Chapter 14 #4
They followed Mike out the big gate and around a corner.
He was carefully laying her father down on the back seat of a big SUV.
Nicole rounded the vehicle, gently lifted her father’s head, slid in, then placed his head on her lap.
She stroked his face, carefully, because she didn’t want the deep slash to start bleeding again.
Her heart squeezed with sorrow as she felt the loose skin over bone, the crepe-like texture of his skin.
His eyes were sunken deep in their sockets.
What was lying on her lap looked more like a skull than the head of a man.
Mike started up the vehicle and pulled out fast. She looked up to see Sam watching her, twisted in his seat, thick arm over the back.
She stroked around the ugly slash in her father’s cheek and met Sam’s eyes. “I hate that man so much,” she said, voice low. “I wish he were alive so I could kill him again. Blow his head apart. Cut his black heart right out with your knife.”
She meant every word and it surprised the hell out of her. If anyone had asked, she’d have assured them that she was tolerant and profoundly nonviolent. The feelings that coursed through her were utterly new, unwelcome, fierce.
She wished with all her heart that she’d been the one to kill the two men.
The men had been so brutal to her father, a helpless and sick man. They’d even tied him up, put his hands in restraints. Slashed his face open. It hurt her heart to think of it.
And they had been perfectly willing to kill both of them to keep a secret. “I need to try to find out what they were looking for,” she told Sam.
He nodded. “We’re vulnerable until we know.”
The back of the driver’s seat held a pull-down tray, like on airplanes. She placed the intruder’s laptop on it, powered it up, and inserted her hard disk.
In seconds, her email program was open. She blocked out everything from her mind. The shock of nearly dying, her father, Sam…In seconds she was in that place where she lived when doing translations, a place of no distractions and utter concentration.
She checked the files that had arrived between June 27 and June 29. Luckily, all in languages with a Latin alphabet. French, German, Spanish, Italian. She knew enough German and Italian to understand the topics of the texts. She went over every single file, one by one.
Nothing. They were perfectly innocuous. All of them.
“Anything?” Sam asked quietly.
Nicole met his eyes. She shook her head, frustrated, went back to staring at the screen. “Nothing.”
“Leave it,” Sam suggested. “Come back to it later, with a fresh mind. You’ve been traumatized, maybe you’re not seeing it.”
She’d been traumatized, that was for sure, but not enough that she’d miss something important. She knew these files. Each file was from a customer she’d had for at least six months. One customer—the Port Authority of Marseilles—she’d had for years.
She knew the texts, too. They were iterations of the same texts she’d either translated herself or sent out for translation.
The Banque de Luxembourg, for example. They’d sent the minutes of a board meeting, 80 percent of which would be exactly what had been said at the last board meeting.
Or the Berlin Buchmesse, a smaller version of the Frankfurt Book Fair.
They had sent a copy of their current “Manual for Exhibitors” to translate and it would be very much like the last manual.
She huffed out a frustrated breath.
“ETA fifteen minutes,” Mike said, voice low.
They’d be at the hospital in a quarter of an hour. Nicole looked down at her father, still unconscious, so fragile and precious. Sick and vulnerable.
They’d slashed him open and would have killed him without a second thought.
She ground her teeth together and turned back to the monitor. Why? Why were they sent to do harm to her and her father? For what?
“Talk it through, out loud,” Mike suggested, meeting her eyes in the rearview mirror. “That sometimes helps.”
“Okay.” She stared into the monitor, as if she could get it to yield its secrets by sheer will power. “I’m looking at twenty files. All by old clients. Not one new one. They are all familiar texts, in that the subject matter is very similar to other texts from the same client.”
“Go over them from the opposite direction,” Sam suggested. “From the last to the first.”
Nicole shrugged. It wouldn’t change anything, but still. “Okay.” She ran the cursor over the files, one by one, from the bottom up. From the oldest to the newest.
She frowned. “That’s odd.”
“What?” Sam and Mike said in unison.
The cursor hovered over the Marseille Port Authority file.
