Snoop. We’re calling it geosnooping in beta, but that probably won’t be the final name. As you may know, Snoop is as anonymous as you want it to be at the moment—you can’t tell where someone is, all you’ve got to go on is what they declare in their profile.”
“Right,” I say slowly.
“But Elliot’s been working on an upgrade that will allow people to view other Snoopers within a fifty-meter radius. You won’t know exactly where they are, but you’ll know they’re close to you.”
“Okay, I get that.”
“It hasn’t gone live yet. But as part of the preparations for rolling it out we changed the permissions Snoop requires to give the app access to your location. Basically Snoop knows that information whether you choose to display it or not—it’s part of the data profile we share with stakeholders to create income.”
“Right…,” I say again, trying to get him to cut to the chase. I don’t care about the inner workings of Snoop, and I think I know where this is going. “Are you saying you used this information to find out Eva’s location?”
“Yes. Elliot’s been able to hack into the back end and get the GPS coordinates of Eva’s phone.”
“It’s here,” Elliot says, pulling up a GPS map, where a red flag shows the location of the coordinates he’s tapped into the search bar.
As soon as I see the pin, my heart sinks down into my stomach, and I feel myself going cold with dread.
“Where is it exactly?” Topher is saying, but his voice sounds very far away now. Danny suddenly puts a hand to his mouth, and I know that he has just figured out what I already knew.
The pistes are marked on Elliot’s maps, but not the elevations, and without the simplified three-dimensional rendering of the resort’s official piste map, it’s not very easy to put together the geography of the peaks and valleys. Eva’s little dot is showing very close to the La Sorcière run. So close in fact that she could almost be on the run.
But she’s not. Because if you’ve skied the run, as I have, many times, what you know is that there is a sheer drop to the side of La Sorcière. A drop that falls hundreds, maybe thousands of feet into a deep, inaccessible valley. Somehow, in the blinding snow, Eva must have done exactly what I feared in the first place—she has skied over the edge.
“If we can give these coordinates to search and rescue—” Topher is saying, with the kind of blithe confidence that only the CEO of a major international company could muster, but I interrupt.
“I’m sorry, Topher, I’m so sorry—”
“What do you mean?”
“This—” I swallow, I try to find a way of putting the news that’s not too brutal. “This dot, it’s off the side of the piste.”
“Eva’s an excellent skier,” Topher says confidently. “Off-piste, even in this weather—”
“No, you don’t understand. I’m not talking about a bit of loose snow. I mean she’s skied off the piste. Off the edge. La Sorcière—” I swallow. There is no way of saying this nicely. “That section of La Sorcière runs alongside a sheer drop. A very steep one.”
Topher looks at me blankly, unable, or unwilling, to understand what I’m trying to tell him.
“What do you mean?” he says at last.
“Topher, if Eva is really where that dot is showing, she’s dead.”
I regret the starkness as soon as the words have left my mouth, but they are said, and they can’t be unsaid.
Topher’s face goes white. Then he turns to Elliot.
“How accurate is this positioning?”
“GPS is typically accurate to about five meters,” Elliot says. He looks… God, I don’t know. Unperturbed almost? Can that be possible? Surely not. No one could be that callous. Even if they were, wouldn’t they at least try to feign some kind of concern? “But you can get interference—bounced signals and so on. I’m not totally sure how the mountains would affect it. It’s not impossible it’s a few meters off.”
“So, what, ten meters? She could be on the piste,” Topher says, desperately, but we can all see, looking at the map’s scale, that that’s not possible. Even fifty meters wouldn’t put her back on the run. “Or—or she could have dropped her phone skiing down.”
“If she’d dropped it, I think it would be on the run,” I say very quietly.
“She could have thrown it off the edge, for fuck’s sake!” Topher cries.
No one responds to this. It’s true, of course, but the obvious response