NEEDLES
God bless the interwebs. Jordan signed off on the deal with Claire’s tenants, an English couple, newly empty nested, arranged to buy a Chicago PD Taser (only used once!) and took a Streetview walk through Hoxton Square, familiarizing himself with every inch of the neighborhood around the Exit Strategy office, all from a seedy little internet café in Brittany. He had really wanted a gun, but with French firearm laws the way they were, it didn’t seem worth the risk. The Taser would do.
He’d have to see Claire to get the money; she’d been chilly since he’d failed to capitalize on her celebratory mood Saturday night. She’d come late, bearing champagne and a faxed letter of intent from the empty nesters. She popped the cork as she slipped out of her pumps and into the depths of the fire-facing sofa. When her stockinged foot teasingly nudged his thigh for a second refill he got a generous view up her skirt. Her face fell when he got up minutes later with vague apologies about the hour. Probably for the best, though, he thought. Less likely to gossip about a transaction with such an anticlimactic ending.
* * *
Checklist getting shorter. Tomorrow he’d see Claire, drive to Laval to pick up the Taser and figure out how to lose the car. T minus thirty-six hours and counting. He prayed Stephanie had found the message. And understood it. He couldn’t think about that. It was too late to stop now; the Rubicon was far behind. They’d be there.
* * *
Herron slammed down the phone. Both computers were squeaky-clean. The histories had been selectively purged. The weenies had managed to follow the IP trail as far as some Russian server that had been used as a proxy and no further. Trahon had said there was heat from undisclosed heights to back off if nothing turned up. Probably related to the DC phone. Smug son of a bitch was going to get away with it all. He didn’t give a fuck about the insider trading—that was a circle jerk, rich stealing from the rich—but Prenn was going to get away with murder.
Herron shook his head. What kind of people were these? Prenn is fucking his partner’s wife and making a fortune by torpedoing his own company. That’s not enough so he finally kills the partner who’s off banging his own mistress—win-win for Prenn and the merry widow. Hell of a neighborhood. He stood up and grabbed his coat off the back of the chair. He’d return the laptop himself.
* * *
Simon had been right about one thing, lots of needles. The probe was picking up dozens of matches. He had to isolate each one and sequence it individually. Stephanie had written him out a copy of her college code with the consonant equivalents for each of the twenty coded amino acids. Simon ran each sequence just until he hit a string of bases that didn’t correlate to any amino acid. It usually didn’t take long; by the seventh base he was usually looking at intron junk.
The twenty-third hit was different.
After the key sequence it read “ATG, TCG, TCG, AGG, AGG, TCG.” This sequence repeated sixty times before giving way to random bases. Methionine, two serines, two arginines and another serine. Simon grabbed the list and scribbled on a blank sheet “mssrrs.” Jesus Christ. He dropped the pen. “I’m so sorry, S.” Fuck, fuck, fuck. It could be true. Or it was a coincidence and he was losing his mind, too?
It took him two hours to find the next one. “Dnttrstnbdy.” Again, sixty repeats.
“Don’t trust anybody.”
He called Stephanie.