He expected a smoking gun, perhaps a scanned document or a incriminating screenshot. Instead, the image that filled his monitor was breathtakingly ordinary, which somehow made it worse.
For hours, Elias ran the image through geographical databases. He searched for the architecture of the tower, the specific species of the yellow wildflowers, and the curve of the highway. Just before midnight, a match popped up on a satellite mapping forum. It was a stretch of road in the Scottish Highlands, miles from any major town. 9AF3B32C-76D4-4601-A761-1ED072647942.jpeg
He looked back at the file name. He realized it wasn’t a random string generated by a computer. It was a GUID—a Globally Unique Identifier. In systems architecture, they are used to ensure that a file can be identified across the universe of data without any chance of duplication. He expected a smoking gun, perhaps a scanned
Elias zoomed in. Reflection in the side mirror showed a pair of sunglasses resting on a dashboard, and in the dark lens of those glasses, he could just barely make out the silhouette of the person holding the camera. He searched for the architecture of the tower,
Should we focus on and why they were hiding?
He pulled up the metadata. There was no GPS location tagged, no camera model listed. The timestamp simply read: September 14, 2018, 05:42 PM.