“One of the files is much bigger than it should be. Clients ask for a quote before sending me the text, even old clients. Wordsmith charges by the word, sixteen cents a word, or forty dollars a page of fifteen hundred bytes. I remember clearly the quote for the Marseille job—twenty-six hundred dollars for about a hundred kilobytes. But it says here the size of the file is almost eight hundred KB. Normally, if there are illustrations or, say, part of the text is in PowerPoint, that will of course increase the bytes, but they told me it would be all text.”
“Open it. Run through it again,” Mike urged. They were in an inhabited area and he’d had to slow down for the speed bumps.
“Okay.” She opened the attachment and scrolled through the text slowly, the words and the concepts very familiar to her, so familiar she sometimes thought she could qualify for a harbormaster certificate. Suddenly, the font changed size for twenty pages. “Whoa.”
Nicole sat back. The file came from the Port administrative clerk, who usually sent her the work, Jean-Paul Simonet.
She’d found out that he had lost his daughters in the Toulouse terrorist attack, and she had sent him condolences.
After that, they often sent each other greetings.
He was an odd man, with strange passions.
Collecting Tintin comic books, trainspotting and… steganography!
“Oh my God,” she muttered. Was the vehicle wi-fi enabled? Yes, she discovered, logging on feverishly, trying to remember a long e-mail exchange with Simonet on his passion. He’d written at boring length about a program called…she stopped, fingers curved over the keyboard.
She suddenly had a huge sense of urgency, a prickling in her veins, a feeling that she had to move now. Not tomorrow or the next day or even the next hour. Right now. Inexplicable, irresistible, almost painful in its intensity.
What was the name of the program? Mike was looking at her in the rearview mirror, frowning, Sam was watching her carefully. She probably looked insane, teeth clenched, eyes closed.
Think, Nicole!
They’d had their last lengthy exchange in December. He wrote that he missed his family a lot come Christmastime. He’d lost two daughters and then his wife. Her heart had gone out to him, spending a Christmas alone. It was cold in Marseille, he’d complained.
Why was she thinking all of this now? Cold…snow. The small app was called Snow!
She clenched her teeth. “I’m going to try something now.”
Nicole was good with computers. She bent down and a few minutes later, the blue bar had filled up, the app was down-loaded, and she clicked on the file.
“I have something,” Nicole said softly. Mike watched her in the mirror, Sam had turned completely in his seat to see her. “It was hidden in the file.”
She watched as a section of the Port Authority report dissolved, and new text was superimposed on the old. Steganography wasn’t encryption. Thank God. She’d never have been able to break a code. Steganography was hiding. Hiding one file inside another.
A message, from Simonet.
Mademoiselle Pearce—je vous envoie le manifeste d’un navire, destination New York, je crois qu’il rappresente un nouveau attentat—un attentat nucléaire—contre les Etats Unis, parce que—
Nicole translated the text, trying to keep her voice level.
“This is a message from a clerk in the Port Authority. The message reads: Ms. Pearce, I am sending you the manifest of a ship sailing to New York, I think they intend to carry out another attack against the United States.” She looked up and met Sam’s eyes.
Her voice wobbled. “He says…he says a nuclear attack. The message ends abruptly. As if he was…interrupted.”
“Or worse,” Sam growled, already punching his cell phone.
A nuclear attack on the United States. Nicole clicked her way through the pages, terror rising.
“Here we are Sam, Mike. The ship flies a Liberian flag. The Marie Claire. Next stop New York, slated to arrive day after tomorrow. The man who sent me the message is very alive to terrorist threats. He lost his family in the Toulouse bombing.” She met Sam’s sober eyes again.
“There’s something on that ship, Sam. It’s got to be stopped. ”
Sam was already talking quietly and earnestly into his cell. He turned back to her, holding the cell phone up. “Okay, sweet-heart, Harry’s patched me through to the FBI and they’ve got the Coast Guard listening too. Give us particulars about this ship.”
“Even better,” Nicole said. “Give me an e-mail address and I’ll send the file. The hidden information is now readable.”
“Great idea.” Sam gave her three e-mail addresses, all ending with .gov.
As she tapped ENTER the SUV swerved, driving up the well-lit ramp of the emergency entrance of a huge hospital complex.
She picked up her father’s limp hand and held it tight. “We might have saved the world. Now let’s save my dad.”