San Diego
The van pulled out from the parking lot so fast the tires burned rubber. Had it not been the dead of night, Nicole could have hoped that the speed would have attracted some attention.
Or she could try buzzing down the window and screaming at a passing car. Make noise. Wrench the wheel and cause an accident.
Do something. Resist.
But they had the highest bargaining chip possible—her father. Who was right now terrified and no doubt in blinding pain, held in a hidden location. The only path to her father ran through this large, cold man sitting beside her.
And probably she wouldn’t have been able to do anything to escape this man, anyway, even if he and the intruder weren’t holding her father hostage.
The driver was vigilant. His eyes tracked from the inside and outside rearview mirrors to the road ahead, to her, ceaselessly, in a constant loop. There was only a mere second between glances, there would barely be enough time for her to bunch her muscles for a move, and he’d notice that.
No, her only hope would have been to attract the attention of someone. But there was no one around. The man in the van had waited for the taxi driver to drive off before leaning down to turn on the ignition. Nicole had watched the taillights of the cab disappear with despair. There had been no chance whatsoever to communicate with the taxi driver. The phone had been open during the drive and then she’d had to get into the car with the new man and her phone had been destroyed.
It had been her last hope—that maybe Sam could somehow trace her through her cell phone. In the movies and in the thrillers she loved to read, a cell phone was like the bread crumbs left by Hansel and Gretel. In NCIS, Tim could trace cell phone signals down to a couple of square feet, and he could do it in the blink of an eye.
If Tim McGee could do it, Sam Reston could. Of that she was certain. If anyone could track her down, it would be Sam.
But not even Tim McGee could track a smashed and dead cell phone and even if by some wizardry he could, she wasn’t there anymore. Sam would track her down to some smashed bits of plastic and metal. The cell phone had been destroyed and she was hurtling through the darkness with an unknown man to an unknown destination. The only thing she was certain of was that they had hurt her father and wouldn’t hesitate to do it again. She sneaked a glance at the driver.
He was driving fast but well, like Sam. He shared other attributes with Sam. Tall, though not as tall as Sam, very fit, with the gift of stillness and a strong aura of self-control.
But there, of course, the similarities ended. This man gave off menacing vibes by the ton. No doubt Sam could do that, too, but she didn’t think he could do that with a woman. And she couldn’t—by any stretch of the imagination—imagine him hurting a sick old man.
Where the hell were they?
Nicole tried to keep track of where they were going, with some vague idea of stealing a cell phone, surreptitiously phoning Sam and providing him with an address.
But by the fourth squealing, stomach-churning curve, Nicole was utterly and completely lost. She had no idea what direction they were traveling in and she didn’t recognize anything about her surroundings.
They were near the ocean, that’s the only thing she knew. They were on a straight stretch of road now and at the cross-roads, to her right, she could see a glint of moon off coal-black water. It didn’t help her. San Diego was nothing but coastline.
They were in some kind of industrial section, only run down and deserted. She imagined a functioning port area to be busy day and night, loading and unloading the ships that arrived and departed on an hourly basis.
This place had mile after mile of derelict warehouses and industrial plants behind chain-link fencing, the buildings low and utterly dark.
Nicole sneaked a glance at the driver’s hard face, then looked away. She had no sense at all that she was in a car with another human being. He could have been a robot-driver for all the emotion he betrayed.
She tried to steel herself for whatever was coming, but waves of panic rolled over her. Even trying to make some kind of a plan—how could she, when she had no idea what was going on?
The driver was not the man who had attacked her. So there were at least two men involved. Two very hard, criminal men. Where there were two, there could be three or four. There could be an army. It didn’t make any difference. She’d been powerless against one. She couldn’t hope to hold her own against two. If there were more, it didn’t really make that much difference.
There was absolutely nothing on her person she could use as a weapon. Whatever they wanted from her, they were going to get.
“Where—” Nicole’s mouth was so dry her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. She shuddered and tried again. “Where are we going?”
Ahead of them the empty road stretched, dark buildings on either side. Nicole would have no trouble believing that she and robo-driver were the last humans on the face of the earth.
Silence.
She licked her lips and tried again. “Where are we going?”
