keep him occupied as long as possible.

Don does not understand why she wants the call made. Blake’s terse instruction to proceed gives him little context, but he follows it. The timing matters. Crosetti is at the hotel, while Harkness is nearby and impatiently signaling for Don to come in. The call draws Crosetti away from the bar and toward reception; Blake later hears him speaking to someone else in German, sounding unhappy, as Harkness continues waving. Don’s part is not to learn anything from Crosetti but to hold his attention long enough for Blake to act elsewhere.

The Phone Exchange

Blake’s method depends on making the two phones interchangeable for just long enough. She deletes the few texts she has sent and received, leaving her own phone without data. When Crosetti is summoned to take the urgent call, he leaves his phone beside his tequila at the bar. Blake slides her phone around the corner, exchanges it for his as she passes his stool, and continues toward the ladies’ room without hurrying. From a locked cubicle, she examines the phone while Crosetti is still occupied at reception.

The exchange is a gamble rather than a guaranteed deception. Blake recognizes that her phone does not look very different from Crosetti’s and privately anticipates explaining the swap if necessary. But possession of his device initially proves less useful than she expects: the most recent messages are in German or Italian, languages she cannot read. She scrolls through them until an English email gives her a readable route into the information she needs. The device’s value lies not in its hardware but in the communications and contacts stored on it—and the language barrier briefly threatens to make that access useless.

What Blake Finds

The email is from Ingrid Denner, dated 12 June, the previous day. It sets out the subject of an upcoming meeting with Crosetti and Ms Townsend: Townsend’s role in the continuing management of Elixtris, especially the substantial budget allocated to outside scientists. Their first recorded contact with the company, in each case, was through Townsend. Denner notes that their specialisms in nanotechnology and bioelectronics do not appear directly relevant to producing a classical cosmetic and says that this spending will require explanation.

The message also gives the inquiry a practical shape. Denner asks Hertha Rietz to reserve a symposium room at Harkness Pharmaceuticals headquarters in Zug for a discussion on Thursday the 14th. She instructs Crosetti to communicate with her through her BlackBerry number until further notice. Blake cannot know the reason for that restriction from the email, but she guesses that Denner has found the Sapper magnetic device. She also supposes that Gareth Lawler never read the message; the text presents this as Blake’s inference, not as a confirmed fact.

A second, shorter email from Rietz, sent a few hours after Denner’s, confirms symposium room B4 at noon. The meeting is the next day, little more than twelve hours away. Blake also finds an attachment listing more than twenty professors and other specialists at universities in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and Japan. The scale and international reach of the names sharpen the discrepancy Denner has identified between the scientists’ expertise and Elixtris’s stated purpose.

Before leaving the cubicle, Blake copies mobile and landline numbers listed for Astrid Townsend, as well as numbers for Harkness and Denner. The additional contacts do not resolve the mystery, but they turn the phone’s contents into possible avenues for further action. Blake stops searching because she judges that she has pushed her luck—and Don’s—far enough.

The Advantage and Its Limits

When Blake returns to the bar, Crosetti is there with her phone in his hand. She leaves the hotel about a minute later; he does not follow her. Her immediate escape succeeds, but the operation has not yet changed what Crosetti or Jane Glasson knows about the impending meeting. Its gain is asymmetric: Blake knows where and when they will meet with Denner, while, as she understands it, they do not know that she has obtained that information.

At the Hotel Marta in Zürich, Blake keeps turning over how to make the advantage count. She texts Don, but receives no reply. She thinks he may have returned to Wortalleth West and remembers that he told her not to call him on the landline there; she expects him to contact her when he can. The episode therefore ends with a successful theft of information but no settled next move. Its suspense comes from the interval between knowing the meeting’s details and deciding how to use them: the phone has opened a door, not supplied the means to walk through it.