Chapter 9 #5
Nicole went to her files and clicked on the folders.
“This is the way my business operates. A client sends a text to be translated. The client would have contacted me beforehand and we would have agreed on a quote. The price varies in relation to the degree of technical difficulty, the rarity of the combination—Dutch into Chinese is going to cost you a lot of money, for instance—and the urgency. So when I receive the text, the client has already been given a quote and I know exactly how much the file he sent me is worth. If it’s from Spanish or French into English, chances are I’ll do it, though lately the workload has increased, so I send what I can’t handle to a friend of mine at the Monterey Institute of Languages.
Everything else is sent to one of the translators in my network.
I negotiate the price, receive the text, forward it to the appropriate translator, who will have the requisite languages and field of expertise, I take care of the billing and client relations.
For that I take a fifteen percent commission.
It’s not a huge business; it’s only a year old, but it’s growing. ”
The lieutenant grunted. “Show me some of the files. Starting from, say, three days ago. We don’t know where the guy came from, maybe he had to travel to get here.”
“He was American, though,” Sam said quietly. “No doubt about that. Probably ex-military.”
“American.” The lieutenant nodded. “So—let’s go back three days. How many files?”
Nicole had a chronology function and went back to June 26.
She spoke with her eyes glued to the monitor.
“Okay, over the past three days I’ve received twenty-two files.
Two hundred fifty pages of a travel guide to St. Petersburg from Russian into English.
” She clicked the file open and the men stared at the Cyrillic text.
“My Russian isn’t very strong, but the title of this is St. Petersburg, Jewel of the North.
It was sent to a professor of Russian at the University of Chicago who rounds out his salary by doing translations. ”
She clicked on another folder. “This is a hundred twenty pages of text that is an analysis of the German bond market, to be translated into English. I sent that off to the appropriate colleague. And here’s a text from Chinese into English, which costs a premium because good Chinese-into-English translators are rare.
A survey of the banking sector in China.
This is the project for the enlargement of the Port of Marseilles.
I’ll take that one myself, the Marseille Port Authority is an old client of mine, I worked for them just out of school, before applying to the UN.
” She did some calculating in her head. “In all, a total of almost four thousand pages.”
“What came in today?” Mike asked.
Nicole pointed. “Since this morning, eighty pages of a novel, Spanish into English, the publisher is hoping for a sale to foreign markets at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. The publicity for a trade fair in Buenos Aires, a short treatise on Napa wines to be translated into French, an Italian paper on microsurgery and a treatise in Polish on the miracles of Pope John Paul the Second. Tomorrow I should receive a technical manual on DVD recorders, Japanese to English—that’s going to cost them—which I will send to a student at MIT. ” Nicole sat back. “That’s it.”
“Has anything else arrived since the last time you looked?”
She leaned forward, typing quickly. “I don’t know…nope. The only thing that has arrived is a copy of a contract and an e-mail from a girlfriend in Geneva. Who has probably broken up with her boyfriend again.”
Silence. She could almost hear the men thinking.
“Do you have any military contracts for translation? Come to think of it, the military has dealings all over the world. They might outsource some translation stuff.”
“No. I’d have to apply for a security clearance for myself and my collaborators. I’ve thought about it, a lot, but have never gotten around to it. I will, though. There’s a lot of work with the military, it’s a big field.”
“State Department?”
“The State Department has its own internal translators, a really good service. They don’t outsource anything.”
“What about industrial espionage?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Do you get translations—texts—that someone could make money knowing? Some industrial secrets?”
Nicole was shaking her head. “We’re too young a company for that.
We do good work, but any corporation that had industrial secrets someone would be willing to steal at the point of a gun—well, they wouldn’t send them to us.
I guarantee a certain degree of confidentiality, there’s a non-disclosure clause in the contract, and my firewalls are pretty good.
But any corporation that entrusted me with truly valuable secrets, well, they’d be so foolish that presumably just about anyone could access them.
Someday I’m going to set up the company to guarantee a maximum degree of confidentiality, including encryption, but that kind of software costs a lot of money and I’d have to up my price considerably. Now is not the time to do that.”
Silence, male cogs whirring.
Finally the lieutenant stirred. “All this banking stuff. Is any of it—” his cell rang and he held up a finger. He listened, grunted, closed the cell. He looked at Nicole. “My men are in place, your father’s protected.”
Nicole slumped, letting out a long breath. “Thank you.”
Sam’s warm hand on her shoulder reminded her that she was protected, too.
“Hey.” The tech who’d been dusting for prints lifted something that looked like a thick plastic string. “Look what I found. Guy must have lost it off his utility belt.”
The men turned to look. Sam’s hand tightened on her shoulder.
“Jesus,” Harry breathed. It was the first word he’d spoken since coming into the room.
“What?” Nicole looked around at the grim male faces. “What is it?”