Somehow, not knowing where they were racing to added another layer of horror to the situation. If only she knew where they were going, she could, she could…
What?
“Here,” robo-driver growled and turned a corner so fast she had to cling to the seat belt.
“Shit,” Sam growled, banging his hand on the steering wheel. “Can’t go any faster.”
He was pushing 90 mph as it was. He just hoped he didn’t run into any cops, because he wasn’t slowing down for anybody. It wasn’t that the SUV couldn’t go any faster—he’d clocked it at 140 mph on a racetrack—but rather that Harry was triangulating their relative positions. Harry observed the path of the vehicle carrying Nicole and had to calculate the best, fastest way for Sam to get there. It was a complex piece of geometry and Sam had to be able to take a corner on a dime when Harry said.
Mike wasn’t paying him any attention. He was staring at the small screen set in the dashboard, listening hard to Harry through his earpiece. Sam was getting the same intel over his.
Mike acted as navigator, quietly telling him two minutes before he had to turn a corner. If they’d been traveling during rush hour, they’d both be dead in smoking ruins by now.
“Turning left onto Spring Road,” Harry said. “Where the fuck is he going? There’s just nothing there but…” His voice trailed off.
“But warehouses,” Mike finished for him. “I thought that might be where he’s headed.” His mouth pressed into a thin, grim line. Sam met his eyes briefly, then gave his whole attention back to the road.
“Not good,” Mike said quietly.
No, it wasn’t good. It was a section of town destined for demolition. A new residential complex was supposed to go up afterward, though the plans had been halted due to the real-estate crisis. In the meantime, it was an area of derelict warehouses and abandoned buildings. Empty, for miles. Guaranteed privacy, for as long as they wanted. No one would ever hear Nicole screaming…
He pressed the accelerator just a little harder.
“Target stopped,” Harry announced quietly into their headsets.
Mike pointed to the screen. “We’re about ten minutes out.”
“Where, exactly?” Sam asked, eyes on the road.
Mike leaned forward, frowning at the map on the screen. “Turn right.” The tires’ squealing sounded loud in the night’s silence. “Left.”
A straight stretch. Sam nudged it up to 110 mph.
“Coming up,” Harry’s voice came over the headset. “Got it?”
Sam flicked a glance down at the grid on the laptop screen on the console, where a blipping light was stopped. It wasn’t on the road, but inside an outline. “Got it. What the fuck is it?”
“They’re inside a compound. Don’t know what security measures they’ve got set up, though. You and Mike be careful.” Harry’s calm voice sounded loud in Sam’s ear.
“That’s a whole row of condemned buildings.” Mike ran his finger over the street. The map showed long rectangles of buildings separated by alleys along the waterfront. “You got the number?”
“Says here 3440.” Harry’s voice was low, calm, but Sam could hear his fingers pounding the keyboard. “It was—yeah, coming up now. Formerly a bonded warehouse. Company moved out in ’oh six.”
“There was a big bust there,” Mike said grimly. “Arms for cocaine. SDPD bagged a couple of real bad guys. That was before Sam set up shop here, before my time even.”
No one to hear her scream. Sam’s hands tightened on the wheel and he pressed down on the accelerator. They were going so fast it took all his skills to keep the SUV on the road at turns.
They were on a straight stretch, only a few minutes out. Sam started slowing down.
“Kill the engine…now,” Harry ordered, and the vehicle drifted soundlessly forward until it came to rest at the curb of a cross street, about ten feet from the street where the car with Nicole had gone in.
The SUV was still rocking when Sam shouldered the driver’s-side door open, ready to leap out. A strong hand held him back.
What the fuck?
“Goddamnit Mike, Nicole’s in there.” Urgency rippled through his veins, prickled his skin. Right now, someone could be hurting Nicole, cutting her, burning her…“Let me go,” he snarled.
“Wait,” Mike said calmly. “We need more intel.”
Sam swallowed. He knew this. He knew this on an intellectual and theoretical level. You do not go blind into a situation. But, shit, Nicole was in there now and Sam felt like jumping out of his skin with urgency. He was panting, the sound loud in the dark cabin of the vehicle.
