Shakira, Shakira by Tom Fynes

Bishop and Knight had been given a suitcase full of cash by Kathleen Hinkley to find her young brother. Who somehow had been swept up by a secret organization called Cicada 3301.

They had made no progress. Dead ends everywhere. They’d pulled in favours from every nook spook and hack journalist they knew. And nada, nothing, not a sausage. Knight had gone through the Mercadona supermarket CCTV camera angles from Garrucha. And nothing. Which led him to believe the kid had never gone there. Which meant he’d been snatched or gone voluntary with someone, somewhere else. The information about Garrucha had come from Kath Hinkley’s seventeen-year-old brother Chad. So, it was a ruse, misdirection.

A meeting with Jiang, a Beijing agent, in the depths of one of those monstrous China warehouses on the way to Vera City, revealed nothing about the case. He did reveal though, that Kath Hinkley was a CIA asset.

Which made them double check the briefcase holding the cash. And they found a micro-bug. So, the American cousins were listening in on their assessment of the case. They also presumed Cicada 3301 was piggybacking on top of the bug. Which is when they started playing Shakira at a high volume, when discussing anything.

They went to visit Broken Jim. The classic wheelchair bound computer nerd, they knew. His big reveal was. someone had been using the Cicada 3301 game plan to suck in any potential recruits. The real Cicada prompted users to follow a cryptic white rabbit hole trail, using steganography software to extract a message encoded with a shift cipher - where each letter corresponds to another letter. Successfully decoding the message will lead you to a URL with yet another image, this time of a moth. And so on, where each clue leads to successive parts of the puzzle, which gets harder and harder.

 Jim surmised it was another group that had snatched Chad. And he had a name for this group.

He called them, BlueNoroff. A North Korean team, whose government job it was, to steal from the Cyber rich and give to the Cyber poor North Korea.

Bishop still had no idea where Chad was being held or where he had been snatched. But now they had a suspect. The Almeria BlueNoroff team. Broken Jim suggested they place a cryptic add, in the ‘Almeria Living Magazine.’ This might get their attention. They went with an image of a Moth and the number 3301. A cell number was left with the magazine marketing team, if they got any bites.

They got a bite.

Which found Bishop and Knight sitting in the big open café at the Parque Comercial Mojácar. They were soon joined by a well-dressed very large Asian gentleman. Who spoke very clear English, with a Surrey accent. He gave his name as Yoon Jong-il. And said, “I believe we both have a problem.”

Bishop replied, “Is this problem called Chad Hinkley?”

Yoon Jong-il just nodded.

And Bishop had that sinking feeling. Things had just gone, from bad, to worse.