Into the Crossfire (36 page)

and there he was, sprawled on the filthy concrete floor, a pool of red flowing from

his head, gun still in his hand.

None of this made any sense.

Two figures stepped forward from the doorway, appearing out of the utter

darkness like ghosts. Strong, substantial ghosts, hard-eyed and carrying rifles...

Nicole simply sat there, completely incapable of processing any of this,

shaking, mind blank. Her entire body felt heavy with the lethargy of shock.

"Honey," one of the ghosts said, and it was as if that deep voice shattered

the chains of shock holding her in place.

Sam! Sam and Mike!

Somehow they'd found her! She drew in a shuddering breath and only then

realized that she had stopped breathing. A second later, she still found it hard to

breathe, because Sam was holding her so hard.

"Jesus," he muttered into her hair. "That was close."

"Yeah." She laughed shakily. "What took you so long?"

He made a sound deep in his chest. Not a laugh, not a snort, but a

combination of the two.

Just feeling him against her, knowing he was there, made her strong.

Awareness rushed back in. The men who had threatened her were dead, but her

father needed medical care and she had to figure out what was in her computer

because there was no guarantee that other bad men might not follow.

Nicole pulled Sam's head down, kissed him, then pushed against his chest,

hard. Surprised, he opened his arms to let her go. She turned to Mike, gave him a

resounding kiss on the mouth, then ran to her father.

"Hey!" Sam shouted.

"Harry wants one of those, too," Mike called out.

The intruder was sprawled at her father's feet, hand still curled around his

gun, finger in the trigger guard. A second later, and a bullet would have gone

through her father's head.

Nicole stared down at the man for a moment, hating him with every fiber of

her being. She kicked his arm away with disdain and knelt next to her father,

frantically touching him all over.

"Daddy, Daddy, are you okay?" She tugged desperately at the duct tape.

She couldn't stand seeing him tied up for one second more. But no matter how

frantically she pulled, the tape held. Her father swayed in his seat as she tugged

harder and sobbed. "Damn it! I can't get this stuff off him!" she raged.

Big hands pulled her gently away. "Here honey, let me," Sam said, pulling

out one of those huge black knives she so wanted for herself.

Nicole eyed the man at her feet. "Too bad he's dead. I'd love to cut his

beating heart out with that knife."

"Beautiful and bloodthirsty, I like it," Sam said, slicing easily through the

duct tape, one big hand on her father's shoulder so he wouldn't fall off the chair.

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"Though it's not as easy as it looks, getting past the ribs to the heart." He sliced the

restraints around the wrists and slipped the knife back into a sheath around his

thigh.

"Oh God." Nicole looked up at Sam, tears swimming in her eyes. "He's

unconscious. We've got to get him to a hospital immediately!"

"Yeah." Sam bent and lifted her father carefully in his arms. "We can drive

him as fast as any ambulance. St. Jude's is about twenty minutes away. Let's get

going."

"I'll drive," Mike said. He looked down at the dead bodies, then at Sam. "I'll

have to call this in."

"From the road," Sam answered, turning sideways to get through the door

with her father in his arms. "We don't have time right now. Let's move."

Nicole scrambled to her feet, light-headed, still shocked at not being dead,

and followed them out the door. Mike held a powerful flashlight to light the way.

She was halfway down the corridor when she stopped, cursing. Nearly

dying had scrambled her brains. She ran back to the room that had almost been her

graveyard, leaping over the man who'd nearly blown a hole in her head, and

grabbed the intruder's laptop, her hard disk and her purse.

Mike was waiting for her, a question in his eyes.

"Whatever they were looking for, they were willing to commit murder to

get it," she huffed, holding the laptop and hard disk up. "We need to find out what

it is. What?" He was looking at her strangely.

They were walking quickly down the corridor, trying to catch up with Sam,

who was already at the big steel gates.

"Should have thought of that myself," Mike grumbled. "Couldn't count on

Sam to think of it, he was crazy with worry over you, but sh--damn! I should have

thought of that. Here, let me carry that for you."

He looked weighed down by about a thousand pounds of...stuff. Nicole

didn't recognize any of it except for a big black rifle, a big black pistol and a big

black knife.

She could certainly carry a laptop, a purse and a small hard disk.

"No, that's fine. I've got it. You just saved my life," Nicole said as they

exited out onto the dark loading apron. "You can be forgiven for forgetting

things."

"Do your thing, Sam," Mike said, holding out his arms.

Sam gently transferred her father to Mike's strong arms and pulled

something small out of a side pocket. Two seconds later, he'd picked the padlock

and was pulling the chains out of the handles. He pulled out the big steel gates just

enough for them to slip through.

"How'd you guys get in?" Nicole looked around for an alternative route

they could have used, but couldn't find one. "Rappelled," Sam said succinctly,

directing the flashlight for a moment over to the right. Two slender ropes hung

down, swaying gently in the chill night air coming off the ocean.

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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, Outlook 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

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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

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daughters in the Madrid 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 laptop 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.