Mike pulled his head around and went nose to nose with him. “Listen up here, I know you’re worried, but I’m not going to let you fuck this up. I like Nicole, too. And the best way to bury that beautiful woman is to go in guns blazing without knowing the terrain or even where they are.”
“Blueprints of the building coming up…now,” Harry said into their earpiece. The screen darkened, then lit again with the blueprints of an industrial complex.
“See?” Mike said. “There’s at least sixty thousand square feet there. How the fuck you think you’re going to find them? By following bread crumbs?”
Sam and Mike stared at the screen. Sam sure as fuck hoped Mike was taking it all in, because he wasn’t. A high keening sound rattled in Sam’s head, the sound of panic. He had the classic symptoms. His heart raced, his palms were sweaty, he could barely focus his thoughts, he didn’t have a sense of his own body, only of imminent danger to his woman.
This wasn’t helping Nicole.
He leaned his head back against the headrest, pressing against it hard, and wiped his mind, concentrating on his breathing, trying to repress the very clear, spotlit image he had of Nicole being hurt that made his heart trip-hammer.
Breathing slowing, heartbeat slowing…
“Welcome back,” Mike said quietly.
Sam opened his eyes and just like that, he was back. Capable and cool, the operator he’d always been.
Panic would get Nicole killed. She was already in serious danger. He was the only thing that stood between Nicole and death. If he didn’t get himself under control, she was fucked, and he would lose her.
Sam leaned forward. “How many points of entry?”
Mike looked at him intently for a second, eyes bright blue even in the low glow of the monitor, then nodded. “Seven,” he said. His finger pinpointed the doors into the building. “Plus what could only be a big loading bay here.”
Sam turned it over in his head. “They won’t be using the loading bay. Those suckers have huge doors that take forever to open even if you find the control panel. They’ll go in through one of the side doors. They’re on some kind of timeline. Whatever it is they’re doing, it has to be quick.”
Mike nodded. “Makes sense. And I don’t think they’d go far into the building, so we’re looking at perimeter rooms.”
Sam nodded. “Here. And here.” He tapped two doors on the blueprint, on either side of the front loading bay.
If the fuckers were at all rational, that’s where they’d be. They had no idea that anyone could be tracking them. Entering into the huge maze of the warehouse made no sense.
“Jesus, I wish we had a Predator with thermal imaging,” Harry sighed into the earpiece.
Fuck yeah. An aerial image showing where warm bodies were.
“Don’t have a Predator,” Mike said, reaching behind him for his backpack. “But while Sam was freaking, I was thinking.” He hauled a camera-like machine with binoculars into the front seat.
A goddamn handheld thermal imager! And Mike was right—he’d been thinking while Sam was freaking. “I have a thermal imager,” Mike said into the mike, for Harry’s benefit.
“Sam should kiss you on the mouth for that,” Harry said.
“Ewww,” Sam and Mike replied in unison.
Mike smiled evilly. “But I will take that kiss from Nicole once we get her out.”
“Over my dead body,” Sam growled.
“Make sure it isn’t over anyone’s dead body, except for the bad guys,” Harry replied over their earpieces. “Now go get them. And afterward, Nicole has to kiss me, too.”
They were in some kind of abandoned industrial building, but Nicole had no idea where. They could have been on the back side of the moon for all she knew.
When the car veered into one of the empty compounds, big gate standing open, her heart sank. The driver got out, growled don’t move, pulled out a big black gun and kept it pointed at her. He could see her perfectly, since the headlights bounced off the steel walls of the building, lighting up the inside of the car. Nicole could barely see the man, and followed what he was doing by sound rather than sight.
The two big steel gates were pulled closed, a chain run through the handles and a padlock on the chain.
She was locked in.
The man came to her side of the car, opened the door and pulled her out roughly, pushing her ahead of him.
They walked around the right-hand corner, the man prodding her painfully in the back with the gun. Along the side wall was a door, ajar, visible in the backwash of the headlights around the corner. The man pushed hard with the gun. The doorway loomed, empty and black and forbidding.
It was like walking to her doom. They’d driven for ten minutes without seeing a light, without seeing another car or another human being. There was no one around to call for help, no way to signal, no way to call. She and her father were as abandoned as this building.
There was no way out, none. Even if, by some insane series of events, Nicole managed to overcome two armed men—and there might be more—and run away, she couldn’t. Her father couldn’t walk, she couldn’t carry him and she’d never leave him behind.
Another sharp jab in the back, hard enough to break skin. Nicole’s heart beat painfully hard as she eyed the open doorway, utter blackness beyond. Something, some animal instinct told her that she and her father wouldn’t escape this building alive. The rusty abandoned warehouse would be their tomb.
“Get going, bitch.” Behind her, the driver’s voice was low, rough. This time instead of stabbing her in the back with the gun, he gave her a violent push that almost sent her to her knees.
Slowly, heart thundering, Nicole walked toward the blackness, stumbling over the threshold, then waited. She had no idea where he wanted her to go.
A heavy hand on her shoulder. “Right,” he rasped and she started walking.
There was a faint light in the distance that grew brighter as she approached it. A door slightly ajar, light behind it. She stopped outside the door, suddenly terrified of what might be behind it.
“Move it.” A hard push against the door and she tumbled into the room. What she saw raised the hair on the nape of her neck.
Her father, duct taped to a chair, hands in restraints clasped on his lap, head hung low, dried blood from the slashed cheek all over the side of his face and his pajamas.
There was a large plastic sheet under the chair. For the blood. To ensure that no DNA be left behind. A tense shiver of horror ran through her. These men were thorough. They were not going to make mistakes.
On a stool next to her father was the man who’d broken into her office. A powerful lamp on a nearby steel table provided enough light to see the hellish scene by.
The man’s head rose at their entrance and Nicole stepped back at the fierce coldness in his eyes.
She bumped into the man behind her.
He pushed her forward. “Watch where you’re going, bitch.”
Nicole barely heard him. Her father—she couldn’t see his chest moving. Oh my God, was he—
“Daddy?” she whispered out of a tight throat.
Nicholas Pearce’s eyelids flickered, opened. His head wobbled up, brows furrowed, eyes narrowed, unfocused.
“Daddy!” Nicole sobbed and he saw her.
In terrible pain, restraints so tight his hands were white and bloodless, duct taped to a chair by thugs, her father tried to reassure her. He made a stab at a smile and the deep wound in his cheek began sullenly bleeding again.
“It’s okay, darling,” he whispered. “I’m okay.”
Pain made her heart miss a beat. She couldn’t stand seeing her father hurt. The room swam as tears flooded Nicole’s eyes. She rushed forward to hold her father, but was abruptly yanked back by a big, strong hand on her arm.
“Very touching,” the man on the stool said, coolly. “Fatherly love. A daughter’s devotion. It helps me.” He picked up a big gun. Nicole heard a sharp snick! A thousand movies told her it was the safety coming off. He pointed the gun at her father’s knee. “Now. Do you have what I want?”
Shaking so hard it took her two tries to unzip her purse, Nicole reached in and brought out the portable hard disk.
Please let this be what he wants, she thought. Otherwise he’d shoot her father in one knee, then the other. She met the man’s eyes, cold, inhuman. The feral eyes of a creature of the night. There was no mercy there at all.
Still, she tried.
“Please,” she whispered, and placed the hard disk on the ground with a trembling hand. The man curled his free hand up in the universal gimme gesture. Kneeling still, Nicole sent the hard disk skimming over the floor to him. He stopped it with a booted foot and picked it up.
He put the gun back down. He could afford to. Her father was tied up in a way a strong man couldn’t break, let alone a weak, very sick one. She was at least ten feet from him. Even if she didn’t have a gun pointed at her back, she’d never be able to make the leap, pick up the gun and shoot. The other man’s hand was a second from the gun and he obviously knew how to use it.
She had no options here, none. She was helpless, unable to save her father, unable to save herself.
The man reached behind him, bringing out an ultra-thin laptop. He fired it up. It looked expensive and it was fast. With a couple of beeps, everything was ready. Connecting the hard disk via the USB port, the man stared at the monitor. Nicole couldn’t see anything other than the silver back of the monitor and the blue-green wash of light over the man’s cold, expressionless face.
“Password,” he grunted.
“Nickyblue,” she said shakily. Her mother’s nickname for her.
He clicked his way through something, following intently, while Nicole trembled. Though it was cold in the warehouse, sweat coated her torso, drops falling between her breasts. Terror made her heart pump so hard she thought it would jump out of her chest.
Utter silence except for the genteel, expensive whir of top-of-the-line electronics, then the man sat back with a sigh. He looked at the other man, next to Nicole. “Got it.”
“Great,” the man next to her answered.
“Now.” The intruder stared coldly at Nicole, picking the gun up once more, placing it against her father’s knee again. “Has this information been forwarded? Did you send the file to anyone?”
Nicole had no idea which file he meant, but she hadn’t e-mailed anyone in the past thirty-six hours.
She shook her head and he nodded. She had no saliva in her mouth to answer.
The man had the air of someone wrapping something up. It was coming to a head. “Did you copy it to a flash drive?” She shook her head again. “Show me.” His voice was low, harsh, affectless.
Nicole lowered her purse to the floor and shoved it to him with her foot, as she had with the hard disk. “In the side pocket,” she said, her dry mouth making the words hard to understand.
He extracted the flash drive, inserted it into the USB port and clicked through it. If it was on the hard disk but not on the flash drive, it must be a file that had arrived on the twenty-eighth or later.
He nodded and looked her straight in the eyes. She forced herself to meet his gaze. It was like looking into a dark abyss.
“Swear that you haven’t copied or forwarded the file.” The man pressed his gun hard against her father’s knee. Sweat broke out on her father’s face, but he said nothing.
“I swear! Please, oh please don’t hurt him!” Nicole cried. Oh God, she couldn’t stand this. Her father was so sick, so fragile. He’d been without pain medication for hours. He was in agony, she could tell.
Nicole watched the man’s eyes, watched the utter indifference to her father’s pain.
A flood of rage swept through her. This man was like every cruel man who had ever lived. He enjoyed holding power over others, he enjoyed inflicting pain, simply because he could.
He looked at her for a full minute. “I believe you,” he finally said, with a nod. “Which means we won’t be needing you anymore.”
He nodded to his partner and lifted the gun from her father’s knee to place it against his head. In the same instant, Nicole felt the round cold circle of a gun muzzle against the nape of her neck.
Oh God. This was it.
She and her father were going to die right here, right now, in a cold, empty, abandoned warehouse with the stench of machine oil and rat droppings in their nostrils, where their bodies might not be found for months. Though, come to think of it, there was the big wide ocean right outside. Weighted down with chains, no one would ever find their bodies.
Nicole wanted to plead, to ask for mercy, but there was no mercy at all in those light brown eyes, as dead and opaque as marbles.
“I guess it’s good-bye, Ms. Pearce.” The man’s hand tightened, white showing on the knuckles.
“No!” she screamed, leaping forward, trying crazily to reach her father, as if she could somehow place herself between the bullet and her father in the time it took the man to pull the trigger.
She was hauled back brutally by the hair by the other man. He knocked her to her knees and placed his gun against the back of her head again. Crazily, Nicole braced, as if that would help her deflect a bullet.
She looked over at her father through the tears swimming in her eyes. If she could at least have departed this life looking into his eyes, so they could go together…but his head lay heavily against his chest, unconscious. He’d slip from unconsciousness into death…
Two shots rang in the room and she cried out. In shock, and then, after a second, surprise. It took her seconds to get her bearings. She was…she was still alive! As was her father, slumped and pale and broken, but alive.
A pink mist had bloomed around the intruder’s head. He had an expression of utter and total astonishment. He sat on the stool for a long moment, a round pink hole in the center of his forehead. Then, suddenly, as if the weight of the gun against her father’s head were too great to bear, the pistol slipped from his hand, falling to the floor with a clatter. Then he bent forward slowly, finally tumbling to the floor.
Nicole turned around, heart racing. The man who’d been holding a gun to her head had suddenly disappeared. Just like that, in a second. Shock had her staring at where he’d been, stupidly checking the room. Finally, she looked down 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. “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.
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 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 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. 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 Madrid 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.”